Female Friends (19 page)

Gwyneth just stares at her.

Chloe (Panicky)
Mother, don’t be like this.

Gwyneth looks older, and tireder, and sadder. Chloe looks as lovely as she ever will. The abortive pregnancy has left her trembling on an uncertain brink somewhere between the girl and the woman: she has the best of both worlds. Gwyneth goes off to clear the tables.

Oliver
It’s my fault, Mrs Evans.

Gwyneth (When she returns)
You look just like her father, you know that, don’t you. I hope your lungs are good, that’s all. Keep the sheets well aired, Chloe.

It is forgiveness, acceptance, and reconciliation. She and Chloe, who lived so close and who so seldom touch each other, actually embrace, and cry a few tears. Mrs Leacock allows her to give the young couple a free supper in the Nookery, and even to sit with them while they eat it. Well, Sunday evenings are slack.

Chloe assumes that the next step is for Oliver to introduce her to his family. She says as much to him as they lie awake one night in their Battersea room. Oliver is racked with coughs. The fog closes in upon the windows, seeping through cracks, and the unlined cotton curtains do nothing to keep it out. Oliver is earning fifteen pounds a week, which is wealth beyond dreaming, but will spend not a penny more than he can help. He works for the Rank Film Organization, where he started at eight pounds a week, and in spite of his noisy hatred of the commercial film industry, and his public castigation of it daily in the canteen as the whore of Cinema, and his drunken afternoons, he is not fired. Rather, his employers, seeing this behaviour as the sign of talent, insist on promoting him. He is given one film to write, then another. He has a gift for it. B-features, seedy thrillers; Oliver is totally involved as he writes them, giving them an internal validity no-one else quite manages—and totally horrified at himself when he has finished.

Chloe
Don’t you think we should go and see your family?

Oliver
I haven’t got a family. I only have a father. My sisters have passed into their husband’s care, thank God, and I hope they’re equal to it. The uncles and aunts are on their way to Bishops Avenue via Golders Green and Stamford Hill. (This being the route British Jewry takes from East End poverty to North London prosperity.) I have less of a family than you do, Chloe.

Chloe
It’s not a competition, Oliver.

This is not the sort of thing she should say, or usually does. But having offered Oliver his in-laws, she feels the least he can do is offer her the same. Or is he ashamed of her? Married life, to Chloe, is beginning to seem more complicated than she had at first supposed. Unless, of course, she can continue for ever to subjugate her own interests in the way she so far has. Oliver turns his back on her and tries to go to sleep. She will not let him.

Chloe
And Oliver, please darling, it’s ridiculous living the way we do now you’re earning so much money. All my wages go on the rent, which is two pounds two shillings, and food, which is three pounds however hard I try, and your fares, which are six shillings every week, and that leaves me with three shillings a week for everything else.

Oliver
It was your idea to save.

Chloe
Yes, but not
all
your salary.

Oliver
Are you saying I’m mean?

Chloe
Of course I’m not, darling. We’re not quarrelling, are we? We never quarrel. It’s just I darn and I darn but my knickers are in rags, and your socks must be dreadfully uncomfortable and the sheets have been sides to middle twice—can’t you feel it—and the egg slicer has worn so thin it bends when you pick up an egg and it falls off. I lost two last week that way and it’s such a waste. We bought it at a jumble sale anyway. If I could just have three shillings I could get lining material for the curtains and then you’d sleep better. If it’s not the fog coming through, it’s the lamplight from the street. You never used to be like this, Oliver.

Oliver
For God’s sake, Chloe, stop nagging. I’ve got to get up at eight tomorrow in order to get half way across London so I can prostitute my soul from nine-thirty to five-thirty in order to keep you. If I wasn’t married I wouldn’t dream of doing it, I can tell you.

Chloe is tearful, and silenced, for a while.

Chloe (Presently)
And you’re always so tired when you come home, and if you stop work at five-thirty why are you never back ’til eight, and you’re bad-tempered and I’m fed up and miserable and I wish I’d never married you.

Oliver
It’s mutual.

Chloe is horrified. She weeps such pitiful tears that Oliver is alarmed and comforts her, and they don’t get to sleep until four in the morning, and the next day Oliver has a temperature and has to stay at home.

So Chloe curbs her tongue and her needs, and goes on polishing, patching, darning, smiling and mashing turnips at twopence a pound, until one Friday evening Oliver comes home with a bottle of whisky and drinks it in surly silence, out of his tooth-mug, staring into the gas fire with its four broken radiants.

Chloe knows betters by now than to ask him what the matter is. She goes to bed, in her British Home Stores nightie, reduced ten per cent for staff, and tries to sleep.

At two o’clock Oliver rouses her, and she dresses, and they walk to Chelsea and from there take a taxi (madness!) to an address off Hackney Road. Chloe is being taken at last to meet old Mr Rudore.

‘But it’s the middle of the night,’ says Chloe.

‘He never sleeps a wink,’ says Oliver, ‘or that’s what he’s been telling me all my life. So night or day, what’s the difference?’

Mr Rudore, poor shuffling old soul, is roused from deep slumber as he lies in his brass bed beneath his feather quilt in the back bedroom of his two-up, two-down house. Alley cats yowl and prowl about his dustbins.

Mr Rudore, though sleepy, does not seem disconcerted by the hour of his prodigal’s return; rather there is a look of pleased animation in his glittery old eye, and gratification at the renewal of a temporarily lost source of entertainment and mirth.

He makes Chloe tea and toast, and shows her photographs of family holidays, taking particular pleasure in a Bournemouth snap of Oliver, naked on a beach, at the age of five, with bucket, spade and starfish.

Oliver
I’m sorry we came so late.

Oliver’s Father
So it’s the middle of the night. So she’s a lovely girl. So you should want to let your father know.

Oliver
We’ve been married three months.

Oliver’s Father
So that’s well and truly married.

Oliver
She’s a goy. A shiksa.

Oliver’s Father
So long as she stops her husband drinking.

It seems that Oliver’s father can hardly contain his mirth.

Oliver
I’m sorry I missed the girls’ wedding.

Oliver’s Father
Weren’t you there? I could have sworn I saw you there, my boy.

Oliver
No. I hurt my ankle. I’ve never been in such pain in all my life. I sent a telegram.

Oliver’s Father
The telegrams there were! By the hundred! Their poor mother, that she shouldn’t live to see it.

Oliver can’t win. Mr Rudore settles Chloe down and hour after hour, through that long night, details to her an account of his still raging litigation with Maison Furs, the establishment which sold his wife a fur coat when they could see she was dying. Chloe struggles with sleep. She has to be at work the next morning, unlike Oliver or Oliver’s father. Oliver fidgets.

Oliver (Interrupting)
Father, about money. How are you managing?

Oliver’s Father
Quiet, boy. The next week, Chloe, the very next week, they had the nerve to send this bill, here it is—now where is it? If I’ve lost it that’s got me finished—ah, here it is. See the date? The 25th. And those initials scratched out. They changed typists, that’s a sign of guilty conscience, if ever I saw one—

Oliver
Father, I can let you have two pounds a week, if that will help. I’m doing quite well in the film industry.

Oliver’s Father
Quiet, boy! If you ask my opinion, Chloe, that typist couldn’t bring her sweet fingers to type anything so grasping and heartless—

Oliver
Three pounds a week, father.

There is silence.

Oliver
But you are not to use it for lawyer’s fees. And you are not to sue Dr Richman for negligence. He did everything he could for mother; if anything killed her it was overwork, and you know it.

He does not say he lays his mother’s death at his father’s door, but of course he does. It was his father’s meanness and stubbornness, he is convinced, which made his mother’s life a misery and so he often tells Chloe. Oliver’s father weighs £150 a year in Oliver’s hand against a possible £1,500 in Dr Richman’s bush, and plumps for Oliver.

He even seems prepared to take Oliver a little more seriously, and as the dawn breaks and Oliver and Chloe take their leave he actually says—

Oliver’s Father
You have broken this poor old man’s heart, my boy. Marrying out!

And he screws an aye-aye-aye wail out of some almost forgotten racial memory.

Oliver, satisfied, prods Chloe awake again and they walk all the way home through the beauties of the dawn. Chloe gets blisters on her feet. She is wearing her slippers and the soles have worn through. She is very tired at work the next day.

Oliver’s meanness slips off him, as if someone had removed a strait jacket. His whole spirit seems to stretch and grow. Next time he is asked to write a film he holds out for payment on freelance terms, and gets it. He uses the money to put down a deposit on a house in Fulham, and they move into it. As if in gratitude, Chloe becomes pregnant again: stays in bed most of her pregnancy, and is delivered safely of Inigo, Oliver’s son.

W
ILL INIGO, NOW EIGHTEEN
have fish-fingers with the younger children, or wait for the
boeuf-en-daube
? Although at ease in adult company and, it sometimes seems, both more sophisticated and more righteous than his elders, so that they feel obliged to temper their conversation in his presence, hearing it anew through his critical yet innocent eyes, he enjoys the company of his brother and sisters, both fleshly (Imogen) and spiritual (Kevin, Kestrel and Stanhope).

It is a belief in many rural communities, and of practical consent in dog-breeding circles, that a female will not breed true once she’s been had by a male of the wrong pedigree. Thus the Alsatian bitch that gets off one night with a Labrador is a write off: and a cow will be mated with two bulls in quick succession, the first for milk, the second for meat. Does Inigo, Oliver’s child, have something of Patrick in him? Impossible to believe, yet he and Stanhope are so similar in looks—if not in build—it is hard not to imagine they are brothers: and Inigo and Imogen seem to share Patrick’s looks, not Chloe’s. Rows of hard blue eyes survey Chloe across the table: it is the triumph of crude vitality over gentility.

And do not think that Chloe thought of Patrick more than once or twice, while she gestated Inigo. She did not. She knew he was living in Marjorie’s house, no more than that, and had long ago confessed to Oliver the details of her encounter with Patrick beneath and on top of her mother’s bed. She would have told the story in the most general of terms; it was Oliver who insisted on the detail. It seemed to fascinate him.

Now Françoise, leaving Chloe peeling potatoes for the chips, goes to find Inigo to ask him whether he will join the children for supper, or stay up late, perhaps too late for his health and energy, and eat with the adults.

Françoise has a degree in Psychology. She is twenty-eight. She is the only daughter of the best restaurateur of Rheims. Picture her standing, one morning, amongst the unswept litter of Victoria Station, off the boat-train, with only one suitcase. She has left home in pique and panic, her fiancé of eight years’ standing having abandoned her on the eve of their wedding, for Françoise’s best friend.

How can she stay in Rheims, and face the pity of friends and family? But where, now she is in London, can she go?

It is at such desperate moments in our lives, of course, as Grace frequently points out to Chloe, that help of one sort or another materializes. The day a husband slams out of the door, a fresh suitor, hitherto undreamt of, appears. The dog is run over: that very day a stray parrot flies in through the window. By the same post the mortgage is foreclosed and an uncle leaves you a villa in Spain. Look warily at these sideways gifts from fate, Grace advises. They are usually loaded. The suitor brings pregnancy, the parrot psitticosis, the villa aged relatives. By the same wisdom, Françoise, standing lost and helpless on Victoria Station, with no past and no future, does not despair, and is right not to.

For on the platform Françoise is approached by Thérèse, a French girl of the kind she, Françoise, most despises, small, fair, timid, virtuous and Catholic, who asks Françoise to mind her bag, and at the very sound of the French tongue collapses into tears. Thérèse is returning to her
chère maman
, after three weeks’ disastrous stay as an au pair in an alarming household in the heart of the English countryside, where the children did not belong to the parents, there was no religion, washing-machine or vacuum cleaner, dinner was frequently at midnight, she was required to work long hours for little pay; the master of the house, who they said was a creative genius and in the film industry but in fact was writing a very important book, so there weren’t any film stars, made suggestive remarks and clearly wished to seduce her, and the lady of the house, having just had her own novel refused by her publishers, was bad-tempered and unjust. Thérèse had packed and left the night before when required to make bread like a peasant. Life is very sad, is it not? Thérèse’s mother had sent her off to this English country house with a frilly apron with which to open the door to milords, but no milords had arrived.