Female Friends (8 page)

‘You do quite a lot of washing, these days,’ says Chloe. ‘What with your mother’s table cloths and Patrick’s undies.’

‘What else do I have to do in my spare time?’ asks Marjorie. ‘And who else would do it?’

The
zabaglione,
astonishingly, is rich, warm and good. The waiter even smiles as he offers it. Perhaps it was shame, rather than resentment, which had so afflicted him. Marjorie smiles back. She has, after all, won a victory.

‘She could pay a laundress,’ Chloe ventures.

‘Oh no.’ Marjorie is shocked. ‘She has to be very careful. You know how worried the elderly become about their futures—having so little of it left, I suppose. She’s even having to sell the Frognal house.’

‘Not before time.’ Chloe has not liked Helen since she overheard her commenting on Esther’s liberalism in letting her daughter associate with the village children. Chloe, that is, the bar-maid’s daughter. Or so Chloe assumed.

The Frognal house, scene of Helen’s early happiness with Dick, has been unoccoupied for the past fifteen years, while Helen toys with the notion of selling it. Occasionally hippies or squatters move in, and move out again, of their own accord.

‘She has a sentimental attachment to it,’ says Marjorie. ‘It’s hard for her.’

‘I expect it’s past repair now,’ says Chloe. ‘And that’s what she’s been waiting for. It will have to be pulled down, there’ll be planning permission for flats, and she’ll make a fortune.’

‘It’s not like that at all,’ says Marjorie. ‘Nothing could destroy that house. It’s solid concrete. She’s not a calculating person at all, she just needs the money.’

Over the years Helen has sold the paintings Dick bought in the twenties. She has done very well from them. Unfortunately the first editions, which would have fetched even more, were left under the leaky roof and eventually disintegrated.

When Dick left for the war there had been only one loose tile on the roof, but the anti-aircraft batteries on Hampstead Heath had shaken the ground and loosened thirty-two more. Or so a fire watcher, up on the roof with his bucket of sand, waiting for incendiaries, had once told Helen. And she, going up to the attic one rainy day, looking at those mildewing pages, could not bring herself so much as to move the volumes from beneath the drips.

His books. His fault. And only one chance for anyone.

‘I don’t know why you don’t live at Frognal,’ says Chloe to Marjorie, although she knows quite well why, and how painful the reason is. But as Marjorie gets warmer and happier Chloe finds herself becoming more and more disagreeable. ‘All that space going to waste.’

And ‘I hope your mother asks you to her smart parties in return for all that washing,’ knowing full well that Helen doesn’t.

And finally, ‘Do you wash Patrick’s sheets as well as his undies? The ones he uses with Lady This and Lady That while you wait outside?’

Marjorie seems pained rather than angry.

‘You’re not usually like this,’ she says. ‘There is something the matter. That’s why you wanted to see me. Well, we all know what it is. You’ve stayed married to the wrong man for twenty years, for reasons that have more to do with snobbery, greed and fear, than anything else.’

Chloe is silent. Presently Marjorie says,

‘I wonder why I keep coming to this dreadful place? The service is appalling, the food is rancid, the waiter is round the bend, and they put us at this draughty table on purpose.’

‘That’s right,’ says Chloe.

Marjorie begins to laugh. Chloe begins to snivel.

‘Oh Marjorie,’ says Chloe.

‘Oh Chloe,’ says Marjorie. ‘Nothing ever changes.’

‘Yes it does,’ says Chloe. ‘It must.’

But it doesn’t really. This is what it’s like now and then it was much the same. You ask for bread, and get given stones.

A
T LAST! HELEN COMES
down to Ulden to visit her daughter Marjorie. How beautiful Helen is, how elegant, how timeless; how she charms Esther Songford and how she flirts with Edwin, laying a scarlet fingernail on his dusty lapel, mesmerizing.

She comes in a chauffeured car. She is all cream and roses. Her stockings are purest silk; her underskirt, just briefly showing, is lined with lace. Her eyes are wide and innocent in an oval face, her pale hair waves sweetly round her ears.

(Dick, far away, cold and hungry, dreams of Helen in the arms of enemy officers on the Library floor beneath a leaky ceiling, and well he might. Helen does not dream of Dick.)

‘Oh my dears,’ she says, ‘my dears.’ And she embraces all and sundry, but Marjorie somehow less than anyone. And Esther, who seldom touches anyone, is gratified and enchanted by the smooth warmth of Helen’s hand; and the feel of another cheek in soft proximity to her own, so gentle and affectionate, amazes her.

‘The times are so dreadful,’ mourns Helen, ‘this war is such a shocking business. I am grateful to you for looking after Marjorie. She has settled in so happily here.’

‘She can stay as long as she likes,’ says Esther Songford. How clumsy she feels, in her old brown skirt and cardy; how earnestly she wishes for Helen’s approval.

‘Well—’ says Edwin.

‘Just until we find somewhere out of London—such a frightening place—and I will send a guinea a week.’ says Helen. ‘It is the least I can do. It is difficult for me, of course. I am very much alone in the world. My husband’s parents, I am afraid, disown his child. They are Jewish, you see, and very orthodox; and of course disowning her does save them money! I am sure it is no more than that. It hurts me, all the same.’

This is the first Marjorie has ever heard about her father being Jewish. Well, she shouldn’t be listening at key holes.

‘We’ll look after her,’ says Edwin. ‘Poor little Marjorie. By Jove we will, it’s the least we can do. Feed her up, make a man of her, put the colour back into her cheeks.’ He is distressed by notions of discrimination and unfairness. He is a nice man, to everyone but Esther. ‘London’s no place for a child, these days. I heard the East End’s taken a battering.’

‘The spirit of the people is incredible,’ says Helen. ‘They sing down in the shelters while all hell rages above them. I’m working day and night, you know. Well, we all have to work, these days. I help young mothers to cope. So many temptations, poor things. If a husband is conscripted, the wife’s allowance is only twenty-eight shillings a week! It is quite shocking. How can anyone keep a family on that? Well of course they can’t—and with so many soldiers on the loose in London, I’m afraid one fears a complete breakdown in morality. No, London is no place for a child.’

‘But mother,’ says Marjorie, in the room somehow, pulling at her mother’s sleeve in the way that most infuriates, ‘all the other evacuees have gone back. I’m the only one left in the village.’

‘Marjorie,’ says Helen, ‘please don’t look gift horses in the mouth, when the Songfords have been so good to you. It’s dreadfully rude.’

Marjorie goes scarlet. Tears burst from her eyes.

‘I’m afraid she’s something of a grizzler,’ says Helen. ‘It’s her heredity, I’m afraid. A kind of permanent wailing wall.’

‘She’s a dear girl,’ says Esther stoutly.

‘Well that’s that,’ says Helen, ‘I must be off.’

‘You can’t stay to tea?’ asks Edwin. ‘We couldn’t tempt you with a slice of nut cake?’

‘I’d love to, but duty calls. I’m at my Young Wives Sanctuary tonight,’ says Helen. ‘I shouldn’t have come at all really, abandoned them, but I had to make sure Marjorie was settled and happy.’

‘Please stay, mother,’ blurts Marjorie. ‘It’s only lunch-time.’

‘Darling heart, don’t pester. We have to be back in London before dark. There’s a blackout, you know.’

The chauffeur opens the door for her. He is blond, young, healthy, handsome, and in some kind of uniform, though whether of private or military service would be hard to say.

Edwin sees her into the car, tucks her fur rug round her.

‘This war,’ she says, hesitant and intimate, ‘this war. So extraordinary. It’s changed my life. I was so selfish before. A blessing in disguise. What a place the world is—oh what a place!’

He gapes, enchanted.

The engine purrs. Marjorie comes running up.

‘Mother,’ she says, ‘what about father? Where’s father?’

‘I simply don’t know,’ says Helen, ‘but that means nothing. Letters, these days, just never get through. You can’t rely on a thing.’

‘But mother—’

Helen smiles sweetly and pats her daughter’s cheek and winds up the window and is gone. But she has stirred something in the Ulden air.

‘Extraordinary,’ says Edwin to Esther over late-night cocoa. Esther makes it with water, not milk.

‘What is?’

‘Her age.’

‘What’s extraordinary about that?’ asks Esther.

‘She must be the same age as you, and look at her and look at you,’ and Esther is as distressed as Edwin, unsettled and restless, has meant her to be.

Silk petticoats lined with lace! Blond chauffeurs!

‘When I grow up,’ says Grace to Marjorie, before they go to sleep, ‘I’m going to be like your mother.’

Marjorie snivels in the next bed and doesn’t reply.

Lies and scarlet fingernails!

Half a mile away, in the room behind the Rose and Crown, Chloe lies awake in her bed. The sheets are coarse and the blankets are thin: the iron bed has rusty springs: the mattress is made of lumpy flock. Little Chloe wonders if she is doomed to live like this for ever. From the open windows of the Cosy Nook comes a gust of beery smoke and song. Down there her mother smiles, and serves, and cleans, and wipes, and disguises her distaste. Doors slam and voices shout. Out in the yard, caught short, beer-loaded men excrete, urinate and vomit. On Saturday nights, when the factory girls come down Stortford, the whole yard seems to heave and grunt with embracing couples. Chloe reads the Bible by torchlight.

‘Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, when the evil days come not—’

But supposing they do?

Next time Helen has to come by train, and not by car. There is no petrol. But she is accompanied by a gallant Polish officer. He clicks his heels and bows and speaks no English. Now Helen too is in uniform. It is of enigmatic origin, and its khaki bulkiness serves to enhance her fragile charm. She looks as if she is in fancy-dress.

She is pale and trembly, and leaves the Polish officer for Esther to cope with, and takes Edwin off for a walk in the woods. And thus, more or less, the conversation goes:

Helen
I feel you are my friend, I feel I can confide in you. And Esther too, of course. But somehow—a man, you know how it is when one needs advice. You don’t think Esther minds me carrying you off like this? I wouldn’t want to offend her for the world. I’m so indebted to her.

Edwin
She’s got the Polish fellow. Fair’s fair.

Helen
Yes. And the children. She loves the children, doesn’t she! Edwin, I’ve heard from Dick at last. I thought he was in Scotland, but no, they sent him to France. It must have been a mistake because no-one in their right mind would have sent Dick on active service. He’s far too much of an intellectual, and Jewish too. Sergei says they make terrible soldiers! Dick belonged to the Peace Pledge Union, you know. So did I, actually, but I think I was very much under Dickie’s influence. Is it a dreadful thing to say—but since he’s gone I’ve discovered myself. I was a Socialist, too, you know. Yes, I really was! I used to think the People were perfectly sensible, they just lacked education and one’s own advantages, but I begin to think they’re really very stupid. Sergei—he’s a Count, actually—says Communism is doomed by virtue of the stupidity of the working classes. At least I think that’s what he says—we talk in French. We both have a smattering. But the thing is, you see, Dick’s a prisoner of war, and I feel so ashamed. I know it’s not his fault but I can’t help feeling he’s taken the easy, well, actually the Jewish, way out. So passive and sneaky. He’ll be cosy as anything for the duration, being an officer and a gentleman, and safe as houses while the rest of us go through the bombings and the hardship. I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t volunteer with just this in mind. It was such an odd thing for him to do. Do you think you could possibly break the news to Marjorie for me? I find it very difficult to talk to her about her father. You know he was unfaithful to me while she was being born and I nearly died?

Edwin finds it an incredible notion. So, plainly, does Helen.

Poor Dick, offered warmth, understanding and solace by Helen’s best friend Rhoda, a bouncy, rompy, ridiculous girl, chosen by Helen for light relief. What should Dick have done that night of Marjorie’s birth? Turned away by the nursing home matron, as he was—birth no business of his, a female concern, his own wife swelling and bursting and all the fault of his own brutishness, the doctors saying no sex during pregnancy bad for baby, and no sex for three months after the birth—bad for mother, and Helen always more than ready to believe anything that suited her? What should Dick have done, Rhoda’s friends (ex-friends) and Helen’s, asked? Why, turned his back resolutely on Rhoda, of course (sexual urges not being considered the driving force they are now, and seen as a weakness, not a strength), held his tongue, his breath, and kept his patience, and saved everyone from ruin.

So poor wounded Helen believed, who had bared her beautiful breast simply, one might imagine, in order to receive the blow, and who in any case always had difficulty distinguishing a symptom from a cause (she believed, quite sincerely, that Marjorie’s spots were the cause of her misery, and not the result). Hurt turned to moral outrage, thence into habit, and now at last to her advantage.

Edwin
You poor plucky little thing.

Helen
All the same, I want to preserve the child’s faith in her father. I think that’s so important. If I see too much of her, I am afraid my rancour may spill over and damage her innocence. There is simply nowhere for her to go. My parents are in Australia, and as for Dick’s—well, they always thought themselves too good for me, you know. Can you imagine, people like that? Sergei says their sort should be interned, the Jews are the real traitors. London is quite dreadfully dangerous now, but I must stay, I can’t run away, it is simply not in my nature. Mr Churchill says we all have to stay put, and help, and London needs all the help it can get, you’ve no idea! One half of the population refuses to leave the shelters, and the other half won’t go down. The first lot risk dying from disease, the others being blown or burned to bits. And the breakdown in morality! I’m working with the fallen mothers. I ask them back to tea, we play records; I show them that life can still be civilized, we don’t have to descend to the level of brutes. And such a trial keeping that enormous house clean—it’s almost impossible to find a cleaner, let alone keep one, without paying something monstrous. One woman asked one and sixpence an hour and she had dreadful varicose veins, she couldn’t possibly have earned it … now, Edwin, you naughty boy, we’d better go back. Esther will be wondering what we’re up to. I am so lucky, to have such good friends, and such a good home for Marjorie.