Marjorie, Grace and me.
Who’d have thought it, when we were young, and starting life together, that Marjorie could ever have taken charge, would ever have stopped crying, fawning, placating, and would have developed these brisk satirical edges? Let alone earned £6,000 a year.
Poor little Marjorie, with her pear-shaped body, her frizzy hair and oily skin, her sad, astonished eyes and her sharp mind, sawing raggedly through illusion like a bread-knife through a hunk of frozen fish. Battling through rejection after rejection, too honest ever to pretend they were not happening.
Marjorie has not cried, she tells me, for twenty-five years. She got through all her tears in childhood, she explains; she used them all up then. (Grace, on the other hand, dry-eyed then, is tearful now. Perhaps we all have our quota to get through. My mother would say so.) Along with Marjorie’s tearducts, it seems, the rest of her dried up too. Womb, skin, bosom, mind. She shrivelled before our eyes, in fact, after her Ben died, the love of her life, long ago. Only once a month, punctually with the full moon, she practically bleeds to death, all but soaking the ground where she stands.
Poor little Marjorie, obliged by fate to live like a man, taking her sexual pleasures if and when she finds them, her own existence, perforce, sufficient to itself. Childless, deprived of those pilferings into past and future with which the rest of us, more fertile, more in the steady stream of generation, enrich our lives. Yet still with her woman’s body and her rioting hormones to contend with.