Female Friends (28 page)

Oliver
And why not? The female is not treacherous, like the male. You women must learn to stick together. I’m sure you will. We men will be for decoration and to fill the sperm banks.

Well, why not, indeed? If this is what Oliver wants. Chloe feels she has all but grown, at last, out of motherhood. She feels safe in the knowledge that Imogen sleeps soundly through the night. Chloe can be woman again, not mother, not watchful, and if Oliver says this is what women are like, he may be right.

Françoise’s breasts are white and heavy, marked blue where Oliver’s fingers have pressed, the nipples are flat and pink. Her arms are dark with hair and are muscular, reminding Chloe of Oliver’s. Otherwise she is as soft and hard mixed as the Cherry Cup in a box of Black Magic chocolates.

It has been a long and trying day, Chloe thinks. This is really no more remarkable than anything else, and better than crying alone on a bed. And has, besides, Oliver’s approval. Perhaps indeed, like this, they could all three be happy? Françoise whispers French indecencies in her ears. Dimly, Chloe understands them. Her body, paying attention, Françoise’s fingers probing, prepares itself to its surge of response.

Ah, but no.

Thus far, no farther, Oliver thinks (or as Helen once put it to Marjorie, spelling it out, with the jovial prudery of that earlier generation, thus far, no father!). Oliver intervenes between Chloe and Françoise separating them, bringing his orchestrations to a sudden, flat and silent halt. Françoise lies face down on the bed beside Chloe. Is she exhausted, overcome with emotion, or simply asleep? Chloe thinks it is the latter.

Oliver sits on the edge of the bed by Chloe and strokes his wife’s forehead.

Oliver
So Chloe, now we see at last what your true nature is. I have always suspected it. You do not really care for me, or for any man. Your true response is to women. To your Grace, or your Marjorie, or your mother. The maid, even. Well, why not? There is nothing wrong with being a lesbian, except that the degree of your hypocrisy has been damaging to me. All these years pretending to be something you weren’t, blaming me for all our failures, throwing away our children. Of course your body rejected them. You have not been fair with me, Chloe.

Chloe
Oliver, really, I am not a lesbian. Don’t be ridiculous.

He bends and kisses her, indulgently. She sits up, pushing him away. Oliver goes and sits beside Françoise, running his fingers down her spine.

Chloe
You are quite ridiculous. I don’t care what you say, any more, or what you do.

And she doesn’t. Her sincerity seems both to impress Oliver and take him aback. He turns Françoise on to her back. She has been crying.

Oliver
You do care, Chloe. I’ll make you care. You’re not just going to sit there now and watch me and not care. You can’t.

Chloe
I can.

Chloe’s head is quite clear. She is her own woman again. She can and she does. She watches Oliver go through the motions of intercourse with Françoise with as much dispassion as she watches her children bathe themselves. Françoise continues to cry, from exhaustion and now apparently fright, turning her head this way and that to avoid Oliver’s mouth, while Oliver takes what can only be termed his desperate and dubious pleasure in her.

Françoise, disengaged, continues to cry.

Françoise
I am sorry to cry. I am so tired. Why is my life so wretched?

Oliver
Because you’re a silly stupid bourgeois bitch and not a liberated lady at all. Go back to bed, for God’s sake.

Françoise goes. Oliver, Chloe sees to her amazement, has tears in his eyes.

Oliver
I’m sorry, Chloe. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I think I’m mad.

Chloe
So do I.

Chloe finds she is laughing, not hysterically, or miserably, but really quite lightly and merrily; and worse, not with Oliver, but at him, and in this she is, at last, in tune with the rest of the universe.

W
ORKING-CLASS WOMEN, GRACE BELIEVES
, have a rather better time of it than the middle classes—apart from starvation, disease, over-work, miscarriages, exhaustion and so on, of course. But in their personal lives, they have fewer expectations and for that reason, fewer disappointments. They put up with their husbands in bed, take their weekly money in return, pack them off to pubs and football matches, and get on with their own lives.

Marjorie maintains that the great, gnawing, devitalizing vice of the middle classes is pretending to be nice when they aren’t. Patrick, she says, in the eyes of women of aspiring gentility and/or depleted nervous energy, smacks of the working classes, rumbling away with a raw, suppressed and vital energy, which must one day inevitably overwhelm and overcome, as the male overwhelms the female. Of course such women fall prostrate at his feet, welcoming the inevitable orgasmic defeat—and with it the expected punishment not just of their class presumptions, but for their female exploitativeness—which in turn is the product of their own exploitation.

‘Marjorie sees Marx in everything,’ Grace complains to Chloe, ‘and from the point of view of a female who always lies beneath the male. I’m dreadfully sorry for her. Why doesn’t she get on top?’

Her own long-drawn-out affair with Patrick, in and out of the ruin of both their days, seems to bring her little happiness—as Marjorie frequently remarks.

‘Poor Grace,’ says Marjorie, ‘what a burnt-out case she is. Fancy putting your faith in sexual athletics. Grace uses Patrick as a memory of better times, of course, when she still had some feeling left in her. As for Patrick, he doesn’t take her to Christie’s grave because he adores her—as she tells everyone—but to annoy Midge and because he likes the shape those dreadful headstones make against the sky.’

While Grace plays fast and loose through the sixties, her thirties, invincibly fashionable—in and out of water beds and topless dresses and the occasional acid-trip, into the occult, and flying saucers, astrology and force fields, and finding therein, of course, cosmic justification for her quite irrational persecution of the unfortunate Geraldine: taking up prison reform after a night in the cells for disorderly behaviour in a Chelsea pub (coincidentally called the Rose and Crown), vying with Patrick, one might almost think, in the number and variety of her sexual exploits—though unlike Patrick never putting brush to canvas, as she would have been better employed in doing, if only to demonstrate to the world that she, like him, suffered from the disease of artistic talent and did not merely exhibit its more disagreeable and anti-social symptoms; aborting frequently instead (an outer and visible sign of an inner and spiritual state, Marjorie maintains, underlining her determination to destroy and not create)—while Grace thus plays fast and loose with herself and her fate, Marjorie plays safe.

‘Marjorie is very wise not to marry,’ says Grace. ‘She is the sort of woman born to be widowed five times. Her husbands would just drop dead one after another—you know how it happens—if not from poison then from sheer suggestion. Well, look at Marjorie’s record. First her father, then her Ben, then her baby. She’s best to stay where she is, putting the finger of death on television programmes.’

And it is certainly true that Marjorie appears to avoid any personal commitment to anything other than a programme or a department. She battles with organizations rather than with people. She engages in a paper war of inter-office memos, fighting for position up the telephone list, to head first this section, then that, scaling the sides of the orthodox organizational pyramid the planners have made of the BBC; her name eventually there in leaded black, as near the apex as a woman can get.

‘She only visits Patrick in the hopes of getting in touch with her younger self,’ says Grace, ‘when she was altogether more hopeful of life. Doing his washing makes her feel she’s female. Well, what else is going to? She’s the only woman in the world he doesn’t fancy. It can’t be very nice for her, though God knows these days he smells rather rancid and his feet are beginning to rot.’

Marjorie has her family, though. She acquires a set of homosexual friends. They cluster round her like a set of lost and earnest chickens: in the warmth of their chattering, clucking regard Marjorie acquires a kind of glow: the silence of her nights are punctured with gossip and laughter. They warm her little hands, admire her cleverness, bring her little gifts. Together, she and they make giggling, anxious excursions to junk and antique shops, collecting little goodies, little treasures, little bygones, bargains all. Forever, and how positive an act it is, rescuing what is good from what is past. Marjorie develops a visual taste: her bleak flat begins to be a place of interest. She talks knowledgeably about Victorian biscuit tins, Lalique and Tiffany. She learns how to cook coq-au-vin. and not just spaghetti bolognese. But presently her friends drift off as they have drifted in. The biscuit tins look rusty rather than quaint: she drops and breaks her best Lalique plate: she starts opening cans of baked beans again.

‘Nothing good lasts,’ she says sorrowfully to Chloe. ‘After they passed that Consenting Adults Bill, and they could go about together openly, they seemed to lose their need of me. We’d quarrel and bitch properly, not just camping it up. And I began to feel they were mocking me and using me; they’d always pretended to, of course, but now it was for real. It was as if their lives had become serious at last, instead of just the play-acting it had always had to be, and so I couldn’t be part of it any more. I’m glad for them, but sorry for me. I miss them. It was nice to have one’s lack of bosom an asset and not a liability.’

As for Chloe, she grits her teeth and sticks to her marriage and children as a shoemaker to his last. The lives of the spiritually unmarried, and the spiritually childless, seem sad to her.

This morning Chloe is woken up by the sound of laughter. It frightens her at first, until she realizes it is her own, and not that of some stranger in her bedroom.

The sun shines through her window. It is another brilliant day. The winter has been short and mild—which is why, no doubt, the greenfly are so active so early in the year. If the climate is changing, thinks Chloe, should I remain the same?

It is eight o’clock. Chloe should get up and supervise the baking of Oliver’s rolls. Françoise tends to forget them, and leave them in the oven too long, so they become dried out, and the crust a danger to Oliver’s increasingly brittle teeth. Chloe lies in her virtuous bed a little longer. Then, when the smell of burning bread fills the room with an almost tangible cloud, she rises in temper, puts on her dressing-gown and goes into the kitchen.

Françoise, this morning, seems determined to deny her sex. She wears a white tee-shirt, faded jeans, and a pair of Inigo’s sneakers. Her ripe female form, unintimidated, bulges alarmingly beneath. She is breathless with nervous distress, and wishes to ingratiate herself with Chloe, who merely throws open the windows in clattering and ill-tempered reproach.

Chloe
Have you no sense of smell at all, Françoise?

Françoise
Please, do not upset me. I have scraped the rolls. Oliver will not notice.

Chloe
I am afraid he will.

Françoise
On such a morning such things are not important.

Chloe
You are mistaken. The morning is not important in the least, the rolls are. If you disbelieve me, take in Oliver’s breakfast yourself, today.

Françoise
You are cross when you should be loving. I want only to love and be loved. To be properly close to those I love most in the world. You and Oliver. And all your lovely family.

Chloe
You should not get too close to Inigo’s shoes, Françoise. He has chronic athlete’s foot.

Françoise
But I see I have upset you. I cannot forgive myself. I wanted only to make you happy. But your heart is closed to me. You believe that sex is for procreation. Therefore you can only conceive of it with the opposite sex. I disgust you. To you sex is something shameful. To me it is a sacrament; I grieve for you that you cannot share something so joyous with me.

Chloe
I can only assume you are not familiar with athlete’s foot, or you would not take it so lightly.

Françoise dissolves into hiccoughing tears, which turn Chloe cold with anger and embarrassment. She feels the desire to hurt Françoise as much as possible. Is this what Oliver feels? Why Françoise’s breasts are black and blue? What pleasure there is in withholding affection, when it is both deserved and desperately needed.

Françoise
You are unkind to me. I want to go home. But there is even worse than here. I lived intimately with my best friend the confectioner. She swore she loved me: she hated men, she said. When she made a wedding cake, she would drive a pin through the heart of the sugar groom. But then she eloped with my fiancé: she accused me to him of being a lesbian and seducing her, and so he hated me and married her. But the truth was the other way round. Why must people play when they should be serious?

Chloe
Heaven knows.

Françoise
I want to go home, where I am taken seriously.

Chloe
I think Oliver takes you very seriously, Françoise. And I very much hope you will stay. I think you must, if only for the sake of literature. Only please will you try not to cry in front of the children? And will you now take Oliver’s breakfast in to him?

But Françoise will not. Chloe goes. Chloe takes Oliver his breakfast tray, sits on the edge of the bed, and talks soothingly about crocuses, daffodils, and Inigo’s athlete’s foot.