Female Friends by Fay Weldon Read Free Book Online Page A

these days.’
    ‘Who says so? Oliver?’
    But Chloe can hardly remember, of her and Oliver, who said what first.
    ‘I behaved very badly towards Oliver,’ says Chloe. ‘If this is his revenge it’s very mild. I can endure it. I would rather not talk about it. Whose is the washing?’
    ‘Patrick’s.’
    ‘I thought you’d stopped that kind of thing,’ says Chloe.
    Marjorie is looking tired. It is one of her bleeding days, Chloe can tell. Her face is drawn and tired, and her hair is a wayward frizz.
    ‘Someone has to do it,’ says Marjorie.
    ‘Not necessarily,’ says Chloe. ‘He could leave it until the council issued a compulsory fumigation order.’
    ‘Patrick’s not as bad as that,’ says Marjorie.
    ‘I may be looking like a boy,’ says Chloe, ‘but doesn’t it seem strange that you, a high-powered television producer, should be doing Patrick’s laundry? You aren’t married to him. You don’t even sleep with him.’
    ‘How do you know?’ inquires Marjorie. ‘Though of course you are right. How can I have a sex life? I bleed all the time. What upsets me is the way his other lady friends behave. A lot of them must have automatics and I don’t see why they shouldn’t take their turn. If they’re strong enough to go down those steps—and lately the local hippies have been using the area as a shit-house—they’re strong enough to face his washing. All my stuff goes to the laundry—but I haven’t the nerve to send his as well. It’s not the money which stops me—it’s the humiliation.’
    ‘If you don’t mind,’ says Chloe, ‘I’d rather not talk about Patrick either. It’s unlucky.’
    Patrick Bates lives in a filthy basement room and paints pictures in the half-dark. They fetch a good deal of money—although not quite so much as they did at the height of his fame, ten years ago. Patrick is reputed to be very wealthy, although he swears he burns the money instead of banking it. Certainly he spends very little. Since the death of Midge his wife he has become more and more eccentric. He danced on her grave when she died.
    Patrick’s paintings were always small: now they are becoming miniature. He will confine a whole seraglio on a canvas marked out by a bread-and-butter plate and use cosmetic brushes to apply the paint. He is a miser. He scrounges food and clothes. He looks older these days than the forty-seven he is. His cheeks have sunk over toothless gums—he won’t spend money at the dentist. He pulls out his own teeth if they ache.
    Chloe has not seen Patrick for nine years. Not since she went to visit him to ask for some money towards Kevin and Kestrel’s upkeep—Oliver was chafing under the burden of supporting them—and came away with Imogen instead.
    Now she prefers not to talk or think about Patrick. She wants him out of her life. She wants him to keep away from the children. He is elemental, disruptive and mischievous. He has moved through her life like the Angel of Death, disguised sometimes as a malicious gnome and sometimes like Pan himself.
    ‘What was he doing, the Great God Pan, Down in the reeds by the river?’ she says now to Marjorie. They learned the poem by heart, at thirteen, competing for an elocution prize. Chloe won.
    ‘What indeed? We have all always wanted to know that,’ says Marjorie tartly. ‘And as for Patrick, you ought to talk about him. He is all those children’s father.’
    ‘Sometimes half a father is worse than no father at all,’ says Chloe. ‘And they have dozens of his paintings on the wall, so his presence is always with them, along with his genes. Oliver will keep buying them, in spite of everything. And you can get so many on a wall, I sometimes think there will be no end to it.’
    ‘Patrick will drink himself to death, and then there’ll be an end to it,’ says Marjorie.
    Chloe is not sorry to hear this.
    ‘And then Oliver will have the largest collection of Bates paintings and Bates children in the whole country. He’ll