Byzantia’s first birthday falls on a Sunday. Driven by anger, rather than by family feeling, Scarlet takes her child and once again visits Kim and Susan. She does not telephone first. She wants it to be a nice surprise.
Kim is not at home, and in her heart she is glad. But Susan and Simeon are there, suitably unprotected.
Byzantia is dark, grubby and bright. Scarlet has dressed her in her shabbiest, most-washed clothes. Byzantia dribbles constantly – she is teething – and her nose runs a lot so that there is one sore reddish patch around her mouth, but in spite of all, Byzantia is beautiful. She is walking well, too.
Scarlet is glad to see that Simeon, in her eyes a withdrawn and stodgy child, still only crawls. Byzantia has at least a few words to offer the world. Simeon has no desire to converse with anyone. He likes his meals at precise intervals, and his sleeping times to be regular, and that is the sum of his present desire. If his routine is not strictly kept, he is fretful and troublesome. He does not like strange places. He does not like other people. Thus Simeon holds Susan prisoner. She is resigned to her captivity. She devotes her life to looking after him. If Kim wants to go out she says, ‘You know what he’s like with baby-sitters.’ If Kim wants to make love she says, ‘No, Simeon always wakes up at the wrong moment.’ If Kim wants to hold his baby and bounce him, she says, ‘No. You’ll overexcite him and he’ll be sick.’
Susan is not happy but she has the consolation of feeling she is in the right. It would be difficult to fault her, and she knows it. She keeps the flat beautifully: she dresses neatly; she cooks from a cookery book and not from memory; she keeps strange cats, strange dogs, strange people, strange germs at bay. These days she does not wander in her secret forests, she has forgotten them. She is the chained magpie. ‘Go on out,’ she screams in her soul, and wakes in the night with an angry fluttering of black wings about her.
She doesn’t smile much, and she blinks rather a lot. She knows, but she cannot feel, that Kim has a right to share her child, her bed, her home, her life. She wants to push him out, and would be shocked at the very notion.
Watson and Belcher, Practitioners in Advertising, are prospering, which is as well for Kim, since surely he deserves some pleasure in life. Their offices now occupy six rooms. There is a creative staff of four, led by Kim. He has to work late, and many of his weekends are spent at the office. He refers to his young wife and baby son with affection, and shows photographs of them to his friends in the pub, but rather as if he had to keep reminding himself that they do indeed exist.
He does not send money to Scarlet. He suggested once to Susan that perhaps he should, but she grew pink in the face and said that if there was any money to spare it should surely go into an Education Policy for Simeon. He agreed with her. He is aware that her distrust of him was born when he took Scarlet in and talked to Wanda, and he feels bad about it.
His secretary, Alison, however, attracts and distracts him from such dismal thoughts. He devotes much of his emotional energy trying to come to intimate terms with her, without Susan’s father knowing. Not so much because Susan is his daughter – Mr Watson has his own fairly public diversion, a pleasant young designer he first took up with in the Ministry of Food when his wife was in New Zealand and can hardly point a censorious finger – but because this Alison of his is over forty and plain, and Kim feels he has a reputation to keep up.
He cannot bear, these days, to be alone, idle or sober for long.
Scarlet drinks the lemon tea which Susan, with barely disguised reluctance, offers her. Byzantia and Simeon sit on the floor and stare at each other.
‘Working weekends, is he?’ says Scarlet. ‘He must be raking it in.’ She’s as crude and brash as she can be.
‘No,’ says Susan firmly. ‘The agency is going through a tricky time. It’s very new, remember.’
‘You understand financial matters, do you?’ says Scarlet, who does, or at any rate could if she put her mind to it, which she won’t. She likes to believe that Susan is not only ill-educated, but stupid. Susan does not reply. Byzantia hits Simeon. Simeon looks bewildered. Susan picks him up protectively.
‘So you called him Simeon, did you,’ remarks Scarlet. ‘Uncle Simeon. Well, it has a dignified ring. They’re just about exactly the same age, aren’t they?’
Byzantia walks over to her mother and holds out her arms to be picked up. Scarlet obliges. Scarlet knows she is behaving badly, but she can’t stop herself. She is almost physically conscious of the knot of resentment in her chest.
‘I see you have a new carpet,’ says Scarlet. ‘Didn’t you like the colour of the other one or something?’
‘No,’ says Susan, who is beginning to feel angry. ‘I didn’t.’
‘What did you do with the old one? Give it to the poor?’
‘I gave it to the dustmen, if you want to know.’
‘Can Byzantia have a biscuit or something?’ asks Scarlet.
‘I’d rather she didn’t,’ says Susan coolly. ‘Simeon will see and want one too, and I don’t let him eat between meals.’
Scarlet looks at Simeon with obvious pity.
‘Poor little Simeon,’ she actually says. Susan sits very upright. She is flushed.
‘Actually,’ says Scarlet, ‘I clean a carpet like this every day. I go out cleaning when Wanda comes back from school.’
‘Cleaning other people’s homes must be quite interesting,’ says Susan eventually. She is taken aback. She sees Scarlet as a lifetime’s burden.
‘It isn’t,’ says Scarlet. ‘But what else can I do? There’s no one to help me. I’m quite alone.’
Susan curls Simeon’s hair into a quiff. She smiles at him.
‘Perhaps,’ Susan observes, ‘you should have thought of that before. I mean, what did you expect to happen? If you have an illegitimate child it isn’t easy, is it?’
Scarlet doesn’t reply at first. She too is pink.
‘Tell you what,’ she says eventually. ‘If I came and cleaned for you and my father, you might pay me a shilling or so above market rates.’
‘We have a daily help already,’ says Susan stiffly.
Scarlet laughs.
‘I was only joking,’ she says. But of course she isn’t. She wants nothing for herself. She is anxious for Byzantia. She is always anxious, these days. Anxious when Byzantia cries, when she has a cold in the nose; paralysed with fear if she runs a temperature; nervous of asking Wanda to baby-sit; alarmed by her own irritation with Byzantia’s grizzles, nappies, fads and habits; terrified (though why should she be?) lest Wanda turn her out and she is left homeless and helpless. She does not feel twenty-one, she feels as old and battered as the hills of the moon.
Like Jocelyn, she wants to be married. But she is moved by desperation, not ambition. She wants security and respectability. She wants to be looked after. She is tired of being pitied. She wants her dignity back. But who would want to marry Scarlet? She is a mess; she knows it now. Over-weight, spotty, untidy, angry; there is only one thing to be said for her, and that is her devotion to Byzantia, her burden.
‘If I was pretty and smart,’ she says suddenly, ‘my father would acknowledge me.’
‘He does acknowledge you,’ says Susan, embarrassed. ‘He just can’t afford to keep you. Frankly, I don’t think he sees why he should. Wanda behaved very badly.’
‘But I’m me. I’m nothing to do with Wanda.’
‘To him you are. You had years when you could have got in touch with him. But coming only when you want something from him …’
‘Please try and explain to him –’ but Scarlet’s voice fades away. She knows it is no use.
‘See him yourself,’ says Susan.
‘No,’ says Scarlet. She has not the heart. Her father, to be frank, frightens and embarrasses her. She is not accustomed to the company of men.
‘Can’t the baby’s father help?’ enquires Susan. Scarlet shakes her head. It has at last occurred to her that from Byzantia’s point of view any father is better than none. She has tried to get in touch with the young man responsible, but he has left his bed-sitting room leaving no address – or at any rate none which is available to sad-voiced females.
She, once so indifferent, now searches Byzantia’s unformed features for traces of this young man; who once took a girl called Scarlet Rider home from a party, spent four hours in bed with her, and then rose, and shaved, and put on a tie, and went to spend Sunday with his fiancée’s parents.
Not that Scarlet wants him now, not really. Scarlet wants no interference. Scarlet will be father and mother both to her incestuous child – for let there be no mistake about it, and to quote her lady analyst years later, Scarlet, all unknowing, wanted her father’s child. And that is why, in this particular version of events, she is bashful of Kim, and is frightened of Wanda, and why she must now quarrel with Susan on anniversaries.
She is hardly being reasonable.
She is causing trouble to everyone.
No one loves her, not even Wanda, who is bored and tired.
Only Byzantia looks at her with pure love in her eyes.
Scarlet snatches up Byzantia and rushes away. Byzantia lets herself be startled and does not complain. Simeon, subjected to similar stress, screams with fright. Scarlet allows herself a second in which she can be seen to sneer. They do not meet again for years.
Down here among the women, there is a sour and grim reality about money as Wanda points out.
So, you choose your degradation, as Scarlet does, and go out scrubbing. So, you lose your purse in Woolworth’s because you want to lose your mother. But you get paid money for scrubbing, and if you leave your purse in Woolworth’s you can’t pay the rent. The bailiffs either come and put you on the streets, or they don’t.
Scarlet worries about money. Scarlet’s fear is that the State will step in and take away Byzantia, her unlawful child. So, it is free-floating anxiety. So, the Council Homes are full of children whom Children’s Officers feel better qualified than any natural mother to care for.
Perhaps they are right, thinks Scarlet, staring with despair at Byzantia, as the child shrieks and stamps with joy upon the floor, and the people in the flat below bang with a broom upon their ceiling, and Scarlet, paralysed with depression, knows that presently she will have to confess to Wanda that it has happened again; and even worse, go down and face them and apologize.
If the people in the flat below complain to the Estate Agents, Scarlet and Byzantia will have to go. There is a ‘no baby’ clause in the lease. And where else will they find to live?
Scarlet comes out in spots.
Wanda had the same concerns years and years ago. They bore her now. She looks at her spotty and apathetic daughter, and laments the waste of her own youth, spent nurturing a child who has grown up no better than she.
‘The thing about having babies,’ she says sourly, ‘is that you can’t. All you ever have is just more people.’ And from the sound of it she doesn’t much like people.
All the same, when Scarlet isn’t looking, Wanda croons to Byzantia, and weaves magic to make her smile, and be content, and good. She is better with Byzantia than Scarlet is; but then of course Byzantia expects more of Scarlet, seeing her mother as an extra limb which will do her bidding, and becoming frustrated and furious when it fails to live up to her expectations, or shows it has a will and purpose of its own.
Wanda earns £10 a week. She worries less about poverty than her daughter, having spent longer with it, and moreover she does not have her daughter’s capacity for running up debts. The rent is £3 5s. 0d. £3 goes on food. Byzantia, one way and another, costs another £1 a week. Other household expenses, including fares, heating, light and hot water come to £4 a week.
Scarlet, working as a cleaner, earns £2 10s. 0d. a week.
There is 25/- a week left over for the three of them, after necessities have been met. This ought to be enough, except that Scarlet, to her mother’s rage, will buy lipstick, cigarettes, toys for Byzantia; and Wanda, to Scarlet’s rage, will buy rum.
Wanda has taken to drink. She has discovered its pleasures late in life. She cannot afford to buy much, but she goes to pubs, leans against bars, and men buy her drinks. She is at her best in pubs. She looks battered, used, available and lively, and in no way a source of reproach, being normally in worse condition than her drinking companions. She builds up quite a pub life. Scarlet is horrified.
‘And you a primary school teacher,’ she says. ‘You’ll lose your job if you’re not careful.’
‘You can be as drunk as you like,’ Wanda claims. ‘What they can’t stand is politics.’ And she adds gloomily, to frighten Scarlet, ‘Wait until they catch up with that.’
She is right. Teachers with communist pasts are suspect. Some have already lost their jobs. Supposing they subvert the children? Or indicate that all might not be well with the world? It is not so much political opinion that is feared, as the spirit of restlessness. No one mocks, in 1951. Stalin is not yet dead.
Wanda is horrified by the way Scarlet goes to parties in a low-cut black sweater and does not return till morning, dusty, tired and bitter.
‘Like a cat on the tiles,’ she complains.
‘I thought you were all for sexual freedom,’ says Scarlet.
‘Not for mothers,’ says Wanda. ‘You’ve had your fling. You should be at home looking after your brat. How can I keep working if I have to get up at two, three, four and five o’clock in the morning?’
It is true. Byzantia has stopped sleeping through the night. She needs entertainment at more frequent intervals than she does food. She will cry as if pierced by a nappy pin or threatened by a rat until the light goes on and a face appears. Then she will giggle, gurgle and rejoice; and only cry again when the face goes away and darkness returns.
‘You grudge me my pleasures,’ says Scarlet. ‘How am I supposed ever to get married if I have to stay at home in this dreary flat? It’s not as if I could ask anyone home. I’d be ashamed.’
‘Pleasure!’ says Wanda, who observes that Scarlet’s all-night absences merely increase her depression.
‘You think sex is dirty and nasty,’ says Scarlet. ‘You try not to but you can’t help it. That’s why you’re always so crude. It isn’t honesty and frankness, it’s sheer terror.’
‘I don’t think sex is dirty and nasty,’ replies Wanda, quick as a flash, ‘I think you are.’
And it is true that Scarlet begins to feel ingrained, though not so much with dirt as with despair. When she’s not thinking she wants a husband, she’s thinking she needs true love.
Alas, neither seems available – she herself is the only thing which is. There are more than enough men to go to bed with – and each one she hopes, will fall in love with her and save her. She feels she has a great deal to offer. She opens her heart and her soul when she opens her legs; but alas, only the latter are of practical use, and men, she decides in the end – experience reinforcing Wanda’s training – are only interested in practical matters.
‘The awful thing is,’ she says to Helen, who drops by one day to visit, ‘if I was morally corrupt, if I was a calculating person, if I played men like fish on a line, if I had had an abortion instead of Byzantia, if I was cold, hard and unfriendly – then I would be pursued by men.’
‘To be pursued by men,’ says Helen, casting Scarlet down to depths from which it takes her years to emerge, ‘you have to be beautiful.’
Helen is both sorry for and irritated by Scarlet. Helen lines her love-nest with silks and downs, plucks the hairs from her legs one by one, learns poetry like a child, and entertains her lover. Y pays the rent, and never calls.
Scarlet, messing about with old saucepans on an ancient gas stove, serving coffee in cracked mugs, seems to Helen to have abandoned youth, hope and beauty. Scarlet, Helen thinks, can sink no lower. Little does Helen know.
Jocelyn is giving an engagement party. Scarlet is asked. Scarlet assumes she will be able to go because it is on a Sunday evening, which is the day Wanda holds her Divorcées Anonymous meetings. Thus Byzantia can be safely left at home. On Sunday evening she is disconcerted to see Wanda putting on the brooch which is her one concession to dressing up for an outing.
‘Are you going out?’ she says.
‘Yes,’ says Wanda.
‘Where?’
‘Is that your concern?’
‘But it’s the lady divorcées’ meeting.’
‘We’re holding it in the pub,’ says Wanda smugly.
‘But I’m going to a party,’ wails Scarlet.
‘You’re not,’ says Wanda. ‘You’re going to stay home and look after your baby.’
Scarlet is in despair.
‘They’ll hate it in the pub,’ she claims.
‘Why? They say they want men. Pubs are full of men. Drunk, red-nosed, miserable men in old creased trousers, married mostly. Impotent, crude, greasy-necked, smelly, stupid men with swollen bellies – you can hear the beer swilling in their stomachs when they walk, did you know? Let alone when they try to copulate – but men, none the less. They say they want men. Men they shall have.’
Wanda is irritated by her ladies. She has tried to indicate to them that life without men is possible, even desirable, for women past child-bearing age, and that in fact the sum of human happiness and achievement would be increased by apartheid between the sexes, but still they persist in longing for the company of men; reject lesbianism as a solution to sexual frustration, curl their hair, put on lipstick, and try to look younger than they are. Why? Because they can only seem to exist in relationship with men. Wanda takes them to the pub to punish them and to be disagreeable to her daughter.
‘You should have told me,’ says Scarlet.
‘What, that you want a cheap baby-sitter?’
‘You knew I was going out.’
‘I did not. You didn’t ask me.’
‘But the card’s been on the mantelpiece for weeks.’
‘A card! What kind of party is it you get asked to by a card? What a funny girl this Jocelyn of yours must be. Does she wear a twin-set and pearls?’
‘She’s a bit dull,’ says Scarlet, ‘but she likes to do things the proper way. And what’s more, she asked me.’
‘Why, is she sorry for you?’ asks Wanda.
‘Yes,’ says Scarlet, ‘she is. She is very sorry for me because I have to live with you.’
And she stomps off. The relationship between them deteriorates still further. The evening at the pub is disastrous. The membership is embarrassed, leaves early, and thereafter loses its trust in Wanda. Only Lottie remains.
‘They don’t really even want men,’ says Wanda in disgust, but cheered because her point is proved. ‘All they want is status. They want to have men to tote round on leads. They’re not unhappy because they’ve lost their husbands. They’re just peeved. How I do despise women.’
‘Shall we dress up as men?’ enquires Lottie. ‘I’ve got so thin lately I’m sure I’d pass. And as for you –’ she stops.
‘I’ve always been half a man,’ says Wanda. ‘I know. Well, I wish to God I had a wife to clear up after me, that’s all.’
They don’t dress up as men, of course. Something in them revolts. What? Men’s underpants? Men’s trousers? And the more intimate the two of them become, emotionally, the more careful they are never, never, to touch one another. Wanda speaks badly of Lottie behind her back, but is in fact devoted to her.
Scarlet gets the better of Wanda by taking Byzantia with her to the party. That means she can’t go home with a man, and has to get the last Underground train home, with a grizzling baby in her arms. She has a sudden panic fear that she will be reported to the Child Welfare Officer for having a child out at such an hour. She almost wishes now that it will happen. She feels she cannot go on. The craving to live her own life is so strong she imagines she cannot act reasonably any more. She is frightened of damaging Byzantia.
Jocelyn’s engagement party is remembered for its dullness. Philip has asked his young executive friends, who only talk of cars and salaries. Helen is ashamed to expose her artistic friends to such a bourgeois gathering, and doesn’t even come herself, let alone ask anyone else. Sylvia brings a group of middle-aged Sales and Research Directors, who drink too much and go round fondling the bosoms of the girls, who are respectable in low-cut, tiny-waisted, full dresses, with hair swept back from the face and well curled. Audrey is in Suffolk with Paul and can’t come up – or, as rumour has it, isn’t allowed to. Scarlet, of course, brings her baby, which cries, and depresses the young men with a vision of their future.
Fatherhood is not yet fashionable. Men are not present at the births of their children, if they can possibly help it. They do not shop, push prams, design the home. Marriage to the unmarried male is a trap, and sex the bait, which by stealth and cunning may yet be won. Poor passive outnumbering middle-class girls do indeed manoeuvre, lure, plot and entice in order to bring men to the altar. Not, of course, Scarlet, ‘Look through the surface of me into my soul,’ she begs of all comers, ‘see what’s there! See how I can love, feel, respond, love, oh love. If you will just accept –’ But why should they bother? Why take the trouble to inspect a dismal soul when there are a myriad glittering surfaces to attend to? Scarlet’s surface does not glitter. Even her low-cut black sweater is dusty: her shoulder-straps dirty.
Philip cannot stand her, or so he tells Jocelyn. He disapproves of their friendship. Jocelyn – although she sleeps with him on Saturday nights, which he is prepared to overlook – is good wife material, a virgin at heart if not in fact. Scarlet is just a slut.
Yet he drifts over to talk to her. He tells himself it is because she is Mr Belcher’s daughter – although he must know that a good word put in for him by Scarlet would do him no end of harm.
She baffles him. She speaks well. She seems to come from the middle-classes; why then does she live the way she does?
‘All your men friends are sorry for you,’ observes Scarlet.
‘Why?’ he asks, taken aback.
‘Entering your life-long prison,’ says Scarlet. ‘Marriage. You’re the first to go.’ She puts on a Welsh voice. ‘Getting married and not pregnant? There’s posh for you!’
‘They’re just envious,’ he says.
‘No, they’re not.’ What an uncomfortable person she is.
‘Of course they are,’ Philip insists. ‘And why not? I’m going to get my meals cooked, aren’t I? Clothes washed. Housework done. The days of discomfort are over.’
‘Is that why you’re getting married?’ she asks. ‘Shall I tell Jocelyn?’
‘Are you a mischief-maker as well?’ he asks.
‘As well as what?’
He doesn’t reply. He smiles, he looks her up and down in a way he has never regarded Jocelyn. Clean, fastidious, well-mothered as he is, she attracts him. She is, in his eyes, delightfully degraded.
‘I’ve got to get a good job,’ she says. ‘I’ve got to earn lots of money, that’s the only way out. Do you know of any?’
‘I know a night-club where you could be a cigarette girl,’ he says.
‘Don’t be silly,’ she says. ‘Me? Look, I’ve got a brain. I got to University.’
In his mind he undresses her, baths her, curls her hair, dresses her in long lace stockings, high heels, black corsets, slings a tray beneath her bosom and sends her out selling cigarettes to the rich and lascivious. His fantasies take him no further. His mother steps in, even here, good, smiling, pure and kind, and makes him feel ashamed. He’s only just kept his mother away from this party by the skin of his teeth. It is fortunate that his mother likes Jocelyn. Or is his mother just being good, smiling, pure, kind and polite yet again?
Scarlet, bored by his silence, which she takes for obtuseness, wanders off, and talks to Sylvia.
‘There are two sides to Jocelyn,’ she complains. ‘There’s the conventional side and the human side, and I’m afraid the wrong one is winning. Bed’s one thing, but marriage! He’ll be playing golf on Sundays any minute now.’
‘There is nothing wrong with sport,’ says Sylvia vaguely. There is a little frown between her eyes. Jocelyn and Philip are going to share the flat. She will, she supposes, have to leave, although it hasn’t been mentioned by the other two. She doesn’t want to think about it. She is, in any case, drinking with Philip’s friend Butch, who is six foot three inches, plays Rugby and works in the sales department of a vacuum cleaning firm. He enjoys her misty-eyed delicacy; and fills her up with gin and bitter lemon. And now she speaks well of sport, which she has been accustomed to despising.
Butch has a wife, but a disagreeable one. He has had to leave her. He weeps. Sylvia is sad on his behalf. She likes his simplicity. Later on, in bed, she tells him things she has never told anyone else, and barely acknowledges herself. She tells him how she loved a boy at fifteen, and let herself be seduced, and became pregnant, and how her mother took her out of her English literature lesson to have an abortion. She wets his shoulder with her tears, and he comforts her in his lumbering way.
‘If I found that boy,’ he says, ‘I’d beat his brains out.’
‘It wasn’t like that,’ she pleads. ‘It wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. It was just something awful that happened.’
‘I’d cut his balls off,’ Butch insists. He was born Christopher but is always known as Butch. He is more subtle in his lovemaking than seems likely. He has discovered, all by himself in a world not yet acclimatized to it, the pleasures of oral sex. In the morning they don’t want to leave each other: sit with bodies touching, he such a lumberer, she so delicate.
Philip nobly warns Butch against Sylvia. She’s fine for an easy lay, he claims, but not the sort to get entangled with. Her morals are weak, along with her eyesight and her hearing. He is glad when Butch sweeps away the warning. It will be easier now to ask Sylvia to leave.
‘She’s been a bit upset,’ Butch says. ‘She’s had a bad start. She’s going to be all right now.’
After the engagement party, Philip gives a stag party. His father offers to pay. Philip’s parents are shadowy figures, even to their son. Philip’s father is gruffly amiable and waves a cheque book to prove his good intent. Philip sees his mother more often in his fantasies than he does in life: she appears ladylike in flowered prints, to damp his ardour and spoil his concentration, and make him feel guilty. In real life she runs the W.I., does Church work, and is always calm and good. He has only once seen her cry. That was when he was sent away to school to be made a man of.
Philip, made a man of, now gives a stag party. Philip goes to an agency and orders a stripper to add gaiety to the occasion. The agency takes his money but the girl does not turn up. Philip is relieved. The mechanics of the matter have played upon his mind since he made the arrangement. He will have to open the door to this girl, give her instructions, pay her, send her home. How, in a taxi? Supposing she is elderly, scraggy and unpleasant? Expects more than money? Is one of his friend’s sisters? (There is a high-class brothel in South Ken, so they say, where girls from high-class families turn the odd penny. A Guards’ Officer is reputed to have been shown into the room where his sister lay waiting, naked on the bed. ‘Why, Amanda, old girl!’ ‘Why, Jonathan, old chap!’)
No, the idea of a stripper is far, far preferable to the actuality.
After the wedding – which takes place in Jocelyn’s village church, with all the trimmings she wished for, except her mother did not cry and her father’s voice was not hoarse, but at least it was too far away for her friends to attend – Philip gets more and more angry with the agency, which he feels has got money from him on false pretences. He threatens to sue. The agency maintain his complaint is against the girl. He sends her a solicitor’s letter, asking for his money back.
Jocelyn, casually informed, is aghast. First that he should have wished to employ a stripper; then that he should seek vengeance. He tries to explain.
‘But it was my stag party,’ he says, smiling in his remote masculine may. ‘My last fling as a bachelor. I wouldn’t do it now.’
‘You’re not a different person,’ she says, ‘just because you’re married.’
‘No, but I’ve got to behave now,’ he says. He thinks he is pleasing her. She doesn’t look pleased.
‘But what’s the point of watching a strange girl take her clothes off?’ persists poor innocent Jocelyn. ‘I’ll take my clothes off for you.’
After hockey she and the girls would strip and shower. She was never shy. She always enjoyed her body.
‘Take them off then,’ he says, conventionally, but of course she won’t. She is offended by the mysteries attendant upon his desires.
‘And you shouldn’t be so vengeful,’ she complains. ‘I don’t understand what is the matter with you.’ And she doesn’t, and neither does he.
‘We need every penny we can get,’ he ventures. It is true. They have overspent his income and some of Jocelyn’s capital. They have had the flat painted, and furnished after the style made fashionable by the 1951 exhibition. Jocelyn stalks over green and yellow carpets, wonders why Philip still only makes love on Saturday nights, and then so languidly, and is put in mind – for no reason she can think of other than a general feeling of depression – of Scarlet’s mother’s green and yellow lino. The curtains are brown and yellow; the ceilings pink and the wallpaper patterned with orange geometric designs. Can this be what she meant by it all? Is this the feel, the heart, the texture of married life? She hasn’t the heart to write to Miss Bonny. It even crosses her mind that she could join a team and play hockey on Saturday afternoons while Philip plays Rugby, but she knows in her heart that those times are past, those sources of solace unavailable.
‘Do you think it’s because he plays Rugby that he always seems tired on Saturday nights?’ she asks Helen.
‘If he didn’t play Rugby on Saturdays,’ says Helen, ‘I doubt you would have the opportunity of knowing whether he was tired or not.’
Jocelyn looks at her blankly.
‘It’s those Rugby songs,’ says Helen, ‘they get him going. And he needs something, I’m afraid.’
Jocelyn is quite pale.
‘They’re so horrid,’ she complains. ‘There’s no feeling in them. I never listen.’
‘If you want feeling,’ says Helen, smugly, ‘you must take up with an artist. The only whole men in the world are the artists.’
Helen lives a strange and isolated life in the studio where X works by night and which Y pays for. X keeps his liaison with Helen sporadically secret. He assumes both that Y must surely know about it, and that his friends don’t. In fact, of course, he is wrong on both counts. Both X and Y wonder, on the rare evenings when Helen joins them for supper, why their friends are now so rude to her.
X does not like strangers in the studio, so Helen has either to entertain secretly or not at all. She is driven more and more into the company of Jocelyn, Sylvia and Scarlet, with none of whom, these days, she has much in common. She does have the pleasure, however, of having her opinion asked, and she thrives in the golden glow of sexual reputation. She is idle. She writes poetry, goes to poetry readings, tends her little home, and waits for X. She grows riotous pot plants. She waxes white and odalisque-like. X spends some four nights a week with Helen, some three with Y, which is surely a victory for Helen.
He is working well. Y, after the interlude of her prize and a patch of acclaim, has fallen into a trough of non-appreciation. But she is glad that X is working well. The studio was a good idea. She suspects he has girls there from time to time, but does not wish to know for sure. At any rate, he is happy.
Y is grateful to Helen for having helped her improve her life. Helen calls sometimes in the afternoons – when she knows X is out teaching, Y notices – and they drink coffee, talk about men in general and X in particular, and Helen will help put the children to bed. Y is defeated by, and X uninterested in, his children. X tried to paint them once but couldn’t catch their essence. And although he had fed them phenobarb to keep them still, they would wriggle. Nothing will stop them wriggling or grizzling. Not threats, shouts, bribes, smiles or drugs.
‘You must take a lover,’ says Helen to Jocelyn now. ‘An artist or a poet. I’ll see what I can do. These are the worthwhile men.’
Jocelyn is indignant. She regrets having confided her difficulty to Helen. She feels she has been unloyal to Philip. Next time Helen rings she is abrupt and unwelcoming, and Helen does not ring again for quite a time.
Jocelyn opens her account at Harrods, and overspends wildly. She buys hoop earrings in solid gold which everyone takes for tin.
There is no answer from the stripper to Philip’s letter demanding the return of his ten guineas. Just a rude, humiliating silence. Philip broods. He feels his friends are watching and waiting for him to resolve the situation.
One Saturday night, after a hard afternoon’s Rugby playing and two inflammatory hours in the pub, Philip takes a taxi to the girl’s flat, instead of home to Jocelyn, to exact payment in kind.
‘You can’t be made a fool of by a whore,’ Butch had said to him in the changing-room that afternoon, when they were both slippery with soap and sweat and seemed to be sharing a moment of truth and intimacy. ‘It’s the kind of thing you remember all your life.’
So now Philip bangs and crashes at her door. The girl, who is neither scraggy, elderly, nor his best friend’s sister, but plump, young and badly spoken, allows him in and concedes victory. Philip acquits himself well enough, but has the feeling she is laughing at him. He slaps her around a little.
Philip returns to Jocelyn confused and depressed. He tells her all about it and asks to be forgiven.
‘I forgive you,’ she says (what else can she do? She has been married a month), and sits on the floor by the gas fire while Philip snores off into a healing sleep on the sofa. She cries a little, but not much, and for her situation rather than for Philip’s infidelity, which seems, now it has happened, to have a cosmic inevitability. She has always expected the world, if not to betray her, certainly to ignore her plea for happiness. Youth had perhaps blinded her to the truth for a year or so; now she is back to a more pertinent vision of reality. The gas fire is faulty. It pops and plops, and one jet burns blue and tiny, instead of golden and powerful. Jocelyn turns the gas off at the main tap in the kitchen, and cleans the jets. When she is next in the kitchen, she turns the main gas tap on again, but forgets that she has not turned off the fire itself, until the cat, asleep on top of the bookcase as is its habit, moans and falls off, unconscious.
There is very nearly a nasty accident. Jocelyn’s life is full of them.
Philip tells the story for years, of how the cat fell off the bookcase and saved his life.
Next Saturday he plays Rugby with more than normal violence, and cracks Butch on the side of his head with his heavy boots. Butch is concussed, and when he is out of hospital, Sylvia has to move into his flat to nurse him.
This suits both Butch and Sylvia. They lie wrapped in each other’s arms, afraid to move for fear of aggravating Butch’s injuries. Their passion, thus repressed, becomes transmuted into a golden glow of love, which stands them in good stead if not for years, at least for months.
Jocelyn, forgiving, and Philip, forgiven, resume their married life. They are polite to each other, and kind, and perhaps a little embarrassed by the intimacies of married life. Jocelyn finds she is more bashful of her body than she had ever believed possible, and undresses in the bathroom. He, so happy, soapy and naked, amongst men, presently does the same. He is a considerate and loyal husband. He and Butch are never to play Rugby together again. By the time Butch is fit and back in the field, Philip has given up. He takes up tennis instead, so that he and Jocelyn can take their Saturday sport together. They take it in unspoken turns to win.
Presently Philip is made Group Executive at the fast expanding Watson and Belcher, and presently, when the bedroom is redesigned, sleeps in one of the twin beds. There was almost an embarrassing moment when the change from the double bed was made, and almost a spoken protest from Jocelyn, but the moment passed. Philip takes care to join Jocelyn in the other bed at least once a month, and more often, sometimes, if he has taken a client to a blue film or a strip club, and the memory still looms in his mind.
Jocelyn, out of kindness to her husband, trains herself in sexual disinterest, even distaste. Presently she is apologizing to the world for her frigidity.
She strips the Festival papers from the walls, distempers them pure white, and begins to buy antiques. She is proud of her home. She gives coffee mornings; has some nice lady friends, all with accounts at Harrods. Still she does not write to Miss Bonny, although she hears that Miss Bonny now lives in a little cottage in Westmorland, which she shares with Miss Tippin, Jocelyn’s Classics teacher.
Stalin dies. Jocelyn thinks of the office, and wonders what horrors they will live off now their demon has gone. She considers going back to work, but Philip is not enthusiastic.
Monthly, Philip and Jocelyn drive to visit one or the other sets of in-laws. The young couple stay overnight in twin-bedded spare rooms which, in both houses, are remarkably similar. They have pink bedside lamps, twin beds, and chintzy curtains, and look out over well-kept flower gardens. Philip’s father nudges him in the ribs and asks about the strip clubs; Philip’s mother offers Jocelyn pot-plants and noticeably refrains from asking why Jocelyn is not pregnant.
Jocelyn’s parents say practically nothing.
Jocelyn writes to Miss Bonny, and tears it up. She never liked Miss Tippin. Hockey one, hockey two, hockey three and away! Sunny winter afternoons, the ground still crisp and crackly with frost, the edges of the park misty. Is it all then to come to nothing more than this?
She becomes rather thin. ‘She will ruin her life if she goes on like this,’ writes Audrey to Sylvia, signing herself Emma, ‘she can talk of nothing but hairdressers and hats.’ They should move to the country, Audrey-Emma maintains. Philip should give up advertising before his soul rots completely away. How can people hope to be happy while they live such unnatural anti-social lives? Audrey-Emma is sure, moreover, that Jocelyn and Philip drink too much coffee, which everyone knows is bad for the liver.
Sylvia won’t be drawn. ‘I don’t see much of Jocelyn and Philip these days,’ she writes. ‘We live rather far out.’ In fact Butch has finally quarrelled with Philip – having no patience with a man who opts out of Rugby in order to play tennis with his wife – and makes it difficult for Sylvia to maintain the friendship. Sylvia feels tired and ill. She is pregnant, and Butch is not happy with what he sees as her bloated and perverted shape. He calls her ‘fatty’ in public, and marvels to friends and pub acquaintances at her increasing size. Butch’s divorce is going to be long, costly and complicated. He and Sylvia now have a tiny little rented house in Dulwich; it is hard to keep going financially because Butch’s wife’s solicitors have insisted on interim alimony of a third of his salary at the vacuum cleaning firm.
Sylvia does editorial work at home for an accountancy journal. She has to struggle to understand its contents, and is pale from strain and boredom. But they do have a television set – the BBC broadcasts live shows in the evenings. It has an eight-inch screen. Sylvia does not like television much, but Butch waits anxiously for the programmes to begin. They do not have much conversation these days, and something has to sop up the silence.