Female Friends (24 page)

Gwyneth excuses herself, and vanishes into the kitchen. Gwyneth’s rump is broad and solid, her waist vanished into stolid flesh. If she was ill, thinks Chloe, surely she’d be thin? The steak appears at the next table: the four men eat. Gwyneth returns, satisfied.

Gwyneth
Creative! What kind of excuse is that? Your father was creative, and he did what he had to for his family. He knew real life came first. The other is make believe.

Chloe (Flatly)
Father died. If he’d gone on painting pictures and not the outside of houses, he might still be alive.

Gwyneth
It was the choice he made, and the right choice. You’ve got to live by ought, not want.

Chloe
No. People should do what they want. If they don’t it just means trouble for everyone.

It is the nearest they have ever come to an argument. Gwyneth’s mouth tightens. Chloe moistens her lips. She feels an unaccountable rage with her mother. The four men at the next table are in discussion with the waiter, who presently sidles up to Gwyneth.

Waiter
That’s the new management. Sneaky bastards, the Leacocks. They’ve gone and sold the place. I don’t suppose they told you either.

Gwyneth turns pale. She looks as Chloe remembers her looking twenty-five years earlier, when she came home a widow from the Sanatorium, having left the house a wife.

And that is what the Leacocks have done. Sold the Rose and Crown as a going concern to a big chain of hotels. And why not? It’s what the Leacocks always meant to do: and he is sixty and she is fifty-five, and Gwyneth should have seen it coming. And if they did not confide in her—well, why should they? Gwyneth is only an employee.

So Gwyneth tells herself, as once she told herself that there was no good reason why Chloe, a grown woman now, should ask her to her wedding. And telling herself often enough, convinces herself, and when the Leacocks return from holiday, Gwyneth smiles at them, and when they leave for Wales, within the month, giving her a lampshade as a farewell present, she waves good-bye and promises to write, and only when the following week the new management replace her with a younger woman from another hotel, and she finds herself unemployed, she wonders briefly why the Leacocks have not seen fit to safeguard her position. Twenty years!

Gwyneth sits in her little cottage and thinks of nothing in particular for a long time, and next time Chloe goes to visit her, she complains of stomach pains and Chloe tries to get her to go to the doctor but she won’t.

‘It’s the change in diet,’ she says, ‘it’s nothing. I’m very happy here and all sorts of people pop in to see me, you mustn’t worry about me, Chloe. And I had such a nice postcard from the Leacocks—they’ve bought a little house in Malta.’

‘Those monsters,’ says Chloe.

‘You mustn’t say that about them,’ says Gwyneth. ‘They’ve always been very good to me.’

‘They’ve exploited you for years,’ shouts Chloe. ‘They’ve conned you and laughed at you, and you asked for it. You’ve stood around all your life waiting to be trampled on. Can’t you even be angry? Can’t you hate them? Where’s your spirit?’

She stamps and storms at her mystified mother. It is the worst of her times. Oliver has been out with Patrick for the last two nights. Out prowling like any tomcat, bent on nocturnal mysteries. If I love him, Chloe tells herself, I’ll let him do what he wants, and a jealous wife is an abomination; and listening to herself, believes herself. Not for nothing is she her mother’s daughter. When Oliver comes home she’ll smile and make a pot of coffee and tell him who’s phoned and who she’s seen.

It drives him mad. His trousers are stained with semen; he hasn’t even bothered to take them off, then, or else he’s been too drunk. Chloe washes them, patiently, with purest, gentlest soap flakes. He’s trying to provoke her. She will not let herself be provoked. Even going to the doctor for treatment for VD she does not permit herself anger, only distress.

Oliver gives up the effort; he stays home, says hard things about Patrick, doesn’t drink, writes another script. Is this victory, or just postponed defeat? Chloe thinks it’s victory. Oliver stares at her with sombre, furious eyes, and says nothing, and at night drives himself and her into the most elaborate and curious of positions, and still she merely smiles, and obliges, and if in the morning she’s bruised and bitten, isn’t that love and didn’t she enjoy it?

In the meantime she has pushed and prodded her mother to the doctor’s. What you want, mother, is a hysterectomy, says Chloe. Get your womb taken out, removed, cut away. Then you’ll be a person, not a woman, and perhaps you’ll get your spirit back from those sad depths to which it has so pitifully sunk.

‘Cancer,’ says the doctor, investigating, and lo, there it is, everywhere.

‘In my young days,’ says Gwyneth’s friend Marion, who keeps the sweet shop, ‘that word was never spoken, and it was better that way. It’s talking about it makes it happen.’

T
HE CHILDREN ARE IN
bed. But only Kevin sleeps. Sleep obliterates Kevin’s day as his head touches the pillow, as a lake might obliterate a candle. The other children lie awake. Stanhope learns League Tables—he hopes one day to win a Brainchild Quiz and impress his mother. Kestrel lies wide-eyed in the dark and tenses and relaxes her calf muscles to strengthen them for a hockey victory. Imogen, precocious, reads the Bible, as once her mother did.

‘Remember now thy creator in the days of thy youth,

 When the evil days come not—’

And they don’t. So much Chloe has achieved.

Inigo waits up for midnight dinner. At eighteen his life has already fallen into a kind of quiescence. He has the patience and dignity of an old man. Sixteen was riotous with sexual activity, as he was obliged and blown by a whole tribe of lost girls, aged thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, who had hysterics in lessons, and collapsed at games—dizzy with sleepers, bombers, pot and acid—grasping at sexual straws in a sea of parental anxiety and distress. Now a couple of years later, the girls have grown respectable. They work for their exams, polish their shoes, wear no eye make-up, return to a state of near virginity and instead of passing into other worlds at parties, would waltz and fox-trot if only they could.

Inigo thinks he will go into politics, and bring about the Socialist revolution his parents so patently failed to achieve. Kropotkin and Engels are his heroes. Marx and Lenin he considers rather trashy modern stuff. And Chairman Mao a mere poet.

So much Chloe has achieved.

The
boeuf-en-daube
is cooked. The rice is drained, the salad tossed. Françoise has laid the table, and arranged a posy of spring flowers as a centre-piece. She has picked crocuses. Chloe has never known anyone to pick crocuses before. She had thought them inseparable from the earth in which they grew, but it seems she was mistaken.

Inigo goes to fetch Oliver. When Oliver is in an uncertain temper, Inigo is commonly sent to fetch him. Oliver is proud of Inigo, flesh of his flesh, love of his love, so socially and sexually competent, and president of the school astronomical society as well. No bar-mitzvahs, no chicken soup, no aie-aieing for him. Presently he’ll go to Oxford, and won’t have to go on a scholarship.

So much Oliver has achieved.

Oliver has had a bad day. He sits and broods and considers his ill-fortune. Thus:

1. A letter from his father demands that the roof over his poor old head be mended. It is leaking. The Rudore family house has long since been condemned, and stands alone and crumbling in a sea of builder’s mud while Mr Rudore’s solicitors (at Oliver’s expense) fight the compulsory purchase order.
   
2. Two telephone calls from Oliver’s sisters, now cheerful, fertile ladies living next door to each other in the Bishops Avenue—that mecca of all desire—with expensively coiffeured hair, crimson nails, chauffeurs and charge accounts, suggest to him that since their husbands have that week given away all their wealth to an Israel Defence Fund, the least that he, Oliver, can do to compensate (for what they regard as anti-Zionism and he as natural common sense) is not just mend but renew his father’s roof. What’s more, they say, they have been together to see Oliver’s latest little film—showing, without his knowledge, at an Art Cinema in Golders Green—and have found it quite brilliantly funny. Oliver can’t remember there being a single laugh line in it.
   
3. Chloe has been to London to see her friends. His indifference is faked—anxiety knots his stomach. Is she disloyal? Do they talk about him? Do they laugh? Oliver lives in terror of being laughed at. When he leaves a script-conference it is his habit to lean against the closed door to make sure they’re not laughing at him. Quite often, of course, they are.
   
4. Oliver has succeeded in reading his last completed chapter to Françoise, having contrived Chloe’s absence without upsetting her—but instead of it bringing gratification and reassurance, as he had hoped, and a literary response as obliging as her sexual one, she has been rancorous and hard to please, and even criticized his grammar. He had thought for a while, that Françoise, with her stocky limbs, solid peasant frame and slow smile, was the personification of primitive female wisdom; and, rightly, that her instinctive perceptions would turn out to be only thinly overlaid with academic sophistications: but essential wisdom has turned out to be stupidity, and innocence limitation, and honesty intransigence. Françoise hears only the construction of his sentences, and is deaf to their meaning and the intertwining patterns they make; and does not even possess that natural and kindly grace which at least Chloe, for all her faults, deigns to offer him—that of keeping quiet about what she does not like.
   

Now he dreads the night, and the punctual returning of Françoise to his bed. A bad day for Oliver.

No doubt he will find ways of recovering from it.

‘You never go to parties these days,’ he accuses Inigo, when his son comes to tell him that dinner is ready. ‘You’re always here.’

‘Parties are a waste of time,’ says Inigo.

‘What isn’t?’ inquires his father, with the cynicism required of age, and Inigo smiles politely.

‘You think I’m a decadent old has-been,’ says Oliver, hopefully.

‘I think you’re a very respectable and responsible person,’ says Inigo, sincerely. He’s not laughing at his father, is he?

‘The roof is mended,’ Inigo goes on, ‘the bills are paid, the household is stable, though not totally orthodox, everyone appears placid. What else can one ask of parents?’

‘I’m glad you can accept Françoise,’ says Oliver, spoiling for the trouble Inigo is so reluctant to provide.

‘I’m glad
you
can,’ says Inigo. ‘I imagine a young woman must be quite tiring for someone of your age.’

‘Not at all,’ says Oliver. ‘I suppose
you
have three women at one time?’

‘I have,’ says Inigo, ‘but I don’t think anyone enjoyed it. It was the girls’ idea, not mine. Girls seem to have a great need to be debased, don’t you think? One doesn’t wish to be party to that kind of thing.’

Yes, Inigo is laughing at Oliver.

Oliver sits at the head of the table, and Chloe sits at the foot to serve the food. Inigo and Françoise face each other. Oliver’s shoulders are hunched forward. His neck muscles twitch. How are we to get through dinner, wonders Chloe? I must hold my tongue and speak only pleasantries, and remember that for Inigo’s sake—and indeed, for Françoise’s—I must appear to be cheerful, sane, and in control of my destiny. And thus the conversation goes:

Oliver
Good day in London, Chloe?

Chloe
Yes thank you.

Oliver
What it is to be born a woman! Free to roam the streets and buy hats while husbands work their fingers to the bone.

Chloe
I didn’t do any shopping, actually. I’m sorry if you missed me.

Oliver
I was only joking, Chloe. You’re so serious, aren’t you! And I didn’t miss you. I read to Françoise instead. She’s a very good critic, within limits. Aren’t you, Françoise?

Françoise
I say what I think. That is all I can do.

Oliver
Few people have the courage, you’d be surprised. We’ll send you off to evening classes, shall we, just to sharpen up your English. Then you won’t have to bother any more, Chloe.

Chloe
It isn’t any bother, Oliver, you know it isn’t. If I can help I’m only too glad.

Oliver
You’re all right on screenplays, Chloe. In fact, very good. They have a commercial basis which you understand. But novels are different. Françoise has a more literary approach. She does have a degree, after all.

Inigo
Mother went to college, didn’t you, mother. What happened? Why didn’t you get your degree?

Chloe doesn’t reply. She finds her voice doesn’t work, and there are tears in her eyes.

Oliver
Go on, Chloe. Answer the boy’s question.

Inigo
Tell you what. I don’t think I’m going to enjoy this meal. I recognize the symptoms. I’ll take my dinner and eat in front of the telly, if no-one minds.

Oliver
There’s nothing on.

Inigo
That’s what’s so soothing. Smashing grub, Françoise.

He takes his plate and goes.

Oliver
I wish you wouldn’t upset the boy, Chloe. It’s so pointless.

Chloe
I didn’t mean to.

Oliver
There’s no reason to sound so flat and depressed. You’ll turn into your mother if you’re not careful. Are you jealous? Is that what it is? Jealous of Françoise?

Chloe
Of course not.

Oliver
I am afraid you are. Very well, I can’t have you upset. If you don’t want me to read to Françoise, I won’t. God knows what I’ll do instead. So. Who did you see in London? Marjorie and Grace, I suppose.

Chloe
Yes. I told you.

Oliver
And what was their advice?

Chloe
What do you mean, their advice?

Oliver
I’ll tell you if you like. Marjorie said throw Françoise out and Grace said divorce Oliver for all the alimony you can get.

Françoise
Please, I cannot follow. Oliver, you are talking in such a soft voice it is difficult to hear and I think you are saying important things.

Oliver
No. You are mistaken. I’m discussing gossip and chit-chat and mischief, and I will speak as I please.

Françoise
I am sorry.

Oliver
Well, Chloe?

Chloe
I didn’t ask for advice. I didn’t mention us at all. They offered it.

Oliver
Interfering bitches. Of course if you want to end up like either of them, take the advice they offer. Why not? You could end up living with them. Three dykes together.

Françoise
Perhaps you would like to be alone. Perhaps I should join Inigo.

Oliver
Stay where you are, Françoise. There, Chloe, now you’re upsetting poor Françoise too. You are a bitch.

Chloe
I’m not. You’re upsetting her. This is ridiculous.

Oliver
I’ll tell you why you can’t in fact take your friends’ advice, and why you are so tearful and upset. You can’t throw Françoise out, much as you’d like to, because this is my house, my property, I have whom I please here and you have no say. You can’t divorce me because you have condoned her stay here, and you know it and your friends know it, and I have committed no matrimonial offence. Besides, who would look after the children?