‘How’s your pains?’ asked Frances the next day. She must have fallen asleep while sunbathing; her system had broken down and her long left leg was bright red, and her long right leg was pale.
‘Much better,’ I say. She doesn’t seem too pleased.
‘Would you like to borrow a Tampax?’ she asks, and I realise she wants to be sure I’m actually bleeding, which will prevent my sexual congress with her father. Little does she know.
In actual fact I was now hardly bleeding at all any more: perhaps my body, knowing where its maximum pleasure lay, was taking steps to make itself properly available to Jack the mad trumpeter. Buggery is okay, but not okay: not quite true love. What is the best that can be done in certain circumstances is always in danger of being the thing that needs to be done: like Valium or heroin: an addiction, self-defeating: pleasure turning into necessity.
‘The curse!’ laments Frances. ‘Why do you think God invented it? Punishment, I suppose. Serving women right.’ We are sitting next to each other on the bus. Jack is up front with Sandy arguing over the day’s programme.
‘But why should we be punished?’ I had a feeling she might somehow know, that she possessed her father’s intuition, would put her finger right on it.
‘For being such messy things,’ she said. ‘God didn’t get us right, if you ask me, something went wrong, so He’s taking it out on us. Do you think I’m mad? I’m always saying things like that. People at school say I’m mad.’ She spoke with the complacency of her age: glad to be mad.
I wonder what it would be like to have her as my daughter. She’s fifteen; I’m forty-two. She was born in the year of a termination, the one I had by Godfrey the Goatherd. I am revising my opinion of Frances. I rather like having her about. I might even teach her to read, write and think, as her mother has so singularly failed to do. Her father, of course, cares nothing for the education of a daughter. On the whole he thinks the better informed someone is the more boring they are.
‘Discover a planet!’ I found myself apologising the previous night. ‘Anyone can discover a planet! All you have to do is have the right backing and look in the right place.’
I know it is not given to many of us women to make precisely that statement, but its like is made up and down the country by successful women in various professions, as male members wilt and quail.
‘But, darling, it’s only a little promotion.’
‘I won’t really be making more than you, darling, not if you take the babyminder into account.’
‘Darling, I’m only the token woman on the Board.’
‘Darling, they’re so short of women to be Dames they’ll choose just anyone. Now to be an OBE, like you, is really something.’
‘I only make all this money because the public has no taste. The more you make, the worse you are. Everyone knows that!’ And buggery is all the rage, in certain circles. If you think there’s a connection, that’s up to you. Male frustration constructively contained. I’m not complaining; Sandra the Stargazer is not complaining, only mentioning. The way round it is to lie there and enjoy it. That way family life continues. I might have got on better with Matthew if he had only heard of it.