Yet the Browns were political, like all the people like them; they were political as their parents had been religious. All their adult lives, ever since the war that had formed them, they had been setting their course, holding themselves steady in self-respect, with words like liberty, freedom, democracy. They were all varying degrees of socialist, or liberal. Whom did she know who was not? Yet the truth was she was thinking, and she knew that Michael did, more and more, that it was all nonsense. But they could not bear to think it.
Her violent reaction to Philip—that was fear. But probably all his little attitudes would turn out to be as much puppet-behaviour as everything else; his Fronts and his Leagues wouldn’t be anything very much—words again!
Putting aside the words, what had Michael offered her when they married? This! No, of course he would never have used words like decency, responsibility, organisation—he would have been too self-conscious; such phrases smacked, then, of what the recently finished war had been fought to end for ever. They had not, then, the ring of fine new-minted truths, which she supposed they did have to young people after a decade or so of what this boy called “anarchy, licence, and self-indulgence”? But the life she had had with Michael was in fact that typical ordered middle-class “responsible” life anywhere, obedient to the necessities of work and the family. Just what this young man believed in and wanted Maureen to share with him. So what did the slogans matter? Except that neither she, nor her Michael—nor anyone they knew, if it came to that—would have spoken or thought of “getting rid of what’s gone rotten.” Well, here it was again, things had come round again, they always did. “Philip,” she said, “when you say ‘getting rid of what’s gone rotten,’ doesn’t that strike a very old bell for you? You haven’t heard it before somewhere?”
“Well everything’s been said before,” he said. Yet there was a look of guilt about him. It occurred to her that this evening might be the first time he had thought like this, had said it in words: but it had come out, he had heard what he had been thinking, perhaps unknown to himself. And it sounded all right, it sounded fine! Now it would be part of his new programme, the manifesto of The Young Front or whatever it was.
“Are you a leading light in this thing of yours?”
“I suppose you could say so. Among others. I didn’t start it. But the people who started it were …” He stopped, remembering these were outsiders.
“They were a lot of wishywashy liberals but now you are putting some real guts into it,” she said. He looked at her. “It can be taken for granted,” said Kate, sweet, “that that is what has happened. And will happen.” She nearly said, Your turn next. It occurred to her that her rage of opposition to him should be directed at history, not at a youth about the age of her second son. She tried to damp her anger; besides what was the point? What she was feeling was fear, of course.
“I think I am going to be one of the people you’ll have to eliminate.”
“Oh no,” said he, shocked. “You got me wrong. It’s not people who have to be eliminated. People’s thinking must change. It must. It had to come. There are all sorts of things that are possible now. For one thing, new research says we can change behaviour—antisocial behaviour, of course, just what’s dangerous to other people. With drugs. Of course that would be a bit tricky, but there are possibilities there haven’t been before.”
Maureen got up, removed the plates, brought back a platter of cheese in one hand, a loaf of bread in the other. She plonked down the cheese, and dropped the loaf onto the table from the height of a foot or two. Then she sat down, leaned back in her chair, spread her legs under her phantasmagoria of a gown, set her heels on the floor as if they were in boots—but they were in buckled high-heeled evening shoes—crossed her arms on her chest, and stared at the end of the room.
Philip coloured again, started to say something that sounded like the beginning of a speech or a statement, then glanced at Kate for aid. She would not give it, she looked down.
Philip stood up. He was visibly controlling something in himself.
In a moment he had succeeded. In the light humorous tone that probably had been his normal manner before his recent reincarnation as saviour of the nation, he said, “You don’t give me a chance, Maureen, do you?” He went behind the girl, and put his hands on her shoulders. Kate could see how she shrank a little, then softened, then tensed: oh yes, Maureen was very attracted to him, very. Whether she liked it or not.
“I shall make a good husband,” he announced, already confident again, laughing at her, at himself. “I love you. God knows why! You’d be mad not to marry me. You’ll never get another like me.”
“Never a dull moment,” said Maureen, sounding both resentful and amused.
“No. And I’m not out of work. Nor am I likely to be. That’s surely something?”
He was joking but he spoke with real pride, and was not ashamed of it: a revolution was complete!
“That’s what I’ve been looking for all my life,” said Maureen.
She laughed, though. He leaned over her, looking down at her sunset-coloured face, and past it, at her jewelled breasts.
She did not move.
“I’ll go if you like,” he said, huffy again. As she still did not respond he said, “Very well, then.”
“No,” said Maureen. “No.”
Not looking at Kate, she got up, and the two went off to her room together, good night, good night, as they went.
It was midnight. Kate walked slowly to Marble Arch and back again, receiving looks, invitations, muttered compliments, the looks of grinding hate that poor sex gets from its prisoners. She was as prominent as a bitch in heat at that hour, in that street. And all the way there and back she thought that in her other guise no one would have seen her, literally, she would have been invisible, and yet inside, the way she felt, would have been no different, she was the same despite the masks. She would have walked past dozens of sober family men, respectable young men, good fathers and grandfathers and brothers and husbands, she would have walked for four miles along the pavements of London and never known that sex was a commodity much traded. After a certain age—or rather, after a certain age and presented in a certain way—a woman feels as if the streets have had a magic wand over them: where are all the hunters gone? Magicked into respectability, every one.
What a lot of rubbish, what a con it all was, what a bloody waste of time.
Everything was dark in the flat when she got back to it. In the room which in daytime was full of light, bringing birdsong and the scent of grass from the many back gardens of this rich street, Maureen was lying in the arms of Philip. She lay in a cocoon of sweet warmth. She lay safe and held. She lay inside arms that shut out all threat. Inside them, Maureen lay. Asleep? Of course, of course: remember the warm safe sweet sleep that is the dream of flying when you are young and lonely, which is all your fantasies come true at once?
Next day Kate woke late. There was a note from Maureen on the kitchen table: “We have gone to the seaside for two or three days. See you, Love. Maureen.”
Kate noted that the conventional little word “love” triggered off in her a warm spurt of emotion. She tore up the note and said, Shit to that! using the word her children used, and Maureen used, but which she never had. She appropriated it, feeling it was her right: What a con! What a bloody great stupid game! What a load of shit.
To use the word was like entering forbidden territory—self-forbidden, self-censored, even a form of tact, like not going to America at the same time as her daughter, in case she might spoil things for her. Fuck had once been such a word. She could remember discussions with contemporaries about permissible language: bloody was then their word, but that had once been abrasive enough, so it was said. But fuck they would not use, they could not bring themselves to it: for one thing it was denigratory of sex and therefore deplorable. So, once, they had felt: but soon fuck was coming as smoothly off their tongues as bloody. But not shit, no, she had felt about that as once she had felt abou
t fuck.
All her children shat, shitted, shit, in every sentence, like the workingman’s fuck, fucking, fucked.
Now she had said shit without knowing she was going to.
So much for a word.
She went shopping in her old clothes, her hair falling, went up and down the street market, invisible, and as she did this, watched Mrs. Michael Brown walking—graciously was the only word for it—up and down the shops and streets of her own area, while everyone smiled, and acknowledged and recognised, and she smiled and basked and grew subtly fat and happy because of all the note taken of her, attractive Mrs. Brown, who had lived so long in Byron Park Road, and who had bought—and paid for—so many hundredweights of food and groceries from all these loving friendly shopkeepers, Mrs. Brown, the mother of so many consumers of food and travel and books and sports goods and …
She was quite alone in the flat. Young people came to ask after Maureen. One night a sullen girl slept on the cushions in the hall, demanding to come in as her right—she “always” slept there—and would not say Good Morning or Goodbye to Kate, but stared right through her, with an indifference of total dislike. She disappeared again without a word.
Kate noted she did not mind about being disliked, yet only a week ago she might easily have wept.
She was eating well again; her sag into sickness already seemed in the past. She was getting restless. She started doing things to the flat, scrubbing the sink, tidying a cupboard. Catching herself at it she finished what she had begun—her training was too strong to allow her to leave it unfinished—and then stopped herself from vacuuming a floor. If she was going to do all this, she might as well go back home.
Who was going to go back home? But she didn’t have to make decisions yet. She still had a month before the end of October.
A letter came from Maureen. Kate read it with a fatalistic contempt: Oh well, what is the use? What can one expect? The letter was humorous and resigned and made little jokes.
She said she had “more or less” decided to marry Philip. “After all”—“what else”—“who’d have thought that she, Maureen …” “Ah well, I suppose there’s no bucking it …”
Kate dropped the letter into the rubbish bin, went out into the street without remembering to check in which of her persons she temporarily was—she was respectable; got onto a bus, went to Global Food, and found letters for Mrs. Brown.
She returned to the flat before opening them.
Her husband was missing her very much, but was still having a wonderful time. He was thinking of doing the same thing next year. She ought to come along too, what about it old girl? He would be back a week or so earlier than he thought. If the house was still let—he couldn’t remember the exact date it became theirs again—he would find a bed in the hospital for a few days.
Kate knew to the minute when the house would be theirs again.
Stephen. Algeria was marvellous. The government was shit. He would be back as planned.
Eileen. The States was great. Everything was a mess but it was everywhere wasn’t it.
James. The Sudan was fantastic. People in Britain had no idea of what went on in other parts of the world, insular didn’t describe it, he would be back again soon.
Tim. He had caught some sort of a bug, he didn’t know what. He had been quite ill, but had not written to say so before, because he didn’t want to spoil people’s holidays, but he was coming home three weeks early and as he had been told to take things easy he thought it would be best if …
Mrs. Brown stepped from her ashes, her hand stretched towards the telephone. She rang her own home and spoke to Mrs. Enders, who said what a funny thing Mrs. Brown had rung just then, she was thinking it would in fact suit them fine to go back to the States earlier.
Kate could take possession of her home in three days from now.
She stood near the telephone, her mind spinning in its grooves. She must send wires to various people, and then ring up the shop that delivered groceries—no, better first get in cleaners to undo the mess the Enderses would certainly have left, and then order the groceries in. It would be a sensible thing if … she knew she was smiling, that every movement she made had energy in it, conviction, decision. It would be best if Tim took over the spare bedroom on the second floor, which got sun all day, his letter sounded pretty depressed, and he would need cheerful surroundings.
She reached for the telephone. “Is that The All Purpose Cleaners?” she began, and saw that Maureen stood in the doorway, staring at her. Philip was behind her, his hands on either side of her waist, as if presenting her to Kate. Presenting something he had created? Maureen was different. The fantasy had gone out of her appearance. She wore a sensible suit, and her hair was wound in Gretchen braids around her head.
Kate flashed them an “I’m busy but later” smile, and went on telephoning. They came into the kitchen, and sat. Silently. They were watching her. Or rather, Maureen was; Philip was watching Maureen because of the intensity of her preoccupation with Kate.
Kate was soon too deep inside skilled organisation to remember Maureen and Philip were there. Making herself a cup of tea, in an interval, she turned to offer them the teapot, when she saw they were not there, but in the bedroom. They were quarrelling. While she rang Mary Finchley to ask her to tell the windowcleaner they both used that a special visit would be needed, she turned to see Maureen, eyes red, face swollen, seated at the table. She was again staring at her. “Don’t cry!” she called cheerily; and saw the girl’s face set in hate. “Don’t talk to me like that,” said Maureen, and Kate was almost checked. Not quite: she was still at the height of pleasure at her own capacities, unused, she was feeling, for decades, not weeks. But she was looking at Maureen, as she listened to the telephone ringing in Mary’s house. Mary was out. Kate put the receiver down, and saw that Maureen’s face had gone slack and pathetic with the force of whatever woe she suffered. It was a little girl’s face, and she stared at Kate in fear.
“What’s wrong?” said Kate, and as she heard her voice, understood that there was in it everything there had not been when she had said so mechanically, “Don’t cry!”
Kate’s limbs were beginning to understand that they had been in some kind of a fever, which was now subsiding: they had already lost their pleasure in decision. Kate was all at once tired, and understood that she had been, for the last minutes, a little crazy. She stared at Maureen. Maureen stared at her.
“But what is wrong, Maureen?”
“I’ve just told Philip I won’t marry him,” said Maureen. This was so much of an accusation, that Kate knew that everything she had organised in the way of returning to her own home was going to have to be undone again. She sat down at the kitchen table.
“Why?”
“I’d do anything, I’d live alone for always rather than turn into that.”
Kate, in silence, now looked at that, her self of a few minutes before.
“It’s my fault, is it?” she said, attempting a dry but humorous accusation, but she was not going to get away with it.
Maureen flashed back, “Awful. Dreadful. Awful. You’ve no idea—can’t you see? If you could just see yourself.” She put her head down on her forearms and cried.
Kate said, “That may be so, but you were miserable about marrying Philip, and something would have changed your mind for you, if I hadn’t.”
Maureen made a small gesture with her head that said, That isn’t the point. She brought out: “About marrying anyone.” And went on crying. Noisily.
Kate sat down and kept silent. She was thinking that she had indeed made a long journey in the last months. Before it she could not have sat quiet, while a girl her daughter’s age wept with misery because of her, Kate’s, power to darken her future. Kate, at the other end of what she suddenly was feeling as a long interior journey, would have been “sensible,” made balanced remarks of one kind or another, attempted consolation, because she had still believed that consolation could be given. Yes, that
was where she had changed. She remarked, “Where I think you may be wrong is that you seem to be thinking that if you decide not to become one thing, the other thing you become has to be better.”
Maureen nodded, without lifting her head. But she stopped crying, and after a time, straightened herself with: “All the same, when I was about ten I took one look at that and said I’d do anything, I’d rather die than be that. It’s awful.”
“It’s what I’ve become good at.”
“All day long, busy busy busy—at what?”
Kate said, dry, “At bringing you up.”
“Oh no you don’t, don’t put it on me,” she shrieked—at her mother, obviously.
“You’re saying this to me because you have never been able to say it to your mother.” She laughed, and said, “Probably at this moment somewhere in America Eileen is screaming at some poor female because she never has at me. She’s only …”
“What?”
“Sulked. Muttered. Broken plates. Slammed doors. Pretended to be pregnant so the whole of the house was in suspense for weeks—the lot. You know,” said Kate, in a sudden flush of pure hate, retrospective and nothing to do with Maureen.
Maureen said, “You’re wrong. I did say it all. I said it and said it. But they are impervious, that crowd. What they are is what they have to be. And what they are is right. I can’t imagine my mother ever, not for a minute, stopping to wonder if she might be wrong. Her whole shitty life doing nothing, fuss fuss fuss about details, details.”
“Bringing you up, and making not a bad job of it,” insisted Kate.
“Oh no, I’ve said already. No, it’s not good enough.”
“Anyway”—Kate felt herself being carried on pleasurably on tides of reminiscent anger—“I’m not going to be saddled with the responsibility for your breaking with Philip.”
“Who said you were responsible?” screamed Maureen. “Who? I didn’t. Why does it have to be your responsibility? Why? Why does it have to be, always? I’m not going to be like you—it’s my responsibility, saying no. I’m not going to be like my mother. You’re maniacs. You’re mad.”