“Because I didn't want you to hold any of it against me. When two people fall in love it quite often happens that someone gets hurt. It is one of the tragedies of living.”
“Why should you care what I think?”
“Because you're of my own generation, I suppose.”
Her long legs were crossed and she smoked a cigarette from a holder. Her nails were long and beautifully manicured.
“It's extraordinary,” he said, “how like Stephanie you are. You would have made a smashing stepmother. In an incestuous kind of way.”
“I think that thought occurred to your father,” she said. “It troubled him. It was one of the reasonsâ”
He looked doubtful. “Did you really get as far as that? I don't think he really ever contemplated divorce. Men don't break marriages lightly. That's one of the reasons I'm not married to Stephanie. That, and me being at school. Have I said something wrong? You're looking all miserable.”
“Oh no,” she said, “it's all right. It's just that I take things seriously and I don't understand how other people can't. I am an artist, you see, and everything appears more real to me than it does to other people. And being more real is more painful. Your father found reality painful, too, I think. He is a very sensitive person, in many ways, but confused, I suppose. You are very like him, but you have not been maltreated and twisted by life, as he has. You don't think women are things, do you? You believe they are people, don't you?”
“Of course,” he looked surprised. “Didn't he?”
“No, not really. It is a common complaint with men of his generation. I keep having to batter away at their impregnability. It's a kind of compulsion. It never works. They still think I'm just a piece of decoration on a birthday cake, and get very angry if I so much as open my mouth to say anything except how marvelous they are. That's what I like about artists and poets and painters. They believe women are people. They don't mind getting hurt. I don't mind getting hurt, either. Your father hurt me.”
“I don't know why you take him so seriously. He's so old.”
“He's very fond of you. He thinks the world of you. That's because you look so much like him. He's a very good-looking man, you know. And very clever. But it's all no use. He's been destroyed by years of petit-bourgeois living; after all, he's an ad-man. You'll never be an ad-man, will you?”
“I certainly hope not.”
“Because it destroys the soul, doesn't it? Your father says you write poetry. Can I see some?”
“I'd be delighted,” he said, blushing. “You're a friend of William Macklesfield's, aren't you? He's one of my heroes. Poetry seems so simple when he writes it. So familiar, somehow.”
“He's a family man,” she said, not without bitterness. “All the same, I know him well. I think I contribute something to his work. I wish I was more of a family woman. I get very tired of living the way I do, sometimes.”
“Perhaps you've never met the right man?” He was eager. “I mean, honestly, Dad wouldn't be right for you at all. He's much too old, and anyway, he's married to Mother, so how could he have a wholehearted relationship with you? I'm sure he would have if he could have, but being married, how could he? You mustn't let it upset you. You're not like Stephanie; she doesn't get upset by anything. I don't think that's right in a woman. I get the feeling I'm being used, if a girl's too cheerful about things. One welcomes a little intensity; I mean, it's easy to be intense about politics, but a girl should be intense about sex, too, to my way of thinking. I think the better of you for being upset, really I do.”
“All the other men I've met,” she said, “only like me when I'm laughing. If I cry, they go away. I suppose if one was married they wouldn't be able to so much. It is very refreshing to meet a man who doesn't mind one being miserable. Perhaps it's because you're so young. As you grow older and feel more like crying yourself you may be less well able to bear it;”
He put his arm around her, conscious that here his father's arm had been before him. He kissed her forehead.
“What about Stephanie?” she asked. “I don't want to cause any more trouble. I'm older than you. I ought to be responsible.”
“She understands,” he said, steering her toward the couch. “She is not at all possessive. All she ever does is laugh and cut her hair. Anyway she doesn't get back from work until seven. I get back from school at half-past four, unless there's games. I'm on the school cricket team. It's a frightful bore, but one can't let them down.”
“Thank God,” she said, succumbing, “thank God you're not married. I can't stand married men. I can't stand competing with their wives.”
Under his weight, the unwanted gift pregnancy that still haunted her was beautifully flattened out, like a steak under a meat mallet. She pretended he was William Macklesfield. There was very little difference between them, if she put her mind to it. She was pleased, anyway, that someone so young, so handsome, so much his father's son, should afford her so much pleasure.
“You're not doing this,” he asked anxiously, “to be revenged on my father or anything?”
“Revenged? Why should I want to be revenged?”
“Because he didn't take you seriously.”
“You've got it all wrong,” she said, “it was I who didn't take him seriously,” and she crept under him again as if to hide.
“If you ask me,” said Brenda's mother, cutting through a mille-feuille with a silver cake fork in the tearooms at the top of Dickens and Jones, “inside your friend Susan, struggling to get out, is a dumpy little woman in a checked apron with a rolling pin in the pocket. It is the only thing about her which reconciles me to your sharing that flat. And, of course, the knowledge that you are a sensible girl and aren't going to do anything silly. It is all talk with your friend Susan; all this sex and emancipation and art, It is quite obvious she just wants to be married, but no one will ask her, so she has to make do with free love. Who would want a girl like that, anyway?”
“Oh, Mother,” said Brenda desperately, staring round the tables where well-dressed, middle-aged ladies with crocodile shoes and becoming hair styles nibbled and sipped. “Everything is so different nowadays. You don't understand.”
“Nothing changes. Women want to get married and have babies just as they always did. But your generation hasn't got the self-discipline ours had. My life with your father wasn't all roses, but I didn't complain. I stuck it out, and I was very sorry when he died.”
“Well, his salary check stopped coming, didn't it? That was really the only difference I noticed. We never saw him.”
“Now, why should you say a thing like that? London life makes you very rude. I don't imagine young men have changed so much since my day that they appreciate rudeness in a girl.”
“But, Mother, I don't much care what men think of me. No, don't look like that. I'm not a Lesbian, it's all right. I just think it's as important what I think of men as what they think of me.”
“Well, it's not, is it? Women have always tried to make themselves attractive to men, and you're not going to change a thing like that in a hurry. Look around you. All the women nicely groomed and attractive and good-looking, and the men no better than fat slugs, for the most part, or skinny runts. Unshaved and smelly, as often as not. They get away with everything, men. They can do every disgusting thing they like and no one ever says a thing. Today is the seventh anniversary of your father's death.”
Her voice had risen, embarrassing Brenda, and there was a mad look in her eye with which Brenda was familiar, and with which she had lived for many years, and which was likely to lead to broken mirrors and china and her mother lying on her back amidst the debris, commenting at random on the habits and personalities of men. So the daughter, who never really gave up hope of extracting some soupçon of wisdom and enlightenment from the mother about the nature of true love, decided that now was not the time to seek it. She changed the subject to cream cakes, and after tea they went down to the underwear department on the third floor and bought see-through nighties and frilly garter belts for each other.
P
RESENTLY PHYLLIS OVERCAME HER
scruples sufficiently to visit Esther. Esther lumbered to the door in her dressing-gown and having let Phyllis in, retreated back to bed.
“I am feeling rather sick,” she said.
“I am not surprised,” said Phyllis.
“Everyone says that. The trouble is, if I stop eating I feel even sicker than I do if I don't stop eating. I will have to learn to live with nausea, I suppose. I have done you a great wrong, Phyllis.”
“What do you mean? What have I done?” asked Phyllis, mishearing.
“You have done nothing. What are you feeling so guilty about? I have wronged you by trying to stop you grieving, by denying that you had any cause to grieve. You may grieve for all the wrong reasons, but grieve you do. Grief is a lovely word and a lovely thing. It heals, as resentment cannot. Grief must be admitted and lived through, or it turns into resentment, and continues to bother you for the rest of your life, rearing its depressed little head at all the wrong moments, so that one Sunday tea-time at the old lady's home you will unexpectedly begin to cry into your toasted tea cake, and the nurses will say, âPoor Mrs. Pierce, that's the end,' and will move you into the senile ward, when the truth of the matter is quite different. It was not senility, but grief grown uncheckable with age. Myself, I cry now and eat now, so as not to cry later, when it is yet more dangerous. I shall make a very cheerful old lady.”
“You're feeling better today then,” said Phyllis.
“Better in my mind but sicker in my body. I am angry with you.”
Phyllis turned pale. “Why?”
“You had your breasts made larger by that extraordinary doctor. He told me.”
“He had no right to tell you. It was my secret.”
“Are you ashamed?”
“Of course not. Why should I be?”
“You ought to be ashamed. It was a degrading thing to do. To allow your body to be tampered with by a man, for the gratification of a man, conforming to a wholly masculine notion of what a woman's body ought to be. That you, a decent woman, should offer yourself up as a martyr to the great bosom-and-ass mystique; should pander to the male attempt to relate not to the woman as a whole, but to portions of the female anatomy; should be so seduced by masculine values that you allow your breasts to be slit open and stuffed with plastic! They are, let me remind you, mammary glands, milk producers, not male exciters.”
“Sometimes you are quite disgusting.”
“The truth is always disgusting to people like you. On the day you let that happen to you, Phyllis, you became less of a woman, for all your brand new bubbly bosom. Didn't it hurt?”
“Yes.”
“Serves you right.”
“I don't understand your attitude at all. I like to look nice. My clothes look better for a bit of bosom. And anyway you're always saying how awful it is to be a woman.”
“Never! It is a fearful thing to be a woman in a man's world accepting masculine values and aping masculinity. It would be perfectly acceptable being a woman if only men didn't control the world. If only it were possible to gracefully and gratefully accept their seed to create children, yet feel obliged neither to accept their standards nor their opinion of womankind, which is, let's face it, conditioned by fear, resentment and natural feelings of inferiority.”
“It's better when you eat than when you talk.”
“Why haven't you and Gerry got any children?”
Phyllis wondered whether perhaps Alan had made her pregnant, and decided, for no rational reason, that he had not.
“That wasn't an attack,” said Esther, “I simply wondered. There is no reason for a woman to have children if she doesn't want to. But if your reason for not is the preservation of your figure for Gerry's benefit then I shall, indeed, think the less of you for it.”
Phyllis blushed, which made her look very pretty.
“Do you intend to go on like this forever,” asked Esther, “spending your entire life attempting to placate that fat selfish bully of a husband?”
“I love my husband. It's a pity you don't love yours a little more, letting him lie there ill with flu. You can talk and talk about woman's rights, but it doesn't seem to make you very happy. And you tease me about everything, and you won't even tell me about you and Gerry. It's not fair.”
“Nothing happened between me and Gerry. I sent him home.”
Phyllis was put out by this news, hoping now for Esther's misbehavior to justify her own.”
“I've only ever been to bed with Gerry,” she said.
“I went mad once,” said Esther. “It was very interesting. I got very depressed after my father died and drank a bottle of bleach. It didn't kill me but I couldn't swallow for months and I got quite thin, and I left Alan to find out what the world was likeâand do you know what? It was full of men. So I went back to Alan. And do you know what? Alan's no different from all the others. You live with them for years, you clean and cook for them, you talk to them, you listen to them, you share your children with them, and you achieve nothing. They are still apart from you, suspicious of you, wishing and wishing you could be a piece of docile flesh, no more. Juliet was trying to tell me that, I think. She didn't mind about it. She didn't expect anything else. But we middle-class women are brought up with notions of partnership in marriage and that's why we all go mad and end up in bed with the plumber.”
On the twelfth day of the diet Esther sat at her kitchen table and drank black coffee. Her head was dizzy and her hands trembled. Juliet sat opposite her and cleaned a copper saucepan, after a fashion.