Wilhelm began saying that he had at last understood: Julia did not really want him there. ‘I have always loved you more than you have loved me. ' Julia had never thought about this love to weigh and measure it. Simply, it was what she relied on. Wilhelm was her support and her stay, and now she was getting old (which she felt she was, despite Doctor Lehman), she knew she could not manage without him. Did she not love him then? Well, certainly not, compared with Philip. How uncomfortable this line of thought was, she did not want to go on with it, nor to hear Wilhelm's reproaches. She would have liked him to move in, if things hadn't been so difficult, if only to soothe her conscience over that big under-used place of his. She was even prepared to contemplate cuddles and bedtime conversations in her once connubial bed. But she had only shared her bed with one man in her long life: too much was being asked of her – wasn't it? Wilhelm's reproaches became accusations and Julia cried and Wilhelm was remorseful.
Frances was planning to leave Julia's. At last she would have her own place. Now that there were no school or university fees, she was actually saving money. Her own place, not Johnny's, or Julia's. And it would have to accommodate all her research materials and her books, now divided between The Defender and Julia's. A large flat. What a pleasant thing it is to have a regular salary: only someone who has not enjoyed one can say this with the heartfelt feeling it deserves. Frances remembered freelancing and precarious little jobs in the theatre. But when she had achieved enough money for the substantial down-payment, then she would resign from what she felt as an increasingly false position at The Defender, and that would be the end of regular sums arriving in her bank account.
She had always done most of her work at home, had never felt herself to be part of the newspaper. That she just came and went was her colleagues' complaint about her, as if her behaviour was a criticism of The Defender. It was. She was an outsider in an institution that saw itself as beleaguered, and by hostile hordes, reactionary forces, as if nothing had changed from the great days of the last century when The Defender stood almost alone as a bastion of wholesome open-hearted values: there had been no honest good cause The Defender had not defended. These days the newspaper championed the insulted and the injured, but behaved as if these were minority issues, instead of – on the whole -'received opinions'.
Frances was no longer Aunt Vera (My little boy wets his bed, what shall I do?), but wrote solid, well-researched articles on issues like the discrepancy between women's pay and men's, unequal employment possibilities, nursery schools: nearly everything she wrote was to do with the difference between men's situation and women's.
The women journalists of The Defender were known in some quarters, mostly male (who saw themselves increasingly as beleaguered by hostile female hordes), as a kind of mafia, heavy, humourless, obsessed, but worthy. Frances was certainly worthy: all her articles had a second life as pamphlets and even as books, third lives as radio or television programmes. She secretly concurred with the view that her female colleagues were heavy-going, but suspected she could be accused of the same. She certainly felt heavy, weighed down with the wrongs of the world: Colin's accusation had been true enough: she did believe in progress, and that a stubborn application in attacking unfairness would put things right. Well, didn't it? At least sometimes? She had small triumphs to be proud of.But at least she had never flown off into the windy skies of the so fashionable feminism: she had never been capable, like Julie Hackett, of a fit of tearful rage when hearing on the radio that it was the female mosquito that is responsible for malaria. 'The shits. The bloody fascist shits.’When at last persuaded by Frances that this was a fact and not a slander invented by male scientists to put down the female sex — 'Sorry, gender' – she quietened into hysterical tears and said, 'It's all so bloody unfair.' Julie Hackett continued dedicated to The Defender. At home she wore The Defender aprons, drank from The Defender mugs, used The Defender drying-up cloths. She was capable of angry tears if someone criticised her newspaper. She knew Frances was not as committed — a word she was fond of — as she was, and often delivered little homilies designed to improve her thinking. Frances found her infinitely tedious. Aficionados of the prankish tricks life gets up to will have already recognised this figure, which so often accompanies us, turning up at all times and places, a shadow we could do without, but there she is, he is, a mocking caricature of oneself, but oh yes, a salutary reminder. After all, Frances had fallen for Johnny's windy rhetoric, been charmed out of her wits by the great dream, and her life had been set by it ever since. She simply had not been able to get free. And now she was working for two or three days a week with a woman for whom The Defender played the same role as the Party had done for her parents, who were still orthodox communists and proud of it.
Some people have come to think that our – the human being's – greatest need is to have something or somebody to hate. For decades the upper classes, the middle class, had fulfilled this useful function, earning (in communist countries) death, torture and imprisonment, and in more equable countries like Britain, merely obloquy, or irritating obligations, like having to acquire a cockney accent. But now this creed showed signs of wearing thin. The new enemy, men, was even more useful, since it encompassed half the human race. From one end of the world to the other, women were sitting in judgement on men, and when Frances was with The Defender women, she felt herselfto be part ofan all-female jury that has just passed a unanimous verdict of Guilty. They sat about, in leisure moments, solidly in the right, telling little anecdotes of this man's crassness or that man's delinquency, they exchanged glances of satirical comment, they compressed their lips and arched their brows, and when men were present, they watched for evidence of incorrect thought and then they pounced like cats on sparrows. Never have there been smugger, more self-righteous, unself-critical people. But they were after all only a stage in this wave of the women's movement. The beginning of the new feminism in the Sixties resembled nothing so much as a little girl at a party, mad with excitement, her cheeks scarlet, her eyes glazed, dancing about shrieking, 'I haven't got any knickers on, can you see my bum?' Three years old, and the adults pretend not to see: she will grow out of it. And she did. 'What me? I never did things like that... oh, well, I was just a baby. '
Soberness soon set in, and if the price to be paid for solid worth was an irritating self-righteousness, then surely it was a small price for such serious, scrupulous research, the infinitely tedious rooting about in facts, figures, government reports, history, the work that changes laws and opinions and establishes justice.
And this stage, in the nature of things, would be succeeded by another.
Meanwhile Frances had to conclude that working for The Defender was not unlike being Johnny's wife: she had to shut up and think her own thoughts. This was why she had always taken so much work home. Keeping one's counsel, after all, takes it out of you, wears you down, it had taken her much longer to see that many of the journalists working for The Defender were the offspring of the comrades, though one had to know them a while before the fact emerged. If one had a Red upbringing, then one shut up about it – too complicated to explain. But when others were in the same boat? But it was not only The Defender. Amazing how often one heard, 'My parents were in the Party, you know.' A generation of Believers, now discredited, had given birth to children who disowned their parents' beliefs, but admired their dedication, at first secretly, then openly. What faith! What passion! What idealism! But how could they have swallowed all those lies? As for them, the offspring, they owned free and roving minds, uncontaminated by propaganda.