Sir!' She Said (11 page)

The news of Gold Arrow's victory was received with displeasure in the small underground hairdressing establishment in Duke Street, behind whose purple curtains Faith Terance had spent the greater part of the afternoon. The majority of the staff had backed Grand Nabob. There was a murmur of discontent when the news came through along the wire. The genial white-haired loquacious autocrat who presided over the men's saloon endeavoured to be philosophic.

‘It's like this, Master,” he said to the Indian Colonel whom he was dry-shampooing. “Once in about twenty years you get away with a whole packet and you feel so bucked with yourself for the next ten days that it makes up for the other nineteen years when you lose a pound or so and feel as sick as hell with yourself for an evening. Although you lose much more in the long run than you win, you get more thrill than disappointment.”

The remainder of the staff were too young to be philosophic. They grumbled unrelievedly.

Faith Terance, alone in the establishment, although she had lost a couple of pounds on Maiden's Folly was unmoved by the result. It would have taken a good deal to move her at that moment. She was
bored, unutterably, as she sat with a hair net round her head waiting for a water-wave to dry. She had spent already the best part of two hours in that chair. She had be en subjected to every process of which the resources of the shop were capable. Her cheeks and forehead had been covered with a grey paste that, as it dried, had stretched the skin across her bones till she had felt that her face would split if she were to smile. Then, after a damp sponge had been drawn healingly over her discomfort, there had been hot towels and cream and oil. An indiarubber sucker vibrant with electricity had tingled over her chin and temples; cool scissors had moved along her neck; adroit fingers had explored the roots of her shingled hair; a pretty self-assured young woman had spread pink varnish upon her nails. And as she sat turning the pages of a twice read
Sketch
, Faith Terance irritably enumerated the ways in which an afternoon might have been spent more amusingly.

She might have gone to a matinée; or to the Nevinson Exhibition at the Leicester Galleries: at Tooth's she had been told there was a very good John Armstrong and a couple of Matthew Smiths: Caligari was being shown at the Pavilion: the Hurricanes were playing the Tigers at Ranelagh; she might have gone out to tea with some one interesting: or she might have stayed at home and read a book. She might, in fact, have done almost anything except the thing she had.

Beauty was a responsibility. It was pretty well a whole time job. Her whole day was centred round the preserving of it. There was the weighing machine
in the bathroom, with the drastic diet of pineapples and lamb chops whenever the needle quivered behind the hundred and sixteenth pound. There were the morning exercises, the daily massaging of her skin and hair. There were the Turkish baths, the visits to hairdresser and manicurist. There was the steady refusal at lunch and dinner of dishes that, however palatable they might be, were fattening, the perpetual rising from the table a little hungry. Then there was that hour of siesta between five and six, which you had to have if you were going to keep late hours, unless you wanted to look like hell at midnight. Her entire life seemed to revolve round the business of maintaining her looks and figure. It occupied, she supposed, one way and another, about four hours of her day. There were times when she wondered if it was worth it.

It was fun, of course, being described as the beautiful Mrs. Terance; and seeing full-page photographs of yourself in the illustrated weeklies. It was fun. But you scarcely got excited over something that had been happening to you for the quarter of a century. It was fun, too, being admired, and seeing that look of surprised delight come into men's eyes when your eyes met theirs. But that side of life meant less and less to you as time advanced. And there were penalties attached. She was too practical, too experienced not to realise the nature of the appeal she made to men. What else could she seem to them but “fair game”? She, a woman in the early forties, married to a thoroughly middle-aged husband whom she might love but could scarcely be in love
with; with only a few years of beauty left to her. She knew what was in men's minds when they asked her to dine or dance with them: and she knew in advance the belligerent attitude they would assume when she did not fall into their arms the second time she was taken out by them: they would behave as though they had been cheated.

She always had to be on her guard with them. They would never let her be herself. And really when it came to that she would have much rather that instead of telling her how beautiful and unique she was, they had talked to her of the things that had come to interest her more; the world and the world's affairs. When you were young the interest you took in a man depended upon the interest that that man took in you. But later on he became interesting to you for what he was intrinsically; for what he was doing; for what he stood for, for the part he played in the world's action. But that side of themselves men would never show her. Because she was a woman, or rather because she was a lovely woman, they assumed that love was the only subject to be discussed with her. It was flattering when an important man who had to economise his leisure, who had to watch his minutes as other men watched their florins, devoted an entire evening to taking you out to dinner. But it was depressing to reflect afterwards that during the four hours he had spent with you he had said less of real interest than he would have to some indifferent stranger during the twenty-five casual minutes at a dinner-party that followed the departure of the women to the drawing-room. If
only they would forget she was a woman. There were many penalties attached to beauty.

She often wondered whether it was worth the trouble; asked herself whether women had not got more out of life sixty years back when they had let themselves grow old at thirty. She remembered her grandmother at fifty, with her knitting, her white bonnet, her black shawl and spectacles; remembering her sitting in the porch of her bungalow in Carmel looking out over the Pacific towards the grey Farra-lones.
She
had not wasted her time in beauty parlours;
she
had not spent half an hour every morning lying on her back waving her legs above her head;
she
had not regulated her health by a thermometer and a weight machine. She had eaten the food, read the books, seen the pictures, met the people, that she had wanted. She had had time to indulge those impersonal interests that oust gradually youth's self-absorption. She was alert, quick-witted, well informed. Nor was she out of touch with youth. The afternoons were few when there was not some young man or other taking tea with her, confiding in her; telling her of his dreams, his love affairs, his troubles. There had been no need for
her
to be on her guard. She had been happy, serene, at peace, in harmony with her setting and herself. She had got more out of life, surely, had lived more vividly, more personally than her Georgian granddaughter was doing. Her grandmother had had her children, too; her children's sympathy and confidence, in a way that the parents of this generation never had. How much did she matter to Julia and to Melanie? They
were not dependent on her. The old days of parental authority were over. Fifty years ago you kept your daughter in cotton wool, till the time came to deliver the package, sealed and registered, to an appropriate husband. A daughter needed you then. To-day she didn't. The modern daughter ran her own life: chose her friends: announcing her decisions and conclusions to her parents from time to time. Nor was there any real, compensating comradeship. Girls did not want mothers who would be mistaken for their sisters. They did not want parents who rode, danced, played tennis with them as their contemporaries. They resented the youthfulness of their parents. They did not want parents who would be in competition with them. They wanted parents who would be an admiring audience. They would far prefer them to be prematurely decrepit than agile in defiance of the almanac. Children wanted their parents to leave the stage free for them. “You have had your innings,” was their attitude, “it's time we started ours.” People might talk, Faith Terance reflected, of the freedom, the advantages, the emancipation that the last quarter of a century had brought to women. But there was the other side to the picture.

For instance, was this pretty manicurist who had been so obviously bored at working on a woman's hands, really so much better off? How much freedom had she actually, stuck underground, working by electric light from half-past nine to six with no real alternative for her future but a succession of intrigues with her male clients or a marriage with a
man out of her own class whom she would compare contemptuously with the men whose confidences she had listened to across a barrier of orange sticks, the refusal of whose advances she would most certainly regret?

She remembered the outbursts of the suffragettes before the Asquith government and the directorial terror in her husband's office when the first woman clerk was taken into employment during the war. “For Heaven's sake,” it had been urged,” let her be plain.” Now men were complaining that women were taking the bread out of their mouths. They talked of women meeting men on equal terms. But where did they, in point of fact? Not in commerce, not in finance, not in politics, not in sport; nor in the arts, except on the stage and in the novel, those two emotional forms of self-expression in which women had always been supreme. It was only really in the less remunerative spheres of life that women could enter into competition with men. How many women had bothered to stand for Parliament? How many women were capable of earning more than ten pounds a week? Women might be able to earn pocket money as mannequins and secretaries, but they were in the last analysis as dependent as ever their parents had been on masculine support. And were the clauses of that dependence any easier to-day? Had they been in her case? She had married at the age of twenty-two a man ten years older than herself. The right difference in age, she had been told. Which very possibly it had been then. No doubt women had aged faster than men in days when women had
had babies every eighteen months, nursing them into the bargain; when women's lives had been divided between the nursery and the kitchen. But to-day there was no real reason why a well-to-do woman should age any faster than a man. She had far less strain put upon her than a man. She did no work. She had her couple of babies which she did not nurse. Modern conditions had vastly simplified the running of a house. Much of her hospitality was staged in restaurants. Science had taught her how to keep young and healthy. There was nothing for the young woman in the middle thirties to do except enjoy herself. Her children were at schools. Her house ran itself. She looked twenty and she felt twenty.

And she had had, there was no use pretending that she had not, a marvellous time in the middle thirties. She had had the looks of a girl and the knowledge and assurance of a woman. Marriage and motherhood had justified her of life. She had had her beauty and the means with which to decorate that beauty. She had lived in a day when a woman's private life was considered her own concern: when discretion was all that was demanded of her: when there were too many glass-houses for much stone-throwing. They had been, those years, a succession of parties, dances, dinners, with herself invariably the most admired, the most sought for person in whatsoever gatherings she might find herself. It had been marvellous. She could never have had a time like that if she had been born in the eighteen fifties.

She had had that. But there was nothing to be
had both ways. There was the law of compensation. She had had that time, and now as a payment for that she found herself young still in looks, with a husband whom hard work had aged; engaged herself in the losing battle against age to retain her looks; living now in middle age the same life that she had lived in youth, a life in which she could no longer satisfactorily express herself: a life that was opposed to her interests and instincts, but that she lacked the resolution to abandon. She had had a better time, certainly, out of the thirties than her mother had. But she doubted if she would get as much out of the fifties and late forties.

She did not care to look too closely into the future: to envisage the details stage by stage of that long and losing battle against nature that she would go on waging. As a child she had respected the boxers who had retired from the ring when the wave was at its crest: the generals who abandoned the power they themselves upheld; the women who closed the gate on love in the rich autumn of their beauty. Now it was to be her fate, apparently, to watch year by year, week by week, the slow ebbing of the tide.

Not that it was any use complaining, she reflected. As long as her contemporaries chose to dress and look as though they were their own daughters, there was nothing for her but to go one better and beat them at their game, and anyhow, dining that evening with young Savile she would be able to be herself. It would be nice to look nice for him. “I think,” she said, “that I'll take a bottle of that Chanel, after all.”

It was close on seven before Faith rose that evening from her siesta. In the road below her window was parked a familiar and mud-spattered Daimler. “So he's still here,” she thought as she walked downstairs. “I wonder how they enjoyed themselves?”

It was a question that quite clearly did not need answering as far at any rate as one of the protagonists was concerned. In the drawing-room, glum and silent, Arthur Paramount was sitting with her husband. In one glance, as he rose to greet her, her eyes took in and recognised the significance of the soiled collar, the creaseless trousers, the mud-caked shoes. “Again,” she thought.

“Well,” she asked, “and have you brought back my daughter safely?”