Big Women. Fay Weldon

exactly? For the excitement and flattery when, as occasionally he did, he kissed her, some magic electricity passed from his lips to hers, and he focused on her central being, whatever that might be, and for once she had power over him. She wanted him for sex, in fact. Yet sexual fulfilment, in the interests of respectability, was what he denied her. The rinsing water finally ran clear and cold. Woollen garments should have a final rinse in cold water; then they dry softer. This is true, though hard on the hands.

      In Primrose Hill the bed squeaks on; however Hamish found ingress to Daffy the results seem satisfactory. The squeaks stop for five minutes, then start again. Still Stephanie smiles on, though the others see the smile as fixed, not exactly happy.

      ‘Women have to learn to rise above the personal,’ says Alice, ‘to ignore their samples of one; otherwise they fall into the trap of male expectation. We must all accept that the personal is the political.’

      There is a silence while they consider this. Squeaking from above, albeit coincidentally, stops as well, thus underlining the importance of the utterance.

      ‘The personal is the political,’ repeats Layla. ‘We need none of us be alone, ever again. That is amazing.’

      ‘Alice says these things,’ says Stephanie, ‘and then they drift off into oblivion. It mustn’t be allowed to happen. This brilliance must be recorded, printed, headlined. We need a newspaper.’

      ‘We need a publishing house,’ says Layla, ‘and a successful one. The thing to do is specialise in women’s classics. This way we will do everything we want: we will reclaim female history, women’s art, our self-esteem. We will record the ideas that shake the world. We will honour Alice. I work in publishing: it’s what I know how to do. Running these places is child’s play, so long as you don’t have to bother with male status-seeking.’

      ‘Let it be part newspaper, part publishing house,’ said Stephanie. ‘But for God’s sake can’t we forget about the past? Forget about art? We live in the present. We must find the women writers of today.’

      ‘You can forget that lot,’ said Layla. ‘They’re too busy being sensitive and pleasing men. Focus on the women writers of yesteryear. Anyone whose works are out of copyright, and you don’t have to pay. A guaranteed readership – everyone reads classics – and pure profit. This is an amazing window of opportunity.’

      The squeak, squeak, squeak had started again.

      ‘What are you talking about, Layla?’ demanded Stephanie. ‘Window of opportunity! Profit! We’re talking about feminism.’

      The squeaking stopped so abruptly that everyone had to try to work out what was going on. Perhaps the lovers, and not before time, had run out of steam. Saffron slept again, soothed by the ambient feeling of relief.

      ‘We can always talk about both,’ said Layla.

      ‘Talk all you like,’ said Zoe. ‘It’s money you need. Everything needs money. If I want a pair of shoes I have to ask Bull for the money, and he always says what’s wrong with the ones you’ve got on, they don’t let water, do they?’

      ‘Money for small things is always difficult,’ said Layla, ‘money for projects less so. I’ve always found the bank manager won’t lend you money for a crust of bread, but he will if you say you need a hat. I’ve got family money. I can call it in.’

      ‘Well lucky old you,’ said Zoe.

      ‘So long as the funding doesn’t come from men,’ said Stephanie.

      ‘Darling,’ said Layla, ‘I shall be careful to ask an aunt, not an uncle, if it keeps you happy. You are so fucking stuffy, Stephie. Stuffing fucky, Stephie. Here’s to you, and your denial of the inconvenient!’

      And she raised her glass of wine, perhaps her fifth, to Stephanie. They were on the fourth bottle. Stephie raised hers.

      Upstairs coitus had resumed, but in a more languid position. Sideways in. Hamish went on complaining.

      ‘Stephie has no time even to make the bed. I have to bring you in here to one that’s unmade. The brutal fact is that she has no time for me, no time for the children. She has no heart. She holds “let’s-hate-men” meetings in my house.’

      ‘I don’t hate men,’ said Daffy.

      ‘I can tell that,’ said Hamish.

      ‘I hate living with my mother,’ observed Daffy. ‘It’s such a horrid mean little house, and this is so lovely, or would be if it weren’t a mess. You probably feel you can’t bring clients home, when you want them to look at important pieces in situ.’

      ‘The best I can do’, said Hamish gloomily, ‘is to use the place as a workshop. Why don’t you leave home if you don’t like it?’

      ‘I’m only a typist,’ she said. ‘I can’t afford to leave.’

      ‘Then why don’t you marry someone?’ he asked.

      ‘Men marry good girls,’ said Daffy. ‘I’m a bad girl. Everyone knows that.’

      ‘Yes,’ said Hamish, ‘you certainly are.’

      It became impossible to talk further, for all their developed expertise at talking and love-making at the same time; encapsulating life story, life problems within strokes, as it were. Shortage of breath in the end must triumph over even a frantic desire to communicate, apparently long denied to both of them. Thus in those heady days, the totality of the other could be assessed and judged within hours. Courtships and affairs which today take years were raced through within hours, days. And oddly, life itself seemed to go more slowly.

      Rafe and Roland, those two dark, solemn, self-contained children, who seemed to both their parents like stolid cuckoos in a noisy and riotous nest – for which fact both blamed the other – sat and watched TV and ate crisps down the corridor. Salt and vinegar, nothing fancy.

      Brian and Nancy lay in their matching bunks, bodies neatly and chastely arranged, in touching distance of one another. Nancy had contrived to end up in the lower bunk, in spite of Brian’s instructions to the contrary. He was not yet ready for sleep, and spent the drowsy moments instructing his fiancée, as he so liked to do.

      ‘It’s called jet lag,’ Brian said. ‘Apparently it’s to do with the body’s internal clock mechanism. The body’s organs have their own rhythm and take time to adapt to the time zone that the brain recognises.’

      ‘I could have told them that,’ said Nancy, isn’t it obvious?’

      ‘Things have to be named,’ said Brian, ‘before they can be understood.’

      Brian had a degree in philosophy from Canterbury University, though you would never have thought it. Five years of active non-reflection can weaken and slacken the muscles of the brain. If non-reflection goes on for too long the brain can appear to wither away altogether, except for those small sections of it devoted to practical matters, the absorption and passing on of information, and obsessive opinions. The awareness of this tendency, and the inability to do anything about it, was then, and is now, what drives graduate, stay-at-home mothers to distraction. You don’t have to be a mother to suffer from it but it helps.

      ‘You know so much, Brian,’ said Nancy, out of the habit of and training in flattery. All women once used to be trained thus. Flatter the man, keep him happy, restrain your tongue, and never appear more clever than he. In those days men customarily married women younger than themselves, less well-educated, of lower social class, with a smaller income and a lesser intelligence. In the typical household it was observable to a growing child of either gender that the woman was the weaker and inferior sex, this being the fact of the matter, so far as anyone could see, and this everyone grew up to believe, and to mark accordingly such essays as turned up in research projects. Up for the men, down for the women.

      Now that equals tend to marry their equals, in age, education, and earning capacity, the conviction of male superiority is less prevalent. And of course these days fatherhood, sapping will,