But Sonia wouldn’t let things go along happily, would she! Sonia wanted justice. Sonia wanted to get to the root of things. Sonia bore a grudge. Sonia knew the history of the carnival – all those afternoons with Edwina, hanging about, out of the cold in the Folk Museum, had not been wasted. Sonia wanted her past to catch up with her present. Sonia hated men. Sonia hated men in the same way as Angus and Arthur, Harry, Stephen and Alec, to name but a few, hated women. It’s just that men have power and women don’t, so men smile and kiss women and hardly know they hate them, even while they hurt them, and women like Sonia, who hop around the world with as many limbs tied as they have children, turn shrill and desperate and go mad so the men can see them coming and get out in time. Maenads, harridans, hags, witches – don’t look at the Medusa, sir, or you’ll see yourself in her mirror eyes, get turned to stone! Harpy hair and writhing snakes! Shall I tear out a snatch of my hair and hand it to you? Would you like that? No?
A pill, please. I must finish the story.
The WAEADA float was to take to the road on the Wednesday night. On the Tuesday morning Arthur’s wife Jane came up to see if she could help. She was carrying the leather bucket. Her cheeks were hollow and her eyes were red with crying, but her clothes were expensive. The others were dressed by Oxfam.
‘Are you sure you want to?’ asked Sonia. ‘We’re all on the dole. You don’t want to get infected.’
But Jane said Arthur had sent her up. She cried into her pot of paint until finally Ros asked her what was up. She said that she kept getting telephone calls from someone who put the phone down when she answered and it was getting her down. ‘You mean it might be one of Arthur’s fancy women?’ asked Flora, right out. ‘Don’t you take any notice of those: those are just his sillinesses. Arthur’s all right.’
‘She wouldn’t keep ringing if it was still going on,’ said Ros. ‘Whatever it was, it’s finished.’
But in spite of this comfort Jane still trembled and wept so much she had to be given a cup of tea.
‘Marriage!’ she said. ‘But what’s the alternative? I’m too old to start again. And he can do as he pleases because what in the world is there to stop him?’
‘You can’t stop them,’ said Natalie, ‘all you can do is feel differently about it in your head. You can learn not to care.’
What did Natalie know about it? What she’d lost to Marion Hopfoot was nothing. What Jane was losing was really quite something. What Sonia had lost was even more. Natalie saying what she did made Sonia even crosser. While women adapt, and adapt and adapt, men will continue to get away with everything. If Jane hadn’t come up weeping and wailing to the barn at Avon Farmers, if Natalie hadn’t been so complacent, perhaps what was to happen wouldn’t have happened.
‘I reckon,’ said Sonia, laying down her paintbrush, ‘you can stop men doing things.’
‘How?’ asked Natalie. These days her attitude towards Sonia was not quite antagonistic, but certainly somehow defiant.
‘For one thing,’ said Sonia, ‘you can stop colluding.’
Ros was busy lettering in the ‘F’ of Housewife’s Friend. She laid down her brush.
‘They’re not really our friends, are they!’ she said. ‘Why should I paint lies?’
‘Because they pay us to,’ said Flora, but she put down her hammer. She’d been tacking Terylene lace around the toy town windows. And Natalie, who had been stitching Velcro onto the estate agent’s waistcoat, stopped that as well. Jane snivelled on for a time, but presently was quiet. It was she who spoke first.
‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘that giant at the back is really Angus, and that one in the front is Arthur. So why don’t we make them look like who they really are?’
And Sonia hardly had to say a word. Of their own accord, out of their own oppression, they were back in the ancient spirit of carnival, when the images of the hated were paraded through the streets, and hung from gibbets, or rolled down the hills in burning tar barrels.
They worked through the evening and into the night, and one of those wonderful late autumn evenings it was, when the sun struck low from behind the Tor, and the red lingered in streaks across the sky, and fog formed in puffy lines low over the levels, and reflected the red upward. Oh yes, a numinous evening indeed. Around carnival time, such evenings are common.
Early the next morning Angus and Arthur came up to have a last look at the float. It was covered by a tarpaulin.
Natalie distracted Angus, and Flora distracted Arthur, and each assumed the other had looked beneath. The float was to travel to Glastonbury pulled by Bernard on the tractor, with a generator for the lights tagged along behind. The girls, together with Angus’ Jean, Pauline from the delicatessen and Sally Bains from the school office as reinforcements, were to change into their housewife costumes in the carnival headquarters. The WAEADA float was no. 62; no. 61, travelling ahead, was to be a ninety foot monster – ‘Baghdad Nights’ and no. 63, behind, was to be a ‘Star Wars’ spectacular. Bernard would steer the float to its place in the appropriate layby, and when evening came, the tarpaulin would be rolled back, its merry band of housewives would ascend, Flora, dressed in virgin white, would take her place on the pale swan throne, the generator would hum, the myriad overhead lights would blaze, music would blare and no. 62 would move off.