I can scarcely remember, on a hot summer’s day what it is like to be cold. When I am replete, I cannot remember hunger. I can, mind you, when rich, remember what it is like to be poor. Though I may tend to look scornfully at the poor and wonder why they stay that way, I try to remember, and not to despise.
I remember wandering through London streets, crying for grief because I had lost Willy and was about to lose Mary; not seeing that my own actions and my own obtuseness had brought these losses about. Or that in any case neither Mary nor Willy were mine to lose.
Had Mary been my own child, had Willy been my legal spouse, I still would not have had the right to call them mine. We shelter children for a time; we live side by side with men; and that is all. We owe them nothing, and are owed nothing. I think we owe our friends more, especially our female friends. I might have been justified in feeling angry with Irma for not helping me when I needed help: and with Colleen because the help she offered was limited by her desire not to inconvenience her husband. But I was not angry: I assumed, along with everyone else, that a man’s convenience rated more in the great scheme of things than a woman’s pain.
In retrospect I see as quite ridiculous my agitation because Willy chose to buy another woman a new pink sweater, when I had had to make do for so long with second-hand dusty black. Why didn’t I buy my own sweater? Why did I expect to be provided for, and resent it when I was not?
And why, when being a part-time whore at the Raffles seemed neither particularly disreputable, or disgraceful, at the time I was doing it, did I allow it to turn into a disgraceful and shameful secret? I was earning, after all; offering one of the few services the world allowed me to offer – apart, I suppose, from my dubious skills as a cleaner, or washerwoman, and I was doing that at home, anyway, unpaid. I was gaining some agreeable physical sensations, and stretching my vision of humanity; I was free to pick and choose my clients, and had time left over to look after home and child. Why was I so easily made to feel it was distasteful, when my own experience indicated that it was not?
Certainly it is true that many, even most, whores are debased and wretched-looking creatures, but I suspect the debasement and wretchedness came before the streets (or the bar stool) and that whoring, for male or female, is a way out, not a path down. It certainly was for me.
And is it really any better at the other end of the spectrum? Is the ordinary domestic woman, lumbering about in a hospital maternity ward, less debased, less wretched? She seems to me to be neither spiritually exalted, nor greatly loved; fulfilling no higher purpose than a mindless biological destiny.
And as to Hilda’s madness, it at least enabled her, in whatever form it had happened to take – rats, or stars or anti-static – to function as a man might do, to earn the respect of her peers and get to the opera of an evening. And I do not believe, had she been a man, that her lack of rationality would have been so easily interpreted as madness, paranoia. If it was madness, it served her very well, as obsessional interests – company, religion, country, politics – serve men well, to relieve them of the more exacting chores of family and domestic relationships.
Do you know, I am beginning to feel better.