Down Among the Women (28 page)
‘He doesn’t look in the least like Philip,’ says Scarlet. ‘Or not much, anyway.’
‘I stayed with him in hospital. I would have died myself to save him the pain. Yet it wasn’t love. It was the maternal instinct. There is no credit in that. It’s just another kind of animal thing.’
‘Is there credit in love?’ asks Scarlet.
‘Well, more,’ says Jocelyn, ‘if not much. Anyway, sitting beside his bed I envied Helen for the first and last time in my life. He was going to have those scars for ever, and I was going to have to live with him, and there was to be no more escape.’
‘The scars hardly show,’ says Scarlet. ‘You don’t notice them at all.’
‘I do,’ says Jocelyn. ‘All other feelings are luxuries, you know. Love, hate, lust, despair, hope—once one is a mother one has no business feeling any of them. They are inappropriate to one’s state. All the same, within a couple of weeks of Edward leaving hospital, I met and was in bed with Ben. I knew by then, thanks to Mr Rigby, that there are other universes to inhabit, and that I was really just like any other woman, and deserved as much and as little; and once I knew that, all kinds of reasonable, sensible things became possible.’
M
Y NAME IS JOCELYN
. I sit in the park and consider the past, and what became of us all, and how little the present accords with our expectations of it. Hockey One, Hockey Two, Hockey Three and away! Oh, Miss Bonny, you and I, running for the bus and laughing, crackling over the winter ground. You and I, caught up for ever and ever in our moment of time, like flies trapped in amber.
Edward is over at the swings now, with little Sylvia, who is my favourite child. I can pick him out—he wears a red woollen cap which Audrey knitted for him in her domestic days—it was far too big then; it fits now, five years later. Perhaps Scarlet is right, and it is only to me that his scars seem so disfiguring? Perhaps he could stay at home, not go away to school, and I could abandon my last pretensions to gentility? I could hand Philip back the school fees and stop trying to get all I can out of him. Perhaps the next time Edward comes homing in to me and stares at me in his absent way and smoothes my hair away from my face as he talks, I will not have to push him away, or tell him he’s a big boy now. Perhaps I will just be able to sit, and accept.
There, I did it. I put my arm round him and smiled, and he smiled back. Every day he looks less and less like Philip—except of course when he’s in a bad temper. And that isn’t really so often.
One can learn, at least. One can go on learning until the day one is cut off.
I sit like a Roman matron, my cloak around my Edward and my Sylvia, and stare out into the dissolving universe. It’s getting dark. Soon it will be time to go home, and I will cook dinner, like all the other women in the world—at least to date.
For let me report a conversation I overheard between Scarlet and her Byzantia. I do not see Byzantia cooking dinner.
Byzantia, kind Byzantia, throws a party for her mother’s friends, for whom she has a weakness. She does not offer them marijuana, explaining to Scarlet that she considers them too unstable.
‘They would have bad trips,’ she says. ‘All lows, no highs.’
‘Perhaps so will you, at our age,’ says her mother.
‘I don’t think so,’ says Byzantia.
‘We haven’t done too badly,’ pleads Scarlet. ‘There’s me with Alec, Jocelyn here with her Ben, Sylvia with her Peter, and I daresay Audrey will bring her Editor, if she thinks he’ll have a bad enough time. And even your step-grandmother Susan will be able to bring your uncle Simeon.’
‘You amaze me,’ says Byzantia. ‘Fancy seeing success in terms of men. How trivial, with the world in the state it’s in.’
‘Merely as a symbol of success,’ pleads Scarlet, ‘I don’t mean to offer it as the cause.’
‘A symptom more like,’ says Byzantia, ‘of a fearful disease from which you all suffered. One of you even died on the way. I think the mortality rate is too high.’
When asked to define the disease, Byzantia cannot. Definitions, she says, are in any case no part of her business. It is enough to tear the old order down.
Byzantia, like her grandmother Wanda, is a destroyer, not a builder. But where Wanda struggled against the tide and gave up, exhausted, Byzantia has it behind her, full and strong.
Down among the women.
We are the last of the women.
Novelist, playwright, and screenwriter Fay Weldon was born in England, brought up in New Zealand, and returned to the United Kingdom when she was fifteen. She studied economics and psychology at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. She worked briefly for the Foreign Office in London, then as a journalist, and then as an advertising copywriter. She later gave up her career in advertising, and began to write fulltime. Her first novel,
The Fat Woman’s Joke
, was published in 1967. She was chair of the judges for the Booker Prize for fiction in 1983, and received an honorary doctorate from the University of St Andrews in 1990. In 2001, she was named a Commander of the British Empire.
Weldon’s work includes more than twenty novels, five collections of short stories, several children’s books, nonfiction books, magazine articles, and a number of plays written for television, radio, and the stage, including the pilot episode for the television series
Upstairs Downstairs. She-Devil
, the film adaption of her 1983 novel
The Life and Loves of a She-Devil
, starred Meryl Streep in a Golden Globe–winning role.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1972 by Fay Weldon
Cover design by Connie Gabbert
978-1-4804-1248-4
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media
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New York, NY 10014
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