Down Among the Women

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What else do you think I'm trying to do?' asks Wanda. 'Their brains get short of oxygen if they're overdue, don't you even know that? Yours will need all the I.Q. points it can muster, I imagine. I am doing you a favour. Shall I tell you the story of the milkman, the lady, and the letter-box?' She has come early, she says, to get in her message of good cheer before the others arrive and swamp her good spirits. It is true that others of my women friends live quiet and happy married lives, or would claim to do so. I watch them curl up and wither gently, and without drama, like cabbages in early March which have managed to survive the rigours of winter only to succumb to the passage of time. 'We are perfectly happy,' they say. Then why do they look so sad? Is it a temporary depression scurrying in from the North Sea, a passing desolation drifting over from Russia? No, I think not. There is no escape even for them. There is nothing more glorious than to be a young girl, and there is nothing worse than to have been one.

The children look healthy enough, says Scarlet, Wanda's brutal daughter, my friend, when I complain. Scarlet doesn't even smile. Wanda feels depressed. The coffee pot is boiling. She turns it upside down to filter it through; something inside goes wrong and boiling coffee bubbles over her hands. Wanda, stoical to the point of mania, does not scream or even complain, but holds her poor red hand under the tap. Sylvia, of course, got into the habit of being the ant; she kept running into pathways and waiting for the boot to fall. Sylvia too ran off with a married man. The day his divorce came through he left with her best friend, and her typewriter, leaving Sylvia pregnant, penniless, and stone deaf because he'd clouted her. Every harsh word you speak,' says Scarlet, 'goes flying off into infinity, to bear witness against you.' Scarlet is disconcerted. Scarlet is offended. Scarlet, impressed by the workings of her own body, is having a fit of sanctimonious motherhood. Scarlet believes—for this one suspended week—in love, life, mystery, meaning, sanctity. Byzantia lies very quiet and kindly allows her mother these few days of illusion. She is seven days late. Scarlet thinks she is a boy. So does Wanda.

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verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ On good afternoons I take the children to the park. I sit on a wooden bench while they play on the swings, or roll over and over down the hill, or mob their yet more infant victims—disporting in dog mess and inhaling the swirling vapours that compose our city air. How's that for a best friend? You've got to be careful, down here among the women. So says Jocelyn, respectable Jocelyn, who not so long ago pitched her middle-class voice to its maternal coo and lowered her baby into a bath of scalding water. Seven years later the scars still show; not that Jocelyn seems to notice. In any case, the boy's away at prep school most of the time. Scarlet's eyelids droop lower. She's in a full-scale sulk. Nothing annoys her mother more. Scarlet has a round smooth face; her mother thinks she looks half-witted; certainly the more angry and miserable she becomes, the more stolid she appears. I wish,' says Wanda hopelessly, 'I wish things didn't have to be the way they are. Why did you have to go and do it?'

One can't take a step without treading on an ant, says Audrey, who abandoned her children on moral grounds, and now lives with a married man in more comfort and happiness than she has ever known before. She, once imprisoned on a poultry farm, now runs a women's magazine, bullies her lover and teases her chauffeur. How's that for the wages of sin? With her children, his children, her husband, his wife, that makes eight. Eight down and two to play, as Audrey boasts. With the chauffeur's wife creeping up on the outside to make nine.No wonder she has no husband; no wonder the Divorcées Anonymous munch her hideous water biscuit offerings with such helpless disdain. Or, as I heard a clergyman say on television the other night, bravely facing the challenge of the times; 'There's more to life,' he said, 'more to life than a good poke.'