Down Among the Women (2 page)

‘You’re not old,’ says Scarlet with unexpected kindness. Perhaps she is touched by her own good nature. At any rate she starts to cry.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ asks Wanda, surprised. She can’t bear to see Scarlet cry. She thinks it might start her off too, and Wanda hasn’t cried since the day before she left Kim, Scarlet’s father, back in 1935.

So Wanda sings, sweetly, as a benison, the mellifluous notes of Brahms’ Lullaby.

‘Hush, my little one, sleep,

Fond vigil I keep,

Lie warm in thy nest

By moonbeams caressed—’

Scarlet stops crying. She thinks perhaps Wanda means it. Something shifts in her universe. Cog wheels unlock, re-lock. The universe continues, but differently. What is happening? Her baby turning, unlocking? The waters shifting, slopping, heaving? No, it is the fact that Wanda is being sentimental.

Scarlet gapes.

‘Shut your mouth, for God’s sake,’ says Wanda, and Scarlet obligingly closes it, for she has seen a tear in Wanda’s eye and is frightened. Wanda, of course, has no mascara to run. Wanda wears brilliant lipstick, to give more shape and vehemence to her words, but otherwise has no time for make-up, which she sees as cowardice. It is a pure and leathery cheek which the tear runs down, and still only forty-odd years since she was born so tender, smooth and throbbing.

‘I wish,’ says Wanda hopelessly, ‘I wish things didn’t have to be the way they are. Why did you have to go and do it?’

It is as well the bell rings, because Scarlet is feeling quite sick from insecurity. She can bear her mother’s anger, spite and indifference, and can return them in kind, but she cannot bear her mother to be unhappy.

It is the first of the ladies. A brave one this, in dirndl skirt and peasant blouse, with dangly ear-rings and bright eyes. Lottie. She ran off with a lover who ran off from her, and her husband wouldn’t have her back. And why, as she herself says, the hell should he? Poor lady, poor brave Lottie, she died of cancer two years later, drifting painfully into nothingness in a hospital bed. She wrote to tell her husband she was ill, but he didn’t come to visit her. Well, why the hell should he? Thrown-away spouses, says Wanda, lying, are like thrown-away trousers, soon forgotten. You have killed them in your mind: their real death is irrelevant.

This evening at any rate Lottie is happy, excited and animated. She puts on the gramophone; embraces Scarlet and tells her generously that she’s a good brave girl and that she personally thinks unmarried mothers are to be pitied not blamed. She tells Wanda life begins at forty. She munches the water biscuits without noticeably wincing and drinks her coffee gratefully; tells Wanda about a good job in the Civil Service she has managed to land, untrained though she is, and announces that she is looking forward to a happy future without men.

Poor Lottie.

She has come early, she says, to get in her message of good cheer before the others arrive and swamp her good spirits.

She is quite right. They swarm into the tiny room like a tide of despair. Scarlet goes to bed. They regard her, and she knows it, as Wanda’s cross.

Down here among the girls.

How nice young girls are, especially when their own interests are not at stake, but even when they are.

Next morning a delegation of Scarlet’s friends climb the stairs to the flat.

Scarlet is more embarrassed than grateful. She feels this morning she can’t get up. She lies there on her back, her extremities flapping feebly, like a piece of crumpled paper held down in a draught by a paper-weight.

Jocelyn, Helen, Sylvia and Audrey crowd into Scarlet’s tiny room. They have to pass through Wanda’s room to reach her. They are frightened of Wanda. They think she is mad, bad and dangerous to know. They think she probably drinks. They think she is what is wrong with Scarlet. They may well be right.

‘We thought if we all gave ten shillings a week,’ says Jocelyn, ‘that would be two pounds. That would help. It would pay the rent somewhere, anyway. And we could get up a collection as well.’

How full of confidence and kindness they are. Their eyes are misty with emotion. Scarlet is only conscious of Wanda pissing herself with laughter in the next room. It is one of Wanda’s weaknesses, in fact. Too much excitement, sex or mirth and her bladder tends to give up. It seems an alternative to weeping.

Scarlet could never tell her friends a fact like this. They have been too delicately reared—except for Audrey, who was brought up on cheerful fish and chips in a Liverpool slum, and Audrey cannot be relied upon to keep a secret.

The others have escaped their parents or believe they have.

Jocelyn, who was head girl of a good private school, writes home every week, visits once a month. She is, in these days, a rather plain, rather jolly, popular girl with legs made knobbly by hockey blows. She likes to drink gin and tonic with young rugger-blues in smart pubs; one will sometimes take her to bed and they will have a jolly, surprising, unemotional time. She will get up out of bed, bright and healthy, bathe, shave her legs, put on a white dress, and play a good game of tennis with her boyfriend if he’s available and a girlfriend if he’s not. She got one of her boyfriends in the eye once, with the edge of her racket, and eventually he lost the sight in it.

Jocelyn was at college with Scarlet. She took her degree in French. Now she is looking for a job.

Scarlet got sent down for failing all her exams, twice over. Now Scarlet is in trouble.

Sylvia, who did classics, and shares a flat with Jocelyn, has been in trouble already. She had an abortion when she was fifteen but can’t really remember it. (Jocelyn, who was at school with Sylvia, and now more or less looks after her, seems to know more about it than Sylvia herself.) Sylvia is training to be a Personnel Officer at Marks and Spencer: she has a nice quiet boyfriend called Philip, and is, these days, a nice quiet girl. Sylvia is sorry to see Scarlet in this condition, but is frightened lest Scarlet suddenly bursts and spatters them all with blood and baby, which seems likely. Scarlet wears only a semi-transparent nightie; she is too far gone to consider decencies. Scarlet’s nipples are brown and enlarged. Sylvia stares. Scarlet droops.

Even Helen, beautiful Helen, with her green witch eyes, her blood-red nails, her high white bosom, makes little impression on Scarlet today. Helen has been married and divorced already, in Australia. What a mysterious and magic creature this orphaned Helen seems, moving as she does in a grown-up world, where the others feel they still have no right to be.

Helen allows Audrey to share her flat, and pay the rent. Helen paints pictures, starves to buy paint, loves and is loved by men who have their names in the papers.

Audrey, who types in a solicitor’s office, which is where her degree in English Literature has led her, not only pays the rent, but washes and irons Helen’s clothes, and thinks herself privileged to do so.

These kind pretty girls, with their tightly belted waists and polished shoes, seem to Scarlet to come from an alien world. She can’t think why they bother with her. There is, though Scarlet can’t think why for the moment, something very wrong about their presence here.

Scarlet’s stomach hardens and goes rigid. Scarlet frowns. The feeling is not so much unpleasant, as an unwelcome reminder that her body now thinks it owns her.

‘Is something the matter?’ asks Sylvia, anxiously.

‘Just getting into practice,’ says Scarlet.

‘Aren’t you frightened?’ whispers Sylvia.

‘Don’t put thoughts into her head,’ says Jocelyn briskly. ‘Scarlet is young and healthy. Think of native women. They just have their babies in a ditch, and then get up and go on harvesting or killing deer or whatever they’re doing.’

‘And then they go home and die,’ says Audrey. ‘I had two aunts died in childbirth within a week. Mind you they both had the flu, I’m not saying it’s going to happen to Scarlet. And London hospitals are better, they say, than Liverpool. Though awful things do happen.’

‘I’m not frightened,’ says Scarlet, and it’s true, she isn’t.

Helen gives a little disbelieving laugh but says nothing. Sometimes she reminds Scarlet of Wanda.

‘Anyway,’ says Scarlet, hoping they will all go away, so she can ease herself out of her transfixed position, ‘it’s very kind of you, and I may take your offer up.’

She doesn’t believe in any of it. She doesn’t believe that Wanda is her mother; she doesn’t believe she is pregnant; she doesn’t believe she has no job and no money; she doesn’t, if it comes to it, believe she’s a day older than five. She has been sleep-walking for years and years. She has summoned up these four friends from some dim fantasy.

‘I know what’s wrong,’ she says suddenly, looking round the startled girls, ‘where are all the bloody men?’

She shuts her eyes and opens them again. They’re still there. She can’t understand it.

Down among the girls.

C
ONTRACEPTIVES. IT IS THE
days before the pill. Babies are part of sex. Rumours abound. Diaphragms give you cancer. The Catholics have agents in the condom factories—they prick one in every fifty rubbers with a pin with the Pope’s head on it. You don’t get pregnant if you do it standing up. Or you can take your temperature every morning, and when it rises that’s ovulation and danger day. Other days are all right. Marie Stopes says soak a piece of sponge in vinegar and shove it up.

The moon, still untouched by human hand, rises, swells, diminishes, sets. Nights are warm; the wind blows: men are strange, powerful creatures, back from the wars: the future goes on for ever. Candles glitter in Chianti bottles; there are travel posters on the walls; the first whiffs of garlic are smelt in the land. To submit; how wonderful. If you don’t anyway, little girl, someone else will. Rum and Merrydown cider makes sure you do, or so they say. Quite often it just makes you sick.

There is a birth control clinic down in the slums. You have to pretend to be married. They ask you how often you have intercourse—be prepared. They say it’s for their statistics, but it’s probably just to catch you out. They have men doctors there too. A friend knows one—he’s a tiny little man who shows her dirty pictures and likes someone else to watch. Are they all like that? And how do you know, if you go to the clinic, that you won’t get him?

Every month comes waiting time: searching for symptoms. How knowledgeable we are. Bleeding can be, often is, delayed by the anxiety itself. We know that. It’s the fullness of the breasts, the spending of pennies in the night, the being sick in the mornings you have to watch out for. Though experience proves that these too can be hysterical symptoms. And what about parthenogenesis? Did you know a girl can get pregnant just by herself? Consider the Virgin Mary.

Try hot baths and gin. There’s an abortionist down the Fulham Road does it for £50. But where is £50 going to come from? Who does one know with £50? No one. Could one go on the streets? And why not? Jocelyn once said, when drunk, it was her secret ambition. No, not to be a courtesan. Just a street-corner whore.

Down among the girls.

Helen has a diaphragm, and a gynaecologist. He fitted her privately, majestically, wearing a rubber finger stall; very nice. She keeps it in a very pretty white frilly bag. Where does she get the money? Audrey, who earns six pounds a week, degree and all, doesn’t like to ask. In any case, Helen very often forgets the symbol of her common sense, and doesn’t take it with her.

Audrey likes men to wear condoms. Helen says it’s because she wishes to be protected not just from disease and babies, but from the man himself; Audrey, says Helen, prefers there to be no real contact. When Helen says things like this they all feel puzzled; 1950 London is not a motivation-conscious place. Audrey says no, she just likes rolling rubbers on, the same way she likes squeezing spots, plucking hens, and gutting fish.

Sylvia says and possibly even believes, she doesn’t go to bed with men, but every month there she used to be, worrying as much as anyone. Married men would take her out a lot; hard-drinking ones. Perhaps she simply didn’t remember? At the moment, anyway, she is settling down with Philip. They hold hands: they love each other: they are happy. He is not married. It all seems lovely. She is not worried now, except for the possibility of parthenogenesis.

Jocelyn, surprisingly, takes no precautions at all. She doesn’t believe she is a woman. In her mind, she still races round the hockey field, scoring goals, while the school cheers. Every month she doubts her own disbelief, is clenched and pale with anxiety, until her female flow once more underlines her female condition, and the cycle starts another round.

Now they stare at Scarlet, swollen and monstrous. There but for the grace of their hormones, the chancy consideration of men, go they. Yet they envy her. Something has actually happened to Scarlet. She has left the girls, and joined the women, and they know it.

‘Why is it,’ asks Audrey, for no apparent reason, ‘when men expose themselves at you, it’s all mottled and purple?’

It seems the wrong subject for the occasion. No one else wishes to discuss it. Only Scarlet rouses herself.

‘Because it’s cold,’ she says.

The girls go. Scarlet gets up and dresses. During that afternoon, Wanda feels obliged to explain the incident of the Brahms lullaby.

‘I’m teaching it to them at school,’ she says. (Wanda is a primary school teacher—on supply. She roams from school to school and thus avoids the moral problem of having, under the Education Act, to teach religious knowledge.) ‘All the little girls cradle their arms and lap it up and even the nasty little boys grow misty-eyed. If only mother love were like that.’

‘If only,’ says Scarlet sourly. She is conscious of a twinge which starts in the centre of her back and runs round to meet in the middle and then is pulled very gently tight, like a ribbon. She doesn’t mention it to her mother. What, give her the pleasure? It is probably nothing, in any case. The ribbon is taken away. There, nothing.

‘The snows of yesteryear,’ says Wanda. ‘How they do hang about, rotting us all. I have always wished for a torrent of truth to pour down and sweep the myths away; I thought this last war would have done it, but no. “Lie warm in thy nest, by moonbeams caressed,” ’ she sneers. ‘Some man wrote that, and you needn’t think he ever changed a nappy. And I am still required to teach it, plus other guff about my country right or wrong, and needlework for the girls, in this year of Our Lord 1950, or rather P.B.5, which means Post Belsen Five, if you want to know.’