Читать книгу Big Women - Fay Weldon - Страница 5

Slap, slap, slurp: a hollow, juicy sound. Stephanie’s pasting up posters on the dark green wall of a Victorian urinal. The year’s 1971. This urinal still stands there at the bottom of Carnaby Street, alongside Liberty’s of London. See it now, as then. Stephanie is clearly not an expert at what’s called posting bills. Paste dribbles down all over the place: they go up crooked, they overlap. But up they go. The legend Bill Posters Will Be Prosecuted gets obscured, as another poster slips and slides.

‘Poor Bill Posters,’ says Layla.

Stephanie doesn’t get the joke. This is her life problem. Her life asset is her beauty. In 1971 she is twenty-five; she has perfect features, a lanky body, abundant blonde straight hair, and rather large hands and feet. Layla is twenty-six, shorter, plumper, funnier; she has curly dark hair. One side of Layla’s face does not line up with the other, so she is called sexy and attractive, but seldom beautiful. Layla does not regard this as a life problem. She has too much to think about.

The posters declare over and over, A Woman Needs a Man like a Fish Needs a Bicycle. People stare a moment and pass on. The message makes no sense. Obviously women need men. Everyone needs men. Masculinity is all. Armies need men, and government and business and technology and high finance. And teaching and medicine and adventuring and fashion. And all the serious arts. Offices, except for the typing pool, which is female, need men. It’s homes which need women, except for the lawn which is male. Women are for sex, motherhood and domesticity. Men are for status and action. Outside the home is high status, inside the home is low status. In popular myth men make decisions, women try on hats. The world is all id and precious little anima. Layla and Stephie, friends, mean to change all this. A Woman Needs a Man like a Fish Needs a Bicycle. Ho, ho, ho. Everyone knows women compete for male attention; isn’t this how the problem of female bitchery arises? Catty? Felines are nothing compared with women. Perhaps this puzzle poster is advertising something?

A couple of tourists, Brian and Nancy from New Zealand, emerge from the crowds in Carnaby Street. They have been rendered punch-drunk by colour, fabric, and the smell of patchouli. These are still flower-power and drug days. See feather boas, silk caftans, crushed velvet hats; lots of mauve, flares, miniskirts, platform heels; good-looking guys with lots of hair, girls with doll faces drifting behind them; wide eyes, fake lashes, white faces. Brian and Nancy both wear white Aertex shirts and tennis shoes for ease and comfort. Both are in culture shock. They flew in today from Wellington. (It took thirty-six hours.) They are accustomed to mountains, plains and sheep farms. Brian is gloriously handsome and golden. Nancy is pleasing enough to look at, but lacks eroticism: she’s tall, long-limbed, and manages to appear gawky rather than slender.

Brian is reading a newspaper headline. Oz Trial Verdict – the Bear’s Obscene. He has taken the paper from its stand but seems to have no intention of paying for it. The man who owns the kiosk lifts eyes to heaven. He is a relic of the old days. He has no nose. Leprosy ate it away. People avert their eyes but buy more papers.

‘Total filth,’ says Brian.

Nancy is staring at the poster, trying to make out its meaning. She senses that there is something mysterious and powerful here. Layla and Stephanie have finished with their bill-posting and now advance towards Brian and Nancy. Layla has a plank tucked under her arm. Nancy nudges Brian.

‘Is something the matter, Nancy?’ asks Brian, who has a man’s dislike of subtle hints.

‘Shouldn’t we get on to the Youth Hostel?’ asks Nancy.

‘They fill up early.’ She tries to draw him to one side but he resists.

‘Stop nagging,’ he says.

‘Sorry,’ she says. Women would say this to men automatically, far more frequently then than they do now.

‘Sex life of Rupert Bear,’ he says. ‘Getting school kids involved. Disgusting. And this Neville fellow is an antipodean. But this thing is worldwide, I reckon. A worldwide epidemic of permissiveness.’ He likes the sound of this. He repeats it.

‘Could we pass?’ asks Layla, politely, since Brian and his unbought newspaper bar their way. The noseless man smiles thinly under hideous nostrils.

‘Ladies say please,’ says Brian. At which Layla simply turns and swipes him to one side with the end of the plank, turns back, and she and Stephanie move on. Brian, knocked against the wall momentarily, recovers quickly.

‘Aggressive bitches,’ he says.

‘You were in their way, Brian,’ remarks Nancy, which makes Brian wonder exactly whose side she’s on.

‘They must be feminists,’ he observes.

‘How can you be sure?’ she asks.

‘They don’t even walk like proper women,’ he says.

And it’s true. All around Brian and Nancy doe-eyed and adoring women drift along in the shadow of men, stumbling on platforms, trit-trotting in stiletto heels. Layla and Stephanie stride; they wear jeans and T-shirts. Their equivalents today would be muscular and well exercised. Layla and Stephanie, for all their health, strength and energy, are soft-limbed, smooth-shouldered. Men have muscles: women have defencelessness as their weapon. No wonder this world is so erotic, super-charged: composed of polarities as it is. He, she. Hard, soft. Think, feel. Yin, yang. Nancy stares down at her laced canvas sandshoes, with their flat heels which seem to sink you into soil, and is suddenly dissatisfied with all things practical and sensible. Brian shoves the newspaper, badly folded, back into the kiosk rack. The newspaper seller snarls, all red gum and broken teeth and no nose. Brian does not even notice. But on the way past, he too stops and stares at the posters.

‘I don’t understand that,’ he says. ‘Is it some kind of stupid ad for something?’

‘I think it means women could exist without men,’ says Nancy.

‘But why would they want to?’ asks Brian. He’s genuinely puzzled. There will always be women waiting for Brian, with his powerful shoulders, bronzed skin and blue eyes gazing out at the white-topped, non-existent mountains. It is hard for any of us to get beyond our sample of one; namely, ourself.

Stephanie drives her little Mini home. Layla goes too. There is to be a consciousness-raising meeting at Stephanie’s house at No. 103 Chalcot Crescent. The drive takes only ten minutes. Traffic flow is half what it is now, and there are lots of parking places, even down the pretty, narrow, Georgian street which curves between Regent’s Park Road and Chalcot Square. In those days you could get a house in Chalcot Square for £30,000. Today, expect three-quarters of a million. So it goes. Everyone has a property story. Look right from the porched windows of No. 103 and see the green of Primrose Hill, look left to the double-fronted green and white curved house at the end of the Crescent, which was once a brothel. Ancient taxi drivers would report that years ago, in his youth, a royal scion would be wheeled by giggling girls up and down the Crescent in a pram, dressed in baby clothes. Whatever changed, except the status of certain roads in certain areas? Primrose Hill, now so salubrious, used to be known as the Coalblow, so much soot drifted over from the King’s Cross marshalling yards; here was the highest bronchitis rate in the entire Western world. Not that a man in a pram would suffer much, in the time it took to get to the end of the street and back. It would be worse for the girls who lived and worked there, but they were two a penny, then as now.

At this time the Crescent was a home for artists and Bohemians: the academics were moving in: soon it would be the bankers’ turn. Stephanie’s husband Hamish lived in the Crescent and owned an antique shop around the corner in Regent’s Park Road. He was an artist by talent and temperament, but made an allied living buying and selling the artefacts of the past. In those days few could tell a Victorian handsaw from an Edwardian fire-tong, oak from pine, or Roman glass from Woolworth’s. Now everyone knows.

As Layla and Stephanie unpacked the Mini they saw Zoe approach, pushing little Saffron in a buggy. She was crying: Zoe, that is to say, not Saffron. Zoe had a degree in sociology, and staying at home to look after her child depressed her. She found the company of children boring and her husband difficult. He was an engineer and talked mostly of bridges, and occasionally slapped Zoe, which was not the sin it nowadays is. And which she could have prevented had she really tried, but she enjoyed occupying the moral high ground.

‘Zoe,’ asked Stephanie, ‘what’s the matter?’

‘Bull wouldn’t baby-sit,’ said Zoe. ‘I had to bring Saffron along. I hope you don’t mind. You can’t blame Bull, I suppose.’

Zoe’s husband’s name was Bullivant Meadows.

‘Can’t you?’ asked Layla. ‘Why not?’ She had the plank tucked under her arm again. Zoe stopped crying and looked at it warily.

‘It seems a bit much,’ said Zoe, ‘excluding men from a meeting and then expecting them to baby-sit.’

‘I don’t see why,’ said Layla. ‘Men have babies too. And what is playing squash but a club from which women are excluded?’ Bullivant played squash for his county.

Zoe looked baffled and Stephie observed, ‘One day we will live in a world in which men aren’t called Bull.’ And they all went inside.

Now, inside there was all the generosity, jumble, untidiness, and the over-regard for the past and lack of regard for the future which typified those years. While only too anxious to do away with the social and domestic restraints of the present, everyone’s ambition was to retrieve the junk of the past and live with it. Dusty old kelim carpets covered the floors; old oak chairs collapsed under you, too worm-eaten to function; cracked glass paintings covered the walls; ships in bottles and matchstick palaces collected dust on every available shelf. Newness in objects had no value: only what was old and craftsman-made was accorded respect. In this ambience Hamish, buying cheap from little old ladies and selling dear to young professionals, made a good enough living. It was Stephanie’s misfortune to be earning her living in an advertising agency, which of all new trades was the newest, and the most ungentlemanly, being so concerned with commercial success. Hamish found Stephanie’s job difficult to accept. He came from Glasgow where his mother worked in a betting shop, and should, as his wife observed, have been accustomed enough to women working, and to frivolous and anti-social ends at that: nevertheless, he was troubled. He had hoped for finer more artistic things. And as their two little boys, Roland and Rafe, played with their Victorian toys upon the dirty floor, who was there ever at hand to take out the wooden splinters which so frequently pierced their poor little fingers? Only the au pair girl, whose face and accent kept changing, and whose nature and skill with a needle was unpredictable, and who had left last week, anyway.

Hamish, who is in his mid-thirties, muscular, glowing from within with a tawny, sexy flame, black Zapata moustache as was the fashion of the day, hiding an over-sensitive – or was it cruel – upper lip, stands in the conservatory beating a refectory table with a length of chain. Bang, bang, crash, tinkle, over and over again. Zoe comes to see what’s happening, dragging Saffron behind her in the pushchair. Saffron, disconcerted by the sight and sound of a man beating up furniture, sets up a wail.

‘All Saffron ever does is bawl,’ complains Zoe to Hamish, by way of conversation. ‘She’s so ungrateful. I’m doing this for her future not mine. She doesn’t realise the risk I’m taking. Supposing Bull throws me out?’

‘Bull, Bull, Bull,’ says Hamish. Zoe comes round quite a lot, to talk about Bull and eye Hamish up. All women eye Hamish up. They seem unable to help it, and he doesn’t even particularly encourage it. Hamish goes on banging.

Zoe goes on into the room where the meeting is to be held. It overlooks the street.

Stephanie and Layla put their pots of paint and paste and left-over posters with the other junk under the stairs. In this recess also find a Venetian glass goblet with a broken stem, an Etruscan vase in two pieces, half a Roman head with the nose eaten away, and other treasures. Two small dark boys with narrow faces and almond eyes sit impassively on the stairs and watch the grown-ups; Rafe and Roland. Both suck their thumbs and wear pyjamas.

‘Go to bed, boys,’ says Stephanie. They rise obediently and go.

‘Are they frightened of you?’ asks Layla.

‘No,’ says Stephanie. ‘They just want a quiet life. They will do anything to avoid a conversation with me, even obey me.’

Layla’s turn to go in and stare at Hamish. Bang, bang, bang.

‘What the fuck are you doing, Hamish?’

He doesn’t deign to reply. Stephie follows after to offer an explanation.

‘He’s giving it a bit of age. Antiquing it up. It’s made from new wood, but in an hour you’d never know it. Old tables fetch more than new.’

‘I’m surprised your principles allow you to tolerate this,’ says Layla.

‘Morality is a relative when it comes to antiques,’ says Stephanie.

‘A man has to make a living somehow,’ says Hamish, banging away.

‘He’s not in a good mood,’ says Stephanie, I got promotion at work today. Now I earn more than he does.’

‘Women earning more than men upsets the natural order of things,’ says Hamish. ‘Anyone can make money in advertising.’

‘You only make money in advertising or anywhere if you’re shit hot, Hamish,’ says Layla. And she enquired as to how the kids ever got to sleep in this house: she was sure she never could.

‘God knows,’ said Hamish, but he gave up banging with his chain and offered the two women the glimmer of a smile. He was not without politeness. He even enquired as to how the bill-posting had gone.

‘We’d have got more up,’ said Stephanie, ‘but we had to get back for the meeting. For all I knew you’d refuse to open the front door. Men do that kind of thing.’

Hamish said he’d left the door on the latch so women could just walk in if they felt like it and he wouldn’t have to stop work. Open house for women presumably meant just that. The point was to raise women’s consciousness, forget what kind of woman, which was never specified. Delinquent or criminally insane notwithstanding, a woman was a woman was a woman, by inference. So welcome all comers: what need of locks. Hamish did not, incidentally, think that the slogan A Woman Needs a Man like a Fish Needs a Bicycle was particularly effective. It was obscure and surely Stephanie with her training in advertising understood the folly of the opaque.

‘Besides,’ added Hamish, ‘people have more to worry about than the oppression of the female.’

‘Like what?’ asked Layla.

‘Paying their rent,’ said Hamish. ‘Saving for their funeral, their teeth falling out. Exploitation by the bosses. Hunger, penury, disease, and so forth.’

‘Show me a man having a bad time,’ said Layla, ‘and I’ll show you a woman having a worse one. I quote our mentor, Alice.’

Layla was nothing if not honourable when it came to quoting her sources. Layla had been brought up in Rhodesia. She’d run away to London when she was nineteen and gone to Cambridge for a year before being sent down for lack of application to her studies. She owned a vast house in Cheyne Walk which she filled with friends and lodgers. It was unmodernised and she complained of the cost. Layla worked in a publishing house, not because she needed the money but because, she explained, she liked to have objectives. She had to be nailed to the ground by other people’s expectations or else she’d simply fly off the face of the earth. She said what she thought, and did as she felt, a privilege granted only to those who inherit money, and who care more what they think of other people than what other people think of them.

Hamish remarked that Alice had an elegant turn of phrase, and as a token of his appreciation he would bring the meeting coffee at half-time, and how many were expected?

‘Five,’ said Stephanie.

‘It is not multitudes,’ said Hamish.

‘It is a beginning,’ said Stephanie.

Hamish began hammering again. He was courteous to his wife but estranged from her. Their eyes looked past one another. They were not easy in each other’s company. But neither spoke of it to the other: ‘talking it out’ was a concept not yet invented. Marriages were conducted in silence.

Two women now knocked upon the door, and, finding it open, simply pushed and came into the house.

‘Like a public meeting hall,’ said Hamish, with distaste, though who but he had left the door unlocked?

Daffy and Alice were the names of the newcomers. Daffy was in her late twenties. She wore a boiler suit and big boots, but the disguise merely accentuated her ravishing prettiness, the slender line from shoulder to buttock, the swell of the breasts, the slimness of ankle. Whatever she wore it was the same: she scarcely noticed any more. Alice was tiny, round-faced, dark-eyed, serious; only her eyes moved rapidly: the rest was slow: she had the gift of stillness. Alice was all mind and very little matter: she was an academic: asexual, as if too much thought had sucked her body dry.

Layla, Stephie, Daffy, Alice and Zoe. Five furies in the front room, sitting in a semicircle.

‘Dorothy couldn’t come,’ said Stephanie. ‘She had to cook the children’s tea. And Maureen decided against it. She doesn’t want to upset her father.’

‘The man’s lament,’ said Layla. ‘Where are you going, my darling? Stay home with me, wife, mother, daughter, whoever you be. Female to my male. Surely you love me? Don’t I cherish you, protect your virtue, provide the roof over your head, keep your false friends and your mother at bay? Stay home, woman, as your love for me surely dictates. Warm my bed, perfect my table, iron my shirts.’

‘Do you find that tempting?’ asked Stephanie, for something melancholy in Layla’s voice suggested that she did.

‘Of course. I’m a weak sister. Aren’t we all?’

‘No,’ said Stephie, and her accusing eyes drifted over to where Daffy sat, and her expression said, ‘Weak, weak, weak.’ And Daffy smirked.

Layla said, ‘Since this is our third meeting could we all try to be honest with one another? Say what we really think and feel? Men have made us meek little creatures: it’s to their advantage. But we weren’t born like that.’

‘There’ll be trouble,’ said Stephanie.

‘Good,’ said Layla.

At the same time as Daffy smirked in Primrose Hill, so did a young reception clerk in the Youth Hostel behind Tottenham Court Road. He smirked because he saw that Brian, the simple antipodean, was taken aback to discover that the Youth Hostel no longer ruthlessly separated men from women for their overnight stay. Brian and Nancy would share a dormitory. What they did or did not do in their bunks was no concern of management. He smirked because he had what nowadays would be called an ‘attitude’. He was tired of dealing with tourists: of working while they had a good time: he was glad when they were disconcerted.

‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘We’re half-empty. You’ll be on your own.’ Nancy and Brian lugged their iron-framed, canvas rucksacks up the stairs. Then the old and rich travelled easily, with porters attending every step of the way. The young and poor had a heavier time of it. Now at least their rucksacks are lighter, being made of steel and nylon, and oppress them less.

‘I told you there was no need to rush,’ said Brian.

‘Half-empty’, said Nancy, ‘is the same as half-full. We’re here nice and early.’

Little events shake the world. If Brian hadn’t chosen to read a newspaper without paying for it, if Nancy hadn’t seen a poster saying A Woman Needs a Man like a Fish Needs a Bicycle, if the Youth Hostel had been full, and so on, and so forth. But more of this later.

In the front room of the narrow house in Primrose Hill, Layla, Stephie, Daffy and Zoe were grouped round Alice, who sat like the High Priestess in a high-back chair, straight, formal and composed. She spoke coolly and with conviction. Little Saffron drowsed, still strapped into her pushchair, in the space between her mother and the oracle.

‘The Socialists claim’, said Alice, ‘that if you improve the condition of the working man, remove the injustices of capitalism, the “women’s problem” will automatically be resolved. To improve the lot of women first improve the lot of men. But do we anticipate that men will allow this to happen? We do not. Where did our association with the Marxists and the Trotskyists leave us, we the women who wanted to join with them to change the world? Where were we when the barricades in Paris fell?’

‘Making the coffee,’ said Stephanie.

‘Addressing the envelopes,’ said Zoe.

‘Filling their beds,’ said Layla.

‘And when the State has withered away,’ said Alice, ‘when the rights of the workers are finally established, what’s the betting that’s where we still will be? Women cannot depend upon men to save them. We must depend upon ourselves. We must speak out with loud clear voices.’

At which Daffy stood up. Her skin was luminous: pale and fair. Her lips were full and so deeply pink it seemed she had lipstick on, but of course she hadn’t.

‘But if I stand up in a room full of men and speak, my voice goes high and squeaky. Like this,’ she said, demonstrating.

‘High and squeaky. I feel stupid and they all look at me.’

‘I think Alice may have been speaking metaphorically,’ said Stephanie.

Stephanie came from a Jewish family of high achievers. Her father ran a chain of toy-shops but had over-expanded too suddenly and lost his money. He and Stephanie’s mother, who had been in politics and had helped engineer the National Health Service, had let the family house and retreated to Ibiza where they lived in passionate love, above a friend’s clothes shop. Stephanie was left to make her own life in London. She had met Layla at Cambridge in the days of her parents’ wealth, and even then had felt orphaned, as is ever the fate, as Tolstoy pointed out, of the children of lovers.

‘What’s metaphorically?’ asked Daffy, whose mother worked part-time in a betting shop, and whose father was a railway engineer.

‘Daffy,’ said Stephie, ‘you’re such a fool it’s hopeless telling you.’

‘I didn’t risk my marriage to come here to listen to ordinary female squabbling,’ interrupted Zoe. ‘I can hear that any day round the toddlers’ sandpit.’

No one took any notice of Zoe. Daffy turned on Stephie. ‘What right have you to call me a fool?’ she asked. ‘You’re so pompous, Stephie. You think you own the universe. You’re worse than a man. I’m tired of being patronised. And that goes for all of you. I do believe you’re jealous.’

‘What is there to be jealous of, you silly cow?’ Layla summed up. ‘Sit down everyone.’

So they did and tried again. Alice continued.

‘The Marxists say that men are born free but everywhere are in chains –’

In the Youth Hostel Brian and Nancy found their way to their allocated dormitory. It was a large bleak room with a high ceiling, white walls and four bunks.

‘Just think,’ said Nancy, ‘we can have it all to ourselves. Just you and me, Brian.’

They had been engaged for four years, and never, as the present so crudely puts it, had sex. All Brian said was –

‘I wish you wouldn’t wear your engagement ring so openly.’

‘Why?’ She was hurt. It was a diamond ring, and Brian and Brian’s parents, apple-farmers, had clubbed together to buy it.

Nancy may not have had a wedding ring as most of her school friends now did – marriage in her early twenties being de rigueur for a girl: but at least she had an engagement ring. And all her own teeth, which was unusual for someone from New Zealand, whose soil was somehow inimical to the formation of good enamel. Nancy’s mother on her seventeenth birthday was given the traditional gift to daughters from the father: a set of state-of-the-art false teeth: the originals taken out to make room for them. Nancy’s mother, when asked by Nancy why she had divorced her father, would only ever reply, ‘To save your teeth, my darling. Had you been a boy, I might have stayed.’ Assiduously, ever since, Nancy had cleaned her teeth and done her best to be ordinary and like everyone else; or, in the fashion of daughters, everyone else except her mother. But blood will out.

Had Nancy’s grandfather given Nancy’s mother a different present on her seventeenth birthday, had Nancy’s mother given her daughter a different answer …

‘It’s not that I don’t want the world to know we’re engaged,’ Brian said to Nancy, as he neatly unpacked his rucksack, shaking, airing and folding, using the top bunk for his purposes. ‘It’s just that this is so mean a city. People are quite mad. Someone crazed on drugs might steal it.’

Nancy was unpacking her things, less carefully than Brian, scrabbling for the blouse and skirt she wore in the evenings, putting them on the top bunk, planning to sleep on the bottom, within touching distance of Brian.

‘If you put your stuff up there,’ said Brian, ‘you’ll only have to move it all when we go to bed.’ He assumed he’d be taking the top bunk, out of touching distance of Nancy.

Little things, little things, shake the world. Big things make the world heave and move, Titans stirring beneath the surface, turning over in their sleep.

‘If man is born in chains,’ says Alice in Primrose Hill that night, ‘how much truer is it that every woman not financially independent finds herself chained to an individual man, husband or father, needing his goodwill for her very survival and that of her children. Conditioned by necessity to smile, to please, to wheedle and charm, to placate.’

‘I try not to smile,’ said Stephanie.

‘She doesn’t have to do much fucking trying,’ whispered Daffy to Zoe.

‘Even if she is financially independent within marriage,’ said Alice, ‘and women have always worked, in the fields, or as cleaners, servants, washerwomen, and in the factories, she is allowed no dignity for it. Her earnings are seen as pin money.’

‘Wherever there’s shit work to be done,’ said Stephanie, ‘that’s where women are.’

‘I don’t think we should use swearwords,’ said Zoe. ‘It loses us credibility. Men don’t like it.’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ said Layla. ‘Who cares what men like?

Haven’t you heard a word Alice has been saying?’

‘I just want to establish’, said Zoe, ‘that Stephie had no right to call Daffy a fool at a consciousness-raising meeting. We are meant to be sisters.’

‘It’s my house,’ said Stephie, feebly.

‘Though sometimes,’ said Zoe, ‘I can’t be sure whether or not I’m talking sense. Ever since I had a baby no one seems to hear me. Perhaps they’re right. Perhaps motherhood has turned my brain to porridge. I have to pinch myself to remind myself I have a degree in sociology.’

Saffron had turned herself round in the pushchair in spite of all the straps and now faced her mother, not Alice. The pushchair was in danger of tipping backwards.

‘My education has not equipped me for life,’ said Zoe.

‘Supposing I go home and Bull hits me for coming here when he specifically told me I wasn’t to?’

‘Then we do what a group of women did in Germany last week,’ said Stephie. ‘We go round to your house, heave Bull out, pull down his trousers, and march him up and down the street for all the neighbours to see, with a label round his neck saying “wife-beater”. This is what they chanted: “Any woman who sleeps with the same man for more than one night is a fool and a reactionary.” That is a translation. It may well have sounded better in German. But the point’s the same. Women have to take responsibility for what happens to them.’

‘I don’t see why,’ said Layla, ‘when you can so easily blame men.’

‘You’re a mad woman, Stephie,’ said Daffy, with confidence. ‘Personally I’m going to go and make coffee, since your husband has failed to bring us any.’

‘You better had,’ said Stephie, ‘since it’s all you’re fit for.

Go back to the socialists, where you met my husband. It’s where you belong.’

At which Daffy slammed out and Alice continued as if nothing had happened.

‘We are on the verge of the greatest revolution the world has ever known. The moment of praxis approaches. Theory feeds through into action, the stresses of oppression build up and burst through, as burst they must …’ and so on, while in the kitchen Daffy found mugs amongst the chaos of a kitchen where food was occasionally cooked, but often thought about. Here were garlic presses for non-existent garlic, saucepan lids for no longer existent pans, a wooden butcher’s block brought home by Hamish but covered with children’s painting material, old bills, overlooked letters, postcards, wooden spoons, a Victorian knife sharpener, a dozen blunt and rusty knives, matches here, cracked pottery lemon squeezers there; bread in one place, butter in another, jam nowhere to be found, a fridge you shuddered to look into.

Daffy found the instant coffee with no trouble, and looking around, longed to bring order to the chaos, cleanliness to the grime, care to the uncared-for. Hamish came in as she knew he would.

‘I was just coming to do that,’ said Hamish. ‘She who earns most outside the home must be obeyed inside the home.’

‘But you can still make us wait,’ observed Daffy.

‘Oh, shrewd, shrewd,’ said Hamish. ‘Why are you wearing that ridiculous garment? I can’t tell where your tits begin or your bum ends.’

‘That’s the reason why. To save us from lascivious looks and so we’re all equal and don’t compete for male favours. Why should we dress for men?’

‘Perhaps I should wear a skirt,’ said Hamish, ‘to keep women in face.’

‘That’s silly.’

‘No more silly than girls wearing trousers,’ he said. The water boiled in the kettle. Neither switched it off, a task necessary in those days. It continued to purr steam into the room. Someone had removed the warning whistle.

‘Women only want to wear trousers because it’s the garb of the ruling elite, that is to say, men. Men don’t want to wear skirts because that’s what the servants wear.’

‘Women want to wear trousers so men don’t look up their skirts,’ said Daffy.

‘Why bother about any of it,’ said Hamish, ‘when a girl like you can get what she wants just by standing around.’

‘I’d feel more like arguing only your wife Stephie keeps calling me a fool.’

‘She only calls you a fool,’ said Hamish, ‘because she knows I like you.’

He undid the top of her dungaree straps. She made no move to stop him other than by leaning over to switch off the kettle, to show she did not really care, one way or the other. He undid the other strap. Underneath, her blouse, which was her little sister’s, gaped open. The bare, rising, pale pink, translucent skin of her breasts could be clearly seen.

‘I’m a traitor,’ said Daffy.

‘All women are traitors,’ said Hamish. ‘That’s why feminism will never work.’

His hand slipped down to touch the breast, fingers stretched to find the nipple. The hand was none too clean, marked with furniture polish and rust from the iron chain. Daffy rather liked that kind of thing. Stephanie hated it: she washed frequently.

Stephanie, meanwhile, found herself not paying total attention to Alice. She wondered what was going on in the kitchen, while trying not to. Alice, in any case, was talking to Zoe, speaking to her as to a child.

‘By Praxis,’ said Alice, ‘I mean the moment theory meets its response in everyday life: when the convergent dynamics of oppression and protest meet. Something happens.’

‘I’ll open some wine,’ said Layla, ‘since neither Hamish nor Daffy seem capable of bringing coffee.’ And she went to Stephanie’s cabinet, brought out four bottles of Bulgarian red, found a corkscrew on the windowsill between unkempt pot plants and opened all four. Stephanie still said not a word; her face was arranged into a careful, attentive and amiable mask.

‘Praxis’, went on Alice, ‘means culmination, breaking-point. Also, interestingly enough, it’s a term used in Victorian pornography for orgasm, and a Victorian girl’s name, though I don’t suppose the parents who used it understood the double meaning: certainly not the fathers. Girls who enjoyed sex were known as nymphomaniacs, and the threat of the description still keeps many a girl out of a man’s bed today.’

‘I’m always being called a nymphomaniac,’ said Layla, liberally pouring wine. ‘And I’ve always taken it as flattery.’

‘That’s because you have your own money,’ said Zoe, ‘and don’t have to worry about what men think of you.’

Stephanie drank a whole glass of her own bad red wine almost straight off, and then another. But she would not go into the kitchen: would not.

Hamish had Daffy’s breasts uncovered, the corners of her blouse tucked under her armpits, and the top of her dungarees flapping down below her waist.

‘Did you burn your bra?’ asked Hamish.

‘It fell to pieces in the wash,’ said Daffy. ‘I only have the one. I don’t earn much. I can’t afford another. And they support themselves well enough. I have good muscular tone.’

‘Stephie’s flop all over the place,’ said Hamish. ‘Some men like that kind of thing.’

‘Comparisons are odious,’ said Daffy, ‘especially when it comes to women’s tits. Men are always doing it, to make women feel bad. Do we women talk about your private parts? No; we are too polite: we understand your insecurities.’ But she made no move to break away from his hands.

‘Supposing Stephie comes in?’ she asked all the same.

‘All the more exciting,’ said Hamish. ‘I’m fed up with her. Anyway, she rations sex. She uses it as a controlling device. I doubted the wisdom of her fish and bicycle poster, so she’ll have a headache for a week.’

‘That’s terrible,’ said Daffy.

At which point Stephanie came into the kitchen. She would not, she would not, but then she did. So go most of our resolutions. She found Daffy half-naked and Hamish’s hands upon her.

‘I came for some wineglasses,’ said Stephanie by way of excuse, which she could not help feeling was needed.

Interrupting others’ intimacies calls for immediate apology, although on reflection outrage rather than apology can be seen to be more appropriate. Pride suggests that the urge to scream and scratch should be controlled. Better for the self-esteem to imply that nothing profound or important has been lost.

‘Actually, Hamish,’ said Stephanie, ‘this is last-straw time.’

Things had not been going too well between them. Hamish had what was called a wandering eye, though he would claim it was woman’s eyes wandered to him. Mind you, according to the custom of the times there was no very great sin in turning visual delight into sexual delight. It got it out of the system.

But Stephanie took what Hamish took lightly very heavily indeed. While Hamish declared that Stephanie’s ‘career’ – any woman with a career was still seen at best as a contradiction in terms, at worst as a description of a masculinised woman with a moustache and aggressive tendencies – was more to do with her desire to get out of the house and away from the children than any need to earn money. In other words they were no longer ‘in love’ or all in all to each other, and not very happy living together, but the custom of the times also suggested that this was just the way things were; no reason on this account to leave home, break marriages, seek personal happiness by setting up another household with a different partner. The human right to veracity and authenticity in personal experience was not yet established. To be ‘happy’ was no one’s quest, simply to get by was enough.

That the man-woman-child threesome was an innate bar to the perfectibility of family happiness was just another fact of life. People lived with angst, and saw nothing wrong with it.

When Stephanie said, ‘This is the last straw, Hamish,’ the world shook a little. The Georgian glasses jammed together on the dresser – any good housewife in those days knew that glasses, especially valuable old ones, should never touch: but this was Stephanie’s house – trembled and clinked, and later, when the day of the dishwasher dawned, and they were subjected to yet more stress, broke almost at once. But the shaking of the house might of course have been the coincidental fall-out from an IRA bomb let off in Trafalgar Square. Who is to say? Or of course the bomb might have been the outer and visible sign of the internalised psycho-social praxis of that night’s events in Primrose Hill. Synchronicity, as Jung might have observed.

Stephanie took the wineglasses and went back to the meeting, leaving her husband and her co-conspirator flesh to flesh. The objects on the dresser stopped trembling.

‘Men control the means of production, capital and labour,’ said Alice. ‘They keep power to themselves. Thus the skill, the input, the energy of half the world’s population is lost to humankind. Everywhere women are despised; seen as second-class citizens. Their inferiority is built into our language, our constitutions, our laws, our institutions. To undo the very structure of our societies is a momentous task, but it must be done, and can be done.’

‘Men’s greatest achievement’, said Zoe, ‘is war. Women’s greatest? Babies. Perforce. You just lie there and pregnancy happens. Go on lying and you push it out. What sort of achievement is that?’

Little Saffron slept, soft arms drooping over the side of her pushchair, not yet called a buggy.

Layla opened another bottle of wine.

‘Men have art, women have babies,’ said Layla. ‘That’s what is said by men, if a woman takes up a brush or a pen. Ballet dancers are allowed, of course, because women have always danced before men, to entice them: and singers, because mothers sing lullabies.’

Nowadays few mothers sing to their children to lull them to sleep. Rather they read the little ones stories to develop their intellects. It’s all uppers, not downers, for the growing child. When adulthood is reached, the opposite occurs. Soothe and lull, soothe and lull: more sleep less stress.

Stephie said nothing. She was pale.

‘Of course great female artists exist,’ said Alice. ‘But they are hidden from history. They have always existed. Patriarchy denies them.’

‘There’s Austen and Brontë,’ said Zoe, always one for an impartial truth.

‘Dead,’ said Layla. ‘Only when women are dead do they enter the canon as honorary men. And what are those particular stories but schoolgirl fodder? Marry or starve with Austen: dive into masochism with the Brontës. Mad Mrs Rochester in the attic pays the price for sexual desire. How are you doing, Stephanie? How are Hamish and Daffy getting on with the coffee?’

‘Just fine,’ said Stephie. ‘Just fine. Can we consider the double bind of the working wife? When I’m at home I have to pretend I don’t go out to work. No tales of office life can be told. I certainly can’t let on that I enjoy it. When I’m at work I have to pretend I don’t have a home. No one there even knows I have children. I wouldn’t get promotion if they did. Employees want your full attention, husbands want your full attention. What’s a woman to do?’ (Well, what changes? But that’s another story.)

‘What about the children?’ asked Zoe primly. ‘Don’t they deserve your full attention? Otherwise, why have them? I think it should be husbands first, children next, employers third.’

‘Shut up, Zoe,’ said Layla. ‘Everyone knows you’re miserable at home.’

‘Life without any of them is possible,’ said Alice. ‘Spouseless, childless, self-employed – free.’

‘But how do we compel men to let us in?’ demanded Stephie. ‘If I get a rise I’m accused by my colleagues of taking the bread out of the mouths of family men. I am meant to turn the offer down. If I come home and say “goody-goody, I got a rise”, my husband says I’m a castrating woman. My earning threatens his male dignity. He fears impotence. He has his revenge.’

‘Well,’ said Layla, ‘if you didn’t insist on calling him “my husband” all the time and not “fucking Hamish” he might be less inclined to role-play.’

‘I am universalising’, said Stephie, ‘from my sample of one. I’m entitled.’

‘Stephie’s going to cry,’ said Zoe. ‘Where’s Daffy?’

‘What upsets me,’ said Stephie, ‘is that some women are just constitutionally incapable of sisterhood. What are we to do about that?’

Upstairs in the marital bedroom the bed began to squeak. The sound could be heard in the room below. Sexually open as all tried to be, and believed they were, embarrassment descended on those in the room below. Even Layla did not know what to say.

Meanwhile in the Youth Hostel, at the back of Tottenham Court Road, Brian asked Nancy to wash his socks.

‘Better wash these now, Nancy,’ he said. ‘I’ll need them tomorrow.’

Nancy took the socks as he peeled them off and handed them to her. They were warm, damp, too thick for the weather, and dirty white. It did not occur to her to say ‘wash them yourself’. It was not customary, in those days, for women to say such things. It was a seller’s market, men being a scarce commodity: men paid no piper but still called the tune.

These days the demographical tables have turned; there are more young men than young women in the world – medical care and life-friendly wars ensure their survival – and women have learned the art of the cartel. They know well enough that if they stare blankly and shake their head so will all the other women down the line. Socks get thrown away, not washed. Manufacturers ensure that washing machines lose them, or remove colours unevenly, and render them shapeless. The life expectancy of the sock falls and falls.

‘OK,’ said Nancy, cheerfully, years ago.

Myth had it that men were hopeless at domestic tasks. The logic was thereby sustained that men should do what they were good at – creating art, mending the car, contending with the outside world, bringing new ideas into the home, disciplining the children, earning, and so forth – and that women should do what they were good at – cooking, washing, having children, nurturing, soothing, consoling, and being flattered by male sexual attention, and so on. Step outside these roles and both were in trouble: women would be labelled shrill, aggressive, slut, nymphomaniac, and worst of all simply unfeminine: terms of opprobrium for men were in short supply. On the queer side, a bit of a pansy, was just about the best that could be done.

Anyway, here’s Brian saying, ‘And be sure to get all the soap out of them. If you don’t they stay stiff. You know how I hate that,’ and Nancy happily saying, ‘I’ll be careful,’ as she potters off to the wash-room to do the socks in the washbasin.

She even sings ‘Greensleeves’ as she goes, so pleased she is to be in England’s green and pleasant land, no matter how domestic tasks pursue her across the oceans.

Squeak, squeak, squeak. Layla wonders if Daffy has bothered to take her boots off, and if not, how Hamish will manage to find an entrance, because without first unlacing the boots how will he get the boiler suit off her, its legs being tapered.

Oh, happy days, when contraception first arrived, and no one thought of Aids, or other penalties of permissiveness, and sex was without ceremony and often instant. ‘Why don’t we do it in the street?’ Why not, indeed?

Squeak, squeak, squeak. In the faces down below was puzzlement rather than shock. Something was bothering them, beyond an abuse of sisterhood, beyond the expected villainy of men. Before an earthquake air pressure falls: animals sense it, and babies, and Theseus the Hero is reputed to have had the gift of predicting the stirring of the Titans.

This evening, in this room in Primrose Hill, London, the assembled women sensed something not quite amiss, something momentous, not yet happening, but about to happen: earthquake-style. Squeak, squeak, squeak.

Alice moistened her lips with her fragile virginal pink tongue and continued.

‘We must’, said Alice, ‘address the subject of women’s low self-esteem. If a tutor hands an essay to a group of students, male and female both, and says that essay is by a woman, men down-mark it but women down-mark it more. Say it’s by a man, and men up-mark it, but women up-mark it yet more. What further demonstration do we need that women can be their own worst enemy? So crushed that they collude in their own oppression, indeed, exacerbate it.’

‘We need role models,’ said Layla. ‘Strong, proud, effective women. But where are they? Where are the women big enough in soul and nerve to win this battle, to carry this revolution through?’

‘I see them here,’ said Alice. ‘In this room tonight.’

At that moment little Saffron woke and set up a wail. Squeal, squeal, squeal.

‘Shut that child up, can’t you?’ said Layla.

Revolution, folk wisdom has it, costs the lives of a generation, while it settles down, only to become the established order. After the French, the Russian, the American revolutions, millions died of hunger, disorder and the effects of sudden change, of too much attention to ideas and too little to the crops in the fields. Of course everyone dies anyway – and though it’s more soothing all round if we die at a ripe age, in our customary beds, the leaders of any revolution find the irritation a small price to pay for their principles. Why should the Women’s Revolution be different? Perhaps little Saffron sensed this, which is why she woke up so suddenly, and in so bad a temper.

Over in the Youth Hostel it occurred to Nancy that it was a strange thing to do, thus to wash Brian’s socks. They were not married, only engaged; he did not support her. Why was his convenience, his leisure, his rest, so much more important than hers? Was there not a great indignity in behaving as she did? What did she want Brian for, exactly? For the excitement and flattery when, as occasionally he did, he kissed her, some magic electricity passed from his lips to hers, and he focused on her central being, whatever that might be, and for once she had power over him. She wanted him for sex, in fact. Yet sexual fulfilment, in the interests of respectability, was what he denied her. The rinsing water finally ran clear and cold. Woollen garments should have a final rinse in cold water; then they dry softer. This is true, though hard on the hands.

In Primrose Hill the bed squeaks on; however Hamish found ingress to Daffy the results seem satisfactory. The squeaks stop for five minutes, then start again. Still Stephanie smiles on, though the others see the smile as fixed, not exactly happy.

‘Women have to learn to rise above the personal,’ says Alice, ‘to ignore their samples of one; otherwise they fall into the trap of male expectation. We must all accept that the personal is the political.’

There is a silence while they consider this. Squeaking from above, albeit coincidentally, stops as well, thus underlining the importance of the utterance.

‘The personal is the political,’ repeats Layla. ‘We need none of us be alone, ever again. That is amazing.’

‘Alice says these things,’ says Stephanie, ‘and then they drift off into oblivion. It mustn’t be allowed to happen. This brilliance must be recorded, printed, headlined. We need a newspaper.’

‘We need a publishing house,’ says Layla, ‘and a successful one. The thing to do is specialise in women’s classics. This way we will do everything we want: we will reclaim female history, women’s art, our self-esteem. We will record the ideas that shake the world. We will honour Alice. I work in publishing: it’s what I know how to do. Running these places is child’s play, so long as you don’t have to bother with male status-seeking.’

‘Let it be part newspaper, part publishing house,’ said Stephanie. ‘But for God’s sake can’t we forget about the past? Forget about art? We live in the present. We must find the women writers of today.’

‘You can forget that lot,’ said Layla. ‘They’re too busy being sensitive and pleasing men. Focus on the women writers of yesteryear. Anyone whose works are out of copyright, and you don’t have to pay. A guaranteed readership – everyone reads classics – and pure profit. This is an amazing window of opportunity.’

The squeak, squeak, squeak had started again.

‘What are you talking about, Layla?’ demanded Stephanie. ‘Window of opportunity! Profit! We’re talking about feminism.’

The squeaking stopped so abruptly that everyone had to try to work out what was going on. Perhaps the lovers, and not before time, had run out of steam. Saffron slept again, soothed by the ambient feeling of relief.

‘We can always talk about both,’ said Layla.

‘Talk all you like,’ said Zoe. ‘It’s money you need. Everything needs money. If I want a pair of shoes I have to ask Bull for the money, and he always says what’s wrong with the ones you’ve got on, they don’t let water, do they?’

‘Money for small things is always difficult,’ said Layla, ‘money for projects less so. I’ve always found the bank manager won’t lend you money for a crust of bread, but he will if you say you need a hat. I’ve got family money. I can call it in.’

‘Well lucky old you,’ said Zoe.

‘So long as the funding doesn’t come from men,’ said Stephanie.

‘Darling,’ said Layla, ‘I shall be careful to ask an aunt, not an uncle, if it keeps you happy. You are so fucking stuffy, Stephie. Stuffing fucky, Stephie. Here’s to you, and your denial of the inconvenient!’

And she raised her glass of wine, perhaps her fifth, to Stephanie. They were on the fourth bottle. Stephie raised hers.

Upstairs coitus had resumed, but in a more languid position. Sideways in. Hamish went on complaining.

‘Stephie has no time even to make the bed. I have to bring you in here to one that’s unmade. The brutal fact is that she has no time for me, no time for the children. She has no heart. She holds “let’s-hate-men” meetings in my house.’

‘I don’t hate men,’ said Daffy.

‘I can tell that,’ said Hamish.

‘I hate living with my mother,’ observed Daffy. ‘It’s such a horrid mean little house, and this is so lovely, or would be if it weren’t a mess. You probably feel you can’t bring clients home, when you want them to look at important pieces in situ.’

‘The best I can do’, said Hamish gloomily, ‘is to use the place as a workshop. Why don’t you leave home if you don’t like it?’

‘I’m only a typist,’ she said. ‘I can’t afford to leave.’

‘Then why don’t you marry someone?’ he asked.

‘Men marry good girls,’ said Daffy. ‘I’m a bad girl. Everyone knows that.’

‘Yes,’ said Hamish, ‘you certainly are.’

It became impossible to talk further, for all their developed expertise at talking and love-making at the same time; encapsulating life story, life problems within strokes, as it were. Shortage of breath in the end must triumph over even a frantic desire to communicate, apparently long denied to both of them. Thus in those heady days, the totality of the other could be assessed and judged within hours. Courtships and affairs which today take years were raced through within hours, days. And oddly, life itself seemed to go more slowly.

Rafe and Roland, those two dark, solemn, self-contained children, who seemed to both their parents like stolid cuckoos in a noisy and riotous nest – for which fact both blamed the other – sat and watched TV and ate crisps down the corridor. Salt and vinegar, nothing fancy.

Brian and Nancy lay in their matching bunks, bodies neatly and chastely arranged, in touching distance of one another. Nancy had contrived to end up in the lower bunk, in spite of Brian’s instructions to the contrary. He was not yet ready for sleep, and spent the drowsy moments instructing his fiancée, as he so liked to do.

‘It’s called jet lag,’ Brian said. ‘Apparently it’s to do with the body’s internal clock mechanism. The body’s organs have their own rhythm and take time to adapt to the time zone that the brain recognises.’

‘I could have told them that,’ said Nancy, isn’t it obvious?’

‘Things have to be named,’ said Brian, ‘before they can be understood.’

Brian had a degree in philosophy from Canterbury University, though you would never have thought it. Five years of active non-reflection can weaken and slacken the muscles of the brain. If non-reflection goes on for too long the brain can appear to wither away altogether, except for those small sections of it devoted to practical matters, the absorption and passing on of information, and obsessive opinions. The awareness of this tendency, and the inability to do anything about it, was then, and is now, what drives graduate, stay-at-home mothers to distraction. You don’t have to be a mother to suffer from it but it helps.

‘You know so much, Brian,’ said Nancy, out of the habit of and training in flattery. All women once used to be trained thus. Flatter the man, keep him happy, restrain your tongue, and never appear more clever than he. In those days men customarily married women younger than themselves, less well-educated, of lower social class, with a smaller income and a lesser intelligence. In the typical household it was observable to a growing child of either gender that the woman was the weaker and inferior sex, this being the fact of the matter, so far as anyone could see, and this everyone grew up to believe, and to mark accordingly such essays as turned up in research projects. Up for the men, down for the women.

Now that equals tend to marry their equals, in age, education, and earning capacity, the conviction of male superiority is less prevalent. And of course these days fatherhood, sapping will, ambition, energy, the way it must, does to men what once motherhood did to women.

‘A girl has to have someone to explain things to her,’ said Brian.

‘I like jet lag,’ said Nancy. ‘It makes me feel kind of languid, kind of nice.’ Sexy, she would have added, but it was not a word yet in general use. There not being a word for it, the feeling stayed elusive, flitting.

Nancy stretched out her hand to touch Brian, where it dangled, rather like Saffron’s from her pushchair, limp and soft. She stroked the back of his hand with her forefinger. ‘You could move in here beside me, Brian,’ she said. ‘We could lock the door.’

Brian moved his hand gently away. He would have preferred to snatch it – she could tell from the tension in the muscles, but he managed not to. He was all control. She liked that. So much the better, she anticipated, when he lost it.

‘People do these days,’ said Nancy. ‘Especially if they’re engaged.’

‘We’ll wait for all that till after we’re married,’ said Brian.

‘Quite a nymphomaniac you’re turning out to be.’

He was joking, but only just.

‘It’s just everything’s so kind of exciting, and abroad,’ pleaded Nancy, i want something amazing to happen. Don’t you feel it, everything buzzing out there? Colour and light and sound and change?’

‘People take drugs,’ said Brian, ‘if that’s what you mean. They get out of control.’

Nancy pushed down the blanket to expose naked breasts. ‘My face may not be up to much,’ she said, ‘but I have beautiful breasts. My doctor says I have the most perfect breasts he’s ever seen. Please look.’

But he wouldn’t; he merely hoped she’d change her doctor.

‘Nancy,’ he pointed out, ‘the best way for a girl to keep a man is not to give him what he wants before marriage. And I suppose you do want to keep me?’

‘Of course I do,’ she said.

‘Then cover yourself up,’ he said, ‘and go to sleep and don’t tempt me.’

She covered herself up. He closed his eyes but she could tell he wasn’t sleeping.

‘You say “what a man wants”,’ she observed, ‘but supposing the truth is he doesn’t want it? What sort of marriage would it be then?’

‘Marriage is about the begetting of children, not sex at every opportunity,’ said Brian. ‘And abstaining from sex before marriage is a sensible convention. Supposing you got pregnant?’

‘For the last ten years,’ said Nancy, ‘there hasn’t been a problem. The pill makes you fat, makes you sick, makes you die sometimes, but at least you don’t get pregnant.’

‘The pill’s for bad girls,’ said Brian, ‘not good girls. Bad girls like sex. Good girls want babies. Can’t you leave it alone, Nancy? A man likes to do the pursuing, not to be pursued. He’s born to be the hunter, not the hunted.’

Nancy sat upright in bed, suddenly.

‘I’m not going to marry you, Brian,’ she said.

He opened his eyes.

‘What did you say?’

‘That’s it,’ said Nancy. ‘I shan’t repeat it. You heard well enough. I’m not going home either. I’m going to stay here, find a job, make my life here. A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.’

She lay down again.

‘I’m tired now. I’ll leave you in the morning.’

And she went to sleep dreaming of fish and bicycles. Brian dreamed he was on a ship, slipping further and further into cloud, waving to someone on the sunlit pier, who was Nancy.

Over in Primrose Hill, in the boys’ room, the TV mouthed its way silently on. The boys had turned off the sound and climbed into their beds, still fully clothed. They sucked their thumbs, like babies, in their unwashed, unkempt, unfed sleep.

Downstairs music was playing. The night was hot. The window had been opened. Layla had taken off her T-shirt. She wore a white bra. Now she was taking off her jeans, sitting on the sofa, easing the fabric off one leg with the foot of the other.

‘But the fact is,’ said Zoe, ‘there isn’t any great female literature. All the best stuff is written by men.’

‘Not if we define what’s great and good,’ said Layla. ‘Not any more. I’m in charge round here. You’re such a wet blanket, Zoe. I don’t want you anywhere near our publishing house, ever.’

‘I wouldn’t dare join you,’ said Zoe. ‘I’d just like to be asked. I can feel Bull’s anger. I can feel it. Male anger shakes the world.’

And it certainly did if wishing made it so. Half a mile away, Bullivant, aware of his wife and child’s absence, suspecting their whereabouts, left the marital home, a substantial house in then unfashionable Belsize Park. Bull was thin, tall, and personable; an angry ectomorph.

‘Men use their anger as a way of controlling women,’ said Alice. ‘As they see us uniting, their rage seems to know no bounds, but in truth they are frightened, scared out of their wits. What we do seems to them unnatural, dangerous, powerful enough to put out the sun, stop the planets in their revolutions. Man has the race memory of Orpheus imprinted in his being, Orpheus the poet, pursued and torn to pieces by the Maenads, the mad women who in religious ecstasy hunted down and destroyed men. Orpheus looked back to see his love, to make sure that Eurydice followed him out of hell. In other words, in rescuing her, his lover, from the dark place, he tried to understand her – and thus he lost her. Not only that, the women had their revenge. Orpheus was destroyed. Women won’t rest till they have victory; they want triumph. In their hearts they want not just equality but the death of man: they cry out for vengeance for past wrongs. This is what men fear. That the oppressed in turn will become the oppressor. So man fights now for his own survival. Becoming conscious of female anger, he ups the ante; now he can hardly endure his own rage.’

The music was loud: they weren’t really listening; and Alice scarcely understood herself, as often happens to oracles, what she was saying. Meaning flows from the Maker through the minds and mouths of Prophet or Priestess, but has only an imperfect human vessel to work through. Listening to her own words Alice felt garish and vulgar as a seaside spiritualist, and downed some more wine.

‘Maenad,’ Layla was saying. ‘We’ll call our publishing house Maenad. Let men tremble.’

‘We’ll have the suffragette colours on the spine,’ said Stephanie. ‘Purple and green.’

‘We’ll have no such thing,’ said Layla. ‘Far too murky. You have no taste, Stephanie. Leave such things to those who have.’

‘We can’t possibly be called Maenad,’ said Stephanie. ‘It’s far too threatening. We don’t want to intimidate men before we even begin.’

‘I don’t see why not,’ said Zoe.

‘Because no one would take us seriously,’ said Stephanie.

‘Money makes everything serious,’ said Layla. ‘Even women. I want angry women to buy our books. You want victim women to read them. I want women to glow with confidence and be as glossy as men: you want their moans to get a hearing.’

‘It is not so,’ said Stephanie. ‘I’m just saying I will not be involved with a publishing house called Maenad.’

‘Then what?’ asked Layla.

‘Artemis,’ said Alice. ‘Let her be called Artemis. The hunter, not the hunted: Diana of the chase, cool and fair. Lucina is her other name.’

‘Artemis is dull,’ said Layla. ‘If we can’t have Maenad, I’ll settle for Medusa. One look at her face and men turn to stone. You’re such a fucking stuffy, Stephie.’

‘And you’re so foul-mouthed, Layla, and a bully,’ said Stephanie.

‘I hate confrontation,’ said Zoe. ‘And why have you taken off all your clothes?’

Stephanie, seeing Layla all but naked, was beginning to take off her own clothes. Remember it was a warm night, the music rocked, they had all been drinking and the spirit of the Muse was upon them, and the exhilaration which came with her.

‘Because I’m a woman and not ashamed of it,’ said Layla. ‘And not afraid either. Nor should any woman be. Naked, free, unashamed. For God’s sake, Zoe, take off some clothes. Let me see what you’re made of. Is your nakedness meant for Bull alone, is that your problem? Throw off the shackles of clothing and with it the shackles of wifedom. Alice, I need to know you have a physical existence and you’re not mind alone. I have to see you before I can believe you. And let’s have Saffron naked too. Don’t you want her to grow up proud, free and female? Isn’t it for her that we do all this? I can almost see the point of having children. Daughters, anyway.’

She alarmed them, but the music was loud, and she danced, and soon they were all naked and dancing about the room, regardless of who could see their cavortings, that is to say a little cluster of neighbours and passers-by, outside, gazing in, growing every minute, whom Bull sent flying as he strode by them and up to Hamish’s front door. He too saw, and expecting no better was a little mollified to have his worst fears realised. Being right can work wonders for anyone. Outrage justified is outrage halved. Nevertheless, how he banged upon the door.

Upstairs in the bedroom Daffy and Hamish contemplated a new relationship. The lesson of the sixties was that on average one in ten of the one-night stands (or compacted relationships) so prevalent at the time would result in something that lasted. If only the humiliations inherent in a ninety per cent rejection rate, for this was what it amounted to, could be endured, true love would in the end be found, and claimed.

‘Stephie will never forgive me,’ said Daffy. ‘Because what I have done is unforgivable.’

‘My plan is’, confessed Hamish, ‘to behave so badly that Stephie will finally get the message and go. In giving her cause to hate me, I am doing her a kindness.’

‘I’m not sure it works like that, Hamish,’ said Daffy, ‘but I admire you for trying. And I never liked her anyway.’

They stopped to listen to the music down below. The base notes seemed to travel through the very fabric of the house. Thump, thump, thump – and now an extra banging noise, Bull striking the front door again and again.

And now Alice turns up the music. In the front room they do not at first realise that Bull is at the door, though they are aware of the watchers, and careless of their existence. ‘Let everyone see,’ cries Layla. ‘Tits, bum, teeth, in the privacy of our own home. Do we ask for an audience? No, we don’t. Is prurience in our hearts? No, it is not. Is it in theirs? Yes, it is. Too bad!’

Zoe danced, but with one hand over her crotch and the other arm clasping Saffron, so her breasts didn’t show.

‘What are you ashamed of, Zoe?’ demanded Layla.

‘Nothing,’ said Zoe, bravely, lying.

Bull had once casually told Zoe her breasts hung too low. For breast read essay. The man downgrades but the woman downgrades more. And the insecure man of the sixties free to talk about such things, as his forebears forbore, made a habit of publicly complaining about the form, shape and size of the bosom which bobbed along with such docility by his side. As a criticism it was unanswerable, there being no set standard of excellence, no norm, and nothing a woman could do about it anyway.

‘We’re going ahead with this, Stuffy Stephie,’ said Layla, ‘and Academic Alice. We’re going ahead with Medusa.’

‘We are,’ said Stephanie, ‘but who’s in charge?’

Stephanie’s bosom was generous and bounced. Layla’s smaller, neater, higher. Alice had almost no breasts at all.

‘All are in charge,’ said Alice, as she lumbered by, little white arms stretching, curvy as a leaping salmon.

‘Hierarchical is male,’ she chanted.

‘former structures stale

Women are not fools

So group decision rules.’

‘Supposing we make money?’ Layla enquired. ‘Who takes it?’

‘Sisters care, so sisters share,’ came back the answer.

‘Plough profits in, and reap the wind.’

‘What an uphill struggle this is going to be,’ said Layla, but she acquiesced. ‘Mount Medusa like Mount Ararat, towering above the floods of Babel.’

Layla too spoke with tongues. Saffron babbled for all of them, now wandering naked in search of her clothes. Saffron preferred to be clothed; it felt safer. There seemed to her to be at least a dozen unclothed dancing women in the room. The bang, bang, bang of male wrath was upon the door, so loud now they had to take notice. Zoe looks out of the window and shrieks.

‘It’s Bull, I told you so!’

‘Too late!’ cries Stephie.

‘Too late!’ cries Layla.

‘The moment of Praxis,’ cries Alice. ‘Dance on. What happens will. The fates are here amongst us.’

And such was the nature of the dance, indeed, it seemed to be true. The muses danced gracefully in their languid threesome, the Maenads wailed, the furies shrieked.

Hamish meanwhile, an ethnic gown flung on for modesty, was at the door to let Bull in. Daffy wandered down, wrapped in a towel. Rafe and Roland, woken, dishevelled, sat on the landing to watch whatever drama was about to unfold. If sometimes they could not tell TV from real life, who could blame them?

‘Where’s my wife?’ yelled Bull. ‘Where’s my child?’

‘In the front room with the others, I daresay,’ said Hamish.

‘It’s a woman’s meeting. Go on in. Be my guest.’

Bull charges past Hamish and slams open the door of the front room: he is met by a waft of wine, a blast of music, overheated breath. The room, which for the first instant seemed crowded, contains his naked wife, already searching in a pile of discarded clothes for hers, and his child, Saffron, in vest and pants, pulling on her socks. She’s a competent little creature. Hamish walks in and takes off the music.

‘Nice dancing, Daddy?’ asks Saffron, anxiously. ‘Mummy, put your clothes on.’

‘Disgusting dancing, darling,’ says Bull.

‘Sorry, Bull,’ says Zoe, but she seems oddly unmoved, merely placatory. It occurs to the others she had expected him to come after her, is not sorry to be caught.

‘What the fuck are you sorry for?’ enquires Layla. ‘What’s to apologise?’

‘Foul-mouthed bitch,’ says Bull to Layla. ‘Leave my wife alone. If you come near her again, if she speaks to you harpies ever, it’s the end of our marriage. I keep the house, I keep the child, she’s out on the streets.’

‘That’s going a bit far, Bull,’ says Stephie. ‘That’s a little Victorian.’

‘It may be Victorian,’ says Bull. ‘But it’s the law. She’s a lesbian, she’s an unfit mother. She has already exposed my daughter to moral danger.’ He turns on Layla, fist raised.

‘Don’t be cross with Layla,’ says Zoe, in a voice which has turned soft and wheedling, and which they haven’t heard before. She has jeans and T-shirt back on by now. She strokes Bull’s raised arm. He lowers it. ‘It’s just Layla’s way. We weren’t doing anything wrong. It’s just so hot and we felt like dancing. We’re not lesbians, honestly.’

Alice is already zipped back into her boiler suit. Layla’s all but clothed again. Someone shuts the window, pulls the curtain. The crowd of watchers dissolves.

‘Moment of choice, Zoe,’ says Layla. ‘Go with him or stay with us. Be a man’s woman or join Medusa.’

‘I have to go home,’ says Zoe. ‘Bull needs me. And Saffron starts nursery school tomorrow.’

Bull’s hand holds hers, and she holds Saffron’s.

‘Sweet,’ says Hamish.

‘Yuk,’ says Stephie.

‘Let her go,’ says Alice, ‘it’s fated.’ But whether she’s talking to the women or the husband, who’s to say?

‘You wouldn’t have been any use to us, Zoe,’ says Layla. ‘No backbone, no stamina, self-absorbed, your brain’s turned to porridge; go your own way. Some women are incapable of sisterhood and you’re one of them.’

Zoe gives a little cry of distress, but Bull is already hustling wife, child and pushchair out into the corridor. There he sees Daffy towel-wrapped on the stairs, and is mollified again, by the proof of his conviction that this is a house of disreputable and disgraceful goings-on.

‘Medusa,’ says Alice, to anyone who cares to listen. ‘The time is ripe, the ceremony fits. But it is Artemis who is involved. Artemis who claims Zoe the fruitful as sacrifice: Persephone and Eurydice in the one form. After the sacrifice the new growth begins. I see blood upon the ground and sorrow. Artemis the hunter destroys what she brings forth.’

If you’d asked her afterwards what she’d said, she couldn’t have told you. Sometimes her mouth opened and the words flowed, without any particular willing of her own. Usually such gifts are given to the simple, the garrulous, the gullible: Alice could at least render the outpourings graceful, and properly formulated, so their origins seemed to have some tenuous connection with wisdom and experience.

‘Beware,’ said Alice, suddenly, ‘lest the wounded return to devour.’

‘Shivery,’ said Layla.

Out in the street Zoe kept step with the striding Bull.

‘Now don’t upset Saffron, Bull. She’s very sensitive.’

‘Naughty Mummy,’ said Saffron.

Daffy retreated back to Stephie’s bedroom. Hamish followed. Stephanie gave them a few moments and went on up, still unclothed.

‘Remember,’ called Layla after her, ‘the personal is the political.’

‘I will,’ said Stephanie, all resolve.

In the bedroom Daffy had her boiler suit on again and was trying to lace her boots, knotting the laces where Hamish had scissored them. But once knotted, how to get the knots through the eyelets? She gave up and sprayed herself liberally and defiantly with Stephanie’s big bottle of stale duty-free Chanel No. 5.

‘Do you like this house?’ Stephanie asked Daffy, when she’d finished with the scent.

‘I do,’ said Daffy. ‘It’s a mess, but it would clean up well.’

‘Then have it,’ said Stephanie. ‘But the husband and the kids go with it.’

‘OK,’ said Daffy, after a little thought.

Hamish drew his naked wife out into the corridor, where Rafe and Roland overheard but were not seen.

‘Are you out of your mind?’ he demanded.

‘I told you it was the last straw,’ said his wife.

‘But you are meant to throw me out, not leave,’ he said.

‘Too bad,’ she said. ‘I’m off.’

‘But I’m the guilty party,’ he said, ‘and there are lots of witnesses.’

‘I don’t want anything,’ she said. ‘You can keep the lot: house, things, children. I want a new life.’

‘You are an unnatural woman,’ he said. Back then, that was a fairly ferocious insult. These days it meets with a ho-hum.

‘So be it,’ she said. ‘Keep Daffy too, as the housemaid. Fuck her and she won’t ask for payment. It will work out cheaper for you like that. As for me, I am to be reborn. Let my sisters take me.’

And she went downstairs again with a cry of ‘Shall we go, Layla?’ and Hamish pattered after her crying ‘Is this all? Is this all the end of a marriage deserves?’ with the two boys clutching at his African robe, for they could see he was all they now had in the world, until Daffy eased their clawing fingers free and soothed them. She had no children of her own but her instincts were good, if not, to date, her behaviour.

Stephie, mother naked, led Layla out into the street. All Stephanie took with her was her car-keys. Later she was to return to the house and claim a few documents – passport, driving licence, that kind of thing – but otherwise she kept to her resolution. Nothing from her past, nothing. Not even snapshots of herself as a child, her parents hand in hand in the Ibiza sun, her graduation ceremony, the boys as babies – nothing. To be without a past is to be free, or so she thought.

Layla got into the side door of the car. Stephie got into the driving seat, limbs gleaming under the streetlamp, in the wedge of light which poured from her front door, where Hamish stood silhouetted, and next to him, Daffy and her two children.

Stephie switched on the ignition and, peering ahead, bare boobs pressed into the steering-wheel, for she had not brought her driving glasses, they set off for Layla’s house in Chelsea.

It was her finest hour, her finest gesture. The night Medusa was born.

Well now let us move on a year. Carnaby Street is still in full swing: the fashions have changed, but minimally. Many girls wear hot pants. Stretches of bare thigh between boots and mini are all the rage: the kind of thing that whores would wear, now acceptable, if still provocative. Female sexuality is the thing: passivity passé. Platform soles are the opposite of stiletto heels. Girls want to be looked at, marvelled at, but have lost interest in enticement. Carly Simon reproaches us from a dozen boutique entrances; street vendors sell mood-watches, which change colour according to your state of mind: the face is black when you’re depressed, blue or green if you’re cheerful.

Nancy, back in Carnaby Street again, finds she misses Brian. This astonishes her. She retreads the paths she took with him, on their one and only day in London together, if only to persuade herself she did the right thing. She wears a black skirt, a white blouse and sensible shoes, and looks like an office worker: it is her intention so to be. She has found herself a walk-up flat on the seventh floor of a gigantic house in Earl’s Court. She has learned shorthand typing, made very few friends, and finally today feels herself equipped to look for a temping job. To this end she goes to a secretarial agency in Regent Street and there encounters Marjorie Price, a neatly coiffed, pale woman in her late middle age – spinstery, as the description once went; a childless, unmarried woman, in those days an object of pity rather than envy, someone who has failed in life’s task.

How fast things change; how fast things are made to change: all it takes is a handful of determined and energetic women; big women not little women.

‘You must be the one who rang me,’ says Marjorie. ‘The one from New Zealand. A nice place, by all accounts. You should have stayed. You don’t look the type to thrive in swinging London.’

‘Am I dressed wrong?’ asks Nancy, nervous.

‘Not in my eyes,’ says Marjorie Price, ‘but hardly the height of fashion. You won’t be looking for a receptionist’s job, I take it. Back office, more like, where looks don’t count.’

‘I want a job with prospects,’ says Nancy, overlooking the insult. ‘Something that will take me up the ladder of success.’ She used the phraseology current in the secretarial school where she had spent her savings. What one pays for, one values, at least temporarily.

‘The ladder of success,’ says Marjorie. ‘That old thing. Better for a woman to stay on the bottom rungs.’

‘Why do you say such a thing?’ asked Nancy, startled.

‘Because the truth of the matter is, if you can look after yourself why should a man want to? Look at me.’

‘I don’t want to be looked after by a man,’ said Nancy.

‘A women’s libber,’ said Marjorie Price. ‘I might have known. All you young girls come to me with these ideas. Ten years of the typing pool and it’s another story.’

But she consents to give Nancy a shorthand and typing test to see what her speeds are. Nancy does well enough. She mentions her degree in English Literature and her accountancy qualifications, hoping to impress, but the news seems only to depress Marjorie Price the more.

‘You are far too qualified for your own good,’ she said.

‘No employer will look at you for fear you’ll take their job away, will bite the hand that feeds you. No man wants a girl cleverer than he, and quite right too. You will become sour and bitter. You will have expectations the world cannot meet. You’re too picky already. A job with prospects! Too picky about jobs, too picky about men. You will end up with the habit of turning things down. You will end up like me. I had a double first in classics from Oxford; now I have nothing. No family, no children, just a card index to love, and not a word of Latin do I remember. What’s a career once you’re over fifty but a glorified job? I’ll be frank with you. I have no time for women’s libbers. They make someone like me feel I’ve wasted my life, following rules they now laugh at.’

‘It’s the married women with children flown the nest who feel that most,’ said Nancy. It was hard to type her fastest and listen to what was being said.

‘Eighty words a minute,’ said Marjorie, ‘but I’ll give you ninety because I was talking. I have so few people to talk to I end up talking at strangers. What’s your shorthand?’

‘One fifty,’ said Nancy.

‘You seem like an honest girl, for all your strange ideas,’ said she of the double first, forty years on. ‘There’s a job round the corner at Medusa Publishing. More women’s libbers. They’re everywhere. Terrible employers. Long hours. Low pay. They call themselves a co-operative. Nice for those who run it – hell for the employees. No one in charge, so no one to blame when you get things wrong. I don’t recommend it.’

‘Sounds wonderful to me,’ said Nancy.

‘It would,’ said Marjorie Price sourly. ‘What makes you think their typing pool is better than anyone else’s? You swim round in the same old water, and not even a passing male to cheer you up.’

And she put the Medusa card away and fished out the one for Battersea Power Station.

‘Don’t let your chances slip by,’ she said. ‘Before you know it you’ll end up like me. Now at Battersea you’ll find some nice young technicians. Always go where the men go. Where there’s power there’s men. Where there’s books there’s women. Not in the top jobs, of course, but doing all the work.’

Nancy said she’d have the Medusa job, thank you very much. Those were the days of full employment, when the employees picked and chose and employers were grateful for what they could get. Those were the days before it was customary for women to go out to work, to snatch the bread from the mouths of family men.

Those were the days when people used typewriters and slipped carbon between sheets of paper; and rolled them in together, trying not to smudge their fingers and everything else in sight. If a typist made a mistake she had to type the entire page again. So very few mistakes were made. Nancy left Marjorie Price, with her double first, picking the black carbon ink out of the letter ‘o’ with a pin kept especially for the purpose. Picking out the keys could be almost as pleasurable as squeezing blackheads.

Nancy went round the corner to a small narrow house in Wardour Street where Medusa had its offices. Wardour Street then as now was a place where US film companies run dour offices, sound studios proliferate, as do whores and their customers, pimps and their friends. At that time Medusa employed between ten and twenty people, on an ad hoc basis. Sometimes the Advisory Board, twelve strong, recruited by Stephanie and Layla, outnumbered the staff. The first revenues were beginning to come in. Some employees had a background in publishing; most made it up as they went along. The process seemed simple enough. You decided what books to print, what you wanted on the cover, found printers to print it, bookshops to stock it, newspapers to advocate it, and some method of collecting the money. One person could do all this, from first principles, but obviously as more books were published some division of labour would sensibly occur. What Medusa would try not to do was fall into hierarchical and bureaucratic mode, typical of male organisations. Men were status-seekers and empire-builders; they shuffled for power one over the other: at all-women Medusa, the ambition was to get the books out to readers, not to win applause.

That some qualities are simply human, not specific to one gender or the other, took time to learn. Put women in a situation where status is possible to achieve and power available, and they too make the most of it. But who at the time knew a thing like that?

Picture Nancy now as she sits demurely on a hard chair, while Layla sprawls behind a desk and Stephie sits upon it and dangles her legs. Such informality is new to Nancy. She is not sure if she likes it. She felt happier with Marjorie Price.

‘I see the Acme Agency sent you,’ observed Layla. ‘It’s our favourite. If you can survive Marjorie Price you can survive anything. She acts as a filter. You say on this form you saved for three years to come to London with your fiance. Why should we be interested in your saving habits?’

‘They loom large in my mind,’ said Nancy. ‘It just sort of slipped in.’

‘Self-centred,’ said Layla. ‘And “sort of” isn’t a good sign.’

‘Give the girl a chance,’ said Stephanie.

‘Girl?’ enquired Layla.

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Stephanie.

‘And then this fiancé, this person went home and you stayed on. Why does she want us to know she was once engaged to be married? Typical!’

‘Well,’ began Nancy, but Stephanie interjected.

‘That’s a remark, not a question. Why did he go home and you stay?’

‘For personal reasons,’ said Nancy, crossly. ‘Why don’t you test me on my speeds?’

‘We don’t have a stopwatch,’ said Layla. ‘You have a degree in English Lit, qualifications in book-keeping – I don’t understand all those initials – and secretarial skills. How boring and sensible.’

‘Look,’ said Nancy, ‘I am a boring and sensible person. I have a tidy mind. I like things to be in order. You need me.’

‘You think we’re untidy in here?’ asked Stephanie.

‘Yes, I do,’ said Nancy.

There seemed to be no clear spaces anywhere; it distressed her. Pot plants mingled with unwashed coffee mugs: letters were discarded where they were opened, papers and envelopes meant for the bin lay around on the floor: filing trays overflowed. Clearly anything problematic would sink to the bottom of files and stay there.

‘I don’t think you’re right for us here at Medusa,’ said Layla.

‘But thanks for looking in.’

‘Why won’t I do?’ asked Nancy.

‘Frankly, darling,’ said Layla, ‘you’re right. You’re too fucking boring.’

Nancy stood up.

‘I really don’t like bad language,’ she said. ‘I find it most offensive.’

‘It’s meant to be,’ observed Layla.

‘It’s a sign of an impoverished mind and an impoverished vocabulary,’ said Nancy.

‘That’s better,’ said Layla. ‘We only pay twelve pounds a week. We all get the same.’

‘I don’t see how I’m expected to live on twelve pounds a week,’ Nancy complained.

‘We manage,’ said Layla. ‘We help one another out.’

‘And if things get too bad,’ said Stephanie, ‘Layla pays out a bonus.’

‘I hope they’re tax-effective,’ said Nancy. ‘Bonuses can be tricky, tax-wise.’

‘It’s your job to make sure about boring things like that,’ said Layla. ‘In the meantime just remember you’re the dogsbody, and it’s last in first out.’

‘I accept that,’ said Nancy.

‘You are privileged to work here at Medusa,’ said Stephanie.

‘I hope you’re strong. You look strong. Books are a heavy trade.’

As indeed they are. Three months later see Nancy toiling up the steps of the British Museum. The muscles in the tops of her arms were well developed. Now she was broad-shouldered, as she hadn’t been since her swimming days at school in Wellington. She carried a bag of books in each hand. She carried them for Alice.

Alice, like Karl Marx before her, was writing a book. She brought her own reference books into the library, which was not normally allowed, but the senior librarian, although male, accorded her this privilege. When Alice was seated in her chair beneath the dome, and Nancy had settled her in, Nancy would go back to the office and check through everyone’s in-trays, to make sure nothing important had been neglected. She would empty the wastepaper baskets, wash up coffee mugs; send out invoices, check receipts, keep the card indexes up to date, do Layla’s shopping, carry Alice’s books, organise Stephie’s divorce and access days, water pot plants, fire and hire employees, persuade bookstores to stock Medusa books, conduct market research on Charing Cross Station. She was tired. Sometimes she snapped at her colleagues.

Today, when she arrived back at the office and someone had spilt sugar into her typewriter and not bothered to clean it up, she said to Layla: ‘This is absurd. I do all the work round here, and get none of the credit. I am chronically exhausted. Last night I nearly fainted in the tube on the way home. I had to sit with my head between my legs.’

‘How inelegant,’ said Layla. ‘And how lucky you were to have a seat.’

But the next day she took Nancy to a used-car salesroom and bought her an ancient car, which chugged and sputtered around the block, and cost £120.

‘Remember, it’s the Medusa car,’ she said, ‘not yours, Nancy. But you can use it when no one else wants it, and park it outside your place. I’ll deduct sixty pounds from your wages over the next year. That’s very generous.’

‘Oh, thanks a million, Layla,’ said Nancy, with an irony which escaped Layla. ‘But if I’m sixty pounds down over the year, how will I pay my rent?’

‘Six pounds a week is far too much for a room,’ said Layla. ‘Why don’t you go and be one of Alice’s parents’ lodgers? That’s food as well for only five pounds.’

So Nancy took up lodgings in Enfield, where Alice lived with her parents Doreen and Arthur. Doreen was stout and wore an apron. Arthur was very thin and a pigeon fancier. Both were eccentric. Nancy’s room was small but cosy, if not conducive to courtship. How could Nancy, so much under Doreen’s nose, even bring men home, foster a relationship? Not that there was time or energy left over for such extravagances. The journey from Enfield was twice the length of the one to and from Earl’s Court: but at least, as Layla pointed out, the car was not under-used. Nancy could drive Alice in to the office in the morning, dropping books off at relevant bookstores as she went.

When Nancy first presented herself to Doreen one Saturday morning, and Doreen looked her up and down and said she’d do, Nancy, feeling suddenly the lack of a mother, burst into tears. Doreen gave her cheese on toast and sweet tea, and soon Nancy felt better. Doreen took her up to the loft where Arthur sat amongst his pigeons, who strutted around the floor and eyed Nancy with beady looks but didn’t scatter at her approach.

‘She’ll do,’ said Arthur. ‘The birds get on with her.’

Nancy smiled.

‘She wants a rest and some looking after,’ said Doreen.

Doreen tapped on Alice’s door.

‘She’s here,’ she said, ‘and she’ll do.’

‘Come on in,’ said Alice.

Alice had the best room in the house. It got the afternoon sun. It looked out on to a rectangle of back yard and beyond that a railway line, and trees. Alice sat cross-legged on her bed. On the shelves were weighty academic tomes, and respectable reference books: on her desk were crystal balls and tarot cards, astrological tables and the apparatus required for divination. A black cat with not a single white mark sat on the desk and occasionally stretched out a languid paw to tap the paper on the typewriter, as if reminding Alice there was work to be done. The walls were hung with silk, on which were embroidered pentacles here and the signs of the zodiac there. The coverlet of the bed on which Alice sat was embroidered with the Tree of Life. Alice was casting coins. The I Ching was open in front of her: also, in old brown bindings, a novel by Mrs Gaskell and one by Edith Wharton.

‘All that education,’ complained Doreen, ‘and still she believes in magic.’

‘It isn’t magic, Mum,’ said Alice, crossly. ‘The I Ching, like all other methods of divination, simply helps focus the mind.’

‘So long as you take it with a pinch of salt,’ said Doreen. ‘Believe it and don’t believe it at the same time. Don’t let it take over.’

‘Mother’s a one to talk,’ said Alice, ‘Mother’s a faith-healer.’ i was,’ said Doreen. ‘Till I got frightened. I got the idea the spirits took strength from the patients, not the patients from the spirit.’

‘Never trust an after-lifer,’ said Alice. ‘That’s Mum’s philosophy.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ said Nancy, alarmed, ‘that you’re casting coins and consulting the I Ching to make an editorial decision?’

‘Fiction isn’t my strong point,’ said Alice. ‘The coins merely echo the mood of the times. The Wharton looks too chancy: we’ll go for Mrs Gaskell.’

It was, time would prove, the wrong decision, but perhaps Alice interpreted the oracle wrongly, as she herself was on occasion wrongly interpreted. Who is to say?

And so Nancy moved in with Alice and was to stay for three years, in a little room unconducive to courtship, a fact that suited everyone but her. So it goes.

Medusa was described in the press, rightly, as a shoestring operation, but received a lot of press coverage, much of it dismissive. The gossip columnists took pleasure in referring to the Harpies of Medusa, the bra-less harridans of the publishing world. Publishers themselves, though male, were helpful. It had become apparent that there was a woman’s market out there. Let Medusa develop it.

Medusa paid its writers notoriously little. If the writers did well, they’d soon desert to the mainstream publishers, for mainstream contracts. If they didn’t do well, forget them. But perhaps this is the cynicism of the eighties speaking: perhaps established publishers genuinely wished Medusa well. Good nature and self-interest can coexist. Stephanie was beautiful: Layla was described as the thinking man’s popsy: both were an on-going source of scandal and entertainment in the gossip columns. Alice was considered a hopeless bluestocking: only those who couldn’t get a man developed the life of the mind.

Meanwhile women read, thought, began to speak up in public, took strength from one another, learned to withstand mockery and required justice in the home and in the workplace: mockery and derision aimed at the women of Medusa was a small price to pay. They could put up with it, and did. Men would walk out of rooms when they walked into them: so what?

The History and Nature of the Female Orgasm was not a filthy book, simply an honest one. The Hidden Order of Female Art by no means special pleading. The novel Sisters won a literary prize or so. Gender Statistics became a seminal book in the universities. Women – Made or Born? one year outsold the Bible, and was presently to enable Medusa to move to better offices and get itself organised.

Money and success, as Layla observed in the beginning, means you get taken seriously.

Let us look in at a meeting of the Advisory Board. Nancy is presenting the annual report. Round the big table are young, enthusiastic, eager, female faces, all without makeup, serviceably dressed. Time is on their side, and the future is theirs. Only Layla wears a skirt. Boiler suits are out: jeans and jumpers in. A couple of babies have been brought in; they’re female. The boys, by common consent, are left at home. Proof copies of the next season’s lists are on display. The Inessential Gender – a History, magazines from Stephanie’s new newsprint division – Liberation Review, and Multigender Dialectic: the Feminist Primer rather badly printed. And down at Layla’s end of the table a display of Medusa Classics, elegantly packaged, eloquently produced.

‘Medusa is now a shareholding company,’ says Nancy to the assembled women, ‘minimally in profit. Our retail outlets are properly established, and male resistance to the idea of a separate literary market for women for the most part overcome. The “women’s market” no longer means romances and Woman’s Own. It means serious books at serious prices. Nevertheless, problems remain. The company’s undercapitalised. We live from hand to mouth. Profits from Women – Made or Born? paid back our starting-up costs, but sales are falling off.’

Nancy, out of delicacy, made no mention of Layla’s occasional large injections of family cash into Medusa’s coffers. These appeared in the books merely as ‘Anonymous donations’. ‘Public demand’, Nancy went on, ‘can’t always be predicted. If only it could. Thus Made or Born does startlingly well: Multigender Dialectic may have to be withdrawn for lack of forward orders. We can build up a core of faithful readers, women loyal to our imprint, of course we can, and will: but real profits always lie within the margins of guesswork, which is an uncomfortable place to be. As the women’s courses in the universities proliferate, thanks to Alice, Medusa will of course provide the standard texts, there being no one else in the field – and we will find ourselves safer.’

‘Why are we talking about profits?’ protested one of the Board. ‘Our main business is to reclaim women’s artistic past. Commercial success isn’t our aim: why even talk about it?’

‘Fuck art,’ said another. ‘We exist to raise female consciousness.’

‘In order to exist at all,’ said Layla, ‘we have to break even. I’m not going to go on digging into my own pocket for ever.’

Layla’s hair was short and curly. She was said to have a new lover, whom the newspapers longed to identify, but couldn’t, and her eyes were bright. There was a feeling around the table that she lacked the capacity for constructive self-criticism.

‘There’s certainly a case for breaking even,’ someone said, ‘if only so Layla doesn’t always get her own way.’

‘Money should be the last of our considerations,’ said Stephanie, ‘when it comes to choosing the list.’ She was looking drawn, and had a spot on her normally perfect chin. She had trouble with her conscience, and her children, and still lived at the top of Layla’s house. She made frequent attempts to move out, but would develop an allergy or flu or hurt her back if the attempts showed signs of success, and so stayed on. Her divorce from Hamish lingered on. Fine gestures create legal opportunity. Nakedness in public gets publicly discussed. Newspaper cartoonists revelled in the vision of a naked Stephanie, bosom pressed against a Mini steering-wheel. It was hard for her. Layla was patient.

‘So what’s for dinner today?’ enquired Layla of the assembled Board. ‘Oh, goodie, look! It’s integrity.’

‘We need to keep afloat, of course,’ said someone piously. ‘But not be a prey to crude commercialism. That’s the male way.’

‘I disagree,’ said Layla. ‘Since the male way keeps men so comfortable, I don’t see why women shouldn’t do the same.’

‘I’m trying to speak,’ said Nancy crossly. ‘Can we not have these interruptions.’

‘They are not interruptions,’ said someone. ‘They are important contributions to a debate. And why are you standing up there at the end of the table, Nancy; spouting at us as if you saw yourself as apart and superior? Surely this is a co-operative in spirit as well as actuality. We were told Medusa would remain hierarchy-free, even though for technical reasons never fully explained to us we became a shareholding company. I see no evidence of that spirit here today.’

‘Trouble at mill!’ hissed Layla to Stephie.

‘Told you there would be,’ said Stephie.

‘Be all that as it may,’ said Nancy firmly and loudly, ‘as I have been trying to explain to you, we have to raise further capital or Medusa will once again approach Standstill, as the I Ching describes it. Stasis. And I’m sure none of us would want that.’

Alice had converted Nancy to the I Ching: tactlessly, Nancy now referred to it. There was further uproar. Many of the Board members had backgrounds in Methodism and the old Adult Education movement, and were stern rationalists.

‘You haven’t been doing the I Ching again, have you!’ cried one woman, in the exact tone of voice she’d use to rebuke a child –‘What, soiled your pants again!’ Women had yet to learn the art of scolding without appearing either maternal or shrewish: to develop the male knack of making reproach seem to come from some cosmic, a-personal source. Accused of nagging over centuries, they had developed the tendency. These days men nag, women reproach.

‘Casting coins to tell our fortune? This is a responsible women’s publishing house; these are the seventies, not the sixties.’

An innocent asked what the I Ching was, protesting that it wasn’t fair to women to intimidate women by raising matters and using words which not everyone understood: it was a male trick.

Someone explained that the I Ching was a Confucian book of oracles: you asked questions, it answered them, like a wise old man, through the pattern the coins threw up.

‘Man!’ someone shrieked. Why was a feminist publishing house asking questions of a man?

Alice said in her soft voice, ‘Don’t be alarmed. The book has a foreword by Jung, whose concepts of the anima and the id have so informed the women’s movement we can almost reckon him an honorary female. Publishing, as Nancy has pointed out, is a matter of prophecy. We merely use what is available.’

‘Please, no one mention the I Ching outside these walls,’ begged Layla, with an alarm unusual for her. ‘If the press get hold of it, they’ll have a fucking field day.’

‘Language!’ reproached Nancy.

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Nancy,’ said Layla. ‘You’re the dogsbody, not the nanny.’

And so the meeting continued, as had many before, as did many after. There was to be a further share issue amongst such members of the Board as could bear to be tainted by commercialism. These included Layla, Stephie, Nancy and Alice. Big Women all. Of the initial share issue a year back, thirty per cent had gone to Layla’s mystery backer, whom she claimed to be a member of her family, and was most assuredly female.

‘I haven’t seen her naked,’ said Layla. ‘I can hardly ask her to fucking strip, but she looks like a woman to me, and her children call her mother. OK?’

Nancy’s hopes of romance, never quite stifled, were given encouragement by her encounter with the man known at Medusa as Layla’s live-in lover. His name was Johnny; he was a writer and book-critic, charming, literate, impoverished, unmarried, and very English. Johnny was assumed to be cover for Layla’s real lover. He was a man of no interest to the press, being neither a socialite nor a truck-driver. These days enough couples lived together without benefit of marriage ceremony to make ‘living in sin’ not much of an issue. It was still customary, of course, for cohabiting partners to be slept separately if ever they stayed over at a parental home.

The war of the generations flickered on, soon to be swamped by the gender war. Layla’s secret lover was supposed to be royal, and rich; but no one knew for certain, and she wasn’t saying. Or perhaps, some conjectured, he didn’t exist at all: he was Layla’s invention, a matter of innuendo, a method of turning away enquiry so she could get on with the real love of her life, that is to say, Medusa.