Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman

Chapter Four

On Monday, the group reverberated with the Charles Madder scandal. All over the building phones rang, lawyers were consulted and journalists chewed over evidence. The atmosphere was shrill and rancorous and, I suppose, we were too.

The smell of bad coffee from the vending machines was particularly offensive. Someone had spilt a cup over the red carpet just outside my area. It left a dark stain, like blood, over which I had to tread.

By Tuesday, the furore was less intense. It was reported that Charles Madder had resigned as a minister to spend more time in cherishing his constituency. The consensus among his constituents was that he had had it coming. Only one person was reported as saying that he was a good and decent man. The ship sailed on, leaving polluted water, and the ex-minister’s wife, Flora Madder, drowning in shock and distress. ‘Don’t be woolly,’ said Minty, when we queued for lunch in the canteen and I expressed sympathy for her. ‘A wife must know if her husband is straying. As for the undeclared interests, it’s collusion, surely. She’s in it up to her neck too.’ She checked herself. ‘Don’t look like that, Rose. You know as well as I do that sometimes the nice explanation will not do.’

I was used to Minty’s cynicism, but it was not like her to be quite so harsh. ‘If you mean human beings are never straightforward, well, yes,’ I said.

She flushed and it was then I realized that she must be having an affair with a married man. I felt a stab of… what? Complicity? Not exactly – more curiosity, but not, I think, envy. Relief, too, that her choice was not my business. Mine had been made.

I looked at her hard. Her heightened colour made her look young and hopeful. ‘And what are you up to, Minty?’

She grabbed a fat-free yoghurt. ‘Nothing.’

Long ago, I had settled on what I wanted. Put crudely, my ambitions were to be a good mother, a Good Wife (to Nathan, of course), and have my career. I wanted others in my life to nurture. Not very grand, certainly not earth-shattering, some might say boring. Convenient? Yes and no. We have to choose something, opt for some species of shelter – and I found those ambitions immensely absorbing, ever changing.

As she often reminded me, Minty was different. She was bold and, to Ianthe, shocking in her outspokenness – her gender was not a problem. She was courageous and upfront – ‘I want to go places.’ She had no family to speak of – ‘Who wants one?’ – and hated the idea of children: ‘Why put a millstone round your neck?’ She chose her role models from Hollywood and television. She did not take drugs but reckoned you had to be good-looking to get on. She liked sex, and rated presentation and PR. It was a generation thing, she argued, a mentality thing.

Sometimes Minty seemed as old as time. Sometimes she was the child in a sweet shop, desperate to try out all the sticky humbugs and gobstoppers. And why not? She had flown in from another planet and she fascinated me. At twenty-nine, smart, sharp, glossy, free-ranging, she was as different from me at that age as it was possible to be.

‘I hate my bust.’ This was the first of several intimacies she had dropped during our first lunch together after she joined the office. ‘It’s the kind that promises much, but delivers little. But I use it all the same.’

‘I see.’ Any shortfall in Minty’s breasts would be made up for by her mixture of honesty and greed. ‘Men are easily led,’ she said also, and her dark eyes flashed subversive knowledge. ‘Easy, easy. Especially if you tell them there are no ties.’

‘But where are they led to?’ I asked.

She fixed me with that unblinking, comforting gaze.

By Wednesday, Charles Madder was regulated to page five, it was on, on with the news, and the atmosphere had changed to shock and something must be done: the daily paper now focused on a medical scandal. As a result of acute lack of funding a hospital porter with no medical qualifications had been acting as the triage nurse in a Cornish hospital’s A &E department. A woman had died as a result of his ignorance. The journalists shed their rancour and became the nation’s social conscience, the exposers of society’s ills.

On Thursday…

On Thursday, Minty arrived – unusually – more than an hour and a half late. She was wearing a floaty skirt, a tight Lycra top, and kitten heels in glacé pink. She looked dewy and flushed but, also, curiously determined. Apologies, Rose.’

It was copy day, time was extra tight and the phone had not stopped ringing, mostly with authors and publishers complaining about unfair treatment. They all had to be placated. ‘You might have phoned.’

‘I said I was sorry.’

I was not angry often, but when I was, I was. ‘Go and check with Steven that the pages are OK this week.’

‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’ Minty hung up her jacket.

‘What?’

She sat down at her desk and switched on her terminal. ‘We should hold our firepower.’

This was the first time that we had openly disagreed on policy, and I was puzzled. ‘Minty, I don’t know what is going on in your private life but you could do as I ask and not treat me to the fallout. If you feel differently, we can discuss it later.’

‘Fallout?’ she queried.

I glanced at my watch. ‘I don’t care what we call it, just get on with it. Please go and talk to Steven.’

Phones rang, computers whined, the post trolley, pushed by Charlie, swayed through the desks. The walls of the building shut out goodness knew what weather. Scowling, Minty got to her feet – she reminded me of Poppy when she had been outflanked. My lips twitched. ‘We’ve got off to bad start. Let’s be friends and then thrash out the policy. Or, rather, get the pages to bed.’

She thought for a moment. ‘That’s the trouble with you, Rose. You bring things down to the personal. It’s very female.’

‘So do you.’

‘Not like you.’

It was a truce. Of sorts.

At the end of the day, Minty got up from her desk, put on her jacket and said goodnight. She did not look back as she clattered out on the glacé kitten heels.

By Friday, a royal had been photographed in a compromising position and a row was ding-donging over privacy. How far? How much? Whose?

The news desk in the goldfish bowl seethed and hummed. When I arrived, dead on nine o’clock, Maeve Otley was hunched over her desk, white and speechless. A bad rheumatism day. I made her a cup of tea and took it over but it was not the moment to commiserate. Charlie delivered a stack of post and a couple of boxes of books.

Minty rang. ‘I can’t come in. I’ve got a… migraine.’

This was unlike her. ‘Shall I phone later to check if you’re OK?’

‘No.’ She sounded choked. ‘Don’t do that. No need.’

‘I hope you feel better.’

But Minty had put down the phone.

In planning terms, summer was on the doorstep, and I spent the day teasing out ideas for the June pages. Ringing the changes was almost impossible on the familiar categories of ‘travel’ and ‘holiday reading’, but I was toying with the idea of a section on books ‘to be read for a second time’.

Meanwhile, for this week’s travel slot, we had covered books on India, Thailand, Greece, HalThorne’s A Thousand Olive Trees, of course, and a thick, illustrated travelogue devoted to Rome.

Long ago, when I had been Rose-the-traveller, I had gone to Rome.

The sun shone on my bare arms and boiled the sweat on my back. My feet spread damply inside my cheap sandals and I knew I would get blisters. I did not care. I was sixteen, in Rome, and in love for the first time-with being there, out of England. Rome was noisy, filled with smells – coffee, exhaust, sweat, hot buildings – and its flux of life, noise and sensation flowed through me, intensely, luxuriously felt.

I was in Rome. I was intoxicated.

Life, wrote Virginia Woolf, was a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope. Oh, no, it was not. Not for some. Some of us lived in a plain brown envelope. It took the trip to Rome to see the luminous halo, the semi-transparent one.

Ianthe nearly me talked out of it: I did not have any proper summer clothes or shoes, and my underwear was not good enough, she said, unless I wanted to wear my gym knickers and plimsolls.

A godmother had taken pity on Ianthe’s penniless widowhood, not to mention her hungry, sensation-starved daughter (who had read her E. M. Forster and reflected seriously on Lucy Honeychurch’s experiences) and paid for a place on the school expedition. Ianthe clicked her tongue and did her I-am-a-Yorkshire-woman-I-am-not-a-cause-for-people-to-patronize-and-lighten-their-consciences bit. I had been forced to abandon Lucy Honeychurch and to adopt Jane Eyre: ‘Please, please, Mother… “Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless?”’ before she ungraciously allowed my godmother to get out her cheque book.

Perhaps it was really my lack of wardrobe that bothered Ianthe but it was unlikely: Ianthe, in make-do-and-mend mode, could fashion a dress from a sack. I sought a better explanation. I knew from my reading that mothers found it hard to let go of their adored children. They dreaded the end of their womanly role and death beckoning, the logical finale. This left me with a moral quandary. Should I sacrifice my yearning to give back my mother her role?

I calculated she could manage without it for a week. In return, I decided to pay three pounds into the charity box, which was then a considerable sum and, therefore, a conscience appeaser.

Lips tight, Ianthe set about preparing my wardrobe between working and running the house. Scrupulous as ever, she washed all my clothes by hand and dried them over the clothes-horse in the kitchen.

The day before I left, she set up the ironing-board. A ham-bone boiled on the stove, and the kitchen grew steamy with starch and stock. The radio played softly. Every so often, she dipped her hand into a jug of water, and shook drops over the ironing-board. The iron bit into the material with a hiss. When she had finished, she folded each garment with exquisite neatness.

I watched dreamily. She was wearing her everyday flat shoes, polished to within an inch of their lives, and there was a careful darn in her stocking, but her hair had escaped its coil and a frown puckered her forehead. Every so often, she glanced up at me, the movement emphasizing her extreme thinness. I knew what she was thinking. She will get ideas above her station. My mother had been so careful not to raise my expectations.

‘Rose,’ she cut sharply into my reverie, ‘don’t just sit there, let down that dress. And don’t look like that.’

She was not taking her defeat lightly, nor did I expect her to, and my victory was too precarious to jeopardize. I pulled out the sewing-box and set about the dress, which had already been rehemmed twice. I cut and snipped and eventually the remaining spare inch of material, which was of a much darker colour, had been tacked into place. I held up the dress. ‘It’ll look awful.’

‘Beggars can’t be choosers.’ Ianthe was at her most maddening, but her eyes were cloudy with distress. This was final proof, if she needed it, that I was growing beyond her reach.

So, there I was: a creature in a seersucker dress with an obviously let-down hem, from a cool, wet island, without a history of my own, bewitched by a city that had almost too much.

There they were: the great fontane of the Trevi and the Barcaccia, or the more playful ones, like the Fontana delle Tartarughe with its bronze tortoises, which I found tucked behind the ghetto, and at street corners the intimate fontanelle. Plump women reclined with their breasts displayed, sea gods grasped tridents, nymphs crouching at their feet, while dolphins, seahorses, lions and amphorae emerged from bronze and stone. Creatures of myth and legend had been summoned from the four quarters of the world.

Those sleek, gleaming men, women and animals had nothing to do but ensure that water was tossed from shell and mouth, and how happy they seemed to me as they guarded the arcs of water in the sun. But I also figured, with a little help from Keats, that they were happy because nothing ever happened to them.

Our hotel was in the via Elisabetta, on a corner, and its top storey almost collided with its opposite neighbour’s. It was a simple place, with hard beds, white cotton covers and a tiny niche in each bedroom that housed a plastic statue of the Virgin, which we had been warned not to touch. ‘I dare you, I dare you,’ cried Marty, my roommate. Marty was going to be beautiful. She came from a better-off family and her wardrobe was extensive. She was contemptuous of me and, because I feared her, I accepted her dare and hung the door key off the Virgin’s plaster hand.

Later that night, I lay and listened to the traffic snarl past and waited for Marty to go to sleep. When I was sure that she had, I slid from under the rough sheets, crept over to the Virgin and removed the key. Mother of God, forgive me. I knew not what I did. Where had I read that? In the half-light, jeering Marty slept, almost like an angel.

The via Elisabetta ran through the Trastevere district from San Pietro in Montorio, past the piazza Santa Maria and down to the river. The Trasterine reputedly have loud, hoarse voices, drink lots of coffee, eat maritozzi for breakfast and spaghetti cacio e pepe for supper. (I had done my research.) It was an area that traditionally had absorbed foreigners and nonconformists. From ancient times, it had understood diversity and the quirks of different peoples.

Ecco.

It was a serpentine street, coiling down to the river Tiber but, by the end of the second day, if you had blindfolded me, I could have led you to the laundry, or to the shop that sold pictures of Christ, heart exposed, surrounded by roses, lilies and flowers of the field. I puzzled over the cards, which seemed to me intemperately vulgar, and as to why Christ had appeared to have had open-heart surgery.

Walking south from San Pietro, the first stop had to be for a café ristretto at Nono’s to brace you for the walk to the river. (In penance, Marty treated me to one.) Long before you saw the water, you sensed its flow and heard its ancient sounds, but before it came into sight, the via Elisabetta widened and flared into a modest square, flanked by the pinky terracotta-coloured buildings. In the centre of the square was a fountain: a stone youth with a drawn sword guarded a woman in flowing robes, who wore a crown and balanced a pot on her shoulder from which the water gushed. The pot had a pattern of bees engraved into it.

Here, I discovered the Café Nannini, run by the family. In the morning, Signora Nannini presided over a magical machine that produced an elixir called coffee, which was nothing like the coffee I knew but was topped by foam over which lay a drift of chocolate. In the afternoon, Signor Nannini took over. In halting Italian, I asked him about the fountain in the middle of the square, which seemed rather ornate for such a modest square. ‘Why the bees?’

‘Barberini bees. A Barberini gave the money for the fountain to be built. A long time ago.’

‘E la donna?’

‘She is the wife of the king of the gods. A woman who suffered because her husband liked the pretty girls.’

I remembered the frozen stone face. ‘Wasn’t being wife to the king of the gods enough?’

‘It is nature.’

Lucy Honeychurch and Jane Eyre did not help me in this matter. Hoping for enlightenment, I inspected the face again, but I did not find any.

‘Rosie,’ said Nathan, as I dumped my book bag on the sofa in the sitting room that evening. It fell over, spilling its contents. ‘Rosie, we must talk.’

He had his back to me and was gazing out of the french windows into the garden. He had not changed out of his office suit, his third favourite one in dark grey with the faintest red stripe running through the material. The cut flattered him, and I urged him to wear it more often.

Nathan sometimes issued imperatives. They meant nothing. I was late, tired, my feet were wet and it had been a trying day. ‘Sorry I’m late. Minty was ill and I had to cope. I expect you’re hungry. I’ll just change my shoes.’

‘Now…’ He sounded strained, my energetic, thrusting, ambitious husband.

I went over to him, slid my arms around him and laid my cheek on his shoulder. ‘All right. Go on.’

Then, he turned round and pushed me away. He looked me straight in the eye. At least he did that. His were alight with an excitement and dread I could not place. ‘This is not a good talk.’