Big Women

‘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, ambition, energy, the way it must, does to men what once motherhood did to women.

‘A girl has to have someone to explain things to her,’ said Brian.

‘I like jet lag,’ said Nancy. ‘It makes me feel kind of languid, kind of nice.’ Sexy, she would have added, but it was not a word yet in general use. There not being a word for it, the feeling stayed elusive, flitting.

Nancy stretched out her hand to touch Brian, where it dangled, rather like Saffron’s from her pushchair, limp and soft. She stroked the back of his hand with her forefinger. ‘You could move in here beside me, Brian,’ she said. ‘We could lock the door.’

Brian moved his hand gently away. He would have preferred to snatch it – she could tell from the tension in the muscles, but he managed not to. He was all control. She liked that. So much the better, she anticipated, when he lost it.

‘People do these days,’ said Nancy. ‘Especially if they’re engaged.’

‘We’ll wait for all that till after we’re married,’ said Brian.

‘Quite a nymphomaniac you’re turning out to be.’

He was joking, but only just.

‘It’s just everything’s so kind of exciting, and abroad,’ pleaded Nancy, i want something amazing to happen. Don’t you feel it, everything buzzing out there? Colour and light and sound and change?’

‘People take drugs,’ said Brian, ‘if that’s what you mean. They get out of control.’

Nancy pushed down the blanket to expose naked breasts. ‘My face may not be up to much,’ she said, ‘but I have beautiful breasts. My doctor says I have the most perfect breasts he’s ever seen. Please look.’

But he wouldn’t; he merely hoped she’d change her doctor.

‘Nancy,’ he pointed out, ‘the best way for a girl to keep a man is not to give him what he wants before marriage. And I suppose you do want to keep me?’

‘Of course I do,’ she said.

‘Then cover yourself up,’ he said, ‘and go to sleep and don’t tempt me.’

She covered herself up. He closed his eyes but she could tell he wasn’t sleeping.

‘You say “what a man wants”,’ she observed, ‘but supposing the truth is he doesn’t want it? What sort of marriage would it be then?’

‘Marriage is about the begetting of children, not sex at every opportunity,’ said Brian. ‘And abstaining from sex before marriage is a sensible convention. Supposing you got pregnant?’

‘For the last ten years,’ said Nancy, ‘there hasn’t been a problem. The pill makes you fat, makes you sick, makes you die sometimes, but at least you don’t get pregnant.’

‘The pill’s for bad girls,’ said Brian, ‘not good girls. Bad girls like sex. Good girls want babies. Can’t you leave it alone, Nancy? A man likes to do the pursuing, not to be pursued. He’s born to be the hunter, not the hunted.’

Nancy sat upright in bed, suddenly.

‘I’m not going to marry you, Brian,’ she said.

He opened his eyes.

‘What did you say?’

‘That’s it,’ said Nancy. ‘I shan’t repeat it. You heard well enough. I’m not going home either. I’m going to stay here, find a job, make my life here. A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.’

She lay down again.

‘I’m tired now. I’ll leave you in the morning.’