Female Friends (11 page)

Chloe shows Patrick Bates her father’s paintings, those near miniatures in 1947. He comes to the room behind the Rose and Crown to inspect them, one night at ten-thirty, while Gwyneth is still washing-up glasses. Chloe lies on her front on the floor, searching beneath her mother’s bed, amongst the cases and crates, for the canvas roll. She finds them right at the back, pushed against the wall. By then she is almost completely under the bed, except for her seventeen-year-old legs.

The floor is so clean that Chloe’s check dress is not even made dusty. Had Gwyneth been of a more sluttish disposition, Chloe might have given up the search earlier, and Patrick never seen her father’s paintings, or Chloe’s smooth stretched legs, for that matter.

Thus our destinies are made, for good or ill. Inigo, Imogen, Kevin, Kestrel, Stanhope: linking back to brave David Evans, sitting exhausted in a hospital bed. waiting for the taste of blood in his mouth, covering his tiny canvases with scrupulous care—obsession mingling with optimism. Courage is not in vain; the painful wresting of beauty out of ugliness is not wasted. Believe it to be forgotten, worthless, buried deep and rotting under clods of earth, yet it creeps out somehow, raises its storms of life and energy.

Patrick stares at David Evans’ paintings and seems stunned.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Very interesting.’

He looks again.

‘Well, well,’ he says. ‘There’s one way not to die.’

Chloe is flushed from crawling about on the floor.

‘Would you like me to make you pregnant?’ Patrick inquires, and it seems to Chloe that this is exactly what she wants. Patrick makes love to her there and then, upon her mother’s bed, to Chloe’s infinite amazement and gratification. It seems to her not so much a pleasurable experience as an overwhelming one—as much another world to enter into, as the one of sleep, when she has been awake, or waking, when she has been asleep. She suspects it of being a dangerous world, full of deadly pit-traps, but clearly the one the elite inhabit.

Patrick leaves within the half-hour, to get back to camp.

‘Don’t tell anyone,’ he says. ‘Forget all about it outside. Remember it inside. It’s very good for you.’

The next morning, waking, she has difficulty in believing the event actually occurred. She stares at the faint well-sponged stain on her mother’s coverlet, and wonders if perhaps she did spill her tea, as she told Gwyneth. Patrick, thereafter, ignores her, and suffering, she recognizes reality again.

She isn’t pregnant, not this time. She doesn’t care for that: it makes Patrick too unlike the Deity.

‘N
O,’ SAYS CHLOE,
‘I don’t know what today is.’ Today Françoise has been in the Rudore household for just nine months. For three months she has had carnal acquaintance with her employer. Chloe has had none for nearly a year. Is this hardship? Chloe does not know.

When Chloe sleeps in her husband’s bed, there is no end to her expectations—not just that the empty spaces in her body should be nightly filled and rewarded, but all her inner space as well, by day.

Look after me, nurture me, love me, care for me, she cries to him with every waking and with every sleeping breath. Be perfect. Not perfect as you see it, but as I want perfection. Be perfect not just for me, but for our children too.
All
our children. Don’t work, don’t drink, don’t be bad-tempered; these things deflect you from your task. Your task is me. Fill me, fill my empty spaces. Complete me.

Although, in her heart, Chloe knows she never can be filled. Some wounds have gone too deep, protective membranes have been torn and can’t be mended. Love and concern will always trickle out of her, in the end, and leave her empty again, no matter how he fills, and fills.

But sleeping in his bed, she cannot quench her expectations.

Out of his bed, she can be serene. Badly treated, but at least free of expectation. Walking wounded, trudging away from the battle zone, not needing the pretence of being whole. What a relief ! So long as the children notice nothing.

Of course they notice. Inigo and Imogen, Kestrel and Kevin. Stanhope too.

‘Very well,’ says Chloe, ‘tell me what today is.’ The ground beneath shakes as a juggernaut passes, off on its journey to the M4 and the West.

What a dim domestic heroine she is in danger of becoming, like her mother, like Mrs Songford, who at least died in disgrace, like a million million women, shuffling and shameful to the end.

‘Today eighteen years ago,’ says Marjorie. ‘I went to the hospital to collect Ben and I found him dead in a drawer. Today a week ago I went to the doctor, and he said I ought to have a hysterectomy, it was ridiculous the way I bled, and I don’t know what to do. Don’t you please tell me, either, Chloe, I don’t trust your judgement any more. Not since Françoise. You don’t know how that’s upset me. I had hoped that you at least could be happy.’

What can Chloe say? She wants to cry, for everyone.

T
ODAY GRACE LIVES WITH
Sebastian, who is fifteen years younger than she is. Or rather Sebastian lives with Grace. Grace may have the income, but Sebastian has the talent, the charm, and the future. He picks and chooses whom he lives with. Grace, these days, tends to take what comes along. Sebastian is a film director, or would be if he could raise the money to make a film. He was taught film-making at his public school, and took a degree in visual communication at college.

Today Grace lives in a half-finished flat, on the top floor of a large terrace house in Holland Park. She has been living there for six months, the last three of them with Sebastian. Here Chloe goes to visit her.

Builders have been knocking three rooms into one, but have gone away, it seems, in the middle of the task. There are piles of plaster rubble and heaps of sodden wallpaper, inside and outside the flat, and strips of wallpaper are still stretched half-pasted on a trestle table. Tins of paint stand open and congealing. Chloe automatically replaces the lids.

Grace crouches on the floor in front of the fan heater, drying her thick red hair. She has cleared a living space by the window, spread it with rugs and cushions, set up the hi-fi, plugged in an electric kettle and a small wall refrigerator, and within these limits has set up her home.

‘Don’t clear up the mess,’ says Grace. ‘I may have to sue. Everything has to look as dreadful as possible.’

Over the years Grace has developed quite a taste for litigation. She who once stood in court and wept, and screamed, now has a liking for the experience. And thus the conversation goes, between her and her friend Chloe:

Grace
And how was Marjorie’s moustache? Or does she shave, these days?

Chloe
She has better things to think about.

Grace
What? The BBC? And how’s Patrick? Does she say?

Chloe
Much the same, mad and mean.

Grace
Why doesn’t she move in with him? What a waste of rent and rates.

Chloe
He hasn’t asked her to.

Grace
She has this dreadful habit of deferring to the male. She’s as bad as you, Chloe. Don’t you just love this flat?

Chloe
It’s hard to say.

Grace
I hate it. It’s been a nightmare.

Chloe
You didn’t have to move. You could have kept the house in St John’s Wood.

Grace
No I couldn’t. I sold it. I had to have the money. I couldn’t keep the buyer out for ever. His wife kept having babies and he kept complaining and in the end he had me evicted, well, more or less. The squatter people were very unhelpful.

Chloe
That house was all you had. When you’ve got rid of the money, Grace, what will you do?

Grace
Die. I hate it round here, don’t you? It’s a real middle-class ghetto. Full of short-sighted women with frizzy hair dressed all in leather and carrying teddy bears. All the real people have been driven out. You can’t think how filthy this flat was when I moved in. They had five children and the father was in prison and the mother had TB and the floorboards were sodden with piss. I tried painting them with lino paint but they still smelt so I got some builders in to replace the floors. It was when the boards were up that Sebastian moved in and said we might as well have the whole place done properly, so they started knocking down the partition walls, and then the Council turned up and said they weren’t partition walls at all, but structural, and the whole thing was illegal anyway and what about Planning Permission, and then of course the builders got disheartened and left. I’d paid them in advance—that was Sebastian’s idea, he said it was customary, to show you trusted them. And then Sebastian got this architect friend of his to do some drawings, and he met some more builders in a pub—that’s their mess over there, they were film technicians starting a new career, well, you know what the film industry’s like—and then the neighbours got up a petition to stop us spoiling the sky-line, and in the meanwhile the builders had been offered a film after all, and couldn’t refuse—they were making it in Belfast and the original crew had walked out—well, you know how it all is. I don’t have to tell you. Property is all very boring.

Chloe
What happened to the mother with TB?

Grace
Is that the only thing you care about?

Chloe
Yes.

Grace
I don’t know. I never asked. She was moved to the outskirts by some kind of agency, I believe. I paid her a thousand to get out. It was a fortune for someone like her.

Chloe
And which is Stanhope’s room?

Grace
You’ll have to ask the architect. He has a plan for some kind of ceiling suspension for guests. I don’t trust him, really. He’s all quick imaginative sketches and lots of talk and never any measurements.

Chloe
Then why employ him?

Grace
He’s Sebastian’s friend.

Chloe
It’s your money.

Grace
No it’s not, it’s Christie’s. He’s lying there in his grave—or at any rate his urn—cheering at the way I’ve mismanaged things. I’ve never earned a penny in my life, not in the pay packet sense. I wouldn’t know how to start. I’d quite like to be an opera singer, mind you.

Chloe
Like your mother?

Grace
No, not like my mother. I’d forgotten about her. I couldn’t bear to do anything which ran in the family. Is Stanhope musical?

Chloe
He never mentions it, only football. He’s your son, not mine. They send you the school reports; you could always look it up, I suppose, under Extra Activities.

Grace
I never read school reports. They should be abolished. They’re an invasion of a child’s privacy. What a child needs from a school is anonymity.

Chloe
In that case, perhaps Stanhope should go to a comprehensive school. It’s what he wants to do.

Grace
You always give in to the children, Chloe. How can a boy Stanhope’s age know what’s best for him? He’s far happier at a boarding school. They’ve got good teachers and wonderful equipment and splendid playing fields, and he must have lots of friends by now.

Chloe
He doesn’t make friends easily.

Grace
Then think how miserable he’d be at a comprehensive school.

Chloe
You did tell him he only had to board ’til you had somewhere settled to live.

Grace
Settled? Do you call this settled? And I don’t trust that architect. I don’t think Stanhope would be happy in a ceiling suspension, do you? No, he’ll have to stay where he is. And I’m certainly not having him at a comprehensive; why does he think he wants to go?

Chloe
He wants to play soccer, not rugby.

Grace
There you are, it’s ridiculous. Besides, with a stupid name like Stanhope he’d only get laughed at, down there amongst the yobs.

Grace changes her social attitudes along with her boyfriends, as a stick insect changes colour according to the bush it lands on. But the nervous craving for privilege keeps rearing its head. Though she is, at the moment, prepared to blow up Eton, or at any rate light the fuse for the dynamite Sebastian has laid, she will not have her son at a comprehensive school

Chloe
It was you who named him. Grace. You insisted on Stanhope, in spite of everyone’s advice.

Grace
The whole episode of Stanhope was ridiculous, I quite agree. I should have had an abortion. I should never have listened to you, Chloe. Stanhope is your responsibility. Do you like my dress?

Chloe
No.

Grace wears a navy-blue silk dress, made circa 1946; it has an uneven hem and frayed seams. It clings rather sadly to Grace’s small bosom, seeming to miss a more robust original owner.

Grace
No? I do. I bought it down the Portobello. Marjorie’s mother had one like this. Do you think it’s the same one? I always wanted to be like Helen.

Chloe
You’ve succeeded.

She does not mean it kindly.

J
ANUARY 1945. HELEN, BACK
from New York, turns up unexpectedly at The Poplars. It is eight in the morning and there is snow on the ground. She presses a ten shilling note into Marjorie’s trembling hand, and presents Esther Songford with a tin of salmon. Esther has put on a good deal of weight—her ankles are puffy and she is short of breath—but she manages to gasp her thanks.

‘Is Esther all right?’ asks Helen, all solicitude, drawing Edwin to one side. ‘She looks dreadful!’ Helen has left the engine of her Baby Austin running. She can’t stay more than a minute. Her passenger, grey-faced and desperate, stands in the drive, stamping his feet to keep warm, refusing to enter. He is, Helen says, a Labour politician.