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Black Grapes

Eva Maclean
Copyright © 2023 by Eva Maclean

The moral right of Eva Maclean to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons living or
dead is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission from
the author.
Contents

1. Chapter 1

2. Chapter 2
3. Chapter 3
4. Chapter 4

5. Chapter 5
6. Chapter 6

7. Chapter 7

8. Chapter 8
9. Chapter 9

10. Chapter 10
11. Chapter 11

12. Chapter 12

13. Chapter 13
14. Chapter 14

15. Chapter 15

16. Chapter 16
17. Chapter 17

18. Chapter 18

19. Chapter 19

20. Chapter 20
21. Chapter 21

22. Chapter 22

23. Chapter 23
24. Chapter 24

25. Chapter 25

26. Chapter 26

27. Chapter 27
28. Chapter 28

29. Chapter 29

30. Chapter 30

31. Chapter 31

32. Chapter 32

33. Chapter 33

34. Chapter 34
35. Chapter 35

36. Chapter 36

37. Chapter 37
38. Chapter 38

39. Chapter 39

40. Chapter 40

41. Chapter 41

42. Chapter 42

43. Chapter 43
44. Chapter 44

45. Chapter 45

46. Chapter 46

47. Chapter 47

48. Chapter 48

49. Chapter 49
Afterword
PART ONE
Chapter One

EFFIE WATSON AND I met on our first day at university. I guess that
makes it easy to remember. October 2009. We were young, innocent
and full of hope and the bad stuff was all in the future.
I had arrived a few hours earlier, hauling myself out of a taxi and
shuffling across the campus with my capacious rucksack and my
ancient wheely suitcase, standing nervously in line at the reception
desk, overcome with gratitude to be given a key to a room which
was mine alone. After a bit of leisurely unpacking and looking out
the window at the block opposite, I was sitting in a mindless trance,
overcome with affection for the single bed, the desk and chair, the
curtains, the washbasin in the corner, drunk with the happiness of
having escaped from home, when there was a knock on the door.
And in she bounced. My next-door neighbour.
‘Hi, I’m Effie.’
‘Olivia.’ My name sounded so much more cumbersome than hers.
Too many syllables.
 Blonde hair, blue eyes that roamed expertly and unashamedly over
all my stuff. She sat uninvited on my bed in her faded jeans and
oversized sweater, with long, droopy sleeves covering her hands,
tucked her bare feet up under her and smiled up at me.
‘You got anything to drink?’
I was struck dumb for a minute and then I was scrabbling
mentally to catch up. It was obvious to me, even in that first
moment, that she had everything I lacked. Perhaps if I stuck with
her, if she let me stick with her, some of it might rub off.
As it happened, I did have a bottle of vodka in my rucksack. I had
brought it in anticipation of the many lonely nights when I would be
sitting alone in my room reading a book or watching a video or
trying to write an essay. I wasn’t counting on much of a social life.
We finished most of it that evening.
Once we started to talk, there was no awkwardness between us,
perhaps it was melted away by the vodka, but I think it was more
due to Effie. I soon realised that she was one of those people who
could keep a conversation going all on her own if nobody else
chipped in. One of my aunties had been the same, people would
lighten up and relax as soon as she got going. It was a talent I had
always wished to have. Effie and I sat and exchanged confidences as
easily as one might tell secrets to a stranger you won’t see again.
Except of course that we would see each other again, many times,
over several years. Effie was the first person to whom I was able to
explain the bizarre family circumstances that I had for so long
sought to hide from all my friends. Her background was also
unusual.
 ‘My mum did a runner when I was eight’ she said. ‘She was
working at an insurance company and she ran off with her boss. My
dad threatened to kill the fellow but then he said it wasn’t worth it.
If he’d gone to prison, I’d have had nobody. After she’d gone, he
had to do all the stuff like meetings with teachers and all the rest of
it. He hated all that, but he did it. Actually, it was quite good for me
in some ways. I think mothers are stricter about what you do and
what you wear and all that. My dad just used to give me the money
and let me buy my own clothes, so I had what I wanted. Not a lot of
money of course, but I could spend it how I wanted. He’s had a
pretty rough life and he does drink a bit, but he’s looked after me for
all these years. I was glad to get away from Manchester in some
ways, but I do worry about my dad and I miss him. I’m glad he’s got
Albert.’ I must have looked confused. ‘Our dog’ she explained.
When we had finished our family histories and exhausted all other
topics of conversation, we walked over to the social building to see
what Freshers’ Week had to offer. It was a large modernist building,
looking like a couple of sugar cubes welded together, designed in
that post-war period when architects could apparently get away with
anything. The concrete areas were already showing signs of decay. I
don’t know why I noticed this. Maybe it steadied my nerves to fix my
mind on something mundane and material. Once we got inside,
there was no time to criticise the fabric of the building. There were
bodies rushing everywhere. The crowds and the music and the
atmosphere were almost overwhelming. The second-year students
running things looked grown-up and experienced to me and I could
feel myself shrinking, but Effie wasn’t fazed by any of it.
 ‘Mostly bullshit’ she told me, tossing her head. ‘Who wants to join
a fucking chess club?’
I had been thinking that I would like to improve my very
rudimentary chess, but I nodded and said nothing and we moved
on. I was grateful to be part of this twosome, I wasn’t about to
assert myself at this point. After a while I realised that Effie wasn’t
interested in any of these clubs or societies. She was looking for
interesting people, specifically interesting men. The guy running the
chess club, with his beard and acne, never had a chance. The
rowing club, with its six-packs and biceps, was a different story.
And the rowing club was equally keen on Effie. For if Effie looked
cool to me, the men were even more susceptible, and that was to
become a constant in our relationship over the years. I never felt like
the less attractive friend. I guess I was the less attractive friend,
because pretty well every woman in our year was less attractive than
Effie, but it didn’t bother me, because we weren’t in competition. I
somehow felt that she belonged to me and the pride I felt in her was
almost maternal. I loved walking down the street with her because I
loved watching men crane their necks as she sauntered past - me
sauntering vicariously in her wake.
Before I knew it, we were the nucleus of a large circle, because
women were drawn to Effie as much as men. She had that knack of
small-talk, of wittering on about nothing much, which broke the ice
everywhere she went and drew everybody in, even if afterwards
nobody could remember anything she had said. Women probably
envied her looks but liked her anyway and wanted to be in the group
that drew the men. Men were easy to attract, but some of them
became more wary as they noted how quickly others were cast
aside.
For Effie had a plan. A long-term plan. One that didn’t involve
getting shacked up with any of our redbrick university mates. They
were all good for passing the time, and she was never without a
man to tow around, but none of them had any place in her future,
not as far as she was concerned. What most people didn’t grasp
about Effie was that she was really clever. Hidden underneath the
ditsy exterior was a first-class brain. And while the rest of us were
just enjoying our three years and wondering what to do when it
came to an end, she was looking much further ahead.
‘The thing is, Livy, you have to go where the money is.’
‘Do you?’ I was a bit nonplussed by this.
‘Of course. If you want to have an interesting life. That’s why I’m
doing History of Art.’
‘But art has nothing to do with money.’
She laughed and shook her head. ‘Right now, art has everything
to do with money. Do you know how much some of these Neo-
Expressionist works are selling for? Art is one of the places people
store their wealth.’
Wealth was an alien concept to me at that time, something a bit
grubby, so I thought this was a bit of a strange conversation and I
assumed that Effie would in time come to the same conclusion. I
was studying French and vaguely hoping that it would lead me into
something other than teaching, but that was as far as my vision of
the future extended.
 For the moment we were Effie and Livy and we were having the
time of our lives. No matter how many other people were around,
we were each other’s primary person, like the sisters neither of us
had. People invited us to things as a pair and if either of us needed
somebody to steer us home or to hold our hair while we puked up
after a really bad drinking bout, we knew who that would be.
Being constantly short of money we both spent most of the
holidays working – shelf-stacking, call handling, waitressing – a lot of
waitressing. Effie made a few trips home to see her dad, I made no
trips home at all but did have a few meet-ups with my brother. It
was an awkward experience for both of us because we were joined
together by that part of our lives that we both wanted to forget.
There were very few happy childhood memories to laugh about and
we discovered that we didn’t really know each other. I think we both
hoped that we could put together some kind of relationship, but it
was obviously going to take time.
During the Easter holidays in our second year Effie invited me
back to Manchester with her for a weekend to visit her dad. They
had a small terraced house in Denton and I got a warm welcome
from Bernie and Albert. Bernie had a cleaner who came in once a
week, but no resident female, so he kept the house exactly the way
he wanted it. The coffee table had a dip in it right where he put his
feet. On the walls were posters of concerts featuring old bands –
very old bands. Grateful Dead, Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin,
Jefferson Airplane, Pink Floyd. Bernie had been an avid festivalgoer
in his youth, Bob Dylan at the isle of Wight in ’69 having been ‘the
high point of my life’ (apart from Effie being born, he hastened to
add). His most precious possessions were his turntables, his
speakers and his vinyls. I was fascinated, picturing Effie growing up
surrounded by rock music. It was not something she’d ever spoken
about. I also couldn’t help noticing that her speech, which up to that
point had sounded pretty unaccented, became Mancunian as soon
as we stepped off the train at Manchester Piccadilly. This wasn’t
something assumed, it seemed to be completely unconscious on her
part.
In the evenings we went to the pub. Not a posh pub (Manchester
has plenty of those) but Bernie’s local, where he seemed to know
everybody by name and where Albert immediately lay down under
the table as if this was his second home.
Back on campus the months rolled on by and our busy social life
continued. Right from the start there had been a steady stream of
boyfriends and Effie was nothing if not generous. It was like a
continuous audition process. Some of them got a few weeks, some
of them got a few months, but the next one was always lined up.
And she managed to move nearly all of them on with no hard
feelings by the simple expedient of lining up their next relationship.
Sometimes I was the recipient, sometimes it was one of the other
women. And Effie’s ex-men had the next best thing to references. If
Effie had been out with them, they were officially not a dork.
Halfway through our third year Effie met Pete Grantham, who was
doing an MA in mechanical engineering. When I say ‘met’, she
walked up to him in the bar and made her pitch. Engineers were
normally shunned as being non-intellectual, but Pete was sufficiently
attractive to get through the gates. It was soon clear to me that this
was more serious than her previous relationships – for one thing,
she wasn’t talking about it. This made me feel slightly excluded and
I could certainly see what was attractive about Pete. Effie and I did
seem to have the same taste in men. For that reason, I started to
make a conscious effort to stay away from them. I had a few one-
night stands over the next few months, but nothing that was going
to change my life. For four months Effie and Pete were inseparable
then, a few weeks before finals, she told me it was over.
‘He really likes you, Livy.’
‘Of course he bloody doesn’t. He really likes you, and you’ve
tossed him aside like all the rest.’
Quite why I was so angry on Pete’s behalf I don’t know. Maybe I
sensed that he was a more grounded person than the self-regarding
faux intellectuals we’d mostly been associating with and so more
worthy of decent treatment. Whatever the reason, I decided that no
way was I picking up this particular reject, and I went out of my way
thereafter to avoid him.
Finals came and went and the post-exam celebration sessions got
underway. I found myself outside the favourite student pub, full of
ecstasy and alcohol, being backed up against a brick wall by
somebody I didn’t remember ever meeting. I tried the old joke
about we haven’t even been introduced, but he was too busy trying
to get his hand down my jeans and my attempts to knee him in the
crucial place had failed to find their target. Just as I was wondering
whether to start screaming (surprisingly difficult when you’re not
used to making a fuss) he suddenly removed his grip and staggered
backwards. If the wall hadn’t been there, I might have fallen over at
this point as there wasn’t much else holding me up. When I had
righted myself and blinked a few times, I saw to my shame that the
person holding him in an armlock was Pete.
He sent my assailant on his way with a parting kick and came over
to me. I was trying to pretend I was somewhere else, anywhere
else. My legs felt weak, but the overriding feeling was
embarrassment, as if what had happened was really my fault.
‘Are you OK?’
I straightened up and put my shoulders back. ‘Yes, I’m fine. Thank
you for that. He was being a bit of a nuisance. OK now. No problem.'
I gave him my best smile. Move along. Nothing to see here.
He took my arm. ‘Come on. I’ll walk you home. He might be
hanging around.’
That was hard to argue with, so we walked slowly back to the flat
I was sharing with Effie and a variable number of other people.
There was no conversation. I’d already thanked him and I didn’t
know what else to say. I just wanted the walk to be over and he was
also silent, probably regretting that he’d got himself into this. There
was no way I was going to let Effie see me walking in with him, so I
repeated my thanks on the doorstep and pointedly declined to ask
him in. He turned, waved and walked off and that was the end of it.
Three days later I was pleased to see him going about with
Melanie from the student house next door. Effie was obviously still
co-ordinating the project. And she herself had taken up with one of
the younger lecturers.
‘We’re all leaving anyway, so I think his duty of care towards me is
pretty much at an end’ she told me.
 In fact, our whole lovely existence was now at an end. The
outside world was not as impressed with us as we were with
ourselves. Most of us drifted down to London, where Effie and I
found a flat in Earls Court, shared with three other people and two
cats. The building was stucco-fronted and had once been a beautiful
family residence with the top floor, where we were, allocated to the
servants. Being at the top of the building, we were safe for the time
being from the damp that was making its way inexorably up the
walls, but excessive insulation in the loft meant that we sweated and
gasped in the summer and the winter was spent huddled over
electric fires as the central heating installation had come to a halt on
the floor below. Decades of neglect and sub-letting had left the
steps up to the front door actually crumbling and flakes of stucco
drifted down like confetti whenever the door was slammed.
Our landlord was a swaggering fellow with the sort of eyes you
see on the slab at the fishmongers and a beer gut that always
preceded him into the room. He was given to ‘spot checks’ early in
the morning, presumably in hopes of finding us in states of undress.
One morning while he was engaged in this pursuit Effie appeared
and motioned him into her bedroom. He made it in there in ten
seconds and shot out equally fast thirty seconds later. Effie never
would give me any details, preferring just to wink, but there were no
more spot checks.
Being in London was not cheap and the graduate premium
seemed to no longer exist, so we had to consider our options. I
managed to secure a junior admin role in a software company, which
I decided would do for the time being, and Effie was accepted for
the MA course in Renaissance Studies at London University, to start
the following year. In the meantime, she got a job in a pub – not a
smart pub, or even a wine bar, but one of the scruffier sort. When I
queried this choice, she said it reminded her of her dad’s local in
Manchester and she didn’t want to be serving drinks to posers. It
was one of those large, tasteless London pubs, with the TV
permanently on over the bar. Punters would come in, order their
drinks, go next door to the betting shop to place their bets, then
come back to watch it on the screen. There was a constant
background hum of four-letter words and at the end of each evening
the floor would be littered with discarded betting slips. It was a place
in which Effie’s looks and her talent for meaningless small talk were
an immediate draw and would have been enough to offset any
shortcomings in the area of giving the correct change or washing
glasses. She was the target of much ribaldry and familiarity, which
she ignored with aplomb. Then one day Jackson Welby walked into
the pub and changed her life.
‘He runs a gallery’ she told me breathlessly the following week
when I went into the pub to see her. ‘In Mayfair. He just walked in
one day last week and we got chatting. He’s offered me a job.’
I looked quickly down the bar to make sure her employer was not
within earshot. He was a soft-footed character who liked to sneak up
on Effie – her response was usually to step back smartly and land
innocently on his foot and she had taken to wearing heels for this
purpose. He was watching the horse racing on the screen, swearing
under his breath and oblivious to anything else.
 ‘This guy Jackson, are you sure it’s not you he’s interested in,
rather than whatever he thinks your accomplishments are?’ I was
sure any accomplishments would have been fabricated, probably
very imaginatively.
She smiled and put a hand on my arm. ‘Livy, you’re always so
negative. Jackson isn’t interested in me. He’s gay. Isn’t that
marvellous?’
I had to agree about that. It sounded very restful. I thought of
Richie and Lawrence in my office - the easiest people in the
organisation to talk to, no hidden agendas. A few days later we met
Jackson for drinks and I discovered that he was anything but restful.
He was in his thirties, dressed (amazingly) in a suit, clean shaven,
with a lot of dark, messy hair – nothing punk or arty about him – but
he was full of ideas and with a sober, cynical understanding of the
art market. He seemed like the ideal employer for Effie and I told
her so the next day. But I had one reservation.
‘You’re going to be a receptionist, Effie. That doesn’t seem to be a
good use of your degree.’ In fairness, it was still a step up from the
pub. ‘And what about your MA course?’
‘Darling, I won’t need the course now. This is not like being a
receptionist at the dentists. I’ll be meeting clients and showing them
artworks and in time I’ll be curating exhibitions. People don’t walk in
off the street, they’re admitted by appointment. According to
Jackson, most of them are filthy rich and totally ignorant. They want
something to hang on their wall which will impress other people, and
that’s what we provide.’
 As usual, she was way ahead of me. Proximity to money. She had
arrived there in record time.
Chapter Two

WHILE EFFIE WAS MAKING her way in the art world, I had managed
to push my way into the publishing industry, courtesy of one of the
contacts from my previous job. It’s always about who you know. It
wasn’t fantastically well-paid, I think salaries are scaled down for the
privilege of working with an acceptable product, but I wasn’t about
to complain.
Effie and I had both started renting separate flats by now. She
stayed in Earls Court and I moved to Victoria, where I paid over the
odds for a one-bedroom flat that was smaller than some studios, but
gave me the massive advantage of being able to walk to work. It felt
more grown up than the two- girls-living-together cliché and I
wanted to be able to conduct my personal life without having it
curated by Effie. She probably felt the same. So we started to see a
bit less of each other and I was able to enjoy a level of cleanliness
and tidiness that she would have derided as bourgeois. But we still
met up regularly and it was in a wine bar in Earls Court that I first
heard about Hugo Fincham.
 We were sitting in a massive space done up like an American
prohibition-era bar, with live jazz and waiters in shirt sleeves and a
large array of unfamiliar cocktails. You really had to admire the
amount of thought that must have gone into the place. We were
drinking vodka martinis with bay leaf syrup and it didn’t take too
many of those to cast a rosy glow over everything we discussed.
Nevertheless, I did have a few reservations about Effie’s latest man.
Looking back on it, I should have had a whole lot more.
Hugo had come into the gallery (by appointment, of course)
looking for artwork to go in his house in Cheyne Walk (‘Cheyne
Walk!’ Effie squeaked, ‘Where Mick Jagger used to live!’). Jackson
was out of town that day so Effie was Hugo’s art consultant and at
the end of several hours browsing the gallery together they arranged
to meet later for drinks. Hugo met most of Effie’s requirements – he
was tall, nice-looking, wealthy (banking job and shares in a
vineyard), passable sense of humour (she was unable to offer any
evidence to support this assertion) and reasonably intelligent (we
assumed, as he had an Oxford degree). I encouraged her to think of
his shortcomings, which I was sure must be many and significant in
order to balance all these virtues. She was unable to come up with
any, which suggested to me that she was not doing proper due
diligence (yes, I was learning all the business jargon now).
‘The thing is Effie’ I was suddenly aware that I was slurring my
words rather badly ‘he doesn’t sound like our sort of person.’
‘What’s our sort of person then? Young and poor?’
I thought about this as best I could. ‘Maybe. I don’t know.’
 ‘You can’t just rule people out because they have money. It
usually means that they’re successful. Why do you want to go out
with failures?’
I didn’t have a response to this, but I thought about it. A few
weeks later I met a lawyer called Jamie at a party. Remembering
what Effie had said, I agreed to go out with him.
Effie pronounced herself satisfied with his credentials. He was
good-looking, reasonably intelligent and with good earning potential.
For some reason this endorsement caused me to slightly lose
interest in him, but it was good to have someone to go places with
and the sex was good, so I hung onto him. After so many years of
being assured by my mother that nobody would ever want me, I felt
lucky to have someone. I was sure I would never be able to treat
men as infinitely replaceable, in the way that Effie did. In retrospect,
that was part of my problem.
When Effie suggested a meetup at a new restaurant opening in
Notting Hill it was good opportunity to appraise each other’s partner.
It was one of those self-conscious openings with an over-designed
interior and a tasting menu. This meant a procession of about ten
small dishes, chosen by the chef according to whatever ingredients
he needed to get rid of. All of the dishes were over-engineered, if
not particularly tasty, and the people at adjoining tables seemed
more interested in photographing the stuff than actually eating it.
Each serving was preceded by a short homily in which the dish was
presented and described with great reverence by the server while
we all sat there looking suitably impressed and grateful. It was a
very tedious dining experience. After the third presentation Effie had
had enough. ‘Just leave it there, love, we’ll guess what it is.’ The
server retreated, offended, and Hugo, who I guessed had booked
this restaurant, looked pained. He had a lot to learn about Effie, and
I hoped he realised that. I was glad to see that she still had no
patience with bullshit.
Hugo was exactly as Effie had described him. Tall, good-looking,
well-dressed, obviously prosperous and very attentive to her – lots
of hugs and adoring looks. So far, so boring. But what was more
interesting, I thought, was that he was happy for her to run the
conversation. A lot of men would have been interrupting her or
trying to shut her up. Hugo did none of that. He sat in silent
admiration while she rattled on and I realised that she was exactly
what he needed. He was rubbish at small talk, but now it didn’t
matter because he had Effie to do it for him. She gave him cover
and with her looks she diverted attention away from him. Any
number of social occasions that he probably hated would now be
easier because he had Effie.
When Effie paused for breath, the real business got going. The
men sized each other up and then went out to bat. They started
with cars. Both had expensive models which I can no longer
remember. Hugo had two, so was probably the winner of this round.
I had an old VW Golf and Effie had somehow managed to fail her
test three times (‘I just didn’t like that examiner’) so we didn’t have
much to contribute to this topic. Then they got onto sport (rugby
and tough mudders). Effie announced that I had been in the
university first rowing team and they gave that a nod and carried on.
Careers were next of course and Jamie’s prospect of taking silk
sounded good until set against Hugo’s family vineyard.
By the end of the evening, Effie’s initial meanderings
notwithstanding, the men had done most of the talking and we had
done most of the drinking, so we both needed assistance to get
home. I decided, as I tumbled into bed with a feeling like something
had come adrift in my brain, that maybe Jamie was not the man for
me.
When we met up the following week for a wander round the
National Gallery, I discovered that Effie had come to no such
conclusion in respect of Hugo.
‘I think Hugo will be making me an offer soon’ she said as we
stood in front of Monet’s various renderings of Waterloo Bridge. ‘He
stayed at the Savoy, you know.’
‘What, Hugo?’
‘No silly, Monet. He came over in the 1870s to escape the Franco-
Prussian War and then again at the turn of the century.’
‘But do you love him, Effie? Hugo, I mean.’
She turned to look at me and then wandered into the next room. I
followed behind. We were done with Monet.
‘I dunno’ she said. ‘Have you loved any of the people you’ve been
out with?’
I gave this some thought. Most of my relationships could now be
viewed from a distance, as it were, so they had been stripped of all
angst and euphoria. ‘I don’t know either.’
‘You see? It’s a meaningless concept.’
 ‘But if you’re thinking of spending the rest of your life with
someone…’
‘That rest of life stuff is rubbish. Most marriages don’t last more
than ten years. Hugo has what I want for now.’
I couldn’t argue with that and I thought about it a lot on the tube
back to Victoria. My parents’ marriage hadn’t lasted much longer
than ten years, although it had been dead long before the end, the
frustration and resentment almost tangible whenever they were in
the same room.
When I was fourteen my father evidently decided that his time
had now come, and he decamped off to his mistress in Brighton,
followed out the door by a flood of screaming recriminations and
threats of suicide. If I had hoped that peace might be restored once
one of the antagonists had been removed from the fight, I was soon
disabused of that idea. My mother’s dramatisations as the woman
scorned were now directed at us. My brother managed, via football,
cricket and motorbikes, to largely remove himself from the scene,
leaving me as the main focus of her hatred and disappointment. It
was always going to be thus. Even the worst mother will have a soft
spot for her son. A daughter is too much of a reminder of her
younger and more desirable self.
And so, for the next few years I kept my head down both
metaphorically and literally, shielded by the pages of books. I kept
on top of the household chores which my mother no longer
considered to be her responsibility and counted down the years and
months until I could do what my father had done and get out. When
I was seventeen (I was a late starter, for all the reasons above) I
met my first proper boyfriend. Felix was dark-haired and brown eyed
and had a Honda 250, and sitting on the back of the bike as we
roared down the road (no silencer), holding proprietorially onto his
leather jacket, I felt like a new, exciting, escaped person.
Unfortunately, I hadn’t felt sufficiently confident to explain my
domestic circumstances to Felix, although he probably wondered
why he always had to pick me up and drop me off at the end of the
road. One day he presumably decided to ignore this stricture and
knocked innocently on the front door. This resulted in a disturbing
confrontation with my mad mother, following which he promptly
dropped me in favour of Beth, who was supposed to be my best
friend. The pain of that betrayal far outweighed any feeling of loss in
respect of Felix.
So I had seen plenty of evidence that Effie was right, the rest of
life stuff was rubbish, and anyway she didn’t need endorsement
from me or anybody else. She had determined on her course of
action. It might not have been the beginning of the end, but it was
certainly the end of the beginning.
Chapter Three

INSTEAD OF A HEN do (thank God), Effie hosted a get-together in a

pub in Maida Vale for all our university friends, or at least all the
ones we were still in touch with. This would probably be her last
seriously downmarket social occasion and I think she realised that.
She stipulated no significant others, so we all more or less took up
where we had left off.
There was a lot of stuff to talk about and lots to drink and some
people had done impressive travelling or landed impressive jobs, but
in the end none of this was much discussed. It says a lot, I think, for
Effie’s social influence that all other achievements were abandoned
as conversation topics in favour of marriage, which most of us
considered to be the least cool option ever. To Effie’s credit, she
wasn’t having bridesmaids or a wedding list and there was no
discussion of the actual event, but she sat in the corner with
everybody around her and held a masterclass on the subject of her
new husband-to-be. She answered questions concerning his net
worth (she didn’t know precisely, but it was substantial), his family
(bonkers, most of them) and her plans after married life (shopping,
travelling, whatever). It was a testament to how much we had
assumed the priorities of the world of work that the pursuit of
money didn’t sound particularly outlandish to a bunch of people who
a few years earlier would have regarded rich people with distaste.
Towards the end of the evening Pete came over to talk to me.
He’d spent the summer in South America and was now working for a
new start-up doing engineering animations (everything’s being done
by AI now). He looked tanned and healthy and quite a contrast to
Jamie who had the complexion of somebody who spends a lot of
time squinting at small print. Melanie was nowhere to be seen, so I
guessed she was out of the picture. He was obviously taken aback
by Effie’s proposed nuptials and said he hoped she knew what she
was doing. I wasn’t able to offer any reassurance. As it happens, any
reassurance would have been misplaced, but we didn’t know that.
‘And how about you?’ he said, ‘What are you doing now?’
I told him about my publishing job, which probably sounded more
impressive than it actually was, but he seemed to think I’d done
pretty well just to get into the industry. I was trying not to think
about our last embarrassing encounter and he didn’t refer to it. It
was one of those times when I wished I was like Effie, able to just
rattle on about anything, because I was remembering that I had
always thought he was attractive, and now I wondered how on earth
Effie could have given him up. It was important to keep up with the
social chitchat in order to keep such thoughts at bay.
The next evening, I left my office and there he was, leaning
against a pillar.
 ‘I realise you’re a very independent woman, but I thought I’d just
make sure nobody was accosting you on the way home.’
I laughed and took his arm and all residual awkwardness between
us was gone. And so it began. Three mornings later I woke up and
looked at his face on the pillow and thought that maybe Effie was
wrong. Love was not a meaningless concept.
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we encounter unpleasant expectorations, except in the immediate
haunts of admittedly hooligan circles.
They say that nowadays it is possible to talk of any subject as long
as one does so with sufficient delicacy and avoids the words of the
gutter and the club smoking-room. Still, I admit that it is difficult to
explain that just as we feel that every other necessary function of
nature should be performed without attracting attention to it, so I
feel that I would rather not be informed every time the bold
experimenters in marriage see fit to take a partner.
When outspokenness is for the public good, when a “hushed-up
disease” becomes disastrous simply because it is “hushed up,” then
there is some meaning in making a gospel and parade of the truth.
But I really think it is time we accepted the convention that men and
women seek each other’s society in order to exchange ideas.
Strangely enough it is often the case. A woman has only to talk and
listen well, and she will find that the less she desires love the more
friendliness she will receive from men. Saint Teresa of Spain was an
excellent example of this. I suppose she had more warmly
affectionate friendships with men, without a shadow of scandal, than
any other woman. A perfectly frank woman will generally keep men
as her friends, they will not dare to be her lovers unless she
deliberately ceases to be frank.
Unfortunately experimenters have to be original in order to be
successful. The people for whom I am sorry are those who are led
into making experiments which are unnatural to them by the
hypnotic power of seductive example.
Save us from our imitators is the cry of all great poets; and the only
valuable advice one can give is, if you must experiment be careful
that you lead the way and are not seduced by the example of
anyone else. If by nature you must follow, it is a sign that you are a
gregarious animal, and had better remain with the main body of the
herd. The real experimenters are quite ready for solitude, and when
they have found fair country and good pasture the rest of the herd
will come over in a body with one accord. It is no use perishing with
cold on the way to the Pole, unless you have the capacity to find it.
Much better stop at home by the fireside.

X
THE SAVAGE, THE BARBARIAN, THE
CIVILIZED
 X

THE SAVAGE, THE BARBARIAN, THE

CIVILIZED
The stately Spaniard, graceful as a tree swaying in its dance with the
wind, savage and noble.
The Nihilist Russian, watching in her lair, instinctive and ready to kill.
Her hatred of government marking her as the free barbarian.
The Parisian, knowing the correct convention of a funeral or an
adultery, civilized and logical to her glove-tips.
Of the three women the two first are simple, but civilization is
complex, and it may mean to be cultivated with regard to intellect
like the Jesuits, art like the Greeks, morals like the Irish, or religion
like the Arab.
In which way will the women of the future develop? Will she strive
like the frequenters of the salon of Madame de Rambouillet to excel
in intellect, or like Saint Teresa of Spain as a religious mystic? We
have seen both these types, and I have no doubt that we shall see
many shining examples of morality, but at the moment I cannot
think of any conspicuous woman of whom no one has whispered
scandal. For in these days if people do not trip in one direction, it is
said it is because they prefer to trip in another; and soon it will be
taken as a sign of evil life that one should live in a desert on bread
and water. I mention in passing that our late Queen is usually
admitted to have been conspicuously moral. In the arts we have
seen, and hope to see again, great women novelists and actresses.
In history we have an array of splendid uncivilized women
immortalized from all time—Medea, Electra, the Roman empresses,
Queen Maive of Connaught, the Russian heroines. Whether they
excelled most as noble savages or as gloriously barbaric haters of
ordered life, I cannot stay to consider.
For I want the women who read this book not to dwell upon the
past, but to look forward to the great century that is waiting for their
alchemy, to transmute its life by giving it a more intent purpose. Are
we going to be like the very badly dressed lady of title, whom we
heard the other day imploring us to behave ourselves like other
people, just as we dressed like other people, in order not to be
conspicuous! Or are we really going to make something out of this
brilliant opportunity given us by the “refusal of the vote,” and the
quickly spreading passion of enthusiasm which is moving the women
of all nations to make a fight against the patriarchal faith of the
goat-worshippers.
Mr. Gorst says that the object of life is making (moral) love. I think
the object of our life is to make experiments, as gardeners make
experiments in floriculture. I quarrel with absorption in the family
because family jealousy is a bar to that kind of social intercourse
which is the only education worth having, and the only experience
which can lead to any result worth having. They say in France, “Love
is a play in which the acts last five minutes, and the entr’actes for
any time you like.” If it filled the whole of life it would only mean
that life would be as short as that of the ephemeral winged
creatures of the insect world. Family love cannot absorb us if we
wish to survive. We are complicated, and our possibilities of social
and political intercourse are a subject of endless interest and inquiry.
Let us then start again on our voyages of discovery, this time with a
little more purpose in our method and delight in our hearts.
Women want the vote, it is true, but what they want more, and what
they are getting, is strength to hammer through the prisons which
have kept them for many centuries packed away conveniently for
use on occasion. They are all coming out into the daylight for the
first time within our memory, and now the real movement of life
begins.
We want to change public opinion about divorce, contagious
diseases, and forethought with regard to breeding. We want married
women to recognize the various proportions of sexuality in each sex,
to make allowance for the passionate, and to admit that we are
greatly indebted for our culture to individuals who do not desire to
be parents.
In conclusion, all I can say is, “Talk! talk! talk!” We are more moved
by one conversation than by many eloquent discourses. After all,
what is so permanently delightful as communion of ideas? So once
again I say, “Go on talking until the savage, the barbarian, and the
civilized women have found out all they can learn from each other.
Plenty of men will be glad to help them in their discoveries.”
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MODERN WOMAN:
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