Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman

Chapter Ten

Since half of me was my mother, it was natural that I shared some of her habits.

When it became intolerable, my thoughts too black and too weary to bear, I found myself pacing from room to room, as Ianthe had after my father died. Up to my study, an aimless rattle through the papers on the desk, along to the spare room, back down the stairs into the kitchen.

It was a reflex I must have learnt from her – a way of making sure that the body still functioned, of dealing with great loss.

The days dragged into night, night into day.

A man from Gleeson’s rang me. ‘Is that Mrs Lloyd? I have the new vacuum cleaner you ordered. Will someone be in the house on Wednesday?’

‘I don’t know,’ I replied.

‘Mrs Lloyd?’

‘Yes, yes, they will be.’

I was frightened by my responses. Overnight I had lost the ability to decide the simplest matter. I spent hours working out what I would say to Nathan – a whole architecture of new beginnings and promises, and as many hours deciding not to see him at all, ever.

If I closed my eyes, I was confronted by pictures of myself hurling violent abuse at Minty. If I dismissed them, equally vivid ones of hurting her took their place.

I went through all the dreary how-could-you-do-this-to-me-Nathan routines. I pointed out that I had been a Good Wife, I had loved him, produced his children, contributed financially. I had been faithful. Was this not a rotten return on that emotional investment?

And what about my lost job? How could that have happened? Where was the natural justice there?

Thus I yo-yoed. From job to marriage. Marriage to job. One was greater than the other, yet they were bound together.

I could not eat and, by the end of the week, I was shaky from lack of food.

I tried to read, but books failed me.

Music was worse.

When it grew dark, I lay on the bed with hot, burning eyes and begged for sleep.

From time to time, I was lucky, fell into a doze and dreamt, always, of a sun-washed garden: of the felty leaves of the olive tree, of smelling spring, fresh, light and sweet, of driving my fingers into the soil and letting it sift through them. In those dreams, a voice sounded across those gentle canvases: the garden anchors you, it suggested. Its complications and subtleties are never treacherous. Yet when I wrestled impatiently with the catch of the french windows and went out, I could not see it. The fug of traffic smothered its sharp, spicy fragrance, the soil was clogged and sour, the plants sullen. The garden was dead to me, and I to it. More often than not, I returned inside.

So I drank Nathan’s whisky and, as my mother had before me, I paced through the house.

‘He was so upset by the Suez affair,’ Ianthe told me, when I was old enough to understand what Suez was. ‘That was the killer.’

I think she was right. Suez cut to the quick of my father’s old-fashioned honour, rattled what we knew too late was his damaged heart muscle.

‘He was so angry,’ she said. ‘And humiliated by the botch-up. He said we were supposed to lead the world but we had turned out to be Hitlers. He was never the same afterwards.’

It froze hard and deep that January, the week of my eleventh birthday. The cold killed, cemeteries were overflowing and the council issued a notice forbidding people to die within the parish boundaries of Yelland. If there was the least likelihood of anyone doing so, they were to be conveyed to the next parish. My father had a good belly laugh over that one. ‘There’s nowt like a council that thinks it’s God.’

I’m glad he found something to laugh about, and even gladder that he could not possibly have seen the irony.

The cold flayed fingertips and cracked lips. On the morning of my father’s death, I pushed open my bedroom window and peered out. More snow had fallen during the night and cleared the sky. The moor was white and sparkling, and the wind had traced patterns on the beautiful snow plains. My breath vapourized into fog and my cheeks burned. I leant on the casement and imagined that outside was a giant birthday cake, just for me.

Downstairs, in his chair by the stove, my father toasted bread on a fork, drank his tea, and went through the daily pantomime of finding his glasses. Then he buttoned his tweed coat, and put on his flat cap. ‘I’ll fetch the shovel,’ he said to my mother, ‘and clear the path.’

He never returned.

It was Ianthe who found him, still holding the shovel in his rapidly cooling hands. A heart-attack. The manner of his death was so commonplace that it was unremarkable as, indeed, was his omitting to have made a will, which resulted in even more muddle and anguish. It is possible that my father believed doctors could heal themselves. More likely, though, he ignored his condition. If he had suspected his heart was so fragile, I am sure he would have tried to pay off his debts, incurred from having run his country practice on the basis that need came before profit.

I remember being so frightened by my mother’s face: it was tight, contained, dead-looking.

Only at night when she paced through the cottage did she give way. Lying freezing and anguished in my bed, I knew exactly which stair would creak, which door was heavy with damp, and which floorboard shifted outside my bedroom when she halted outside to check my breathing.

All the remaining winter and into a cruel spring, the wind rattled and snow crept into the oddest corners. It was a wet, dispiriting summer, too, and a dank autumn, and one day a van stopped outside Medlars Cottage.

‘These nice men are coming to take our furniture,’ a red-eyed and now wraith-like Ianthe announced. ‘We don’t need it, Rose, and we will have a little extra money for a new home. We’re going to a new home. Isn’t that a lovely surprise? Don’t worry, it will be fun.’ She held my hand tight as the men tip-tupped our possessions over their shoulders and carried them out to the van.

Tears streamed down her face and every line of her body shouted protest. Yet… ‘Rose,’ she proclaimed, through those tears in her trained way, ‘isn’t it lucky we have a new home to go to? We have lots to be grateful for.’

I looked from my mother to the rapidly emptying room. I had not realized that the skirting-board sagged, that the paintwork was so shabby, or that the floorboard under the window was rotten.

Why had I not realized, either, that Ianthe told lies?

How’s my little chickaninny? I heard my father murmur, deep in my head. I wanted him to be there, I wanted Medlars Cottage to remain ours, even with the cracks, and space, and emptiness. ‘But there’s nothing to be grateful for,’ I cried.

‘Shush.’ Ianthe drew me close to her body. I felt her hip bones press into me, smelt clean cotton and soap. ‘Shush, now’

But fathers came and went, homes were emptied, mothers were duplicitous. Despite the council’s best endeavours, death could not be ordered into obedience and the bright, scrubbed surfaces of my home hid secret caches of snow and ice.

For the first week books, sent by publishers hoping to bypass the system, continued to arrive. I did not bother to open the packages for I could guess what they were. The heavy biography. The large illustrated cookery book. A manuscript.

By the second week news had got round. The packages dwindled and, soon, the postman no longer rang the bell.

Minty wrote me a letter.

Dear Rose,

You won’t believe me when I tell you that I did not know what Timon planned until very recently. However, presented with the idea, I was not going to turn it down. I reasoned that you had had your turn, had your day in the sun, and now it was someone else’s, mine, and there was a natural justice in that. I know that natural justice is a concept you believe in and I hope one day that you will acknowledge that I made the right choice for me. But the purpose of this letter is to tell you that Nathan did not know. I miss our conversations.

Minty

I read and reread that letter, with its so-called honesty, its specious explanation and breathtaking assumptions, which were a mask for Minty’s hungers. Rotten fruit and rotten meat: she disgusted me and I rejoiced in my disgust.

I could not put off any longer telling Ianthe and I rang her up, got into the car and drove over to Kingston.

‘Cheap and cheerful, Rose, just what we need,’ had been Ianthe’s masterly verdict, delivered with typical Mrs Miniver good cheer, on Pankhurst Parade. Number fourteen was sited in one of several identical roads in the housing estate outside the town. Why Kingston? The reasons for Ianthe’s uprooting both of us from Yelland to down south were too complicated for either of us to attempt to disentangle at the time. Cheap it had been, cheerful, no.

Today, dressed in a Viyella shirt and wool skirt, she was sitting in her chair with her hands folded. This was Ianthe’s waiting pose. You see it in paintings: a female form – it is more often than not female – composed on a chair, or a bench, or a sofa, waiting for orders, or for life to begin or be over.

For such a busy woman, Ianthe had an extraordinary gift for it – waiting for me, waiting for a meal to cook, waiting for God in church in a hat and a tweed coat, waiting for events to right themselves, providing she observed the rules. Patience is as patience does, she said.

Unusually, she was pale and unmade-up, hair not properly seen to. ‘Tell me what’s wrong, Rose.’

I bent over to kiss her, sat down and took her hands in mine. ‘I’m in trouble.’

‘I thought as much.’ Ianthe’s fingers dug into my hands. ‘Not the children?’

‘No.’ I had to force myself to go on. ‘It’s Nathan. He’s decided to leave me for another woman. Actually for Minty, my assistant.’ I swallowed. ‘And I’ve lost my job… also to Minty.’

Ianthe shook her head. ‘I think you’ll have to tell me again.’

‘Nathan w-wants his freedom. He thinks that Minty will give it to him.’

She struggled to absorb the news, and tried to equate it with the image of the son-in-law she cherished.

It was a family joke that Nathan and Ianthe defied every mother-in-law cliche, for they loved each other. On holiday Nathan sent her extra-sized postcards, brought home presents of chunky jewellery and honey in china pots with overweight bees embossed on them. He fussed over her pension, arranged her tax and insisted on paying for medical insurance, of which she disapproved. ‘I don’t want to be a nuisance, and I don’t like private doctors,’ she told me. ‘I don’t like their hands. Too manicured.’

She dabbed at the wisps of hair at her neck. ‘You were always so busy, Rose. Never any time. Always on the run.’

I concede that we can only see events from our own point of view, but her reaction stung. ‘Is that all you can say?’

‘This is terrible.’ Ianthe leant back in the chair. She looked hurt and, suddenly, worn out by expectations that had turned out to be increasingly cruel in their disappointments. I got up and stood by the window. ‘That awful girl.’

That did not surprise me. On the one occasion Minty and Ianthe had met at a Sunday lunch, Minty had been unable to deal with Ianthe. ‘I don’t do older people,’ I overheard her explaining to a friend on the office phone. ‘I don’t get them.’ And Ianthe had displayed a surprising blind spot. ‘People like her make such a point of being youthful, which is very selfish. It makes the rest of us feel so redundant.’

‘Rose, you have talked to Nathan, tried to sort it out?’

‘Nathan did not give me much choice.’

Her tone sharpened. ‘Marriages don’t end just like that. You’ll see. Men are such funny creatures. They need a lot of looking after.’

‘That’s bad luck on Nathan, then, Mum. Minty’s only interested in number one.’

‘Perhaps Nathan needs reminding of how much he means to you. He’s had a little rush of blood to the head and, at the moment, he can’t see straight.’

‘Hardly to the head, Mum.’

‘You know what I mean.’

I did. Ianthe had been taught her views by her mother, who had been taught by her mother before her, women who had scrubbed their doorsteps, made their own bread, had their babies at home. She had bowed her head and made it her life’s work to obey their strictures.

The doorbell rang and I went to answer it. With surprising speed, Ianthe got to her feet and nipped into the downstairs cloakroom where she kept her emergency supplies of lipstick and powder, emerging half a minute later with smoothed hair and orange-pink lips.

Charlie Potter was delivering the bridge timetable. I observed my mother flirt gently and declare that, yes, she would be on time and she was planning to make a plate of his favourite egg sandwiches.

While they talked, I went upstairs to my old room, which remained unchanged but had a trick of growing smaller each time I went into it. At this rate, it would not be long before the white candlewick bedspread and the lamp with the pink shade dwindled to the size of doll’s-house furniture.

Downstairs Charlie Potter gave a belly laugh and my mother accompanied it with a discreet chuckle. It was a nice sound, Ianthe’s innocent flirting.

My childhood seemed very far away and I needed to grab something of it, anything. I opened the cupboard in which Ianthe stored my childish, but not discarded, objects. Dust filmed the boxes and there was a dry, musty scent of decayed lavender. Propped up at the back was a collage of newspaper cuttings and pictures from magazines and portraits of favoured authors pasted on to hardboard. It had occupied me for years and colonized the room. Ianthe hated it, but it had been my way of marking who I was and the interminably slow passage of growing up. I begged, salvaged, hoarded and squirrelled away cuttings, photographs, postcards, and from these images I built kingdoms. One of the earliest was a picture of an ordinary family having a picnic by the sea: Mum, Dad and two little girls.

I had studied that picture for clues as to what I was missing: smiles, a gingham tablecloth, potted-meat sandwiches, a father with his arm around his eldest, a mother busy with the picnic. How I had wanted to be that family. How I had wanted my father back, and to see my mother pat her hair into place when she heard his step in the evening. How I wanted him sitting at the table.

A family.

When I became a teenager the collage changed. My chosen images breathed of escape. Here was the picture of the ox-bow lake, and an aerial view of a Patagonian wilderness, pink, blue and grey-green, stolen from the National Geographic magazine. The glue had made its corners curl like apple peel. Here were the deserts, jungles and strange locations to which I ascribed magical powers to transform and enchant. Only step into them, and the girl in a cheap blue school uniform would become powerful and knowing. The more different and alien from Kingston they appeared, the stronger their fascination and the more I dreamt over them.

‘I’ll see you tonight, Charlie,’ called Ianthe downstairs.

I touched the postcards of Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, part of a picture sequence of writers, which formed the other side of the collage. The cards were brittle and darkened from age and handling, and drawing-pins had punctured the corners, but the pinched, intelligent faces of the women remained unchanged. They knew the secrets of men and women, and how they behaved, and I imagined, too, that I was going to help myself to their knowledge and that pinched intelligence.

After I came back from Brazil, I took Nathan to meet Ianthe for the first time and, wonderfully, they fell for each other on the spot. In the kitchen Ianthe served up beef stew and carrots with mashed potato. She arranged a careful spoonful of the latter on Nathan’s plate, and said with a shy, awkward tilt of her head, ‘You’ll think I’m silly because I’ve got no brains. I’m not like that lot up on Rose’s collage.’

Nathan leant over the table. ‘I don’t go for bonnets either. Never could get the hang of them.’

Ianthe had smiled, and dished out a plate of stew for me.

Now, sneezing, I went downstairs.

‘Such a nice man…’ Ianthe watched Charlie Potter’s retreating back. ‘Such a terrible wife.’

We sat and drank tea from a tray laid with a starched cloth, china and a plate of digestive biscuits arranged in a fan. Ianthe snapped off a tiny piece of one and ate it. ‘Do you think you helped Nathan enough? Do you think that he wanted more help from you?’

This was a reasonable question from the woman who yielded up all claims to a teaching career when she married and my father gained, in one clean economical pincer movement, an unpaid secretary, counsellor and cleaner to help run his practice.

‘We helped each other.’ I was careful to make the point. ‘Both of us did. But I’ll have to get another job. As soon as I’ve sorted my severance package.’

‘Oh, work.’ Ianthe raised her shoulders in a dismissive gesture.

‘Mum, I have to earn my living. It won’t be easy – I can’t not work.’

Ianthe regarded her tea thoughtfully. ‘That’s what I mean,’ she said finally, the ace barrister wrapping up her case.

To keep me, Ianthe had been employed for fifteen years in a travel agent’s in Kingston, issuing tickets and timetables. (And I’ll have none of your snobbishness about that,’ she said, more than once. ‘It does me fine.’) She looked at me sadly. ‘I worked because I had to take on your father’s role. You didn’t have to.’

My ringless hand, which held the cup, felt odd, weightless, unfamiliar.

Ianthe warmed to the attack and bore down on me, as she always had. ‘Nathan loves you. I know he does. You married each other and that has not changed. There are the children to consider. They suffer, too, you know, even in their twenties. Look at me, Rose. A woman must think about others.’ With an angry gesture, she refilled her cup and added the milk, a widow who bore the scourge of her conviction, a sense of duty and her decades of waiting with an unsettling grace. ‘Go home, ring Nathan and make him come to his senses.’

As always, I ignored Ianthe’s command but fretted about doing so. She had that effect. Instead I rang Mazarine in Paris.

‘Oh, the stranger,’ she said, coldly. ‘I’ve been waiting for some sign of life. Vee and I were just saying the other day how little we hear from you.’

‘I wanted to ring you, but I’ve been busy’

‘Too busy for your oldest friend?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, you need to look at your life.’

A ball bounced back across the court. Fifteen years ago I had told Mazarine something similar when she was in danger of losing Xavier, the man she eventually married. ‘Mazarine, listen, Nathan has left me.’

There was a silence. ‘I didn’t mean that much of a change.’

‘Will you listen?’

‘You know I will.’

I was so tired that I faltered over my French – we always talked in French – and Mazarine corrected it as patiently as was possible for someone as rigorous as she. She was as quick to take a point of view. ‘You mustn’t be too hysterical, Rose. This is only an interlude. Nathan will come back.’

‘Would I want him back?’

‘Whatever happens, you will adapt.’

‘What do I do?’

‘Do? You look for a job and wait for Nathan to find out that he has made a fool of himself. Rose, you must smooth this over. Be practical and wise, it’s our role in a crazy world. An affair is not such a huge thing, you know. Of course you know, and Nathan is bound to you. He just doesn’t see it that way at the moment. What have you eaten today?’

‘A biscuit. I think.’

‘Don’t be so conventional. It’s exactly what every abandoned woman does. Be different and eat a proper meal.’

Mazarine could not see the wry smile on my lips. This was the woman who, incoherent with shock, called me after Xavier, who had been eating foie gras, had dropped dead of a heart-attack in a restaurant. (‘So serve him right,’ said Poppy. ‘Foie gras.’) I had caught the next train to Paris and fed her soup, coaxing spoonful after spoonful into her unwilling mouth.

‘I’ll try’

‘You will do more than try, and you will come and see me. By the way, I thought Vee was looking a bit dowdy last time I saw her.’

‘Vee is happy and she’s lost her sense of style. It happens.’

‘In that case, there must be an awful lot of happy English women.’

I laughed until I was forced by lack of breath to stop, and I thought how odd it was to be laughing when my life was in ruins.