Female Friends (22 page)

‘Are they?’ asks Chloe, really wanting to know. ‘Are you sure?’

‘I could not endure to live like my mother.’

‘Aren’t you?’ inquires Chloe, but she is brooding. Her mood has changed. Why did Oliver ask Françoise to listen to his work today, having had none to offer for weeks? It is as if Oliver has merely been waiting for Chloe to leave the house in order to humiliate her. And not just waited, come to that—but used boredom to drive her out. But Oliver is not like that. Surely. Not when it comes to his work.

‘No indeed I am not like my mother,’ says Françoise, incensed.

‘You’re washing up.’

‘That is altogether different. I do it under different circumstances.’

Françoise is quite panicky.

‘
Mon Dieu
,’ she goes on, ‘I fought at the barricades in 1968. I was arrested by the police. I was beaten as if I was a man. I was freed. I locked myself in a lecture hall; myself and my comrades starved. Only at the very end did I capitulate. I could not be expelled, after all. I had to have my degree.’

‘What for?’

‘For
my
freedom. I did what I could for France. I suffered for France. My freedom meant something too.’

‘And this is freedom?’

Françoise polishes a glass so hard Chloe is afraid it will break.

‘Careful,’ says Chloe.

‘I am sorry,’ says Françoise. ‘I think I am rather tired. I am not getting much sleep.’

‘I am,’ says Chloe.

There is silence. Françoise strains off the chip fat into a pottery bowl. Chloe sets the yeast to prove for Oliver’s morning rolls.

‘I am not doing this for long,’ Françoise says. ‘You understand? Presently I will do work appropriate to my education. My friend who married my fiancé did not receive academic qualifications—she was trained as a confectioner. Instead of making a free and open liaison with my fiancé as I had planned, I succumbed to my parents’ wishes and a ceremonious wedding was arranged. My friend the confectioner visited for the festivities and on the eve of the wedding she and my fiancé eloped. The humiliation was extreme. My friend earned more money as a confectioner than I did at the education office, and was more pretty than I. She too has facial hair but hers, being fair, is less apparent. Nevertheless, to be rejected for someone so inferior was most painful. I wished to come to England, for this is the land where the relationship between the sexes is free and decent and honest. Where else in Europe could we three live thus and be happy?’

‘Where indeed?’ says Chloe.

‘If only my mother had been more like you, and taken in my father’s mistresses and made them welcome. They were my friends in any case and told me all there was to know. There should be no sexual secrecy.’

Why
does Oliver want to sleep with this girl, wonders Chloe? She is both ridiculous and humourless. Or is that perhaps why?

Inigo comes in, holding a grubby white sports shirt.

‘Do you see this?’ he says, distressed. ‘It’s my football shirt. It hasn’t been washed. I need it tomorrow.’

‘I’ll do it,’ says Françoise, with alacrity. ‘If I wring it well and leave it in front of the Aga, it should be dry.’

Inigo pinches Françoise’s bottom by way of showing his gratitude. She squeals and jumps and laughs and blushes, Bachelor of Psychology as she is.

Chloe leaves them and joins the children, and watches the Captain and Mr Spock put paid to the monstrous inhabitants of space, which so often invade their spaceship in the form of blank and beautiful young women.

Kevin, Kestrel and Stanhope move to make room for Chloe on the sofa. It is done silently and sightlessly. No-one takes their eyes from the screen. Imogen, all eight years of her, creeps from the floor on to her lap. Chloe is incorporated and enclosed. It is a comfort. The woman has to do with the children, she thinks. Anything else is an optional extra, a luxury, a bonus from fate.

Fate! Let us not think that we can too easily get the better of it, change the pattern of our lives. The Fata Morgana are tricky ladies, and obstinate too. The wisest of us know how to deal with them—to wish for things sideways, out of the corners of our minds, facing neither our hopes nor our fears too squarely. Conceive of defeat, and it is already upon you—yet to avoid it, it must be conceived of. Yet gently, gently, sideways. Wish too hard, too strong, hope too fiercely—someday I shall conceive, someday marry, someday be forgiven, someday walk again—and fate turns against you with an implacable obduracy. You can almost feel it sneer and turn its back on you. The worst does happen, goes on happening, and yes, this is you, you of all people, trudging into old age childless, or crippled, or with the weight of dead men hanging round your neck, worst fears realized, best hopes dashed.

So don’t wish too hard, don’t pray, don’t go on your knees or the sightless eyes will focus on your bowed head. Rather step close behind, unseen, keeping pace, like a child playing Grandmother’s footsteps. If you have a whitlow in your finger, expect it to be worse next morning, not better. Or you’ll be one finger less next week. Oh, careful! Be careful.

Inigo has a fever. He is six. Chloe hears him coughing in the night. She goes to see. It is three in the morning; she is very tired. She takes his temperature. 105°F. Chloe goes back to bed. Chloe dreams that in the morning she finds Inigo dead. And when dawn comes and the proper time for getting up, why up she gets from her uneasy sleep, and what does she find? Inigo well, his temperature normal. What happened in the night? Did angel wings flutter, did some more heavenly, less monstrous mother come down to nurse and succour him?

Four angels round my bed

One at foot and one at head.

One to guard me while I pray,

And one to bear my soul away.

Inigo’s little friend Michael O’Brien taught him that. Perhaps it saved him? Something did, and it wasn’t Chloe. Inigo sings it to himself at night, as other six-year-olds sing themselves to sleep with rude exciting songs about bosoms and bums.

What’s the time?

Half past nine!

Hang your knickers on the line.

When a copper comes along,

Take his off

And put yours on.

Inigo is nine. Inigo has toppled off the garage, face first. He lies where he falls. His friends stare, turn him over. Some run home in panic, others to fetch Chloe. Chloe comes running, face whiter than Inigo’s; the brain flutters, trembles, registers finality. What scene is this, to be forever graven on the mind? A child limp upon the ground, two hundred yards away. Your child? Yes, your child. Wish this upon some other mother? Why doesn’t he get up? Is it a joke? Or is it death? And still the distance isn’t covered, and the legs move heavier and slower than in a dream. All those dreams, leading up to this? No. Inigo’s alive. He breathes. He moans. His face is dirty with mud and blood; a pulpy, bloodless wound on his temple. What’s beneath that? Does it always look worse than it is, or is it always worse than it looks, which? Now what? Neighbours gather. The slow-motion dance goes on. Doctor? No, don’t move him. Ambulance? No they take too long. Someone fetches a car. ‘Wait, wait,’ says Chloe, ‘let me clean him up a bit.’ They wait. Someone fetches a flannel. Chloe wipes the face. All mothers do this, in emergencies, as cats lick kittens. First lick the handkerchief, wipe the face, the hands, compose, establish order and cleanliness, the everyday standard of things. Then you can think.

‘Don’t do that,’ someone says. ‘The worse they look the quicker they act, in hospital.’ But no-one doubts from the now shuddering body and the grey and mottled face of Inigo, that they’ll act quickly when they see him. Chloe sits in the back of the car, they place Inigo on her lap, push in her handbag after her. Inigo is in a coma now. Is that a coma? One mile to the hospital.

Inigo’s all right. Three fractures to the skull, none depressed, no brain damage, superficial face lacerations, and two dented knees. They nearly lost him, from shock, some six or seven times during those first two hours. After that all’s well.

Inigo is in hospital for three weeks. Chloe loses nine pounds in weight. All to the good; Oliver says she’s getting fat.

Oh my friends, my female friends, how wise you are to have no children or to throw them off. Better abort them, sterilize yourselves, or have your wombs cut out. Give birth, and you give others the power to destroy you, to multiply your hurts a thousand times, to make you suffer with them.

It is nothing to be Inigo, lying there semi-comatose as the car jerks and stops. (The Samaritan is a bad driver, goes the wrong way round the roundabouts, loses the way. Yes, they should have called an ambulance.) Nothing to be Inigo, dreadful to be Chloe, suffering for herself and him.

And never have parents, either. Flee the country, emigrate, seek out the antipodes, so you do not have to go to Sunday tea and witness the fall of what was once so strong and competent. Be like Patrick Bates. Seal yourself off.

Blessed are the orphans, and the barren of body and mind.

In the kitchen Inigo laughs and Françoise squeals.
Star Trek
finishes.
Panorama
begins. They switch to
High Chaparral
.

C
HLOE SITS ON THE
sofa amongst her children, and wonders, listening to serpent voices in her ears.

Does Oliver mean to make Françoise pregnant? Is this his plan? He has fathered only the one child, perhaps he feels it is not enough? Perhaps his urge to create, which has made him both so rich, so poor, and so absurd, now spills over again in sorry imitation of Patrick?

Is this why he has chosen Françoise, and ignored the dozens of pretty, lively girls who in the past have lain down hopefully in his path? Because Françoise has broad thighs and a generally relaxed and fertile air? Whilst she, Chloe, thin and nervous, has miscarried time and time again, before and after Inigo, and until Imogen, relinquishing the children of his loins into nothingness again, as if from spite? Perhaps Oliver felt not grief with her, but resentment, against her?

Does Oliver want revenge? Is that it? Has he waited until now, knowing that it’s too late for Chloe, and her life bound inseparably with his, but his not necessarily to hers? Now, when she can no longer drum competitors out of the thin air and escalate the conflict. Too late for her to wage wars of attrition; not for him. Knowing that she’s older, tireder, nearer defeat; that if he hands her a baby and says there you are, bring it up, I’ll have your next twenty years, thank you very much; why then she’ll nod, and acquiesce, and bake another loaf.

These are night fears, Chloe thinks. They have no place while television puts off darkness, casting its worldly shadows all about. These are notions put into her head by her friends, her female friends.

Oliver has no reason to be resentful.

For it was Oliver who sought Patrick out; Oliver who became Patrick’s friend, his fan, his confidant, his drinking and gambling partner—his pimp, God help us—in the years when Patrick painted portraits and was hailed (by some) as a second Goya, and stars of stage, screen, commerce and politics came knocking, one or two, on the rather ordinary door of his Acton semi-detached (how camp); and later (how trendy) in droves to the penthouse he shared with Grace; and later still, trickling in after Midge’s suicide, to the barred basement where he now lives. It was Oliver, in this middle period, who insisted that Patrick paint Chloe—made her go and sit in front of him, all but naked, day after day. What did he
think
would happen?

That was in the early sixties, when England, as it were, discovered that God was dead, and that sex and youth was lovely, and age and experience sad, and that images mattered more than reality.

A topless dress and a miniskirt—a flurry of excitement, and what? Why, Imogen, and a race of children shaking their heads over the future, concerned lest Concorde make the atmosphere fly off the earth and discussing how best to cope with the 2.25 children each they are determined not to exceed.

Good days, those, for Patrick—not yet so crippled by meanness that he couldn’t bear to buy paints in order to paint. Not yet abandoned by Grace; not yet dancing on Midge’s grave.

A good time for Oliver. Four Hollywood epics under his belt: flying to and fro from the States, sometimes with Chloe, Inigo and nursemaid, sometimes not. A large Hampstead home; smart worldly friends with long un-English names. Clinging to Chloe at night, laughing with her at the strangeness of fate: which gave what they wanted: namely, critical acclaim for him, and children for her.

Good days, all the same, before discontent crept in, and drink, and all-night poker sessions; and parties so hard, fast and far-away that marital fidelity appeared ridiculous: and the friendship with Patrick, in which the two of them reeled about London, and in and out of pubs, clubs and the houses of friends—who were all too happy, whatever the hour of night, to receive so notable an eccentric pair.

Then back, in Patrick’s case, to Midge, breakfast, and work. And in Oliver’s to Chloe, vomiting and hangover, and the gradual disenchantment, the realization that though Patrick had the disease itself, that genuine hotline to Apollo, Oliver could only ever have the symptoms, operate on a rather blurred and feeble extension, and that no amount of rubbing up against Patrick would make the slightest difference.

Not such good days for Chloe.

Poor Chloe, lying half awake all night on her soft bed, feeling only the soft weight of the very best bed-clothes on top of her, waiting for the sound of Oliver’s car returning, jerking into wakefulness at the least noise—a taxi outside, or the cat, or the maid—pregnant, perhaps?—on her way to the bathroom for the second time, never Oliver. Where has he gone? Whose bed is he in? Slumped drunk and senseless in some whorehouse, or in the arms of some smart young person they both know well? Where perhaps he was the night before, and before that? How can I preserve my dignity before my friends, how can I smile and look serene at the parties you take me to, knowing what I know, and what they know? That you prefer anything in the world to me?