A famous African hunter describes how, when hunting, he kept the shape of the duiker or deer somewhere behind his eyes, and this inner print fitted over the camouflaged beasts that were so hard to see among their patterns of light and shade: but in this way he did see them easily.
A woman walking in a sagging dress, with a heavy walk, and her hair—this above all—not conforming to the prints made by fashion, is not “set” to attract men’s sex. The same woman in a dress cut in this or that way, walking with her inner thermostat set just so—and click, she’s fitting the pattern.
Men’s attention is stimulated by signals no more complicated than what leads the gosling; and for all her adult life, her sexual life, let’s say from twelve onwards, she had been conforming, twitching like a puppet to those strings.…
Next day Maureen was not anywhere to be seen—she had perhaps gone to Turkey?—and Kate wore the dark-green dress and was Mrs. Michael Brown all day, for with the mask, the charade, the fitting of herself to the template, came the old manner, the loving lovely Mrs. Kate Brown, whom shopkeepers served with a smile, and waiters liked to hover over.
The well of tears in Kate that had been threatening to flood over at the slightest nuance of indifference subsided a little, the querulousness went out of her voice, and she did not knock over glasses of water.
On the day after that Kate was in a grocery shop when she saw at the cash desk in front of her a middle-aged woman with hair of dry brass—the dye had taken badly—high heels, a tight skirt. She stood squarely in front of the shopman smiling and chatting and emphasising her presence, while he said, “Yes?” and “Is that so?” and “Fancy that!”
On and on she went, the lonely woman, her eyes forced full of vivacity, her voice urged full of charm, until the shopman turned deliberately to Kate and put an end to her.
The other woman’s face set into forlorn lines; she smiled pathetically while tears brimmed; she jutted out her chin and went out into the street with a little flouncing movement of disdain.
Kate followed her; Kate was following herself slowly, along the Edgware Road, watching how she looked long into every approaching face, male or female, to see how she was being noticed, how she was fitting into expectation that had been set in that other person by the modes of the time, she saw how she stood at shop windows that showed clothes, examining dresses that would be appropriate for Maureen, or her Eileen; how she kept sagging into tiredness, for her heels were punishing, then pulling herself up and throwing glances everywhere that were aggressive and appealing at the same time.
Kate came back into the flat to find Maureen lying on the cushions in the hall, looking at the ceiling. She wore a long smocklike garment in scarlet linen, with scarlet boots, and her hair was loose. She was like a doll.
“I thought you’d gone to get married,” said Kate.
“Don’t joke about that!”
Kate went to her room, took off her fitting dress, put back an ill-fitting one, pulled out her hair.
Maureen looked at her from where she lay and said, “Why?”
“I’m seeing something. I’ve got to understand something.”
Blue smoke eddied—ordinary smoke, it lacked the dry nostalgic tang of the weed. Maureen lay beneath, as if she were drowning in smoke. Her silent question made Kate say, “Who has been married all this time?”
“I see.”
“Ah no, you don’t. Or I don’t think you do.”
“You patronise me,” said Maureen.
“How can I help it? The questions you ask—there is no weight behind them. Not of experience, you see.”
“And that’s everything? Ripeness is all?”
“If it’s my all … what else can I say? I haven’t anything to offer. I’ve never done anything so that I could say—but I don’t know what you value. I haven’t travelled the golden trail to Katmandu or done social work among the aged or written a thesis. I’ve just brought up a family …” she stopped because of the bitterness in her voice. She sat abruptly down in a chair and said, “Oh my God—listen, did you hear that?”
But Maureen jerked to her feet, as blue smoke waves washed about the hall at waist level, and she was screaming, “You don’t understand. Why don’t you?”
“When I say what I feel, you say it’s patronage.”
“Oh fuck you all!” Maureen went off into the kitchen. Kate went to her room. In a few minutes Maureen came in without knocking and found Kate sitting on a straight chair staring at the window, along the top half of which people’s legs were scissoring: a film had slipped out of true, and the top half of one frame—plants on a wall with sunlight—showed with the bottom half of another, legs without torsos.
“Philip is very hot on marrying me. He says: Please marry me. I love you. I will give you a home and a car and three children.”
“Well?”
“I’m surprised you didn’t say: Do you love him?”
“Is that what your mother says?”
“Oh my mother! But yes, she does. And I do too.”
“What’s wrong with your mother?”
“Nothing.”
“Yes there is. What?”
“She’s such a failure. She’s such a …”
“Asad sack?”
“Yes. Who’d want to be like that? Why can’t you—but I’m not getting into that, be what you like, I don’t care. But what do you say?”
“Be what you like. I can’t help you.”
“Then what is the use of all that ripeness?”
“None, I think.”
“He’s coming to supper tonight. Would you like to meet him?”
“How formal.”
“He is formal. On principle.”
“Oh?” For there was more behind this.
“He’s one of these new ones—the fascists, as they are called. Do you see?”
“I haven’t met any yet. But my youngest went to a meeting and said he thought they were being maligned. He sounded tempted.”
“Oh, it’s tempting all right. Law and order. Values. And of course, one is made to feel absolutely like dirt—what could be more attractive?”
“All right, I’d like to meet him.”
Maureen went out, saying, “Eight o’clock.”
The table in the kitchen had a tablecloth over it. It had three places laid. There was a bottle of wine already opened.
Kate had made herself look respectable. Maureen on the other hand, asserting herself, was outrageous, in a dress that had every conceivable pattern and print, stripe and check, incorporated into it. It was a piece of skilled engineering, that dress, so that the eye kept returning and returning to it, to find out how it was done. And it was low in front, a screen of beige lace to the waist, showing breasts whose nipples had been painted like eyes. Maureen’s own face was invisible behind a mask of paint.
Philip wore what was obviously the new uniform, a development of the old style; it was not so much the clothes that were different, as that they were worn differently. Jeans, but they were dark blue, unfaded, and crisp. His cotton shirt was dark blue and fitted him. His jacket was military, dark blue again, with buttons and tabs. He wore a narrow black tie. His hair was not short-back-and-sides, but getting close. It was the urchin cut again, the cap fitting over the skull without a parting, from a centre point. It had the effect of absolving him from responsibility: one wanted to run one’s hand through it; it was boyish. One could assume that this style would soon be superseded by something sterner. But the general impression was of cleanness, alertness, a pleasant readiness to take responsibility. This, however, seemed not to be his attribute, but rather the result of an act of will—the collective act of will. Looking at the trim barbered man, suddenly his rather red, slightly overful, countryish cheeks, his eyes that overflowed with the need to impose, shouted that his real, his own nature, was other. But above all, and here was the point, he had the confidence which shouted that he was the new thing, on the rising wave; he knew that his presence was enough
to make all the Jerries and the Toms and the Dicks and the Harrys look scuffy; suddenly all the longhaired ones, the fancifully dressed, the anarchists, the dissidents who so recently had stamped on them the approval of the time—all these were going to look wan, tatty, and as if transparent: ghostlike, they were going to have to fade away; Philip’s presence would be enough to see to that.
Well, just as so many years ago an entire generation of young people (not her children, they had been too young, had had to fit themselves to the pattern as one after another they grew up) had come into existence, it had seemed overnight, with an identical vocabulary, manner, clothes, political and social ideas, millions of them, exactly the same as each other, now it was obviously time for a new metamorphosis. And Philip was it? No, he was likely to be an intermediate type; he would be superseded. Meanwhile his attraction was great: it was that of absolute self-assurance. He did not have to say in so many words that what he offered was a thousand times better than the anarchy and sloppiness of the other young men who—this was how one had to see them, compared with himself—slouched and slithered and slid through her life.
Maureen was serving paté and hot toast. All very correct. Because of Philip they were all three behaving like middle-class people at a dinner table.
But he wasn’t middle-class. He was the son of a printer, and he had even “dropped out” of school; but had gone back again and taken examinations, was now in a job that looked, as far as anyone could see, secure. He was a municipal official, and his work was to do with deprived children. He had all the attractive experience of dissidence, of having refused what “the system” offered, behind him. He used the phrase “the system” as the generation before his had done, but he saw it as something that needed to be reformed, stiffened, made authoritarian, not rejected. He was, in short, the very newest model of authority figure, the welfare worker, the social worker, whose power derived not from: Do this because there is a law agreed to by all of us—we are a democracy, aren’t we?—or, Do this because the Party says so—but Do this because you are poor, hungry, ill-educated and desperate: you have no alternative.
He also belonged to an organisation called The Young Front, which in turn was affiliated to something only recently formed, called The British League of Action.
And what did it all stand for? enquired Kate. Meanwhile Maureen was toying with fingers of toast, watching Kate engaged with Philip—she was trying to find out what her own reactions were, or ought to be? What her mother’s reactions were likely to be? At any rate, Maureen was sitting back and letting Kate get on with it. Kate was back inside having to be responsible; she was accepting it: she had to.
“Well Mrs. Brown, I don’t have to tell you—everyone can see the mess everything is in.”
“Of course.”
“We’ll have to pull it together.”
“Of course. But how?”
“We stand for responsibility. Not for all this carping and criticising and muck-raking and doing nothing. No, we do things. We will get things done. We don’t mind getting our hands dirty.” He was eating fast as he talked, he ate and talked, looking at Kate and at his love Maureen, who indolently bit into toast, while her painted eyes seemed far away from him, concerned only with herself. “Yes, I am not ashamed to say it, it is decency we want, we have had enough of muck for muck’s sake, we need standards now.”
“In aid of what?” asked Maureen suddenly. Her voice sounded tremulous. Beneath all the paint and lace and the flounces, she was in strong conflict—Kate could feel it. Well, Philip was attractive. In Maureen’s place, offered Jerry and the rest as alternatives, she knew whom she would be responding to—and be feeling afraid of her response.
“Well look at you, Maureen,” he said, in a bluff kindly way that sounded forced: the truth was he was trying to hold himself calm and steady inside the force field of her attraction. He could hardly look at her, because of the strength of his love, and his detestation. He kept giving wincing glances at her almost naked breasts, and then said angrily, “How much do you spend on yourself a week would you say? On your clothes, your face, your hair?”
“Not as much as you may think,” said Maureen, getting up to lift away plates, butter, a fragment of paté. “I buy clothes off junk stalls mostly. And I make them. I am very clever. I don’t spend much.”
“But it’s all you do, it’s how you spend your time.”
“And millions of people are starving? Millions of people are dying as we sit here?” She sounded troubled, while she tried to jeer—not at what the words meant, but at his claims for himself.
“Yes,” he said gently, forcing himself to stand up to her, trying to make her face him. She did look at him, but sighed, and turned away with her laden tray to the sink.
“Yes,” he insisted, “it’s all you ever do, change your clothes all day and paint your face.” He gave another anguished look at her bosom, and grabbed out for an apple. He remembered they were not at the fruit stage of the meal, and sat still, his hands in two fists on the tablecloth.
“No,” she said, after quite a long pause. “That’s not true. It’s not what I do. It’s not how I spend my time. That’s what it looks like.”
“You and all your lot,” he insisted, gruffly and with difficulty, because she had been definite, had made a definite claim.
“My lot?” she said laughing.
“Yes,” he said, dissociating himself from the past generation in that word.
Maureen lifted a pot of stew from the stove and drifted gorgeously to the table. “You are so fucking sure of yourself,” she complained.
“Yes, in a way I am. I’m not saying we have all the answers.”
“This we of yours,” said Kate.
“We are getting a good deal of support.”
“That isn’t an argument in itself.”
He did not take her point.
“What Kate is saying,” said Maureen for herself, “is what you are saying isn’t new. To put it mildly.”
“To put it mildly,” said Kate.
He looked from one to another, blinking a little. Just as, when the last generation had stepped as one man onto the scene, identical in voice and vision, they did not see themselves as a repetition of the one before—not in appearance or in belief, but in their conformity with each other—so, now, Philip: he saw himself as new, fresh-minted by history.
“They call us fascists,” said Philip suddenly. He was hot, resentful—all aplomb gone for the moment. “Well, sticks and stones may break our bones but words won’t.”
“Yes, but what are you going to do?” said Kate. “You don’t say.”
“No, he never does,” complained Maureen.
“The first thing is to get together, then to agree what should be done.”
“You sound as if it will be easy. It won’t be.”
“Yes, perfectly easy,” he said, using an arrogance that made Maureen sigh again. “First we have to agree about one simple thing—that everything is in a mess, it’s getting out of hand. And then, put things right. There can’t be much argument about what is the cause of the mess—there haven’t been any standards for a long time. We need to get back to the old values. That’s all. And eliminate what’s gone rotten.”
“Me,” breathed Maureen, ladling stew into bowls. She propped her chin in one hand as she did this, her long eyelashes purple over bright pink cheeks. She was as it were sliding down and away out of her role as correct hostess, collapsing under the weight of everything.
“Yes,” said Philip. “As you are now, yes.”
“Then why do you want to marry me?”
He went scarlet, despite himself, looked in resentful fascination at Maureen, shot a glance of appeal at Kate: he saw her in loco parentis. He pulled himself up, with an effort, and said, courageously, for it was obviously hard for him to go on, “I don’t want to marry what you are now. But I can see what you really are. I can. You aren’t what you make yourself look. You aren’t just a spoiled, silly …
” He began hastily spooning in bean stew, not at all good-mannered now. The three of them had quite abandoned the good behaviour of the start of the meal. They were all disturbed.
“This business of getting rid of what’s gone rotten,” said Kate.
“Yes,” said Maureen.
He said firmly, for the first time in history, “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”
They finished their stew in silence.
Maureen still had her chin on her one hand as she ate. She was irritating Kate as well as Philip. The girl was deliberately at a distance from the scene, as if none of it were her business. And Kate was feeling like a hostess: she ought to be making conversation, putting Philip at his ease, restoring a tone of formality for the sake of the occasion: she suppressed all this, and ate on in silence.
At last Philip cracked with: “It’s just a question of organisation, of getting things organised the right way.”
The women said nothing.
“Things have to be taken in hand—not allowed to go from bad to worse.”
Maureen’s sigh was not deliberate: it silenced Philip.
Kate was thinking that probably one or more of her own children would take to this Youth Front or something of the kind. Who, Tim? No, he was not organisation material. Why was she so sure? People changed, people became anything under pressure. Stephen? But surely someone who saw everything as rotten was likely to be saved from taking positions on this or that platform? Perhaps. James? Out of the question—he was too much of a socialist, a believer. Well, it had happened before. Eileen? She wanted to be married more than anything else: this was how one saw her future.
But it was undermining, thinking like this, diminishing. More and more the political attitudes seemed like the behaviour of marionettes, or little clockwork figures wound up and continuing to display their little gestures while they were being knocked about and around and blown in all directions in a typhoon.