Down Among the Women (17 page)

To live so graciously costs a great deal—more, probably, than Philip can afford on his salary. They do not, of course, discuss money, or sex, or politics. Jocelyn, made nervous by the amount of her Harrods’ bill, has been obliged to spend some of her capital. One suicidal impulse, as it were, leading to another, she then takes the rest out of Gilt Edged and re-invests in Insurance Companies. She does not tell Philip.

The parrot has died. Jocelyn left the window open one frosty night, and forgot to move the cage, so that it caught a chill, wilted, and expired, reproaching her. Now she has a highly-bred dachshund with a bronchitic cough, and a limp, creased body.

Jocelyn, opening the door to Helen, wears a pretty white and blue fur-edged housecoat and white fur slippers. (Central heating is not yet fashionable. Hot bedrooms seem sinful and over-luxurious.) As for Helen, she has walked half-way across London in her night-gown, and the night is not warm, and her face is battered, but still she smiles with condescending grace at poor, dull, chic, bourgeois Jocelyn.

‘You can’t have come dressed like that,’ is the first thing Jocelyn says.

‘I walked boldly,’ says Helen, ‘with my head held high. I assumed I was wearing evening dress, so others assumed it too. No one remarked on anything unusual.’

‘Not even a policeman?’ asks Jocelyn, leading her friend to the bathroom.

‘One can tell you’re a rate-payer,’ says Helen. She surveys the cleanly lustres of the bathroom, and manages to make clear that it is not to her taste. Jocelyn bathes Helen’s eye with cotton wool. (We are not yet into the era of plentiful tissues, and the toilet paper is still hard and shiny, made by puritanical Northerners.)

Helen’s face is quite badly battered. Jocelyn is nervous, and her hands tremble, but Helen stands still and docile, as if accustomed to being tended.

‘What happened?’ asks Jocelyn. ‘Was it an accident?’

‘No,’ says Helen. ‘You are the one who has accidents, not me. It is a private matter actually.’

And she peers at her face, and the swollen purplish flesh around her eyes.

‘It gives one a slightly oriental look,’ she says. ‘It might please decadent tastes. What a pity Philip isn’t here.’

This remark puzzles Jocelyn. A lot of things about Helen puzzle Jocelyn. Jocelyn is not stupid. Let us say she is going through a stupid patch, as people will when they are attempting to evade unpleasant truths; and Jocelyn, these days, maintains that she is happy.

Helen thinks Jocelyn is a pain in the neck, but has, frankly, nowhere else to go.

Jocelyn, for her part, welcomes Helen kindly, even though it is the middle of the night, both for old times’ sake, because X is by now one of the country’s leading painters, and artists of all kinds have a cachet down here in Chelsea, and because she has not the courage to turn Helen away. Helen makes such vibrant demands of the world, it seems to Jocelyn, that other people’s wills and wants tend to dissolve in her path. Only X faces her, implacable, and refuses to be manipulated.

Helen and X have quarrelled. Or rather, Helen and X have been discovered by Y, and X, it transpires, can live without Helen but not without his wife.

Picture the scene in which Y, paler than ever, and trembling, arrives at the studio and stands at the end of the bed in which Helen lies surprised, helpless, and even righteous—for on that particular night X has worked late and fallen into bed too tired to even put his arms round her. Helen stares, and then smiles politely. Y takes off a shoe and starts to beat Helen about the head and face.

X wakes, slips out of bed, goes into the bathroom and locks the door. Y abandons her victim and batters the door with her shoe.

‘Coward,’ she cries, ‘come out of there.’

There is silence.

‘I want you to come out of here,’ she shrieks.

‘Momma don’t allow no female-fucking here,’ he sings, in his powerful voice, ‘Going to fuck that female any old how, cos momma don’t allow no females here—’

Thwarted, Y takes up a kitchen knife and goes round the room slitting canvases. Helen emerges from under the bedclothes, and struggles long and silently with Y to take the knife away.

X emerges from the bathroom.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asks his wife. ‘You promised me you would never come. What kind of person are you, to break a promise like that? How can I trust you again? And what are you doing up in the middle of the night? Shouldn’t you be asleep? I hope you haven’t left the children alone?’

Y squirms free of Helen and advances on X with her knife raised. Helen rushes into the bathroom and locks the door.

X disarms Y, easily.

‘How can you!’ says Y, inadequately enough. ‘And with Helen!’

‘But you know I have girls here,’ says X. ‘You have never minded before. I’m sure you have your own diversions.’

‘But I haven’t,’ says Y.

‘Is that the trouble then?’ asks X. ‘Shall I arrange something for you?’

He is very angry at his wife’s intrusion. He does not like his actions questioned, or his liberty challenged.

‘It’s not like that,’ says Y, helpless, and already beginning to feel she is in the wrong. ‘I only want you.’

‘That is your misfortune,’ he says. ‘Do not burden me with it.’

‘But Helen!’ she says. ‘I had no idea it was Helen. You’ve both been cheating me.’

‘You are mad,’ he says. ‘First, you practically drive me away from home and push me into bed with other women. If you remember it, it was your idea I should have this place. I didn’t want it, God knows—I was happy at home. Now you object when I use it. What proper wife behaves the way you do?’

‘I love you,’ says Y. ‘I want you to be happy.’

‘Love?’ he says. ‘What’s that? You wanted me out of the way so you could pursue your career, that’s all.’

Y gets her knife back and starts slitting more of Helen’s paintings, and breaking Helen’s best glasses and china.

‘Stop her, stop her,’ bleats Helen through the keyhole, but X makes no move.

‘Stop, stop! Let me talk to you, let me explain,’ begs Helen, but all Y does is slit on, and smash on, and say, ‘What a lousy painter she is! What crude and amateur stuff. An amateur artist and an amateur whore. What an insult she is, what a parasite, what a nothing.’ And X just sits and watches. He seems amused, now, as if he was watching the antics of a performing animal.

‘I am going to hand back the lease,’ says Y, pale and vicious. ‘Tomorrow. You have cheated me long enough. Why should I pay for your filthy pleasures?’

‘Don’t do anything so rash,’ says X, moved to nervousness at last. ‘I have an exhibition next month. I can’t move out now, not without spoiling everything.’

‘It’s you who’ve done the spoiling,’ says Y. ‘If you see anything good or noble, you can’t wait till you have spoiled it. Why should I put up with it? This is my place. I command you to leave now, or I will call the police.’

‘Helen will leave, if it all upsets you so much,’ says X. ‘I never meant to upset you. I honestly thought you didn’t care.’

At this Helen opens the bathroom door, looks at X with no little contempt, and walks out of the studio and into the street.

Thus Helen makes her exit, and once out in the street wonders where to go. Scarlet is lost in limbo, Sylvia weeping in Dulwich, Audrey plucking feathers in Suffolk. Only Jocelyn lives sensibly in central London.

‘So he’s finished with you, has he?’ says Jocelyn not without relish, pouring Helen brandy.

‘Of course he hasn’t,’ says Helen, who is wrapped in a blanket. ‘He is only trying to keep his wife quiet. What a spoilt and dangerous woman she is! How terrible it is that the wrong people always have the money, the power and the glory.’

‘She earned the money,’ says Jocelyn. ‘And it must have nearly all gone by now.’

‘She didn’t earn it,’ says Helen. ‘She won it. And I daresay she slept with the judges in order to do so. I wouldn’t put it past her. She is a vile, scheming, neurotic woman. How desperate she must be to have recognition. She is a remarkably inept painter.’

‘I thought she was supposed to be rather good,’ murmurs Jocelyn.

‘I hardly imagine,’ says Helen, looking round the paintings on Jocelyn’s walls, ‘that you are an expert. And now if you don’t mind I will go to bed. My face is beginning to hurt.’

Jocelyn leads her friend to the spare bedroom and helps her into bed, for Helen is trembling violently.

‘Shall I call a doctor?’ she asks.

‘Ring X,’ says Helen. Jocelyn is horrified.

‘What, me??

‘Ring X at the studio and tell him he can get hold of me here.’

‘But supposing he doesn’t want to?’

‘Don’t be so stupid,’ says Helen. ‘Of course he does.’

Jocelyn telephones. To her relief there is no reply.

‘You see,’ says Helen. ‘He is walking the streets, looking for me.’

‘Shall I try his house?’ asks Jocelyn, fearfully.

‘He won’t be there,’ says Helen, with total conviction, and falls asleep. Jocelyn goes back to bed.

Helen is wrong. X is back home in bed with Y, as Helen finds out the next afternoon when she goes back to the studio with Jocelyn and finds her belongings out in the street, and X, silent and craggy, stacking her paintings, slashed and broken, behind the dustbins.

He will not speak to her. Not a word. Y is there, though, and she says quite a lot. Jocelyn tugs and drags at Helen, gets her back into the car, and takes her back home. Jocelyn too is trembling. She had not known educated people could speak to each other like that. She goes back later for the paintings, but the dustmen have taken them.

Helen lies on the bed in Jocelyn’s spare room, silent and frightening. She will not eat. She spends her twenty-sixth birthday staring at the ceiling.

Jocelyn is bowed down by responsibility. Helen has no parents, no family, no friends. Where does she come from, this mysterious creature? No one has ever been quite sure.

On the second day Philip, who is flattered by having his spare room occupied by someone so exotic, tries to cheer Helen up. He puts on a false moustache and does his imitation of a Jewish miser. Helen turns her face to the wall but sheer astonishment seems to work some healing in her, for on the third day she speaks.

‘How like your dog your husband is,’ she says to Jocelyn, who is dusting round the ornaments. Jocelyn wears rubber gloves for the dusting, feeling she has to choose between the ornaments and her hands. Many is the nice piece of glass, the pretty piece of china she smashes. But what else can she do? She doesn’t trust the cleaning woman Elise, though Elise—who is a middle-aged mid-European refugee fallen on hard times—looks in the dustbins at the wreckage and marvels; she who has seen so much broken in her life that she now treasures and cherishes the smallest thing.

‘What do you mean?’ asks Jocelyn, surprised. ‘Like a dog?’

‘Oh, never mind,’ says Helen, and closes her eyes and appears to go to sleep, until the crash of Jocelyn tripping over the lead of the vacuum cleaner prompts her to speak again.

‘We all have our own ways of surviving,’ she remarks. And she talks of her past, while Jocelyn puts the electric plug back on to the lead. Her parents were Berliners, communists. They sent her out of Germany to a British family just before the war, and that was the last she saw or heard of them. The family—rich Hampstead communists—sent her to Australia, and then were themselves wiped out by a flying bomb. At seventeen, she married. At eighteen she divorced her husband, who was a schizophrenic. Helen relates the tale calmly.

‘I never knew,’ says Jocelyn. ‘What a terrible place the world can be! I have so much to be thankful for.’

She puts the plug into its socket and turns on the switch. There is an explosion and all the power in the house goes off, though Jocelyn does not realize this until the evening when she tries to put the lights on. Philip roars and bangs through the house in rage, and Jocelyn, going into the darkness of Helen’s room, hears what at first she thinks is sobbing, and then realizes is laughing. Helen does not often cry.

On the fourth day Helen talks about X.

‘He is a man without a name,’ she says. ‘He is any man, he is interchangeable with other men. All men are the same. So, he can paint. So, because he is a great painter does not mean he is a great man. It was his painting I loved, not him. As for Y, she is meaningless. I thought she was gentle and kind, as I remember my mother, but she was hard and cruel and violent to me.’

All the same, she cries a little. Jocelyn has never seen Helen cry. She is awed.

‘They were my family,’ says Helen, eyes enormous and swimming. ‘Y had no right to be so unkind to me. I never meant to harm her. I loved her. I only took from her what was left over. She didn’t need it. Why did she grudge me such a little part of him?’

She sits up in bed. She combs her hair. She looks at her face in the mirror.

‘I am beautiful,’ she says. ‘I am talented. Y is nothing, nothing. That is the whole trouble. A man can only be happy with his inferior.’

‘What a strange thing to say,’ says Jocelyn.

‘It is perfectly true,’ says Helen. ‘That is why Philip will never be happy with you.’

Jocelyn leaves the room.

On the fifth day Helen gets out of bed and stands naked before Jocelyn. Not as the girls at school would stand naked and shivering under the showers, but like some goddess, arms up-stretched towards the heavens, as if they were her natural home.

‘Well,’ says Helen. ‘I am still alive. So, while we wait, let us live.’

Helen goes through Jocelyn’s wardrobe, without enthusiasm, and finally condescends to wear a lambswool sweater and skirt. She wears no bra, which shocks Jocelyn, who is alarmed by the sight of nipples through stretched wool, and disconcerted at the way Philip’s eyes are riveted while they eat dinner. Philip plies Helen with wine. Helen talks of painters and paintings, and scandals in the art world. Jocelyn forgets that she ought to be jealous. Already she cannot bear to think of the world without Helen.

On the sixth day Helen takes Jocelyn shopping. They go to Liberty’s, and Helen feels fabrics with her sensitive fingers, and regards clothes with an eye that seems only to be pleased by what is very expensive, and very precious. Helen adopts a haughty attitude towards material things. It is as if they have to try very hard to please her. Jocelyn, for her part, tends to feel inadequate in the face of objects, as if it was she who failed in the appreciating, not they in the pleasing.