She May Not Leave. Fay Weldon

       Frances Presents Some Authorial Background

      Let me make clear who is speaking here, who it is who tells the tale of Hattie, Martyn and Agnieszka, reading their thoughts and judging their actions, offering them up for inspection. It is I, Frances Watt, aged seventy-two, née Hallsey-Coe, previously I think, but for a short time, Hammer: previously Lady Spargrove: previously – we would have got married but he died – O’Brien. I am Lallie’s bad mother, Hattie’s good grandmother – determined to get my money’s worth from my new laptop, bought for me by my sister Serena. Write, write, write I go, just like my sister. ‘Scribble, scribble!’ As the Duke of Gloucester said to Edward Gibbon, on receiving The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a million and a half words long: ‘Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr Gibbon?’

      Serena is the one with the reputation for writing: she has been writing steadily since she was thirty-odd, scarcely giving herself a minute’s time for reflection: she pays everyone – the household helps, the secretaries, taxi drivers, accountants, lawyers, the Inland Revenue, friends, grocers – just to make them go away so she can get on and write. But this doesn’t mean she has a monopoly on writing skill. I myself have finally found the time and courage to do it, while my husband Sebastian is in prison. The presence of a man in the house can be inhibiting to any endeavour which does not include him, such as writing a book. I run a little art gallery in Bath, but I choose not to open every day, so I have time and to spare.

      Hattie, beloved only child of my only daughter Lallie, called me this evening to say she was going back to work, and had found an au pair for her baby, and Martyn was being a bit iffy about it. Is her return to work a good thing or not? What can I say? Speaking as the great-grandmother she has made me, she should sacrifice her life to the baby. Speaking as her grandmother, I want her to get back into the world and live a little and have affairs with men – life is for living, not just handing on. I am actually very fond of Martyn, but so far as I know he is only the second man she has been to bed with, and that does seem to me to be rather limiting.

      Hattie will not settle easily to domesticity, that I do know. The Victorians used to pity girls like her, born too clever for their own good, never content as appendages to the Male – daughter, mother, sister, wife – forever striving for an identity which was theirs and theirs alone, whilst living in a society which forbade them to find it. Such girls made bad mothers and worse wives. That was the old world wisdom.

      Martyn, I know, has romantic ideas about having a full-time wife and mother for his child, but I know he is being unrealistic. Couples today need two incomes to get by. And Hattie is bound to pay the new girl too much: she has her great-aunt Serena’s generosity but not the means to fund it. The guiltier the mother, the higher the au pair’s wages – or else it goes the other way and the mother, identifying, is furious that the girl expects any salary at all, let alone any free time, let alone boyfriends in the house. But Hattie will be the concerned kind, and that can come expensive.

      My grand-daughter Hattie is thirty-three. She has a sharp nose, a square jaw, and a mass of striking red-gold Pre-Raphaelite hair, curly on some days, frizzy on others, which she keeps in a cloud around her face. I have the same hair, but mine has gone rather satisfactorily all-over white. It too is striking, and suits me. Hattie has very long legs: this she must get from her father, since her mother Lallie’s are rather short and plump of calf. Not that anyone has seen Bengt’s legs, other than Lallie (presumably) briefly, once, long ago and far away when Hattie was conceived. Lallie is a pouting, fleshy, sensuous beauty with a high colour, very different from her daughter’s lean, high-cheekboned, abstemious, long-fingered paleness. You would think from the look of them that the daughter, not the mother, would achieve world fame playing the flute but it is the other way round.

      Hattie has what her great-aunt Serena calls ‘good bones’ and men can be guaranteed to turn and stare at her when she walks into a room: amazing what confidence this can give to a girl. But she is currently thin to the point of gauntness. The strain of looking after a new baby has told on her. Or perhaps it just is that some women do get pale and thin after having babies, just as some stay with the rounded pinkness of a good pregnancy. The body is wilful and usually goes the way a person very much hopes it won’t.

      The trick with bodies, as with so much in life, is not to let the Fates know just how desperate you are about anything. You must look casual and act casually, play Grandmother’s Footsteps with life. Hattie and the cousins used to play it at Caldicott Square. One child stands in front of the group with her back turned. The others move forward stealthily. The one in front turns swiftly. Anyone who’s caught moving or giggling is out, and has to leave the game. So don’t move; don’t giggle; don’t show the Fates you care, and the less likely you are to develop a cold sore before the wedding, tonsillitis before the holiday, thrush before the dance, and your period won’t come on as you’re putting on your tennis skirt.

      Hattie is really happy to be thinner than she was, but placates the Fates by saying aloud she doesn’t mind what size she is so long as she and Kitty are happy and healthy. Martyn – she likes to add – is certainly not one of those men who would be put off by a few extra pounds.

      Likewise, Hattie does not show how she looks forward to going back to work, but murmurs to others that she might have to start earning again, since it’s such a problem managing on one salary. These sops thrown to destiny are working for the moment: she has got thin by sheer force of secret yearning, a job is waiting for her and now a kindly destiny has put Agnieszka her way. Hattie loves little Kitty, of course she does. Indeed, she is sometimes quite overwhelmed by love, and presses her face against the baby’s firm, soft, milky flesh, and thinks that is all she needs in life; but of course it is not. It’s just so dull at home. You listen to the radio, and struggle to stem a sea of disorder – the trouble with babies is that it’s all emergency: you keep having to stop whatever you’re doing. She craves gossip, infighting, the amphetamine effect of deadlines, and the swirling soap opera of office life. She misses conversation as much as her salary. Kitty lies around gurgling and disgorging the food that’s put into her and is not a valid source of entertainment, only of love, received and given. Songs and scriptures tell her that love is all she needs, but it is not true. Love is all she needs just for some of the time. So Martyn is being ‘a bit iffy’. I can imagine.