Free Down Among the Women by Fay Weldon Page B

with a clear pale skin and well-formed features. His son is a dark-red mottled sticky-eyed lump. He has been having long talks with Wanda. She has provoked him almost to the point of believing the time might be ripe for him to start painting again. But how can he, now he has this influx of dependants? At least Wanda works—he can’t see Susan ever doing anything but sit round waiting to be kept. Poor Susan. He smoothes her hair back from her forehead: it has wrinkles there he never noticed before. She is very tense. He wishes he didn’t have these thoughts about her.
    ‘Scarlet is part of our lives now,’ he says. ‘We must try and make the best of it, that’s all.’
    Nurses erupt from all sides; they move him to one side. It is not within normal visiting hours, so they don’t count him as human. One wheels the baby off; another the locker. Susan watches while her flowers, her breakfast and slices of white bread and butter and raspberry jam disappear. (The hospitals are using up the war-time stocks. Jam is made of turnip pulp, flavouring, cochineal, and—in the popular imagination, at any rate—flecks of wood for raspberry pips.) Other nurses seize Susan’s bed and wheel that off too.
    He follows.
    ‘Where are you taking her?’
    ‘Ask Sister, please.’ They are firm, brutal and kind all at the same time; armour-bosomed and sexually aware, these smiling girls who watch and observe the processes of motherhood.
    He finds Sister in the store room, up a step-ladder investigating a forgotten shelf. She has discovered a false leg lying in the dust; she has not much concentration for Kim. Susan, however, she admits, has a post-puerperal fever.
    ‘What’s that?’ he asks.
    Sister is vague. But Susan is going into the isolation ward. ‘Just to be on the safe side.’ It’s not dangerous, he enquires? Good gracious no, she beams. And she can have the baby with her now, can’t she? Without disturbing the other mothers.
    Kim has to be off, back to the office, the three-roomed suite in Mayfair. Susan’s father is away. Kim has to be entire creative and executive departments himself and he is very busy.
    But he takes time off to have drinks at lunchtime with his friends in the pub in Oxford Street. Dylan Thomas holds the floor, with a supporting cast of poets. Penguin New Writing is into its fortieth and last edition. The beer is good, if warm; Scotch is back. The Welfare State is being wrought around them. In the Black Horse Kim drinks to celebrate his new fatherhood with friends on the whole rather younger than he is, not long back from the war, duffle-coated, seeking a congenial level—doorman today, BBC producer (radio) tomorrow, who knows? Painters, jazzmen, writers, the first sociologists—the original do-your-own-thing people, widening up the channels of culture for the masses to flow through.
    Here Kim is a man of status: he earns enough to buy the drinks, he has two paintings in the Tate, albeit painted twenty years ago, albeit in the basement; now he has a baby. They are pleased for him. It is a time of hope.
    Babies are welcome in this still rationed, still unpainted, barely photographed, rarely filmed, but lively world.
    Kim is moved to tell them of Scarlet. He confesses to having a grandchild. They think it is a great joke. Why, they did not even know he had a daughter. There are more drinks all round. He understands he can be proud of and not alarmed by his new relatives. At closing time he takes some friends back to meet Scarlet and Byzantia.
    In truth, he knows very little of Scarlet. She has hardly said a word to him. She is shy; but she glows at Byzantia—the perfect baby, who only sleeps to wake again and suck, and sucks to sleep again—and looks a good deal better than she usually does. He is pleased, for the moment, at any rate, to own her for a daughter.
    During the course of the evening Scarlet’s friends arrive to inspect the baby. It is quite a party.
    Jocelyn brings Philip with her. While