Rose comes to me with stories. Rose lives in a tower-block where sub-culture myths abound – they spread across the country like the german measles, in and out of Council estates, up and down the tower blocks.
I shall repeat two of them. They are nasty stories, but they are not true. Myths are not true. Myths simply answer a need.
But what kind of need can it be, down here among the women?
MYTH NO. 1
A detective told us, so it must be true. It’s not in the papers, it’s too horrible. It happened in Clapham High Street. A young woman took her five-year-old boy shopping. He wanted to go to the toilet. She took him to the Ladies but the woman there said he was too big, so he had to go to the Gents by himself. His mother sent him down and waited on top of the steps for him to come out. She waited and waited. A gang of young boys went down and when they came up she thought they were acting a bit strange. But still no child. Finally, she asked a passer-by to go down and fetch him. There was her child, dead. They’d cut off his willy and he’d bled to death.
MYTH NO. 2
A young mother has three children, a daughter of four, a boy of two, and a new baby. The little boy wets his pants. The mother is in the habit of saying, ‘If you do that again, you naughty boy, I’ll cut your willy off!’ One day she’s bathing the baby when there’s a shriek and then silence. The little girl calls out, ‘It’s all right, Mummy. He was a naughty boy again, but I cut it off.’ She drops the baby and rushes to see. The boy dies; when she gets back the baby has drowned.
What about that poor little girl then? Down here among the women. Would you like your little boy to sit next to her at school?
My children come up to me. They are cold, and sit on either side of me. I wrap the edges of my cloak around them and we all three sit and stare out into the world.
So we all protect our children, or try to, but they too must come to it, and be part of the past like us. Where is little Alice now, Helen’s child? She used to play with my children. Mine are still here, mine can still feel hungry, cold and frightened; mine still play. Alice is a pile of little bones. I would like to feel her spirit has entered some other body, and was not wasted, so terribly, but can one believe such things?
Well. Fortunately, there is more to life than death. There is for one thing, fiction. A thousand thousand characters to be sent marching out into the world to divert time from its forward gallop to the terrible horizon. It seems as if, bewildered, he has to pause to scoop them up as well. Give yourself over entirely to fiction, and you could have eternal life. That’s what Jesus said – though look how that story ended.
Certainly not down here among the women. Who ever heard of a crucified woman? Who would bother?
‘Socks,’ says Emma-Audrey to Jocelyn. ‘Socks. Two male children, and one man. Six socks a day seven days a week. Forty-two socks a week. Why? Why do they wear them, and worse, why do I feel obliged to wash them? Millions starve all over the world, other millions go barefoot – I wash socks. Jocelyn, I am so bored.’
They eat lunch in a Kardomah Café. Cottage-cheese salad, and good coffee. Emma-Audrey is discontented. She looks at her hand-knitted sweater with contempt. She raises her wash-sodden hands to her hair – home-washed in rainwater which Paul tests with a Geiger counter for radioactivity – and longs for the feel of lacquer and artifice, carcinogenic though such frivolities tend to be.
‘Can’t you take more interest in the hens?’ suggests Jocelyn.
‘Hens are boring birds at the best of times,’ says Emma-Audrey, ‘and battery-reared hens are worst of all. They have no character. They have no one to talk to. They are reared in isolation.’
‘It is strange the way Paul has gone over to the other side,’ says Jocelyn, who never liked Paul, which is presumably why Emma-Audrey has now sought her out. ‘He used to be all for healthy living. Quite the nut-cutlet man.’
‘He’s an Egg Marketing Man now,’ says Emma-Audrey. ‘He puts penicillin in the mash, and hormones, and do you know what, every year he looks more and more like a hen.’
Jocelyn is shocked. Jocelyn never speaks of her husband in disparaging terms. Even to her lover, Jocelyn spoke well of Philip.
‘I would love to live in the country,’ she says vaguely.
‘Why?’ asks Emma-Audrey, sourly.
‘To be in touch with the seasons.’
‘All one is in touch with is mud. You can’t think how much there is. On the floors, and the walls, and all over clothes, and in one’s hair. Mud. Smelly mud, too. You can’t think how filthy battery farms are. On mucking out days I take the children to friends. I can’t go to my mother’s, of course, because Paul won’t let me.’
Jocelyn does not pursue this.
‘It must be profitable,’ she says.
‘Oh, it is,’ says Audrey-Emma, plucking at her knobbly skirt. ‘But he’s so mean. Look at the rags I have to wear.’
‘I thought you liked weaving,’ says Jocelyn.
‘No,’ says Audrey-Emma, firmly. ‘He told me I liked weaving, and I believed him, more fool me. Now look at me. Stuck away in the country, with only hen farmers to talk to, mud up to my ears. I can’t go on like this.’
‘You have the children to consider,’ says Jocelyn, who still has none.
‘Oh, yes,’ says Audrey-Emma vaguely, ‘the children. Paul doesn’t like the children. He has no time for them. If only they were chickens he’d feel differently.’
‘Where are they today?’ asks Jocelyn.
‘He’s looking after them. They’ll be nervous wrecks by the time I get back. He’s an anal obsessive, I think. He makes them scrub their nails and examines between their toes. Well of course there’s mud there. There’s mud everywhere.’
Jocelyn wonders if Audrey-Emma is not having some kind of nervous breakdown.
‘If I stay,’ pleads Audrey-Emma, ‘I will go mad.’ There are tears in her eyes. ‘But I can’t leave,’ she goes on, ‘because if I do he will follow me and kill me. I know he will. He believes in marriage. It looks,’ says Audrey-Emma, ‘as if I have to choose between madness or death.’
‘I’m sorry,’ murmurs Jocelyn, inadequately. This is not the kind of conversation she is accustomed to having in the Kardomah.
‘If only some man would come along and rescue me. But who would look at me? That’s another thing Paul has done – he has aged me prematurely. He nags me, long into the night.’
‘About what?’
‘Everything. Anything. He believes I personally carry fowl pest with me, I think. I slave away in that house, and all he ever says is how he could do it better. If that’s the way he feels, why doesn’t he? But oh no, that’s woman’s work, he won’t demean himself. If he’d let me take over the business side of the batteries we’d be rich in no time, but will he? No. He’s terrified I might do it better than him. What am I going to do? Why does he always find fault with me?’
‘Perhaps you find fault with him,’ Jocelyn ventures, but Audrey-Emma doesn’t hear.
Audrey-Emma’s face has lost its girlish roundness. She looks peaky, as well as dowdy, and there are lines of resentment deepening round her eyes. Jocelyn smooths hers away nightly with beauty creams. Audrey-Emma smears honey on her face from time to time.
‘You have let yourself go a little,’ murmurs Jocelyn.
‘I have, haven’t I,’ says Audrey-Emma, not without satisfaction. ‘Why should I be pretty just for him? He wants me to be a dowdy housewife, so that’s what he’s going to get.’
‘I think you should make the best of it,’ says Jocelyn. ‘You have three children, after all. Once you have children you can’t just think of yourself, you have to think of them too.’
‘What kind of future will it be for them?’ Audrey-Emma laments, ‘with a father like Paul.’ She consults the menu. ‘Do you think I could have a cream pastry? Paul says cream’s all right so long as it isn’t sweetened.’
She eats her pastry. Presently a worldly man with greying hair and a journalistic air comes in for coffee. Audrey-Emma, hampered only slightly by the bulk of her tweed skirt, darts over to join him, deserting Jocelyn instantly. It is her old Editor. The lines on her face smooth out as if by magic; she grows prettier and more animated minute by minute. She clasps the Editor’s hand. How white her skin is; how female and nonsensical her whole being. He laughs at her but is entranced. She practically lays herself down, there and then, legs apart, offering herself as a sacrificial victim. How can he fail to deliver the ritual blow?
They leave together.
Audrey-Emma whispers a farewell to Jocelyn. ‘You don’t mind do you, darling? He’s such an old fool, but he might do a thing on chicken farming. I’m not deserting you, am I? It’s for poor Paul’s sake: I have to chat him up a little.’
And they’re gone, the Editor holding Audrey-Emma’s little elbow closely, as if afraid she might wander off by accident.
Jocelyn, pale, elegant Jocelyn, so longing for love, so afflicted by discrimination, is left to pay the bill.
Scarlet has discovered the C.N.D. She works in its headquarters. Byzantia addresses envelopes in her childish hand. Edwin is furious.
‘Long-haired lefties!’ he mutters. ‘Do what you want, if you insist on being associated with cranks and perverts, but leave Edwina out of it.’
‘Do you want the world to be blown up?’ enquires Scarlet. They are touring through Boreham Wood. Byzantia dozes on the back seat. (‘She stays up too late watching television,’ as Edwin has already observed. ‘She’s not getting enough discipline.’)
‘You over-simplify issues,’ he complains. ‘You are absurdly naïve, even for a woman. We must defend ourselves, or the reds will simply walk in.’
‘You’re mad,’ observes Scarlet.
He drives rather fast and badly, when they are quarrelling, which they do frequently. It is a miracle they are all still alive. It is their ninety-eighth weekly outing.
‘It’s very depressing,’ he says. ‘What a flighty mind you have. All those Common Cause meetings and they taught you nothing.’
‘I suppose you think better dead than red,’ she sneers.
‘Indeed I do,’ he says. ‘Without freedom life is not worth living. If this country went red I would kill Edwina with my own hands.’
‘Do you hear that, Byzantia?’ asks Scarlet of her daughter, who fortunately is too busy counting pubs to hear. Scarlet has weighed up the emotional disadvantages of their car rides with Edwin, and the financial advantages, and decided to continue them. What she cannot do, not even to save her daughter, is to behave decently during their jaunts. Is it so difficult to appear to agree, to appear to accept criticism? she asks herself, and the answer comes back, yes, difficult to the point of impossibility. She usually returns home with her nails bitten to the quick, one or two outbursts of grief and rage the worse. (‘You are a hysterical woman,’ he complains. ‘I can argue rationally, why can’t you? It is a fact that I am older than you. If you would just agree that my experience of the world is greater than yours, we could be perfectly happy.’ His back pains are much better, these days, now there is no likelihood of him finding himself back in bed with Scarlet.)
‘I wish you would stop calling her by that ridiculous name,’ he says now.
‘It’s her real name,’ says Scarlet.
‘I have been consulting my solicitor about it,’ he says. ‘An individual’s real name is the one he is called by. All the same I would like to have her Christian name changed by Deed Poll.’
Scarlet does not reply at first. He has a certain tone of voice which he uses when he makes final ultimatums; he does not add, ‘Or I will stop the money.’ He does not have to.
‘Isn’t that rather expensive?’ she asks, finally, with what she feels is cunning. ‘Wouldn’t it be a good idea just to let one person call her one thing and another another?’
‘Not if one of those names is Byzantia.’
‘What’s so awful about Byzantia anyway? I’ve never known.’ Scarlet sounds quite cheeky. There is going to be real trouble.
‘It’s foreign,’ he says. ‘Not that I have anything against foreigners, but why call an English child by a foreign name? Her father wasn’t foreign, was he? Black, or anything?’
‘Does it look as if her father was black?’
‘That kind of thing can skip a generation.’
‘Please,’ requests Scarlet, ‘do we have to have this conversation in front of Byzantia?’
‘In front of whom?’
‘Byzantia.’
‘Oh, Edwina, you mean. Edwina is too young to understand what we are talking about.’
‘Your fantasy child Edwina may be. My Byzantia is not.’
‘I support, feed, clothe, care for and love that child. I suggest that makes her as much mine as yours.’
‘Oh no,’ says Scarlet. ‘Oh no.’
‘What is more,’ he says, ‘I think the time for this nonsense is over. If you are mentally disturbed that is a pity, but it has been going on for too long. It is time you returned home. People are beginning to talk.’
‘What? After two years? How impetuous people are in Lee Green!’
He stares at her, wondering if she is being sarcastic, and nearly crashes the car into a bollard.
‘Would you mind driving more carefully?’ She is polite.
‘I am a very good driver. I am taking my Advanced Motorists’ Test presently. Please do not change the subject.’
‘You changed it yourself by trying to kill us. You are so full of hostility and anger it has to come out somehow. You are the most violent person I know.’
‘And I certainly have no intention of paying another bill for this trick-cyclist of yours if that’s the kind of nonsense he feeds you.’ (Scarlet has been seeing an analyst weekly. She charges 50/- a session.) ‘I am a very mild and civilized person. Anyone else would have beaten you to death by now. I demand a straight answer, Scarlet. You can’t play silly-buggers with me. When are you coming home?’
Scarlet does not reply.
‘I have supported you and Edwina for two years, out of the kindness of my heart. Anyone else would have divorced you. I think it is time I received my reward.’
‘You want me back in your bed, do you?’ Scarlet is smiling. It is a bad sign. Byzantia begins counting lamp-posts, feverishly.
‘I want you back in my home, where you belong.’
‘But not in your bed?’
‘You know my state of health,’ he says. He is pale, ‘I love you and need you, Scarlet. I miss you. My most earnest desire is to have you and little Edwina back. I think I am more conscious of the higher states of love than you, Scarlet.’
‘But not back in your bed? Not that I was ever in it, more than once.’
‘I am an ill man.’
‘Ill? You are a stupid, impotent, elderly old dribbler,’ Scarlet shrieks. ‘All you’ve ever been good for is to pay the bills. Skinny Winny!’
Edwin slams on the brakes. Scarlet allows herself to fall forward and bangs her head badly. Byzantia starts to cry.
‘Now we know,’ says Edwin, above the noise. ‘Now we know your true motives. I always suspected it. Well, now we know. Prostitute!’
‘Prostitute –’ she laughs, holding her head, where a lump is already beginning.
‘Whore,’ he hisses. ‘Slut. Sex-mad animal. Thank God my mother never lived to see me tied to a foul creature like you.’
Scarlet decides it is madness to be sitting in a stalled car with other cars hooting all around, with an insane elderly school inspector. She tries to get out. He tries to stop her.
‘If you go,’ he says, ‘not another penny, not another penny.’
‘Mum –’ says Byzantia from the back.
Scarlet heaves herself over into the back seat and clasps Byzantia.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says to her daughter, ‘sorry. Really it’s all right. It’s going to be all right. It will never happen again –’
The car jerks forward.
‘Quieter now, are you?’ asks Edwin.
‘Yes,’ says Scarlet, with apparent docility.
‘That man should give you shock treatment,’ says Edwin. ‘It’s what you need.’
At the next red traffic light Scarlet opens the door and shuffles herself and Byzantia out of the car. Edwin shakes his fist and holds up Scarlet’s handbag, which she has left behind, and drives off in triumph. They are twenty miles from home. Scarlet smiles. She has a ten-shilling note in her pocket; otherwise she would not have abandoned her handbag.
A car pulls up beside them. It is a dirty Jaguar.
‘Can I help you?’ asks the driver. He is quite young, and has good white teeth, which he is now showing, for he is smiling broadly. Scarlet feels she is unused to seeing men smile.
‘No, thank you,’ says Scarlet, with a feeling of discovery. ‘I can look after myself perfectly well.’
It is a useful discovery, because the following day she receives a letter from Edwin’s solicitors saying she will receive no more maintenance. He rings in the evening to see if she is prepared to be reasonable about Edwina’s name, but Scarlet is not.
‘In that case,’ says Edwin, ‘that is that. You are a wicked woman. You have ruined my life, and you mean to ruin your child’s. What will you do, go out cleaning again?’
‘No.’
‘No, perhaps not. You are not very good at it, are you? The house is much cleaner now you have left. There are vacancies for porters on London Underground. You should consider it. It might suit you. You can put Edwina in a home, I suppose, amongst strangers. I am starting divorce proceedings, for your information.’
‘So am I.’
‘What?’
‘I am proceeding against you for mental cruelty.’
He puts the telephone down abruptly, and comes straight round. His eyes are red from weeping.
‘I was never cruel to you,’ he says, ‘never. I was always kind. I loved you and Byzantia. If I have offended you please forgive me. I will try and do better. I would cut off my right arm to please you.’
‘No,’ says Scarlet, who is tired. ‘You were never cruel to me. I was only joking.’
‘Not a very funny joke,’ he says, recovering quickly enough at the slightest sign of weakness from Scarlet. He has brought her handbag back.
‘How did you get home?’ he enquires.
‘A man in a dirty Jaguar picked me up,’ says Scarlet. ‘He is a rather eccentric solicitor, and a very kind man.’
‘He put you up to divorcing me for cruelty, didn’t he? After all I did for you and Byzantia. Rescuing you both from the gutter. Admit it.’
‘No.’
‘Yes, he did.’ Edwin begins to cry. ‘Everyone’s ganging up on me. All I ever do is try to be kind.’
Scarlet picks up the poker.
‘If you don’t go away I’ll kill you,’ she says.
He goes, passing the solicitor who is on the way in. The solicitor’s name is Alec. Scarlet has heard the gate click, and knows Alec is on his way. Now she has, as it were, the law on her side, she is prepared to murder Edwin. She certainly wants to. She can bear depending on Edwin, hating Edwin, despising Edwin, but she cannot endure being sorry for him.
Edwin never returns. Scarlet receives divorce papers from him through the post, and does not argue; a private detective comes to examine the double bed she shares with Alec, but she never actually sees Edwin again.
Sometimes he moves through her dreams, grey, thin and fidgety, making her feel bad.
There is a sale of Y’s paintings. They fetch a record price. Y is dead. There will be no more paintings. The art columns of the Sunday papers tremble with loss and grief. The greatest painter of a generation. Perhaps the only real female painter who ever was, hounded to death, destroyed by her own hand. Helen takes the blame. X is exonerated. His own pictures go up in value. He is popular again within six months.
Picture the scene one evening, when Carl and Helen still lived together, when Y still lived. Carl arrives home early, champagne under each arm, to celebrate a successful sale.
As he turns on the light in the living-room, there is a scuffling on the floor. It is Helen, his mistress, and X, once his most promising young painter. He turns off the light and goes away.
‘He must have seen,’ says Helen, appalled.
‘Do him good,’ says X.
‘He’ll murder me,’ says Helen.
‘You’re a big girl,’ says X. ‘Murder him back. I’ll look after you.’
‘Supposing he tells Y?’
‘He won’t dare. Y does as I tell her. If there’s trouble he’ll get no more of her paintings.’
Helen struggles to get to her feet, but X pins her down and forces her legs apart. She giggles, pleased by thoughts of rape, relieved of guilt by the knowledge that she is helpless.
An hour later they are both still there on the floor, entwined, when Carl comes in with Y.
(‘Sex drives you mad,’ says Helen to Jocelyn, months later. ‘We must have known what would happen. If he’d gone when Carl first came back Y might be alive now. Perhaps we just wanted to hurt her. Perhaps all X has ever done is want to hurt Y. Even now she’s dead he gets at her, through me.’
‘What do you mean?’ Jocelyn is puzzled. They are both pregnant. Jocelyn eight months, Helen six. But all Helen can say is – ‘By loving me.’)
Y is silent, and stands like a pale doll in the doorway, limbs limp, staring. Carl flies at Helen and strips her remaining clothes from her. She stands naked.
‘That’s how you came to me,’ he says. ‘That’s how you can go.’
X laughs. ‘What a foreigner you are, Carl,’ he says.
‘What do you mean?’ asks Carl, alarmed even in this extremity of situation by the suggestion that he is not behaving like a true Englishman.
‘You take sex so seriously,’ says X, adjusting his clothing. He turns to Y. ‘What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue? I am sorry this malicious pig has seen fit to bring you here.’
‘He is not a pig,’ says Y. ‘He is a friend. I think he is the only friend I have ever had.’
‘I am your friend,’ whispers poor naked Helen, but Y does not seem to hear.
‘Get out,’ says Carl to Helen. ‘Leave me alone. You are a dispensable and interchangeable woman. You are not even ornamental. Look at you, with your great orange nipples. You are coarse. I like a woman with little pink nipples.’
‘Yes. Get out,’ says Y. ‘I do not want you in the same room as my paintings. You defile them.’
This remark irritates X. It is as if she rated her paintings higher than she did him.
‘If she goes,’ he says, surprisingly, ‘I go with her, nipples and all.’
Carl and Y are taken aback. Y begins, at last, to cry; a gentle subdued painful sound. X steps forward and takes Y’s coat off. She lets her arms be moved, never helping or hindering, but does not stop sobbing. X puts the coat on Helen, who is more positively co-operative, and then puts his arm round her to offer yet more protection, and they leave.
‘I’ve had enough,’ X says, ‘of all this hysteria. I just want to live in some kind of peace.’ He adds, speaking to Carl, ‘I blame you for this. It need not have happened. You ridiculous foreigner, your taste is lousy. You are the con-man of the art world and I’ll see that everyone knows it.’
Helen and X go and live in the country. Helen gives out that she is pregnant: she sends flowers to Y one day, asking for forgiveness and a renewal of friendship, and offering to look after her children so Y can get on with her painting.
Since X left Y has felt paralysed. If she tries to paint she falls asleep. She has been sleeping with Carl but it does no good. Y plaits Helen’s flowers into a wreath and pins the letter above the gas-stove, and turns it on, and dies, as she has always known she would. She is thirty-five, and feels that life has been going on for a long, long time.
Helen receives anonymous and non-anonymous letters, blaming her for Y’s death. X is distraught. ‘You came into our lives,’ he says to Helen, ‘and destroyed them. Now you have killed my wife.’ For weeks he is silent, but he does not leave Helen. Nor does he ask her to marry him. ‘Y is my wife,’ he says. ‘You are my destiny. I was born under a fearful star.’ Art-conscious local people ask him round to dinners and parties. Helen is not asked. X goes. Helen, swelling and helpless, stays at home and waits, as Y once did.
Helen embroiders white linen cloths. She thinks, in her fantasies, she should have been some diplomat’s wife. She could have lived elegantly, in some European capital, and been gracious to important people. She thinks that would suit her. But she knows in her heart that nothing she ever does now will make any difference. Wherever she goes, Y will pad softly along behind, dressed in a white suit, pale and slightly stooping. X writes a monograph about Y’s work.
Helen rings Jocelyn once, but Jocelyn pretends to be out. Since Y died, Jocelyn thinks Helen is too wicked to be endured. She is grateful yet again for the enduring boredom of her own marriage.
Helen rings Sylvia, but Sylvia has left home. Butch now lives in their little house with a girl called Rachel. It was Sylvia who first met Rachel in the ante-natal clinic, where the latter was doing research, and brought her home, a plain, stark girl with up-swept horn-rimmed spectacles, a plump figure, hair unfashionably back-combed into a beehive, and a braying laugh. It does not occur to Sylvia that Butch will find Rachel attractive: that her own pale languor now bores, rather than appeals. During this last but successful pregnancy both her hearing and her eyesight have become worse, and she sometimes peers at Butch as if she could not remember who he was.
Rachel has no such handicap. She looks at hearty, healthy Butch with bright brown alert eyes and challenges his interest, and laughs uproariously when he makes dirty jokes. Sylvia, at such times, just looks bewildered and ladylike, and asks him to say it again. He can’t stand it.
On the day Butch’s divorce finally comes through he confides in Sylvia that he has been having an affair with Rachel for some months and that he wants to marry her. Sylvia asks Butch to repeat what he said. He hits her hard on the side of the head – the left side, the side of her best ear. Her ear whistles for days, and when it stops, it is because she can hear nothing.
Sylvia, after a lonely day or two, goes to stay with Jocelyn. When she is gone, Rachel – who has been keeping an eye on the house – moves into it with Butch. So far as Rachel is concerned, Sylvia has been making Butch unhappy, and so deserves whatever she gets.
Butch and Rachel live happily ever afterwards.
As for Helen, she types X’s monograph on Y, and waits for her child to be born. X says it is Carl’s child. She knows that it is not.