57

St Stephen’s hospital in the Fulham Road, where Helen has been taken, is overdue for demolition. Or so the taxi-driver tells Chloe, on her long journey across London from Liverpool Street Station, via St George’s hospital, to the Fulham Road, in the very thick of the rush-hour.

‘That place! It’s alive with black-beetles. I lost an uncle in there. Collapsed in the street and they whipped out a kidney. When he came round the nurse asked him how he felt. “All right,” he said. “Much better than when they took out the other one.”’

Chloe is silent.

‘No offence,’ he says. ‘Just a joke to cheer you up. No-one close you’re visiting, I hope.’

‘No,’ says Chloe. ‘Not really close.’

Marjorie’s mother Helen. It was Helen’s spite which drove Patrick into Midge’s arms, and so, though indirectly, drove Midge to destroy herself. Poor Midge, taken unconscious from her home, bound for St Stephen’s too, but never getting there, dying in the ambulance instead.

It was Stanhope and Kestrel’s birthday, though they were still of an age to prefer the wrappings of the birthday present rather than the present itself, having been in the world only two short years.

Marjorie’s mother Helen. Trembling between youth and middle-age, back from Australia, loverless for an amazing moment, throwing Patrick out of Frognal. Motivated by what? A sense of property abused, or of flesh and blood defiled? For the big living room was stacked with portraits of Marjorie naked, and Marjorie naked, in Helen’s view, was altogether too lumpy, bumpy, frizzy and pear-shaped an affair to reflect credit on her mother. Or was it merely a trivial irritation to find Marjorie thus not personally care-taking, but off at Oxford taking a further degree, and financed by sources well out of Helen’s control, having left the Frognal house in the care of a man who did not cut his hair or do up his shirt, or use a fork if fingers would do, and wiped his greasy fingers on the mat made by the hair on his chin stretching down to meet the hair on his chest, reddish, coarse and curly – was it this irritation which led Helen to throw Patrick out, destroy the paintings, and put a padlock on the front door?

The door did not even close properly, and through the gap, narrow as it was, squeezed for several subsequent years a tide of cats, litter and leaves. Helen would have done better to have allowed Patrick to stay, and certainly not to have destroyed the paintings, which later would have been worth many thousands – although painted on too large a scale for the really perspicacious buyer. But of course Helen, and she was the first to admit it, was always prodigal with man-made works of art, seeing them as something presumptuous in the face of her own God-made female perfection, and a kind of challenge to it.

She threw Marjorie out as well. Thus, summoning her from Oxford, meeting her in the refreshment bar at Paddington, over bad coffee:

Helen Marjorie dearest, I am so distressed for you. How unhappy you must be to form an alliance with someone like that! And to think I was not here to protect you from it! To allow yourself to be painted, naked! To open yourself to such ridicule! What a tragedy it is that I could not bring you up myself, and develop your sensitivities. Esther Songford was a sweet soul, but so dull and so plain it would drive anyone to distraction, as you seem to have been. My dear child, I understand your desperation. We must face the fact that you’re no beauty; but it simply is not true that any man is better than no man at all. Better to live in celibacy, believe me, than with a member of the working classes. It is not snobbery, simply that their attitudes to women are different from ours – they make use of their women, treat them as animals, as I am afraid that Patrick Bates has made use of you. I don’t deny that to a certain sort of woman he might appear attractive, and he certainly made every effort to win my affections, Marjorie, I may say, in the hope of further free board and lodging, but he mistook his woman. I know what I have to offer a man, I don’t need the likes of Patrick Bates to tell me so. If you are to survive as a woman, Majorie, and not to shrivel up into the blue-stocking you seem determined to become – what is all this Oxford nonsense? – you must develop a little more pride in your femininity. And that does not mean flaunting your nakedness in front of the working classes like some kind of prostitute. What are we to do with you?

Marjorie But mother!

Helen I have tried and tried to be a good mother to you, and you always let me down. Look at the state of the house—

Marjorie I did my best—

Helen But you did not. Any more than you did your best when your poor father died. I should have been there, and I was not.

Marjorie I sent a telegram—

Helen A telegram which did not arrive. Well, we will not go into that now, or your callousness, or your spite in trying to keep me away. It hurt me very much at the time, but my friend Peter Smilie – he runs the Department of Education in Sydney – has explained the resentments which apparently children – God knows why – hold against their parents. And I am sure your father’s death was sufficient punishment to you. I am just surprised you hold his memory so lightly, Marjorie. It would break his heart to think of you sunk to such depths.

Marjorie But I’m not, mother. It’s not like that. We’re just friends. And poor Patrick, where’s he going to go?

Helen You really think more of him than you do of me, Marjorie, I’m afraid. And don’t tell lies on top of everything else.

She’s quite right. It is a lie. An empty bottle of Grand Marnier, kept beneath Marjorie’s bed, bears witness to it. Guilt depletes Marjorie’s strength.

Marjorie It’s not a lie, and I’m sure Father wouldn’t mind Patrick staying at all. He loved paintings.

Helen Good paintings, dear, not bad painters. You’re so naïve.

Marjorie (Tearful) And I don’t want to be there by myself. It’s haunted.

She had determined never to mention it, too. Rightly. See what happens when she does? Helen is affronted. Haunted? The happiest days in her life – before Marjorie put an end to them – were spent in that house. How can it possibly be haunted?

Helen But you’re supposed to be so clever, Marjorie, how can you talk such nonsense? Haunted! If that’s what you feel about that poor house, we had better lock it up, close it altogether, and I’ll try and find a buyer. It’s too much responsibility if you won’t help me.

Marjorie But where will I go in the vacation?

Helen Stay in Oxford. Such a pretty place.

Marjorie I can’t afford to. I only get a small grant—

Helen Take a job. You’re not too grand for that, I hope, but please not as an artist’s model. You simply haven’t the figure, or the skin. There is to be a portrait of me in this year’s Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy. Isn’t that exciting? And Marjorie if you don’t mind me saying so, you simply must not wear your hair like that. It’s so bad for the shape of your face. You always just thrust it back behind some old scrap of ribbon. I know it’s frizzy and discouraging but you have to work at these things, you know. Good heavens, you’ve drunk your coffee. How could you!

Helen goes off first to the hairdresser, leaving her coffee untouched, and then to buy a padlock and order a carter to transport Marjorie’s things from Frognal to Oxford. Generously, she bears the cost herself. At the Summer Exhibition she meets a man from Newfoundland who owns a trawler fleet, and goes off with him to Northern climes. She looks better, these days, muffled up in sailor’s sweaters than sunning all but naked on the deck of someone’s yacht, and knows it.

Helen does not marry again. She invested the total of her commitment, as women will, who have little to commit, into that first marriage, and the return on the investment proved, in the end, so disappointingly small, that she prefers not to repeat the experience. Like Grace after her, Helen never seems to be short of money. Dim male figures lurk in the background of her life, dispensing riches, kindnesses, holidays. What they get in return is not passion, but a kind of unkind condescension, a grudging parting of the legs, and such a total absence of orgasm as seems to fascinate rather than repel. And so fastidious is she, that to be allowed so much as to admire her is to these suitors a matter of self-congratulation.

Oh messy, modern Marjorie. Living in college at term-time, working in a pub during vacations, sleeping in a room above the bar, looking out at closing time, as once Chloe did, upon those reeling scenes of male depression and debauchery: waiting, as if she knew, for Grace’s wedding and her own fate to come together on the same day.

And Patrick, sent off by Helen into what she thought and hoped would be a wilderness, and which in fact was Midge.

Midge the Mason’s daughter, dead.

Whose fault?