Enid’s mother Patty didn’t stand a chance. That was in the Great War, in the fifties, when women were at war with women. Victory meant a soft bed and an easy life: defeat meant loneliness and the humiliation of the spinster. These days, of course, women have declared themselves allies, and united in a new war, a cold war, against the common enemy, man. But then, in the Great War, things were very different. And Patty didn’t stand a chance against Helene. She was, for one thing, badly equipped for battle. Her legs were thick and practical, her breasts floppy, and her features, though pleasant enough, lacked erotic impact. Her blue eyes were watery and her hair frizzy and cut brusquely for easy washing and combing. ‘I can’t stand all this dolling up,’ she’d say. ‘What’s the point?’
Patty cooked with margarine because it was cheaper than butter and her white sauces were always lumpy. She wouldn’t keep pot plants, or souvenirs, or even a cat. What was the point?
She didn’t like sex and, though she never refused her husband Arthur, she washed so carefully before and after, she made him feel he must have been really rather dirty.
Patty, in other words, was what she was, and saw no point in pretending to be anything else. Or in cooking with mushrooms or holidaying abroad or buying a new pair of shoes for Enid, her only child, when she had a perfectly good pair already, or going with her husband to the pub. And, indeed, there very often was no point in these things, except surely life must be more than something just to be practically and sensibly got through?
Enid thought so. Enid thought she’d do better than her mother in the Great War. Enid buffed her pre-pubertal nails and arranged wild flowers in jam jars and put them on the kitchen table. Perhaps she could see what was coming!
For all Patty’s good qualities – cleanliness, honesty, thrift, reliability, kindness, sobriety, and so on – did her no good whatsoever when Helene came along. Or so Enid observed. Patty was asleep on duty, and there all of a sudden was Helene, the enemy at the gate, with her slim legs and her bedroom eyes, enticing Arthur away. ‘But what does she see in Arthur?’ asked Patty, dumbfounded. What you don’t! the ten-year-old Enid thought, but did not say.
In fact, the Second World Male War, from 1939 to 1945, which men had waged among themselves in the name of Democracy, Freedom, Racial Supremacy and so forth, to the great detriment of women and children everywhere, had sharpened the savagery of the Female War. There just weren’t enough men to go around. In ordinary times Helene would have gone into battle for some unmarried professional man – accountant or executive – but having lost country, home, family and friends in the ruins of Berlin now laid claim to Arthur, Patty’s husband, a railway engineer in the north of England, who painted portraits as a hobby. The battle she fought for him was short and sharp. She shaved her shapely legs and flashed her liquid eyes.
‘She’s no better than a whore,’ said Patty. ‘Shaving her legs!’ If God put hairs on your legs, thought Patty, then a woman’s duty, and her husband’s, too, is to put up with them.
Helene thought otherwise. And in her eyes Arthur saw the promise of secret bliss, the complicity of abandon, and all the charm of sin: the pink of her rosy nipples suffused the new world she offered him. And so, without much difficulty Helene persuaded Arthur to leave Patty and Enid, give up his job, paint pictures for a living and think the world well lost for love.
By some wonderful fluke – wonderful, that is, for Arthur and Helene, if infuriating for Patty – Arthur’s paintings were an outstanding commercial success. They became the worst bestselling paintings of the sixties, and Arthur, safely divorced from Patty, lived happily ever after with Helene, painting the occasional painting of wide-eyed deer, and sipping champagne by the side of swimming pools. ‘Nasty acidy stuff, champagne,’ said Patty.
Enid – Patty and Arthur’s daughter – never really forgave her mother for losing the war. As if poor Patty didn’t have enough to put up with already, without being blamed by her daughter for something she could hardly help! But that’s the way these things go – life is the opposite of fair. It stuns you one moment and trips your feet from under you the next, and then jumps up and down on you, pound, pound, pound for good measure.
You should have seen Enid, when she was twelve, twisting the knife in her mother’s wounds, poking about among the lumps of the cauliflower cheese, saying: ‘Do we have to eat this? No wonder Dad left home!’ ‘Eat it up, it’s good for you,’ her mother would reply. ‘If you want something fancy go and live with your stepmother.’
And, indeed, Enid had been asked, but Enid never went. Enid would twist a knife but not deliver a mortal wound, not to her mother. Instead she took up the armoury her mother never wore, breathed on it, burnished it, sharpened its cutting edges, prepared for war herself. Long after the war was over, Enid was still fighting. She was like some mad Aussie soldier hiding out in the Malayan jungle, still looking for a foe that had years since thrown away its grenades and taken to TV assembly instead.
At sixteen Enid scanned the fashion pages and read hints on make-up and how to be an interesting person; she went weekly to the theatre and art galleries and classical music concerts and exercised every day, and not until she was eighteen did she feel properly prepared to step into the battlefield. She was intelligent, and thought it sensible enough to go to university, although she chose English literature as the subject least likely to put men off.
‘Nothing puts a man off like a clever woman,’ said Helene when Enid visited. Now warriors in the Great War thought nothing of swapping secrets. Intelligence services of warring countries, hand in glove, glove in hand! It’s always been so. Just as there’s always been trade with enemy nations, unofficially if not officially. Helene lisped out quite a few secrets to Enid: her accent tinged with all the poise and decadence of a vanished Europe. ‘My foreign wife!’ Arthur would say, proudly in his honest, northern, jovial, middle-aged voice. Arthur was the J. B. Priestley of the art world – good in spite of himself.
Oh, Patty had lost a lovely prize, Enid knew it! Her beloved father! What a victory Patty’s could have been – and yet she chose defeat. She’d chosen a bra to flatten an already flat chest. ‘What’s the point?’ she asked, when Enid said she was going off to university. Couldn’t she even see that?
Little Enid, so bright and knowledgeable and determined! So young, so ruthless – a warrior! And fortune favours the brave, the strong, the ruthless. That was the point. Enid’s professor, Walter Walther, looked at Enid in a lingering way, and Enid looked straight back. Take me! Well, not quite take me. Love me now, take me eventually.
Walter Walther was forty-eight. Enid was nineteen. Enid was studying Chaucer. Enid said in an essay that Chaucer’s Parfait Gentle Knight was no hero but a crude mercenary, and Chaucer, in his adulation, was being ironic; Walter Walther hadn’t thought of that before, and at forty-eight it is delightful to meet someone who says something you haven’t thought of before. And she was so young, and dewy, almost downy, so that if she was out in the rain the drops lay like silver balls upon her skin; and she was surprisingly knowledgeable for one so young, and knew all about music and painting, which Walter didn’t, much, and she had an interesting, rich father, if a rather dowdy, vague, distant little mother. And Enid was warm.
Oh, Enid was warm! Enid was warm against his body on stolen nights. Walter’s wife Rosanne, four years older than he, was over fifty. Rain fell off her like water off a duck’s back – her skin being oily, not downy. Enid had met Rosanne once or twice baby-sitting; or rather adolescent-sitting, for Walter and Rosanne’s two children, Barbara and Bernadette.
Rosanne didn’t stand a chance against Enid. Enid still fought the old, old war, and Rosanne had put away her weapons long ago.
‘He’s so unhappy with his wife,’ said Enid to Margot. ‘She’s such a cold unfeeling bitch. She’s only interested in her career, not in him at all, or the children.’ Margot was Enid’s friend. Margot had owl eyes and a limpid handshake and not a hope of seducing, let alone winning, a married professor. But Margot understood Enid, and was a good friend to her, and had most of the qualities Enid’s mother Patty had, and one more important one besides – self-doubt.
‘Men never leave their wives for their mistresses,’ warned Margot. It was a myth much put about, no doubt by wives, in the days of the Great War, to frighten the enemy. Enid knew better: she could tell a savage war mask from the frightened face of a foe in retreat. Enid knew Rosanne was frightened by the way she would follow Enid into the kitchen if Walter Walther was there alone, getting ice for drinks or scraping mud from the children’s shoes.
Enid was pleased. A frightened foe seldom wins. The attacker is usually victorious, even if the advantage of surprise is gone, especially if the victim is old: Rosanne was old. She’d had the children late. It wasn’t as if Walter Walther had really wanted children. He knew what kind of mother she’d make – cold.
Enid was warm. She knew how to silhouette her head against the sunlight so that her hair made a halo round her head, and then turn her face slowly so that the pure line of youth, the one that runs from ear to chin, showed to advantage. Rosanne had trouble with her back. Trouble with her back! Rosanne was a hag with one foot in the grave and with the iron bonds of matrimony would drag Walter Walther down there with her, if Walter didn’t somehow break the bonds.
And Enid knew how to behave in bed, too: always keeping something in reserve, never taking the initiative, always the pupil, never the teacher. Enid had seen the Art of Love in Rosanne’s bookshelves, and guessed her to be sexually experimental and innovatory. And she was later proved right, when Walter managed to voice one of his few actual complaints about his wife: there was, he felt, something indecent about Rosanne’s sexual prowess: something disagreeably insatiable in her desires; it made Walter, from time to humiliating time, impotent.
Otherwise, it wasn’t so much lack of love for Rosanne that Walter suffered from, as surfeit of love for Enid.
Enid exulted. And Rosanne was using worn-out old weapons: that particular stage in the war had ended long ago. The battle these days went to the innocent, not to the experienced. Modern man, Enid knew by instinct, especially those with a tendency to impotence, requires docility in bed and admiration and exultation – not excitement and exercise.
‘He’ll never leave the children,’ said Margot. ‘Men don’t.’ But Enid had been left. Enid knew very well that men did. And Barbara and Bernadette were not the most lovable of children – how could they be? With such a mother as Rosanne – a working mother who never even remembered her children’s birthdays, never baked a cake, never ironed or darned, never cleaned the oven? Rosanne was a translator with the International Cocoa Board – a genius at languages, but not at motherhood. She was cold, stringy and sour – all the things soft, warm, rounded Enid was not. Walter said so, in bed, and increasingly out of it.
‘What are you playing at?’ asked Helene, crossly. Her own attitude to the world was moderating. She was an old retired warrior, sitting in a castle she’d won by force of arms, shaking her head at the shockingness of war.
Patty now lived alone in a little council flat in Birmingham. As Enid had left home Arthur no longer paid Patty maintenance. Why should he?
‘You want Walter because Walter’s Rosanne’s,’ observed Patty to Enid one day in a rare rush of insight to the head. Patty’s doctor had started giving her oestrogen for her hot flushes, and side-effects were beginning to show. There was a geranium in a pot on Patty’s windowsill, when Enid went to break the news to her mother that Walter was finally leaving Rosanne. A geranium! Patty, who never could see the point in pot plants!
All the same, something, if only oestrogen, was now putting a sparkle in Patty’s eye, and she turned up at Walter and Enid’s wedding in a kind of velvet safari jacket which made her look almost sexy, and when Arthur crossed the room to speak to his ex-wife, she did not turn away, but actually saw the point of shaking his hand, and even laying her cheek against his, in affection and forgiveness.
Enid, in her white velvet trouser suit, saw: and a pang of almost physical pain roared through her, and for a second, just a second, looking at Walter, she saw not her great love but an elderly, paunchy, lecherous stranger. Even though he’d slimmed down quite remarkably during the divorce. It wasn’t surprising! Rosanne had behaved like a bitch, and it had told on them both. Nevertheless, people remarked at the wedding that they’d never seen Walter looking so well – or Enid so elegant. He’d somehow scaled down to forty, and she up to thirty. Hardly a difference at all!
Barbara and Bernadette were bridesmaids. Rosanne had been against the idea, out of envy and malice mixed. She hadn’t even been prepared to make their dresses, which Enid thought particularly spiteful. ‘I’d never have made a bridesmaid’s dress for you,’ said Patty. ‘Not to wear at your father’s wedding.’ ‘That’s altogether different,’ said Enid, hurt and confused by the way Patty was seeing the war, almost as if she, Patty, were Rosanne’s ally; more Helene’s enemy than Enid’s mother.
And then Helene upset her. ‘I hope you’re not thinking of having children,’ she said, during the reception. ‘Of course I am,’ said Enid. ‘Some men can’t stand it,’ said Helene. ‘Your father, for one. Why do you think I never had any?’ ‘Well, I’m sure he could stand me,’ said Enid, with a self-confidence she did not feel. For perhaps he just plain couldn’t? Perhaps some of the blame for his departure was Enid’s, not Patty’s. Perhaps if she’d been nicer her father would never have left? And perhaps, indeed, he wouldn’t!
Well, if we can’t be nice, we can at least try to be perfect. Enid set out on her journey through life with perfection in mind. Doing better! Oh, how neat the corners of the beds she tucked, how fresh the butter, how crisp the tablecloth! Her curtains were always fully lined, her armpits smooth and washed, never merely sprayed. Enid never let her weapons get rusty. She would do better, thank you, than Patty, or Helene, or Rosanne.
Walter Walther clearly adored his Enid and let the world know it. His colleagues half envied, half pitied him. Walter would ring Enid from the department twice a day and talk baby-talk at her. Until recently he’d talked to his daughter Barbara in just such a manner. His colleagues came to the conclusion, over many a coffee table, that now the daughter had reached puberty the father, in marrying a girl of roughly the same age, was acting out incest fantasies too terrible to acknowledge. No one mentioned the word love: for this was the new language of the post-war age. If there was to be no hate, how could there be love?
In the meantime, for Walter and Enid, there was perpetual trouble with Rosanne. She insisted at first on staying in the matrimonial home, and it took a lawsuit and some fairly sharp accountants to drive her out: presently she lived with the girls in a little council flat. Oddly enough, it was rather like Patty’s. Practical, but somehow depressing. ‘You see,’ said Enid. ‘No gift for living! Poor Walter! What a terrible life she gave him.’ In the Great War men gave women money, and women gave men life.
Barbara and Bernadette came to stay at weekends. They had their old rooms. Enid prettified them, and lined the curtains. She was a better mother to Barbara and Bernadette than Rosanne had ever been. Walter said so. Enid remembered their birthdays, and saw to their verrucas and had their hair styled. They looked at her with sullen gratitude, like slaves saved from slaughter.
Rosanne lost her job. Rosanne said – of course, it was because the responsibility of being a one-parent family and earning a living was too much for her, but Enid and Walter knew the loss of her job was just a simple matter of redundancy combined with lack of charm. Bernadette’s asthma got worse. ‘Of course the poor child’s ill,’ said Enid. ‘With such a mother!’ Enid didn’t believe in truces. She ignored white flags and went in for the kill.
Enid had a pond built in the garden and entertained Walter’s friends on Campari and readings of Shakespeare’s sonnets. They were literary people, after all, or claimed to be. ‘Couldn’t we do without the sonnets?’ said Walter.
But Enid insisted on the sonnets, and the friends drifted away. ‘It’s Rosanne’s doing,’ said Enid. ‘She’s turned them against us.’ And she twined her white, soft, serpent’s arms round his grizzly, stranger body and he believed her. His students, he noticed, seemed less respectful of him than they had been: not as if he had grown younger but they had grown older. Air came through the lecture-room windows, on a hot summer’s day, like a sigh. Well, at least he was married, playing honestly and fair, unlike his colleagues, who were for the most part hit-and-run seducers. As for Rosanne, he knew she knew how to look after herself. She always had. A man, in the Great War, usually preferred a woman who couldn’t.
‘Let’s have a baby of our own soon,’ said Enid. A baby! He hadn’t thought of that. She was his baby. Or was he hers?
‘We’re so happy,’ said Enid. ‘You and I. It doesn’t matter what the world thinks or says. We were just both a little out of step, that’s all, time-wise. God meant us for each other. Don’t you feel that?’
He queried her use of the word God, but otherwise agreed with what she said. Her words came as definite instruction from some powerful, knowledgeable source. They flowed, unsullied by doubt. He, being older, had to grope for meanings. He was too wise, and this could only diffuse his certainty, since wisdom is the acknowledgment of ignorance.
‘Of course you should have a baby, Enid,’ said Patty. ‘Why not?’ But she wasn’t really thinking. She was having an affair with a mini-cab driver, and had forgotten about Enid. ‘Your behaviour is obscene and disgusting,’ Enid shouted at her mother. ‘He’s young.’
‘What’s the point in your making all this fuss?’ asked Patty. ‘I deserve a little happiness in my life, and I’m sure you brought me precious little!’
Enid got pregnant, straight away. Walter went out and got drunk when he heard, with old friends of himself and Rosanne. Enid was so upset by this double disloyalty she went and stayed with her friend Margot for at least three days.
Margot was married and pregnant, too, and by one of Walter Walther’s students, who had spots and bad breath. They lived on their grants, and beans and cider. Nevertheless, her husband went with her to the antenatal clinic and they pored over baby books together. Walter Walther took the view, common in the Great War, that the begetting of children was something to do with the one-upmanship of woman against woman, and very little to do with the man.
‘Look, Enid,’ said Walter, a new Walter, briskly and unkindly, ‘you just get on with it by yourself.’ Arthur had left Patty to get on with it by herself, too. Her very name, Enid, had been a last-minute choice by Patty with the registrar hovering over her hospital bed, because Arthur just left it to her.
‘You can’t have everything,’ was what Helene said, when Enid murmured a complaint or two. ‘You can’t have status, money, adoration and what Margot has as well.’
‘Why not?’ demanded Enid. ‘I want everything!’
Enid saw herself on a mountain top, a million women bowing down before her, acknowledging her victory. Her foot would be heavy on the necks of those she humbled. That was how it ought to be. She pulled herself together. She knew that, in the Great War, being pregnant could make you or break you. Great prizes were to be won – the best mother, the prettiest child, the whitest white – but much was risked. The enemy could swoop down, slender-waisted and laughing and lively, and deliver any number of mortal wounds. So Enid wore her prettiest clothes, and sighed a little but never grunted when the baby lay on some pelvic nerve or other, and never let Walter suffer a moment because of what he had done to her. (In those pre-pill days men made women pregnant: women didn’t just get pregnant.)
His boiled egg and toast soldiers and freshly milled coffee and the single flower in the silver vase were always there on the breakfast table at half past eight sharp and they’d eat together, companionably. Rosanne had slopped Sugar Puffs into bowls for the family breakfast, and they’d eaten among the uncleared children’s homework and students’ essays. Slut!
Walter was protective. ‘We have to take extra special care of you,’ he’d say, helping her across roads. But he seemed a little embarrassed. Something grated: she didn’t know what. They ate in rather more often than before.
Then Rosanne, who ought by rights to have been lying punch-drunk in some obscure corner of the battlefield, rose up and delivered a nasty body-blow. Barbara and Bernadette were to come to live with Enid and Walter. Rosanne couldn’t cope, in such crowded surroundings. She had a new job, and couldn’t always be rushing home for Bernadette’s asthma. Could she?
‘A new boyfriend, more like,’ said Walter, bitterly. Enid restrained from pointing out that Rosanne was an old, old woman with a bad back and hardly in the field for admirers.
Now six perfectly cooked boiled eggs on the table each morning – Bernadette and Barbara demanded two each – is twelve times as difficult to achieve as two. By the time the last one’s in, the first one’s cooked, but which one is it?
Walter looked at his bowl of Sugar Puffs one morning and said, ‘Just like old times,’ and the girls looked knowingly and giggled. They looked at Enid and her swelling tum with contempt and pity. They borrowed her clothes and her make-up. They refused to be taken to art galleries, or theatres; they refused even to play Monopoly, let alone Happy Families. They referred to their father as the Old Goat.
Sometimes she hated them. But Walter would not let her. ‘Look,’ said Walter, ‘you did come along and disrupt their lives. You owe them something, at least.’ As if it was all nothing to do with him. Which in a way it wasn’t. It was between Rosanne and Enid.
Enid locked herself out of the house one day and, though she knew the girls were inside, when she knocked they wouldn’t let her in. It was raining. Afterwards they just said they hadn’t heard. And she’d fallen and hurt her knee trying to climb in the window, and might have lost the baby. Bernadette threw a bad asthma attack and got all the attention.
Walter spent more and more time in the department. She and he hardly made love at all any more. It didn’t seem right.
Enid went into labour at eight o’clock one evening. She rang Walter Walther at the English Department where he said he was, but he wasn’t. She rang Margot and wept, and Margot said, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever known you cry, Enid,’ and Margot’s spotty husband said, ‘You’ll probably find him round at Rosanne’s. I wouldn’t tell you, if it wasn’t an emergency.’
‘Yes,’ said Barbara and Bernadette. ‘He goes round to see Mum quite a lot. We didn’t like to tell you because we didn’t want to upset you.
‘Really,’ they said, ‘the whole thing was a plot to get rid of us. The thing is, neither of them can stand us.’ (Barbara and Bernadette went to one of the large new comprehensive schools, where there were pupil-counsellors, who could explain everything and anything, and were never lost for words.)
Enid screamed and wept all through her labour, not just from pain. They’d never known a noisier mother, they said: and she’d been so quiet and elegant and self-controlled throughout her pregnancy.
Enid gave birth to a little girl. Now in the Great War, the birth of a girl was, understandably, and unlike now, cause for commiseration rather than rejoicing. Nevertheless, Enid rejoiced. And in so doing, abandoned a battle which was really none of her making; she laid down her arms: she kissed her mother and Helene when they came to visit her, clasped her baby and admitted weakness and distress to Barbara and Bernadette, who actually then seemed quite to like her.
Walter Walther did not come home. He stayed with Rosanne. Enid, Barbara and Bernadette lived in the same house, shared suspender belts, shampoo and boyfriends, and looked after baby Belinda. Walter and Rosanne visited, sheepishly, from time to time, and sent money. Enid went back to college and took a degree in psychology, and was later to earn a good living as a research scientist.
Later still she was to become something of a propagandist in the new cold war against men; she wore jeans and a donkey jacket and walked round linked arm-in-arm with women. But that was, perhaps, hardly surprising, so treacherous had the old male allies turned out to be. All the same, yesterday’s enemy, tomorrow’s friend! Who is to say what will happen next?