Female Friends (23 page)

‘Hogamous, higamous,’

Oliver sighs to her over the breakfast table, seeing her puffy red eyes.

‘Men are polygamous.

Higamous, hogamous

Women monogamous.’

‘All this clobber,’ he’ll say, looking round the tasteful antique furniture she collects and cherishes, ‘what do you want it for? You’re becoming very worldly, Chloe. Bourgeois to a degree. Possessions and people. People and possessions. You shouldn’t seek to
own
them, Chloe. You can’t.’

‘This jealousy of yours,’ he’ll say, ‘is pathological. It’s the sign of an immature personality.’

‘I don’t understand why you worry,’ he’ll say. ‘These other women mean nothing. You’re my wife.’

‘For God’s sake,’ he says, irritated, ‘go out and have a good time yourself. I don’t mind.’

He lies in his teeth, but she doesn’t know this. She only wants Oliver. It irks him (he says) and cramps his style. He who only wants her to be happy, but whose creativity (he says) demands its nightly dinner of fresh young female flesh.

Gradually the pain abates, or at any rate runs underground. Chloe gets involved with Inigo’s school: she helps in the library every Tuesday and escorts learners to the swimming pool on Fridays. She helps at the local birth control clinic and herself attends the fertility sessions, in the hope of increasing her own.

Oh, Oliver! He brings home clap and gives it to Chloe. They are both soon and simply cured. His money buys the most discreet and mirthful doctors; Oliver himself is more shaken than Chloe, and her patience is rewarded: he becomes bored with his nocturnal wanderings and stays home and watches television instead.

Not such good days for Midge, either. Patrick out all night and shut up in his studio working all day, and forgetting to buy the family’s food—which he is prone to do at the best of the times, for he himself will go for days without eating, if he is absorbed in a painting, and if he can, why cannot they? Are they not his flesh and blood, Midge and baby Kevin? Patrick does not give Midge money (she is a bad housekeeper, he feels, and squanders enormous sums, given half a chance, on rent and nappies and washing materials) but sees to his family’s needs himself.

What does Patrick spend his money on? His friends wonder, looking at Midge’s thin face, and her quiet, scraggy baby, and the shabby furniture—all of it acquired or given, none bought. All Midge knows is that he will give a beggar in the street ten pounds and think nothing of it, but that if she presses him for extra he is angry with her for days and will not speak to her. She would rather have his company than his alms. Still, she worries about Kevin’s lassitude, and the struggle between her desire to please Patrick and her desire to feed her baby gives her an ulcer.

She goes into hospital for a month, and Kevin goes to his grandparents, who soon fatten him up. Grace sleeps with Patrick in the studio while she’s away: and insists on remaining in the room while he paints his other lady clients. Midge wouldn’t dream of behaving in such a way.

Quite nice days for Grace, really. Now divorced from Christie, indifferent to the fate of Piers and Petra (rock in two languages), living it up with Patrick, persecuting Christie’s second wife Geraldine, heavy breathing down her telephone night after night, painting ‘mass murderer’ in gloss paint on her mini, writing to Geraldine’s employers, clients, family and friends that Geraldine is variously an ex-convict, ex-whore, bigamously married, a man in drag; until obliged by the law to desist.

‘Geraldine hasn’t done you any harm,’ says Chloe to Grace. ‘It’s none of it her fault. I wish you’d stop it.’

‘I don’t care whose fault it is,’ says Grace. ‘It makes me feel better. Bad behaviour is very animating, Chloe. You should try it yourself some time. One could get hooked on it.’

Grace is in fact quite sorry for Geraldine, and frequently rings her up in office hours to tell her so, explaining that Christie doesn’t love Geraldine, that she’s not anywhere smart enough for Christie to love, and that he has married her only to get custody of Piers and Petra.

Geraldine is a child-care officer, and a pleasant if humourless soul. She is in her turn sorry for Grace, thinking her mad, and telling her so when provoked sufficiently.

Grace is of course right about Christie’s motives in marrying Geraldine. She has been right about Christie longer than anyone. As Marjorie says, it is a pity that Grace who is, as it turns out, of all of them the one most capable of moral action—for did she not leave Christie on the grounds of moral principle, rather than on the promptings of personal female desperation?—should thus hide the light of her essential rectitude beneath a bushel so dreadfully overflowing with nonsensical bad behaviour?

Pleasant days for Marjorie, too, believe it or not. Marjorie is working her way up through the ranks of the BBC. With her Double First and short-hand typing to back her, she becomes first a secretary, then a research assistant, then is promoted to Personal Assistant to a Hungarian drama director by name Marco, who talks ceaselessly in praise of his own talents—which indeed are considerable.

Thus Grace and Chloe discuss their friend, at the time:

Grace
She’s in love with him. She must be, to put up with him.

Chloe
She’s paid to put up with him. Besides, she’s learning a great deal from Marco. She says so.

Grace
That means he’s getting her to do all the work. Camera scripts and so on. While he sits on his arse. I expect she sleeps with him after tapings to relieve the tension: they all do, you know, those PAs. It’s their function.

Chloe
Marjorie isn’t easily taken in. She’s much too clever.

Grace
Clever never got a woman anywhere. Look at me. No, Marjorie’s become a BBC camp-follower, that’s all. It’s a dreadful fate. Those PAs never marry. It’s their own fault. They do all the work and are shocked if they get any credit. They give it away in handfuls to whoever they’re in love with, producer or director. They sublimate by becoming dedicated to the media, like nuns.

Chloe
How can you be a camp-follower and a nun at the same time?

Grace
You are so literal, Chloe. You must drive Oliver mad. I suppose this Marco of hers is married?

Chloe
I believe so.

Grace (Triumphant)
There you are, you see. He’ll use her to do his camera scripts and send flowers to his wife when he’s away in the Bahamas doing a thirty-second insert for some boring play, which he could just as well have done in Margate, and Marjorie will wait for him for ever. Serve her right for having no principle and going with married men.

Grace is just off to sleep with Patrick. Midge is due out of hospital the next day. Chloe murmurs a protest but Grace ignores it.

Grace is as wrong about Marjorie as she is right about Christie. Marjorie escapes the category that waits for her like a Venus flytrap, becomes first a director in her own right, and then a producer. She must put up with the obloquy which follows successful women in offices—the criticism of looks, dress and manners—and withstand the implication that by virtue of having attained a position which many grown and earning men would dearly like to reach, she must somehow be lacking in essential female grace. It is all nothing new to her: it is, in effect, merely the old vision of herself, repeated, which her mother so frequently held out to her.

Pleasant days. An ill wind, Marjorie sometimes thinks, toughening up her poor cold heart. If she’d had the baby, would she have come so far? If Ben had lived, would she have wanted to?

L
EFT-OVER DAYS FOR GWYNETH
, with Chloe gone.

Chloe goes to Ulden to visit her mother. She takes Inigo, aged eight. Oliver has bought Gwyneth the cottage next to the Rose and Crown, and now Gwyneth sleeps there and spends her day off cleaning its floors, and is not noticeably grateful for the change in her circumstances.

On this particular Sunday, the Leacocks are off to Italy on holiday. Gwyneth has, for once, been left formally in charge, and not just unofficially. The Rose and Crown flourishes: it has twenty beds, ten bathrooms, not enough fire escapes and a restaurant with a good wine list and a Spanish chef and Portuguese waiters. The public bar has been swept away, along with good cheap local beer, and the spirit of the Cosy Nook extends throughout the premises; somewhat plushed up, of course, with rosy mock Victoriana replacing the faded maroon original.

Gwyneth earns four pounds a week plus meals. A five hundred per cent increase on her original salary, as Mrs Leacock emphasizes. Gwyneth rises these days at seven and goes to bed at twelve. The girls who work under her earn double what she does, but Gwyneth seems to take a pride in the lowness of her wage.

‘Only four pounds a week,’ she says, with awe. ‘They wouldn’t get anyone for that now.’

Although she is always pleased to see Chloe, and delights in Inigo, she seems uninterested in Chloe’s London life. Chloe is half relieved, half hurt. It was as if, with her marriage, she has become a stranger to her mother.

And indeed—living with, getting pregnant by, and marrying Oliver, without her mother’s knowledge, let alone permission, were not deeds calculated to increase the bond between them. Rather it was to loosen it—with that destructive instinct for self-determination which the loving daughters of loving mothers sometimes so alarmingly exhibit. And loosen it, it did.

Gwyneth has understood and forgiven. But she keeps her daughter at a distance now.

‘The girls are so slip-shod,’ she complains to Chloe. ‘They have no standards. You have to watch them all the time,’ and although it’s her day off she takes Chloe to lunch in the restaurant, instead of cooking for her in the cottage, so that she can keep an eye on the staff, the food, and the guests.

Gwyneth makes excuses.

‘I do hardly any cooking in the cottage,’ she says. ‘I can never get used to cooking food for myself. All that work and only me to appreciate it. Besides, if I eat by myself I get indigestion. It’s the quietness, it worries me. I like a bit of clatter and a shout or two, and even an argy-bargy, so long as it doesn’t turn nasty!’

The waiter brings Inigo a mountain of chips, especially prepared for him in the kitchen. He’s pleased by this special attention and smiles benignly at his mother and grandmother. He is a beautiful, clear-eyed child. Chloe feels such a pure clarity of love for Inigo, at this age, that it pierces her with almost more pain than any Oliver has ever caused her. Chloe picks at gammon and pineapple. She does not have much appetite, these days.

Chloe
When you retire, mother, you’ll have to be a little more on your own. Do try and get used to the cottage.

Gwyneth (Horrified)
I mean to work until I drop.

Chloe
But why? You don’t have to work any more. And if you’re getting varicose veins—

Gwyneth
Only little ones—

Chloe
And if your insides are giving trouble—

Gwyneth has complained to Chloe that occasionally, though past the menopause, she bleeds a little from time to time.

Gwyneth
If I forget about it it will go away.

She asks after Marjorie. Gwyneth has seen her name on the television screen—albeit low down on the credits—and is pleased to know she is doing well.

Gwyneth
Such a bright girl. So were you all, bright as buttons.

She asks with some temerity after Grace. Tales of Grace are often cataclysmic.

Chloe
Grace? Litigating.

Gwyneth
That should keep her out of trouble for a while. And little Stanhope? What a name to call a baby!

Chloe
He’s with me most of the time. Well, with the au pair.

Gwyneth
I expect it’s for the best, though it’s hard on you. She never sounded the best of mothers, to me. Leaving the poor little thing alone like that.

Grace goes out drinking, one night, leaving the sleeping two-year-old Stanhope locked in the flat. He wakes, is terrified, dials telephone numbers at random, gets through to the Continental Exchange, who keep him soothed and reassured while the call is traced and help summoned. When Grace comes home at three with a Nigerian in national dress there are the police, the NSPCC and a Children’s Department official waiting for her.

Poor Grace. Everyone gets to hear about it. Even Gwyneth, tucked away in Ulden.

Poorer Stanhope.

Grace consents to let Chloe have Stanhope. She has never cared for him. It was Chloe who talked Grace out of having an abortion so it seems only fair that Chloe should put up with the consequences.

Gwyneth
Poor Grace. Poor little Grace. She always seemed to have so much and really it was nothing.

She puts her hand on Chloe’s arm and strokes it, with a brief return of the passionate, protective love she once had for her child.

Gwyneth
I’m glad things are all right for you. I did my best for you but it wasn’t much. I don’t deserve what you’ve turned out to be. And Oliver doesn’t mind about you having Stanhope?

Chloe
No. He has a great respect for Patrick Bates.

Gwyneth (With unaccustomed asperity)
I can’t think why. I must say I could never see his charm. It was a bad day when he was posted here. I wish he’d been sent to Aberdeen. Upsetting all you girls the way he did. And that poor wife of his, I don’t know why she puts up with it.

Chloe
He’s very creative.

Inigo has been taken off by a waiter to inspect the ice-cream stores. At the table next to theirs four grey-suited men with competent, choleric faces grow impatient because their steaks take so long to arrive.