Female Friends (27 page)

‘I have finished with you, Grace,’ says Christie.

And so he has.

He stops at the door.

‘And don’t think you will have the children,’ he adds.

And she doesn’t.

Christie divorces Grace for adultery, citing Patrick. Grace cannot deny the charge, since Patrick freely admits it. The judges look sourly at her, thinking her unfit to look after her children, being a self-confessed creature of low moral habits. But they do not like Christie much, either. His lawyers seem too clever by half, his vilification of his former wife too extreme. The children need a woman’s touch: Christie is cold and sensible.

Grace gets the house in St John’s Wood and, for a time, care of the children, though he has custody. He visits every second Sunday: he brings them expensive presents and hires a nanny for the day. They are confused and unimpressed. Grace, seeing him, is noisy, hysterical, and irrational. He is icy, indifferent, and powerful.

If they did not love each other, in their own dreadful ways, they might have left each other alone. As it is, they can’t.

Christie marries Geraldine, the social worker. Faced with her, and photographic evidence of (1) the children crying at Grace’s window, and (2) little Petra lying on the pavement outside Woolworths having a temper tantrum, (3) Grace dancing with a black man at a night-club—and a doctor’s report that Piers has threadworms, the judges seem to have no choice but to award Christie custody of the children. Still they deliberate.

Grace could accept the divorce but not, it seems, the remarriage. Perhaps somewhere, somehow, she believed that she and Christie would be reconciled.

Christie is outraged by what he still sees as Grace’s infidelities, and vengeful as ever. Christie has Grace’s black boy-friend followed and framed (perhaps) by the police on a drug charge. Grace sends anonymous letters and makes obscene phone calls to his clients, his friends, and his family.

They never see each other. Her lawyers cringe when they see her coming. His rub their hands. More money! They present the judges with the obscene letters from Grace to Geraldine. Christie gets the children.

He steals them of course. Not content to have them decently handed over. It is the end. Grace cannot subject them to this, not any more. She loves her children. Christie does not. So, let Christie have them.

Love can only damage them, she sees it now. She must give them up, and him up, and so she does. Piers and Petra, goodbye.

Piers, eventually, goes to Sandhurst, then Oxford, then the Guards. He always wears a tie, even on Sundays.

Petra goes to finishing school and then takes a secretarial course. She is very good at flower arrangements and will one day have her photograph as the frontispiece of
Country Life
.

After their father dies in a car crash (on the day after his third marriage to California), they go back to live with Geraldine, his second wife, who is very good to them, although she does not really like them. California was never interested in Christie’s children, in any case. She only cared about his money, and said as much, and Christie did not seem to mind.

Grace, at Christie’s death, does not even inquire as to her children’s whereabouts. Everyone says how heartless Grace is, what a selfish, unmaternal, unnatural woman.

Grace goes out to Golders Green, sometimes, where a plaque marks (supposedly) his ashes, and sits placidly in the sun beside it, as if waiting for him to rise up and re-form again, and start another wrangle, and re-animate her.

Sometimes it is Patrick who drives her out there. He waits in the car, while Grace sits in the cemetery, and contemplates mortality.

M
ARJORIE, GRACE AND ME
.

Fine citizens we make, fine sisters!

Our loyalties are to men, not to each other.

We marry murderers and think well of them. Marry thieves, and visit them in prison. We comfort generals, sleep with torturers, and not content with such passivity, torment the wives of married men, quite knowingly.

Well, morality is for the rich, and always was. We women, we beggars, we scrubbers and dusters, we do the best we can for us and ours. We are divided amongst ourselves. We have to be, for survival’s sake.

A
FTER HER EVENING’S QUARREL
with Oliver—if so lopsided a conflict could be termed quarrel—Chloe lies crying and dozing on her bed, the quilt pulled over her. Oliver approaches.

Chloe is surprised. When she cries he normally keeps away from her. He does not like scenes. Afterwards, when she has regained her calm, he will renegotiate their marital relationship without reference to whatever incident has caused its temporary severance.

Now Oliver sits at the end of the bed, and strokes Chloe’s hair. Chloe is exhausted by her grief. There is a luxuriant quality to her distress. He knows it, and capitalizes upon it.

‘It’s been a hard day, Chloe,’ he says, and then, astonishingly, ‘I’m sorry. But you shouldn’t take on so. What’s the matter?’

‘The things you said.’ To Chloe it is self-evident.

‘Words,’ says Oliver. ‘You know I don’t mean them. Why do you get so upset?’

There is something strange about this, Chloe thinks, pleasant though it is. She sits up. Gently but firmly Oliver pushes her back against the pillows.

‘Stay there,’ he says. ‘I want to talk to you. I’ll lie down beside you.’ And so he does.

Oliver talks up at the ceiling thus:

Oliver
You must have more confidence in my love for you, Chloe. We have been together for all our adult lives. We are part of each other. If I savage you with words, it is because you are an extension of me, and I say to you the things I feel like saying to myself. That’s all there is to it. But you will react to words as if they were blocks of stone, coming hurtling down upon your head.

Chloe
I’m sorry.

Oliver
It’s very damaging: it’s no use just saying that you’re sorry. You try and inflict a pattern of conventional married behaviour upon me which is alien to my nature. You want me to be nice. I’m not nice. People aren’t nice, not all the time, just some of the time. You drive me mad, Chloe.

Chloe
I’m sorry.

Oliver
Never mind. I love you.

He takes her hand. He strokes it.

Oliver
I hate it when we are estranged.

Chloe
Then why estrange us, Oliver?

Oliver lays down her hand.

Chloe
I’m sorry. I know it’s me. Ever since Patrick—

He takes her hand again.

Oliver
Oh yes, Patrick. I think it is time you forgot Patrick, Chloe.

Chloe
How can I? You don’t.

Oliver
Dearest Chloe, you wrong me. See our marriage as a citadel, see Patrick ramming at the gates: he made a nasty dent in the walls, it’s true. But as for me, I don’t see the damage any more. He hurt himself more than us. He sent Imogen in, as a thief in the night, but Imogen has remained as our dearest ally. We have gained more than we ever lost, Chloe, you and me. And if the truth were told, I think Patrick has homosexual inclinations, and got at you to get at me. It was me he was interested in, not you at all.

Chloe
I expect so.

Oliver
Of course you, doing the actual betraying, feel worse about it than I ever did. It has coloured your behaviour for years. You have felt insecure and defensive—you’ve been no fun. You’ve stooped to jealousy. How ridiculous—what two—or three—people do to each other physically, what parts of each other they put into each other, can be a matter for pleasure, but hardly for pain. Patrick and I were friends—you couldn’t let that alone, you had to come wiggling your pretty little arse between us. I don’t think women understand the quality of friendship between men, and not understanding, resent it.

Chloe
I have friends. Female friends.

Oliver
Yes. You use them when you need them, discard them when you don’t. Male friendship is of a different order—it gives as well as takes.

His hand has opened her blouse and is on her breast by now. Her nipples, in spite of herself, grow hard. She does not like to argue.

Oliver
Darling Chloe. Darling hard-and-soft Chloe. Remember what it all used to be like?

Chloe
Yes.

And so she does. Her body certainly remembers, turning easily towards Oliver’s, with the same instinctive movements that a new baby makes towards its mother’s breasts.

Oliver
I’m sorry I made you cry. Put your arms round me.

Chloe
What about Françoise?

Oliver
Bother Françoise—

Chloe
But you can’t just—

Oliver
I can, you know.

Chloe
Poor Françoise, out in the cold—

Oliver disengages himself from Chloe, gently.

Oliver
Very well. You are quite right. If you want Françoise you shall have her.

What does he mean? She is confused. But Oliver seems more than rational.

Oliver
Take your clothes off, Chloe. Why have you gone to bed with your clothes on, in any case?

Chloe
I was too unhappy to take them off.

Oliver
My dearest Chloe, what would your mother say? You’re falling to pieces, you must be put together again, at once, this very night.

Oliver helps Chloe undress.

Oliver
Your lovely body. I never forget it.

Somewhere Chloe has heard these words before. Ah yes, the film his sisters thought so funny. Chloe went to a preview and told Oliver and everyone what a masterpiece it was. Only by clinging to that conviction could she escape the indignation she would otherwise feel.

Oliver
It doesn’t matter who I sleep with, Chloe, it’s always the same. They turn into you. All-wise, all-seeing Chloe. I sleep with Françoise and I dream it is you. I punish myself, instead of you. It’s a kind of superstition. I told myself that until I had finished the novel I wouldn’t touch you. I’d feed on my frustration instead. I’m sure that’s what went wrong with that last film—screwing you like fury all the time I was writing it. How could I stand enough away from myself to see my own life?

He’s always denied it was his own life, but Chloe scarcely notices, so bemused, and so comforted, is she. As she says to Marjorie later, making light of it, ‘I thought I’d been rejected on sexual grounds, but no, they were purely literary, after all.’

Chloe (Tentative)
And will you be finished with the novel soon?

Or perhaps he has finished it? Perhaps that’s why he’s here, stroking her forehead, her breast, her tummy, between her thighs, with his familiar finger: her body is still warm and hopeful.

Oliver
It’s all madness, isn’t it. I’m mad, I daresay. I don’t know. Perhaps I’ll never finish it. I have writer’s block. I’ll burn it. Be done with it. Go back to writing commercial crap.

Chloe
You can’t burn it, not after all this time.

Oliver
Why not? What else can I do? You’ve taken to lying in bed with your clothes on, crying your heart out. I can’t have you unhappy. It upsets the children. I’ve got to throw Françoise out, I have no choice, and she’s so much connected with the novel, if she goes, it goes.

Chloe
But Oliver—

Oliver
Unless perhaps the three of us—

Chloe stares at him unblinkingly, neither assenting nor rejecting, too astounded to do either.

Oliver
Lie there Chloe dear, don’t move. I shall save us all, you see.

Chloe lies, dutifully. Oliver goes away and comes back with Françoise. She is bleary with sleep and wears an orange quilted nylon dressing-gown.

Oliver
We shall have no more evenings like tonight. No more days like yesterday. The two of you must be properly friends.

Françoise
We are most truly friends. Mrs Rudore is a most civilized and progressive person.

Oliver
Mrs Rudore! It is ridiculous. Her name is Chloe. Say it, Françoise.

Françoise
Chloe. But what of the respect due between servant and employer?

Oliver
Françoise, I am your employer, and I would like you to love as well as respect Chloe. Take off that dreadful dressing-gown. You have a beautiful body. Hasn’t she, Chloe?

Chloe, alas, can almost see her husband framing the scene in preparation for his next film. As Grace was to say later, unkindly, ‘If he’s going to try skin-flicks, he’s wasting his time. Look what happened to Sebastian. Lost all his money and mine too. What the public wants these days is family entertainment, not scenes of lesbian delight. They’re old hat. There’s nothing left remarkable, not even pigs and fishes.’

It is, perhaps, this sense of being projected on to some future screen, and of the unreality of herself (thus at last revealed) through Oliver’s eyes, which enables Chloe to lie at first without protest, and later with evident enjoyment, under Françoise’s pressing lips and investigating hands. Françoise, Oliver explains to Chloe, is bi-sexual, and takes as much pleasure in the female response as the male. After the 1968 fiasco, tired of making coffee, thereafter, for armchair revolutionaries, she had joined a commune of insistently lesbian ladies.