Big Women. Fay Weldon

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СКАЧАТЬ It’s made from new wood, but in an hour you’d never know it. Old tables fetch more than new.’

      ‘I’m surprised your principles allow you to tolerate this,’ says Layla.

      ‘Morality is a relative when it comes to antiques,’ says Stephanie.

      ‘A man has to make a living somehow,’ says Hamish, banging away.

      ‘He’s not in a good mood,’ says Stephanie, I got promotion at work today. Now I earn more than he does.’

      ‘Women earning more than men upsets the natural order of things,’ says Hamish. ‘Anyone can make money in advertising.’

      ‘You only make money in advertising or anywhere if you’re shit hot, Hamish,’ says Layla. And she enquired as to how the kids ever got to sleep in this house: she was sure she never could.

      ‘God knows,’ said Hamish, but he gave up banging with his chain and offered the two women the glimmer of a smile. He was not without politeness. He even enquired as to how the bill-posting had gone.

      ‘We’d have got more up,’ said Stephanie, ‘but we had to get back for the meeting. For all I knew you’d refuse to open the front door. Men do that kind of thing.’

      Hamish 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 СКАЧАТЬ