She’s right, of course. One night Blubbery Bill doesn’t show and he doesn’t show the next night either. That’s when Lee breaks into his flat, finds someone else’s T-shirt, someone else’s bottle of nail polish.
She’s waiting for him when he comes in. He’s not alone. He has someone who looks exactly like her beside him.
He introduces her as his new ‘girlfriend’, an absurd vanity this, threatens to call the police when Lee won’t go, in the end throws her belongings out of the window. In the street she picks them up, the T-shirt and the nail polish. She leaves the broken shoe where it landed.
‘Mai pen rai,’ she says the next day when she tells us. Mai pen rai – never mind.
Mai pen rai.
Most famous of all Thai sayings.
* E.g.,
I fold my memories of you
Away
In the tissue of my mind …
† About a mature student at university writing a novel …
J is for… Jane
If anyone deserves a chapter to herself it’s Jane. Which Jane? Oh, come on. That Jane, the one already mentioned, not just a spinster heroine, the spinster heroine, St Jane, patron saint of spinsters. Amiable Jane is what I call her and this because it’s what she called herself. Jane, who also had a sister, Cassandra, one who was an artist too, although not a good one in my opinion, this on the strength of that awful portrait, the one they put in all the paperbacks, all thin lips, pointy nose and kiss curls. The very image of the spinster.
Those who dislike Jane, and there are plenty around, reach first for the cheapest, most banal and clichéd of insults, ‘spinsterish’.
Spinsterish?
What exactly does this mean? More importantly, what could it possibly cover?
Even when Mary Tyler Moore waited with helmet hair and a freshly made martini for Dick to slam the front door and call, ‘Honey, I’m home,’ we didn’t use ‘married-ish’ as an all-purpose, Gladstone bag of a description. We didn’t assume there was an all-purpose, archetypal, homogenous married state even then, so why, all these years on, are we doing it for the spinster? There’s as many different forms of the spinster state scattered throughout the planet as there are spinsters so what price ‘spinsterish’? More importantly, if it’s meant to imply something slightly feeble, frail, spineless, delicate, something apprehensive, vulnerable and skittish, if it’s supposed to mean ‘whimsical’, what the hell is it doing being applied to Jane Austen?
Because Jane could write a sentence as sharp as a stiletto, as deadly today as the day she wrote it. Take this little number for instance. It’s the rich, vain Maria Bertram about to be wed in Mansfield Park.
In all the important preparations of the mind she was complete; being prepared for matrimony by an hatred of home, restraint, and tranquillity; by the misery of disappointed affection, and contempt of the man she was to marry.
Tell me there isn’t someone you know, or have known, who that wouldn’t apply to.
I call Jane the spinster patron saint for this reason: that any fool can see she was only hustling her heroines to the altar in the absence of any available option (it not being open to most to become, like her, a Giant of English Literature).
‘Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor,’ she wrote in another of her letters. For it wasn’t the spinster state she was against, far from it. It was the penury and the dreadful accompanying servility dictated by it.
As Emma Woodhouse says firmly to the vacuous Harriet:
‘… It is poverty only which makes celibacy contemptible … A single woman, of good fortune, is always respectable, and may be as sensible and pleasant as anybody else.’*
And amen to that, sister.
In that same letter Jane wrote that money was indeed ‘one very strong argument for marriage’. But it wasn’t enough for her.
Little is known about Jane’s marriage proposal and the man, Harris Biggs, who could have improved her financial position. Still a few facts remain. She was twenty-six at the time and staying with the Biggs Wither family. One night Harris, son of the house, proposed and she accepted. Perhaps it was the glow of the candlelight that did it, but whatever it was, it was gone by the time the grey light of dawn came creeping through her window.
She left on the early coach, before the family were up – an approach to be recommended to all like-minded spinsters.
As I said before, it was Queen Jane who started me writing, who provided me with that glorious phrase ‘the importance of aunts’, which broke like a clear white light over my head. In that same moment I knew that this would make a great title for a children’s book. What was more amazing was that I knew I was going to write it.
I’d always liked sci-fi and, again, without really thinking about it, I knew that the aunts would be from some distant planet. Within a few months I had them: Lavinia, sensible and practical; Aurora, with her flamboyant good looks and talent for really bad driving, spinsters both, and from the planet Alpha Chameleon, a constellation, according to a book in the college library, ‘faint and unremarkable and hidden from all but the most persistent telescopes’, just the sort of place I felt spinsters should come from. I even had a plot, the pair of them crash-landing behind the shed in twelve-year-old Maddy Wilkins’ back garden, going on to help her prevent her loving, domestically useless, widowed, mad scientist father marrying Entirely The Wrong Woman. (Oh, come on … doesn’t it always happen?)
All this was during my last year at university. By the time I left I had a first draft. I’m a slow writer – more to the point I’m a slow learner. I got a job copywriting for an ad agency, and it took me another year of writing at nights and weekends before the novel was in sufficiently good shape to send it off to an agent. This I did and she took me on. And the rest, as they say, is history.
O for a Muse of fire now …
Imagine, if you will, à la the Chorus in Henry Vee not those vasty fields of France, those upreared and abutting fronts (and while we’re on the subject, what exactly is an ‘upreared and abutting front’?), not those proud horses printing their hooves or those thousand, thousand soldiers. No, no. Imagine instead if you will, but on the same scale, the sheer height and width and depth of my mother’s joy when not only was The Importance of Aunts shortlisted for one of our major children’s fiction prizes but, along with the rest of the shortlistees, I appeared on daytime television.
‘Put them in their place, I can tell you.’ ‘Them’ and ‘their’, as always, being short forms for anything and everything to do with The Other Side of the Family.
To say that my mother basked in reflected glory when this happened is totally untrue. My mother is congenitally incapable of basking in anything. She’s far too hyper for that. Besides which, as far as she was concerned, said glory was not remotely reflected.
‘Of course she gets it from me. You remember, Fran? When we were kids I was always scribbling.’ Apparently Aunt Fran did not remember, something that paradoxically lends credence to my mother’s claim, it being perfectly clear that any talent I have for making things up belongs entirely to Babs Gordon.
I was approaching forty by the time all this occurred. Despite my age, overnight I acquired a showbiz mother.
‘You need someone.’
‘Sorry?’
‘To advise you.’
‘On what exactly?’
‘Your hair, for a start.’
‘Oh, right.’
‘And … really … darling. Leggings.’ Her voice is hushed with a mixture of horror and adoration. ‘On Richard and Judy.’
Ah, yes, heady days indeed.
Someone else won the prize in the end but it didn’t matter. I was on my way and I knew what I wanted to do in life, not bad for someone previously without an iota of ambition. Beside this, the film rights of I. o. A. were bought, this by a production company with an impressive Los Angeles address and a supposed direct line to Steven Spielberg. To this day the film has not been made and I presume the
resulting script remains mouldering away on a shelf somewhere. Still, I didn’t much care. I had a cheque and an advance agreed on a new book and thanks to this, not too long afterwards, like I said, I was able to give up life in the city and move back to my home town and this cottage.
In the decade or so that has passed since then there have been three more ‘Aunts’ books (I’m still a slow worker), the last, Day Trip to Corvus. I was on my way back from the post office after packing it off to my publisher, edits completed, that very day I called in to see Magda and she told me about getting married.* Today, the advances for my books remain modest, but still I’m published, which is all that I care about. I don’t make a stir, which is OK by me, not so my mother.
‘See this,’ she said, only this morning, slapping the paper down on her kitchen table. ‘It says here they’re camping out overnight for the new Harry Potter.’
My mother can be quite bitter, not to say spiteful, when it comes to my career. To understand why you have to picture her, year in, year out, growing steadily more pissed as she stays up with Tommy to watch the Oscars. She does this quite explicitly (drinking and watching) so she can weep and snuffle along with the stars when they do all that without whom stuff, blathering on about the debt they owe their mothers.
‘Ah, Tommy … what a nice thing to say. Oh, look at her crying. Isn’t that lovely …?’ And all this spoken with the martyred air of a woman whose daughter utterly failed to acknowledge the debt she owed her on that occasion she was on Richard and Judy.
That I did not do so is entirely due to the fact that I’ve never been clear about the precise nature of my obligation.
‘Listen. We went short for you, me and your father.’
‘How? When? Where? Tell me.’
‘We sent you to a good school …’
‘I passed the eleven-plus. I got a scholarship.’
‘Yes, well… Who do you think paid for the extras?’
‘What extras?’
‘Uniforms. Hockey sticks.’
‘Stick. Stick. One stick in five years. I hated hockey.’
Still, bearing all this in mind, I believe I can do no better than conclude this chapter with a firm vow that in the unlikely event of this humble work being awarded some small token in order to denote its literary merit, and of my being thrust forward, protesting and tearful, to the microphone as a result, I shall indeed make a heart-warming speech in which I shall thank my mother for ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING. It not being my way to push myself forward (indeed, such self-promotion is utterly abhorrent to me) I will only say that if it is the case that even now these words are being read by someone (you, sir, yes you, madam) whose onerous and thankless task it is to award such a token … Think, oh, only think, I beg of you.
You have it within your power to make a vain, batty, anorexic old woman deliriously happy.
* When planning Emma, Jane Austen said that she intended to create a heroine ‘whom no one would like but myself’. Hold on to that thought throughout this volume, dear Reader.
* Possibly the very reason why you’re reading this. For the devil makes work for idle hands, particularly when it comes to writing. I see now that without a new Aunts plot coming – which it did not – I fell prey to this ABC for spinsters. It’s a perverse and cussed notion if ever there was one. On the other hand, maybe that’s precisely what it should be. Perverse and cussed. Just like the spinster.
K is for . . . Kinder, *
The reaction of Fleur to The Importance of Aunts was highly gratifying as far as my mother was concerned because Fleur gave all the signs of being mortally offended.
‘Really. I’m amazed,’ she said in a rather chilly tone of voice at the next family party.
‘Why exactly?’
‘Well, you …’
‘Well me what?’
‘Writing a book … for children.’
Let it be said, and this in her defence, that she wasn’t the only one to feel her nose put out of joint in this respect. Looking through my press cuttings book, I see that I was questioned on more than one occasion about my spinster state.
‘You don’t have children of your own?’ This I remember, in particular, from my own right on, left-leaning paper, the smooth smile entirely failing to camouflage the air of accusation.
‘No,’ I said, smiling back, ‘but then you don’t have to have children to have children,’ which is what I believe, and this thanks to Jonah and Elsa.
‘Have you ever felt broody?’ I said once to Sophie.
‘No.’
‘Me neither.’
Sophie comes from a large Catholic family. Besides her, there’s a brace of brothers and three sisters. She’s the eldest. By the time she was six, she could carry a toddler over one arm, jam food into a mouth in a high chair with the other.
‘By the time I was thirteen, I knew I’d had all the childcare I wanted.’
It’s never felt like a gap for me, not having children. I was going to say that not wanting them has been a conviction with me for as long as I can remember, something firm and fast and always present. But then I realised that it hasn’t been like that at all, that not wanting children hasn’t been a tangible desire not to have, instead it’s been something else. A gap. An absolute absence. A component, just like ambition, missing.
‘I guess I just never had it, that’s all,’ I said to Cass.
‘So what?’ Her hand flipped in the air, dismissing the argument. ‘Neither do lots of woman. Neither did I. You’re doing what you always do.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Assuming you’re different. That it’s all cut and dried for everyone else.’
‘Isn’t it? At least for some people?’
‘Maybe. For those who just always knew they wanted children. But for the rest of us, me for instance, you just fall into having children. Mostly it comes with the territory. I mean, if there’d been someone …’
‘Oh, come on, Cass. There were always someones. If it had been what I wanted …’ And I think I’m right. Because one thing’s for sure, if my body clock ever ticked away, then it must have done so with such immaculate Swiss precision, with such a subdued clicking and whirring of its little cogs and wheels, that I never noticed. And maybe, like I say, my lack of maternal desire is all part of that ingrained laziness, or there again maybe it has to do with something else.
‘Oh, well, I might have known.’
‘What?’
‘It would have to be my fault, wouldn’t it?’
‘I didn’t say it was your fault. I just said it was interesting.’
According to research that had caught my eye, and which I made the mistake of mentioning to my mother, it appeared people who were the result of difficult births themselves were less likely to produce children.
‘Yes, well, I can tell you, it was a difficult birth alright. You kept me hanging on for bloody hours.’
‘Something I recall you mentioning on numerous occasions, Mother.’
My mother, always one for a colourful turn of phrase, likes to describe herself as ‘shell-shocked’ after my birth. Now it turns out, and against all the odds, she’s entirely entitled to use the word.
‘See … see.’ She’s waving the newspaper at me. ‘What did I tell you?’
According to her paper on this particular morning (mine as well, so there’s a chance it could be true) soldiers aren’t the only ones to suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. One in twenty mothers are apparently subject to the same symptoms – recurrent dreams of the event, excessive sweating and anxiety. Giving birth, it seems, can be as traumatic as going through a train smash or a bomb blast or being tortured, none of which comes as a surprise to me, merely a vindication.
Personally, I always thought Genesis said it all when it came to childbirth: ‘In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.’ Childbirth, the punishment for eating the apple, a reminder, if one was needed, of that for which we were kicked out of Eden. More importantly an explanation by th
e early myth-makers for the inexplicable pain of childbirth. So that what I figured was, if a wandering Middle Eastern tribe circa 3000 bc, used to all the privations of desert life, thought giving birth was sufficiently painful to make up a myth about, that was good enough for me.
Squeezing out a six-pounder, legs akimbo, with some fool of a woman telling me to push, and the twerp whose fault it was doing bugger all but holding my hand and dabbing at my forehead never struck me as where I wanted to be in life. And since I found myself in the blessed position of being born in the Land of the Free where there was no Birth Police to ensure I kept the numbers up, well, frankly, I thought I’d give the whole thing a miss.
As it turns out, I’m increasingly less alone in this line of thinking than you might imagine. Take the matter of Caesarean births.
According to my friend Connie Cheung, who, being a doctor, and in gyny, is up with such figures, one in five babies are now born this way. Apparently, this is because the medical profession is much more likely to intervene these days, complication equalling the possibility of litigation. In private hospitals, according to Connie, where women get to choose how they’d like to give birth, the figure for Caesareans is even higher, one in two – that other big L, Life-style, thought to be largely responsible.*
All this is grist to the mill of the spinster. For hasn’t she been given to understand from time immemorial that her life is irredeemably the poorer, and she so much less of a woman, for not having gone through the sweat and grind and good old-fashioned agony of traditional childbirth?
‘Well … all I can say is I simply don’t understand all this. I mean, for me the moment when I felt her THRUST herself out of me … well … it was … utterly ELEMENTAL … SPIRITUAL … I wouldn’t have missed it for the WORLD.’
Yes, folks. No prize for guessing it. It’s Mad Magda, president of the Miracle of Birth Party.
‘I don’t care what they say. For me, it was an EXPLORATION … a DISCOVERY.’†
If Magda could have got away with it, she’d have dropped Rochelle squatting down in the savannah and chewed through the umbilical cord before returning to the well to fetch water. Savannah being in short supply in Somerset, and, in addition, this particular form of childbirth being frowned on by the local health authority, she had to make do with her tape of Animal Calls from the Wild and the surroundings of the local maternity hospital. Sticking to the spirit of the thing, however, she announced she would be refusing the pethidine et al., and instead would get by on Buddhist chanting. We might even have believed she’d pulled it off was it not for our good friend Connie, who was a junior doctor there at the time and almost got a black eye off Magda when she didn’t get the gas and air in fast enough.
Not Married, Not Bothered Page 11