Female Friends (12 page)

‘Esther’s just fat,’ says Edwin. ‘Too many potatoes. She’s let herself go.’

‘We must none of us let ourselves go,’ says Helen. ‘We must get ready to win the peace, as we are winning the war.’

Helen is elegant even at eight in the morning. She wears a thin spotted navy dress with padded shoulders and a pleated skirt, and a fur coat, and her stockings are made of nylon—the first pair even seen in Ulden. She has the new wedgie shoes. Her hair is piled up over her forehead and falls smoothly away behind until it reaches the nape of her neck, whence it rises again in a semi-circular half-curl, like a seawave on the verge of breaking. Such an effect is hard to come by: but in these times hair must look as unlike hair as possible, as must complexions. Orangy pancake make-up hides every blemish; scarlet lipstick transforms the lips into a cupid’s bow God never intended.

Helen looks lovely, and inhuman. Esther clutches her old dressing-gown round her, clasps the tin of salmon and sinks into a chair, taking the weight off her poor aching legs. She feels sick all the time.

‘I’ve only a minute, my dears,’ says Helen, as they cluster round her, like bees around the honey. ‘Marjorie, you must move back to London this weekend.’

‘But you can’t, the V-bombs—’ says Esther Songford, from her chair. Helen ignores her.

‘But I can’t leave now. What about my Higher Certificate—’ says Marjorie, ‘and my University Entrance—’ Edwin scowls at her.

‘You love your father more than school, surely,’ says Helen. ‘We have reason to believe he will soon be repatriated, on humanitarian grounds. He’ll want his family about him after all he’s been through. I must dash now. John’s on his way to a very important meeting. I promised to drive him; so much more cosy than the train, but I’m afraid if I stop the engine we never seem to get it started again. I tell him it doesn’t matter if he’s late, he’s so important they’ll be perfectly happy to wait all day for him, but I’m afraid he’s dreadfully agitated.’

And off she goes.

When Chloe tells Gwyneth that Marjorie’s going back to London, tears come into Gwyneth’s eyes.

‘What’s the matter?’ asks Chloe, surprised. ‘She’s going home, isn’t she?’

‘This war,’ says Gwyneth. ‘What it’s done to us all!’ She has an unsightly rash on her hands. The doctor says it’s due to washing-up water and vitamin deficiency, but what can she do about either?

‘After the war,’ asks Chloe, ‘what about us? Will we go back to London?’

But Gwyneth doesn’t want to go.

‘You must stay here and finish your schooling,’ she says.

Gwyneth is proud of Chloe; her neat, pretty, clever daughter is her one achievement. She thrills with pleasure at each success in school; she panics at the slightest headache. She is selfless in her concern for her daughter’s welfare, expecting nothing in return, forever soothing, patting, encouraging, moulding, preaching patience and endurance.

So long, that is, as Chloe’s interests and that of the Leacocks do not conflict. If this happens, the Leacocks win. Gwyneth loves Mr Leacock. Why else would she allow Chloe to get up at six on those winter mornings, risking health and energy, to do the guests’ shoes, and lay up breakfast, and waylay the milkman to get extra milk—and even, as she grows older and cleverer, to stay up late and make up the accounts after the Rose and Crown is closed? All for nothing, unless you count Mr Leacock’s smile.

‘What an honour,’ Gwyneth says. And believes it, and so does Chloe.

Gwyneth has nowhere to go. She is over forty now and has no savings. Her life at the Rose and Crown has settled into a tolerable pattern of exploitation and excitement mixed. She believes that Mr Leacock loves her. And indeed, on the rare occasions when he can contrive to be alone with Gwyneth, he certainly kisses her and tells her so. They were meant for each other, he says, but their love can never be, can never go beyond kisses. Gwyneth must not, no, she must not, leave his employment because he will be miserable if she does. And no, she must not ask for more money or a shorter working week or his wife will suspect him.

And Gwyneth, such is her guilt and such the excitement engendered by these secret meetings, is content to believe him. The years pass quickly: she is forever looking forward, forever watching for a sideways look, forever half fearing, half hoping that Mrs Leacock will see and suspect. And the more guilty Gwyneth feels about the husband, the more fond she becomes of the wife, that bright little bird-woman, pitying her for the drabness of a life which contains only an open and legal love.

Gwyneth believes she has only to speak the words and Mr Leacock will be hers; and forever procrastinates, and never quite speaks them. Thus, lonely women do live, making the best of what they cannot help: reading significance into casual words; seeing love in calculated lust: seeing lust in innocent words; hoping where there is no hope. And so they grow old in expectation and illusion, and perhaps it is preferable to growing old in the harsh glare of truth.

‘O
F COURSE I TOLD
Marjorie that father raped me,’ says Grace. ‘Marjorie would never be able to make up anything so interesting on her own account. They’re all like that in the media—no imagination at all. Poor father. He was very drunk and very angry.’

In what serves for a bedroom, Grace packs. That is, she empties drawers upon the floor, selects garments and stuffs them into squashy leather bags, seeming to have as much an affection for old torn knickers as she does for Yves St Laurent jumpers.

‘He’d taken off his belt to beat me—I think he once had a batman whose virility he admired very much, who used to say the way to keep women in order was to belt them. But all that happened to father was that his trousers fell down, and you know what those austerity underpants were like. I could see he had what I supposed—I was only fifteen—to be an erection. Usually his penis was a dim little thing snuggling in beneath his pot belly. Mother referred to it as daddy’s winkie. We had baths together, you know, to save the hot water. Sunday mornings. Marjorie went in with mother, I went in with father. It was unpatriotic to have more than six inches of water in the bath—even King George himself did not.

‘And here father was, pointing this great big swollen thing at me, like a gun. I told Marjorie he got me down on the bed and put it in, because that’s what she wanted to hear, and I might have known she’d pass the word along, but I don’t think he actually did. One would remember a thing like that, I suppose? Though in fact, in sexual matters, one remembers what one wants to forget. At the time I wanted it to be true. I told Patrick my father had raped me. I wanted him to take an interest.’

‘Did he?’ asks Chloe.

‘Yes,’ says Grace. ‘He laid me in the ditch, there and then, to take the taste from my mouth, he said. And then he said tell no-one, or I’ll go to prison, you’re under age, look what a risk I’m taking on your behalf. Forget it outside but remember it inside, he said. ‘It’s good for you.’

‘Patrick and his therapeutic dick,’ says Chloe, sadly.

Occasionally, as Grace tosses about amongst her piles of clothing—as she used to toss about, as a child in piles of autumn leaves—she will lift a jersey or bra to her nose and sniff, and if she finds it offensive she will either throw it into the waste bin, if she considers it too far gone, or spray lavishly with cologne before returning it to its pile. Chloe is half admiring, half shocked.

‘It’s a relief to be able to talk about such things,’ says Grace. ‘All those years we had to keep quiet! Sebastian talks about everything all the time, every detail, as if nothing that happened was too terrible to mention. When we make love, which isn’t often, thank God, he keeps up a running commentary. I don’t like it at all.’

And indeed, Grace prefers the silent embraces of her youth, when there were no words for what she did, or what was done to her, or if there were, she didn’t know them.

In those other days of speechless intertwinings, she feels, a darker force came into play, linking her more closely to the mindless patterns of the universe. Now this procreative essence shrivels in the light of knowledge. Fellatio, cunnilingus, sodomy—is this what is happening? Is this better than the night before, or what the Jaggers do? Grace would really rather not know, but to Sebastian such knowledge is all in all. Presently it will be the same for her. She knows it.

‘I preferred it when fuck was a swear word,’ says Grace.

‘You ought to get this place cleared up,’ says Chloe, nervous of what Grace might say next.

What does Grace have to offer Sebastian, Chloe wonders, since it’s not her sexual cooperation? You could leaf through a whole month’s supply of women’s magazines and not find the answer. Certainly not his creature comforts, let alone a secure and supportive base from which to face the outer world. Apart from the builders’ droppings, the floor is littered with books, crumbs, bills, mouse-traps, wine corks, empty bottles and old camembert boxes. The toilet has recently overflowed and the floor has been only cursorily cleaned. Out on the balcony Grace has been building a curious part-shiny part-encrusted tower with the foil boxes in which Chinese take-away food has been delivered. So much for talent.

Grace
If you don’t like the mess, don’t look. You’re a poor cowardly timorous thing, like your mama. You think if you don’t clean up, no-one will love you.

Chloe (Lying)
It’s not that at all. It’s if you don’t clear up you get typhoid.

Grace (Happily)
We have rats. That ought to look good in court. I feed them.

Chloe
You must get in new builders. It’s impossible to live like this.

Grace
How can I? I haven’t any money until I get damages from the last lot.

Chloe
Grace, you must have some money. You’ve just sold the Acacia Road house.

Grace
I’ve given it all to Sebastian. He has to make a feature film about a strike in the Warwickshire coal fields in 1933.

Chloe (Horrified)
Grace!

How many times has she not spoken that word, in just those tones? Perhaps it is to hear it that Grace behaves as she does? Spoken by Chloe, a wail of concern.

Grace
Sebastian says it’s Christie’s money anyway. It ought to be ploughed back as soon as possible into the society whence it was milked.

Chloe
But that’s nonsense.

Grace
Do you think so? In any case I’m certain to get it back. I have a percentage of the profits.

Chloe
What profits? You’re crazy. If you want to invest in a film why didn’t you ask Oliver first?

Grace
Because I don’t love Oliver: I love Sebastian. Anyway Oliver belongs to another world. He’s too old. What a bourgeois soul you have, Chloe. You’ve gone quite pale.

Chloe
What about Stanhope’s school fees?

Grace
Perhaps he’ll have to go to a comprehensive school, after all. That should please you. But it will be from necessity, not principle, don’t think otherwise.

Chloe
God give me strength.

This is Oliver’s favourite phrase.

Grace
Don’t get so agitated. Stephen said it was a perfectly good script. He told me I should put my money in it. He said the world was ripe, for protest films.

Chloe
But Stephen is in advertising, not films.

Stephen is Grace’s brother. He is twenty-seven.

S
PRING, 1945. HITLER IS
in retreat. Esther Songford is fatter than ever, in spite of stringent rationing. Two ounces of butter a week, three of margarine, one egg and six ounces of meat. Bread and potatoes are on points, as are nearly all groceries. Only carrots and cabbage seem in infinite supply. Esther cooks both in the same water, to save fuel.

‘You lumber round like an old cow,’ says Edwin to Esther, and she cries. She would like to be young and lively and slim again, and not feel sick all the time. She would like to be like Helen, to please her husband. She doses herself with Syrup of Figs, in the hope that it will make her so. She has a vague belief that you become fat from eating hot food; and lets her dinner get cold upon her plate, to Grace’s outrage and irritation. Anything irritates Grace, these days.

Edwin explains about proteins and carbohydrates: but Esther refuses to understand. She is not stupid, but is as irrational about food as she is about her insides.

One Saturday evening when Marjorie is back for the weekend, she, Grace and Chloe sit playing Monopoly with Esther. Esther sits well back from the table to give her fat tummy room. She wears a thin green cotton smock over a skirt which will not meet around her waist, and is pinned with a nappy pin.

A ripple runs under the smock. Esther’s bulging stomach, beneath the thin cotton, can be seen to bulge and heave. There’s something alive, inside.

‘Look,’ says Marjorie, her hand frozen in mid air, still holding the hotel she’s about to put down on Pall Mall. (Marjorie’s winning, as usual. Lucky in games, unlucky in love.) Everyone looks where she points.

‘There’s something in there moving,’ says Marjorie.

Mrs Songford lurches to her feet: she is pale with shock and realization.

‘I’m too old,’ she says. ‘I can’t be. I thought it was the Change.’

But it’s not, and she is, and Stephen is born in the cottage hospital some two months later.

The end of the war is a difficult time for everyone. The adrenalin level in the nation’s bloodstream falls abruptly—depression is bound to follow. It does. Fear of oneself replaces the fear of sudden death: waking nightmares turn into sleeping ones again. No excuses left. Children have to move over to make room for fathers they cannot remember: wives have beloved husbands to feed and not just talk about: women have to leave their jobs and return to the domestic dedication expected of all good women in peacetime. Hitler is not coming, and neither is God; there is to be neither punishment nor salvation. There is, instead, a flurry of sexual activity which will land the schools between 1950 and 1960 with what is known as ‘The Bulge’.