Down Among the Women (25 page)

And here she is, a grown woman, stumbling through muddy fields, still at it.

‘Nothing changes much in life,’ Scarlet observes, panting.

‘Don’t say that,’ says Helen. ‘It is too depressing a thought.’ The station is in sight. Sanity returns. They walk demurely now. Helen nods graciously to the villagers, who stare back, either in non-comprehension, or in unabashed hostility.

‘I very much hope that change is possible,’ says Helen. ‘I have spent my life so far amongst enemies. As a child I was hated and feared as an enemy alien. Later I grew beautiful and was disliked for that. Then I loved too fixedly—and people don’t like such constancy, it frightens them. It indicates there is a purpose and a doom, a plan beneath the chaos. It is too strong a concept for ordinary people, who can only love for a minute at a time.’

‘Like me,’ says Scarlet.

‘There are excuses for you,’ says Helen, charitably. ‘You have difficulty surviving.’

On the train she chatters about the fate of women, plans a tomb to the Unknown Whore, and says she will set herself up as a painter of portraits.

She stays for a while with Scarlet and Alec in their comfortable house, and is much attached to Byzantia.

‘She is a lovely girl,’ says Helen. ‘You see what good things can come out of so much trouble? Do you remember when we all promised to pay you ten shillings a week? We never did. There was no time. Life caught up with us too fast.’

And she rocks her own baby and changes its clothes unceasingly, and curls its wispy hair with her finger, and waits for X to come and take her home. He does not come.

One day she says to Scarlet, ‘I saw Y in the street the other day; I have to leave here. X won’t come, so she has come instead. I know I am talking nonsense, but I also know I have to leave.’

Scarlet thinks that Helen is being kind and making excuses; that the desire to go is on Scarlet’s account. For Helen has been eyeing Alec with automatic lust. It is not that she really likes or desires him; just that she is unused to being without a man. Scarlet is confident enough that Alec will not return Helen’s interest, for Alec is made nervous by intensities of feeling. All the same, Scarlet catches herself opening doors as if fearful what she might find, and she has a pale, watchful, stooping feel, as if Y’s mantle was falling across her shoulders. So she does not resist.

‘Yes,’ she says to Helen. ‘In that case you had better go.’ Alec finds Helen a flat in Wembley Park. It will not be ready for a month, so in the meantime Helen stays with Audrey in her love-nest.

Audrey’s love-nest is a pretty Georgian house in St John’s Wood, which Audrey has deigned to allow her magazine editor to buy, decorate and furnish for her. She is very unkind to him. She has, she maintains, had her fill of men, domesticity, sex and children. The more elusive Audrey is, the more admiring of her he becomes. She insists on having other lovers—and condescends to allow the Editor to visit her for the night, perhaps once a week—or once a fortnight if he has displeased her.

‘You are such a bad lover,’ she says, ‘it is really an ordeal for me. Paul was very, very good in bed. It was just he was so impossible out of it. You’re fine out of bed, but not really much good in it. So don’t get above yourself. Because you choose to pay out money on my behalf doesn’t mean you own me. I can look after myself. I once ran a chicken-farm single-handed. I am afraid of nothing. Not poverty, not loneliness, not your wife.’

He gazes at her in admiration, and buys her another dress, another holiday, organizes a still better job for her to play with.

It is not true to say that Audrey is afraid of nothing. She is afraid of Paul. Paul assails her and the Editor through the post and in person. He paints obscenities on her walls and his car: he throws stones with rude limericks engraved upon them through the windows: he makes phone calls to her employers and the Editor’s Board of Directors. He threatens murder, and mutilation. He prophesies madness and suicide. He is not angry (he says) because she has deserted him; in fact, he maintains, he has done really well since she left, and even the hens, relieved of her baleful presence, have been laying splendidly—but at the outrage to principle, the despoiling of his vision of womanhood, inherent in her abandonment of the children.

Audrey is both flattered and frightened by these attentions.

‘I never knew he loved me so much,’ she says. And to the Editor—‘You could never love anyone as deeply as that.’

The Editor protests when Helen comes to stay, disturbing the grossly flimsy structure of his idyll.

‘It is none of your business,’ says Audrey. ‘I have who I want here, and what’s more Helen and me will share a room. I like talking in bed, and you’re always too tired or too drunk or too randy for proper conversation. You’ll just have to stay out.’

Forced into his wife’s company, evening after evening, he finds it the more boring.

‘I wish he would go back to her,’ says Audrey to Helen. ‘I don’t want him. I just want to be myself, like you. I don’t want to be married, or do housework. I just want to have a good time, and earn money, and have lovers until I’m too old. Then I’ll take to drink like Scarlet’s mother.’

The Editor calls one evening when Audrey is out to dinner with a television producer. He sits and talks to Helen. Audrey, returning, finds them sitting peacefully and at a distance discussing Russian icons, and has a fit of hysterics. She screams at her Editor, belabouring him with her fists, accusing him of infidelity, and drives him physically from the house. Afterwards she sobs and weeps for hours.

‘I don’t know what’s the matter with me,’ she says to Helen. ‘Do you think I’m going mad? I tried all these years to be something I wasn’t; now I’m trying to be the opposite, and it’s just as upsetting.’

‘You don’t have to be anything,’ says Helen, piously, ‘except yourself.’

‘I haven’t got a self to be,’ complains Audrey. ‘I change every five minutes. It was much easier when we were all younger. Ever since I’ve had the children, I’ve been confused. I always thought I was the one who was supposed to be the child. And it was all my own doing, that’s what I can’t get over. All the same, the children were the only real thing that ever happened to me. But of course Paul won’t let me have them. It’s not that he loves them, he just wants to punish me.’

Presently, when Helen has gone, and she has forgiven the Editor, and he has been re-instated as a once-weekly visitor, she asks him if she could not have a man-servant.

‘I would like to have your children,’ she says. ‘To do that I have to have space, money and time. These are the three things children need most. I can give them space and money; but time? I can’t give up my work, it wouldn’t be fair, and all the rest of my life and energy is spent in either meeting your sexual demands or cleaning this house of yours.’

‘But
you
live here, not me—’

‘—at your insistence. I would be just as happy living on a park bench, if not happier. However, you’ve landed me with this bourgeois monstrosity. I think the least you can do is not burden me with the task of cleaning it. I need a daily man—not a woman, they lie and steal and nag—to do it for me.’

The Editor hires a manservant-cum-chauffeur—an out-of-work actor with a beard, who flirts with Audrey, and lives with his wife and children in the basement flat.

Soon she is pregnant. She spends days in Harrods, in the baby-clothes departments. She sends the bills to the Editor’s home, where his wife comes across them.

‘You should have been more careful,’ Audrey accuses him. ‘You probably meant her to find them, in your neurotic way. You know what it means, don’t you? I can’t possibly have the baby. I shall have to have an abortion.’

He pleads with her, but it is no use. He makes the arrangements, gives her the cash, and the manservant, who likes to be called the chauffeur, takes her off to the clinic.

The Editor has a painful vision of his future vanishing down the plughole with swirling pink finality; but it only makes him more conscious of the present and he insists on visiting Audrey twice a week. Sometimes she won’t let him into her bed—‘Since you made me have the operation, I have become sexually anaesthetized. It is not just a matter of indifference to me now—more like revulsion—’ but she does let him stay in the house. He finds that when he insists, she complies. This is, for him, a great and useful discovery. Although if he presses too hard, he discovers, her personality disintegrates altogether, like a blob of mercury flying into bits, and when gathered together again, has incorporated flecks of dust and foreign matter which take yet more getting used to.

Once, when she complains about the cost of the food he eats when he stays overnight, and refuses to give him an egg for breakfast, he points out that as he pays the food bills, the mortgage, the electricity, laundry and servant bills, he is entitled to as many eggs as he pleases. What’s more, he suggests, if she wants him to go on doing these things, she had better cook his breakfast graciously. Audrey gets as far as cracking a large brown egg into the pan before dissolving into tears, accusing him of blackmail, and becoming too hysterical to continue the cooking process. Still, she did crack the egg, and he considers this an advance.

At his wife’s home he sits down to a properly laid, three-course, punctual breakfast every morning, the eggs peppered and served with vinegared butter; and every morning boredom makes his very mouth muscles limp, so that coffee trickles down his chin, and his wife can watch with fastidious delight and disgust, pleased to be able to tell herself that if he finally goes for good, she has lost very little.

And here he is—he knows it—trying to make Audrey behave like a proper woman; like his wife.

Audrey is upset by his insistence on a cooked breakfast. ‘All my life,’ she complains to Jocelyn, ‘people have been taking advantage of me. This terrible man! He treats me as if I was a menial, but I have a brain like a man’s—everyone tells me so at work. What a terrible fate it is, to pass from life with Paul to life with this bully.’

‘It didn’t just happen,’ says Jocelyn. ‘You did it. You chose it.’ It is Jocelyn’s refrain nowadays, spoken faintly from depths of unfathomable boredom. She likes to listen to the tales told her by her friends: it is as if they stretch their hands down towards her, trying to raise her to the light again. Her little boy is sleepless and bad-tempered. She tries to love him but she can’t. He has Philip’s face, and watches her with Philip’s eyes—or is it with the eyes of that other man, long ago?

Jocelyn wrote to Miss Bonny when Edward was born. She had a letter by return. Miss Bonny now breeds dogs in the Lake District. Miss Bonny told her—why? as a cautionary tale?—about a wilful spaniel bitch who managed to mate with a collie, and then fortunately aborted. Later, properly mated with a spaniel, one of the pups was unmistakably collie. ‘Female fidelity,’ writes Miss Bonny, ‘is the cornerstone on which the family, the heredity principle, and the whole of capitalism rests.’ Virginity, thinks Jocelyn, has gone to Miss Bonny’s head, and she throws the letter away. But she’s upset.

Jocelyn leaves the electric blanket on in Philip’s bed during one of his weekend absences, and it bursts into flames. The fire brigade has to be called. One of the attendant policemen, kindly staying behind to help clear up, propositions her. Jocelyn, these days, is beautiful enough in her chilly fashion. Made distraught and dirty by flames, smoke, and fear, she must appear, to the policeman, a likely lay. Jocelyn declines his offer with a haughty disdain which does not disconcert him at all.

For months afterwards, lying sleepless, waiting for Edward to stop crying and sleep, or wake and start crying, the policeman enters her fantasies, fully-clothed, brandishing his truncheon like a phallus, bullying, humiliating. The more extreme her sexual fantasies, the more in her head she moans and squirms in masochistic frenzy, while lying still and motionless in her bed—the more remote and frozen does she become by day.

Jocelyn handles Edward as if he was a rather strange, noisy doll. She does what is necessary for his survival, and little more. She can hardly bear to be touched by Philip.

Philip drinks later and later at the Watson and Belcher club. Drinks are free. The rumour goes the firm are trying to save paying out on their pension scheme by killing off the staff with drink at an early age. Philip begins to look quite old, and has a puzzled air.

Jocelyn is glad that Philip is so seldom at home. She likes to sit by herself in the evenings; or with her women friends. Her snobbish fit has passed. She goes round the corner to C. & A. for her clothes. She has given up Harrods. She makes no move to have the bedroom re-decorated, liking to lie in the smoky ruins and dream of rape and destruction. Eventually Philip complains. So Jocelyn hires a fashionable firm of decorators to re-do the whole house, and not just the bedroom, in pop-art style. The bill in the end, is £2,500, which Philip does not have, and nor does she. Philip is angry. He hates the look of the house. He had thought, when he first saw it, that such crudity would at least be cheap. Jocelyn has never seen him angry, and it pleases her, and she spends a whole night actually sleeping in his bed, and wakes feeling like a whore. The feeling frightens her, and she retreats again into chilly respectability.

In the meantime, the bill remains a reality. It overshadows their lives. Philip, in punishing mood, takes to washing his own shirts to save the laundry bills.

When Jocelyn says she is perfectly prepared to wash his shirts herself, if that is what he wants, he says, ‘No. You are too much of a lady for that.’

Jocelyn shrugs. She doesn’t care what he thinks, or what he does.

Sylvia lives in a bed-sitting room, with her little daughter, and is supported by the National Assistance Board. She goes to the Ear, Nose and Throat Hospital once a week for treatment to her ears, and once a week to Moorfields Hospital where they are investigating her sight. Her ability to see fluctuates, experts consider, in an unreasonable, even bizarre fashion. ‘When I’m cheerful,’ she assures them, ‘I can see perfectly well. When I’m miserable I’m blind as a bat. I will never be able to kill myself; I won’t be able to see to do it. Isn’t that something? You might almost say I did it on purpose.’