Down Among the Women (5 page)

It is quite a long time before Scarlet speaks. Then all she says is, ‘Mrs Belcher, I presume.’

Kim’s surname is Belcher. It is the cross—along with the complications of his past—that Susan has to bear; she carries it bravely. Wanda reverted the moment she could to her maiden name, Rider, and Scarlet used this too. Every now and then, if Scarlet complains too bitterly of her lot, Wanda suggests she reverts to her father’s name. Scarlet Belcher. Scarlet declines. Scarlet Rider is a good name and one of the reasons why the father of Byzantia took her home from a party, drunk and dismal as she was.

‘Don’t try to talk,’ says Susan. ‘Just lie a little. There’s lots of time.’

Scarlet shuts her eyes and tries to contain her rage. Susan just sits with her hands folded and continues to smile.

Scarlet peeks.

She’s working out a knitting pattern, thinks Scarlet.

But Susan is off where she always goes when she has a minute to spare, and times are tense. She is walking through the silent kauri forests of New Zealand. Clematis creepers trail down from the high branches. What light there is catches on its white starry flowers. The trunks are dark, smooth and immense. There is thick moss underfoot. It is a primeval forest—no birds, no animals, no sound. Just Susan, back at the beginning of time.

Scarlet calls her back.

‘I don’t think there is much time,’ says Scarlet enigmatically, more to frighten Susan than because she believes for one moment she is about to give birth. Susan enquires when the baby is due. No baby, surely, can be more nearly due than hers, in six and a half days.

‘Last week,’ replies Scarlet, as is her pleasure. Susan, for the first time, is put out. Scarlet’s baby’s aunt should surely arrive first. (She is as convinced she is having a girl as Scarlet is that she is having a boy.)

‘You mean you might have it any minute?’ her voice squeaks a little. She remembers her mother’s training and lowers it a little. They had a dreadful journey back from New Zealand—in an unconverted troopship. Susan’s mother caught dysentery and conjunctivitis but managed to ignore even these inconveniences. Still she paced the deck with the other mothers, released
en masse
from the dreadful provincial prison of war-time New Zealand, drilling offspring in ‘The Rain in Spain’, and other niceties of pre-war England. Susan’s mother was not so much brave as obstinate.

‘Any minute,’ says Scarlet. ‘I keep getting these pains.’

‘We’d better get the ambulance.’ Susan keeps her voice pitched low.

‘They’re only pains,’ says Scarlet crossly. ‘They’ll go away. They always have before. I can’t stand women who make a fuss.’

The only harsh word Kim has so far said to Susan is, ‘For God’s sake, don’t fuss.’ Susan is silenced. Scarlet swings her legs over to touch the floor and sits on the edge of the sofa, and smiles and smiles, which encourages poor Susan.

‘Is this—um—just a social visit?’ enquires Susan, with antipodean awkwardness.

‘I have come to visit my father,’ states Scarlet.

‘Yes. Of course. How nice. But do you
need
anything?’

The question is too enormous for Scarlet to answer; in any case she has another pain and wants to go home; but Belsize Park seems too far away to be reached; and has not her mother sent her here?

The feeling grows that if she goes back home now she will never, ever get away. She continues to sit brightly, tightly upright and begins to dread her father’s return. How can she explain herself to this stranger? If she stops smiling she will cry.

Susan makes a pot of tea, conscious of Scarlet’s need, but praying that Kim will return and make everything all right again. Simeon kicks and she cries out, startled, and nearly drops the kettle. She has a vision of those white pure feet of hers raw, blistered and disfigured for ever. She trembles.

Susan hovers for a moment on the borders of that other terrible world, where chaos is the norm, life a casual exception to death, and all cells cancerous except those which the will contrives to keep orderly; where the body is something mysterious in its workings, which swells, bleeds, and bursts at random; where sex is a strange intermittent animal spasm; where men seduce, make pregnant, betray, desert: where laws are harsh and mysterious, and where the woman goes helpless.

Susan, in fact, nearly leaves the girls and comes down here among the women.

She thinks of her mother and survives, hauling herself out of the mire, using a lace doily as a foothold. She lays it on a tray and makes Scarlet lemon tea. There is a fine sweat on Scarlet’s brow. Still she sits upright, tightly, smiling.

What are people saying about Scarlet these days? All kinds of things. Byzantia bestows on this former invisible girl the mantle of existence, and thus makes her the easier to snipe at.

‘I do think Scarlet went a bit far,’ Audrey is saying to her potter, Paul, ‘not even knowing who the father is.’ They have gone on from the V. and A. to an anarchist party in Hampstead. There is a sheet hung out of the window saying, ‘Only a sheep would vote’. The party has been going on since the previous night. The host has made beer in the bath. People queue outside the bathroom either to piss or vomit in the toilet, or take more beer from the bath. There is also home-made elderberry wine in the kitchen. At some time during its preparation it was contained in tin buckets, and is now mildly poisonous. A drunken rumour goes round that those who drink it die. No one seems to care; in particular not those who have recently visited the bathroom. Purple-lipped and black-toothed they drink on. Thus, in the vanity of youth, these reckless anarchs of twenty years ago rejoice.

Audrey and her escort prefer to see themselves in the role of spectators. The scene here is too like the home of her childhood, too unlike his, for comfort.

‘I would like to meet this Scarlet,’ he says.

‘She has bad legs,’ says Audrey firmly.

‘Bad in leg means good in bed,’ he persists.

‘She’s hardly in the condition,’ says Audrey.

‘In Poland they mate the cattle twice,’ he says, ‘once for milk and once for meat. It works.’

‘I don’t know what that’s got to do with it.’

‘That proves your ignorance and lack of subtlety.’

So they bicker, but both are aware in their hearts that he knows better than she.

‘I’m going to give her ten shillings a week to help out,’ volunteers Audrey, defiantly. ‘We all are.’

This silences him for a full minute. At the end of this time she is as nervous as once she was when she waited outside the headmaster’s office to receive the cane. She had done a terrible thing. Brave then as now, she had crept into the boys’ toilets to see what they were like and bear the news back to the waiting troupes of little girls. She’d been told on by a little boy. Discovered, Audrey is at her worst. She will lie, renege and squirm to get out of trouble. But undertaking the impossible, Audrey is magnificent.

At last he speaks.

‘You—Audrey undertook to give her ten shillings a week. You—Emma may well wish to change your mind.’

Emma-Audrey is so overwhelmed by the masterful nature of this well-educated, cultivated young man that she betrays Scarlet instantly.

‘I suppose it’s not really doing her a favour,’ she says, with hardly a moment’s pause. ‘She’s got to come to terms with things, hasn’t she?’

‘Better,’ he says, ‘better. More my Emma, less my slum-child Audrey. Terrifying how deprivation fails to toughen, but merely softens. No one so mean as a man born rich; no one so spendthrift as a girl born poor. Helen’s taking you for a ride, too.’

But she won’t have a word spoken against Helen, who moves like a grasping goddess through her life. He is put out, this young man with the clear cold blue eyes. She moves to placate him.

When he introduces her as Emma she abandons Audrey—or thinks she does. She joins him in abhorring the wine. He is used to better things, better parties, better orgies. He rips Emma’s peasant blouse a little, thrusts in his hands and disorders her breasts.

‘Do try and look more debauched,’ he implores.

Emma-Audrey does her best.

His ex-wife (news to Emma) turns up later, red-haired and drunk, and makes a scene. He comforts her; assures her of his emotional if not his physical fidelity. Audrey-Emma, outraged, leaves the party with his best friend, an Australian teetotaller (astonishing!) with a very clean white shirt and asthma, a follower of Subud. There is a fearful row. It goes on for weeks. The ex-wife implores Audrey to stop tormenting her ex-husband. Audrey says my name is Emma, and pleads honest debauchery. The best friend sleeps with the ex-wife. Emma ends up in hospital with mysterious stomach pains, with the potter at her bedside—weeping tears of reproach, throwing away her prescribed pheno-barb and replacing with herbal tablets given by a friend who as father-of-five is supposed to know all. My name is Audrey, says Emma, and worsens. He, seeing her slipping away, not just into Audrey, but into—he imagines in his conceit—death, offers to live with her.

Emma lies in her hospital bed and considers. Thwack, thwack went the cane in the hand of the tall grey man with flapping trousers; it wasn’t me, Audrey cried, it was someone else: and thwack, thwack, it went again; it wasn’t me who wanted to look, it was someone else. Why won’t you believe me? It’s true. It didn’t hurt in the least, and the honour of his attention was singular. He shoots hares, standing in the field like a scarecrow. Audrey skins and cleans them for him at two shillings a time.

Emma’s life, in fact, is so rich and strange she has no time to think of Scarlet.

Those were the parties.

What is Jocelyn saying about Scarlet, as Philip sits up in bed and drinks the tea that Sylvia brings them?

‘Of course if we give her ten shillings a week she’s got to be honest with us. She’s got to tell us who the father is.’

Jocelyn wears her bra in bed. She doesn’t like the feel of her breasts flopping and bobbing. Neither, come to that, does Philip, but he’s not aware of it yet.

‘I suppose she knows who it is,’ says Philip gloomily. ‘I don’t understand why you bother with her. She doesn’t seem the right kind of friend for you two at all.’

Jocelyn and Sylvia enlist themselves on the side of the virtuous women.

‘We can’t desert her now while she’s in trouble,’ says Jocelyn, ‘that wouldn’t be fair. But she’ll have to stop cheapening herself.’

Sylvia cries herself to sleep that night, but can’t think why, except she would have liked Philip to have persisted in his wooing. She takes up with a Sales Director some fifteen years older than she is. He drinks a lot of gin, and is in the habit of telling her in detail on the way home in his Riley of exactly what he wants to do to her, this way and that, in bed. Thus he expends himself and saves the effort of an actual seduction. Sylvia doesn’t mind. She has a kind, if wispish, nature and is only too glad to be of service. He goes home happier to his wife. She sleepwalks back to Jocelyn.

Down here among the women, we do a lot of sleepwalking. The only way to get through some days is to suppose one will presently wake up. So says Wanda.

‘They have no style,’ Helen is complaining of her friends and admirers. ‘Especially not Scarlet. It was a bad party, given by no one for nobodies, and now of course she’s pregnant by someone no one’s ever heard of. If one is to be an unmarried mother one should do it with a certain panache, don’t you think?’

She is talking to Y, who is finishing a portrait of Helen. X is out lecturing students. The children ram and batter at the closed door which keeps them out of the studio. They are hungry. It is past teatime. Y ignores them.

‘I don’t think one should be an unmarried mother at all,’ says Y virtuously. ‘Children can’t eat panache.’

‘There’s always National Assistance,’ says Helen. ‘I don’t think women really need men at all. Fathers should be done away with. Men must be entertainment for women, no more.’ She knows this will upset Y. She is quite right, it does. ‘Women don’t need men,’ she repeats, ‘not nowadays.’

‘I do,’ says Y, her large pale eyes unblinking, looking straight at Helen, who doesn’t know whether she is being stared at as something to paint, or—which she would prefer—as a rival female.

‘I would kill myself,’ says Y, ‘if X ever betrayed me with another woman.’

‘How dramatic!’ says Helen, as languid as she can manage, though Y sounds perfectly matter-of-fact. ‘Do you really think a man like him can be expected to live the rest of his life with only the one woman? Surely, if you loved a man properly, you would want him to be happy, in his own way.’

‘I wouldn’t,’ says Y, in whom there is not a small element of Wanda. ‘I would want him to be mine, that’s all.’

There is no doubt now but that she is looking at Helen, into the spirit of Helen. Helen is gratified. She feels they are hardly a match—Y so frail and mousy, she so bold and strong.

‘I would kill myself,’ says Y, ‘and then I would kill the other woman.’

‘In that order?’ enquires Helen pertly.

Y shrugs. Helen is never to forget this conversation, never. At the door the children hammer and yammer. Y does nothing.

‘Poor Scarlet,’ says Helen. ‘I don’t suppose anyone will ever marry her now. She’s rather plain and hasn’t much to offer, except brains, and what man wants a woman with brains? Of course I don’t believe in marriage, so it wouldn’t matter to me, but she does. Not that I’d ever have a child if I really loved a man. Love’s a full-time occupation, don’t you think? And children are so distracting.’

She has to raise her voice to be heard above the din made by Y’s three.

‘And so very unerotic,’ she adds. Y, in a fit of—what, rage, resentment, petulance, foreboding?—hurls a jam-jar of turps at the closed door, but still does not open it.

When X returns he finds Helen in the kitchen cutting jam sandwiches for three washed, brushed, well-behaved children, while Y paints on. He, who is accustomed to saying that the role of the artist is more important than the role of mother, is impressed, and feels a pang of purely bourgeois irritation with his wife. It enables him to kiss Helen in the pantry with a clear conscience, which is what she had in mind. For a girl of twenty-one, she is not doing badly.