Big Women

‘Too late!’ cries Layla.

‘The moment of Praxis,’ cries Alice. ‘Dance on. What happens will. The fates are here amongst us.’

And such was the nature of the dance, indeed, it seemed to be true. The muses danced gracefully in their languid threesome, the Maenads wailed, the furies shrieked.

Hamish meanwhile, an ethnic gown flung on for modesty, was at the door to let Bull in. Daffy wandered down, wrapped in a towel. Rafe and Roland, woken, dishevelled, sat on the landing to watch whatever drama was about to unfold. If sometimes they could not tell TV from real life, who could blame them?

‘Where’s my wife?’ yelled Bull. ‘Where’s my child?’

‘In the front room with the others, I daresay,’ said Hamish.

‘It’s a woman’s meeting. Go on in. Be my guest.’

Bull charges past Hamish and slams open the door of the front room: he is met by a waft of wine, a blast of music, overheated breath. The room, which for the first instant seemed crowded, contains his naked wife, already searching in a pile of discarded clothes for hers, and his child, Saffron, in vest and pants, pulling on her socks. She’s a competent little creature. Hamish walks in and takes off the music.

‘Nice dancing, Daddy?’ asks Saffron, anxiously. ‘Mummy, put your clothes on.’

‘Disgusting dancing, darling,’ says Bull.

‘Sorry, Bull,’ says Zoe, but she seems oddly unmoved, merely placatory. It occurs to the others she had expected him to come after her, is not sorry to be caught.

‘What the fuck are you sorry for?’ enquires Layla. ‘What’s to apologise?’

‘Foul-mouthed bitch,’ says Bull to Layla. ‘Leave my wife alone. If you come near her again, if she speaks to you harpies ever, it’s the end of our marriage. I keep the house, I keep the child, she’s out on the streets.’

‘That’s going a bit far, Bull,’ says Stephie. ‘That’s a little Victorian.’

‘It may be Victorian,’ says Bull. ‘But it’s the law. She’s a lesbian, she’s an unfit mother. She has already exposed my daughter to moral danger.’ He turns on Layla, fist raised.

‘Don’t be cross with Layla,’ says Zoe, in a voice which has turned soft and wheedling, and which they haven’t heard before. She has jeans and T-shirt back on by now. She strokes Bull’s raised arm. He lowers it. ‘It’s just Layla’s way. We weren’t doing anything wrong. It’s just so hot and we felt like dancing. We’re not lesbians, honestly.’

Alice is already zipped back into her boiler suit. Layla’s all but clothed again. Someone shuts the window, pulls the curtain. The crowd of watchers dissolves.

‘Moment of choice, Zoe,’ says Layla. ‘Go with him or stay with us. Be a man’s woman or join Medusa.’

‘I have to go home,’ says Zoe. ‘Bull needs me. And Saffron starts nursery school tomorrow.’

Bull’s hand holds hers, and she holds Saffron’s.

‘Sweet,’ says Hamish.

‘Yuk,’ says Stephie.

‘Let her go,’ says Alice, ‘it’s fated.’ But whether she’s talking to the women or the husband, who’s to say?

‘You wouldn’t have been any use to us, Zoe,’ says Layla. ‘No backbone, no stamina, self-absorbed, your brain’s turned to porridge; go your own way. Some women are incapable of sisterhood and you’re one of them.’

Zoe gives a little cry of distress, but Bull is already hustling wife, child and pushchair out into the corridor. There he sees Daffy towel-wrapped on the stairs, and is mollified again, by the proof of his conviction that this is a house of disreputable and disgraceful goings-on.

‘Medusa,’ says Alice, to anyone who cares to listen. ‘The time is ripe, the ceremony fits. But it is Artemis who is involved. Artemis who claims Zoe the fruitful as sacrifice: Persephone and Eurydice in the one form. After the sacrifice the new growth begins. I see blood upon the ground and sorrow. Artemis the hunter destroys what she brings forth.’

If you’d asked her afterwards what she’d said, she couldn’t have told you. Sometimes her mouth opened and the words flowed, without any particular willing of her own. Usually such gifts are given to the simple, the garrulous, the gullible: Alice could at least render the outpourings graceful, and properly formulated, so their origins seemed to have some tenuous connection with wisdom and experience.

‘Beware,’ said Alice, suddenly, ‘lest the wounded return to devour.’

‘Shivery,’ said Layla.

Out in the street Zoe kept step with the striding Bull.

‘Now don’t upset Saffron, Bull. She’s very sensitive.’

‘Naughty Mummy,’ said Saffron.

Daffy retreated back to Stephie’s bedroom. Hamish followed. Stephanie gave them a few moments and went on up, still unclothed.

‘Remember,’ called Layla after her, ‘the personal is the political.’

‘I will,’ said Stephanie, all resolve.

In the bedroom Daffy had her boiler suit on again and was trying to lace her boots, knotting the laces where Hamish had scissored them. But once knotted, how to get the knots through the eyelets? She gave up and sprayed herself liberally and defiantly with Stephanie’s big bottle of stale duty-free Chanel No. 5.

‘Do you like this house?’ Stephanie asked Daffy, when she’d finished with the scent.

‘I do,’ said Daffy. ‘It’s a mess, but it would clean up well.’

‘Then have it,’ said Stephanie. ‘But the husband and the kids go with it.’

‘OK,’ said Daffy, after a little thought.

Hamish drew his naked wife out into the corridor, where Rafe and Roland overheard but were not seen.

‘Are you out of your mind?’ he demanded.

‘I told you it was the last straw,’ said his wife.

‘But you are meant to throw me out, not leave,’ he said.

‘Too bad,’ she said. ‘I’m off.’

‘But I’m the guilty party,’ he said, ‘and there are lots of witnesses.’

‘I don’t want anything,’ she said. ‘You can keep the lot: house, things, children. I want a new life.’

‘You are an unnatural woman,’ he said. Back then, that was a fairly ferocious insult. These days it meets with a ho-hum.

‘So be it,’ she said. ‘Keep Daffy too, as the housemaid. Fuck her and she won’t ask for payment. It will work out cheaper for you like that. As for me, I am to be reborn. Let my sisters take me.’

And she went downstairs again with a cry of ‘Shall we go, Layla?’ and Hamish pattered after her crying ‘Is this all? Is this all the end of a marriage deserves?’ with the two boys clutching at his African robe, for they could see he was all they now had in the world, until Daffy eased their clawing fingers free and soothed them. She had no children of her own but her instincts were good, if not, to date, her behaviour.