Down Among the Women

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She is quite right. They swarm into the tiny room like a tide of despair. Scarlet goes to bed. They regard her, and she knows it, as Wanda's cross. verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ What else do you think I'm trying to do?' asks Wanda. 'Their brains get short of oxygen if they're overdue, don't you even know that? Yours will need all the I.Q. points it can muster, I imagine. I am doing you a favour. Shall I tell you the story of the milkman, the lady, and the letter-box?' The children look healthy enough, says Scarlet, Wanda's brutal daughter, my friend, when I complain.

You're not old,' says Scarlet with unexpected kindness. Perhaps she is touched by her own good nature. At any rate she starts to cry.Down among the women. What a place to be! Yet here we all are by accident of birth, sprouted breasts and bellies, as cyclical of nature as our timekeeper the moon—and down here among the women we have no option but to stay. So says Scarlet's mother Wanda, aged sixty-four, gritting her teeth. I wish,' says Wanda hopelessly, 'I wish things didn't have to be the way they are. Why did you have to go and do it?' Bad,' replies Wanda, with satisfaction, and Scarlet moans in outrage. Wanda is egged on. She sings again.

Listen, now. Wanda sings as she scours the coffee pot. Wanda would have looked good in uniform, but they never let her have one. When Wanda walked into this headquarters or that, and demanded her right to help her country, there would be so much shifting of weights and pressures behind closed doors that even Wanda could not persevere. Why? Because she carried a Party Card and named her child after the blood of martyrs? How could that be? Was not Russia our ally? Nevertheless, there it was. She, who would have looked so good in Air Force glory, or Wren gloss, or even A.T.S. norm, had to do without. Wanda is always having to do without. If it's not her own necessity, it's Scarlet's. It is true that others of my women friends live quiet and happy married lives, or would claim to do so. I watch them curl up and wither gently, and without drama, like cabbages in early March which have managed to survive the rigours of winter only to succumb to the passage of time. 'We are perfectly happy,' they say. Then why do they look so sad? Is it a temporary depression scurrying in from the North Sea, a passing desolation drifting over from Russia? No, I think not. There is no escape even for them. There is nothing more glorious than to be a young girl, and there is nothing worse than to have been one. Scarlet doesn't even smile. Wanda feels depressed. The coffee pot is boiling. She turns it upside down to filter it through; something inside goes wrong and boiling coffee bubbles over her hands. Wanda, stoical to the point of mania, does not scream or even complain, but holds her poor red hand under the tap. I wish you'd grow old,' says Wanda, with bitterness. 'I wish you'd grow old and see what it's like.'

Scarlet is disconcerted. Scarlet is offended. Scarlet, impressed by the workings of her own body, is having a fit of sanctimonious motherhood. Scarlet believes—for this one suspended week—in love, life, mystery, meaning, sanctity. Byzantia lies very quiet and kindly allows her mother these few days of illusion. She is seven days late. Scarlet thinks she is a boy. So does Wanda. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. She has come early, she says, to get in her message of good cheer before the others arrive and swamp her good spirits. How's that for a best friend? You've got to be careful, down here among the women. So says Jocelyn, respectable Jocelyn, who not so long ago pitched her middle-class voice to its maternal coo and lowered her baby into a bath of scalding water. Seven years later the scars still show; not that Jocelyn seems to notice. In any case, the boy's away at prep school most of the time. Today the vapours are swirling pretty chill. It's just us women today. I have nothing to read. I fold the edges of my cloak around my body and consider my friends.