Big Women. Fay Weldon
says Stephie.
‘Let her go,’ says Alice, ‘it’s fated.’ But whether she’s talking to the women or the husband, who’s to say?
‘You wouldn’t have been any use to us, Zoe,’ says Layla. ‘No backbone, no stamina, self-absorbed, your brain’s turned to porridge; go your own way. Some women are incapable of sisterhood and you’re one of them.’
Zoe gives a little cry of distress, but Bull is already hustling wife, child and pushchair out into the corridor. There he sees Daffy towel-wrapped on the stairs, and is mollified again, by the proof of his conviction that this is a house of disreputable and disgraceful goings-on.
‘Medusa,’ says Alice, to anyone who cares to listen. ‘The time is ripe, the ceremony fits. But it is Artemis who is involved. Artemis who claims Zoe the fruitful as sacrifice: Persephone and Eurydice in the one form. After the sacrifice the new growth begins. I see blood upon the ground and sorrow. Artemis the hunter destroys what she brings forth.’
If you’d asked her afterwards what she’d said, she couldn’t have told you. Sometimes her mouth opened and the words flowed, without any particular willing of her own. Usually such gifts are given to the simple, the garrulous, the gullible: Alice could at least render the outpourings graceful, and properly formulated, so their origins seemed to have some tenuous connection with wisdom and experience.
‘Beware,’ said Alice, suddenly, ‘lest the wounded return to devour.’
‘Shivery,’ said Layla.
Out in the street Zoe kept step with the striding Bull.
‘Now don’t upset Saffron, Bull. She’s very sensitive.’
‘Naughty Mummy,’ said Saffron.
Daffy retreated back to Stephie’s bedroom. Hamish followed. Stephanie gave them a few moments and went on up, still unclothed.
‘Remember,’ called Layla after her, ‘the personal is the political.’
‘I will,’ said Stephanie, all resolve.
In the bedroom Daffy had her boiler suit on again and was trying to lace her boots, knotting the laces where Hamish had scissored them. But once knotted, how to get the knots through the eyelets? She gave up and sprayed herself liberally and defiantly with Stephanie’s big bottle of stale duty-free Chanel No. 5.
‘Do you like this house?’ Stephanie asked Daffy, when she’d finished with the scent.
‘I do,’ said Daffy. ‘It’s a mess, but it would clean up well.’
‘Then have it,’ said Stephanie. ‘But the husband and the kids go with it.’
‘OK,’ said Daffy, after a little thought.
Hamish drew his naked wife out into the corridor, where Rafe and Roland overheard but were not seen.
‘Are you out of your mind?’ he demanded.
‘I told you it was the last straw,’ said his wife.
‘But you are meant to throw me out, not leave,’ he said.
‘Too bad,’ she said. ‘I’m off.’
‘But I’m the guilty party,’ he said, ‘and there are lots of witnesses.’
‘I don’t want anything,’ she said. ‘You can keep the lot: house, things, children. I want a new life.’
‘You are an unnatural woman,’ he said. Back then, that was a fairly ferocious insult. These days it meets with a ho-hum.
‘So be it,’ she said. ‘Keep Daffy too, as the housemaid. Fuck her and she won’t ask for payment. It will work out cheaper for you like that. As for me, I am to be reborn. Let my sisters take me.’
And she went downstairs again with a cry of ‘Shall we go, Layla?’ and Hamish pattered after her crying ‘Is this all? Is this all the end of a marriage deserves?’ with the two boys clutching at his African robe, for they could see he was all they now had in the world, until Daffy eased their clawing fingers free and soothed them. She had no children of her own but her instincts were good, if not, to date, her behaviour.
Stephie, mother naked, led Layla out into the street. All Stephanie took with her was her car-keys. Later she was to return to the house and claim a few documents – passport, driving licence, that kind of thing – but otherwise she kept to her resolution. Nothing from her past, nothing. Not even snapshots of herself as a child, her parents hand in hand in the Ibiza sun, her graduation ceremony, the boys as babies – nothing. To be without a past is to be free, or so she thought.
Layla got into the side door of the car. Stephie got into the driving seat, limbs gleaming under the streetlamp, in the wedge of light which poured from her front door, where Hamish stood silhouetted, and next to him, Daffy and her two children.
Stephie switched on the ignition and, peering ahead, bare boobs pressed into the steering-wheel, for she had not brought her driving glasses, they set off for Layla’s house in Chelsea.
It was her finest hour, her finest gesture. The night Medusa was born.
Well now let us move on a year. Carnaby Street is still in full swing: the fashions have changed, but minimally. Many girls wear hot pants. Stretches of bare thigh between boots and mini are all the rage: the kind of thing that whores would wear, now acceptable, if still provocative. Female sexuality is the thing: passivity passé. Platform soles are the opposite of stiletto heels. Girls want to be looked at, marvelled at, but have lost interest in enticement. Carly Simon reproaches us from a dozen boutique entrances; street vendors sell mood-watches, which change colour according to your state of mind: the face is black when you’re depressed, blue or green if you’re cheerful.
Nancy, back in Carnaby Street again, finds she misses Brian. This astonishes her. She retreads the paths she took with him, on their one and only day in London together, if only to persuade herself she did the right thing. She wears a black skirt, a white blouse and sensible shoes, and looks like an office worker: it is her intention so to be. She has found herself a walk-up flat on the seventh floor of a gigantic house in Earl’s Court. She has learned shorthand typing, made very few friends, and finally today feels herself equipped to look for a temping job. To this end she goes to a secretarial agency in Regent Street and there encounters Marjorie Price, a neatly coiffed, pale woman in her late middle age – spinstery, as the description once went; a childless, unmarried woman, in those days an object of pity rather than envy, someone who has failed in life’s task.
How fast things change; how fast things are made to change: all it takes is a handful of determined and energetic women; big women not little women.
‘You must be the one who rang me,’ says Marjorie. ‘The one from New Zealand. A nice place, by all accounts. You should have stayed. You don’t look the type to thrive in swinging London.’
‘Am I dressed wrong?’ asks Nancy, nervous.
‘Not in my eyes,’ says Marjorie Price, ‘but hardly the height of fashion. You won’t be looking for a receptionist’s job, I take it. Back office, more like, where looks don’t count.’
‘I want a job with prospects,’ says Nancy, overlooking the insult. ‘Something that will take me up the ladder of success.’ She used the phraseology current in the secretarial school where she had spent her savings. What one pays for, one values, at least temporarily.
‘The ladder of success,’ says Marjorie. ‘That old thing. Better for a woman to stay on the bottom rungs.’
‘Why do you say such a thing?’ asked Nancy, startled.
‘Because the truth of the matter is, if you can look after yourself why should a man want to? Look at me.’
‘I don’t want to be looked after by a man,’ said Nancy.
‘A women’s libber,’ said Marjorie Price. ‘I might have known. All you young girls