Female Friends (16 page)

Grace takes direct action. She throws out the offending lover, has hysterics, attempts to strangle, breaks up her home, makes obscene phone calls, issues another writ, calms down. Goes to the hairdresser and demands that the manicurist does her toe nails. Life continues.

I, Chloe, move in another tradition, like my mother and Esther Songford before me. Mine is the mainstream, I suspect, of female action and reaction—in which neglected wives apply for jobs as home helps, divorcees go out cleaning, rejected mothers start playgroups, unhappy daughters leave home and take jobs abroad as au pairs.

Rub and scrub distress away, hands in soap-suds, scooping out the sink waste, wiping infants’ noses, the neck bowed beneath the yoke of unnecessary domestic drudgery, pain in the back already starting, unwilling joints seizing up with arthritis. Life continues.

G
RACE IS THE FIRST
to marry, prancing back to Ulden with a ring on her finger, a white wedding behind her, and Christie at her side.

Who’d have thought it a year earlier, when Grace sets off for London and the Slade from Ulden station, with only Gwyneth, Chloe and the Vicar to see her off. Her mother decomposing in the churchyard, her father nutty in a nursing home, and The Poplars up for sale. Nervous, affectionate and chattery, looking thin for once, and not just slim.

‘A pity Marjorie isn’t here,’ Grace says, as they wait for the Toy Town train. It is early October, and a damp and dismal day. Chloe is constantly surprised, these days, at Grace’s softness. Grace even tucks her gloved hand under Gwyneth’s arm and she is normally cool and distant with her friend’s mother, who when all is said and done, in spite of her lilting voice and ladylike ways, is only a barmaid.

But after her mother’s death, for a time, Grace becomes humbler and gentler, and grateful for affection.

‘Remember the day Marjorie and you arrived,’ says Grace. ‘There were so many people around then. Now there seems to be no-one. Everything’s running down.’

‘It was a very smelly train,’ says Gwyneth. ‘And they were very upsetting, dangerous days. Times are better now.’

But they are nostalgic, all the same, for those days of innocence and growth and noise. The post-war world is drab and grey and middle-aged. No excitement, only shortages and work. The airfields are closed, the Americans gone, the troops have been demobilized. Even Patrick has left, taking his guilty excitements with him, leaving virtue and propriety behind. Cabbages grow wild in Esther’s flower-beds, but the roses have taken over Edwin’s bean trellises. Neither of them won, neither Edwin nor Esther. They were evenly matched in the end.

‘You will look after yourself, Grace dear,’ says Gwyneth. ‘You’re too young to be setting off on your own.’

The Vicar has found Grace a bed-sitting room in Fulham, her place is waiting at the Slade, she has two hundred pounds in the bank, she can’t wait to be off, but Gwyneth worries.

‘No younger than Chloe,’ says Grace. Chloe is off to Bristol University the following week. Gwyneth is trying to get used to the idea. For seventeen years the circumstances of her life have been dictated by Chloe’s needs. Now she will be free, when she no longer has the strength to use her freedom.

‘Still too young,’ says Gwyneth.

‘I can look after myself,’ says Grace. ‘Marjorie’s in London. I won’t be alone.’

‘Now remember,’ says Gwyneth, ‘don’t let yourself be alone with a man, then you can’t get into trouble. It’s a simple rule. I hope Chloe remembers it.’

‘I’m sure there’s a branch of the SCM at the Slade,’ says the Vicar.

‘The SCM?’ asks Grace.

‘Student Christian Movement. And at Bristol too, Chloe. They’ll help you meet other young people socially under proper supervision. We’re not wet-blankets, we old codgers of the cloth: We know girls want to meet boys and boys want to meet girls.’

Grace thinks of the muddy ditch in which she lay with Patrick. Chloe of her mother’s bed, and the unlocked door, and Patrick.

‘Yes,’ says Grace, politely.

‘Yes,’ says Chloe, the same.

‘I wish you’d put it off a year,’ says Gwyneth.

When one mother goes, another moves in.

‘Too late now,’ says Grace.

Grace has burnt her boats. Her mother is dead, the baby sent off, her father is having a nervous breakdown. It is all Grace’s fault and she can’t wait to get out of Ulden.

‘It’s not too late,’ says Chloe. ‘You just don’t get on the train.’

Chloe worries lest Grace meet Patrick in London. Perhaps even at the Slade. For did not Patrick, usually so secretive, once let fall that after the war he meant to use his ex-service educational grant at art school? Does Grace know more than she does? Chloe can’t ask. Chloe and Grace never talk about Patrick, for fear of what they might hear, and this major silence sets up a whole chain of little silences between them.

Still, if you’re going to be laid and left, it might as well happen in silence. The humiliation, otherwise, is extreme. Both feel it.

Chloe is wrong, as it happens. Patrick goes to the Camberwell School of Art, not the Slade, and sees more of Marjorie than anyone else. Marjorie has a large house all to herself, after all, and Patrick sees no point in paying rent. He finds her address in his pocket-book. Chloe had given it to him.

Patrick
What a superb house. What decadence!

Marjorie
I’d clear it up if I knew where to start.

Patrick
It would be a shame to do that. I like it as it is. Are you here all by yourself?

Marjorie
Yes. Mother’s in South Africa.

Patrick
Don’t you get rather lonely?

Marjorie
Yes.

Patrick
The locks don’t look too good.

Marjorie
They’re not. Sometimes when I wake in the morning the front door’s ajar. And of course I can’t use the kitchen at all because it’s haunted.

Patrick
What by?

Marjorie
I’d think my father, except he died in there months after the haunting began. Unless of course these things have a different time scale from ours.

Patrick
A ghost is the projection of a living person, not a dead one. If you stopped being so unhappy and depressed the ghost would go away.

Marjorie
What makes you think I’m unhappy and depressed?

Patrick
The spots on your chin.

Marjorie is fascinated rather than insulted. That the state of the mind and the state of the body might be inter-related is something that comes to her with the shock of truth.

Marjorie
How do I stop being unhappy and depressed?

Patrick
You get me to move in as the lodger.

Patrick smiles at her. How broad, strong, young and healthy he appears, and how simple, sensible, and straightforward his requests. You would think he was a farmer’s son and not a criminal’s.

Marjorie
Mother doesn’t like strangers in the house.

Patrick
Your mother’s in South Africa.

True, thinks Marjorie, with a flicker of, what, spite?

Patrick
And I am not a stranger.

True. Patrick kissed Marjorie once, in 1946, leaning his strong hands against her small ones, pinning her against the trunk of a poplar tree, and who’s to say what might not have happened if it had not started to rain, or indeed if it had been a different tree, and not a poplar, with its upstretched, unsheltering branches. How Marjorie had trembled. Patrick Bates, grown man, in His Majesty’s uniform, and she nothing but Helen’s plain and awkward daughter. ‘Never mind,’ he’d said then, as if he knew more about her than she did herself, and what can be more erotic than that. ‘Never mind.’

Now Marjorie steps aside, and Patrick steps in. He looks at the ceiling of the long living room, and the criss-cross of curtain rails, from which hang moth-ridden brown curtains.

Patrick
What’s that patch of damp?

Marjorie
There’s something wrong with the roof, I think. It gets worse when its been raining. I don’t understand it. The roof’s two floors up. How could the rain get down this far?

Patrick
I’ll see to it.

But he never does.

Patrick moves in with his paints and canvases and suitcases, and makes his home the living room. He goes to Camberwell by day, and paints in the evenings, still lifes at first, and presently Marjorie, at first clothed, and then unclothed. He makes no further demands on her. He does not wish her to cook, or wash, or clean for him. He prefers to eat baked beans cold from the tin, and once the possibility of so doing occurs to her, so does Marjorie. Neither of them, these proud, strong days, likes to be beholden to anyone or anything.

Marjorie’s chin gets less spotty.

Helen moves to Australia. For two terms she fails to pay Marjorie’s tuition fees at Bedford College, where she is studying Classics. The Registrar sends for Marjorie, and refers to Helen, in a perfectly kindly way, as ‘one of these difficult parents’. Marjorie is most indignant on her mother’s behalf, preferring to blame the mail for her shortcomings. At Patrick’s suggestion she sells three Etty portraits for fifteen pounds each, to pay the bill. They were stacked in the wood shed in the garden, until he brought them in.

One night Marjorie, untroubled for some time, wakes in sudden terror, spirit breath upon her cheek, and runs to Patrick for comfort. He sleeps, fully clothed, in a roll of blankets beside the long, once luxurious, sofa. But he will not allow Marjorie in beside him, though he does not himself understand why not.

He sends her back to the troubled, heaving darkness of her room, which no amount of electric light seems able that night, to brighten.

‘If you are the bride of darkness,’ he tells her as they breakfast off cold tinned macaroni cheese, ‘and I suspect you are, then who am I to come between you and your succubi? It is too dangerous.’

‘But I get so frightened,’ she says. ‘And what are you talking about? I know it’s only projection and neurosis and so on.’ She does not love Patrick. She feels too close to him for that. He is father and brother in one.

‘Just lie there and try to enjoy it,’ says Patrick. ‘Like any other woman. God knows what you and your other world invader are breeding. It is not this house that is haunted, it is you. I don’t want to catch it from you, your spiritual VD.’

‘It’s not catching,’ says Marjorie, miserable. Is there to be no end to the dreadful things she is responsible for?

But perhaps it is a catching, or at any rate, a transferable ill. A few months later Patrick comes back from college with a full bottle of Grand Marnier he has found in the gutter, and he and Marjorie drink it all between them, and in the morning find themselves entwined together on the floor, sick and hungover, and though Marjorie’s mind has little remembrance of what exactly happened, she has the physical knowledge that her body, this morning, is undoubtedly different from what it was the night before, and she, all unbeknownst, handed some kind of season ticket to enter worlds she has so far only heard about.

And as for Patrick, it is certainly true that about this time a kind of natural goodness inside him becomes clouded over; or perhaps it is only that the violent gloom which marked his entry into the world begins to take its toll upon his personality—at any rate he has, thereafter, the gift of bringing disaster not so much upon himself as upon the heads of people less accustomed to it than he. Though Patrick, one might say, has been rendered immune in infancy to Marjorie’s disease, others, more fortunate than he, have not. These are the people Patrick seeks out, thereafter, and these the people he in his turns infects and destroys.

The entering of one person into another is seldom without meaning, or without result, breeding at best children and at worst death; at its lowest, disease and humiliation; at its most pedestrian, status and relief; at its most profound, animation, spiritual change and happiness—and no amount of Grand Marnier can undo a moment of it.

All those grey other people scurrying about the streets of our cities—do not under-rate them, or the power they carry, each of them, in the great and convoluted scheme of things.

Patrick under-rates no-one. It is his power.

Grace calls once at Frognal to see Marjorie, finds Patrick installed, and disappears instantly. These days she presents herself as a virgin.

For Grace’s Christie feels virginity to be essential in the woman he loves, whilst he does his damnedest to dispose of it.

C
HRISTIE IS THAT YEAR’S
Bachelor Catch. While the winter snow lies impacted month after month, and half Europe starves, and the bombers overhead carry food for Germany instead of bombs, and the gas dwindles to a flicker, and the electric lights waver, and strangers stand close to each other for comfort—Christie shines before Grace like a beacon of hope and promise. He is all clear-cut, up-standing (but only in marriage) masculinity. Christie is Grace’s ambition. Not a diploma, not a career, nor the world’s recognition, not any more. Just Christie.

She loves him. Oh, indeed she does. Her heart quickens at the sight of him, her bowels dissolve with longing. But she will not, she cannot, succumb to his embraces. He takes her on his boat, well chaperoned (yes, he sails) and up mountains, rather less chaperoned (yes, he climbs). He offers to buy her a flat (yes, he can afford to) but no she will not. No diamonds, thank you, Christie. No wrist watches. No gifts, no bribes, my dearest. Chocolates, yes, oh thank you! And orchids, and invitations to dinner and a taxi ride home, and yes, a kiss, and yes, you may touch my breast (how wicked we are!) and quickly, quickly, goodnight, Christie. My own, my love, my dearest dear. I would die for you but I will not sleep with you.