Down among the women.
Let us now praise fallen women – those of them at any rate who did not choose to fall, but were pushed and never rose again.
Let us praise, for example, truckloads of young Cairo girls, ferried in for the use of the troops, crammed into catacombs beneath the desert floor. More crowded even than Paul’s battery hens, as plucked of fine feathers and as raw of breast, and even more diseased. Where is their Ministry of Agriculture official, where their vet, where their Marketing Board? Where are their post-war treats; their grants, their demob suits, their cheering crowds? Come reunion day, where have they gone? Lost to syphilis, death or drudgery. Those girls, other girls, scooped up from all the great cities of East and West, Cairo, Saigon, Berlin, Rome. Where are their memorials? Where are they remembered, prayed for, honoured? Didn’t they do their bit?
Let us now raise a monument in the heart of the London Stock Exchange. Let us call it the Tomb of the Unknown Whore. Let the Queen pay homage once a year. Whose side is she on, anyway? The men have taken the top-of-the-milk, and left us with whey for our cornflakes.
So at any rate says Helen, when Scarlet calls to visit her, to show off her wedding ring and photographs of beautiful Byzantia.
X is having an affair with the wife of a neighbour. Her name is Barbara. He does not trouble to hide it from Helen. He paints Barbara naked, and takes Barbara, not Helen, to Private Views.
When Helen protests all he can say is ‘Now you know what Y felt like. Stay quiet and put up with it, as you expected her to do.’
‘Do you want me to die too?’ asks Helen.
‘That’s up to you,’ he says. ‘You carry death with you, in any case. I knew that, from the moment I first saw you.’
Helen, looking at herself in the mirror, sees that he is right. When X is away at night, and the blackness of the country closes round the cottage, and the silence mounts, it is death she hears creaking the floorboards and the beams, and death who rustles the leaves against the windows. She is frightened now of the supernatural, as she has never been frightened of anything alive. She will pick the baby Alice out of its crib and sit rocking it against her breast hour after hour, and then become frightened to even pull back the shawl and look at her child, in case it stares back with Y’s eyes, suckles with Y’s mouth.
‘Do you want me to go?’ she asks X.
‘No,’ he replies, and falls silent again.
‘I can’t live like this,’ she tells him.
‘You must live as you wish,’ he replies. ‘It is nothing to do with me. We are bound together by Y’s death. It is not up to me to break those ties.’
‘It is your fault as much as mine,’ she says, and he laughs, loudly and shockingly, at the absurdity of such a notion. They both accept that it is not true. Y’s death is established as Helen’s fault.
X thinks that Helen is turning from a domestic into a wild animal. She has become gaunt: her lips stretch back over teeth that seem too large: the whites of her eyes show unnaturally. She seems to him to lurk in dark corners, embodiment of all reproach. She is his punishment. He will not turn her away for fear of something worse.
He is fearful of Alice, who mews and suckles like a little animal. She too is monstrous, he thinks, with her tiny, blind searching head. He has relief only when he is with his Barbara, whom he sees as a calm, pleasant, stupid woman. She has no imagination. To her a table is a table, a death is a death. Barbara disapproves of Helen, and believes in saying what she thinks.
‘She is a femme fatale, that’s all,’ says Barbara. ‘One day you will grow out of her, and you will stop feeling so depressed. In the meantime, of course, you are painting beautifully. Perhaps the strain is good for you?’
Barbara does not really want the situation altered. Why should she? She has such status now as she has never dreamt of. A successful farmer for a husband, and a famous artist for a lover, and the black beast Helen, snarling in her corner, defeated.
‘You can’t stay,’ says Scarlet to Helen, for tales of Barbara have drifted back to London. Helen is still seen as the witch-woman, but Scarlet is now on Helen’s side. ‘You must leave. There are more men in the world.’
‘Things may get better,’ says Helen. She is wearing what seems like many chiffon scarves. When she moves, she drifts in a waft of fabrics. They flutter round her strong, bony, tough-skinned face. She has become very thin.
‘You are fixated on that man,’ says Scarlet, ‘and what is he? Just another man.’
‘He has become my life,’ says Helen. ‘I have invested everything of me in him. I have nothing left but him.’
‘Well,’ says Scarlet briskly, ‘I am not in love with him, and see him quite clearly. He is self-indulgent, conceited, sadistic, and as neurotic as all get out. None of it’s real.’
‘Y dying was real,’ says Helen. ‘I saw the certificate. In fact, do you know, I registered the death. No one else could bring themselves to do a sordid thing like that. I always have to do the dirty work, the same as I have to deal with Y’s ghost. While he’s off having a good time somewhere else.’
‘You’ve got to get out of here,’ says Scarlet.
‘I can’t leave him,’ Helen repeats. ‘He is my existence. Anyway, I can’t until he asks me to go. He may need me. I inspire him, I always have. His work is more important than my feelings.’
X comes home and ignores Scarlet, except to nod curtly to her as he passes through the living-room to his bedroom. He shuts the door firmly.
‘He is not inspired,’ says Scarlet, ‘he is mad. I’ve been mad in my time, so I can tell. You’ve been a bit odd, but never mad. You owe him nothing. For Alice’s sake, get out. You are a mother now, not a woman. What kind of a father is he to her?’
There was a time when Scarlet never used to interfere in other people’s lives. As she gets older she realizes more and more that she knows best.
‘Where would I go?’ asks Helen. ‘How would I live? I have never been without a man. I have always been someone’s mistress. It will not suit me to be an unmarried mother.’
‘I was one of those too,’ says Scarlet, ‘and every year it gets easier.’
‘You don’t understand,’ says Helen, helplessly. ‘I have never been responsible for anyone except myself. I can’t start now. I can’t do anything new. Only the same as I did yesterday.’
Scarlet is shocked by the change in Helen.
‘You’re like someone in prison,’ she says. ‘You’ll die if you stay.’
‘All my family died in prison,’ is all Helen will say. ‘Mother, father, aunts, uncles. My sister. Why should I be different? I don’t mind dying, or prison. Better late than never. Off to the great kibbutz in the sky.’
Scarlet wants to slap her.
‘I was joking,’ says Helen feebly.
‘Give me Alice,’ says Scarlet. ‘Go on being as wicked as you like, but let me save Alice.’
‘There is no saving her,’ says Helen smartly. ‘She is doomed, she is female… What’s more,’ Helen adds dismally, ‘she is mine.’
And she sinks again into lethargy, sitting slumped in her chair. She raises her hand and points.
‘Here she is,’ says Helen. ‘Here comes Y.’
And Scarlet goes quite cold, because it is true that a pale stooping figure is coming up the drive. It is only the girl who delivers the milk, as Helen must surely know, for the milk is delivered at the same time every evening.
Scarlet takes it upon herself to knock upon X’s door, go in, and tell him that Helen needs a doctor as she is having a nervous breakdown.
‘A doctor?’ enquires X, apparently bemused. Then he laughs and says, ‘We don’t need doctors. We need priests. We will exorcise her.’
And as if on cue he leaves the bed on which he lies and broods, and strides off to the local library, where he is a celebrity, in search of a book on exorcism.
‘Look here,’ says Scarlet to Helen, ‘he is going too far. Are you just going to sit here and be exorcised?’
‘Not in such a cut-price fashion,’ says Helen, with what seems like returning spirit. ‘Not by him. Am I not even worth a priest? Who does he think he is?’
‘Come to London with me,’ says Scarlet.
‘No one will talk to me in London,’ says Helen. ‘They blame me.’
‘It may surprise you,’ says Scarlet, ‘but there are at least fifty million people in the country who have not heard of X, Y or you.’
‘I am so old,’ says Helen. ‘Old as death. No one will want me.’
Scarlet takes Helen’s bony hands in hers.
‘Y once stroked my hair and brought me back to life,’ says Helen. ‘I do not think that you can do the same for me.’
All the same she allows her hand to remain in Scarlet’s, and gazes at it fixedly. And Scarlet, conscious of her own years in the darkness, tries to transmit, by simple touch, some of her own harshly-acquired strength. Scarlet is generous. She wishes to share. She is prepared to give at least a portion of her own happiness away. And it is, indeed, as if the dark tide begins to recede from Helen’s brain as she holds Scarlet’s hand. Her mouth, which has been so tautly held, relaxes into what is almost a smile.
(‘I made death leave her,’ says Scarlet to Jocelyn later, ‘just for a little.’ And Jocelyn nods politely, rather embarrassed, and thinks, but does not say, what many other people also think, that if only Scarlet had left Helen alone, matters might have been a good deal better.)
‘All right,’ says Helen, unexpectedly. ‘I shall come to London. Quick, quick. We must be gone before he comes back. He will kill us.’
And she runs up the narrow staircase to her room, and starts gathering her things together, quickly, quickly. Scarlet helps. How white the linen, how fragile the underwear; how Helen’s fingers caress and care for them, automatically, even in this extremity of fright. For now Helen has decided to go, her fear of X is sudden and extreme. For their very lives, it seems, they must be gone before he returns.
Scarlet wonders for a disconcerting moment whether Helen intends to leave the baby, but Scarlet has misjudged her friend. Helen stops to scoop up Alice as she leaves; wraps her in a snowy-white, beautifully washed shawl. Now they half-walk, half-run, over ploughed fields towards the station. Their shoes are clogged with mud.
Scarlet does not dare look back, for fear of seeing X looming on the skyline; she has invested him, in the space of just ten minutes, with supernatural powers. Threading through her fear is a vein of excitement. She is running away again. She has always run away, and always found it exhilarating. There has always been, with Wanda, a new school, a new father, a new flat to run to; later a new man, a new baby, a new life. Every new event ensures a host of old ones thrown out, run away from, left undone. She remembers what it felt like to be a naughty little girl; excited by disaster and her own wilfulness.
And here she is, a grown woman, stumbling through muddy fields, still at it.
‘Nothing changes much in life,’ Scarlet observes, panting.
‘Don’t say that,’ says Helen. ‘It is too depressing a thought.’ The station is in sight. Sanity returns. They walk demurely now. Helen nods graciously to the villagers, who stare back, either in non-comprehension, or in unabashed hostility.
‘I very much hope that change is possible,’ says Helen. ‘I have spent my life so far amongst enemies. As a child I was hated and feared as an enemy alien. Later I grew beautiful and was disliked for that. Then I loved too fixedly – and people don’t like such constancy, it frightens them. It indicates there is a purpose and a doom, a plan beneath the chaos. It is too strong a concept for ordinary people, who can only love for a minute at a time.’
‘Like me,’ says Scarlet.
‘There are excuses for you,’ says Helen, charitably. ‘You have difficulty surviving.’
On the train she chatters about the fate of women, plans a tomb to the Unknown Whore, and says she will set herself up as a painter of portraits.
She stays for a while with Scarlet and Alec in their comfortable house, and is much attached to Byzantia.
‘She is a lovely girl,’ says Helen. ‘You see what good things can come out of so much trouble? Do you remember when we all promised to pay you ten shillings a week? We never did. There was no time. Life caught up with us too fast.’
And she rocks her own baby and changes its clothes unceasingly, and curls its wispy hair with her finger, and waits for X to come and take her home. He does not come.
One day she says to Scarlet, ‘I saw Y in the street the other day; I have to leave here. X won’t come, so she has come instead. I know I am talking nonsense, but I also know I have to leave.’
Scarlet thinks that Helen is being kind and making excuses; that the desire to go is on Scarlet’s account. For Helen has been eyeing Alec with automatic lust. It is not that she really likes or desires him; just that she is unused to being without a man. Scarlet is confident enough that Alec will not return Helen’s interest, for Alec is made nervous by intensities of feeling. All the same, Scarlet catches herself opening doors as if fearful what she might find, and she has a pale, watchful, stooping feel, as if Y’s mantle was falling across her shoulders. So she does not resist.
‘Yes,’ she says to Helen. ‘In that case you had better go.’
Alec finds Helen a flat in Wembley Park. It will not be ready for a month, so in the meantime Helen stays with Audrey in her love-nest.
Audrey’s love-nest is a pretty Georgian house in St John’s Wood, which Audrey has deigned to allow her magazine Editor to buy, decorate and furnish for her. She is very unkind to him. She has, she maintains, had her fill of men, domesticity, sex and children. The more elusive Audrey is, the more admiring of her he becomes. She insists on having other lovers – and condescends to allow the Editor to visit her for the night, perhaps once a week – or once a fortnight if he has displeased her.
‘You are such a bad lover,’ she says, ‘it is really an ordeal for me. Paul was very, very good in bed. It was just he was so impossible out of it. You’re fine out of bed, but not really much good in it. So don’t get above yourself. Because you choose to pay out money on my behalf doesn’t mean you own me. I can look after myself. I once ran a chicken-farm single-handed. I am afraid of nothing. Not poverty, not loneliness, not your wife.’
He gazes at her in admiration, and buys her another dress, another holiday, organizes a still better job for her to play with.
It is not true to say that Audrey is afraid of nothing. She is afraid of Paul. Paul assails her and the Editor through the post and in person. He paints obscenities on her walls and his car: he throws stones with rude limericks engraved upon them through the windows: he makes phone calls to her employers and the Editor’s Board of Directors. He threatens murder, and mutilation. He prophesies madness and suicide. He is not angry (he says) because she has deserted him; in fact, he maintains, he has done really well since she left, and even the hens, relieved of her baleful presence, have been laying splendidly – but at the outrage to principle, the despoiling of his vision of womanhood, inherent in her abandonment of the children.
Audrey is both flattered and frightened by these attentions.
‘I never knew he loved me so much,’ she says. And to the Editor – ‘You could never love anyone as deeply as that.’
The Editor protests when Helen comes to stay, disturbing the grossly flimsy structure of his idyll.
‘It is none of your business,’ says Audrey. ‘I have who I want here, and what’s more Helen and me will share a room. I like talking in bed, and you’re always too tired or too drunk or too randy for proper conversation. You’ll just have to stay out.’
Forced into his wife’s company, evening after evening he finds it the more boring.
‘I wish he would go back to her,’ says Audrey to Helen. ‘I don’t want him. I just want to be myself, like you. I don’t want to be married, or do housework. I just want to have a good time, and earn money, and have lovers until I’m too old. Then I’ll take to drink like Scarlet’s mother.’
The Editor calls one evening when Audrey is out to dinner with a television producer. He sits and talks to Helen. Audrey, returning, finds them sitting peacefully and at a distance discussing Russian icons, and has a fit of hysterics. She screams at her Editor, belabouring him with her fists, accusing him of infidelity, and drives him physically from the house. Afterwards she sobs and weeps for hours.
‘I don’t know what’s the matter with me,’ she says to Helen. ‘Do you think I’m going mad? I tried all these years to be something I wasn’t; now I’m trying to be the opposite, and it’s just as upsetting.’
‘You don’t have to be anything,’ says Helen, piously, ‘except yourself.’
‘I haven’t got a self to be,’ complains Audrey. ‘I change every five minutes. It was much easier when we were all younger. Ever since I’ve had the children, I’ve been confused. I always thought I was the one who was supposed to be the child. And it was all my own doing, that’s what I can’t get over. All the same, the children were the only real thing that ever happened to me. But of course Paul won’t let me have them. It’s not that he loves them, he just wants to punish me.’
Presently, when Helen has gone, and she has forgiven the Editor, and he has been re-instated as a once-weekly visitor, she asks him if she could not have a manservant.
‘I would like to have your children,’ she says. ‘To do that I have to have space, money and time. These are the three things children need most. I can give them space and money; but time? I can’t give up my work, it wouldn’t be fair, and all the rest of my life and energy is spent in either meeting your sexual demands or cleaning this house of yours.’
‘But you live here, not me –’
‘– at your insistence. I would be just as happy living on a park bench, if not happier. However, you’ve landed me with this bourgeois monstrosity. I think the least you can do is not burden me with the task of cleaning it. I need a daily man – not a woman, they lie and steal and nag – to do it for me.’
The Editor hires a manservant-cum-chauffeur – an out-of-work actor with a beard, who flirts with Audrey, and lives with his wife and children in the basement flat.
Soon she is pregnant. She spends days in Harrods, in the baby-clothes departments. She sends the bills to the Editor’s home, where his wife comes across them.
‘You should have been more careful,’ Audrey accuses him. ‘You probably meant her to find them, in your neurotic way. You know what it means, don’t you? I can’t possibly have the baby. I shall have to have an abortion.’
He pleads with her, but it is no use. He makes the arrangements, gives her the cash, and the manservant, who likes to be called the chauffeur, takes her off to the clinic.
The Editor has a painful vision of his future vanishing down the plughole with swirling pink finality; but it only makes him more conscious of the present and he insists on visiting Audrey twice a week. Sometimes she won’t let him into her bed – ‘Since you made me have the operation, I have become sexually anaesthetized. It is not just a matter of indifference to me now – more like revulsion –’ but she does let him stay in the house. He finds that when he insists, she complies. This is, for him, a great and useful discovery. Although if he presses too hard, he discovers, her personality disintegrates altogether, like a blob of mercury flying into bits, and when gathered together again, has incorporated flecks of dust and foreign matter which take yet more getting used to.
Once, when she complains about the cost of the food he eats when he stays overnight, and refuses to give him an egg for breakfast, he points out that as he pays the food bills, the mortgage, the electricity, laundry and servant bills, he is entitled to as many eggs as he pleases. What’s more, he suggests, if she wants him to go on doing these things, she had better cook his breakfast graciously. Audrey gets as far as cracking a large brown egg into the pan before dissolving into tears, accusing him of blackmail, and becoming too hysterical to continue the cooking process. Still, she did crack the egg, and he considers this an advance.
At his wife’s home he sits down to a properly laid, three-course, punctual breakfast every morning, the eggs peppered and served with vinegared butter; and every morning boredom makes his very mouth muscles limp, so that coffee trickles down his chin, and his wife can watch with fastidious delight and disgust, pleased to be able to tell herself that if he finally goes for good, she has lost very little.
And here he is – he knows it – trying to make Audrey behave like a proper woman; like his wife.
Audrey is upset by his insistence on a cooked breakfast.
‘All my life,’ she complains to Jocelyn, ‘people have been taking advantage of me. This terrible man! He treats me as if I was a menial, but I have a brain like a man’s – everyone tells me so at work. What a terrible fate it is, to pass from life with Paul to life with this bully.’
‘It didn’t just happen,’ says Jocelyn. ‘You did it. You chose it.’ It is Jocelyn’s refrain nowadays, spoken faintly from depths of unfathomable boredom. She likes to listen to the tales told her by her friends: it is as if they stretch their hands down towards her, trying to raise her to the light again. Her little boy is sleepless and bad-tempered. She tries to love him but she can’t. He has Philip’s face, and watches her with Philip’s eyes – or is it with the eyes of that other man, long ago?
Jocelyn wrote to Miss Bonny when Edward was born. She had a letter by return. Miss Bonny now breeds dogs in the Lake District. Miss Bonny told her – why? as a cautionary tale? – about a wilful spaniel bitch who managed to mate with a collie, and then fortunately aborted. Later, properly mated with a spaniel, one of the pups was unmistakably collie. ‘Female fidelity,’ writes Miss Bonny, ‘is the cornerstone on which the family, the heredity principle, and the whole of capitalism rests.’ Virginity, thinks Jocelyn has gone to Miss Bonny’s head, and she throws the letter away. But she’s upset.
Jocelyn leaves the electric blanket on in Philip’s bed during one of his weekend absences, and it bursts into flames. The fire brigade has to be called. One of the attendant policemen, kindly staying behind to help clear up, propositions her. Jocelyn, these days, is beautiful enough in her chilly fashion. Made distraught and dirty by flames, smoke, and fear, she must appear, to the policeman, a likely lay. Jocelyn declines his offer with a haughty disdain which does not disconcert him at all.
For months afterwards, lying sleepless, waiting for Edward to stop crying and sleep, or wake and start crying, the policeman enters her fantasies, fully-clothed, brandishing his truncheon like a phallus, bullying, humiliating. The more extreme her sexual fantasies, the more in her head she moans and squirms in masochistic frenzy, while lying still and motionless in her bed – the more remote and frozen does she become by day.
Jocelyn handles Edward as if he was a rather strange, noisy doll. She does what is necessary for his survival, and little more. She can hardly bear to be touched by Philip.
Philip drinks later and later at the Watson and Belcher club. Drinks are free. The rumour goes the firm are trying to save paying out on their pension scheme by killing off the staff with drink at an early age. Philip begins to look quite old, and has a puzzled air.
Jocelyn is glad that Philip is so seldom at home. She likes to sit by herself in the evenings; or with her women friends. Her snobbish fit has passed. She goes round the corner to C. & A. for her clothes. She has given up Harrods. She makes no move to have the bedroom re-decorated, liking to lie in the smoky ruins and dream of rape and destruction. Eventually Philip complains. So Jocelyn hires a fashionable firm of decorators to re-do the whole house, and not just the bedroom, in pop-art style. The bill, in the end, is £2,500, which Philip does not have, and nor does she. Philip is angry. He hates the look of the house. He had thought, when he first saw it, that such crudity would at least be cheap. Jocelyn has never seen him angry, and it pleases her, and she spends a whole night actually sleeping in his bed, and wakes feeling like a whore. The feeling frightens her, and she retreats again into chilly respectability.
In the meantime, the bill remains a reality. It overshadows their lives. Philip, in punishing mood, takes to washing his own shirts to save the laundry bills.
When Jocelyn says she is perfectly prepared to wash his shirts herself, if that is what he wants, he says, ‘No. You are too much of a lady for that.’
Jocelyn shrugs. She doesn’t care what he thinks, or what he does.
Sylvia lives in a bed-sitting room, with her little daughter, and is supported by the National Assistance Board. She goes to the Ear, Nose and Throat Hospital once a week for treatment to her ears, and once a week to Moorfields Hospital where they are investigating her sight. Her ability to see fluctuates, experts consider, in an unreasonable, even bizarre fashion. ‘When I’m cheerful,’ she assures them, ‘I can see perfectly well. When I’m miserable I’m blind as a bat. I will never be able to kill myself; I won’t be able to see to do it. Isn’t that something? You might almost say I did it on purpose.’
They refer her to a psychiatric clinic, and continue their investigations.
Sylvia’s vision improves. The sense that things are as bad as they can be reassures her. The National Assistance money comes regularly – so do the inspectors to ensure that she doesn’t have a gentleman caller. If she does, the money will be stopped. Thus protected, Sylvia begins to bloom. A woman neighbour looks after little Claire when Sylvia is visiting her clinics or the Welfare Offices.
Sylvia has a successful operation upon her right ear. Now she can hear when Claire cries, which is seldom, for Claire gave up crying as a bad job some time ago. Not that Claire bears a grudge against her mother, not at all. She loves her, puts her tiny arms around Sylvia’s legs and worships her.
‘They shouldn’t have made me have that abortion all those years ago,’ says Sylvia to her psychiatrist. ‘All I wanted was something to love. Everything went wrong because of that.’
‘It is not enough to give love,’ says the psychiatrist, ‘one must be able to receive it as well.’
It is surprising the things Sylvia hears, these days, even with one good ear.
Moorfields give up and provide her with contact lenses. Her eyes look large, misty and beautiful. She feels, as she clasps Claire to her, this gift of God, like a virgin again, untouched and full of hope.
‘The State,’ she says to Jocelyn, ‘must have spent at least £5,000 so far rehabilitating me. Why? What have I ever done to deserve it, besides merely exist? The State has done far more for me than my father ever did. I feel grateful, and that is something I have never felt in all my life before. Never gratitude, only resentment.’
(‘She has a new life now,’ says Jocelyn to Philip. ‘The State is her father and mother.’ But Philip does not want to discuss Sylvia. He likes talking about advertising matters, which Jocelyn feels too superior to discuss.)
Presently Sylvia takes a job in the Civil Service. She works patiently and methodically in the Department of Child Welfare. She moves into a Council flat. Claire goes to a State nursery by day, and seems happy. Sylvia’s ears and eyes are functioning; the psychiatrist says she need come to see him no longer. Sylvia sends a Christmas card home at Christmas, and receives one in return, and a doll for Claire. Her child is at last acknowledged.
‘It is perfectly possible to live happily without a man,’ says Sylvia to Jocelyn in gratified astonishment, but in the New Year she meets a quiet, gentle, kind, unmarried Probation Officer, and within three months is married to him.
They are married at St Pancras Registry Office. Sylvia and her Peter hold hands. Scarlet is there with Alec; and Jocelyn (Philip is at a conference); and Wanda, stumbling slightly for she has been celebrating, with Susan; and Audrey in a cartwheel hat and very short skirt; and Helen, at her most dramatic and beautiful in white velvet – Sylvia wears dove grey – escorted by a handsome, dark young man who clearly loves her. Sylvia’s parents send a telegram of good wishes.
Scarlet throws them a party in her Hampstead house. Alec has inherited a good deal of money. Scarlet has her sociology degree. She is hoping for a lectureship at the London School of Economics. Byzantia plays Beatles records very loudly in the basement, combs loose her flowing black hair, and tells her mother she means to change her name to Joan. She asks her uncle Simeon down into the basement, and there, hour after hour, attempts to seduce the bewildered lad. ‘Although his hair is long his heart is square,’ she complains to her mother. (Byzantia has a poetical sense, and writes long narrative poems in her Physics lessons at school.) ‘He keeps claiming incest, but that’s just an excuse. An uncle is as distant as a cousin, and cousins are allowed. Well, anyone’s allowed, now there’s the pill. Either he won’t, or he can’t. The whole incest taboo thing is on genetic grounds, after all, and since no one has to get pregnant these days, as a taboo it’s très outmoded. Personally I think incest is a very exciting thought. I don’t fancy Alec, I don’t know why. You should never have deprived me of my natural father, Mother.’
Jocelyn, Wanda, Audrey and Susan think Byzantia should be put on the pill, but Scarlet, Alec and Sylvia agree that she should not.
‘I am not filling up any daughter of mine with artificial oestrogen,’ says Scarlet. ‘I did not bring her into the world to drug her, neuter her, fatten her, and render her passive. Her own mother to turn her into a sexual object? And for what? What profound pleasure? A safe fuck with her own uncle?’
‘Half-uncle,’ says Wanda. ‘And what alternative do you suggest? If you think I’m going to look after a great-grand-child-cum-step-grandchild, you’ve got another think coming.’
‘Abstinence,’ snarls Scarlet, repairing to the many and varied pleasures of her own marital bed. ‘That filthy word! That’s what I suggest.’
Fortunately Byzantia loses interest in Simeon the moment he actually manages to achieve an erection, and falls in love with the dancer Nureyev, who at least is unattainable. She talks at length, as she follows her mother round the house, about her feelings, her actions and her reactions. She has a melodious voice, but it seldom stops: nothing is hidden, nothing is feared. Every subject, every relationship, every event, must be aired, discussed, categorized, rendered harmless, and then not even shelved for future reference, but simply forgotten.
‘Did I bring her up like this?’ Scarlet asks her mother, ‘or is it the world in which she lives?’
‘I see nothing wrong with her,’ says Wanda. ‘She lives in the present, that’s all. She means to be free and happy now, not some time in the future. You and I lived by saying “one day I am going to”. Byzantia says “Now! Let’s go!” It’s much healthier.’
Helen is entranced by Byzantia, and Byzantia likes Helen, and will go over to Helen’s Wembley Park flat on Saturdays to visit; they will take Alice for walks in the park, and feed her ice-creams, or bring her over to tea with Scarlet, or with Jocelyn. But mostly Byzantia likes the ritual of having tea with Helen – the white embroidered tablecloth, the flowered porcelain cups and saucers, tiny cucumber sandwiches, the iced cake, the afghans – little chocolate biscuits with a half-walnut on top of each – and Alice finely dressed and curled. Alice is a rather nervous, chattering little girl, who breaks into dance when she thinks no one is looking, bowing and swaying like a very young sapling swept by a gale.
Helen has tried. She has done what she can do to build a new life. She goes to parties, makes friends; allows herself to be taken out, wooed, even bedded. But there is a dusty film over all experience. She sees with dead eyes, hears with dead ears. She moves herself through the world like a puppet. She pulls strings to make herself dance, go to fortune-tellers, play with her child.
Presently X seeks her out. He says, ‘Let us be friends,’ and stays the night from time to time. Helen’s nightie is yellow scattered with white stars. She pretends she is a girl again. She pulls the strings that make her love. She loves. If anyone asks her, she says she loves.
He says, ‘Perhaps one day we will get married.’
‘When?’ she asks.
‘When we have grown new skins,’ he says, ‘renewed ourselves like the snakes we are. It takes seven years, I believe.’
They go on holiday to the Isle of Skye. Helen climbs a mountain, stands on the edge of a precipice and teeters.
‘Not here,’ she says, presently.
‘Not here,’ he says. He hasn’t moved. ‘Besides, look at the sky. It is beautiful.’
Helen looks at the dusty sky.
‘Besides,’ he says, ‘who would look after Alice? I have no gift for children. I do not like them.’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Who would look after little dusty Alice?’ and he thinks he has won. His other children live with a sister of Y’s, whose husband is an ex-R.A.F. man. They run a paper shop in Essex.
After the holiday he goes back to the village and his Barbara, who never has visions of self-destruction, or urges to suicide. She is shocked at the very thought. When she is depressed she makes jam or a batch of cakes. ‘I have my own ways of being creative,’ she says, and he finds such presumption amusing and even touching.
‘One day,’ he says to Helen – he visits her once a month or so, when he has business in London, ‘we will live together. We might even marry, with the full rites of the Church.’
‘When?’ she asks.
‘One day,’ he says. He no longer talks about Y. Helen thinks it might be true. One day he will marry her. Days slip into days. Now when she looks in a mirror, she sees herself as dusty, too, not just the world around her. She has been in mourning for too long. She complains to Scarlet.
‘It’s no good,’ says Scarlet. ‘You must break with him, never see him again. The world is full of men. You have so much to offer. You are still young; you are handsome, Alice is an asset, not a liability.’
‘No,’ says Helen. ‘I am thirty-six. I am going off.’
‘Your life is only half-way through.’
‘I am not interested in the second half.’
‘You need to meet a proper man.’
‘There is only one man for me, and that is X. I cannot get interested in the others. God knows I try. I went out to dinner with a young man; and there was a woman at the next table who looked familiar. I realized it was Y. It wasn’t really, of course. How many tall pale women there are in the world; I’d never realized. After that I had nothing to say to him, and he lost interest. When there is something so enormous to be said, you see, which can’t be said, then silence is the only possibility.’
‘Stay to dinner tonight,’ says Scarlet. ‘Meet some more people.’
‘I must go back to Alice,’ says Helen. ‘I like to be there at her bedtime.’ She is growing closer to Alice. When they go walking, they hold hands. Helen is more and more reluctant to be separated from her.
‘I wish Alice had been born a boy,’ she says. ‘What kind of life is it for a girl? I am thirty-six. Being young lasts so short a time. Do you really see me as an old lady?’
‘So am I thirty-six.’ says Scarlet, ‘or nearly. But I don’t feel it as you do. Life goes on. It gets better, even.’
‘You were – forgive me – very plain when you were a girl. Life has got better for you as you went on. Mine has been a falling away. You are accustomed to living unadmired, but loved. I have only ever had admiration, and envy. Now even that will be taken away from me. I am to be left with nothing. I have achieved nothing in my life. I should never have survived. I should have died with the others.’
‘I hope,’ says Scarlet, ‘You won’t do anything silly.’
‘Kill myself? Why not?’
‘Because of Alice.’
‘Ah yes,’ says Helen. ‘That’s what everyone says. Does one want life for one’s children? Can one?’
‘Of course,’ says Scarlet, shocked.
‘The pain so outweighs the pleasure,’ says Helen.
‘Not for everyone,’ says Scarlet. ‘You feel like that now. You probably won’t tomorrow. Anyway you have no business to feel it for Alice.’
But Helen does not look convinced.
‘If only he would marry me…’ she says.
‘It would make no difference,’ says Scarlet. ‘Your happiness must come from yourself. It will never come from others.’
Helen smiles politely: it is a beautiful smile, as always, although disbelieving. These days Scarlet almost loves her.
X has an exhibition of paintings in a London gallery. It opens on a Saturday. He spends the Friday night with Helen; he asks her, not Barbara, to be with him at the opening. She meets him at the gallery.
No one speaks to her. All these years after Y’s death, she is still shunned, abhorred and witch-hunted. She doesn’t mind much. Their hatred too has a dusty flavour. X is surrounded by admirers, swooped on by ageing vulture ladies with large sad eyes. He ignores Helen: he behaves as if she was a stranger, as if he had brought her with him to prove how much of a stranger she is. She is an episode in his past, no more. His life goes on from strength to strength. Helen goes home alone. X does not visit her the next day.
Instead Y walks beside her, holding her hand, explaining how Helen can stop crying. Byzantia is supposed to be coming to tea. Helen half hopes she will arrive, half hopes she won’t, so that Y will fade again into the wallpaper. Byzantia does not arrive.
Helen puts Alice to bed. Alice, hot and restless, grizzles and cries, and disturbs her conversation with Y. Y is being very kind.
‘It should have been you and me,’ Y says. ‘Not you and X. You would have been my daughter. Well, it can still be like that. The world is an imperfect place. The only perfection is death, silence, and completeness. One fights it too much, too hard, and too long. Will you join me?’
In the next room Alice cries.
‘What about Alice?’ asks Helen.
‘Alice? Alice should never have been. Listen, how unhappy she sounds. She has no lawful place in the world.’
Helen goes into Alice’s room, and gives her half a sleeping pill. Alice drifts happily into sleep.
‘Millions of people are born every day,’ says Helen. ‘Other millions die. What does it mean?’
Y smiles as if she knew.
‘What do I mean when I say “I”?’ asks Helen. ‘I wondered that when I was six. I still don’t know. All I know is that I is the bit that suffers, and without the I there would be peace.’
Y says nothing. Really, there is no more need.
‘I cannot bear to wake up another morning, knowing that the day will hold no pleasure, only pain,’ says Helen, ‘and that the next day when I wake it will be just the same, except I will be a little older, a little further down the path I am now obliged to travel. I can look back over my shoulder, but that is all. I cannot turn, and go back the way I came, which was through green grass and flowers, bright days, and black nights with brilliant stars. I want to finish now, sit down and fall asleep, while these good things can still at least be seen when I look back. Soon I will have travelled so far they will have faded altogether.’
Y nods. Helen thinks her friend is getting impatient.
‘Wait,’ she says. ‘I will be with you soon.’
She goes into Alice’s room, shuts the windows and turns on the gas; she does not ask Y in, but sits there patiently by herself, not unhappily. She feels she has been half-dead for so long that the difference in state will not be very great.