Big Women. Fay Weldon

to work here at Medusa,’ said Stephanie.

      ‘I hope you’re strong. You look strong. Books are a heavy trade.’

      As indeed they are. Three months later see Nancy toiling up the steps of the British Museum. The muscles in the tops of her arms were well developed. Now she was broad-shouldered, as she hadn’t been since her swimming days at school in Wellington. She carried a bag of books in each hand. She carried them for Alice.

      Alice, like Karl Marx before her, was writing a book. She brought her own reference books into the library, which was not normally allowed, but the senior librarian, although male, accorded her this privilege. When Alice was seated in her chair beneath the dome, and Nancy had settled her in, Nancy would go back to the office and check through everyone’s in-trays, to make sure nothing important had been neglected. She would empty the wastepaper baskets, wash up coffee mugs; send out invoices, check receipts, keep the card indexes up to date, do Layla’s shopping, carry Alice’s books, organise Stephie’s divorce and access days, water pot plants, fire and hire employees, persuade bookstores to stock Medusa books, conduct market research on Charing Cross Station. She was tired. Sometimes she snapped at her colleagues.

      Today, when she arrived back at the office and someone had spilt sugar into her typewriter and not bothered to clean it up, she said to Layla: ‘This is absurd. I do all the work round here, and get none of the credit. I am chronically exhausted. Last night I nearly fainted in the tube on the way home. I had to sit with my head between my legs.’

      ‘How inelegant,’ said Layla. ‘And how lucky you were to have a seat.’

      But the next day she took Nancy to a used-car salesroom and bought her an ancient car, which chugged and sputtered around the block, and cost £120.

      ‘Remember, it’s the Medusa car,’ she said, ‘not yours, Nancy. But you can use it when no one else wants it, and park it outside your place. I’ll deduct sixty pounds from your wages over the next year. That’s very generous.’

      ‘Oh, thanks a million, Layla,’ said Nancy, with an irony which escaped Layla. ‘But if I’m sixty pounds down over the year, how will I pay my rent?’

      ‘Six pounds a week is far too much for a room,’ said Layla. ‘Why don’t you go and be one of Alice’s parents’ lodgers? That’s food as well for only five pounds.’

      So Nancy took up lodgings in Enfield, where Alice lived with her parents Doreen and Arthur. Doreen was stout and wore an apron. Arthur was very thin and a pigeon fancier. Both were eccentric. Nancy’s room was small but cosy, if not conducive to courtship. How could Nancy, so much under Doreen’s nose, even bring men home, foster a relationship? Not that there was time or energy left over for such extravagances. The journey from Enfield was twice the length of the one to and from Earl’s Court: but at least, as Layla pointed out, the car was not under-used. Nancy could drive Alice in to the office in the morning, dropping books off at relevant bookstores as she went.

      When Nancy first presented herself to Doreen one Saturday morning, and Doreen looked her up and down and said she’d do, Nancy, feeling suddenly the lack of a mother, burst into tears. Doreen gave her cheese on toast and sweet tea, and soon Nancy felt better. Doreen took her up to the loft where Arthur sat amongst his pigeons, who strutted around the floor and eyed Nancy with beady looks but didn’t scatter at her approach.

      ‘She’ll do,’ said Arthur. ‘The birds get on with her.’

      Nancy smiled.

      ‘She wants a rest and some looking after,’ said Doreen.

      Doreen tapped on Alice’s door.

      ‘She’s here,’ she said, ‘and she’ll do.’

      ‘Come on in,’ said Alice.

      Alice had the best room in the house. It got the afternoon sun. It looked out on to a rectangle of back yard and beyond that a railway line, and trees. Alice sat cross-legged on her bed. On the shelves were weighty academic tomes, and respectable reference books: on her desk were crystal balls and tarot cards, astrological tables and the apparatus required for divination. A black cat with not a single white mark sat on the desk and occasionally stretched out a languid paw to tap the paper on the typewriter, as if reminding Alice there was work to be done. The walls were hung with silk, on which were embroidered pentacles here and the signs of the zodiac there. The coverlet of the bed on which Alice sat was embroidered with the Tree of Life. Alice was casting coins. The I Ching was open in front of her: also, in old brown bindings, a novel by Mrs Gaskell and one by Edith Wharton.

      ‘All that education,’ complained Doreen, ‘and still she believes in magic.’

      ‘It isn’t magic, Mum,’ said Alice, crossly. ‘The I Ching, like all other methods of divination, simply helps focus the mind.’

      ‘So long as you take it with a pinch of salt,’ said Doreen. ‘Believe it and don’t believe it at the same time. Don’t let it take over.’

      ‘Mother’s a one to talk,’ said Alice, ‘Mother’s a faith-healer.’ i was,’ said Doreen. ‘Till I got frightened. I got the idea the spirits took strength from the patients, not the patients from the spirit.’

      ‘Never trust an after-lifer,’ said Alice. ‘That’s Mum’s philosophy.’

      ‘Don’t tell me,’ said Nancy, alarmed, ‘that you’re casting coins and consulting the I Ching to make an editorial decision?’

      ‘Fiction isn’t my strong point,’ said Alice. ‘The coins merely echo the mood of the times. The Wharton looks too chancy: we’ll go for Mrs Gaskell.’

      It was, time would prove, the wrong decision, but perhaps Alice interpreted the oracle wrongly, as she herself was on occasion wrongly interpreted. Who is to say?

      And so Nancy moved in with Alice and was to stay for three years, in a little room unconducive to courtship, a fact that suited everyone but her. So it goes.

      Medusa was described in the press, rightly, as a shoestring operation, but received a lot of press coverage, much of it dismissive. The gossip columnists took pleasure in referring to the Harpies of Medusa, the bra-less harridans of the publishing world. Publishers themselves, though male, were helpful. It had become apparent that there was a woman’s market out there. Let Medusa develop it.

      Medusa paid its writers notoriously little. If the writers did well, they’d soon desert to the mainstream publishers, for mainstream contracts. If they didn’t do well, forget them. But perhaps this is the cynicism of the eighties speaking: perhaps established publishers genuinely wished Medusa well. Good nature and self-interest can coexist. Stephanie was beautiful: Layla was described as the thinking man’s popsy: both were an on-going source of scandal and entertainment in the gossip columns. Alice was considered a hopeless bluestocking: only those who couldn’t get a man developed the life of the mind.

      Meanwhile women read, thought, began to speak up in public, took strength from one another, learned to withstand mockery and required justice in the home and in the workplace: mockery and derision aimed at the women of Medusa was a small price to pay. They could put up with it, and did. Men would walk out of rooms when they walked into them: so what?

      The History and Nature of the Female Orgasm was not a filthy book, simply an honest one. The Hidden Order of Female Art by no means special pleading. The novel Sisters won a literary prize or so. Gender Statistics became a seminal book in the universities. Women – Made or Born? one year outsold the Bible, and was presently to enable Medusa to move to better offices and get itself organised.

      Money and success, as Layla observed in the beginning, means you get taken seriously.

      Let us look in at a meeting of the Advisory Board. Nancy is presenting the annual report. Round the big table are young, enthusiastic, eager, female faces, all without makeup, serviceably dressed. Time is on their side, and the future is theirs. Only Layla wears a skirt. Boiler suits are out: jeans and jumpers in. A couple of babies have been brought