Big Women - Fay Weldon

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metaphorically?’ asked Daffy, whose mother worked part-time in a betting shop, and whose father was a railway engineer.

      ‘Daffy,’ said Stephie, ‘you’re such a fool it’s hopeless telling you.’

      ‘I didn’t risk my marriage to come here to listen to ordinary female squabbling,’ interrupted Zoe. ‘I can hear that any day round the toddlers’ sandpit.’

      No one took any notice of Zoe. Daffy turned on Stephie. ‘What right have you to call me a fool?’ she asked. ‘You’re so pompous, Stephie. You think you own the universe. You’re worse than a man. I’m tired of being patronised. And that goes for all of you. I do believe you’re jealous.’

      ‘What is there to be jealous of, you silly cow?’ Layla summed up. ‘Sit down everyone.’

      So they did and tried again. Alice continued.

      ‘The Marxists say that men are born free but everywhere are in chains –’

      In the Youth Hostel Brian and Nancy found their way to their allocated dormitory. It was a large bleak room with a high ceiling, white walls and four bunks.

      ‘Just think,’ said Nancy, ‘we can have it all to ourselves. Just you and me, Brian.’

      They had been engaged for four years, and never, as the present so crudely puts it, had sex. All Brian said was –

      ‘I wish you wouldn’t wear your engagement ring so openly.’

      ‘Why?’ She was hurt. It was a diamond ring, and Brian and Brian’s parents, apple-farmers, had clubbed together to buy it.

      Nancy may not have had a wedding ring as most of her school friends now did – marriage in her early twenties being de rigueur for a girl: but at least she had an engagement ring. And all her own teeth, which was unusual for someone from New Zealand, whose soil was somehow inimical to the formation of good enamel. Nancy’s mother on her seventeenth birthday was given the traditional gift to daughters from the father: a set of state-of-the-art false teeth: the originals taken out to make room for them. Nancy’s mother, when asked by Nancy why she had divorced her father, would only ever reply, ‘To save your teeth, my darling. Had you been a boy, I might have stayed.’ Assiduously, ever since, Nancy had cleaned her teeth and done her best to be ordinary and like everyone else; or, in the fashion of daughters, everyone else except her mother. But blood will out.

      Had Nancy’s grandfather given Nancy’s mother a different present on her seventeenth birthday, had Nancy’s mother given her daughter a different answer …

      ‘It’s not that I don’t want the world to know we’re engaged,’ Brian said to Nancy, as he neatly unpacked his rucksack, shaking, airing and folding, using the top bunk for his purposes. ‘It’s just that this is so mean a city. People are quite mad. Someone crazed on drugs might steal it.’

      Nancy was unpacking her things, less carefully than Brian, scrabbling for the blouse and skirt she wore in the evenings, putting them on the top bunk, planning to sleep on the bottom, within touching distance of Brian.

      ‘If you put your stuff up there,’ said Brian, ‘you’ll only have to move it all when we go to bed.’ He assumed he’d be taking the top bunk, out of touching distance of Nancy.

      Little things, little things, shake the world. Big things make the world heave and move, Titans stirring beneath the surface, turning over in their sleep.

      ‘If man is born in chains,’ says Alice in Primrose Hill that night, ‘how much truer is it that every woman not financially independent finds herself chained to an individual man, husband or father, needing his goodwill for her very survival and that of her children. Conditioned by necessity to smile, to please, to wheedle and charm, to placate.’

      ‘I try not to smile,’ said Stephanie.

      ‘She doesn’t have to do much fucking trying,’ whispered Daffy to Zoe.

      ‘Even if she is financially independent within marriage,’ said Alice, ‘and women have always worked, in the fields, or as cleaners, servants, washerwomen, and in the factories, she is allowed no dignity for it. Her earnings are seen as pin money.’

      ‘Wherever there’s shit work to be done,’ said Stephanie, ‘that’s where women are.’

      ‘I don’t think we should use swearwords,’ said Zoe. ‘It loses us credibility. Men don’t like it.’

      ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ said Layla. ‘Who cares what men like?

      Haven’t you heard a word Alice has been saying?’

      ‘I just want to establish’, said Zoe, ‘that Stephie had no right to call Daffy a fool at a consciousness-raising meeting. We are meant to be sisters.’

      ‘It’s my house,’ said Stephie, feebly.

      ‘Though sometimes,’ said Zoe, ‘I can’t be sure whether or not I’m talking sense. Ever since I had a baby no one seems to hear me. Perhaps they’re right. Perhaps motherhood has turned my brain to porridge. I have to pinch myself to remind myself I have a degree in sociology.’

      Saffron had turned herself round in the pushchair in spite of all the straps and now faced her mother, not Alice. The pushchair was in danger of tipping backwards.

      ‘My education has not equipped me for life,’ said Zoe.

      ‘Supposing I go home and Bull hits me for coming here when he specifically told me I wasn’t to?’

      ‘Then we do what a group of women did in Germany last week,’ said Stephie. ‘We go round to your house, heave Bull out, pull down his trousers, and march him up and down the street for all the neighbours to see, with a label round his neck saying “wife-beater”. This is what they chanted: “Any woman who sleeps with the same man for more than one night is a fool and a reactionary.” That is a translation. It may well have sounded better in German. But the point’s the same. Women have to take responsibility for what happens to them.’

      ‘I don’t see why,’ said Layla, ‘when you can so easily blame men.’

      ‘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.

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