Free Down Among the Women by Fay Weldon

among the wage-earners, of course, we don’t have that class of patience. Our love is less lofty. Money and law interfere. Let me quote a poem I know. It is called ‘The Poet to his Wife’.
    ‘Money-and-law
    Stands at the nursery door.
    You married me—what for?
    My love was not to get you clothes or bread,
    But make more poems in my head.
    I’ve fathered children.
    God!
    Am I to die
    To turn them out as fits a mother’s eye?
    I wanted mothering, and they, this brood
    Step in and take my daily food.
    Money-and-law
    Stands at the nursery door.
    Money-and-law, money-and-law
    Has the world in its maw.’
    Well.
    Susan sits up in her hospital bed. Her father sends flowers: he’s in the United States discovering more about instant coffee. Susan’s stitches are infected. Movement is painful. Kim is kind but thinks she is fussing. Well, it isn’t his first baby. There was, after all, Scarlet, a full twenty years ago.
    Scarlet, they (Kim, Wanda, Scarlet and friends, but not Susan) have decided, may as well stay in the flat with her baby daughter until Susan returns with her son. Susan wants to return now, at once. But Susan is running a slight fever in the evenings. The hospital doesn’t want to take any risks. And the baby is not yet back to its birth-weight. Susan’s breasts are cracked and painful. When the baby sucks, male and searching, tears of pain and humiliation spurt from her eyes.
    Susan’s mother, and the ward sister, both say she should persevere in breast feeding for Baby’s Sake. Susan perseveres, pumping her strength into the baby for her own sake, not his. She wants her home back. She wants her breasts back, too, for her own. She doesn’t dare ask Kim on his nightly visit if Wanda visits Scarlet.
    She won’t decide on a name for the baby. ‘I’d only thought of girls’ names,’ she says. ‘What’s Scarlet calling hers?’
    Kim says he doesn’t know. She doesn’t believe him. Kim’s sleeping on the sofa. She’s not sure she believes that, either. But she must believe it, otherwise she’s mad. Men do not sleep with their daughters, let alone when they’ve had a baby only days previously. Nevertheless, Scarlet is in her, Susan’s, matrimonial bed, and Susan is deeply affronted.
    Susan’s baby develops an eye infection. He cries in that corner of the upstairs nursery reserved for infected babies. He with his sticky, pus-clogged eye, another with a dermatitis, another with dysentery; they lie in cots six inches apart. Mother isn’t told. They wipe his eyes before he comes down.
    Susan can pick out her baby’s cry. It has a different note from the others. In the middle of the night, against all the rules, she hobbles and groans up the stairs to see her baby. She has never wittingly broken a rule in all her life; not even to run in the school corridors, not even to trap and sell for sixpence the miniature frogs, protected by law, which hopped and dived in her antipodean paradise of a back garden.
    There is Simeon, segregated, cast out, threatened, eyes closed fast by pus. She clasps him, won’t let him go, backs into a corner with him. Staff come running: they tug, she snaps and bites like a bitch with pups. She is astonished at herself. They think she is mad. So indeed she seems to be. They ring Kim, but he isn’t at home. Wanda is. They tell Susan. They can’t give her tranquillizers, it is too early in the world’s history, so they try pheno-barb; they even let her have the baby beside her for the night.
    In the morning Kim comes.
    ‘You shouldn’t get so upset,’ he says. ‘Lots of babies get eye infections.’
    ‘Take me out of here.’
    ‘You’re in no state to go, love. You need a rest.’
    ‘Rest? Here?’
    ‘Yes. You’re still feverish at night. Sister said so.’
    ‘Of course I’m feverish at night after what I’ve been through. If I stay, the baby will go blind.’
    ‘Don’t be so silly. They’re looking after it perfectly well.’
    ‘He’s not an