Big Women. Fay Weldon

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 lived in passionate love, above a friend’s clothes shop. Stephanie was left to make her own life in London. She had met Layla at Cambridge in the days of her parents’ wealth, and even then had felt orphaned, as is ever the fate, as Tolstoy pointed out, of the children of lovers.

      ‘What’s metaphorically?’ asked Daffy, whose mother worked part-time in a betting shop, and whose father was a railway engineer.

      ‘Daffy,’ said Stephie, ‘you’re such a fool it’s hopeless telling you.’

      ‘I didn’t risk my marriage to come here to listen to ordinary female squabbling,’ interrupted Zoe. ‘I can hear that any day round the toddlers’ sandpit.’

      No one took any notice of Zoe. Daffy turned on Stephie. ‘What right have you to call me a fool?’ she asked. ‘You’re so pompous, Stephie. You think you own the universe. You’re worse than a man. I’m tired of being patronised. And that goes for all of you. I do believe you’re jealous.’

      ‘What is there to be jealous of, you silly cow?’ Layla summed up. ‘Sit down everyone.’

      So they did and tried again. Alice continued.

      ‘The Marxists say that men are born free but everywhere are in chains –’

      In the Youth Hostel Brian and Nancy found their way to their allocated dormitory. It was a large bleak room with a high ceiling, white walls and four bunks.

      ‘Just think,’ said Nancy, ‘we can have it all to ourselves. Just you and me, Brian.’

      They had been engaged for four years, and never, as the present so crudely puts it, had sex. All Brian said was –

      ‘I wish you wouldn’t wear your engagement ring so openly.’

      ‘Why?’ She was hurt. It was a diamond ring, and Brian and Brian’s parents, apple-farmers, had clubbed together to buy it.

      Nancy may not have had a wedding ring as most of her school friends now did – marriage in her early twenties being de rigueur for a girl: but at least she had an engagement ring. And all her own teeth, which was unusual for someone from New Zealand, whose soil was somehow inimical to the formation of good enamel. Nancy’s mother on her seventeenth birthday was given the traditional gift to daughters from the father: a set of state-of-the-art false teeth: the originals taken out to make room for them. Nancy’s mother, when asked by Nancy why she had divorced her father, would only ever reply, ‘To save your teeth, my darling. Had you been a boy, I might have stayed.’ Assiduously, ever since, Nancy had cleaned her teeth and done her best to be ordinary and like everyone else; or, in the fashion of daughters, everyone else except her mother. But blood will out.

      Had Nancy’s grandfather given Nancy’s mother a different present on her seventeenth birthday, had Nancy’s mother given her daughter a different answer …

      ‘It’s not that I don’t want the world to know we’re engaged,’ Brian said to Nancy, as he neatly unpacked his rucksack, shaking, airing and folding, using the top bunk for his purposes. ‘It’s just that this is so mean a city. People are quite mad. Someone crazed on drugs might steal it.’

      Nancy was unpacking her things, less carefully than Brian, scrabbling for the blouse and skirt she wore in the evenings, putting them on the top bunk, planning to sleep on the bottom, within touching distance of Brian.

      ‘If you put your stuff up there,’ said Brian, ‘you’ll only have to move it all when we go to bed.’ He assumed he’d be taking the top bunk, out of touching distance of Nancy.

      Little things, little things, shake the world. Big things make the world heave and move, Titans stirring beneath the surface, turning over in their sleep.

      ‘If man is born in chains,’ says Alice in Primrose Hill that night, ‘how much truer is it that every woman not financially independent finds herself chained to an individual man, husband or father, needing his goodwill for her very survival and that of her children. Conditioned by necessity to smile, to please, to wheedle and charm, to placate.’

      ‘I try not to smile,’ said Stephanie.

      ‘She doesn’t have to do much fucking trying,’ whispered Daffy to Zoe.

      ‘Even if she is financially independent within marriage,’ said Alice, ‘and women have always worked, in the fields, or as cleaners, servants, washerwomen, and in the factories, she is allowed no dignity for it. Her earnings are seen as pin money.’

      ‘Wherever there’s shit work to be done,’ said Stephanie, ‘that’s where women are.’

      ‘I don’t think we should use swearwords,’ said Zoe. ‘It loses us credibility. Men don’t like it.’

      ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ said Layla. ‘Who cares what men like?

      Haven’t you heard a word Alice has been saying?’

      ‘I just want to establish’, said Zoe, ‘that Stephie had no right to call Daffy a fool at a consciousness-raising meeting. We are meant to be sisters.’

      ‘It’s my house,’ said Stephie, feebly.

      ‘Though sometimes,’ said Zoe, ‘I can’t be sure whether or not I’m talking sense. Ever since I had a baby no one seems to hear me. Perhaps they’re right. Perhaps motherhood has turned my brain to porridge. I have to pinch myself to remind myself I have a degree in sociology.’

      Saffron СКАЧАТЬ