Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman

Chapter Three

When I rang Poppy was asleep. ‘I just wanted to see how you are,’ I said.

She was cross. ‘Mum, what time is this?’

‘Sorry. I just wanted to talk to you.’

‘Talk to me at a decent time.’ She sniffed. ‘How’s Dad?’

‘At work. A crisis.’

‘He enjoys those,’ said his daughter. ‘Makes him feel needed.’

‘He’ll be ringing you. I thought I’d get a word in first.’

Poppy’s sigh gusted down the phone. ‘Look, I know what you’re going to say… but there’s no need. I deal with my own life…’

There was a lot more in this fashion. Poppy was warning me politely to stay within the limits and, after a while, I gave up. She promised that she would come home soon, that she was well and happy, and that was that.

I fed Parsley her biscuits for elderly cats, and she drowsed on the shelf above the radiator. Parsley was sixteen, which I tried my best to ignore. She held my heart in her killer tawny paw and, as far as I was concerned, she must live for ever.

I stacked the breakfast things in the dishwasher, as I listened to the radio news. Another serial murderer in America, civil war threatening in Indonesia. A desperate British couple had travelled to South America to adopt a baby, only to find they had been duped.

I made myself listen. By the skin of my teeth, I had got away with it. My life had been filled with children and Nathan and work, which had given me happiness. I had drunk greedily of that happiness, knowing that others were denied it.

‘Is it possible to be happy when somewhere in the world someone is dying because they do not have enough food, or have been born with scrambled genes, or their very breath is a political problem?’ I asked Nathan as we sat at the table in the kitchen, soon after we had moved into Lakey Street. I was twenty-two, pregnant with Sam, dreamy and apprehensive. Before the babies arrived, there was still time for conversations such as this one. ‘Shouldn’t they overshadow us, those with dreadful lives, unconsciously perhaps?’

Nathan poured wine for himself, milk for me. ‘If you’re talking about the Freudian idea of “the Other” for which we unconsciously seek, then no, you’re applying it too loosely. Anyway, it’s just a theory and humans are far more selfish than you suggest.’

The reference to Freud floored me and reminded me that there was much I did not know about Nathan. Yet. ‘I’ve no idea about the Freud, I was just speculating,’ I said. ‘I hope we can be happy’

There was a dreadful silence and I wished I’d kept my mouth shut. ‘Rosie, look at me. Of course we can be happy,’ he said vehemently, troubled at the way the conversation had turned. I got up and kissed him until he forgot.

Luckily that was all in the past, just a ruffle in the surface of an infant marriage.

If there was benefit in the children leaving home, it was my rediscovery of delight in domesticity, which had been pushed to one side. Some women hated it, but I loved the business of cleaning – the ritual of sweetening and cleansing a house was as old as time and I liked the idea that I was one in a long line of women to perform it. Nathan loved my buffing and polishing too, and confessed that sometimes, at work or travelling, he thought of me wielding a feather duster in a polished, gleaming setting. It was an intimacy no one else shared. He added, with a grin, that I was free to use the feather duster on him anytime. I promised I would.

Today the table required its weekly polish. It was made from French walnut and unsuitable for use in the kitchen, but since we ate there, I had wanted a table at which we could celebrate our family life. Anyway, it was beautiful. I had seen that instantly when I came across it, bruised and battered, in a junk shop in Norfolk, and set about saving it.

The cleaning materials were kept in a room that opened off the kitchen. The estate agent who sold us Lakey Street, whose imaginative abilities could not have been faulted, referred to it as ‘the original game larder’ but it was more likely to have been the privy or washhouse. It was a tiny room and I piled into it all the objects I could not bear to discard – an old pushchair (might come in useful), Sam’s discarded Meccano (ditto) and Poppy’s fold-away pink Wendy house (a reminder of Poppy’s fantasy life). On the shelves stood my collection of vases, also liberated from junk shops – overdecorated china flutes, cheap glass that tried to look like crystal, and imitation art deco. I was touched by their makers’ ambition.

The polish spread milky clouds over the table surface, and I buffed away at it until I was satisfied that the satiny wood was protected for another week. Then I stood back and surveyed my work.

Since we had moved in, only a year after we were married, number seven Lakey Street had enshrined most of Nathan’s and my life together. Someone once told me that, if you knew your stuff, old walls could be read like books. The contents of houses were no less intimate and fascinating. If you were interested, it took only a glance at a room to tell who was fussy, who had given up, who despaired.

Lakey Street had been in a bad state of repair when we bought it and, consequently, cheap. We went into battle with the damp, the mice and the structural wobbles. Building it up had been like applying coats of lacquer: slow. Mistakes had been made – the unfortunate terracotta paint in the dining room, which we had never got round to changing, the bathroom put in in just the wrong place, the uncomfortable and ugly sofa in what had been the au pair’s room. When I chose it I had thought it smart. The less said about the ruffled blinds on the landing, the better. (‘Tart’s knickers,’ was Vee’s verdict when she first saw them. ‘Do you have a past, Rose?’) They were so old now that they were fraying.

Nathan and I had promised each other that when the children were off our hands we would do something about the house. We never had. We were too comfortable in it as it was.

I spent that Saturday morning peacefully in the kitchen sorting, tidying and making shopping lists. The radio was playing a Mahler symphony, full of despair and lament for the composer’s unfaithful wife. Every so often, the music forced me to stop and listen. Mahler’s anguish was our gain. The fresh, starchy smell of ironed clothes, mixed with beeswax polish and the faintest reminder of coffee, drifted through the room. Occasionally, Parsley got up and stretched.

I left the kitchen to carry the ironing upstairs to the airing cupboard in the spare room. A spare room was a luxury and, for that reason, I kept it immaculate. It had white cotton quilts on the two beds, a faint pink wash of toile de Jouy as curtains and, on the wall, a painting of white roses against a dark background, which had been a birthday present from Nathan. ‘It’s for our bedroom,’ he had said when he gave it to me. ‘The artist is Russian, quite young still, and his work is smuggled over. It’s a rather complicated arrangement, but I had a tip-off. When I saw it, I knew it was for you.’

Nathan often received tip-offs. He pretended they just came along, but I suspected he encouraged them because it flattered him to be in the thick of what was happening.

‘I adore it, Nathan,’ I told him truthfully. ‘It’s beautiful.’

He was pleased. ‘I’m so glad I’ve got you something you like.’ He was less confident when talking about the arts, which I found touching. ‘I like the way he paints in the older European tradition, Modernism doesn’t seem to have affected him,’ he added carefully.

‘No,’ I agreed.

The combination of realism with beauty, religiosity with diligent truth, melancholy and depth told me a lot about the unknown painter, and I was not surprised that Nathan had fallen for it. Arranged in a pewter vase, with a rosary thrown beside it, the roses were painted from many tints, grey, chalk, sludge, but the effect was of radiance, a sensual ruffle of blossoms, even though the artist had included a scattering of blown, brittle petals. The dark background masked other dramas, but I would never know what they were.

‘They remind me of you and the garden,’ Nathan said. We were standing looking at it together, and our reflections glimmered faintly on that dark background.

We never did agree on a place for it in our bedroom. Besides, I felt the painting was set off perfectly in the spare room.

I stacked the laundry in the cupboard, double sheets in one pile, pillow cases in another, shook out a couple of lavender bags to release their scent and left the room.

Sam was in London for the weekend and dropped in for Sunday lunch. Without Alice.

Sam was beautiful and fine but, to his credit, did not know it. He worked for a scientific research company in an old pig factory on the outskirts of Bath. He was considered a young turk, and had the salary and lifestyle to prove it. He had a long, strong finger on the pulse of genetic probabilities and anticipated the dawning of a world where human genes would be manipulated for everyone’s comfort and health. He truly believed that things would get better and I loved him passionately for himself and his beliefs.

He did not, however, hold a long, strong finger down on his emotional life.

As I got lunch under way, he wandered into the kitchen and took up a post by the window. I fluffed up the parboiled potatoes in the colander. ‘Why do you do that?’ he asked.

I spooned them into a tray of hot fat. ‘Makes them crisper.’

‘I must tell Alice. We’re both learning to cook.’

I pushed the tray into the oven. Sam should have known by now that Alice was not the sort of woman to appreciate cookery tips. What was more, her immaculate good looks and naked ambition made older women uncomfortable. ‘How is she?’ I avoided his eye.

‘Fine.’ A pause. ‘I think.’

‘You think?’

‘She went skiing in Austria.’ Sam dug his hands into his pockets, which made him look just like his father. ‘An all-party girl’

Alice hurt Sam regularly. He was admirably reticent about it but Nathan and I did not require chapter and verse. One fine day, he had met the golden-haired Alice at a conference and, far too quickly for warnings, had fallen in love. There was nothing to be done, except sit it out.

To go with the chicken, I had planned tarragon gravy and tiny carrots, peas and broad beans. The carrots were fiddly and I had to concentrate on scraping them. ‘Lay off, Mother,’ Poppy would say – but there was no point in having children and not involving yourself in their lives. It was as natural as breathing.

‘I asked her to marry me, you know’

The peeler caught my nail and I sucked my finger. Alice’s answer was reflected in Sam’s stiff attitude. I knew I should be the Samaritan, the wise counsellor, but Sam’s hurt and disappointment distressed me so much that I was at a loss. ‘Sam, why don’t you open a bottle of wine?’

‘It’s OK. I can talk about it.’

‘So…?’

‘She doesn’t feel there’s any point in getting married. She has a fantastic job and a fantastic salary. A fantastic flat. A fantastic car. The works. Why spoil a good thing?’ His eyes were dark with longing. ‘But I want to start something.’

‘Have you explained this to her?’

He shrugged. ‘Sure. Alice feels that people do unspeakable things to each other when they get married. She thinks it’s wrong to base your life on the idea of love. Women don’t buy that any more. As an organizational principle, love has flaws.’

‘Will you give up?’

‘I don’t know’

‘Oh, Sam…’ I took his hand and stroked it, willing his hurt on to me – which is what mothers do.

When the chicken was ready Nathan carved a couple of pieces of breast and arranged them in a fan on Mr Sears’ plate. I added the roast potatoes and vegetables, and a separately made portion of gravy: Mr Sears had an aversion to herbs. ‘I’ll only be a couple of minutes,’ I said, and left Nathan stirring the gravy and Sam laying the table.

Mr Sears lived on his own next door and was bedridden. I went down the stone steps to the basement of number nine. During the war, Lakey Street had been the random target of a bomb flung out of a plane on its way home to Germany, which had destroyed three houses. During the fifties, the council had nipped in and built three neither beautiful nor appalling replacements.

‘Who’s that?’ Mr Sears called at my knock.

‘Rose.’ I was never the person he wanted, which was Betty, his daughter who, long ago, had packed her bags and done a bunk. Betty got in touch with her father once a year, and then only grudgingly.

I let myself into his sitting room where he had been eased into his chair, surrounded by newspapers and full ashtrays. ‘I’ve brought your Sunday lunch.’

It was important to remind Mr Sears of what day it was because it was difficult for him to remember. Time no longer functioned for him in the conventional manner and calendars were of no use to him: he never looked at them. ‘That’s nice,’ he said, looking surprised. ‘What made you do that?’ Off and on, I had been bringing him Sunday lunch for the last five years.

I fetched a tray from the kitchenette, and settled it on his knees. ‘Chicken. Your favourite. Unless you’ve changed your mind.’

He poked at a carrot and I knew he would need encouraging.

‘Thought you might like to know, Mr Sears, they’re taking off the Routemasters on the eighty-eight and putting in pay-the-driver buses.’

‘Are they now?’

‘Everybody’s grumbling about it. There’s a protest meeting being organized.’

This information excited Mr Sears so much that he took his first mouthful and I relaxed.

Ours was a carefully developed friendship, which had taken years to mature. Before he had become housebound, Mr Sears had spent his days riding the buses. They were his passion and he had mastered the network of interconnecting routes, a king of the city. What he did not know about timetables, tickets and bus territory nobody knew. So, in a small way, I had made buses my business too. I told him about breakdowns, the latest adverts I had seen pasted on to their sides, and sometimes swung by the depot in Stockwell to give him an update.

Mr Sears’ other great passion was Parsley, who treated number nine as her second home. If the subject of buses ran out, we talked about her and Ginger, the cat Mr Sears had once had.

I checked up on the rota to see which of his Homecare nurses would put him to bed. ‘Marilyn’s coming this evening, Mr Sears. She’s the one you like.’ I heard that falsely cheerful note creep into my voice. It made me wince.

Mr Sears shot me a look.

‘I hope you enjoy your lunch,’ I said.

‘Chicken gives me a headache,’ he said, to punish me.

Immediately after we had eaten, Sam left Lakey Street, and I insisted that Nathan and I took our coffee out into the garden. ‘See?’ I said, flinging open the french windows. ‘Perfect’

The first growth of the Buff Beauty was struggling for space through the bullying Solanum jasminoides. The Marie Boisselot clematis had already put out a few leaf buds and the Rambling Rector rose was readying itself to dust, later, in the spring, its tiny creamy buds – like Poppy’s baby fist along the fence. In fact, all the plants were poised to shake out their plumage for their annual show. Lavendula ‘Nana alba’, Artemisia nutans ‘Silver Queen’ – my lovely, tender children. I almost forgot the olive tree in the stone pot. That, too, had a silvery gleam in the thin light.

During the winter, moss had edged over the stones and colonized the bench. They required dousing and scrubbing with disinfectant and I fetched a bucket. Nathan scuffed the patio with his shoe, revealing grubby streaks of the stone underneath.

‘You’ve been very quiet, Nathan.’ I scrubbed at the bench and wiped it over with a cloth. He watched me.

‘It’s far too cold.’ He sat down but did not look at me and I wondered if he was angry with me.

I tried again. ‘I think I saved the clematis.’

‘I don’t know why you’re obsessed with white. Can’t we ever have a bit of colour to liven things up?’

It had crossed my mind more than once that Nathan was jealous of the garden. ‘I don’t know. I love white – but maybe as a change I could go for red.’

Now Nathan said something that struck me as strange. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever understood you, Rosie.’

It was too serious a statement not to treat it as a joke. ‘You don’t have to.’ I leant over and kissed him. ‘That’s part of my mystery’

‘Don’t be silly.’

Why did I love white in a garden? No doubt some of the books that passed over my desk offered explanations of the white period in a gardener’s history. Picasso had had a blue one, and plenty of print had been devoted to analysing it. Perhaps white gardens revealed an unconscious yearning for purity. More likely, the fat, innocent buds butting their way through chocolate earth, the tender, reliable goodness of a garden, provided a direct contrast to what took place in the world. Yet any fool can tell you that it is not the answers which are significant, but the garden itself. My white beauties traced pathways over rotting fences and spread their cool canopies over tired city soil. It may be true that I was gripped by the longing for clarity and resolution that white suggests, which I could not explain to Nathan, but it was the visible beauty that was the real point.

Nathan stood up. ‘I’m going indoors.’

‘Would you like to go for a walk? I can do this another time.’

‘No. I know you want to tackle the moss. I might take myself off for a stroll.’

‘Fine.’

I refilled the bucket at the outside tap, poured in disinfectant then got down on my hands and knees and began to scrub. The disinfectant was astringent and clean-smelling and made my skin tingle. Nathan moved about inside the house. He washed something up, made a phone call, and then I heard the bang of the front door.

The scrubbing brush was new and bit hard into the moss. A swathe of freshly minted stone flag appeared. A cheap substitute for limestone, this stone had been imported from India, hewed from hot, dusty plains. It was old and some of the flags had fossils imprinted on them. A foamy leaf. A fishbone of fern.

I traced the fern with a wet finger. Nature produces her enormous variety from only ten basic patterns: the whorl, the spiral, the crystal, the branch, etc. I learnt that while I was a student at Oxford. I loved that piece of information. I found Nature’s strictness reassuring – and I was the woman who still cherished a silver medal engraved ‘Rose Uttley: for Tidiness and Not Being Late. Form 3’. I liked the notion of such order, such simplicity. It was one of the reasons I had married Nathan.

Etc., etc.

I finished the patio and embarked on the garden furniture. It was hard work and I grew pleasantly warm. Every so often I looked up – just for the pleasure of looking – at the green and brown of the waiting garden. When we had moved in, forty-five feet of bleak, leached London clay, tangled with briars and rubbish – the same imaginative estate agent had called it ‘a mature prospect’ – had greeted me. ‘Try me,’ I fancied it was saying. ‘I dare you.’

The fountain was situated at the bottom and the water fell out of a pitcher, held by a woman in drapery, into a brick pool into which I had piled stones collected with Sam and Poppy on Hastings beach. I saw in it an amorphous, eternal quality. Things changed, but they also remained the same.

My eyes travelled over the lilac, which was old and woody. Yet it had that pregnant look about it – so, too, did the roses, the leaf clumps from which the black and white poppies would emerge, and my treasured tawny verbascum. Everything, in fact. Spring was coming. Once again, the cycle had travelled back to the beginning, ready to start again.