Big Women. Fay Weldon
said he’d left the door on the latch so women could just walk in if they felt like it and he wouldn’t have to stop work. Open house for women presumably meant just that. The point was to raise women’s consciousness, forget what kind of woman, which was never specified. Delinquent or criminally insane notwithstanding, a woman was a woman was a woman, by inference. So welcome all comers: what need of locks. Hamish did not, incidentally, think that the slogan A Woman Needs a Man like a Fish Needs a Bicycle was particularly effective. It was obscure and surely Stephanie with her training in advertising understood the folly of the opaque.
‘Besides,’ added Hamish, ‘people have more to worry about than the oppression of the female.’
‘Like what?’ asked Layla.
‘Paying their rent,’ said Hamish. ‘Saving for their funeral, their teeth falling out. Exploitation by the bosses. Hunger, penury, disease, and so forth.’
‘Show me a man having a bad time,’ said Layla, ‘and I’ll show you a woman having a worse one. I quote our mentor, Alice.’
Layla was nothing if not honourable when it came to quoting her sources. Layla had been brought up in Rhodesia. She’d run away to London when she was nineteen and gone to Cambridge for a year before being sent down for lack of application to her studies. She owned a vast house in Cheyne Walk which she filled with friends and lodgers. It was unmodernised and she complained of the cost. Layla worked in a publishing house, not because she needed the money but because, she explained, she liked to have objectives. She had to be nailed to the ground by other people’s expectations or else she’d simply fly off the face of the earth. She said what she thought, and did as she felt, a privilege granted only to those who inherit money, and who care more what they think of other people than what other people think of them.
Hamish remarked that Alice had an elegant turn of phrase, and as a token of his appreciation he would bring the meeting coffee at half-time, and how many were expected?
‘Five,’ said Stephanie.
‘It is not multitudes,’ said Hamish.
‘It is a beginning,’ said Stephanie.
Hamish began hammering again. He was courteous to his wife but estranged from her. Their eyes looked past one another. They were not easy in each other’s company. But neither spoke of it to the other: ‘talking it out’ was a concept not yet invented. Marriages were conducted in silence.
Two women now knocked upon the door, and, finding it open, simply pushed and came into the house.
‘Like a public meeting hall,’ said Hamish, with distaste, though who but he had left the door unlocked?
Daffy and Alice were the names of the newcomers. Daffy was in her late twenties. She wore a boiler suit and big boots, but the disguise merely accentuated her ravishing prettiness, the slender line from shoulder to buttock, the swell of the breasts, the slimness of ankle. Whatever she wore it was the same: she scarcely noticed any more. Alice was tiny, round-faced, dark-eyed, serious; only her eyes moved rapidly: the rest was slow: she had the gift of stillness. Alice was all mind and very little matter: she was an academic: asexual, as if too much thought had sucked her body dry.
Layla, Stephie, Daffy, Alice and Zoe. Five furies in the front room, sitting in a semicircle.
‘Dorothy couldn’t come,’ said Stephanie. ‘She had to cook the children’s tea. And Maureen decided against it. She doesn’t want to upset her father.’
‘The man’s lament,’ said Layla. ‘Where are you going, my darling? Stay home with me, wife, mother, daughter, whoever you be. Female to my male. Surely you love me? Don’t I cherish you, protect your virtue, provide the roof over your head, keep your false friends and your mother at bay? Stay home, woman, as your love for me surely dictates. Warm my bed, perfect my table, iron my shirts.’
‘Do you find that tempting?’ asked Stephanie, for something melancholy in Layla’s voice suggested that she did.
‘Of course. I’m a weak sister. Aren’t we all?’
‘No,’ said Stephie, and her accusing eyes drifted over to where Daffy sat, and her expression said, ‘Weak, weak, weak.’ And Daffy smirked.
Layla said, ‘Since this is our third meeting could we all try to be honest with one another? Say what we really think and feel? Men have made us meek little creatures: it’s to their advantage. But we weren’t born like that.’
‘There’ll be trouble,’ said Stephanie.
‘Good,’ said Layla.
At the same time as Daffy smirked in Primrose Hill, so did a young reception clerk in the Youth Hostel behind Tottenham Court Road. He smirked because he saw that Brian, the simple antipodean, was taken aback to discover that the Youth Hostel no longer ruthlessly separated men from women for their overnight stay. Brian and Nancy would share a dormitory. What they did or did not do in their bunks was no concern of management. He smirked because he had what nowadays would be called an ‘attitude’. He was tired of dealing with tourists: of working while they had a good time: he was glad when they were disconcerted.
‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘We’re half-empty. You’ll be on your own.’ Nancy and Brian lugged their iron-framed, canvas rucksacks up the stairs. Then the old and rich travelled easily, with porters attending every step of the way. The young and poor had a heavier time of it. Now at least their rucksacks are lighter, being made of steel and nylon, and oppress them less.
‘I told you there was no need to rush,’ said Brian.
‘Half-empty’, said Nancy, ‘is the same as half-full. We’re here nice and early.’
Little events shake the world. If Brian hadn’t chosen to read a newspaper without paying for it, if Nancy hadn’t seen a poster saying A Woman Needs a Man like a Fish Needs a Bicycle, if the Youth Hostel had been full, and so on, and so forth. But more of this later.
In the front room of the narrow house in Primrose Hill, Layla, Stephie, Daffy and Zoe were grouped round Alice, who sat like the High Priestess in a high-back chair, straight, formal and composed. She spoke coolly and with conviction. Little Saffron drowsed, still strapped into her pushchair, in the space between her mother and the oracle.
‘The Socialists claim’, said Alice, ‘that if you improve the condition of the working man, remove the injustices of capitalism, the “women’s problem” will automatically be resolved. To improve the lot of women first improve the lot of men. But do we anticipate that men will allow this to happen? We do not. Where did our association with the Marxists and the Trotskyists leave us, we the women who wanted to join with them to change the world? Where were we when the barricades in Paris fell?’
‘Making the coffee,’ said Stephanie.
‘Addressing the envelopes,’ said Zoe.
‘Filling their beds,’ said Layla.
‘And when the State has withered away,’ said Alice, ‘when the rights of the workers are finally established, what’s the betting that’s where we still will be? Women cannot depend upon men to save them. We must depend upon ourselves. We must speak out with loud clear voices.’
At which Daffy stood up. Her skin was luminous: pale and fair. Her lips were full and so deeply pink it seemed she had lipstick on, but of course she hadn’t.
‘But if I stand up in a room full of men and speak, my voice goes high and squeaky. Like this,’ she said, demonstrating.
‘High and squeaky. I feel stupid and they all look at me.’
‘I think Alice may have been speaking metaphorically,’ said Stephanie.
Stephanie came from a Jewish family of high achievers. Her father ran a chain of toy-shops but had over-expanded too suddenly and lost his money. He and Stephanie’s mother, who had been in politics and had helped engineer the National Health Service, had let the family house and retreated to Ibiza where they