The Man Who Understood Women

by Rosemary Friedman

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

A delightful series of short stories, providing a composite portrait of women and how the worlds they inhabit have changed over the past 50 years. No longer satisfied with marriage being their only socially acceptable destiny, these women relish their new freedom. From the spinsterish Miss Phipps, who opens the gate for women to fulfill their dreams and fantasies through her lending library, to the divorced 53-year-old Helen, who road-tests her internet date and becomes empowered by her new-found ability to make choices, these stories portray women who overturn centuries of tradition, as they live fuller lives and follow their dreams.

Release date: November 7, 2013

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 260

Sample

The master of the short-story, Anton Chekhov, wrote about ordinary people and their survival strategies; he held a mirror up to nature, and – without striving for a climax or a neat resolution – showed that life’s most significant moments are often the least dramatic ones, for small things may be small only on the surface: the butter knife in the kitchen – ‘a deep cave paved with linoleum’ – can be as effective as a pickaxe.


Underplanted like forget-me-nots, among my novels, film scripts, TV episodes and plays, are my self-contained, short stories, which showcase the changes in the lives of Western women over the last half-century. HouseWife, Good Housekeeping and Woman’s Realm are some of the women’s magazines in which my stories appeared from 1956 onwards, and those titles are a direct reflection of their readers’ place in society.


In the post-war period, working-class women still slaved to make ends meet and put up with multiple pregnancies, while the upper classes hunted and socialised. Middle-class women were kept busy, playing second fiddle to their husbands – if they were lucky enough to have them – and managing their nuclear families; their sons were educated to follow in father’s footsteps and their daughters groomed for marriage.


By 1956 women had been enfranchised for over twenty-five years, yet often they voted as directed by their husbands and were far from emancipated. The clientele of Miss Phipps, the librarian protagonist of ‘The Magic’ (1956) consisted mainly of middle-aged matrons who shopped daily in local high streets and then returned to a suburban home with a neat garden. A woman’s life was at the bottom of the excitement scale, so women relied upon novels – often recommended by the librarian – to open the gate to a dream life in which their fantasies were fulfilled.

Yet within thirty years, their daughters would be running hospitals, banks and international businesses. Like Ibsen’s Nora, they had struggled successfully to escape from the Doll’s House.

In the sixties, a new phenomenon – teenagers – were no longer unpaid apprentices but earned proper wages, and with that came financial independence. British fashion icon, Mary Quant, showed them how to present themselves. Women’s magazines now carried advertisements of girls in miniskirts and hot-pants, with sooty eyes and short, sharp haircuts. Role models were pop singers and actors, athletes, hairdressers, photographers and models.

As these teenagers grew up, electronic machinery made housework easier. Women began to enter the workplace, which unleashed a relentless torrent of criticism, and discussion about the exact location of a woman’s place.


‘A decade later, women wore trouser suits with exaggerated shoulder pads that said, ‘Don’t you dare’, as they became lawyers and politicians, and Margaret Thatcher, who became prime minister in 1979, made the eighties her own.


By the nineties, women MPs were the norm and it had become clear, even to the long-married Maisie (‘The Moules Factory’, 1998) that her ‘days of domestic servitude passed in a bungalow in Burlington, Massachusetts, had hardly amounted to a full life’.

By 2000, independent women did not necessarily believe that marriage was for life. In ‘A la Carte’ (2010), a divorced primary school teacher, fifty-three-year-old Helen, road tests Dominic, whom she meets through the Internet. She feels empowered by her considered decision – not to embark on a new relationship.


While most of the stories portray women, as they began to overturn centuries of tradition, prepared to live fuller lives and to follow their dreams, I could not resist including ‘Mea Culpa’, (1960) – an amuse-gueule or grace note – in which women do not feature at all.


Rosemary Friedman
2013





1956


Miss Phipps knew what they said about her in the library. With her eyes cast down and seemingly intent on a list or catalogue she would listen to their conversation.


‘Ask her if this is any good,’ young Mrs Withers would say to her husband, flicking over the pages of a green-backed novel marked with an ‘R’ for Romance.

Mr Withers would glance up at Miss Phipps and then move a little closer to his wife. ‘Make up your own mind, dear. If the old girl reads at all, I doubt if she reads romance.’ They would smile together and then bring the book over to the desk for her to mark neatly with her little rubber stamp.

From behind her desk, where she had to stand on a box because she was so small, Miss Phipps watched her customers. In more ways than one they were her bread and butter and they were a constant source of interest. There was the Colonel, six foot two, with his purple face and his grey, waxed moustache. He came in regularly for the stories of famous battles and famous generals and life in the colonies – you’d think he had had enough – which she put aside for him. While she was removing the ‘reserved’ label from its metal clip, the Colonel would clear his throat with a rumbling roar and out would come some gallant remark.


Sometimes he’d look down at her, standing there so demurely in her flowered smock, and say, ‘Y’re such a bit of a thing, m’dear; could pick you up and put you in m’pocket, what!’ Or at other times when she knew that his arthritis was bad because it took him so long to remove his gloves, he would look at her sadly and pat her hand. ‘Don’t work too hard, m’dear, there aren’t so many good people in the world.’ Then he’d pick up his book and his gold-topped stick, straighten his shoulders and, with the ghost of a once smart salute, make his way back to his service flat and his lonely gas fire.

There was Miss Loveday with her knitted stockings, her head held to one side and her passion for poetry; Dr Thomas who liked to relax with a ‘whodunit’; a pair of newly-weds who came in, all moonbound with love, and asked for a good story to read aloud to each other curled together on their sofa.

Once a couple of sixth-formers, from the school round the corner, marched boisterously in, their long striped scarves trailing down their backs, but when they saw Miss Phipps with her neat grey hair pulled tight into its neat grey bun they looked uncertainly at each other and one of them muttered: ‘Come on, Thompson, she’s probably never even heard of Gerard Manley Hopkins,’ and the glass panel quivered in its frame as the door slammed shut behind them.

Tonight the air was light and warm. Looking across the shop, past the skilfully displayed books and out through the window, Miss Phipps noticed that the pavement was dark with people strolling towards the park. Summer would not be long arriving and the busy, winter demand for cosy novels would soon be over. It was just on closing time and only Mrs Graves was still there. As soon as she had chosen her book Miss Phipps would lock up; there was work to be done in her little flat above the shop.


Empty-handed, Mrs Graves came over to the desk. ‘Good evening, Miss Phipps,’ she said. ‘I was looking for another book by Vanessa Chase but I think I’ve read all you have.’

‘There’ll be her new one out soon,’ Miss Phipps said, and picked up her fat pencil, blue one end and red the other. ‘Amber for Love, it’s called, I’ll keep it for you, Mrs Graves.’


‘If you would, Miss Phipps. She’s quite my favourite.’

Miss Phipps shut up the order book with a little thwack. Her eyes twinkled behind her glasses. ‘To be perfectly honest,’ she said, ‘she’s mine, too.’

Locking the door behind Mrs Graves and pulling down the blind with ‘Closed’ printed on the front, Miss Phipps smiled to herself. This was the time of day she liked best. Working quickly and with the agility born of use, she unfolded the dust sheets and unfurled them in the air, watching them sink down sighingly on to the tables of new books that stood in the centre of the shop. When all was tidy and the fat pencil lay neatly on the desk, carefully sharpened for the morning, she switched out the light and climbed the narrow staircase at the back of the shop to her little flat.

There was no one to welcome her in the living room, yet Miss Phipps, as soon as she had opened the door, said, as she always did: ‘Hello, my darling, I’ve had such an interesting day.’ As she spoke she looked towards the mantelpiece at a faded sepia photograph in a black frame. The picture was of a young, very handsome man. He was wearing the uniform of an army officer in the First World War and underneath his likeness was the inscription: ‘They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old.’


Miss Phipps put a match to the fire, ready laid in the grate, and kneeling on the rug, watched the growing flames licking up towards the neat spindles of wood. As she watched she thought, as she always allowed herself to think, in this lost moment between her two lives, of The Magic. The magic that began and ended with Captain Albert George Alexander Chase who looked down at her from the mantelpiece.


Miss Phipps, owing to the premature and tragic death of both parents – and this was many, many years ago – had been brought up by an aunt. The aunt, a Christian woman who knew her duty, took the orphan in and cared for her, as the years went by, with large helpings of the Bible and the stodgiest cabinet pudding in the world. Small wonder that when the handsome Captain Chase appeared on the scene in her eighteenth year, her ward lost her head as well as her heart and ran away to Brighton.

It was only a weekend. Two ecstatic days in a topsy-turvy world, then he had, heartbreakingly, gone off to meet his maker in the mud of France and she had returned to grim, silent lips and cabinet pudding.

Two days, among all the days it takes to make fifty-seven years, yet because they were magic days they had been enough. Miss Phipps listened to the wood in the grate crackling and snapping as the flames, now roused, curled angrily round it; but the sound she heard was the low call of seagulls swooping over the pebbled beach at Brighton.


It had been hot, she remembered, very hot. The French windows that looked out over the sea were flung wide open, and they had sunbathed, naked, in the big armchair in the bedroom. She could see the bedroom now with its giant bed between two rows of polished brass knobs; the fern, its edges brown and curling, in the fireplace; the green plush cloth on the table; the rose-patterned china wash-bowl and jug with the third piece to the hideous set in the pedestal cupboard beside the bed.


Two days, and in them he had tried to help her forget the twelve years she had spent in the tall old house – with the Bible but without the love that it taught. He had loved her, cherished her and brushed her long, jet-black hair. In return she had given him all the devotion no one had wanted from her ever since she could remember.

A fussy cascade of notes, sounding the half-hour, reminded Miss Phipps that she had dreamed for long enough. She looked up gratefully at the marble clock on the mantelpiece, which never failed to remind her of the too-swift passage of time. The clock had been presented to her on her fiftieth birthday by the governors of the orphanage to which, for many years, she had devoted all her spare time and money, and to whose small inmates she was known as Aunt Phipps.

The wood was now well alight, and, leaning one hand on the coal box, Miss Phipps got up off her knees. Slivers of pain shot up into her thighs as she straightened her legs. It was only when things like that happened that she remembered she was rising sixty. The magic had kept her mind young but it couldn’t do much about wrinkles or rheumatism. Unbuttoning the flowered overall she wore, because she thought it looked the part in the library, she thought about other people’s magic. Miss Loveday had her poetry; the Colonel had his memories of an adventurous and colourful career; the schoolboys had the magic of an uncharted future and the newly-weds had each other.


Reflected in the glass front of the bookcase the orange-tipped flames twirled higher up the chimney. Miss Phipps looked at the row of books on the top shelf; they were all by Vanessa Chase. What she had said was true when she told Mrs Graves that she was her favourite author. As she took the cover off her typewriter, which stood on the centre table, Miss Phipps smiled contentedly and thought of the millions of words which, taking her strength from the magic, she had written. She had given them all personality with the combination of the names of the only two people she had ever loved: Vanessa, her mother, and her darling Albert Chase.





1958


On the hottest of a stifling spell of summer days, Christopher Aldington lost something and found something. What he lost was gone for good but what he found was only a beginning.

Of course, he had known for weeks that Grandfather was dying. Grandfather himself had told him, when the nurse was out of the room, but Christopher had sat silent, embarrassed for the first time by the old man, his friend, and unwilling to believe.

Last night, unable to find a position in which he was cool enough to sleep, he had read his book until his eyes ached, then slipped silently out to the bathroom for a glass of water. He knew that it must be late, very late. Yet downstairs on the lower landing outside his grandfather’s room he saw his mother, Aunt Evelyn, Dr Matthews and a strange nurse he hadn’t seen before, in whispered consultation. He had gone quickly back to bed, unwilling to know what was going on, and fallen asleep immediately. This morning he had been reluctant to wake up, keeping his eyes tightly shut against the sunlight that spilled over his bed. He heard his mother open the door and by the tone of voice in which she said: ‘Christopher, wake up, dear!’ he knew that it was all over and that life would never be the same again.


In the stuffy, darkened, blind-drawn dining room he forced himself to eat a piece of toast. Aunt Evelyn was crying and his mother put her arms round her sister and said that it was a ‘blessed release’. Christopher looked at her scornfully, but she was too busy comforting Aunt Evelyn to notice. He took the large iron key from the mantelpiece. ‘I’m going into the Square,’ he said, but his mother didn’t even say

‘Don’t be late for lunch, Christopher’; she was busy with a tiny lace handkerchief.

Coming out of the gloomy hall, he had to stop for a moment on the top step to accustom his eyes to the brilliance. Being Sunday morning the Square was quiet, and the plane trees sheltering the gardens stood, black-green, majestically against a breathless blue sky.

The warm iron gate creaked as he opened it. The seats were occupied by the usual assortment of navy-blue or grey-hatted nannies, rocking their shiny prams or knitting. He walked on until he found one on which there was only a girl in a pink summer dress and white socks. She was sitting at the very end of the seat. Christopher walked to the other end and sat down.

He knew that he had come to say goodbye, that he would never again in the holidays sit in the garden. Everywhere he looked he saw Grandfather and the pain was too great for him to want to come again. Grandfather with his stick in the autumn crunching round the little paths, the red and yellow tight-rolled leaves like cornflakes crackling underfoot; Grandfather with his muffler and galoshes, stepping carefully in the snow, holding tightly to Christopher’s arm, fearful of slipping, the trees stark against a winter sky; Grandfather, a lighter step for spring, unearthing the first primrose with his stick, glad that the weather was warm enough to sit for a while. Grandfather, a few weeks ago, a red rose in his buttonhole, ashen-faced, sitting slumped upon the seat while Christopher ran frantically for help.


The girl in the summer dress was swinging her legs; Christopher could see the flash of white socks from the corner of his eye.


Now he was the only man in a household of women. His father had died in an air crash when he was nine, and in the holidays Christopher came home to the tall old house in the Square where he lived with his three small sisters, his mother, Aunt Evelyn and, until today, Grandfather who every holiday greeted him with the same words: ‘Thank goodness you’ve come, Christopher. I’m fed up with all these women.’

Every morning after breakfast he would go into the old man’s room and discuss the ailments of the world, or his own particular problems, until Grandfather wanted to get up. When it was time for him to go, Grandfather would let him get as far as the door, then say: ‘Christopher, would you like a piece of chocolate?’ And Christopher would say: ‘Yes please, Grandfather,’ and have to go back all the way across the room to get it. Two squares of the same make of chocolate every day that he had been at home since he was five, and now he was fifteen. It was always two squares only and never offered until he had his hand on the doorknob. Today, against his mother’s wishes, he had gone into the bedroom to say a last goodbye to his grandfather. The nurse, bustling starchily about, looked at him disapprovingly. Grandfather, it was true, was paler than usual, but looked only as if he were sleeping. There seemed nothing, as he had told his grandson, to be afraid of. At the door, Christopher had found himself hesitating and, meeting the nurse’s curious stare, realised that he was waiting, as he had always done, to be called back. ‘Christopher, would you like a piece of chocolate?’ But it was only in his own head. His grandfather lay peacefully silent, and the nurse said: ‘I think you’d better go now.’


He felt something warm and damp on his knees and, looking down, saw to his horror that great teardrops were soaking through his trousers and making dark patches on the grey flannel. He reached for his handkerchief but found nothing except a Victorian half-crown, his talisman, and a piece of string. The feet in the white socks shuffled nearer and soon a fold of pink cotton lay across his knee.


Nothing was said but he had to look up. There was no choice but to accept the proffered handkerchief. Accustomed to the continual baiting of his sisters, he waited for the caustic comment. After all, tears in a fifteen-year-old boy could provide the material for a whole afternoon’s entertainment. There was no comment. Christopher dabbed at his eyes and his trousers and then handed back the little white square. The eyes above the pink cotton were large and black. He felt a strange, drowning sensation and it was a few minutes before he was able to look away.


‘I’ve seen you here lots of times,’ she said.

‘I’ve never seen you.’

‘I know, you were always talking to your grandfather.’

‘I shan’t be any more.’

‘Is that why you were crying?’

Christopher nodded.

‘It’s very sad,’ the girl said, ‘but beautiful. I know because of my granny. He was a nice old man, wasn’t he?’

‘He was my friend,’ Christopher said. ‘I told him everything.’

‘What was that pink newspaper you were always reading?’

‘The Financial Times. Grandfather taught me all about shares and used to ask my advice. Sometimes he even took it.’


‘What else did he teach you?’

Christopher considered. It was a difficult question. They had discussed together everything from Horace’s Odes, Grandfather disagreeing with his pronunciation, to modern youth, which Grandfather, contrary to most of his generation, considered no worse than his own, only different. Sometimes they didn’t talk at all. The old man would bury his nose in The Times leaders, and Christopher would think about whatever happened to be on his mind. At times they both just sat, silent. But it was always a restful, amicable silence, a silence of perfect understanding.


On wet days they stayed at home and played Scrabble. Christopher had been ten points in the lead in their fierce contest, which carried on from one holiday to the next, when Grandfather had played his last game. He’d never again find such a keen opponent. He let his mind slip back over the years but could think of not one thing his grandfather had actually taught him.


He only knew that be. . .