Down Among the Women (3 page)

‘I think babies are rather sweet,’ says Scarlet bravely, and watches for Wanda’s nostrils to flare, as she has since she was a tiny child. Tormenting Wanda was never without its pleasures.

‘So do you,’ Scarlet adds, ‘because you cried.’

‘It was the pickled onions,’ says Wanda, cool as can be. ‘I was watering them down for the lady divorcées, who are sour enough as it is. Lettice used to sing Brahms’ Lullaby, I do admit.’

Lettice was Wanda’s mother, Scarlet’s grandmother.

‘What, to you?’ enquires Scarlet, surprised. Lettice, who died under anaesthetic in 1925, while (according to Wanda) having a facelift, has hardly been presented as a maternal figure.

‘No, of course not to me,’ says Wanda harshly. ‘If she wanted to keep me quiet she’d feed me opium. She would sing it to Harry; she would sit and tinkle at the grand piano on Sunday when he visited and hope he would be touched and leave his paramour and come home. It just irritated the piss out of him. He couldn’t wait to get back and lay his hoary old bird.’ Harry was Wanda’s father, Scarlet’s grandfather.

‘All the same,’ says Wanda, with a certain melancholy, ‘it is a pretty tune, and she had a pretty voice, much good it did to her. When she moved into her bed-sitting room in Barons Court she took the grand piano with her. If one visited one had to sit under it, so one did not visit much. Not that that was the real reason. God, she was a useless woman.’ Wanda is bitter.

‘She must have given you something,’ says Scarlet, who has always had a sneaking admiration for her unseen, long-past grandmother. Divorced, abandoned, disregarded, ageing, penniless—to forge her daughter’s signature on an insurance policy, spend it on a facelift and
die
—or is Wanda just making it up? There is a photograph of Lettice taken in 1898; a young woman all hat, smiles and frills. Wanda can’t bear to look at it. Scarlet has it on her wall, just to annoy.

‘She gave me opium,’ complains Wanda. ‘There was a teething medicine on the market then, guaranteed to soothe any infant. She gave it to me by the bottleful. She gave me dreams I couldn’t hope to keep up with in later life. She gave me lessons in how not to be, the useless bitch. But I won’t hark back,’ she says with a cold and dismal ferocity, and repeats, ‘I won’t hark back.’

‘Something to be said for you as a mother,’ says Scarlet. ‘You’ve given me nothing to want to hark back to.’

‘I have tried to be honest,’ says Wanda, and adds, kindly for one so attacked, ‘Do you feel all right?’

‘Yes,’ says Scarlet. She looks round the room, with its sparse furnishings, and it dissatisfies her. She thinks the green and yellow lino looks dirty.

‘Going to start scrubbing?’ enquires Wanda.

‘No,’ says Scarlet.

‘But you want to, don’t you? It’s the nesting instinct. Down on your hands and knees. It means you’re about to produce any minute now.’

‘No, I am not. Actually, I think it’s a phantom pregnancy,’ says Scarlet hopefully. ‘If it wasn’t I’d have had it by now.’

Wanda snorts; puts water in a pail, produces a bar of green soap and a scrubbing brush and induces her daughter to scrub.

‘When I was married to your father,’ she says, ‘we had a daily help to do the scrubbing.’

‘How nice,’ says Scarlet.

‘It was revolting,’ says Wanda. ‘And so was she.’

‘I wish I could remember her,’ says Scarlet. ‘I can’t remember anything nice.’

‘There was nothing nice about Mrs Richmond, the thieving old bag. She got killed in an air-raid, in the house of someone she was doing for. They’d gone away and she was having a bath. And why shouldn’t she? Poor withered filthy old soul: at least she died happy, in green, hot, scented water. She didn’t believe in doctors or medicine. She’d wave her deformed hands at me—she’d dislocated both thumbs at one time or another—and glare out of her rheumy eyes—she had a cataract in one of them, too—and thank God in her croaky voice for her perfect health. Silly old bitch.’

‘You shouldn’t speak so badly of the dead.’ Scarlet swirls happily in soapy water. She loves to hear Wanda talk about the past. It makes her feel real.

‘At least I remember her,’ says Wanda. ‘She used to water the whisky, too. Think of it, whisky in the 1930s, when the whole country was starving.’

‘Perhaps you had a right to it,’ says Scarlet. ‘Perhaps you deserved a little treat. I mean people do, sometimes.’

‘How like your father you are.’ This is just about the worst thing Wanda can say to Scarlet, but Scarlet is in a kind of scrubbing trance. ‘Your father had no guts, either. He could have been a good painter but he sold out. He painted what people wanted.’

‘He had to live,’ remarks Scarlet.

‘Why?’ enquires Wanda. ‘He was no good to anyone. He woke up one morning and went all over his canvases painting the clothes out and all the genitalia back in.’

‘Perhaps he thought it was better like that.’

‘No, he thought it would sell and so it did. I thought it was piss-awful and told him so and he hit me. He got me on the side of the head, and shook my brains up good and proper; my ears sang me tunes for days. I fell on the floor. He poured water over me to revive me. He revived me all right. I got the side of his face with my nails, freshly cut with good thin edges. He hit me on the chest: he knew that would frighten me. Well, you know what happens to blows on the chest.’

‘What?’

‘You get cancer,’ says Wanda.

‘That’s an old wives’ tale,’ says Scarlet.

‘Of course it is,’ says Wanda, ‘but it doesn’t half make you nervous. Other women’s boobs were for selling to the bourgeoisie for wall decoration, mine were for turning rotten. That was what your father was like.’

‘They were good paintings.’

‘They were not. After he hit me I broke into his exhibition in the middle of the night and slashed them all, every one with the kitchen knife, which was what they deserved.’

Scarlet does not comment. She has heard the story often. It seems to worry Wanda—and certainly did her husband Kim at the time. The police prosecuted and he did nothing to stop them.

‘Actually,’ says Wanda, ‘I was doing him a good turn because the publicity made him even richer. They said in Court I did it because I was jealous of his mistress, but I promise you that day in Court was the first time I ever knew she existed.’

‘Was that when you cried?’ asks Scarlet.

‘Certainly not,’ says Wanda, lying. ‘Why should anything like that make me cry? He’d sold out his principles, that’s why I did it.’

‘He did good paintings,’ says Scarlet obstinately. The ribbon tightens round her middle again, and presently loosens.

‘He did not.’

‘He did so.’

‘What do you know about it?’ asks Wanda.

‘I’ve seen some.’

‘Where?’ Wanda is sharp.

‘In the bloody Tate, so there,’ says Scarlet.

There is silence from Wanda.

‘I don’t tell you everything, you see,’ says Scarlet presently, smugly.

‘Where were they? Down in the basement?’ demands Wanda, clutching at straws.

‘Yes,’ admits Scarlet.

‘I thought so,’ says Wanda, relieved. ‘They keep all their old rubbishy paintings down there, which they’ve bought in those fits of insanity and malice to which they appear to be prone. They ought to burn them and destroy the evidence, but they haven’t got the guts in case later generations jeer.’

She points at her daughter’s stomach.

‘I can imagine that thing jeering, can’t you?’ she says.

‘The thing about all those women he painted,’ says Scarlet, ‘is that they all look like you.’

‘There is more to a woman,’ says Wanda, ‘than her tits, her arse and her cunt, although your father was never really convinced. It’s what turned him against Russia, in the end. All those women in boiler suits.’

Scarlet does not reply. She feels very cross.

‘Tits, arse and cunt,’ repeats Wanda, to annoy further. ‘Why did you want to go and look at his paintings, anyway?’

‘He is my father,’ says Scarlet, plaintively.

‘Now you’re getting maudlin,’ says Wanda.

‘And there were good times, there must have been. I remember the feel of carpet between my toes. It’s been this bloody lino ever since. It gets harder and harder to clean.’

‘If you don’t like living here,’ says Wanda complacently, ‘you can always leave.’

Scarlet—lumbering, helpless, trapped Scarlet—glares. Presently she says, ‘You never used to wash the paint. I remember dried-up trickles running down the bedroom wall, where you’d thrown coffee at him. I dream about them sometimes. If I could paint it would be my motif, only I can’t paint, I can’t do anything.’

‘I wasn’t born to wash paint,’ says Wanda. ‘Nor was I born to bring men breakfast in bed either. Kim was perfectly healthy. Perhaps times have changed, I don’t know. Did
your
young man expect you to bring him breakfast in bed? Wash his socks, iron his shirts? Come along now, Scarlet, give us your experience of men.’

She is being as disagreeable as she knows how, believing as she does that Scarlet has never had a steady boyfriend but merely sordid sexual encounters.

‘Don’t start,’ says Scarlet, nervously.

‘What me, start?’ enquires Wanda in a voice shriller than usual. She is starting, all right. ‘Why should I start? I’m thrilled to bits about the baby. Such a surprise it’s going to be. We don’t know what we’re going to get. Colour, shape or size, might be anything—except losing its I.Q. points daily, that we do know. Reminds me of the story of Royalty visiting the maternity hospital. Royalty inclines towards young mother. “What lovely red hair baby has, mother. Does he take after his father?” Answer: “Don’t know, ma’am, he never took his hat off.” ’

‘Do you think I wanted to get pregnant?’ says Scarlet gritting her teeth.

‘Yes, I do,’ shrieks Wanda, ‘or you wouldn’t have.’

Scarlet snivels. Wanda subsides for the time being, contents herself with muttering, ‘Those stupid friends of yours—’ She can’t abide them. Helen, Jocelyn, Audrey and Sylvia. They seem to her lightweight creatures who have rendered her Scarlet even more obtuse than was inevitable. Scarlet hasn’t the energy to defend them, but manages a little spirit on her own behalf.

‘It isn’t my fault,’ she mutters.

‘And whose is it, mine?’ enquires Wanda.

‘Yes,’ says Scarlet, feeling pleased with herself and quite perking up.

‘Christ,’ says Wanda.

‘You didn’t give me a proper home,’ says Scarlet, smugly.

‘And what are you going to give that?’ asks Wanda, pointing.

‘Everything,’ says Scarlet, with unexpected vehemence. ‘I’m going to give it all the love it needs. I’m going to give it everything I never had.’

‘I gave you what I could,’ says Wanda, seeming quite impressed by this outburst. ‘You can only give what’s in you.’

‘Other girls in my position would have had an abortion,’ says Scarlet. ‘At least I see things through.’

‘You’ve got another twenty years to go,’ says Wanda. ‘I had three abortions in my time, which, come to think of it, isn’t finished yet.’

‘I don’t want to hear about them.’ Scarlet feels quite sick now. Is it the baby? Or her mother? Who’s to say?

‘Well you shall. I feel quite bad about them, if that makes you feel better. I used to think perhaps you were my punishment. If I’d tried one of the others instead of you it might have turned out better.’

‘You are a revolting woman,’ says Scarlet, and means it, and is tempted to tell her mother that she knows perfectly well who her baby’s father is, and that he is everything that would most appal her. She makes do with, ‘Father’s new wife is younger than me.’

Wanda says nothing at first. Then, ‘How do you know?’

‘I asked him.’

‘You mean you’ve seen your father?’ Wanda is shaken.

‘I spoke to him on the telephone.’

‘Why?’

‘Why shouldn’t I?’

‘You’re wasting your time. He doesn’t want anything to do with you.’

‘I know,’ says Scarlet, not without bitterness.

‘Did you want to tell him about being pregnant? Break the good news? Was that it?’

‘I was going to, but I couldn’t. He talked about himself, he didn’t seem to want to know about me. It was very formal and rather embarrassing. His new wife is called Susan. She is twenty. Do you think my baby is going to be a monster, mother?’

Wanda is surprised not only at being called mother, but by the panic in her daughter’s voice: Scarlet seems to have stuck in her kneeling position. Wanda helps unfold her. Scarlet has tears in her eyes.

‘I only wanted,’ gasps Scarlet, ‘I only wanted …’

‘What?’ asks Wanda, ‘what did you want?’

‘I only wanted to give you something to make up for all the other things,’ says Scarlet, in desperation.

‘Give me something?’ repeats Wanda, incredulous. ‘Like a baby?’

‘Yes,’ whispers Scarlet.

‘You were born to make me a laughing stock,’ says Wanda.

‘What am I going to do?’ asks Scarlet, panicking now at last. ‘How am I going to live? What’s going to become of me? Mother?’

The ribbon gives up its tightening process, postpones more strenuous activity for another little while. Byzantia, curled and cosy, drifts back into sleep.

‘You’d better ask your father,’ says Wanda briskly and astoundingly. ‘Go on, ask your father. Why not? I’m finished. I have nothing to tell you, nothing to advise you. Go on. Get out of here. Ask your father.’

D
OWN HERE AMONG THE
women. Is there no one nice, ordinary, and pleasant? Yes. There’s Jocelyn, Helen, Audrey, Sylvia, Wanda, Scarlet and kind, kind Byzantia. Millie, Lettice, Lottie. It depends only on which of their words one chooses to listen to, which of their actions to overlook. And Susan, Scarlet’s father’s new wife, is nicest of all, slender of waist, and thick of mind, thick as the trunk of a kauri tree in the New Zealand forests whence she comes, and of which she is so fond, almost as fond as she is of Kim, Scarlet’s mother Wanda’s first husband and Scarlet’s daughter Byzantia’s grandfather.

Down here among the women we like to describe people by their relationship with others. It makes us feel more secure, or as if someone might notice when we die. So Sylvia says.