‘I know what the matter is with you,’ says Marjorie, as they wait for their coffee, ‘and with me. It’s the Stay Put poster. It has embedded itself in our minds.’
Oh yes. The Stay Put poster, on the notice boards of Church, Pub, School, Women’s Institute and Station, along with the Ministry of Food recipes for carrot cake and cod-and-potato pie.
‘What do I do?
– If I hear news that the Germans have landed? I stay put. I say to myself “our chaps will deal with that”. I do not say “I must get out of here” whether at work or home, I just stay put.’
‘I stay put at work, and you stay put at home,’ says Marjorie. ‘What good little girls we are.’
Snip, snip, snip, goes the shopkeeper’s scissors round coupons and points. Little packets of margarine, smaller ones of butter, tiny squares of cheese pass over the counter. Melon jam and milk powder. That’s all for this week. Ration books get flabby with use. Identity cards to children, are a source of pride. So that’s who one really is! The suicide rate plummets. The standard of health soars. If you can’t fill up on chips, you have to on carrots. War babies grow inches taller than pre-war ones. Britain’s finest hour!
The buses are filled with turbaned women on their way to work in the munitions factory. The sweet-shop lady’s son is killed in action. The baker’s brother loses a leg. The gardener who once helped Esther with the herbaceous borders is posted missing. Regulars at the Rose and Crown, laughing, handsome, horse-playing young men from the air-field, fail to turn up at their usual time. Other young men take their place at the bar, leaning and crowding in the same way, ordering the same drinks. It is hard to tell them apart.
Sometimes Gwyneth lies in bed at night and cries. Why? Chloe does not know. For herself or for the world. In the morning she is brisk and competent again. Chloe and she follow the early-morning exercise classes on the radio as best they can in their tiny room. Chloe breaks her little finger hitting the wall as she swings her arm. Well, there’s a war on. Hardship is no longer one’s own responsibility.
A German bomber is shot down, and explodes a mile or so from the village. The charred remains, metal and human, are cordoned off. A week later Marjorie comes across a severed human arm, still in its uniform sleeve, in a ditch.
Always Marjorie.
‘It’s nothing to do with staying put,’ says Chloe. ‘I love my husband.’
‘Love!’ says Marjorie. ‘What’s that? At your age?’
She gets up, goes over to the Cona coffee machine, and helps herself and Chloe to coffee. The waiter is nowhere in sight. Chloe longs to leave, but Marjorie has no intention of giving up.
‘One gets driven too far,’ says Marjorie. ‘Like Edwin Songford. Did you know he once raped Grace? She would walk round the house with no clothes on.’
Chloe blenches.
‘Grace will say anything to liven up a conversation,’ she says, faintly.
‘What’s more,’ says Marjorie, ‘she says that when her father was a little boy in India his father wired him up to a machine which gave him an electric shock if he masturbated, and that’s what rendered him impotent for ever.’
‘Then how did he rape her?’
‘She didn’t go into that.’
‘And how did she get born in the first place?’
‘You take everything so literally, Chloe,’ Marjorie complains. ‘And the reason he was cashiered, was because he cut a hole in the floor to watch his commanding office copulating with his lady in the room below.’
‘Poor Edwin,’ says Chloe. ‘Why is she so dreadful about him?’
‘Because he’s alone and senile on the Bournemouth coast and if she had a good word to say for him she might feel obliged to go and look after him. But it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the rape story is true. Grace was very provocative and very inquisitive, and the whole set-up was there waiting. In primitive communities, I may say, the wife who finds her sexual duties distasteful will rear one of the daughters to take her place in the marital bed. Remember how Esther kept insisting Grace wasn’t developed enough to wear a bra, so she used to bounce about the house, when the rest of us were decently encased in solid boned uplift bras?’
‘Nobody bounced in those days. One died with shame if a nipple showed through. Anyway, you’re talking about incest, not rape, and I don’t believe a word of it. Life just wasn’t like that.’
‘Yes it was,’ says Marjorie. ‘You just never noticed. You walked past that ditch twice without seeing that pilot’s arm. I was the only one to see it.’
‘Perhaps it was only there because you expected it to be,’ says Chloe, desperately.
‘According to Grace,’ Marjorie goes on, ‘it happened after I’d gone back to London to stay in the Frognal house, and Edwin was worrying about Grace’s purity. He’d come back from the Rose and Crown and gone to her room to check that she was there, and she wasn’t. So he blamed poor Esther for it, and she went to bed crying, and he sat up waiting with a bottle of whisky. When she finally came in about three, all flushed and mocking and furious – you know what she was like – he followed her up to his room and took off his belt to thwack her and his trousers fell down and that’s when it happened.’
‘I suppose,’ says Chloe gloomily, ‘that if you have a fantasy as detailed as that it might as well be true. If she’s determined that he raped her, the facts of the matter are irrelevant.’
‘That is simply not true,’ says Marjorie, ‘and you know it. A fact is a fact, and a fantasy open to Freudian interpretation.’
‘Whosoever lusteth in his heart,’ says Chloe, ‘as my mother used to say.’
‘No wonder you can’t keep Oliver in control,’ says Marjorie. ‘Why do you put up with Françoise?’
‘Because she makes Oliver happy,’ says Chloe.
‘And what about you?’
‘She doesn’t make me unhappy,’ says Chloe, cautiously.
‘She ought to,’ says Marjorie.
And what do you know about it, thinks Chloe, furious. Unmarried as you are and always have been and always will be, so sure you are of ought and oughtn’t.
‘You’re like your mother,’ Marjorie goes on, blandly. ‘You put up with too much. Endurance is a disease, and you caught it from her.’
‘It’s a question of alternatives,’ says Chloe. ‘How would my mother have lived, except by putting up with things? And what could Esther have done, except stay with Edwin? How would she have lived? Women live by necessity, not choice.’
‘Women who don’t earn,’ says Marjorie.
‘I tried to earn,’ says Chloe. ‘I did, and that’s when the trouble started. And Esther Songford didn’t have too bad a life, in spite of what you say. Married people don’t, it just looks dreadful from the outside.’
‘It doesn’t look,’ says Marjorie. ‘It is.’
‘She had an inner life, which nothing could touch.’
‘That’s not true,’ says Marjorie. ‘It was touched, and braised and destroyed. Esther hurt dreadfully when Edwin mocked her, or Grace was rude to her, I know she did. I had to watch her being brave.’
‘It wasn’t like that,’ says Chloe. ‘She had all kinds of pleasure. Her flower garden and the house, and making do. And when Edwin was out she’d get quite skittish.’
And indeed, Esther would sometimes act like a kitten on a windy evening, prancing and dancing and singing around the kitchen, to the mingled delight and embarrassment of the girls.
‘Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?’ she’d sing, but when the front door opened at eleven-thirty, and Edwin returned from the pub, she would be, and with reason.