Female Friends (7 page)

And everyone suffers for Marjorie, so transparent are her pains, so noble her efforts to be good and happy.

Family life at The Poplars. Making England what it is. The backbone of the nation, set rigid against change.

Esther likes to save things from corruption. She makes cold sago pudding into soup by adding tomato sauce and salt. She makes jam from the over-ripe sodden plums in the grass at the end of the garden. She presses flowers to save them from decay. She turns and re-turns the sheets to stave off the inevitable holes. She prays and prays for her soul to be saved, and that Marjorie, Grace and Chloe should be good and happy. She prays that Edwin should be forgiven.

When Edwin is away fishing or seeing his solicitors, Esther is brisk and efficient. When he returns, she lapses into a vague clumsiness, letting the saucepans burn, the baths overflow: she trips and sprains her ankle.

There comes a time when all is not well with Edwin. His Home Guard troop is incorporated into a larger unit, and he loses his command. The blow drives him back into the Rose and Crown, from which, encouraged by military responsibilities, he has been diffidently emerging, like a mole into the light of day. And back in the Cosy Nook, alas, all is not as it should be. Sometimes a trooper or a common airman will take over the corner seat which he regards as his, and will not vacate it even on request. His perfectly ordinary and patriotic remarks extolling Churchill’s conduct of the war will on occasions, if there’s a particularly low crowd in the bar, be met by a gale of laughter. Sometimes, too, the beer runs out.

Edwin ages ten years in as many months. Alcohol traces pink stress marks over his face. His moustache turns grey. He suffers from fits of temper, depression, asthma, and acute irritation with his wife. And his stomach, normally tough enough to cope with even Esther’s cooking, now revolts at the very thought of dinner.

He becomes an expert in domestic sadism.

Envisage one Sunday, not untypical of those months, when distress, frustration and despair swirled in Edwin’s mind and distorted his view of the world and the people that inhabited it.

The sun shines. It is high summer. The sea calls. There is enough petrol in the tank to get the car to the coast and back. Esther has made sandwiches with real butter—having saved everyone’s ration for a week—and bloater paste. Chloe has provided four hard-boiled eggs—given to her mother by a hard-drinking farmer, in the vain hope of preferential treatment on days when beer is short and the whisky run out. Grace has put on her best dress—red cotton spotted with blue, and Marjorie has swept out the Riley and polished its real leather seats. They have borrowed a beach-ball from neighbours, and with difficulty, for girls grow apace and clothing coupons are short, have acquired decent swimming suits for everyone.

Departure is timed for ten o’clock. As the hall clock strikes the hour, Esther and the girls assemble by the garage. (Edwin does not like to be kept waiting, at the best of times, and if he is, is quite capable of making the entire journey in total silence.) By ten-fifteen Edwin has not appeared.

Chloe, being the one least likely to provoke bad behaviour, is sent to the library to fetch him. Edwin sits staring morosely out of the window. He is dressed in his Home Guard uniform, not in the expected slacks and sports shirt.

‘We’re ready, Mr Songford,’ says Chloe.

‘Ready?’ He seems puzzled.

‘We’re going to the sea,’ she ventures.

‘The sea? The country is on the verge of disaster, and we are going to the sea? What madness is this?’

‘We’re waiting,’ says Chloe, humbly. Edwin strides out to the garage. Chloe trots behind. She is wearing her mother’s white sandals. They both wear size two and have difficulty finding shoes to fit their feet.

‘So!’ Edwin is jocular. His teeth gleam in a too wide smile. ‘Is our journey really necessary?’

‘Yes it is, daddy,’ says Grace. ‘Before I die of boredom.’

‘We’re all ready and waiting,’ says Esther. ‘And a lovely packed lunch! I can hear the sea calling us, can’t you?’

‘I polished the seats,’ says Marjorie.

Edwin stands, and smiles, and waits. Esther falls into the trap. She always does.

‘Are you going to wear your uniform?’ she asks.

‘Why, do you think I shouldn’t? Am I not entitled to it?’

‘Of course you are, dear. I just thought it might be a little hot. Such a lovely day!’

‘You must allow me to be the judge of my own body temperature.’ Edwin’s face begins to flush. A vein in his temple throbs. The children move away, pack themselves and their belongings into the car, and hope against hope.

‘I shouldn’t have mentioned it,’ says Esther. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘But you have mentioned it,’ remarks Edwin. ‘So shall we investigate the remark? You want me to be the only man on that beach not in uniform. I am afraid I am not the sort of person to take such things lightly. You have organized this outing, Esther, solely to humiliate me in front of every whipper-snapper we pass. I see through you, Esther.’

‘But darling—’

‘Too hot in uniform! You are impossible.’

He stalks back towards the house.

‘Edwin,’ she calls plaintively after him. ‘Edwin, where are you going?’

‘To my study.’

‘What for?’

‘To write letters. Should I not?’

‘But we were going to the coast,’ she is in tears. ‘I’ve made sandwiches.’

Edwin shuts himself into his study. The girls clamber out of the car, embarrassed and disappointed. Esther pulls herself together, and says, brightly,

‘I’m afraid daddy’s tired. Shall we have a lovely picnic instead, down by the river? We can carry the basket. It isn’t far.’

But they shake their heads. They won’t. The day is spoilt.

Edwin remains in his study. Eleven passes, and twelve. What slim chance there is of his relenting, evaporates. The heat is oppressive. The house is silent. Esther fries the sandwiches for lunch. Grace draws. Marjorie does her homework. From under the study door drifts a miasmic cloud of hate, gloom and resentment.

Chloe goes home at tea-time to the Rose and Crown, and returns the eggs to her mother.

They are not good days for Edwin, or for anyone.

Sometimes Esther wonders if she could learn to drive, but the first obstacle, that of asking Edwin to teach her, is insurmountable.

Envisage now another scene, one summer Sunday some twelve years later, when Grace is in the middle of her dream marriage to Christie. (Grace had a dream marriage the way other women have—or don’t have—dream kitchens.)

Into the Mercedes, waiting in the drive, are packed Grace’s two little children—a pigeon pair—the Spanish nursemaid, a picnic hamper packed by Harrods (
alia tempora, alii mores
) and a case of champagne for the charming friends they mean to visit that day in their cottage on the Sussex coast.

Grace leans, all warm and contented, against the long bonnet of the Mercedes. Her high plump bosom is delicately revealed by the low-cut white cotton dress which she wears. She stares at the sky, and watches the birds. Does she think of the past, of her mother and father, and other outings, in other years? Probably not. Grace makes few connections between then and now.

But here comes Christie, leaping down the steps, all vital executive energy and financial acumen. Six feet one inch, broad-shouldered, clean-shaven, with a clear-cut Aryan face, her highly desirable husband.

He stops short, seeing Grace. She smiles at him. It is a slow and languorous smile; she offers him a remembrance of past pleasures; she has not smiled at him like that before, nor will she again.

The night before has been rich with strange untoward sexual events (thanks to a careless remark dropped by Grace’s gynaecologist) as new to Grace as to Christie, who had thought the missionary position—he on top of her—with his eyes closed, to mark the limits of married conduct, and anything else the mere substance of pornography. Women, like men, the gynaecologist told Grace, have orgasms, and though her mouth could scarcely bring itself to utter the word aloud, so rich, strange and dangerous a concept it seemed, she had whispered the information into Christie’s ear as they lay together in their marital bed.

In the morning, this feat accomplished, she is languid, replete and gratified. But what is Christie saying? Why is he calling her names? He who so embraced and pleasured her in the night—and yes, at breakfast ate his bacon and drank his coffee in so unusually companionable a way—what are these words he uses now? Exhibitionist, slattern? What has she done? Her dress? Exposing her breasts like a tart?

But the day is hot. She chose the dress because the day is hot, and that is all, she swears—and not, as he alleges now, to seduce their host in his Sussex cottage, husband of her dearest friend. Christie is cruel, unjust, sadistic. Her happiness crumbles. The children cry. The nursemaid is white with horror.

Now, it is true that the host much admires Grace’s bosom. It is true that she would like to annoy her friend. It is true that the events of the night before and the power she then exerted over Christie, and which he now so fears and resents, have extended her erotic fancies towards all the men in the world, and not just her best friend’s husband. Christie is not so wrong as he in his poor cold heart suspects he is. So far as Grace is concerned she is totally innocent. She chose the dress because the day is hot; her eyes fill with tears. Christie has ruined her day, her life, her future. She stammers hurt and bitter words, and he stalks off silently to his office.

It is the first Sunday in seven months he has taken off from work, and see how she has ruined it?

Grace tells this story often, as evidence of Christie’s malevolence and general impossibility, and her own fortitude, for her response to the incident was, very sensibly, to learn to drive, and to pass the test first time. And since Christie would not let her drive the Mercedes in case she damaged the gear-box, she sold herself for fifty pounds to an Armenian violinist in his bedroom in the Regents Park Hotel, in order to buy a car of her own. Or so she said.

Though Christie’s second wife Geraldine, the social worker, said very differently.

‘I know for a fact,’ she said to Chloe once, ‘that Grace only passed the test on the fourth try. As for sleeping with an Armenian for money, that is typical of one of Grace’s sick fantasies—and part of her mental illness, I’m afraid, and further evidence, if any is necessary, that she is not fit to see the children at weekends. The Regents Park Hotel! Women just don’t behave like that, and if they did, I’m sure the hotel porter doesn’t let them in. It’s a very respectable place. I’ve been there to tea. And fifty pounds! Who would pay that much for Grace? Armenians are a very shrewd race, the market price for prostitutes is three pounds, and our currency is not all that difficult to master. She is quite frigid, poor Grace, according to Christie, and that of course is part of her trouble.

‘As for that Sunday, Christie didn’t go to the office in a temper, but because he’d had a phone-call to say one of his buildings was falling down, and he was needed on site.’

This last statement certainly had the ring of truth. Christie was a civil engineer and his buildings were frequently falling down.

Chloe quite liked Geraldine, and was sorry for her, believing Grace when she said that Christie had married Geraldine, that respectable young woman, merely to gain custody of the children. And though Geraldine, at that time, possessed to a marked degree the cool and irritating smugness of the untried and childless wife, who knows that a little goodwill, a little common sense and a little self-discipline will solve all problems—be they matrimonial, social or political—Chloe knew that life and time would soon cure all that.

As indeed they did. Once the children were safely and securely adopted, and Grace had renounced all interest in them, Christie drove Geraldine out, and a long and humiliating process it was, and entered his day-long marriage to the greedy if blissful flower-child California; and thus Geraldine found herself the mother of two children whom she neither liked particularly nor had the means to support, and was no longer heard to make remarks such as—

‘No such thing as a bad child, only bad parents.’

or

‘People have only themselves to blame.’

—and was much the nicer for it.

B
Y THE TIME THE
waiter takes away their empty plates the Italiano has almost emptied. Marjorie, nevertheless, consults the menu and orders
zabaglione
for Chloe and herself. Marjorie never gives up, never saves herself, thinks Chloe. She invites trouble, in order to face it. She struggles in some monstrous swimming-pool of dire events, forever almost drowning, forever bobbing up again, reproachful and gasping for breath, and forever declining to stretch out her hand and be saved.

‘How’s your mother?’ inquires Chloe. It was Helen who pushed Marjorie into the pool, in the first place, and that’s why she won’t get out.

Yes. Listen to her now.

‘Mother? Mother’s marvellous!’ says Marjorie. ‘She’ll be seventy next week. She was in
Vogue
last month. Didn’t you see? No? I thought you’d be sure to read
Vogue
. She gives fashionable dinner parties for the gay political crowd. All very camp. I don’t know if she knows that’s what it is, but it’s something for old ladies to be appreciated by somebody, isn’t it, and they all adore each other over the lace napery and the flower pieces and the
Coq à la Tunisie
cooked by a sublime little Suliman imported from the Bosphorus.’

‘I hope he washes the napery,’ says Chloe, to whom tablecloths have always been a burden, for her husband Oliver cannot digest food without one, and she has no washing machine.

‘I do them for her,’ says Marjorie. ‘I collect them on Sunday, do them by hand in luke-warm suds on Sunday afternoon, dry them in my little yard, and send them back in a taxi on Monday morning from the office. I wish I could move in with her and look after her properly but you know how independent she’s always been.’