Free The Heart of the Country by Fay Weldon Page A

seemed to her that whenever she asked a simple question she got a reproach in return.
    ‘Now’s your chance,’ said Sally Bains. ‘The comprehensives round here aren’t bad. Of course they’re on strike a lot of the time. The Government means to privatize all schools, in due course, but you might just get a couple of years free schooling before the state system collapses altogether from lack of funding.’
    ‘I see,’ said Natalie, unsure whether Sally Bains approved or disapproved of free schools. Sally, of course, had little emotional energy left over from her marriage to approve or disapprove of anything. She spoke out of the memory of herself as a political being, young and vigorous, not as wife of Val Bains, unemployed back-sufferer and depressive.
    ‘Ring up the headmaster of Quartermante. Don’t let them go to St John’s. No one’s got an O level out of there for five years, and now it’s GCSEs I don’t think they’re even bothering to enter anyone: it’s too expensive. Still, it’s a sort of free child minding service, I suppose, even if it’s not an education.’
    What Sally could have told Natalie, as she had told many another embarrassed parent in the past, was that all kinds of charities existed which would have been prepared, properly approached, to pay Ben and Alice’s fees – the rich look after their own – and that representation to the board of governors might well have resulted in the waiving of the money owing. But she did not tell her; Natalie was too neat and too pretty and her husband had run off, and Sally could not help wishing, from time to time, that Val’s back would improve sufficiently for him to be able to do what he kept threatening to do; look up the girl he had ditched in order to marry Sally and run off – with her. What Sally felt for Natalie, amazingly, was envy. But that’s what being married to a depressive can do for a woman. How do I, Sonia, know all this? My husband Stephen, thank God, couldn’t claim to be a depressive; he was an anal retentive paranoic, which is bad enough. And personally I border on the manic (out and out it pours, doesn’t it, never stopping), but I reckon about two thirds of the women in the estate, all of us on the dole, were married to depressives at one time or another, or had our illegitimate children by them. And though we all started out as healthy, cheerful, female children, the male disease of depression is catching. Quite simply, the men pass it on to their womenfolk and, to use a dirty word, it’s as fatal as AIDS. We drudge down to the post office to cash our drafts: we can’t even get it together to have them paid direct into a bank.
    My shrink – sorry, psychiatrist – says this is nonsense: women are depressives too, sit in hospital corridors, speechless and motionless, staring into space, just like men; unmarried ones too – but I reckon they caught it from their fathers.
    Be that as it may, Sally failed to give Natalie proper sisterly help at a time when she needed it. Okay?
    In the meantime, Jax was restless at the end of his lead. He was hungry.
    Natalie took the telephone number of the recommended school from Sally, and then its address. A phone call would cost ten pence and, if she was left waiting at the end of the line, possibly more. She would do better to call round in person. That would be free. Or would it? Perhaps the free schools, like the museums, would now charge her admission? A fee to see the headmaster?
    Neatly dressed, clear-eyed little children with self-satisfied faces ran about the corridors as she left. That’s what £1,250 a term can do for the young, here in the heart of the country.
    Angus, driving past the school in the Audi Quattro, saw Natalie and Jax pass out through the school gates and pulled up beside them, with an enviable squealing of brakes, the kind that betokens a person of instant decision at the wheel. Natalie got in beside Angus. Jax, as if sensing the urgency of the situation,