Big Women

‘You’re a mad woman, Stephie,’ said Daffy, with confidence. ‘Personally I’m going to go and make coffee, since your husband has failed to bring us any.’

‘You better had,’ said Stephie, ‘since it’s all you’re fit for.

Go back to the socialists, where you met my husband. It’s where you belong.’

At which Daffy slammed out and Alice continued as if nothing had happened.

‘We are on the verge of the greatest revolution the world has ever known. The moment of praxis approaches. Theory feeds through into action, the stresses of oppression build up and burst through, as burst they must …’ and so on, while in the kitchen Daffy found mugs amongst the chaos of a kitchen where food was occasionally cooked, but often thought about. Here were garlic presses for non-existent garlic, saucepan lids for no longer existent pans, a wooden butcher’s block brought home by Hamish but covered with children’s painting material, old bills, overlooked letters, postcards, wooden spoons, a Victorian knife sharpener, a dozen blunt and rusty knives, matches here, cracked pottery lemon squeezers there; bread in one place, butter in another, jam nowhere to be found, a fridge you shuddered to look into.

Daffy found the instant coffee with no trouble, and looking around, longed to bring order to the chaos, cleanliness to the grime, care to the uncared-for. Hamish came in as she knew he would.

‘I was just coming to do that,’ said Hamish. ‘She who earns most outside the home must be obeyed inside the home.’

‘But you can still make us wait,’ observed Daffy.

‘Oh, shrewd, shrewd,’ said Hamish. ‘Why are you wearing that ridiculous garment? I can’t tell where your tits begin or your bum ends.’

‘That’s the reason why. To save us from lascivious looks and so we’re all equal and don’t compete for male favours. Why should we dress for men?’

‘Perhaps I should wear a skirt,’ said Hamish, ‘to keep women in face.’

‘That’s silly.’

‘No more silly than girls wearing trousers,’ he said. The water boiled in the kettle. Neither switched it off, a task necessary in those days. It continued to purr steam into the room. Someone had removed the warning whistle.

‘Women only want to wear trousers because it’s the garb of the ruling elite, that is to say, men. Men don’t want to wear skirts because that’s what the servants wear.’

‘Women want to wear trousers so men don’t look up their skirts,’ said Daffy.

‘Why bother about any of it,’ said Hamish, ‘when a girl like you can get what she wants just by standing around.’

‘I’d feel more like arguing only your wife Stephie keeps calling me a fool.’

‘She only calls you a fool,’ said Hamish, ‘because she knows I like you.’

He undid the top of her dungaree straps. She made no move to stop him other than by leaning over to switch off the kettle, to show she did not really care, one way or the other. He undid the other strap. Underneath, her blouse, which was her little sister’s, gaped open. The bare, rising, pale pink, translucent skin of her breasts could be clearly seen.

‘I’m a traitor,’ said Daffy.

‘All women are traitors,’ said Hamish. ‘That’s why feminism will never work.’

His hand slipped down to touch the breast, fingers stretched to find the nipple. The hand was none too clean, marked with furniture polish and rust from the iron chain. Daffy rather liked that kind of thing. Stephanie hated it: she washed frequently.

Stephanie, meanwhile, found herself not paying total attention to Alice. She wondered what was going on in the kitchen, while trying not to. Alice, in any case, was talking to Zoe, speaking to her as to a child.

‘By Praxis,’ said Alice, ‘I mean the moment theory meets its response in everyday life: when the convergent dynamics of oppression and protest meet. Something happens.’

‘I’ll open some wine,’ said Layla, ‘since neither Hamish nor Daffy seem capable of bringing coffee.’ And she went to Stephanie’s cabinet, brought out four bottles of Bulgarian red, found a corkscrew on the windowsill between unkempt pot plants and opened all four. Stephanie still said not a word; her face was arranged into a careful, attentive and amiable mask.

‘Praxis’, went on Alice, ‘means culmination, breaking-point. Also, interestingly enough, it’s a term used in Victorian pornography for orgasm, and a Victorian girl’s name, though I don’t suppose the parents who used it understood the double meaning: certainly not the fathers. Girls who enjoyed sex were known as nymphomaniacs, and the threat of the description still keeps many a girl out of a man’s bed today.’

‘I’m always being called a nymphomaniac,’ said Layla, liberally pouring wine. ‘And I’ve always taken it as flattery.’

‘That’s because you have your own money,’ said Zoe, ‘and don’t have to worry about what men think of you.’

Stephanie drank a whole glass of her own bad red wine almost straight off, and then another. But she would not go into the kitchen: would not.

Hamish had Daffy’s breasts uncovered, the corners of her blouse tucked under her armpits, and the top of her dungarees flapping down below her waist.

‘Did you burn your bra?’ asked Hamish.

‘It fell to pieces in the wash,’ said Daffy. ‘I only have the one. I don’t earn much. I can’t afford another. And they support themselves well enough. I have good muscular tone.’

‘Stephie’s flop all over the place,’ said Hamish. ‘Some men like that kind of thing.’

‘Comparisons are odious,’ said Daffy, ‘especially when it comes to women’s tits. Men are always doing it, to make women feel bad. Do we women talk about your private parts? No; we are too polite: we understand your insecurities.’ But she made no move to break away from his hands.

‘Supposing Stephie comes in?’ she asked all the same.

‘All the more exciting,’ said Hamish. ‘I’m fed up with her. Anyway, she rations sex. She uses it as a controlling device. I doubted the wisdom of her fish and bicycle poster, so she’ll have a headache for a week.’

‘That’s terrible,’ said Daffy.

At which point Stephanie came into the kitchen. She would not, she would not, but then she did. So go most of our resolutions. She found Daffy half-naked and Hamish’s hands upon her.

‘I came for some wineglasses,’ said Stephanie by way of excuse, which she could not help feeling was needed.

Interrupting others’ intimacies calls for immediate apology, although on reflection outrage rather than apology can be seen to be more appropriate. Pride suggests that the urge to scream and scratch should be controlled. Better for the self-esteem to imply that nothing profound or important has been lost.

‘Actually, Hamish,’ said Stephanie, ‘this is last-straw time.’

Things had not been going too well between them. Hamish had what was called a wandering eye, though he would claim it was woman’s eyes wandered to him. Mind you, according to the custom of the times there was no very great sin in turning visual delight into sexual delight. It got it out of the system.

But Stephanie took what Hamish took lightly very heavily indeed. While Hamish declared that Stephanie’s ‘career’ – any woman with a career was still seen at best as a contradiction in terms, at worst as a description of a masculinised woman with a moustache and aggressive tendencies – was more to do with her desire to get out of the house and away from the children than any need to earn money. In other words they were no longer ‘in love’ or all in all to each other, and not very happy living together, but the custom of the times also suggested that this was just the way things were; no reason on this account to leave home, break marriages, seek personal happiness by setting up another household with a different partner. The human right to veracity and authenticity in personal experience was not yet established. To be ‘happy’ was no one’s quest, simply to get by was enough.

That the man-woman-child threesome was an innate bar to the perfectibility of family happiness was just another fact of life. People lived with angst, and saw nothing wrong with it.

When Stephanie said, ‘This is the last straw, Hamish,’ the world shook a little. The Georgian glasses jammed together on the dresser – any good housewife in those days knew that glasses, especially valuable old ones, should never touch: but this was Stephanie’s house – trembled and clinked, and later, when the day of the dishwasher dawned, and they were subjected to yet more stress, broke almost at once. But the shaking of the house might of course have been the coincidental fall-out from an IRA bomb let off in Trafalgar Square. Who is to say? Or of course the bomb might have been the outer and visible sign of the internalised psycho-social praxis of that night’s events in Primrose Hill. Synchronicity, as Jung might have observed.

Stephanie took the wineglasses and went back to the meeting, leaving her husband and her co-conspirator flesh to flesh. The objects on the dresser stopped trembling.

‘Men control the means of production, capital and labour,’ said Alice. ‘They keep power to themselves. Thus the skill, the input, the energy of half the world’s population is lost to humankind. Everywhere women are despised; seen as second-class citizens. Their inferiority is built into our language, our constitutions, our laws, our institutions. To undo the very structure of our societies is a momentous task, but it must be done, and can be done.’

‘Men’s greatest achievement’, said Zoe, ‘is war. Women’s greatest? Babies. Perforce. You just lie there and pregnancy happens. Go on lying and you push it out. What sort of achievement is that?’

Little Saffron slept, soft arms drooping over the side of her pushchair, not yet called a buggy.

Layla opened another bottle of wine.