Female Friends (21 page)

And so she did, the pretty little thing, with her long legs and her blue eyes, and her reddish hair and her cleft chin, and her everlasting chatter. Wrenching Oliver and Chloe apart, like a surgeon’s knife parting Siamese twins, obliging them henceforth to live their separate lives. It seemed there was a hole torn in Oliver’s side, from which the living energy flowed.

Buzz-buzz, goes Patrick through Oliver’s life, another buzz-bomb; wham-bam it falls, and there’s ruin and destruction, nothing left of anyone’s efforts. Broken things are broken: patch and mend as you like, make the damage unnoticeable to strangers, yet you who saw it broken know it’s not the same.

Oliver looks at Imogen and goes through the motions of fatherhood, and his riven side hurts as if a sword had been driven into it.

Oliver goes to the doctor again and again about the pain in his side but the doctor finds no physical cause for it.

(‘It will be stigmata next,’ says Grace to Chloe. And Chloe, next time she sees Marjorie, says that Grace is impossible to communicate with, these days, so clever-clever she’s become. ‘All words and no feeling,’ complains Chloe to Marjorie, her friend, of Grace, her other friend.)

‘Imogen spoilt nothing,’ says Oliver now. ‘I’ll see Françoise gets back to her room by morning. We mustn’t confuse the children. And you must remember I love you very much. And that Françoise helps me sleep.’

‘Don’t you find her rather hairy?’ asks Chloe.

‘It’s a sign of passion,’ says Oliver, and Chloe does not pursue the matter further, for fear of a pain which seems threatening to constrict her chest, but which, if she is careful, will never quite emerge to consciousness.

‘I’ve missed my bus,’ Chloe says, miserably.

‘I’ll drive you,’ says Oliver, generously, and does, and on the way in to Cambridge tries to explain some of his antagonism to her going out to work. He needs Chloe at home, he says. He only feels secure if she’s at home. And now he is getting on well with his novel, he really needs to have her at hand during the day to read aloud to, so he can properly balance the sentences. No, of course Françoise won’t do. She is foreign. Besides, he doesn’t respect her judgement or her creativity, as he does Chloe’s. It is Chloe he needs, she mustn’t think otherwise. She is his wife. He has all his emotions invested in her, he explains, and his past, and his present, and his future. It is just in this one very small and insignificant sexual area that he needs another younger person who doesn’t snore and who responds properly and naturally, and Françoise fits the bill very well, besides taking the domestic load off Chloe. Perhaps Chloe could ask the Head Buyer for three months’ leave of absence, just during the middle period of his novel? Which is now. If her employers value her services, they’ll be happy enough to oblige.

Chloe asks. Chloe loses her job.

‘You weren’t cut out for it,’ says Oliver, ‘or you would have made more impact. They’d have kept you on at any cost, just so long as they could make a profit out of you. You’re well out of it: you were miserable and exhausted and bad-tempered all the time. You were beginning to get chilblains.’

Chloe recovers her temper and Oliver from his displeasure, and the household falls into a placid rhythm. The children breathe again and flourish.

Françoise goes to bed at midnight, lies awake for an hour, and then moves from her own bed to Oliver’s at precisely one in the morning, and goes back to her own bed at two, having prepared Oliver a hot cup of chocolate to help him sleep. She gets up at eight to help Chloe with the children’s breakfast. Chloe gets up at seven-thirty to put the bread in the oven for Oliver’s nine o’clock breakfast. It needs half an hour to bake and a full hour to cool. Hot bread, as everyone knows, is indigestible.

Chloe sits in Oliver’s room between midday and two o’clock (Imogen, not over-fond of Françoise, has chosen to eat school dinners, cabbage and all) and waits for Oliver to read to her. Occasionally there is something to be heard; usually there is silence. Oliver will type busily from ten to eleven, read over and think about what he has written from eleven to twelve, and then, as like as not, scribble everything out. Presently he says he thinks perhaps Chloe’s presence inhibits his creative flow, and thereafter she sits in the living room waiting for his summons. After a time the summonses cease coming, and one spring morning she takes it on herself to go to London for the day, and talk to her friends. Grace and Marjorie.

Both of whom, come to think of it, have their own troubles. If they have little time or energy left for Chloe, beyond a cursory, ill-considered and possibly even malevolent ‘divorce him! Leave him! throw her out!’ is that surprising; or more than she deserves? All the same, she is hurt.

M
ARJORIE, GRACE AND ME.

Marjorie is well acquainted with death. Her sad brown eyes seem created for its contemplation, her sturdy feet for the stirring of a dead body on the floor. Patrick Bates once said she smelt of death, and that is why of all the women in the world, having slept with her once he never would again. Her skin was dry even in adolescence—it flaked away as if it was dying, not growing.

As a child Marjorie would bravely pick up dead birds and bury them—maggots and all. The rest of us looked the other way.

Being so accustomed to death, it seems that she has trouble facing life. She prefers the world on the page, or pictures flickering on the screen. The media world is full of such refugees from reality.

Marjorie tried once. Yes she did. Living with her Ben, carrying his six months’ child. Two days after Ben died Marjorie started to bleed, just gently, and feel generally uncomfortable, so she called the doctor. He came at once, to her surprise, and she lay on the bed while he talked and chatted and kept her cheerful. Not that she was uncheerful.

‘If I keep it, that’s good,’ she says. ‘If I lose it, that’s good too.’

He was a small fine-boned man, like an elf. She liked him. He’d seen many people die.

He told her what her chances were of keeping the baby and not miscarrying. Fifty-fifty, don’t despair, he said, and she didn’t.

But through the evening the chances worsened, the odds shortened.

A pain. Yes a contraction. Gone again, but forty-sixty, I’m afraid. But you never know! Think happy thoughts, girl. He calls the ambulance, nonetheless.

A sudden flow of blood, stopping soon. Thirty-seventy. Pregnancy suits her. Her skin stops flaking, her complexion clears, she feels placid and content. Even her hair grows silky and falls in waves about her face. She hasn’t told her mother. She didn’t want her mother, for once, to turn up and change everything.

A pain, this time the face distorting. Marjorie lies more flatly on the bed. Twenty-eighty, he thinks. Poor little baby, breaking free; or else cast out by a host too shocked to shelter it, who’s to say? Too small, at any rate, to survive. No ambulance, as yet. It has lost its way.

More blood, more groans, the legs parting.

Ten-ninety.

Five-ninety five.

One-ninety nine.

Nil-one hundred.

Good-bye baby. Here you come.

Life does not continue.

Grace gets in first, of course. Grace murders. Grace has abortions. Like having a tooth out, she says. She looks forward to it. All that drama, she says, and distracted men, and the anaesthetics are lovely, and you wake up with no sense of time passed. What luxury! Marjorie says that if Grace had done what her father wanted her to, and looked after the infant Stephen, her baby brother, she might not afterwards have disposed of foetuses with such abandon. I, Chloe, think it is due more to the way Christie battered the maternal instinct out of her, than anything else. For Grace did have such an instinct once—she wailed like an animal for her stolen children.

I heard her. It is the reason I look after Stanhope for her, and the reason Oliver allows me to. We understand why poor Grace can’t. We witnessed it.

I have never seen a dead person, only coffins, but I have imagined the body within and taken responsibility for it. I would have a dozen children if I could; if Oliver and commonsense allowed. The answer to death is life, and more life, which is why the world is getting so overcrowded. Or so they say.

Leave Oliver, Marjorie says. Divorce him, Grace says. Save yourself, they both say. If only they seemed more saved themselves.

I
NIGO SAYS HE WILL
stay up for the
boeuf-en-daube
, although he has school tomorrow. He is in his last year there. If he gets his A-levels he will go to York University. Inigo is too old to be told how to behave, when to eat, how to dress, how to speak, how to get on in the world—anything, in fact. He comes and goes as he pleases. He is a well-built dramatic looking boy of eighteen, with his father’s hook-nose and upstanding black hair—which, being uncut, forms a wide curly halo round his head—and hard blue eyes. He plays rugger.

Inigo seems nothing to do with Chloe any more. Inigo is his father’s child, and she just a servicing machine. She is irritated with him. He seems to admire Oliver for having got Françoise to bed—Oliver tells Inigo, too, as well as his mother, believing as he does in sexual frankness with the young, and she suspects them of having oh-you-dog snicker-snicker sessions when they listen to records or go fishing together.

Chloe is hurt. Was this what she raised Inigo for? Trained him in understanding, forgiveness, patience, love; raised him with open, liberal consideration and care? And see, he is as prurient and predatory on the female sex as any young man of her own generation! Inigo is not to be her champion, either.

Kevin is fourteen. He is a thin wiry child with his father’s coarse red hair, and blue eyes, and the same cleft chin—but he is wiry as his father is stocky. He is always hungry. He piles food on to his plate, pulls it towards him, crooks his left arm round it to protect it from scavengers whilst he bolts it down with his right. He was hungry for his first three years. It seems that no amount of food will ever make up for it. He goes to the Masonic boarding-school, now in recess for the Easter holidays. His hair is cropped short and he has a pasty look, and his vowels do not have Inigo’s ringing purity. He collects anything—stamps, wild flowers of England, car registration numbers. His room is awash with notebooks and cardboard files. He plods doggedly through school, and work, and holidays with Chloe, and never inquires after his father.

He opts for fish-fingers now. So does Kestrel.

Kestrel, his sister, is twelve. Her birthday is on Christmas Eve. She goes to the same school as her brother—girl’s division. She is determined not to grow up. She wears ankle socks and sandals and would wear her school-uniform throughout the holidays if Chloe didn’t wrench it from her. She has her hair short and carries her homework wherever she goes, like a weapon. She loves school and is Form Prefect and, Chloe thinks, can hardly be popular. Kestrel likes to tell everyone what to do, and how, and when, and has spots on her chin which she covers with plasters. She has her mother Midge’s mousy colouring and round innocent face, but hard blue eyes and Patrick’s chin.

Stanhope will have fish-fingers too.
Boeuf-en-daube
sounds foreign. His birthday, also, is on Christmas Eve. He and Kestrel were born on the same day, in St George’s hospital at Hyde Park Corner. Kestrel’s mother Midge had booked in properly. But Stanhope’s mother, Grace, was taken there from Selfridges, where she’d tapped a lady at one of the perfumery counters on the shoulder and said ‘excuse me, I’m having a baby’.

Stanhope looks bewildered and brave. He goes to a rather small public school.

Stanhope is not unlike Kevin, whom he admires, but has a more delicate and refined cast of countenance. Clearly unsuited to competitive sports, Stanhope talks of nothing else. He runs himself ragged on cross-country runs. Last term he was picked up collapsed three-quarters of the way round the course. He was leading. The school let Grace know but she forgot to pass the message on to Chloe and no-one came to visit him in the school san. No-one.

On Grace’s instructions, Chloe is obliged to maintain the myth that Stanhope is the son of an airline captain who crashed the day after his birth. ‘He’ll like that,’ says Grace, ‘anything is better than having Patrick Bates for a father.’ When Chloe remonstrates at the impracticality of such a story, Grace becomes quite offended. ‘I
am
the child’s mother,’ she says.

One day, when Stanhope seems strong enough. Chloe means to tell him the truth. But every holiday he appears more fragile, more delicate, more emotional, and not tougher at all.

Imogen is Chloe’s darling. She is an artful prattler. Imogen loves Oliver with an all-pervasive love. He melts before it, even as he resents her.

How can Chloe leave? How can she carve through these patterns of dependency and hope, in the interests of something so impractical and elusive as personal happiness?

Françoise cooks twenty-four fish-fingers. She has to. Oliver has found the two packets in the tiny ice compartment where he keeps the champagne, and such is his dislike of packaged foods that naturally he removes them, and puts them on top of the refrigerator, where they soon thaw and turn soggy, and if not cooked quickly will be wasted.

Chloe has turned four pounds of potatoes into chips. There is no chip basket because Oliver despises chips, but Françoise manages very well with the egg slicer and a deep frying pan.

Chloe opens two cans of peas.

Françoise and Chloe sit at either end of the table, the children sit in between. There is laughter and frivolity. Stanhope finds the secret bottle of tomato sauce. Oliver will not emerge till midnight.

They are all remarkably happy.

‘T
HE NEW WAYS ARE
so much better,’ says Françoise, as the two women wash up.

The children watch
Star Trek
in the living room. The set is small and portable. Oliver feels that to own a small screen is less of a concession to the vulgarities of the media than to rent a large one. The children do not seem to mind. The fuzzier the image on the screen, the more attentively they stare.