by Emily Dean
I found it all a bit exhausting.
Rach would seize A Woman in Your Own Right from my mother’s room and scornfully read passages aloud to me. ‘Listen to this! “Are you a martyr at home? How do you respond if everyone leaves the cleaning to you?”’
The book advised stating your needs in clear language and using the prefix, ‘I appreciate you want me to do that BUT …’
‘I appreciate’ evolved into comedy gold for us, and our father became a co-conspirator as we hurled the phrase around. ‘I appreciate you want me to turn the TV down …’ we would say, in sanctimonious American accents, as he laughed in shared delight.
My mother had also started to spend a lot of time visiting our pop star neighbour, Lynsey de Paul, who had just returned from a long spell visiting her boyfriend in Los Angeles. She lived in solitary splendour in one of the most fairy-tale dwellings in our gated community. ‘I bought this house myself – so no man can ever tell me what to do in it. Do you know how great that feels, girls?’ she once said to us.
Rach and I observed our mother through Lynsey’s windows as we sat in the garden, both of them gesticulating wildly, lost in adult female discussion. Sometimes they caught sight of us and broke off to give us slightly panicked smiles, like unsuccessful award nominees sensing a looming camera.
As I got to know Lynsey during her summer back in London, I realised I had never met anyone like her before. She certainly wasn’t one of Cookie Monster’s regimented plates of cookies. There was no sensible dad, Tupperware boxes or a tail-wagging Ralph at the heart of her home, but for some reason it didn’t matter. Her non-conformity was presented with such forthright, glamorous entitlement you had no option but to be hopelessly enthralled by it.
Until I met Lynsey, the women I knew who lived alone were retired headmistresses and widows, not dazzling self-made goddesses who drove fast cars and used the C-word with abandon. She had a fierce tongue, terrifying temper and low tolerance for ‘assholes’. She didn’t tread around men in that gentle, coercive way I often witnessed.
In fact, she didn’t tread around anyone. She once told my mother about a school reunion and an old classmate who had abandoned her Oxford degree to get married. ‘Shame on you,’ Lynsey had announced. ‘Waste of a place at Oxford!’
It left me with a lingering sense of awe. It was thrilling that someone could disregard the social contract so recklessly. How could anyone be so removed from the need to be likeable? Her entire essence was a firm ‘screw you’ to the dog families. But, confusingly, I admired her. I had only ever seen men behaving with this level of fiery confidence – roaring around in sports cars, yelling swear words and throwing money and power at problems. I didn’t know women could do that.
Aunty Lyn (as she liked us to call her) had become celebrated for her ballads about love, narrowly missing out on first place in the Eurovision Song Contest. She had an iconic beauty spot above her lip that I saw her painting in with a brown eyeliner one day. ‘It’s a chicken pox scar!’ She smiled. ‘DON’T tell any journalists, Emmy!’ As if my Paddington Bear address book was bursting with the numbers of Daily Mail diarists.
She had marble telephones, a glass coffee table held up by stone Chinese lions, a framed photo of her laughing elegantly at something Prince Charles had just said and a glare that warned, ‘Don’t-fuck-with-me, fellas’. I remember the first time I saw her, as her 4-foot 11-inch frame floated out of her ivy-covered Gothic door, buttery blonde crimped hair falling to her waist, glinting four-inch heels hitting the gravel path with purpose, white coat sweeping behind defiantly.
‘CHRISTEEENE!’ she hollered at my mother, as our new friendship developed, using her set of keys to enter our house without knocking, smelling of wealth and sex appeal. She refused wine, (‘No thanks, I quite like not having grey skin’) reviewed our plates of ham with disgust (‘Enjoying your dead animal?’) and responded to my mother’s apology for smoking with, ‘I’d rather you crapped on the carpet but, sure, go ahead.’
Her house was geographically next to ours but it felt like the kingdom beyond the wardrobe with Lynsey as glittering snow queen. If you really were hell-bent on not living like the others, this, perhaps, was the way to go about it.
Rach and I drank Coca-Cola out of her crystal wine glasses, sitting on Gothic oak chairs, while she discussed her ex-boyfriends. They included Ringo (Starr), Dudley (Moore), Dodi (Fayed), a married screen icon and Roy Wood, the lead singer of Seventies pop group Wizard. I’d seen photos of him and he looked slightly scary, something she seized upon whenever a newspaper described her as ‘a plus-one to debonair men.’ ‘I dated a guy with green hair, for fuck’s sake!’
We were hugely flattered by Aunty Lyn’s cultivation of our family. Her interest in us was partly due to relief at finding fellow oddballs in our quiet neighbourhood. But we all knew that the real deal-closer was Treacle. She would scoop him up into her glossy embrace and steal him away to lovingly paint his claws with clear polish. Sometimes I would find him gobbling up fresh salmon from an Art Deco bowl. Then eyeing me smugly as if to say, ‘Bitch – this is how we do it now.’
‘Where on earth is Treacle?’ my mother asked one evening, and Rach and I headed out to investigate the cemetery. Until we caught a glimpse of our cat perched like an Egyptian figurine, in the seductive glow of Lynsey’s living room. We were now the helpless teenage sweetheart to his just-signed footballer, watching him shift into a tempting world that lay beyond us. ‘He’s more like a lodger these days,’ my father said, delighted that Treacle had been savvy enough to pick such a dazzling part-time mistress.
Sometimes Aunty Lyn invited us over for ‘a girls sleepover!’ in her Elysian turret. She sat Rach and me on a chair in her mirrored make-up room, painting our lips scarlet and our eyes gold, ringleting our hair and draping us in bespoke designer gowns. ‘I wore that to Studio 54. It looks GREAT on you!’ she told me. ‘Princess Diana’s designers made that for me!’ she said to Rach.
Our friendship with Lynsey, who was the subject of much gossip in our local area, intrigued the dog families when she strode into school fetes in leather trousers and Cartier sunglasses. The philosophers with dandruff, the foreign correspondents whose spittle landed on the table when they talked about books – they weren’t the most persuasive advert for our unorthodox lifestyle. But Lynsey’s confident glamour cast our difference in an altogether more attractive light. Her refusal to sublimate herself into anyone else’s way of thinking was intoxicating. She lived her life not as an endlessly charming guest but as the resolutely uncompromising CEO of her world.
‘You remind me of me, Emmy,’ she once told me as we ate spaghetti in her kitchen. ‘You’re strong and sparky.’
I absorbed this praise with a hint of shame because in truth, I wasn’t like her at all. I was strong and sparky in her presence because I knew that was what she wanted. I was dutiful in the presence of the dog families because that was what they expected. Boisterous and precocious in front of my parents’ friends because that went down well with them. Playing at being different people was all I had ever known; unlike Rach, who seemed exasperatingly committed to remaining the same person in every environment.
‘I never borrow clothes,’ Lynsey once said. ‘Why would I want to walk into a room as someone else?’ I realised this was perhaps all I had ever wanted to feel.
One of the things that made me happiest was trying on her designer dresses. Catching sight of myself in the mirror, I felt as if I had temporarily absorbed some of her magnificent power. They weren’t so much clothes, more spectacular armour, with huge shoulders and sweeping sleeves. They reminded me of the women I had seen in soaps like Dynasty and Dallas, which my father watched with me. (‘Well, even shit has its own integrity,’ he would say, guiltily.) They were clothes for women who closed discussions by snapping, ‘Waiter – cheque please!’ and who told boardrooms of men ‘not to underestimate me’, before departing in outrage.
By the end of the summer, Lynsey’s domain had beco
me Treacle’s almost-full-time residence. He juggled our two houses with the wily charm of a playboy cultivating a harem of exes. Until one morning, Lynsey crunched up the gravel path wrapped in a Cruella de Vil coat with two impossibly handsome Burmese kittens all of her own, named Louis and Bix. Treacle responded with outright hostility, thrusting his backside in her face and retreating to lick his wounds. He slunk back into our shabby world, scarred forever from getting so close to Lynsey’s blistering star.
Perhaps it was his very own ‘return from the Simpsons’ moment. It takes an Icarus to know one.
‘He HATES Lynsey now!’ Rach said. My parents laughed in agreement.
But none of us were prepared for the unlikely cat whisperer who was about to arrive.
I’d heard a lot about James Coburn, Lynsey’s boyfriend in LA. I knew he was famous, best known for his starring roles in movies like The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape. That he had won an Oscar, owned a fleet of Ferraris and that his mate ‘Steve’ had the surname McQueen. But I hadn’t anticipated what a towering, magnetic colossus James would be in person, with his huge glittering smile, thick silvery hair and growling Darth Vader voice.
‘Hey, Emmy, I’m James,’ he said with a grin on our first meeting, revealing thoroughbred teeth and extending a powerful forearm to embrace me in a vast hug. It was hard to see him as a cinematic titan as he spread out lazily on the sofa in slippers, reading the Sunday papers, talking about his problems with arthritis and chuckling obediently at Lynsey’s jokes. But I saw everyone behave differently around James when he entered a room. People adjusted themselves instinctively, adopting deferential body language.
Everyone, that is, except Lynsey.
‘James, come on, help me with the bins!’ she would cry as he lumbered up from the sofa, adjusting his kimono to avoid a reveal. I flinched when she addressed him with such casual bossiness. She spoke to him as if he were a normal man. Which seemed a terrible idea.
After one trip to LA, he and Lynsey returned with gold ‘E’ and ‘R’ necklaces for us, each with a sparkling diamond at the centre. ‘Don’t write “James Coburn got me a diamond necklace” in your school holidays project, darling,’ my mother advised. ‘It sounds a bit showy.’ But the diamond necklace wasn’t what sold me on James. It was his extraordinary self-possession.
My grandfather visited us that summer from his sleepy beach town in New Zealand. He was a sweetly gentle, slightly deaf and hopelessly absent-minded GP. He wore a beret, regularly left stool samples in the boot of his car and liked to quote Tolstoy at his bemused patients. So James Coburn’s cinematic dominance was lost on him.
‘What was your name, Cockburn you say?’ he asked James.
I looked to Rach with horror.
Rach suppressed a giggle, as she tended to in situations like this. So what, Em? her look said. Why do you care so much?
Why don’t YOU? said my hostile return glance.
‘Coburn, Sir, it’s Coburn,’ James replied, with the respectful tones of someone who has served military duty addressing an elder.
When my mother and Lynsey were closeted away in her kitchen having one of their long chats, James would be charged with the role of babysitter. ‘James! Play Boggle with the girls,’ Lynsey instructed him one afternoon as we sat in her garden. She clacked around in slingbacks and obscene cut-off denims, fetching us orange juice before retreating to the kitchen and their private discussions.
Clad in his black silk dressing gown, James placed his huge tanned hands on the miniature egg timer and thrust it upside down before gently prompting us with word suggestions. ‘Fad? Great choice, Rach!’ he boomed encouragingly. He puffed on his cigar, his large frame almost overwhelming Lynsey’s tiny garden chairs, coaxing Treacle towards him with the self-confident charm of the never-knocked-back.
Treacle had been observing James’s presence from the safety of the bushes for several weeks. One day he emerged cautiously, trying to decide whether his curiosity outweighed his hurt pride. ‘Hey Treac!’ James whispered, holding out tapered fingers. ‘Come on Treac, come on Treac, baby.’ After several weeks of this encouragement, Treacle swallowed his shame and settled contentedly in James’s lap. His return to Arcadia was complete. Like the rest of us, Treac baby was powerless to resist Uncle James’s magnetic signal.
It felt odd seeing Lynsey suddenly sharing the space she loudly dominated, especially with someone who commanded rooms without uttering a word. The high-status men we knew tended not to have look-at-me partners like Lynsey. This was a domestic realm I hadn’t seen before, one governed by two equally powerful emperors.
Sometimes they would take Rach and me to the shops, Lynsey marching ahead in her heels, James strolling along, spotted silk hanky poking out of his linen blazer, black shades protecting him from the perpetual gaze of the world. They stood out, with their conscious entitlement, architects of their exotic difference. ‘We’re not like you, so we’re not going to even try to be like you.’
One day Lynsey decided that Treacle ‘urgently’ needed the vet, as she often did (a broken claw was enough), so Rach and I clambered into her Jaguar as James arranged his limbs awkwardly and dutifully extinguished his cigar. He emerged with us to ring the Sellotape-covered doorbell of the vet’s ramshackle practice, crouching to enter its tiny front room as pensioners with marmalade cats eyed him with shock that bordered on outrage. He seemed curiously vulnerable at those times, like Gulliver, too mountainous to really work in our little north-London world.
A few months later my mother told us that James wasn’t coming back to Holly Village. Lynsey talked to us about everything having a life and a death. ‘Flowers, people. And love can be like that, too.’ She looked puffy-eyed, and I heard her mentioning something about ‘commitment’ to my mother. Her space suddenly seemed tinged with absence. My mother told us that Lynsey had escaped a difficult childhood and underneath her ferocious exterior was ‘just a frightened little girl.’ Which didn’t really fit with my notion of her as fiery goddess whom I wanted to imitate.
Within a few weeks her waspish humour was back. She told me when I’d had a dramatic haircut, ‘What do you mean “try everything once?” Try cutting off your head, see how you like that.’ As were her collection of ‘walkers’: a bunch of citrus-scented male friends who took her to premieres and cocktail parties, occasionally providing a burst of overnight activities she referred to as ‘medicinal’.
Some of the playground mums came over to gossip about the end of Lynsey’s relationship with James. They had read about it in the papers. ‘She’s all alone in that big house. It’s sad really,’ they said, with a concern that I knew sounded phoney even if at the time I didn’t know why.
It was only years later that something struck me about the end of Lynsey’s love affair. She didn’t seem diminished by the removal of James’s unquestionable power and status. Her life remained intact. She saw the same friends, got invited to the same parties and drove the same sports car with noisy abandon. She had never changed her vote to please him, held back her opinions or taken up less space to accommodate his dominance. So she returned to a self that hadn’t been reduced. People often described her as ‘difficult’, ‘impossible’ or ‘frightening’ – most of which was undeniably true. But perhaps that was the way she had to be, as an early female settler, hacking through the undergrowth with a machete to clear the path for other women – all those who wanted to live a life that was based on being more than an adjunct to someone else.
It was Lynsey who inadvertently introduced me to another female who was fond of doing things in a different way.
I had occasionally spotted a girl, who looked as if she too might be around eleven years old, walking up the gravel path to Lynsey’s house. The girl was usually talking animatedly with her mum and always dressed in the kind of fashionably disarrayed outfits that pop stars wore, radiating an air that didn’t belong to coastal walks and ringed viewing in the Radio Times. Sometimes I would peer at her through the window before
leaping back, not wanting her to discover the secrets behind our Gothic portal.
But she favoured a rather more direct approach. I answered our door one day to see her standing there, in an orange fishnet top and tiny black leather jacket, smiling confidently. ‘Hi, I’m Jane,’ she said, ‘my mum’s at Lynsey’s. Do you want to hang out?’
Hang out? It sounded so sophisticated and cool, the way people in American bands probably addressed each other. And suddenly, Rach and I had a new best friend called Jane Goldman.
Jane didn’t eat last night’s canapés for breakfast. Her house, which was only a few miles away from ours in nearby Hampstead, didn’t have Chilean concert pianists sleeping on the sofa. And her bed wasn’t loaned out for illicit affairs. But her parents, Stu and Mandy, laughed tolerantly when Jane called her cat Mims ‘a little fucker’, allowed us to play Culture Club loudly and told us we looked ‘wonderful, darlings!’ when we made dresses out of black bin liners and paraded down the street. They lived in a mews house with fashionable Eighties phone cables in bright colours, and had a video camera, with which we recorded a series of improvised plays. I felt safe enough in this liberal environment to pull back the curtain slowly on our own eccentricities, which were greeted with cries of ‘that’s hilarious!’ rather than sidelong glances.
Jane’s mother, Mandy, was also a recent convert to my mother’s female empowerment bible A Woman in Your Own Right, and we bonded with Jane over the shared inconveniences we were experiencing as a result of this stupid book. The three of us decided the simplest way to re-educate our mothers was via a passive-aggressive sketch, which we filmed and forced them to watch.