Down Among the Women (12 page)

‘So you called him Simeon, did you,’ remarks Scarlet. ‘Uncle Simeon. Well, it has a dignified ring. They’re just about exactly the same age, aren’t they?’

Byzantia walks over to her mother and holds out her arms to be picked up. Scarlet obliges. Scarlet knows she is behaving badly, but she can’t stop herself. She is almost physically conscious of the knot of resentment in her chest.

‘I see you have a new carpet,’ says Scarlet. ‘Didn’t you like the colour of the other one or something?’

‘No,’ says Susan, who is beginning to feel angry. ‘I didn’t.’

‘What did you do with the old one? Give it to the poor?’

‘I gave it to the dustmen, if you want to know.’

‘Can Byzantia have a biscuit or something?’ asks Scarlet.

‘I’d rather she didn’t,’ says Susan coolly. ‘Simeon will see and want one too, and I don’t let him eat between meals.’

Scarlet looks at Simeon with obvious pity.

‘Poor little Simeon,’ she actually says. Susan sits very upright. She is flushed.

‘Actually,’ says Scarlet, ‘I clean a carpet like this every day. I go out cleaning when Wanda comes back from school.’

‘Cleaning other people’s homes must be quite interesting,’ says Susan eventually. She is taken aback. She sees Scarlet as a lifetime’s burden.

‘It isn’t,’ says Scarlet. ‘But what else can I do? There’s no one to help me. I’m quite alone.’

Susan curls Simeon’s hair into a quiff. She smiles at him.

‘Perhaps,’ Susan observes, ‘you should have thought of that before. I mean, what did you expect to happen? If you have an illegitimate child it isn’t easy, is it?’

Scarlet doesn’t reply at first. She too is pink.

‘Tell you what,’ she says eventually. ‘If I came and cleaned for you and my father, you might pay me a shilling or so above market rates.’

‘We have a daily help already,’ says Susan stiffly.

Scarlet laughs.

‘I was only joking,’ she says. But of course she isn’t. She wants nothing for herself. She is anxious for Byzantia. She is always anxious, these days. Anxious when Byzantia cries, when she has a cold in the nose; paralysed with fear if she runs a temperature; nervous of asking Wanda to baby-sit; alarmed by her own irritation with Byzantia’s grizzles, nappies, fads and habits; terrified (though why should she be?) lest Wanda turn her out and she is left homeless and helpless. She does not feel twenty-one, she feels as old and battered as the hills of the moon.

Like Jocelyn, she wants to be married. But she is moved by desperation, not ambition. She wants security and respectability. She wants to be looked after. She is tired of being pitied. She wants her dignity back. But who would want to marry Scarlet? She is a mess; she knows it now. Over-weight, spotty, untidy, angry; there is only one thing to be said for her, and that is her devotion to Byzantia, her burden.

‘If I was pretty and smart,’ she says suddenly, ‘my father would acknowledge me.’

‘He does acknowledge you,’ says Susan, embarrassed. ‘He just can’t afford to keep you. Frankly, I don’t think he sees why he should. Wanda behaved very badly.’

‘But I’m me. I’m nothing to do with Wanda.’

‘To him you are. You had years when you could have got in touch with him. But coming only when you want something from him …’

‘Please try and explain to him—’ but Scarlet’s voice fades away. She knows it is no use.

‘See him yourself,’ says Susan.

‘No,’ says Scarlet. She has not the heart. Her father, to be frank, frightens and embarrasses her. She is not accustomed to the company of men.

‘Can’t the baby’s father help?’ enquires Susan. Scarlet shakes her head. It has at last occurred to her that from Byzantia’s point of view any father is better than none. She has tried to get in touch with the young man responsible, but he has left his bed-sitting room leaving no address—or at any rate none which is available to sad-voiced females.

She, once so indifferent, now searches Byzantia’s unformed features for traces of this young man; who once took a girl called Scarlet Rider home from a party, spent four hours in bed with her, and then rose, and shaved, and put on a tie, and went to spend Sunday with his fiancée’s parents.

Not that Scarlet wants him now, not really. Scarlet wants no interference. Scarlet will be father and mother both to her incestuous child—for let there be no mistake about it, and to quote her lady analyst years later, Scarlet, all unknowing, wanted her father’s child. And that is why, in this particular version of events, she is bashful of Kim, and is frightened of Wanda, and why she must now quarrel with Susan on anniversaries.

She is hardly being reasonable.

She is causing trouble to everyone.

No one loves her, not even Wanda, who is bored and tired.

Only Byzantia looks at her with pure love in her eyes.

Scarlet snatches up Byzantia and rushes away. Byzantia lets herself be startled and does not complain. Simeon, subjected to similar stress, screams with fright. Scarlet allows herself a second in which she can be seen to sneer. They do not meet again for years.

Down here among the women, there is a sour and grim reality about money as Wanda points out.

So, you choose your degradation, as Scarlet does, and go out scrubbing. So, you lose your purse in Woolworth’s because you want to lose your mother. But you get paid money for scrubbing, and if you leave your purse in Woolworth’s you can’t pay the rent. The bailiffs either come and put you on the streets, or they don’t.

Scarlet worries about money. Scarlet’s fear is that the State will step in and take away Byzantia, her unlawful child. So, it is free-floating anxiety. So, the Council Homes are full of children whom Children’s Officers feel better qualified than any natural mother to care for.

Perhaps they are right, thinks Scarlet, staring with despair at Byzantia, as the child shrieks and stamps with joy upon the floor, and the people in the flat below bang with a broom upon their ceiling, and Scarlet, paralysed with depression, knows that presently she will have to confess to Wanda that it has happened again; and even worse, go down and face them and apologize.

If the people in the flat below complain to the Estate Agents, Scarlet and Byzantia will have to go. There is a ‘no baby’ clause in the lease. And where else will they find to live?

Scarlet comes out in spots.

Wanda had the same concerns years and years ago. They bore her now. She looks at her spotty and apathetic daughter, and laments the waste of her own youth, spent nurturing a child who has grown up no better than she.

‘The thing about having babies,’ she says sourly, ‘is that you can’t. All you ever have is just more people.’ And from the sound of it she doesn’t much like people.

All the same, when Scarlet isn’t looking, Wanda croons to Byzantia, and weaves magic to make her smile, and be content, and good. She is better with Byzantia than Scarlet is; but then of course Byzantia expects more of Scarlet, seeing her mother as an extra limb which will do her bidding, and becoming frustrated and furious when it fails to live up to her expectations, or shows it has a will and purpose of its own.

Wanda earns £10 a week. She worries less about poverty than her daughter, having spent longer with it, and moreover she does not have her daughter’s capacity for running up debts. The rent is £3. 5s. 0d. £3 goes on food. Byzantia, one way and another, costs another £1 a week. Other household expenses, including fares, heating, light and hot water to £4 a week.

Scarlet, working as a cleaner, earns £2. 10s. 0d. a week.

There is 25/- a week left over for the three of them, after necessities have been met. This ought to be enough, except that Scarlet, to her mother’s rage, will buy lipstick, cigarettes, toys for Byzantia; and Wanda, to Scarlet’s rage, will buy rum.

Wanda has taken to drink. She has discovered its pleasures late in life. She cannot afford to buy much, but she goes to pubs, leans against bars, and men buy her drinks. She is at her best in pubs. She looks battered, used, available and lively, and in no way a source of reproach, being normally in worse condition than her drinking companions. She builds up quite a pub life. Scarlet is horrified.

‘And you a primary school teacher,’ she says. ‘You’ll lose your job if you’re not careful.’

‘You can be as drunk as you like,’ Wanda claims. ‘What they can’t stand is politics.’ And she adds gloomily, to frighten Scarlet, ‘Wait until they catch up with that.’

She is right. Teachers with communist pasts are suspect. Some have already lost their jobs. Supposing they subvert the children? Or indicate that all might not be well with the world? It is not so much political opinion that is feared, as the spirit of restlessness. No one mocks, in 1951. Stalin is not yet dead.

Wanda is horrified by the way Scarlet goes to parties in a low-cut black sweater and does not return till morning, dusty, tired and bitter.

‘Like a cat on the tiles,’ she complains.

‘I thought you were all for sexual freedom,’ says Scarlet.

‘Not for mothers,’ says Wanda. ‘You’ve had your fling. You should be at home looking after your brat. How can I keep working if I have to get up at two, three, four and five o’clock in the morning?’

It is true. Byzantia has stopped sleeping through the night. She needs entertainment at more frequent intervals than she does food. She will cry as if pierced by a nappy pin or threatened by a rat until the light goes on and a face appears. Then she will giggle, gurgle and rejoice; and only cry again when the face goes away and darkness returns.

‘You grudge me my pleasures,’ says Scarlet. ‘How am I supposed ever to get married if I have to stay at home in this dreary flat? It’s not as if I could ask anyone home. I’d be ashamed.’

‘Pleasure!’ says Wanda, who observes that Scarlet’s all-night absences merely increase her depression.

‘You think sex is dirty and nasty,’ says Scarlet. ‘You try not to but you can’t help it. That’s why you’re always so crude. It isn’t honesty and frankness, it’s sheer terror.’

‘I don’t think sex is dirty and nasty,’ replies Wanda, quick as a flash, ‘I think you are.’

And it is true that Scarlet begins to feel ingrained, though not so much with dirt as with despair. When she’s not thinking she wants a husband, she’s thinking she needs true love.

Alas, neither seems available—she herself is the only thing which is. There are more than enough men to go to bed with—and each one she hopes will fall in love with her and save her. She feels she has a great deal to offer. She opens her heart and her soul when she opens her legs; but alas, only the latter are of practical use, and men, she decides in the end—experience reinforcing Wanda’s training—are only interested in practical matters.

‘The awful thing is,’ she says to Helen, who drops by one day to visit, ‘if I was morally corrupt, if I was a calculating person, if I played men like fish on a line, if I had had an abortion instead of Byzantia, if I was cold, hard and unfriendly—then I would be pursued by men.’

‘To be pursued by men,’ says Helen, casting Scarlet down to depths from which it takes her years to emerge, ‘you have to be beautiful.’

Helen is both sorry for and irritated by Scarlet. Helen lines her love-nest with silks and downs, plucks the hairs from her legs one by one, learns poetry like a child, and entertains her lover. Y pays the rent, and never calls.

Scarlet, messing about with old saucepans on an ancient gas stove, serving coffee in cracked mugs, seems to Helen to have abandoned youth, hope and beauty. Scarlet, Helen thinks, can sink no lower. Little does Helen know.

Jocelyn is giving an engagement party. Scarlet is asked. Scarlet assumes she will be able to go because it is on a Sunday evening, which is the day Wanda holds her Divorcées Anonymous meetings. Thus Byzantia can be safely left at home. On Sunday evening she is disconcerted to see Wanda putting on the brooch which is her one concession to dressing up for an outing.

‘Are you going out?’ she says.

‘Yes,’ says Wanda.

‘Where?’

‘Is that your concern?’

‘But it’s the lady divorcées’ meeting.’

‘We’re holding it in the pub,’ says Wanda smugly.

‘But I’m going to a party,’ wails Scarlet.

‘You’re not,’ says Wanda. ‘You’re going to stay home and look after your baby.’

Scarlet is in despair.

‘They’ll hate it in the pub,’ she claims.

‘Why? They say they want men. Pubs are full of men. Drunk, red-nosed, miserable men in old creased trousers, married mostly. Impotent, crude, greasy-necked, smelly, stupid men with swollen bellies—you can hear the beer swilling in their stomachs when they walk, did you know? Let alone when they try to copulate—but men, none the less. They say they want men. Men they shall have.’

Wanda is irritated by her ladies. She has tried to indicate to them that life without men is possible, even desirable, for women past child-bearing age, and that in fact the sum of human happiness and achievement would be increased by apartheid between the sexes, but still they persist in longing for the company of men; reject lesbianism as a solution to sexual frustration, curl their hair, put on lipstick, and try to look younger than they are. Why? Because they can only seem to exist in relationship with men. Wanda takes them to the pub to punish them and to be disagreeable to her daughter.

‘You should have told me,’ says Scarlet.

‘What, that you want a cheap baby-sitter?’

‘You knew I was going out.’

‘I did not. You didn’t ask me.’

‘But the card’s been on the mantelpiece for weeks.’

‘A card! What kind of a party is it you get asked to by a card? What a funny girl this Jocelyn of yours must be. Does she wear a twin-set and pearls?’

‘She’s a bit dull,’ says Scarlet, ‘but she likes to do things the proper way. And what’s more, she asked me.’

‘Why, is she sorry for you?’ asks Wanda.

‘Yes,’ says Scarlet, ‘she is. She is very sorry for me because I have to live with you.’

And she stomps off. The relationship between them deteriorates still further. The evening at the pub is disastrous. The membership is embarrassed, leaves early, and thereafter loses its trust in Wanda. Only Lottie remains.