An Unkindness of Ravens (16 page)

‘You’ve been reading Graves!’

‘No. Smith’s Classical Dictionary.’ The girl called Nicky laughed. ‘But I don’t know what the letters stand for,’ he said.

‘Action for the Radical Reform of Intersexual Attitudes.’

‘A case of making the nym fit the acronym? Or is it a deliberate obscuration?’

‘Perhaps it is.’

‘How many schools are involved?’

It was Eve who answered him. ‘Kingsmarkham High, Haldon Finch, St Catherine’s .. . ‘ but Caroline Peters interrupted her.

‘I teach at Haldon Finch. ARRIA had its inception just over a year ago at St Catherine’s. We admitted as members only those women over sixteen, those in fact in the sixth and seventh years. I’m glad to say it had an immediate appeal—how could an organization designed expressly for women, designed to give men no quarter—be otherwise?’ She turned on him a glacial look of distaste and it gave him a most unpleasant feeling. He didn’t belong to a minority, there was no way he could be categorized into a minority, yet the sensation she gave him was of doing so and of an oppressed one at that. ‘Our very well-organized propaganda machine,’ she said, ‘spread the good news through the other schools in the area and we soon had considerable cells at Pomfret College of Further Education and Kingsmark ham High.’ The good news, he thought, the ‘gospel’ no less. She astonished him by saying, ‘We now have a membership of just over five hundred women.’

He suppressed the whistle he wanted to give. What must the local population of seventeen—and eighteen-year-old girls be? All of them, including those who had left school, could surely hardly amount to more than a couple of thousand and that meant 25 per cent in ARRIA. Why, they could almost start a revolution!

‘All right, you’ve got badges, you’ve had tee-shirts printed, you hold meetings, but what do you Jo?’

Caroline Peters answered readily. ‘Basically, have as little contact with men as possible. Defy men by intellectual and also by physical means.’

He pricked up his ears at that. She wasn’t carrying a bag but she had pockets. Most of the other girls had bags. He hadn’t got a warrant and, almost more to the point, hadn’t a woman with him to carry out a search.

‘We have a constitution and manifesto,’ she said. ‘I expect there’s a copy about and I see no objection to your having one. Would you women agree to that?’ There was a murmur of assent, some of it amused. ‘But I must point out that our aim isn’t to meet men on equal terms. It isn’t to come to a truce or compromise with them nor to reach that uneasy detente which in past revolutions has some tunes come into being between a proletariat and a bourgeoisie. As Marx said in another context: Philosophers have tried to explain the world. The point surely is to change it. Good night, everyone.’ She went out of the room, closing the door with a somewhat sinister quietness behind her.

Silence. The black girl, Donella, cast up her eyes, rolling sloe-brown pupils in moon-white whites. Eve said, ‘By physical means, she only meant self-defence stuff. It’s compulsory when you join to take a self-defence course, karate or judo or tai chi or whatever.’

‘Personally,’ said Donella, ‘I think that’s one of the things that attracts people—the sport, you know.’

‘You may have noticed, there’ve been three times as many evening courses in martial arts started since ARRIA began. That’s in response to increased demand, that’s ARRIA.’

Nicky had spoken with pride, not aggressively. She made a swift chopping movement with one arm. Wexford, a large man over six feet tall, felt relieved he wasn’t on the receiving end of that blow. It was true about the judo and karate courses, he had remarked on it himself to Burden, pleased that women were at last taking steps to defend themselves against the muggings and rapes which in the past few years had so disproportionately increased.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘that’s for self-defence. How about aggression? I don’t suppose anyone’s going to admit to carrying an offensive weapon?’

Nobody was. They didn’t look scared or guilty or even alert. He fancied he saw wariness in one or two faces.

Til give you a copy of the constitution,’ Eve said. ‘There’s nothing private about it. Everyone’s welcome to know what we do, men as well as women. Do you have daughters?’

‘They’re a lot older than you.’

She looked at him in a not unkindly way, assessing. ‘Well, they would be, wouldn’t they? You can’t be too old for ARRIA, though.’

The constitution was typed and photocopied. He noted that there were no flaws in the apexes of the capital As or the ascenders of the lower-case ts. It went into his pocket to be read at leisure. Sara Williams, he observed, was watching his every movement. The big fair girl called Helen he now realized had been Eve’s partner in the tennis match. He said to Eve, ‘If everyone is in fact going I’d like to talk to you alone for five minutes.’

The brisk policeman’s tone replacing the one of easy jocularity seemed to jolt her. She pushed fingers through the purple crest of hair.

‘OK, if that’s the way you want it. Everybody out, right?’ She gave a hiccuping giggle. ‘Home, women!’

Amy said, ‘Well, I think I’ll just .. . ‘ and drifted vaguely towards the door.

They all began to take their leave in ways peculiar to young girls, whether feminists or reactionaries. Helen and Donella closed in upon each other with a tight bear hug which ended in giggles and heads subsiding on each other’s shoulders. Sara wrapped her arms round herself and moved across the floor with vague dancing steps. Jane humped her bag, filled with ARRIA constitution sheets, as if it weighed a ton, making agony faces. Nicky was lost in a dream that seemed to turn her into a sleepwalker so that she neither paused in her exit nor spoke but merely raised a languid flapping hand in farewell as she passed through the doorway.

Alone with Eve, Wexford said, ‘You’ve been telling me lies.’

‘I have not!’

‘Why did you tell me your boyfriend couldn’t come here because you had to share a bedroom with your sister? This is an enormous house and as far as I can see your parents mostly aren’t here anyway. But you told me lack of space —and you implied lack of privacy—stopped him coming here.’

‘Well,’ she said, a sly look in her eyes, ‘I can explain that. You’ll see the answer in our constitution actually. Rule 4.’

He pulled the constitution out of his pocket. Here it was, Rule 4. ‘Women’—not ARRIA members, he saw, but always ‘women’ as if the society contained the world’s entire female population—’Women shall avoid the company of men wherever possible but should their presence be required for sexual, biological, business or career purposes, it is expedient and desirable for women to go to them rather than permit them to come to us.’

‘But why?’

‘Caroline and Edwina—she’s the classical one who’s at Oxford—they said it smacked of the sultan visiting his harem. You’ve got to think it through, you know. When you do you can see what they mean.’

‘So that’s why you went to your boyfriend in Arnold Road? You required his presence for sexual or even biological purposes?’

‘Isn’t that why women usually require men?’

‘There are other ways of putting it. More aesthetic ways, I’d say. Maybe more civilized.’

‘Oh, civilized. Men made civilization and it’s not up to much, is it? It’s no big deal.’

He left it. ‘Did you know Sara Williams was the daughter of the murdered man whose car you saw in Arnold Road?’

‘Not then I didn’t. I do now. Look, I only know her through ARRIA and I didn’t know her father. For all I knew, she mightn’t have had a father.’

He accepted that. ‘Miss Peters didn’t tell me much about this society of yours, did she? Only that it’s a wildfire movement, it’s caught on in all the local schools. How about the—what shall I call it?—esoteric stuff? How do you join? Do you pay a subscription? Is there any sort of ritual—like freemasons, say?’

‘We don’t need money,’ she said, ‘so there’s no sub. Where would they get it from anyway? Most of our members are still at school. They’d have to get it from their fathers and that’s out. See Rule 6 and dependence. The only thing that costs us is the photocopying, only it doesn’t because Nicky does it on her dad’s Xerox in the night, when he’s asleep.’

There was an irony there but Wexford didn’t point it out. ‘Anyone can join?’

‘Any woman over sixteen who’s not married. Obviously a married woman has already capitulated. Anyway, it wouldn’t be possible for her to keep to the rules.’

‘That would let my daughters out.’

She ignored him. ‘I’m a founder member. When we started there was a lot of really way out stuff going on. Edwina wanted initiation ceremonies, sort of baptisms of fire if you can imagine.’

‘What sort?’

He was deeply curious. At the same time he was afraid she would soon realize she was spending too much time unnecessarily in the society of a man. She considered his question in thoughtful silence. She was not a pretty girl. But perhaps this didn’t matter in these days when beauty was no longer at a premium. She had one of those chinless faces, long-nosed, full-lipped, but with creamy delicate skin. A frown creased, or rather crumpled, her forehead. Creasing was for older people. Eve’s frown was like the bunching of a piece of cream velvet.

‘Some of the others went along with her ideas,’ she said. ‘I mean, she was a radical feminist. For instance, she used to say we couldn’t make revolution on Marxist principles on account of Marx having been a man. She said sexuality was politics and the only way to get freedom was for all women to be lesbians. Any hetero behaviour was collaborating with the enemy. Even Caroline Peters never went as far as that.’

‘You were going to tell me about initiation.’

Eve seemed reluctant to reach the subject. ‘They actually formed a splinter group over it. Sara, the one whose father was murdered, she was one of them and Nicky Anerley was another. One of the things they objected to was being educated along with the other sex. They wanted schools and colleges run by women and with women teachers. Of course, it would be best, it’s the ideal if you know what I mean, but it’s a bit fantastic.’

‘Particularly as it’s only in very recent years that women have gained admission to certain men’s colleges, notably at Oxford.’

‘That’s beside the point. This would be a question of getting the men out altogether. Edwina and the rest of them who were at mixed schools wanted to go on strike until they agreed not to admit boys. But Caroline wouldn’t have that. I suppose she was afraid of losing her job.’ ‘And that’s what caused the rift in the party?’ ‘Well, partly. This was all last summer and autumn. It more or less stopped when Edwina went up to Oxford in October and the others drifted back. I may as well tell you. It was all a sort of fantasy anyway. Edwina said in order to prove herself a true feminist a woman ought to kill a man.’ Eve looked at him warily. ‘I don’t mean everyone who joined ARRIA was to have to kill a man to get to be a member. The idea was for groups of three or four to get together and .. .

‘But that’s not an initiation ceremony really, is it? I could tell you about some of those if you want.’

12

 With inscrutable face Jenny Burden sat reading ARRIA’s manifesto. She was past the stage now of prettifying disguises of her pregnancy. It was beyond disguise and her condition didn’t flatter her. Younger than her years though she had always looked, she now appeared too old to be having a baby. Her face was not so much lined as lacking in its former firmness, caverns hollowed out under the eyes and chin muscles sagging. She had no lap now so she held the flimsy sheets against a book propped up on the table in front of her.

But Wexford could tell by Burden’s pleased expression that he was content to see his wife making even this small effort to escape from the apathy that had settled on her as the psychotherapy she was having progressed. No longer in revolt, no longer violent in her hatred of the child, she had become resigned. She waited in hopeless passivity. When Wexford arrived she had taken his hand, put up her face for a kiss, inquired in a limbo voice after Dora and the girls. And he had thought: when the baby is born she could go completely mad, enter a schizophrenic world and pass the rest of her life in hospital. She wouldn’t be the first to whom such a thing had happened.

Still, now she was reading ARRIA’s constitution, and apparently reading every word with care. Wexford wouldn’t talk about the Williams case in her presence and Burden knew that. Suddenly she began reading aloud.

‘Rule 6: With certain limited exceptions, no woman shall be financially dependent on a man. Then they list the exceptions. Rule 7: All women shall take a course in some martial art or self-defence technique. Rule 8: All women shall carry a permitted weapon for self-defence, i.e. ammonia spray, pin, penknife, pepper shaker, etc. Rule 9: No member shall marry, participate in the bourgeois concept of becoming ‘engaged’ or share accommodation with a man in a cohabiting situation. Rule 10 ... Do you want Rule 10?’

‘Oh, I have read it,’ Wexford said. ‘It is heresy!’

She didn’t recognize the quotation. ‘You’re bound to think that way, aren’t you? Perhaps I should have read all this before I met you, Mike.’

He took the blow with a physical flinch.

‘ARRIA didn’t exist then. It was around earlier this year before I gave up work, though. I always wanted to get hold of their manifesto but no one would even talk to me about it. I was a married woman, you see.’

‘I suppose I was lucky to get it,’ Wexford conceded.

Burden was making an effort to recover from the pain she had given him. ‘I want to hear Rule 10.’

‘All right. Rule 10: Women wishing to reproduce should select the potential father for his physique, health, height, etc., and ensure impregnation in a rape or near-rape construct.’

‘In a what? What the hell does it mean?’

Wexford said, ‘Margaret Mead says men of the Arapesh fear rape by women just as women in other cultures fear rape by men.’