Down Among the Women (13 page)

‘They don’t really even want men,’ says Wanda in disgust, but cheered because her point is proved. ‘All they want is status. They want to have men to tote round on leads. They’re not unhappy because they’ve lost their husbands. They’re just peeved. How I do despise women.’

‘Shall we dress up as men?’ enquires Lottie. ‘I’ve got so thin lately I’m sure I’d pass. And as for you—’ she stops.

‘I’ve always been half a man,’ says Wanda. ‘I know. Well, I wish to God I had a wife to clear up after me, that’s all.’

They don’t dress up as men, of course. Something in them revolts. What? Men’s underpants? Men’s trousers? And the more intimate the two of them become, emotionally, the more careful they are never, never, to touch one another. Wanda speaks badly of Lottie behind her back, but is in fact devoted to her.

Scarlet gets the better of Wanda by taking Byzantia with her to the party. That means she can’t go home with a man, and has to get the last Underground train home, with a grizzling baby in her arms. She has a sudden panic fear that she will be reported to the Child Welfare Officer for having a child out at such an hour. She almost wishes now that it will happen. She feels she cannot go on. The craving to live her own life is so strong she imagines she cannot act reasonably any more. She is frightened of damaging Byzantia.

Jocelyn’s engagement party is remembered for its dullness. Philip has asked his young executive friends, who only talk of cars and salaries. Helen is ashamed to expose her artistic friends to such a bourgeois gathering, and doesn’t even come herself, let alone ask anyone else. Sylvia brings a group of middle-aged Sales and Research Directors, who drink too much and go round fondling the bosoms of the girls, who are respectable in low-cut, tiny-waisted, full dresses, with hair swept back from the face and well curled. Audrey is in Suffolk with Paul and can’t come up—or, as rumour has it, isn’t allowed to. Scarlet, of course, brings her baby, which cries, and depresses the young men with a vision of their future.

Fatherhood is not yet fashionable. Men are not present at the births of their children, if they can possibly help it. They do not shop, push prams, design the home. Marriage to the unmarried male is a trap, and sex the bait, which by stealth and cunning may yet be won. Poor passive outnumbering middle-class girls do indeed manoeuvre, lure, plot and entice in order to bring men to the altar. Not, of course, Scarlet, ‘Look through the surface of me into my soul,’ she begs of all comers, ‘see what’s there! See how I can love, feel, respond, love, oh love. If you will just accept—’ But why should they bother? Why take the trouble to inspect a dismal soul when there are a myriad glittering surfaces to attend to? Scarlet’s surface does not glitter. Even her low-cut black sweater is dusty: her shoulder-straps dirty.

Philip cannot stand her, or so he tells Jocelyn. He disapproves of their friendship. Jocelyn—although she sleeps with him on Saturday nights, which he is prepared to overlook—is good wife material, a virgin at heart if not in fact. Scarlet is just a slut.

Yet he drifts over to talk to her. He tells himself it is because she is Mr Belcher’s daughter—although he must know that a good word put in for him by Scarlet would do him no end of harm.

She baffles him. She speaks well. She seems to come from the middle-classes; why then does she live the way she does?

‘All your men friends are sorry for you,’ observes Scarlet.

‘Why?’ he asks, taken aback.

‘Entering your life-long prison,’ says Scarlet. ‘Marriage. You’re the first to go.’ She puts on a Welsh voice. ‘Getting married and not pregnant? There’s posh for you!’

‘They’re just envious,’ he says.

‘No, they’re not.’ What an uncomfortable person she is.

‘Of course they are,’ Philip insists. ‘And why not? I’m going to get my meals cooked, aren’t I? Clothes washed. Housework done. The days of discomfort are over.’

‘Is that why you’re getting married?’ she asks. ‘Shall I tell Jocelyn?’

‘Are you a mischief-maker as well?’ he asks.

‘As well as what?’

He doesn’t reply. He smiles, he looks her up and down in a way he has never regarded Jocelyn. Clean, fastidious, well-mothered as he is, she attracts him. She is, in his eyes, delightfully degraded.

‘I’ve got to get a good job,’ she says. ‘I’ve got to earn lots of money, that’s the only way out. Do you know of any?’

‘I know a night-club where you could be a cigarette girl,’ he says.

‘Don’t be silly,’ she says. ‘Me? Look, I’ve got a brain. I got to University.’

In his mind he undresses her, baths her, curls her hair, dresses her in long lace stockings, high heels, black corsets, slings a tray beneath her bosom and sends her out selling cigarettes to the rich and lascivious. His fantasies take him no further. His mother steps in, even here, good, smiling, pure and kind, and makes him feel ashamed. He’s only just kept his mother away from this party by the skin of his teeth. It is fortunate that his mother likes Jocelyn. Or is his mother just being good, smiling, pure, kind and polite yet again?

Scarlet, bored by his silence, which she takes for obtuseness, wanders off, and talks to Sylvia.

‘There are two sides to Jocelyn,’ she complains. ‘There’s the conventional side and the human side, and I’m afraid the wrong one is winning. Bed’s one thing, but marriage! He’ll be playing golf on Sundays any minute now.’

‘There is nothing wrong with sport,’ says Sylvia vaguely. There is a little frown between her eyes. Jocelyn and Philip are going to share the flat. She will, she supposes, have to leave, although it hasn’t been mentioned by the other two. She doesn’t want to think about it. She is, in any case, drinking with Philip’s friend Butch, who is six foot three inches, plays Rugby and works in the sales department of a vacuum cleaning firm. He enjoys her misty-eyed delicacy; and fills her up with gin and bitter lemon. And now she speaks well of sport, which she has been accustomed to despising.

Butch has a wife, but a disagreeable one. He has had to leave her. He weeps. Sylvia is sad on his behalf. She likes his simplicity. Later on, in bed, she tells him things she has never told anyone else, and barely acknowledges herself. She tells him how she loved a boy at fifteen, and let herself be seduced, and became pregnant, and how her mother took her out of her English literature lesson to have an abortion. She wets his shoulder with her tears, and he comforts her in his lumbering way.

‘If I found that boy,’ he says, ‘I’d beat his brains out.’

‘It wasn’t like that,’ she pleads. ‘It wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. It was just something awful that happened.’

‘I’d cut his balls off,’ Butch insists. He was born Christopher but is always known as Butch. He is more subtle in his lovemaking than seems likely. He has discovered, all by himself in a world not yet acclimatized to it, the pleasures of oral sex. In the morning they don’t want to leave each other: sit with bodies touching, he such a lumberer, she so delicate.

Philip nobly warns Butch against Sylvia. She’s fine for an easy lay, he claims, but not the sort to get entangled with. Her morals are weak, along with her eyesight and her hearing. He is glad when Butch sweeps away the warning. It will be easier now to ask Sylvia to leave.

‘She’s been a bit upset,’ Butch says. ‘She’s had a bad start. She’s going to be all right now.’

After the engagement party, Philip gives a stag party. His father offers to pay. Philip’s parents are shadowy figures, even to their son. Philip’s father is gruffly amiable and waves a cheque book to prove his good intent. Philip sees his mother more often in his fantasies than he does in life: she appears ladylike in flowered prints, to damp his ardour and spoil his concentration, and make him feel guilty. In real life she runs the W.I., does Church work, and is always calm and good. He has only once seen her cry. That was when he was sent away to school to be made a man of.

Philip, made a man of, now gives a stag party. Philip goes to an agency and orders a stripper to add gaiety to the occasion. The agency takes his money but the girl does not turn up. Philip is relieved. The mechanics of the matter have played upon his mind since he made the arrangement. He will have to open the door to this girl, give her instructions, pay her, send her home. How, in a taxi? Supposing she is elderly, scraggy and unpleasant? Expects more than money? Is one of his friend’s sisters? (There is a high-class brothel in South Ken, so they say, where girls from high-class families turn the odd penny. A Guards’ Officer is reputed to have been shown into the room where his sister lay waiting, naked on the bed. ‘Why, Amanda, old girl!’ ‘Why, Jonathan, old chap!’)

No, the idea of a stripper is far, far preferable to the actuality.

After the wedding—which takes place in Jocelyn’s village church, with all the trimmings she wished for, except her mother did not cry and her father’s voice was not hoarse, but at least it was too far away for her friends to attend—Philip gets more and more angry with the agency, which he feels has got money from him on false pretences. He threatens to sue. The agency maintain his complaint is against the girl. He sends her a solicitor’s letter, asking for his money back.

Jocelyn, casually informed, is aghast. First that he should have wished to employ a stripper; then that he should seek vengeance. He tries to explain.

‘But it was my stag party,’ he says, smiling in his remote masculine way. ‘My last fling as a bachelor. I wouldn’t do it now.’

‘You’re not a different person,’ she says, ‘just because you’re married.’

‘No, but I’ve got to behave now,’ he says. He thinks he is pleasing her. She doesn’t look pleased.

‘But what’s the point of watching a strange girl take her clothes off?’ persists poor innocent Jocelyn. ‘I’ll take my clothes off for you.’

After hockey she and the girls would strip and shower. She was never shy. She always enjoyed her body.

‘Take them off then,’ he says, conventionally, but of course she won’t. She is offended by the mysteries attendant upon his desires.

‘And you shouldn’t be so vengeful,’ she complains. ‘I don’t understand what is the matter with you.’ And she doesn’t, and neither does he.

‘We need every penny we can get,’ he ventures. It is true. They have overspent his income and some of Jocelyn’s capital. They have had the flat painted, and furnished after the style made fashionable by the 1951 exhibition. Jocelyn stalks over green and yellow carpets, wonders why Philip still only makes love on Saturday nights, and then so languidly, and is put in mind—for no reason she can think of other than a general feeling of depression—of Scarlet’s mother’s green and yellow lino. The curtains are brown and yellow; the ceilings pink and the wallpaper patterned with orange geometric designs. Can this be what she meant by it all? Is this the feel, the heart, the texture of married life? She hasn’t the heart to write to Miss Bonny. It even crosses her mind that she could join a team and play hockey on Saturday afternoons while Philip plays Rugby, but she knows in her heart that those times are past, those sources of solace unavailable.

‘Do you think it’s because he plays Rugby that he always seems tired on Saturday nights?’ she asks Helen.

‘If he didn’t play Rugby on Saturdays,’ says Helen, ‘I doubt you would have the opportunity of knowing whether he was tired or not.’

Jocelyn looks at her blankly.

‘It’s those Rugby songs,’ says Helen, ‘they get him going. And he needs something, I’m afraid.’

Jocelyn is quite pale.

‘They’re so horrid,’ she complains. ‘There’s no
feeling
in them. I never listen.’

‘If you want feeling,’ says Helen, smugly, ‘you must take up with an artist. The only whole men in the world are the artists.’

Helen lives a strange and isolated life in the studio where X works by night and which Y pays for. X keeps his liaison with Helen sporadically secret. He assumes both that Y must surely know about it, and that his friends don’t. In fact, of course, he is wrong on both counts. Both X and Y wonder, on the rare evenings when Helen joins them for supper, why their friends are now so rude to her.

X does not like strangers in the studio, so Helen has either to entertain secretly or not at all. She is driven more and more into the company of Jocelyn, Sylvia and Scarlet, with none of whom, these days, she has much in common. She does have the pleasure, however, of having her opinion asked, and she thrives in the golden glow of sexual reputation. She is idle. She writes poetry, goes to poetry readings, tends her little home, and waits for X. She grows riotous pot plants. She waxes white and odalisque-like. X spends some four nights a week with Helen, some three with Y, which is surely a victory for Helen.

He is working well. Y, after the interlude of her prize and a patch of acclaim, has fallen into a trough of non-appreciation. But she is glad that X is working well. The studio was a good idea. She suspects he has girls there from time to time, but does not wish to know for sure. At any rate, he is happy.

Y is grateful to Helen for having helped her improve her life. Helen calls sometimes in the afternoons—when she knows X is out teaching, Y notices—and they drink coffee, talk about men in general and X in particular, and Helen will help put the children to bed. Y is defeated by, and X uninterested in, his children. X tried to paint them once but couldn’t catch their essence. And although he had fed them pheno-barb to keep them still, they would wriggle. Nothing will stop them wriggling and grizzling. Not threats, shouts, bribes, smiles or drugs.

‘You must take a lover,’ says Helen to Jocelyn now. ‘An artist or a poet. I’ll see what I can do. These are the worthwhile men.’

Jocelyn is indignant. She regrets having confided her difficulty to Helen. She feels she has been unloyal to Philip. Next time Helen rings she is abrupt and unwelcoming, and Helen does not ring again for quite a time.

Jocelyn opens her account at Harrods, and overspends wildly. She buys hoop earrings in solid gold which everyone takes for tin.

There is no answer from the stripper to Philip’s letter demanding the return of his ten guineas. Just a rude, humiliating silence. Philip broods. He feels his friends are watching and waiting for him to resolve the situation.