Big Women

‘In order to exist at all,’ said Layla, ‘we have to break even. I’m not going to go on digging into my own pocket for ever.’

Layla’s hair was short and curly. She was said to have a new lover, whom the newspapers longed to identify, but couldn’t, and her eyes were bright. There was a feeling around the table that she lacked the capacity for constructive self-criticism.

‘There’s certainly a case for breaking even,’ someone said, ‘if only so Layla doesn’t always get her own way.’

‘Money should be the last of our considerations,’ said Stephanie, ‘when it comes to choosing the list.’ She was looking drawn, and had a spot on her normally perfect chin. She had trouble with her conscience, and her children, and still lived at the top of Layla’s house. She made frequent attempts to move out, but would develop an allergy or flu or hurt her back if the attempts showed signs of success, and so stayed on. Her divorce from Hamish lingered on. Fine gestures create legal opportunity. Nakedness in public gets publicly discussed. Newspaper cartoonists revelled in the vision of a naked Stephanie, bosom pressed against a Mini steering-wheel. It was hard for her. Layla was patient.

‘So what’s for dinner today?’ enquired Layla of the assembled Board. ‘Oh, goodie, look! It’s integrity.’

‘We need to keep afloat, of course,’ said someone piously. ‘But not be a prey to crude commercialism. That’s the male way.’

‘I disagree,’ said Layla. ‘Since the male way keeps men so comfortable, I don’t see why women shouldn’t do the same.’

‘I’m trying to speak,’ said Nancy crossly. ‘Can we not have these interruptions.’

‘They are not interruptions,’ said someone. ‘They are important contributions to a debate. And why are you standing up there at the end of the table, Nancy; spouting at us as if you saw yourself as apart and superior? Surely this is a co-operative in spirit as well as actuality. We were told Medusa would remain hierarchy-free, even though for technical reasons never fully explained to us we became a shareholding company. I see no evidence of that spirit here today.’

‘Trouble at mill!’ hissed Layla to Stephie.

‘Told you there would be,’ said Stephie.

‘Be all that as it may,’ said Nancy firmly and loudly, ‘as I have been trying to explain to you, we have to raise further capital or Medusa will once again approach Standstill, as the I Ching describes it. Stasis. And I’m sure none of us would want that.’

Alice had converted Nancy to the I Ching: tactlessly, Nancy now referred to it. There was further uproar. Many of the Board members had backgrounds in Methodism and the old Adult Education movement, and were stern rationalists.

‘You haven’t been doing the I Ching again, have you!’ cried one woman, in the exact tone of voice she’d use to rebuke a child –‘What, soiled your pants again!’ Women had yet to learn the art of scolding without appearing either maternal or shrewish: to develop the male knack of making reproach seem to come from some cosmic, a-personal source. Accused of nagging over centuries, they had developed the tendency. These days men nag, women reproach.

‘Casting coins to tell our fortune? This is a responsible women’s publishing house; these are the seventies, not the sixties.’

An innocent asked what the I Ching was, protesting that it wasn’t fair to women to intimidate women by raising matters and using words which not everyone understood: it was a male trick.

Someone explained that the I Ching was a Confucian book of oracles: you asked questions, it answered them, like a wise old man, through the pattern the coins threw up.

‘Man!’ someone shrieked. Why was a feminist publishing house asking questions of a man?

Alice said in her soft voice, ‘Don’t be alarmed. The book has a foreword by Jung, whose concepts of the anima and the id have so informed the women’s movement we can almost reckon him an honorary female. Publishing, as Nancy has pointed out, is a matter of prophecy. We merely use what is available.’

‘Please, no one mention the I Ching outside these walls,’ begged Layla, with an alarm unusual for her. ‘If the press get hold of it, they’ll have a fucking field day.’

‘Language!’ reproached Nancy.

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Nancy,’ said Layla. ‘You’re the dogsbody, not the nanny.’

And so the meeting continued, as had many before, as did many after. There was to be a further share issue amongst such members of the Board as could bear to be tainted by commercialism. These included Layla, Stephie, Nancy and Alice. Big Women all. Of the initial share issue a year back, thirty per cent had gone to Layla’s mystery backer, whom she claimed to be a member of her family, and was most assuredly female.

‘I haven’t seen her naked,’ said Layla. ‘I can hardly ask her to fucking strip, but she looks like a woman to me, and her children call her mother. OK?’

Nancy’s hopes of romance, never quite stifled, were given encouragement by her encounter with the man known at Medusa as Layla’s live-in lover. His name was Johnny; he was a writer and book-critic, charming, literate, impoverished, unmarried, and very English. Johnny was assumed to be cover for Layla’s real lover. He was a man of no interest to the press, being neither a socialite nor a truck-driver. These days enough couples lived together without benefit of marriage ceremony to make ‘living in sin’ not much of an issue. It was still customary, of course, for cohabiting partners to be slept separately if ever they stayed over at a parental home.

The war of the generations flickered on, soon to be swamped by the gender war. Layla’s secret lover was supposed to be royal, and rich; but no one knew for certain, and she wasn’t saying. Or perhaps, some conjectured, he didn’t exist at all: he was Layla’s invention, a matter of innuendo, a method of turning away enquiry so she could get on with the real love of her life, that is to say, Medusa.