Down Among the Women (15 page)

No one can understand her.

Edwin calls at the flat every day, nods in a slightly, but only slightly, embarrassed way to Wanda, and continues his wooing of Scarlet. He won’t let her go out cleaning any more. Silently, every week he hands her £2. 5s. 0d.

Byzantia laughs and chuckles as he bends over her, his faded blue eyes crinkling. He is a kind man. He is an old man. His back is weak—he has mysterious pains in his spine, for which he consults doctor after doctor. Byzantia doesn’t know this. She holds out her arms to him. He picks her up and tries not to wince. They love each other: old flappy legs and plump, curly, brilliant Byzantia.

Byzantia will not stay in her cot. She will not go to sleep. She is an exhausting child. Wanda is tired. Wanda is tired of Edwin, tired of Scarlet, tired of life, tired of lifting Byzantia back into her cot while Scarlet and Edwin drive down leafy lanes and kiss in their mis-matched way.

Wanda snaps and snarls. Wanda keeps her children in after school.

Edwin proposes.

Scarlet accepts.

People talk. Kim makes a phone-call to Wanda. ‘Don’t interfere,’ says Wanda. ‘Either support her, or keep out of it. Look, he’s a man, he can give her a home. God almighty, I think she loves him,’ Kim keeps out of it.

‘She’s made her bed,’ says Susan, unforgivably. ‘Now she’ll have to lie on it.’ And Susan repairs to her own with a migraine, taking Simeon in beside her, clutching him and moaning in pain. He smiles, thinking she’s playing, because it is his time for playing. She hates him, slaps him, and wants her mother. When she remembers that these days it is she who looks after her mother—for Mrs Watson has discovered the existence of Mr Watson’s lady friend—Susan cries. She is having a terrible time, and is sorry for herself.

Audrey writes from the country, to give her blessing. She signs herself as Emma, and mentions that the pottery is giving way to a free-range whole-food chicken farm, says marriage is bliss. She is making a patch-work quilt. She will send it to Scarlet for her marriage bed. She is glad everything has turned out well at last. Children need fathers. (Audrey is six months pregnant, and appears to be rejoicing in her state. Though Jocelyn, visiting her, complains of an atmosphere of chicken feathers, wholemeal bread, and despondency.)

Jocelyn tries to dissuade Scarlet. ‘If you marry him,’ she says, ‘you will become a Lee Green housewife.’

‘I will remain myself,’ says Scarlet, ‘only more comfortable, and without my mother trying to ruin my life.’

‘But you don’t remain yourself when you marry,’ says Jocelyn. ‘You take on your husband’s level in the world. You take on his status, his income, his friends and his way of life. His class, if you like. You become an aspect of him. It’s all right for girls to marry above them, but they should never ever marry below.’

‘You are a terrible snob,’ says Scarlet.

‘Don’t be cross,’ begs Jocelyn. ‘I don’t want to see you ruin your life, that’s all.’

‘It’s pretty ruined already,’ states Scarlet. ‘Anyway, how do you know it’s like that? Perhaps I won’t take on his way of life. Perhaps he’ll take on mine.’

‘He’s twenty-five years older than you,’ says Jocelyn. ‘It’s not likely, is it?’

‘Thirty-two,’ says Scarlet smugly, and Jocelyn is shocked. ‘Anyway, Byzantia needs a father.’

‘But not this one, Scarlet. I’m sure he believes in early potty training and discipline, and shutting children in dark cupboards.’

‘Look,’ says Scarlet, ‘I’m sorry you don’t like him—’

‘It’s not that I don’t like him,’ pleads Jocelyn. ‘It’s just he’s so unsuitable.’

‘He may not be—well, widely cultured, and he’s not really interested in abstract matters, but he’s kind. And by God, he wears trousers and he wants to marry me.’ Scarlet’s voice rises to a shriek. Jocelyn keeps a parrot, which begins to squawk in sympathy. The cat’s lungs were weakened after the incident of the gas fire, and it died a few months later. Philip bought her the parrot to cheer her up.

‘I can always leave him,’ adds Scarlet presently, and Jocelyn is even more shocked. Jocelyn believes marriage is forever.

‘I can’t go on the way I am,’ Scarlet tries to explain. ‘Sleeping around. I don’t really like it. I’ve got to settle down. And I am so tired of worrying about money, and the rent, and Wanda, and everything.’

It is a plea for support and understanding but Jocelyn becomes even more remote, icy and disapproving.

‘It’s all so messy,’ is all she’ll say. ‘You’re not going to be happy.’

‘Byzantia is,’ says Scarlet, pleading mother love. Jocelyn is unmoved. She raises her eyebrows, crooks her little finger and sips tea. She doesn’t take sugar. Scarlet does. Jocelyn has put salt in the sugar bowl and forgotten she has done so.

‘What would you know about being a mother, anyway?’ says Scarlet, when her tea has been emptied down the sink, and a fresh cup poured, and the explanation and apologies are over.

Jocelyn sees this remark as an unprovoked attack, and they part on cool terms.

Scarlet asks Jocelyn and Philip to the wedding, but they don’t come. Jocelyn gets the date wrong. When they discover the error, they are relieved rather than distressed. Jocelyn does describe Edwin to Philip, and he takes a prurient interest in the union of these two such disparate bodies, but he is really not concerned in Scarlet’s fate. In his view, she long ago turned into a slut and opted out of the world of serious people. He hopes her marriage will keep her more out of Jocelyn’s way. He does not like to associate with unfortunate people. He fears the ailment may be catching, like measles.

Sylvia is glad that Scarlet is getting married. She sees marriage as a desirable state. Butch’s divorce drags on and on. But she won’t come to the wedding. She is frightened that Jocelyn will be there. Butch has made up the quarrel with Philip. Now it is Sylvia who hangs back. Butch has expressed recently an unnerving appreciation of Jocelyn’s arse—Sylvia finds his language these days, crude. Once she had found it stimulating. She is very thin, and her eyes dark and wide.

Helen simply says of Scarlet, ‘She is doing the proper thing. He will be a good father to her.’ And of Jocelyn, ‘The more frustrated the lady, the more expressive the backside.’

Wanda can hardly bring herself to speak to Scarlet. Was this what she has endured so much privation for? To see her daughter in the hands of this grey and stooping philatelist? To lose Byzantia to the back streets of Lee Green?

In the schools, her reputation goes before her. ‘Miss Brown is ill. Miss Rider’s coming.’ The absentee rate soars. Little children clutch their stomachs and convince their parents they are ill.

Elderly Edwin takes Scarlet to see his even more elderly father, a retired railway worker with a gold watch to prove it. The old man can scarcely see Scarlet, for his eyesight is failing, but what he does see he does not like. He cannot comprehend the existence of Byzantia. He thinks, in his confused way, when they try to explain her, that she is some foreign visitor who refuses to leave.

The wedding arrangements proceed. Edwin cannot understand why Scarlet’s father does not pay, since surely the bride’s father bears the cost of the wedding? Scarlet begs and pleads with him not to approach Kim, but Edwin does. Edwin writes to Kim asking for £57. 10s. 0d. Kim, too astonished to resist, sends a cheque for £50. Edwin refrains from asking again for the £7. 10s. 0d., and points out to Scarlet, at length, his generosity and understanding. She believes him.

A slight difficulty arises for Scarlet, however. Edwin, relating after the fashion of lovers the high-spots of his life, tells Scarlet an anecdote of how, as a young man, he and a friend both managed to seduce and make pregnant a farmer’s wife—and then left the district. As they had given her false names, the woman had no means of tracing either of them, and thus trouble was avoided. He tells this story as an example of his ingenuity and presence of mind.

Scarlet pushes Byzantia in her pushchair for hours and hours, trying to recover her love for Edwin. Byzantia has holes in her woollen bootees. Her little pink toe pushes through. Even as Scarlet watches, another strand of wool gives, and lo, there is half Byzantia’s naked, chilly, infant foot. Scarlet recovers her love for Edwin.

Weddings plans proceed. Edwin takes Scarlet away for a week’s holiday. They book into a boarding house on the south coast under a false name—‘Johnson, to make a change from Smith’, explains Edwin. ‘We couldn’t have gone abroad, you see. They ask for passports.’ He is delighted at the subterfuge. It affords him an erotic pleasure, and they make love on the first night they are there. ‘The non-event of the year,’ Scarlet describes it to Jocelyn years later. But the next day he has bad back pains—the cold sea winds, he supposes—and asks the landlady if they can be transferred to a room with twin beds. ‘So I’m not tempted,’ he explains to Scarlet.

On the way back to London he stops the car to relieve himself. Scarlet watches his tall grey stooping figure—back carefully to the wind—suffers total revulsion, and knows she is mad. But she won’t stop. She won’t.

The wedding day comes. It is a dismal affair in a registry office. The Registrar, or so Scarlet likes to think, looks dazed. He is used to marrying rich and vigorous older men to pretty young girls, but Edwin looks like a death’s head. Edwin’s pain is bad on his wedding day.

Scarlet thinks he won’t last long. She is horrified at herself. She takes his hand, presses it, willing him health and happiness, protecting him against evil. Yet she would like that little Lee Green house all to herself. It has carpets, red Wilton patterned with yellow zig-zag stripes.

Wanda doesn’t come to the wedding, either. She says she will stay home and look after Byzantia.

The reception, in a Lee Green hotel, is a forlorn affair. There is warm sweet white wine, slices of ham, potato salad, and trifle. People stay for as short a time as possible; leave without discussing the marriage. There is nothing to say.

The marriage is not consummated for some months. Edwin discovers undisclosed debts of Scarlet’s—£30 run up on a Budget Account at a department store—and takes the view that she has wilfully deceived him. He sulks for days. Scarlet offers to go out to work to pay the debt, but that makes him angrier still. No wife of his goes out to work. It is the first time Scarlet has heard of this.

She looks into a blank future. But at least Byzantia has a little room to herself; and Edwin has bought a frieze of dancing lambs to go round the picture rail. Scarlet puts it up. They are crude and vulgar lambs, but they do dance; and Byzantia, Scarlet thinks, will need all the gaiety she can muster in the coming years.

Edwin passes out of his sulk into another attack of back pains. Scarlet asks for details. ‘The doctors are fools,’ he says. ‘They know nothing. There’s some foreign body pressing between a couple of discs. I know there is. I can feel it. Something that ought not to be there. They say there’s nothing. They say I imagine it.’

‘But if it hurts, there’s something wrong,’ says Scarlet.

‘Of course there is,’ he says. ‘But try getting them to admit it. I even got sent to a psychiatrist once.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He? It was a she. The world’s gone mad.’

‘What did she say, then?’

‘She said I was a repressed homosexual.’ And he laughs. He can laugh. He has a sweet smile, in fact, like a little boy’s, who knows only too well how to be endearing. Scarlet laughs too.

‘What would having a pain in my back have to do with me being a repressed homosexual, even if I was, which of course I’m not? How extraordinary people are! Why, I’ve been married twice.’

‘What kind of thing do you think it is, trapped between your discs?’ asks Scarlet.

‘A bit of grit, I should think. A little bit of dirt. Probably something quite tiny. I’m sorry. Not much of a honeymoon for you, is it?’ and he laughs nervously. He feels friendly towards her, and protective, and has forgiven the £30 altogether, now that his back is hurting, and he is relieved of his sexual obligations.

For a time Scarlet does not mind. She sleeps in Byzantia’s room—Edwin says it would be better. His tossing and turning might disturb her. Scarlet makes toast in the toaster. She takes Byzantia to the swings. She shops in the high street. She smiles graciously to the neighbours. She, who is accustomed to feeling worse than other people, now feels better than they. As an educated, cultured girl, she is superior to her husband, who is old and ill, superior to her neighbours, and superior to her fellow shoppers.

Edwin leaves the house at 8.30 in the morning and returns at 5. He is a man of regular habits. He pays bills the day they come in. Her housekeeping money is regular. Sometimes he travels the country for the Education Authority, but always makes sure she is properly provided for in his absence.

She feels well looked after.

It is not surprising, she thinks, that he is an inspector. It is in his nature to inspect. He runs a finger over door-ledges; he turns down the gas flames as he comes into the kitchen. He cannot bear to see them high. He inspects Byzantia’s hair, nails, neck for dirt.

Scarlet waits for him to die.

Months pass.

The marriage is consummated, astonishingly, rapidly, one night, in a south coast boarding house. Edwin and Scarlet have gone to visit a spiritualist healer who is an old friend of Edwin’s. Scarlet presents herself to him with confidence thinking that if this old man has any kind of extra-sensory perception at all he will perceive that she is an exceptional person. But the spiritualist responds to her badly. He clearly does not like her. He is on Edwin’s side.

Scarlet is depressed. The consummation of the marriage—though the event is not repeated—does not cheer her up at all. On the contrary. It means she now can’t get the marriage annulled.

Edwin becomes more critical, more anxious to find fault. They have rows. He does not take baths. They hurt his back, he says. He sits for hours and hours on the lavatory.

‘You impotent dirty old man,’ she screams.

‘You oversexed whore,’ he snarls.

When they are calmer he claims that sexual activity is a small part of normal life. Her experience of life to date has been faulty. She has simply associated with a peculiar and perverse group, from which he has rescued her. He cites various couples he knows, in their fifties, who, to use Edwin’s language, ‘never do it’. His parents never did it, either.