Female Friends (15 page)

Françoise puts her arms round Chloe’s neck, and lays her cheek on Chloe’s hair. Françoise is taller than Chloe. It is a gesture both childlike and perverse, and disturbing to Chloe. In some way this flesh, so close to Oliver’s, might be his. It is as if Oliver is touching her, and rousing her, through Françoise, yet still in the presence of a third person. Chloe stands still, neither accepting nor rejecting. When Françoise steps back, it seems the moment was after all innocent, of intent, or seduction, or even apology, and was indeed merely childlike. As a child will, she has recovered in the space of seconds from grief, guilt, and spite.

Françoise
Ah, so you forgive me. All is well again. We shall all be happy. It is a great pleasure to see friends, especially those of long standing, is it not? Oliver says you and your friends are, as the saying goes, thick as thieves. We agreed, he and I, you were right to go. It is important to cultivate friendship, after a certain age.

Thick as thieves! What did they steal from each other, Marjorie, Grace and Chloe? Everything, in their desperate youth. Parents, lovers, children, a vision of themselves.

Chloe denies her friends, to that Gallic snippet, Françoise.

Chloe
(Lying) They are not important to me.

Françoise
What a pity! It is different for me, of course. It is not natural for someone of my age to have many friends. Lovers, yes. Friends, no. In any case, female friends are not to be trusted.

Françoise’s fiancé ran off with her best friend, on the eve of her wedding.

A
T HELEN’S BEHEST, MARJORIE
leaves The Poplars and moves into the house in Hampstead. The war is on its last ulcerated legs.

Buzz-buzz.

Is it a bee?

Is it a wasp?

No, it’s a bomb.

A buzz-bomb, Hitler’s last secret desperate weapon.

A Robot bomb, or doodle-bug, a Farting Fury or an unemotional V1.

It was all right so long as you could hear them buzzing. When the engine cut out you knew they were about to fall, and probably on you.

Marjorie, alone in Frognal, hears the same bombs as Oliver does in the East End. She welcomes the sound. Somebody, somewhere is thinking of her. Such is her frame of mind.

As for Helen, she’s gone to Taunton, her current headquarters. She wears a gay red cap and bright red lipstick, drives a general about, and books in at his hotels. The Frognal house depresses her, as much as it does Marjorie. The long low curving rooms are flakey with rotten plaster. The metal curtain rails, which crisscross the ceilings like railway tracks at a junction, are rusty. They drop reddish flakes upon the pale unwaxed warping Bauhaus furniture. Creepers press and nod against the portholes. The roof still leaks: dry-rot has started, and the books and the bedding throughout the house are musty.

Helen feels that the fabric and condition of the house is nothing to do with her. It’s man’s work. Even so, she complains of its gloom. If she is in London she books in at the Connaught Hotel, where cucumber sandwiches are still served for tea, and keeps away from Frognal. Marjorie is there, of course. Well, someone has to be, in case the house is burgled. (Helen lives in fear of thieves, and rape. Her gentlemen friends, even generals, are obliged to look under the bed before she can compose herself for sleep.) Besides, Dick is still expected back. A letter from the Red Cross says he is due for repatriation on humanitarian grounds. Prepare his bed, Marjorie.

So Marjorie lives alone in the pale, dusty, damp house. She studies for her High School Certificate through a Correspondence College. Latin, Greek and French. Helen complains of the expense, but pays the fees. She allows her daughter ten shillings a week for food and keep.

Marjorie goes to the shops on Mondays, buys her week’s rations, posts off the week’s work and goes home. Sometimes she does not leave the house until next Monday comes again. Once a month she goes to Ulden to spend a weekend with the Songfords. She cannot afford to go more often.

Once, when Helen is passing through London, she meets her at the Connaught for lunch, and eats kedgeree with a listless appetite.

Helen wears a cream shantung suit and a yellow hat. She does not seem to look older as the years pass, merely more immaculate. Marjorie wears one of her father’s old grey jerseys, found in a drawer, and a brown skirt borrowed from Grace. She has put on a maroon scarf in deference to the fact that she is lunching at the Connaught. And thus the conversation goes:

Helen
You’re much too thin, Marjorie. I hope you’re doing your bust exercises.

Marjorie
Yes, mother.

Helen
All that stooping over books! It’s bad for your figure.

Marjorie
It was never up to much in the first place.

Helen
One is as attractive as one believes, Marjorie. I do worry about you. You’re not lonely? All alone in that great house.

Marjorie
There’s no need to worry about me, mother. Please don’t. I’m perfectly all right.

Helen
Somebody has to be in the house, you see. I can’t put in a caretaker, not these days. A good paid servant is as rare as dust. They say they’re on war service, but my own opinion is they’re taking advantage of the national emergency. And if you find someone to do it, it would be like putting the key into the burglar’s hand! Now you’re getting enough to eat?

Marjorie
Of course, mother.

Helen
Rations are very meagre, I know, but we all have to make sacrifices. Besides, you’re slightly built, so you should find them perfectly adequate. I hope you’ve brought your clothing book with you? Good! How many? Sixty-seven points? Lovely! I’ve seen such a nice winter coat in Harrod’s sale, and being the cold person I am, it simply isn’t safe for me to drive my generals about if I’m not nice and snug and warm. It’s all right for you, safe and snug in front of the fire.

Marjorie
I can’t get any coal.

Helen
For heaven’s sake then, child, use your initiative. There’s enough old wood in that garden to fuel a battleship for a month. And Marjorie, you won’t leave crumbs in the kitchen, will you. I don’t want the mice encouraged. How are your lessons going?

Marjorie
Very well. I got an Alpha for a Latin prose.

Helen
They have to give you something in return for all that money. I’m positive that all those tutors with degrees are either fakes or deserters, or worse. Or why aren’t they working in proper schools? Don’t look so dismal, dear, you have your father’s return to look forward to.

Marjorie’s heart shrinks at the vision of some blind, mutilated stranger stumbling towards her, up the elegant, unswept stairs, calling her by the name of daughter.

Helen
Marjorie, what are we going to do about your hair? Your father will want to see you looking at your best. He has such an eye for a pretty woman, we all know that. Besides, it is a woman’s duty to look her best, especially in time of war. It gives the men something to fight
for
. Perhaps if you tried brushing your hair a hundred strokes each side.

Marjorie
I did try. It went all greasy.

Helen
Better that than like a haystack.

Marjorie goes home. Helen gives her an extra ten shillings for which she is grateful. She spends it on stationery for her correspondence course.

Marjorie hopes a V1 bomb will fall on her soon. She begins to think the house is haunted. It takes all her courage to go through from the living room to the kitchen. It’s as if some kind of invisible curtain hangs between them; she has to use all her strength to brush it aside. And in the kitchen a force rears up in front of her, saying go back, go away. She tends to do just that.

Marjorie eats her food, uncooked, in the dining room and gets her water from the bathroom.

Marjorie finds it more and more difficult to leave the house. She has nowhere to go, in any case. People in the street seem strange and distant, as if they inhabited another universe. Her voice, as she shops on Monday mornings, sounds hollow and undersea, a booming in her ears. And what she says sounds so nonsensical that she is surprised when the shopkeeper understands, and hands her food in exchange for money and coupons.

Marjorie is seventeen. She is in a nightmare. Some life comes to her off the pages of text books. And she manages a quite bright response to a Miss Janet Fairfax, MA, who corrects her Latin proses and from time to time adds an encouraging comment—well done! What a flair you have! How well you handle the living language, as well as the dead!

Marjorie thinks, she is probably a phoney. A fake or a lady deserter from the ATS. Or some maiden lady running a tea-shop and knowing nothing. But she is pleased, all the same. It makes a slight wall of warmth to help keep the cold out.

Marjorie goes home from the shops. She works, eats, clears the house up, barricades herself into her room after dusk. But whatever it is in the kitchen seems now to extend to the dining room. It is growing. She eats in the bedroom. The side of the house where the bathroom is seems less afflicted. The sun shines in through the portholes onto the staircase and makes yellow pools of light on the shallow stone steps.

Buzz-buzz. There it goes! Hitler’s swan-song. Please fall. Spare someone else. Choose me.

No.

There is a private boys’ school down the road. The boys were evacuated throughout the war but have lately moved back to London. Young men walk up and down past her windows: it is beyond the bounds of possibility to talk to them.

Marjorie wakes in the middle of the night. Something’s in the room. The heart thudding, the hand creeping out to switch on the bedside light. Quick. No. Nothing. Just the knowledge that it’s there, in the room; come out from the kitchen. Why? Marjorie flees from the room, through the unseen curtain, which parts unwillingly to let her through. She sits all night on the stairs, with the light on and the full moon shining through the windows.

Marjorie begins to bleed. She doesn’t dare move up to the bathroom to wash or back to the bedroom for paper sanitary towels. The stairs are stained for ever.

The next day her father returns. Dick. He wears a patch over one eye, and the other is opaque, but still has some sight in it. All the same, he walks with one hand rigid in front of him as if he were pushing away obstacles. He is gaunt; his head is prickly with newly-grown hair. Marjorie does not remember him: Dick clearly has other things to think about than her. A Red Cross lady comes with him. She is kind, and settles him in his bed, tells Marjorie not to worry, just to wait.

Where is Helen? Why, Helen’s in the Shetlands, taking an American general on a visit to Northern defences. He’d always wanted to see Shetland sheep, in any case, having had a very expensive Shetland pullover in infancy. When else in his life will he have the chance? Helen drives him all the way, as obliging out of bed as in it. Marjorie sends a telegram at once—but the Shetlands are a long way, and the posts are not reliable, and it does not arrive.

That was Monday.

Marjorie comes to life and goes into the kitchen without thinking. She makes tea, and gives up all her butter ration so that Dick can have buttered toast. Dick lies on his back on the bed and sleeps, and rouses himself to eat, and then falls back again. Sometimes he just lies with his eyes open, blinking a little, thinking. What about?

That was Tuesday.

Buzz-buzz

Please don’t fall.

No.

That was Wednesday.

Dick sits up, smiles, takes Marjorie’s hand.

‘Well, Marge,’ he says. ‘Perhaps we should call you butter.’ He goes to sleep again. What a rare and precious commodity butter is.

That was Thursday.

It is night time. Dick gets up out of bed while Marjorie is asleep, goes up the blood-stained stairs (does he notice?) to the attic, to look at his books. He sees mildew and smells dry-rot. He comes down to the kitchen and has a heart attack and dies.

That was Friday.

Marjorie finds Dick on the kitchen floor. Helen comes back. The Red Cross say the death was to be expected, had they not made that clear? Helen says it is all Marjorie’s fault for not calling her back. Well, she is very upset.

That was Saturday and Sunday.

Marjorie goes to Bishops Stortford to sit her Latin exam. How callous and cruel you are, says Helen.

That was Monday.

What a week!

Buzz-buzz

Shoo fly, don’t bother me!

Marjorie gets Honours in all three subjects.

M
ARJORIE, GRACE AND ME
. How do we recover from the spasms of terror and resentment which assail us, in our marriages and in our lives? When we lie awake in bed and know that the worst is at hand, if we do not act (and we cannot act)—the death of our children, or their removal by the State, or physical crippling, or the loss of our homes, or the ultimate loneliness of abandonment. When we cry and sob and slam doors and know we have been cheated, and are betrayed, are exploited and misunderstood, and that our lives are ruined, and we are helpless. When we walk alone in the night planning murder, suicide, adultery, revenge—and go home to bed and rise red-eyed in the morning, to continue as before.

And either the worst happens, or it doesn’t. Or one is mistreated, or one is not, the answer is never made clear. Life continues.

Marjorie recovers her spirits by getting ill. She frightens herself with palpitations, slipped discs, stomach cramp. Snaps out of anxiety and depression and into hypochondria. She sits another examination, though with hands trembling and aching head. She writes another memo. Gets another job. Life continues.