Female Friends (31 page)

Oh messy, modern Marjorie. Living in college at term-time, working in a pub during vacations, sleeping in a room above the bar, looking out at closing time, as once Chloe did, upon those reeling scenes of male depression and debauchery: waiting, as if she knew, for Grace’s wedding and her own fate to come together on the same day.

And Patrick, sent off by Helen into what she thought and hoped would be a wilderness, and which in fact was Midge.

Midge the Mason’s daughter, dead.

Whose fault?

M
ARJORIE, GRACE AND ME!
How do we grow old? How shall we die?

Marjorie has her pension fund, her insurance policies, and perhaps, presently, the inheritance of her mother’s Frognal house. She does not let her mind go further than that—she keeps it trained on practicalities. Her epitaph will be the affection of her friends, the regret of her colleagues, and a shelf or two of tapes in the library of the BBC—until eventually, in the interests of economy, they too are wiped for re-use. She hopes for nothing else.

Grace hopes to die suddenly, and soon, or so she says, before the shame of physical inadequacy overtakes her. She will not grow old serenely. She fights against it. Already she drinks too much. She is used to being admired, and only her looks are admirable. When they go, she goes, Grace says.

I, Chloe, put my faith in children for my immortality. When I die, they will remember me, as I remember my own mother—and Esther, who, like me, saved other women’s children, stealing them in passing. Of such maternal warmth, I think, legal or illegal, is immortality made. It seeps down through the generations, fertilizing the ground, preparing it for more kindnesses.

T
HE CORRIDORS OF ST
Stephen’s hospital are long and green, lined with pipes, echo to the clanking of metal food containers and are foggy with steam, disinfectant and age.

Helen is in a small ward, with four beds. Three are empty. Helen is in the fourth, propped up against pillows. She seems to be asleep, or in a coma. Her eyelids have fallen over her large eyes, as if by gravity and not from any muscular intent. Her old mouth droops. They have taken out her teeth. Her head is bald. Only the wound on her temple, too clearly seen beneath a thin skull cap, jaggedly cobbled together, as if very little in the way of service was expected from the stitches, demonstrates anything of her old vitality. It pulses; or does Chloe only imagine it?

Her old enemy, brought so low. Chloe finds that there are tears in her eyes. Marjorie sits beside her mother, stroking the limp but still graceful hand. They who in good times so seldom touched each other. Helen would certainly not have allowed it in life, as she does, perforce, in this half-death of hers.

Marjorie
It was good of you to come. And Grace was here earlier.

Chloe
Of course we came.

Marjorie
No of course about it. We were none of us all that much help to each other.

Chloe (Surprised)
We do what we can.

She whose garden rings with the oaths of Inigo, Imogen, Kevin, Kestrel and Stanhope.

Marjorie
We should interfere more in each other’s lives, and not just pick up pieces. I should go and shoot Oliver, and you should commit Grace to an insane asylum, and as for me, you should have got me to a marriage bureau a long time ago. See how it all ends—

Marjorie indicates her mother, and snivels.

Marjorie
They say she can go on for weeks like this. I’ve got a taping today and I’m just not at the studio, am I?

Chloe
Of course you’re not.

Marjorie
I just don’t care about it.

Chloe
You will again.

Marjorie
I don’t think so, somehow. How am I going to live without her, Chloe? I have no children. She’s all the family I have.

Chloe
There’s always the BBC.

Marjorie
What’s the point? Mother never even had a television, you know. I’m sure it was in case she saw my name on the screen.

As if in affirmation, Helen stirs and opens her eyes. She withdraws her hand from under Marjorie’s and relapses again into quiescence. Marjorie endures.

Chloe
Why don’t you go home and sleep, Marjorie? I’ll stay.

Marjorie
She might wake up and miss me.

Chloe
You’ll go on wringing and wringing, won’t you, trying to squeeze a drop of affection out of an old dry bone. No wonder you take in so much washing.

Marjorie smiles, pleased at the notion, and lies down on one of the empty beds, and closes her eyes.

Marjorie
I’ve been thinking of Midge.

Chloe
So have I.

Marjorie
We just stood back and let her die.

Midge the Mason’s daughter. Patrick, turned out of Frognal by Helen, goes to live with Midge. Who’d have thought it?

Not Midge’s parents, Mrs Martha and Mr Mervyn Macklin, stationer and Master Mason. Midge is their fourth child and their only daughter, and at the age of fourteen winner of the Luton Child-Artist-of-the-Year competition.

Mrs Macklin is a worrier. She worries about Midge’s health and happiness, and Mr Macklin’s secret Masonic rites. Mervyn keeps no other secrets from her; what is this disloyalty? Martha tries to break into the locked suitcase in which Mervyn keeps his robes: Martha wheedles, Martha begs, Martha cries, to no avail. Mr Macklin keeps his secrets. Midge his daughter aids and abets him. Daddy’s girl, not Mummy’s.

Mrs Mahonie next door tells Martha that what Masons do is to kiss the arses of goats in secret conclave. ‘What children men are,’ she says. ‘Like little boys, always trying to piss higher than anyone else. To see who can make the ceiling stink, as well as just the walls.’ Midge is not allowed to speak to Mrs Mahonie.

Midge is the triumph of the Macklin family: she is what they have worked and lived and bred for over generations; someone who will step out and away from the world of small streets and corner shops, and into something rich, grand and strange. Their offering to the middle classes.

Mervyn and Martha see Midge off to Art School, fearful for her virginity, her future, her sanity. She seems such a frail offering, this thin childish creature, with her stick-like legs, her mousy hair, her sparse bosom and her fierce loyalties.

They do well to be afraid. Midge takes an attic flat in Camberwell—unheated, unfurnished, and cheap, as two Doberman Pinschers roam the floor below—and within a month Patrick is installed there with her.

The female turtle wades out of the sea and on to the shore; digs a hollow and with infinite effort lays some six hundred eggs, covers them with sand, and dies, exhausted. The eggs hatch; the infants scramble for the sea. A thousand sea-birds lie in wait. Perhaps one turtle escapes, and reaches the waves. The quickest, the liveliest, the fittest to survive—or just the luckiest.

Is Patrick good luck or bad? Midge to her dying day—not long removed—maintains that it is good. Stubborn to the end.

Why then is she always crying? Is it her nature, or is it Patrick, or is it her nature making Patrick what he is?

Mr Macklin comes to London to rescue his daughter.

‘It’s my life,’ Midge says. ‘Let me lead it.’

‘You’re thin and ill,’ says Mr Macklin, ‘and wasting yourself and your talent—our talent—on that man. I’ll go to the College authorities. I’ll get him sent down.’

‘He’s left college already,’ says Midge, ‘and so have I. It was a waste of time. What can Patrick learn? He’s painting portraits and doing well. I’m perfectly all right.’

But she isn’t. Patrick cannot bear to give her money. He wants Midge to live with him for love, not for what he can provide. She does.

Midge is taken off to hospital suffering from malnutrition. How she cries, missing him.

Mr Macklin conceives a plan to poison Patrick. He sends him chocolates through the post, which Patrick prudently feeds to the Doberman Pinschers. They do not die, but their diarrhoea leaves dead patches over a wide circular area of Camberwell Green, to be seen to this day. (The park-keepers insist the dogs be kept on leads, so the owner takes them out on reels of kite string.)

Midge goes home to recuperate, stays three weeks in impatience and misery, in the room above the shop, and then goes back to Patrick, who marries her; to be revenged, he says, on Mr Macklin for his murderous attack and the wilful damage of Camberwell Green.

Midge, asked to leave the flat while Patrick paints his portraits, discovers he sleeps with his sitters. Everyone else has known for a long time. She goes home. She comes back. But to what? How Midge cries.

Patrick has taken a studio in London and is having an affair with Grace, who does not care whom he sleeps with or how so long as it’s only art; and he has smart ruthless friends, amongst them Oliver and Chloe, who terrify Midge. Midge, mousier every day, snivels and sniffs in her lonely sleep.

Midge gives birth to Kevin. Patrick, entranced by the visual aspects of motherhood, moves back. It is a dreadful time. Midge does not mind going hungry herself, or wearing jumble-sale clothes or Grace, Chloe, and Marjorie’s cast-offs, but when the baby cries from hunger and she has to borrow money from Chloe, while Patrick loses hundreds every night at poker, she is distressed, and cries, and the baby cries, and Patrick can’t stand it, and moves back with Grace.

Patrick oscillates between Grace and Midge. Weeks at the studio, weekends at the flat. Years pass. He buys bones for Midge to boil. There’s lots of nourishment in bones, he says.

Midge can’t go home any more. Her father has had a stroke and her mother nurses him and takes in lodgers and says to Midge ‘if you don’t mind I’d rather think of you as dead.’

Patrick impregnates Grace one drunken night, quarrelling with her the while, gets out of bed and goes home to Midge who has forgotten to take her pill and impregnates her.

Women conceive more easily when they’re crying, Patrick observes.

Grace, distraught, embarks on the abortion from which Oliver, at Chloe’s instigation, rescues her.

Oliver knocks on the door of the clinic. A pretty Irish nurse with steely eyes opens the door a crack. Does he have an appointment? No? Then he can’t come in.

But Oliver can and does, and the staff bundle Grace out of the building, sniffing trouble in the wind. Even though she doubled the money in the surgeon’s envelope, they would not touch her now. They are superstitious, as well they might be, dealing with death. Trouble breeds trouble, they all know that.

If your aircraft’s delayed, don’t board it. Bomb scares breed engine failure, and vice versa.

Grace proceeds with her pregnancy with an ill-will. She smokes, drinks, takes tranquillizers, tells Chloe if it’s a mongol, if it’s deformed, then it’s Chloe’s fault. Grace won’t see a doctor, won’t book a hospital bed, goes out shopping on the day the baby’s due, and in the labour ward encounters Patrick on his way to visit Midge.

Patrick stays with Grace, to watch the birth, and afterwards goes back to live with her. He admires her spirit. Midge keeps crying.

Grace calls the baby Stanhope, the name least likely to please, and parks it with Chloe most of the time.

Midge tries to get National Assistance and can’t. She is entitled to money from the State only if she starts divorce proceedings. Divorce Patrick? How can she? Patrick is her husband. Her children’s father. She loves him. One day, surely, he will settle down. Age and impotence, if nothing else, will eventually effect a cure. Or Grace will lose interest in him.

Grace sees Midge’s love for Patrick as nothing to do with her. Such singleness of spirit, in Grace’s post-Christie eyes, is nothing but masochistic and destructive folly. Midge should divorce Patrick, oblige him through the courts to support her properly, and set him free to follow his own nature. By what right, she asks, does Midge demand fidelity from Patrick, who is not equipped to give it? She, Grace, demands nothing. She enjoys what there is to enjoy, and has ironed physical jealousy out of her soul. If she torments Geraldine it is for fun, and not from any sense of despair. Grace says.

She sends Kevin and Kestrel presents, however. She has some sense, or so Oliver says, of having deprived the children of something, if only a father.

Oliver takes fatherhood seriously.

Chloe, in Midge’s company, feels neither natural nor comfortable. She longs to take up a scrubbing-brush and scrub Midge’s floors, make up curtains for the bare windows, provide a toy-box for the children’s toys, a private doctor for Kestrel’s eye, handles for the chest of drawers. But she does not. She does not wish to offend Midge, by seeming to offer so simple a solution to her misery, and ignoring the greater, inner cause of it. Besides, she feels humble in the face of Midge’s devotion to a cause so vital yet so hopeless.

‘Humble! I can’t think why,’ says Marjorie. ‘With Oliver bringing home clap.’ Chloe had to tell Grace, in case Patrick as well as Oliver had been infected from the same source, and of course Grace had told Marjorie. ‘You show the same absurd devotion to Oliver as Midge does to Patrick. And Oliver isn’t even an artist.’

‘That’s altogether different,’ says Chloe. ‘Oliver doesn’t deny by word or deed that I’m his wife. Patrick’s every waking breath is a denial of Midge.’

And she believes it, too, like Midge. One day, one day, Oliver will calm down, stay home, acknowledge her own sexual supremacy over all the rivals he has found for her, and watch television with her through the evening of their years. That Oliver, as Christie did to Grace before him, will take it into his head to push this neglected looming wife of his into Patrick’s arms—in what can only be seen as an attempt to assuage his own guilt, or an excuse for further unpleasantness, or just a liking for emotional escalation, she is not to know. All she knows now is that Midge seems in some vague way her, Chloe’s, moral superior. And that she cannot ask her to her dinner parties, because how would Midge fit in amongst all the film people (who have sunken baths and marble front-door pillars) she must ask to dinner for Oliver’s sake. And how can she, with so much on her mind, be forever traipsing over to Acton in order to cheer up Midge, and listen to her tales of woe?