Down Among the Women (16 page)

‘How did you come to be born?’ asks Scarlet.

‘There was only the one occasion,’ Edwin claims. ‘That was not for pleasure, that was to conceive a child. You don’t want another child,’ (he asserts, though he has never asked her). ‘Byzantia is quite enough for you as it is—and incidentally, when she goes to nursery school don’t you think she should be registered under a more normal Christian name? Linda, for example. It’s not just that one does not wish to underline her somewhat unconventional start in life, for her sake—but she does bear my surname, and is known as my child. No, I don’t really understand your complaint. You must be a strange person. If you do feel yourself to be sexually deprived I can only suggest you go out for the night every now and then. It will break my heart,’ he adds, ‘but if you feel like a whore that is my cross and I must bear it.’

At other times he feels he has failed her. Tears come into his eyes. (Edwin cries easily. He is a sentimental man, easily moved by kindness. He cries when Byzantia—who is fond of him, in spite of his inspectorial habits—draws him a birthday card, or makes any gesture of affection.)

‘I know I am no good to you,’ says Edwin. ‘But I am an ill man. I haven’t much longer in the world. Be patient with me just a little.’

‘Yes,’ she says, and is.

At other times he accuses her of waiting for him to die in order to inherit his money. £400 in Gilt-Edged. The house, worth £2,500 with a £1,500 mortgage still to pay. Or at other times he suspects her of trying to send him mad, by twisting his words. When he speaks like this he sounds like a mad man, and she could dismiss him as such, except that she knows that what he says is true.

She wishes him to die: she wants him locked up, put away, buried, gone.

Yet when he is in fact taken to hospital for an exploratory operation, she visits him daily, prays for his recovery, fights doctors, sisters, nurses for his comfort, worries for him, feels for him, nurses him back to health to the limit of her capacity.

He has a little song he sings while he convalesces; a cheerful time. Scarlet has been good to him and he is happy:

‘Uncle Alf and Auntie Mabel,

Fainted at the breakfast table.

Let it be an awful warning,

Never do it in the morning.’

And he looks at Scarlet slyly to see if she is shocked. She is. Her mother sang rude songs. Must this man do the same?

Scarlet’s friends do not visit her. Lee Green is a long way, and besides they cannot get on with Edwin. They write to her, sometimes. Scarlet does not reply. Jocelyn gives parties, and asks Scarlet. Scarlet does not turn up. She does not want to be pitied.

Edwin and Scarlet see very little of Wanda. Wanda has joined the C.N.D., thus frightening Edwin. And she is brisk and formal if they do meet, thus frightening and upsetting Scarlet.

Wanda can only be happy when she is not thinking about her daughter. It is not too difficult for her not to think, these days, for she has a lover. He is a twenty-year-old lorry driver she met in the pub. The liaison offends everyone—Kim, Susan, Scarlet, Edwin, even Lottie in her last few months—which gives it a cheerful momentum. Scarlet thinks if she can, I can—but she doesn’t.

Wanda is further displeased with her daughter’s behaviour, when, instead of justifying her existence by starting a Lee Green branch of the C.N.D. (though can you imagine Edwin allowing any such thing?) Scarlet joins the Lee Green branch of an anti-communist organisation.

For Edwin has discovered that Wanda was once a communist, and though he could forgive her teaching innocent children the facts of life, he cannot excuse her political past, which, the times being what they are, puts his own position in jeopardy.

Edwin accuses Scarlet, yet once again, of concealing information detrimental to his interests. Edwin points out, at length, long into the seven nights of a full week, that she has married him on false pretences. He, a much respected man with a position in the community, has out of the kindness of his heart seen his way to marrying a fallen woman and taking her illegitimate daughter into his home. Is this how she repays him?

Scarlet is perfectly happy to join the anti-communists if it will stop Edwin talking. Wanda can’t forgive.

Years pass.

Scarlet walks like a zombie. Regard Scarlet’s personality as if it were a plant. Come the winter it goes underground. Come the spring it will force its way up, cracking concrete if need be, to reach the light.

Scarlet’s spring seems a long time coming. No sun rises to bathe her world with warmth.

She is deserted by, has deserted, Wanda, Kim, family, friends.

She makes no new acquaintances here in Lee Green. They think she is snobbish, and they are right. Only Byzantia smiles and grows and talks, beginning to feed back to her mother the nourishment she has sapped for so long.

Suez. English, French, Israeli troops—shooting at Egyptians? It seems, in those naïve days, incredible, monstrous, dangerous, unfair.

Scarlet is frightened. She thinks the nuclear holocaust is imminent. She wants to take Byzantia and flee to Cornwall, where she imagines she will be safe. Edwin won’t give her the fare money. Edwin is shocked.

‘You are mad,’ he says. ‘If there is any danger, which there isn’t, it is your duty to stay here.’

‘Why?’ she asks.

‘You can’t run away,’ he says, indignant.

‘But I want to,’ she says.

Suez passes, nations subside; but the fact that Scarlet wants to run away, once spoken, stays in her mind. It feeds, grows, nourishes the roots of her being. Is spring coming?

A stall-holder at the Saturday market where Scarlet shops, a dealer in fabrics, forty, a short, fat, lively villain, propositions her as she buys elastic for Byzantia’s knickers. Scarlet is shocked; she laughs it off. He renews his request the following week. She refuses. But she quite likes him. He is insistent.

‘Why me?’ she asks.

‘You’re my type,’ he replies.

‘A fat, spotty, dreary housewife?’ asks Scarlet—and indeed she is all these things, and looks a good thirty-five as well—‘Your type?’

‘You’re posh,’ he says. ‘I’ve got a little room round the corner—’

‘I’m not like that,’ she says. ‘I’m a married woman.’

‘What do you want? Money?’

‘No,’ she says, shocked.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ he says. ‘Nylons.’

She looks down at her stockings, as he does. Stockings are always a problem to Scarlet. When Edwin goes through the accounts, he questions the amount she spends on nylons, and reproaches her for not taking more care of them. She goes round, always, with laddered stockings.

‘All right,’ she says.

Spring is coming.

They rendezvous one evening, the barrow boy and Scarlet. She has told Edwin that she is going to the pictures: she has checked the stills outside the cinema during the day to make her story stick in case she is questioned later. The film is
The Nun’s Story.
She likes that. Deceit comes easily to her.

Alone with this stranger in a neat clean chintzy bed-sitting room in a private house, she talks nervously about his wife, which disconcerts him.

‘We didn’t come here to talk,’ he says. ‘Take your clothes off.’

She does.

Two pairs of cut-price nylons the richer, Scarlet walks the Lee Green streets, until it is time for the cinema to end. Then she joins the crowd as it leaves and walks home.

Scarlet feels she is at last a whore. She need no longer resist Edwin’s accusations. She can accept them gracefully and have some peace.

The next Saturday Scarlet goes to the market seeking her client, who, apparently pleased with her performance, has asked her thus to meet him. His stall is empty. Where once the gauzy laces and the brilliant trimmings dangled, is now just a bare dusty platform. He has gone. Gone to another market, another part of London, to buy another posh lost lady housewife for two pairs of cut-price nylon stockings.

Scarlet walks home with Byzantia holding her hand. Scarlet cries. Scarlet sings ‘Tammy’s in love’ to Byzantia. It is a commercial love-song. It was playing on the radio—he had turned the volume up so that his landlady, of whom he seemed nervous, would not know he had a visitor—while he obtained his nylons’ worth from Scarlet.

Scarlet loves her client. Scarlet will love anything, anyone, so long as it’s impossible and not actually Edwin, whom she married for what he could give her and now finds that this is nothing.

Poor Edwin. To grace him with her presence in his house, eating his food, spending his money, though wearing her own nylons, is hardly enough.

Scarlet cries herself to sleep for a full week. Tears water the ground. All is ready for the sun.

It doesn’t dawn.

But one day there is a knock at the door. The milkman? Scarlet shuffles down, wearing Edwin’s slippers. It is Susan.

Susan has driven to visit her in her little Morris Minor. Simeon sits in the back, a neat, clean little boy, even neater and cleaner than his mother or his grandmother before him.

Scarlet asks them in. Scarlet looks round her house with their eyes. It is a dim and dusty place. Edwin will have nothing in it changed. When she Hoovers the carpets she must put the furniture back exactly where it was before. The legs of the three-piece suite (1932) have worn twelve small neat holes through the carpet in the living-room.

Byzantia trips Simeon up. She is not used to other children in the house. Edwin does not encourage them.

‘This is
our
house,’ he will say. ‘Not a stage-post for strangers. You, me, Byzantia—shall we call her Edna?—we are happy just by ourselves.’

Simeon, tripped, does not cry. It is not man-like.

Susan cries.

‘It’s all my fault,’ she says, ‘I’ve felt so bad about it, Scarlet.’

‘Bad about what? I’m all right.’

‘You’re not all right,’ says Susan. ‘You’re fat and miserable and you live in this horrible place with that horrible man.’

‘How do you know he’s horrible?’

‘Wanda says so.’

‘You talk to each other, then?’

‘Yes, actually.’

Susan has had a nervous breakdown. She trembled and cried, and could not stop. Kim took her to a psychiatrist; she still visits him weekly; now she visits Wanda and talks to her instead of to her mother. She feels better these days. She dreams about Scarlet, and feels she must make amends, somehow.

‘It was me would never let Kim send you money,’ says Susan, in an agony of remorse. ‘It was me made him so nasty to you. I was angry about Byzantia.’

Scarlet is baffled. Susan explains she is seeing a psychiatrist and Scarlet assumes that Susan is a little out of her mind.

‘You’ve got to get out of here,’ says Susan.

‘Why?’

‘It upsets me too much,’ complains Susan.

Susan cannot escape, these days, in the manner she used to. Just before her breakdown, when she fell asleep it was as if her eyes stayed open. The night worlds would be closed to her. She would sleep, that was all. And waking in the mornings in her new house—for Kim has grown rich and they have moved to Kew—she would think she was still back in Baker Street and would stumble round the bedroom trying to find her bearings. Now at least she knows where she wakes, and she dreams of Scarlet, and has steeled herself to come visiting.

Edwin returns, and is introduced to Susan. Susan leaves as quickly as possible, but not before Edwin has reminded her that her husband owes him £7. 10s. 0d.

‘It is not the money,’ he says. ‘It is the principle. A father must take responsibility for his daughter, whatever the daughter may be like. I am sure I will take responsibility for Marjorie—’

‘Marjorie?’ asks Susan, confused.

‘My name for Byzantia—although she is not even mine by blood. I take it Scarlet
is
Kim’s daughter, although knowing Wanda’s habits one can forgive him for perhaps doubting it? Was that why he failed to pay me the £7. 10s. 0d? I have sometimes thought so.’

Susan writes a cheque. Scarlet is humiliated.

It takes Scarlet a week to move such belongings as she has out of the house, suitcase by secret suitcase, to an astonished Lee Green neighbour. Then she steals seven pounds from Edwin’s wallet in the middle of one night, wakes Byzantia early in the morning, and they leave together.

She means never to return.

D
OWN AMONG THE WOMEN
. If all else fails, we can always be useful.

Angling story:

Two men sit fishing on a river bank, raincoated, morose, silent. Eventually one speaks.

1st angler: You weren’t here yesterday, then.

2nd angler: No.

1st angler:
(presently)
Something hold you up, then?

2nd angler: Got married.

Silence.

1st angler: Good-looker, is she?

2nd angler: No.

Silence.

1st angler: Got money, has she?

2nd angler: No.

Silence.

1st angler: Sexy, then?

2nd angler: You’re joking.

Silence.

1st angler: Good little housekeeper, is that it?

2nd angler: No. She’s blind.

Silence.

1st angler: Then what you want to go and marry her for?

2nd angler: She’s got worms.

The girls are on the move. That same manoeuvring star, which once led them trooping up the stairs to offer help to Scarlet, which then dispersed, antagonized and rooted them down for years—like children playing Statues, caught when the music stopped—that same star now takes another turn and sets these young women in motion once again.

Helen turns up at Jocelyn’s house in the middle of the night. (It is fortunate that Philip is away on business.) Jocelyn lives in Chelsea now. She is a cool, chic, childless young lady. She has a built-in kitchen, new American style. Her cushions are covered in Thai silk, and tastefully arranged in a cool, chic, childless drawing-room. Her bathroom is pink and orange, and the soap and towels match. Her drinks tray contains bottles of every imaginable form of alcohol. Her accent has sharpened into Upper English Chelsea. Shopgirls pay attention when Jocelyn walks in: it seems an achievement.