Female Friends by Fay Weldon Read Free Book Online

listens patiently and tries to make sense of it all. She is a good girl.
    Gwyneth, disturbed by the amount of time Chloe is spending at The Poplars, worried in case Chloe is making a nuisance of herself, is emboldened to ask for an extra half-day off so she can spend more time with her daughter. At which Mrs Leacock, that bright, hard-eyed bustling little woman, a devout Catholic, utters a shriek of dismay, calls on Mother Mary, and takes to her bed with a pain in her chest, and for a day or two a cloud comes over Mr Leacock’s kind and ruddy face, while he considers the request. He seems not so much annoyed, as grieved.
    Gwyneth is horrified to have caused so much trouble. She withdraws her request, but the Leacocks mull over it for weeks. They seem unable to let the incident go, gnawing at it as if they were starving and had been at last offered a bone.
    If the problem is money, Mr Leacock says, Chloe could be allowed to clean the guests’ shoes—there are eight guest bedrooms by now—for two shillings a week.
    ‘It’s not the money—’ says Gwyneth—
    ‘If the problem’s tiredness,’ says Mrs Leacock, descending the stairs all of a tremble. ‘I can get hold of some Ministry of Food Orange Juice. They’re selling some off cheap in Stortford—too much preservative so the babies won’t drink it—but perfectly all right for adults. That’ll perk you up.’
    So Gwyneth doesn’t get her extra afternoon off. But before Chloe starts work on the shoes each morning, she is given a spoonful of thick orange syrup, tart with sulphuric acid, from the crate Gwyneth now has to find room for under her bed.
    One winter morning, groping for Chloe’s mouth in the dark—blackout curtains are tacked over the windows at night—Gwyneth laughs.
    ‘You have to laugh,’ she says. ‘It’s a funny old life.’
    Ha-ha.
    So now, when the Portuguese waiter brings a Dubonnet instead of a Campari, in a not very clean glass, Chloe says nothing. She is aware that he especially dislikes women customers, seeing it as a humiliation to have to serve them. She is aware that he is overworked, underpaid, exploited and helpless in a strange land, and that the greatest insult of all is her awareness of these things. And still she sits there.

seventeen
    A T TWELVE-FIFTY MARJORIE ARRIVES at the Italiano. She is dressed in expensive leather but manages to look not so much erotic, as fearful that the weather might turn. Chloe, who is tall and very slender, and has small hands and feet, and a refined and gentle face, and short cropped dark hair, wears a pale silk blouse, and pale suede trousers. She spends a lot of Oliver’s money on clothes, ever fearful that the days of tablecloth dresses, holed by cigarettes, might return.
    ‘You’re looking more like a boy than ever,’ says Marjorie. ‘Do you think you should?’
    Marjorie carries a bright green plastic launderette bag, stuffed full of damp washing.
    ‘And we can’t possibly sit at this table,’ says Marjorie. ‘Are you mad? We’re practically in the Gents.’
    ‘Don’t make a fuss,’ begs Chloe, but Marjorie has them removed forthwith to a table near the window. She stows the launderette bag beneath her chair, and beams at the waiter, but he remains hostile. They order antipasto . He brings dried-up beans, hard-boiled eggs in bottled mayonnaise, tinned sardines and flabby radishes prettily arranged in bright green plastic lettuce leaves.
    Marjorie eats with relish. Chloe watches in wonder.
    ‘Why don’t you kill her?’ asks Marjorie, meaning Françoise. ‘I can let you have some tablets.’
    ‘I am perfectly happy, Marjorie,’ says Chloe. ‘I don’t suffer from sexual jealousy. It’s a despicable emotion.’
    ‘Who told you that? Oliver?’
    ‘We all live as best we can,’ says Chloe, ‘and surely we are entitled to take our sexual pleasures as and when we want.’
    ‘Yes, but they’re getting the pleasure and you aren’t.’
    ‘I’m not a highly-sexed person,