Down Among the Women (26 page)

They refer her to a psychiatric clinic, and continue their investigations.

Sylvia’s vision improves. The sense that things are as bad as they can be reassures her. The National Assistance money comes regularly—so do the inspectors to ensure that she doesn’t have a gentleman caller. If she does, the money will be stopped. Thus protected, Sylvia begins to bloom. A woman neighbour looks after little Claire when Sylvia is visiting her clinics or the Welfare Offices.

Sylvia has a successful operation upon her right ear. Now she can hear when Claire cries, which is seldom, for Claire gave up crying as a bad job some time ago. Not that Claire bears a grudge against her mother, not at all. She loves her, puts her tiny arms around Sylvia’s legs and worships her.

‘They shouldn’t have made me have that abortion all those years ago,’ says Sylvia to her psychiatrist. ‘All I wanted was something to love. Everything went wrong because of that.’

‘It is not enough to give love,’ says the psychiatrist, ‘one must be able to receive it as well.’

It is surprising the things Sylvia hears, these days, even with one good ear.

Moorfields give up and provide her with contact lenses. Her eyes look large, misty and beautiful. She feels, as she clasps Claire to her, this gift of God, like a virgin again, untouched and full of hope.

‘The State,’ she says to Jocelyn, ‘must have spent at least £5,000 so far rehabilitating me. Why? What have I ever done to deserve it, besides merely exist? The State has done far more for me than my father ever did. I feel grateful, and that is something I have never felt in all my life before. Never gratitude, only resentment.’

(‘She has a new life now,’ says Jocelyn to Philip. ‘The State is her father and mother.’ But Philip does not want to discuss Sylvia. He likes talking about advertising matters, which Jocelyn feels too superior to discuss.)

Presently Sylvia takes a job in the Civil Service. She works patiently and methodically in the Department of Child Welfare. She moves into a Council flat. Claire goes to a State nursery by day, and seems happy. Sylvia’s ears and eyes are functioning; the psychiatrist says she need come to see him no longer. Sylvia sends a Christmas card home at Christmas, and receives one in return, and a doll for Claire. Her child is at last acknowledged.

‘It is perfectly possible to live happily without a man,’ says Sylvia to Jocelyn in gratified astonishment, but in the New Year she meets a quiet, gentle, kind, unmarried Probation Officer, and within three months is married to him.

They are married at St Pancras Registry Office. Sylvia and her Peter hold hands. Scarlet is there with Alec; and Jocelyn (Philip is at a conference); and Wanda, stumbling slightly for she has been celebrating, with Susan; and Audrey in a cartwheel hat and very short skirt; and Helen, at her most dramatic and beautiful in white velvet—Sylvia wears dove grey—escorted by a handsome, dark young man who clearly loves her. Sylvia’s parents send a telegram of good wishes.

Scarlet throws them a party in her Hampstead house. Alec has inherited a good deal of money. Scarlet has her sociology degree. She is hoping for a lectureship at the London School of Economics. Byzantia plays Beatles records very loudly in the basement, combs loose her flowing black hair, and tells her mother she means to change her name to Joan. She asks her uncle Simeon down into the basement, and there, hour after hour, attempts to seduce the bewildered lad. ‘Although his hair is long, his heart is square,’ she complains to her mother. (Byzantia has a poetical sense, and writes long narrative poems in her Physics lessons at school.) ‘He keeps claiming incest, but that’s just an excuse. An uncle is as distant as a cousin, and cousins are allowed. Well, anyone’s allowed, now there’s the pill. Either he won’t, or he can’t. The whole incest taboo thing is on genetic grounds, after all, and since no one has to get pregnant these days, as a taboo it’s
très
outmoded. Personally I think incest is a very exciting thought. I don’t fancy Alec, I don’t know why. You should never have deprived me of my natural father, Mother.’

Jocelyn, Wanda, Audrey and Susan think Byzantia should be put on the pill, but Scarlet, Alec and Sylvia agree that she should not.

‘I am not filling up any daughter of mine with artificial oestrogen,’ says Scarlet. ‘I did not bring her into the world to drug her, neuter her, fatten her, and render her passive. Her own mother to turn her into a sexual object? And for what? What profound pleasure? A safe fuck with her own uncle?’

‘Half-uncle,’ says Wanda. ‘And what alternative do you suggest? If you think I’m going to look after a great-grandchild-cum-step-grandchild, you’ve got another think coming.’

‘Abstinence,’ snarls Scarlet, repairing to the many and varied pleasures of her own marital bed. ‘That filthy word! That’s what I suggest.’

Fortunately Byzantia loses interest in Simeon the moment he actually manages to achieve an erection, and falls in love with the dancer Nureyev, who at least is unattainable. She talks at length, as she follows her mother round the house, about her feelings, her actions and her reactions. She has a melodious voice, but it seldom stops: nothing is hidden, nothing is feared. Every subject, every relationship, every event, must be aired, discussed, categorized, rendered harmless, and then not even shelved for future reference, but simply forgotten.

‘Did I bring her up like this?’ Scarlet asks her mother, ‘or is it the world in which she lives?’

‘I see nothing wrong with her,’ says Wanda. ‘She lives in the present, that’s all. She means to be free and happy now, not some time in the future. You and I lived by saying “one day I am going to”. Byzantia says “Now! Let’s go!” It’s much healthier.’

Helen is entranced by Byzantia, and Byzantia likes Helen, and will go over to Helen’s Wembley Park flat on Saturdays to visit; they will take Alice for walks in the park, and feed her ice-creams, or bring her over to tea with Scarlet, or with Jocelyn. But mostly Byzantia likes the ritual of having tea with Helen—the white embroidered table-cloth, the flowered porcelain cups and saucers, tiny cucumber sandwiches, the iced cake, the afghans—little chocolate biscuits with a half-walnut on top of each—and Alice finely dressed and curled. Alice is a rather nervous, chattering little girl, who breaks into dance when she thinks no one is looking, bowing and swaying like a very young sapling swept by a gale.

Helen has tried. She has done what she can do to build a new life. She goes to parties, makes friends; allows herself to be taken out, wooed, even bedded. But there is a dusty film over all experience. She sees with dead eyes, hears with dead ears. She moves herself through the world like a puppet. She pulls strings to make herself dance, go to fortune-tellers, play with her child.

Presently X seeks her out. He says, ‘Let us be friends,’ and stays the night from time to time. Helen’s nightie is yellow scattered with white stars. She pretends she is a girl again. She pulls the strings that make her love. She loves. If anyone asks her, she says she loves.

He says, ‘Perhaps one day we will get married.’

‘When?’ she asks.

‘When we have grown new skins,’ he says, ‘renewed ourselves like the snakes we are. It takes seven years, I believe.’

They go on holiday to the Isle of Skye. Helen climbs a mountain, stands on the edge of a precipice and teeters.

‘Not here,’ she says, presently.

‘Not here,’ he says. He hasn’t moved. ‘Besides, look at the sky. It is beautiful.’

Helen looks at the dusty sky.

‘Besides,’ he says, ‘who would look after Alice? I have no gift for children. I do not like them.’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Who would look after little dusty Alice?’ and he thinks he has won. His other children live with a sister of Y’s, whose husband is an ex-R.A.F. man. They run a paper shop in Essex.

After the holiday he goes back to the village and his Barbara, who never has visions of self-destruction, or urges to suicide. She is shocked at the very thought. When she is depressed she makes jam or a batch of cakes. ‘I have my own ways of being creative,’ she says, and he finds such presumption amusing and even touching.

‘One day,’ he says to Helen—he visits her once a month or so, when he has business in London, ‘we will live together. We might even marry, with the full rites of the Church.’

‘When?’ she asks.

‘One day,’ he says. He no longer talks about Y. Helen thinks it might be true. One day he will marry her. Days slip into days. Now when she looks in a mirror, she sees herself as dusty, too, not just the world around her. She has been in mourning for too long. She complains to Scarlet.

‘It’s no good,’ says Scarlet. ‘You must break with him, never see him again. The world is full of men. You have so much to offer. You are still young; you are handsome, Alice is an asset, not a liability.’

‘No,’ says Helen. ‘I am thirty-six. I am going off.’

‘Your life is only half-way through.’

‘I am not interested in the second half.’

‘You need to meet a proper man.’

‘There is only one man for me, and that is X. I cannot get interested in the others. God knows I try. I went out to dinner with a young man; and there was a woman at the next table who looked familiar. I realized it was Y. It wasn’t really, of course. How many tall pale women there are in the world; I’d never realized. After that I had nothing to say to him, and he lost interest. When there is something so enormous to be said, you see, which can’t be said, then silence is the only possibility.’

‘Stay to dinner tonight,’ says Scarlet. ‘Meet some more people.’

‘I must go back to Alice,’ says Helen. ‘I like to be there at her bedtime.’ She is growing closer to Alice. When they go walking, they hold hands. Helen is more and more reluctant to be separated from her.

‘I wish Alice had been born a boy,’ she says. ‘What kind of life is it for a girl? I am thirty-six. Being young lasts so short a time. Do you really see me as an old lady?’

‘So am I thirty-six,’ says Scarlet, ‘or nearly. But I don’t feel it as you do. Life goes on. It gets better, even.’

‘You were—forgive me—very plain when you were a girl. Life has got better for you as you went on. Mine has been a falling away. You are accustomed to living unadmired, but loved. I have only ever had admiration, and envy. Now even that will be taken away from me. I am to be left with nothing. I have achieved nothing in my life. I should never have survived. I should have died with the others.’

‘I hope,’ says Scarlet, ‘you won’t do anything silly.’

‘Kill myself? Why not?’

‘Because of Alice.’

‘Ah yes,’ says Helen. ‘That’s what everyone says. Does one want life for one’s children? Can one?’

‘Of course,’ says Scarlet, shocked.

‘The pain so outweighs the pleasure,’ says Helen.

‘Not for everyone,’ says Scarlet. ‘You feel like that now. You probably won’t tomorrow. Anyway you have no business to feel it for Alice.’

But Helen does not look convinced.

‘If only he would marry me …’ she says.

‘It would make no difference,’ says Scarlet. ‘Your happiness must come from yourself. It will never come from others.’

Helen smiles politely: it is a beautiful smile, as always, although disbelieving. These days Scarlet almost loves her.

X has an exhibition of paintings in a London gallery. It opens on a Saturday. He spends the Friday night with Helen; he asks her, not Barbara, to be with him at the opening. She meets him at the gallery.

No one speaks to her. All these years after Y’s death, she is still shunned, abhorred and witch-hunted. She doesn’t mind much. Their hatred too has a dusty flavour. X is surrounded by admirers, swooped on by ageing vulture ladies with large sad eyes. He ignores Helen: he behaves as if she was a stranger, as if he had brought her with him to prove how much of a stranger she is. She is an episode in his past, no more. His life goes on from strength to strength. Helen goes home alone. X does not visit her the next day.

Instead Y walks beside her, holding her hand, explaining how Helen can stop crying. Byzantia is supposed to be coming to tea. Helen half hopes she will arrive, half hopes she won’t, so that Y will fade again into the wallpaper. Byzantia does not arrive.

Helen puts Alice to bed. Alice, hot and restless, grizzles and cries, and disturbs her conversation with Y. Y is being very kind.

‘It should have been you and me,’ Y says. ‘Not you and X. You would have been my daughter. Well, it can still be like that. The world is an imperfect place. The only perfection is death, silence, and completeness. One fights it too much, too hard, and too long. Will you join me?’ In the next room Alice cries. ‘What about Alice?’ asks Helen.

‘Alice? Alice should never have been. Listen, how unhappy she sounds. She has no lawful place in the world.’

Helen goes into Alice’s room, and gives her half a sleeping pill. Alice drifts happily into sleep.

‘Millions of people are born every day,’ says Helen. ‘Other millions die. What does it mean?’

Y smiles as if she knew.

‘What do I mean when I say “I”?’ asks Helen. ‘I wondered that when I was six. I still don’t know. All I know is that I is the bit that suffers, and without the I there would be peace.’

Y says nothing. Really, there is no more need.

‘I cannot bear to wake up another morning, knowing that the day will hold no pleasure, only pain,’ says Helen, ‘and that the next day when I wake it will be just the same, except I will be a little older, a little further down the path I am now obliged to travel. I can look back over my shoulder, but that is all. I cannot turn, and go back the way I came, which was through green grass and flowers, bright days, and black nights with brilliant stars. I want to finish now, sit down and fall asleep, while these good things can still at least be seen when I look back. Soon I will have travelled so far they will have faded altogether.’

Y nods. Helen thinks her friend is getting impatient. ‘Wait,’ she says. ‘I will be with you soon.’

She goes into Alice’s room, shuts the windows and turns on the gas; she does not ask Y in, but sits there patiently by herself, not unhappily. She feels she has been half-dead for so long that the difference in state will not be very great.