Fay Weldon - Watching Me, Watching You

Maureen has experience of life: she knows by now, having also been married to a psychiatrist who ran off with all her money and the marital home, that it is wise to watch what people do, not listen to what they say. Well, it’s something to have learned. Ruthie and Alison, her (nominal) partners from the beginning, each her junior by some ten years, listen to Maureen with respect and diffidence.

‘Mind you,’ says Maureen now, matching up purple feathers with emerald satin to great effect, ‘if I were Derek I’d certainly beat Erica to death. Fancy having to listen to that whining voice night after night. The only trouble is he’s become too much of a gentleman. He’ll never have the courage to do it. Turned his back on his origins, and all that. It doesn’t do.’

Maureen has known Derek since the old days in Hoxton. They were evacuees together: shared the same bomb shelter on their return from Starvation Hall in Felixstowe — a boys’ public school considered unsafe for the gentry’s children but all right for the East Enders.

‘It’s all Erica’s fantasy,’ says Ruthie, knowledgeably. ‘A kind of dreadful sexual fantasy. She wants him to beat her up so she trots round London saying he does. Poor Derek. It comes from marrying into the English upper classes, old style. She must be nearly fifty. She has that kind of battered-looking face.’

Her voice trails away. There is a slight pause in the conversation.

‘Um,’ says Alison.

‘That’s drink,’ says Maureen, decisively. ‘Poor bloody Derek. What a ball-breaker to have married.’ Derek was Maureen’s childhood sweetheart. What a romantic, platonic idyll! She nearly married him once, twice, three times. Once in the very early days, before Kim, before anyone, when Derek was selling books from a barrow in Hoxton market. Once again, after Kim and before the professor, by which time Derek was taking expensive photographs of the trendy and successful — only then Erica turned up in Derek’s bed, long-legged, disdainful, beautiful, with a model’s precise and organised face, and the fluty tones of the girl who’d bought her school uniform at Harrods, and that was the end of that. Not that Derek had ever exactly proposed to Maureen; not that they’d ever even been to bed together: they just knew each other and each other’s bed partners so well that each knew what the other was thinking, feeling, hoping. Both from Hoxton, East London: Derek, Maureen; and a host of others, too. What was there, you might ask, about that particular acre of the East End which over a period of a few years gave birth to such a crop of remarkable children, such a flare-up of human creativity in terms of writing, painting, designing, entertaining? Changing the world? One might almost think God had chosen it for an experiment in intensive talent-breeding. Mauromania, God-sent.

And then there was another time in the late sixties, when there was a short break between Derek and Erica — Erica had a hysterectomy against Derek’s wishes; but during those two weeks of opportunity Maureen, her business flourishing, her designs world famous, Mauromania a label for even trendy young queens (royal, that is) to boast, rich beyond counting — during those two special weeks of all weeks Maureen fell head over heels classically in love with Pedro: no, not a fisherman, but as good as — Italian, young, open-shirted, sloe-eyed, a designer. And Pedro, it later transpired, was using Maureen as a means to laying all the models, both male and female (Maureen had gone into menswear). Maureen was the last to know, and by the time she did Derek was in Erica’s arms (or whatever) again. A sorry episode. Maureen spent six months at a health farm, on a diet of grapes and brown rice. At the end of that time Mauromania Man had collapsed, her business manager had jumped out of a tenth-floor window, and an employee’s irate mother was bringing a criminal suit against Maureen personally for running a brothel. It was all quite irrational. If the employee, a runaway girl of, it turned out, only thirteen, but looking twenty, and an excellent seamstress, had contracted gonorrhoea whilst in her employ, was that Maureen’s fault? The judge, sensibly, decided it wasn’t, and that the entire collapse of British respectability could not fairly be laid at Maureen’s door. Legal costs came to more than £12,000: the country house and stables had to be sold at a knock-down price. That was disaster year.

And who was there during that time to hold Maureen’s hand? No one. Everyone, it seemed, had troubles enough of their own. And all the time, Maureen’s poor heart bled for Pedro, of the ridiculous name and the sloe eyes, long departed, laughing, streptococci surging in his wake. And of all the old friends and allies only Ruthie and Alison lingered on, two familiar faces in a sea of changing ones, getting younger every day, and hungrier year by year not for fun, fashion, and excitement, but for money, promotion, security, and acknowledgment.

The staff even went on strike once, walking up and down outside the workshop with placards announcing hours and wages, backed by Maoists, women’s liberationists and trade unionists, all vying for their trumpery allegiance, puffing up a tiny news story into a colossal media joke, not even bothering to get Maureen’s side of the story — absenteeism, drug addiction, shoddy workmanship, falling markets, constricting profits.

But Ruthie gave birth to Poppy, unexpectedly, in the black and gold ladies’ rest room (customers only — just as well it wasn’t in the staff toilets where the plaster was flaking and the old wall-cisterns came down on your head if you pulled the chain) and that cheered everyone up. Business perked up, staff calmed down as unemployment rose. Poppy, born of Mauromania, was everyone’s favourite, everyone’s mascot. Her father, only seventeen, was doing two years inside, framed by the police for dealing in pot. He did not have too bad a time — he got three A-levels and university entrance inside, which he would not have got outside, but it meant poor little Poppy had to do without a father’s care and Ruthie had to cope on her own. Ruthie of the ribs.

Alison, meanwhile, somewhat apologetically, had married Hugo, a rather straight and respectable actor who believed in women’s rights; they had three children and lived in a cosy house with a garden in Muswell Hill: Alison even belonged to the PTA! Hugo was frequently without work, but Hugo and Alison managed, between them, to keep going and even happy. Now Hugo thinks Alison should ask for a rise, but Alison doesn’t like to. That’s the trouble about working for a friend and being only a nominal partner.

‘Don’t let’s talk about Erica Bisham any more,’ says Maureen. ‘It’s too draggy a subject.’ So they don’t.

But one midnight a couple of weeks later, when Maureen, Ruthie and Alison are working late to meet an order — as is their frequent custom these days (and one most unnerving to Hugo, Alison’s husband) — there comes a tap on the door. It’s Erica, of course. Who else would tap, in such an ingratiating fashion? Others cry ‘Hi!’ or ‘Peace!’ and enter.

Erica, smiling nervously and crookedly; her yellow hair eccentric in the extreme; bushy in places, sparse in others. Couldn’t she wear a wig? She is wearing a Marks & Spencer nightie which not even Ruthie would think of wearing, in the house or out of it. It is bloodstained down the back. (Menstruation is not yet so fashionable as to be thus demonstrable, though it can be talked about at length.) A strong smell of what? alcohol, or is it nail varnish? hangs about her. Drinking again. (Alison’s husband, Hugo, in a long period of unemployment, once veered on to the edge of alcoholism but fortunately veered off again, and the smell of nail varnish, acetone, gave a warning sign of an agitated, overworked liver, unable to cope with acetaldehyde, the highly toxic product of alcohol metabolism.)