Not Married, Not Bothered

by Carol Clewlow

  He said, ‘I know what I am, but so did you. If you wanted to make me something else, that’s your business.’

  He got up from the floor, brushed his hands together as if dusting off the argument. As I lay there, too exhausted to move, he lifted his briefcase from across the desk and walked to the door. There he stopped, stood still for a moment.

  He said, ‘You can’t say I lied to you, Riley.’

  He turned, glanced at me one last time and I remember thinking that he had never looked better. He looked so good, goddamit; like an actor playing the scene. Although as far as I could see he wasn’t playing it quite right, because there wasn’t a shadow of shame or guilt in those liquid brown eyes, and that familiar slight frown that pulled in his eyebrows was only of irritation. The full dark lips curled a little in a purse of dismissal as he shrugged his shoulders.

  He said, ‘I never made any secret of anything. You had what you had. You knew what I was, Riley.’

  I found out about the mobile phone scam from Denis, about the way Lennie’s boot had been full of them when he’d tried to outrun the helicopter.

  I’d been out for a ride on the bike and I came back to find Denis standing on the doorstep. He was perfectly polite. He said, ‘We think Lennie may have been receiving stolen goods. Nice bike, by the way. Not by any chance a Hopper?’

  As he left he said, ‘You’ll let us know if you hear from him?’

  I said, ‘Trust me. It isn’t likely.’

  At the Fraser family party, a few weeks later, Martin buttonholed me in a corner, complained because Lennie had left owing three months’ rent.

  He said, ‘I’m not very happy about that, Riley, I mean, I wouldn’t have rented to him if there hadn’t been a family connection.’

  I said, ‘Oh, please. You’re an estate agent, Martin. You’d have rented to Hitler if it’d suited you.’

  Later Fleur’s pearly little teeth did one of those sharp little tch-tch-tching sounds, jumping up and down like a plastic joke pair on a table. She said, ‘I don’t know, Riley. Fancy signing something without reading the small print.’ This from a woman whose only experience of anything less than twelve point was on the back of her Christian Dior moisturiser.

  I said, ‘That’s why it’s small, so you won’t read it. Geddit?’

  It was a bummer losing all that money, that’s for sure. I ended up remortgaging the cottage to pay off the bank. Ten years on, the ripples can still be felt in my finances.

  It’s been a learning curve, though, going over the whole thing. I think I can see now why it happened – that wham bam sexual attraction, for a start, something I guess I haven’t liked to acknowledge. There’s also the fact of wanting to make him happy. More than that, though, more than both of these things, I think I was caught unawares by Lennie. I think he sneaked through the net of my philophobia. Because I think I was afraid of falling in love. I had that honourable fear of hurting people. I knew I never could hurt Lennie, I knew that from the start. I relaxed my guard. I thought I was safe. And I fell, hook, line and sinker.

  Still one question remains, the most important one, spinster that I am: does Lennie O’Halloran qualify as an Unsuitable Liaison? I’d say that depends on the way you look at it. If I’d been in search of long-term relationship material, then the answer would be yes, no question. But for an old dyed-in-the-wool spinster with a severe case of gamophobia, I’d say he was entirely appropriate.

  One thing’s for sure, I got my comeuppance with Lennie. In terms of pure self-interest (always a danger for a self-centred spinster like myself) I got to work with a true professional. And in those moments when I’m ranting about how I hate finding things to do in relationships (yes, yes, folks, I know that I do), it’s good to remember that once upon a time in that narrow, circumscribed curry and video existence, I’d have loved to have taken off one Sunday afternoon to some stately home, sat in the coffee shop over a bad cappuccino.

  Looking back on it all now, I’d say the only thing I regret (OK so, big deal, I’ve used the word ‘regret’) is the good time I wasted back in my forties getting over Lennie (forties are good; moral, don’t waste them). Still it’s a sound lesson to learn. The big rule in this regard. Whatever it is, move On. Get Over It.

  ‘I don’t know where Lennie is,’ I said to Denis that first night we met, ‘and, trust me, that’s the way I like it.’

  Later, after he got called away, and Sophie and I were alone, I said, ‘You know I see now, it was only pride. That’s what took me so long to get over Lennie.’

  She shook her head. She said, ‘There’s no such thing as only pride, Riley.’

  * Mental Health and the Single Woman, G. Edwards and R. Eisenbrowsky, Woolford University, 2001. Closer inspection of the survey (via the university website) throws up serious questions about Edwards and Eisenbrowsky’s pre-established agenda, and in particular their cavalier approach to the category of ‘single woman’, which in the case of the survey includes not only spinsters but separated, divorced women and windows. In addition, the survey also does not differentiate between those recently separated, divorced or widowed, i.e., those who quite understandably might be feeling bad about the state of being single, and those who had been on their own a long time. Thus because Edwards and Eisenbrowsky chose not to break the categories down, we shall never know how the spinster fared as regards emotional health compared with, say, previously married women. In fact, all in all, as Sophie pointed out, some might think that the figure for contented wives didn’t exactly shape up as an endorsement for the state of marriage.

  ‘Bloody hell. Only a fifty-fifty chance of feeling good. Wouldn’t make me want to do it, I can tell you.’

  V is for … Values (i.e., Family)

  OK. First the facts of the case.

  In order to keep a population static, i.e., prevent it from decreasing, it requires a procreation figure of 2.1 children per woman.

  Across Europe at the moment the figure is a mere 1.5.*

  A hearty hollow laugh it would appear is due to those olive oil and pasta ads featuring football-pitch-length dining tables with bambinos crawling all over them. In fact Mama Italy is only procreating at the rate of 1.25, neck and necking with Germany on the same figure (the sound you hear is the crumbling remains of Joe Goebbels turning in his grave). Spain is even lower at 1.22. Greece nudges slightly ahead but only just at 1.30. The UK comes in at 1.63, with Denmark, the only country with a figure on the rise, at 1.74. Long-time leader, Catholic Mother Ireland, is now in second place with 1.88 (and you might like to compare this with her sixties figure of 3.5) while Top of the Moms and Pops is France at 1.89, a slender victory certainly, but still a cause for great jubilation when the figures were released.

  Neither is the problem confined to Europe. In countries as diverse as North Korea, the Czech Republic, Singapore, Colombia, Bangladesh and Australia women appear to be refusing to lie back and think of population replacement.*

  With regard to the scenario that started this chapter, the upshot of all the above is that, theoretically, if things continue as they’re going, within a couple of hundred years the population of the European Union will have dropped from 375 million to 75 million, while come the third millennium a scant 50,000 of us will be scattered across the continent.

  Still, as I say to my mother, at least parking will be a lot easier.

  ‘And hey, you’ll have a much better chance of winning the lottery.’

  But my mother is not listening. I know the look on her face. The eyes glazed with fake memory as she stares at me over the top of the paper with its traditional End of the World As We Know It in 72 point, this time proclaiming:

  THE END OF THE FAMILY

  Around her mouth, which is skewed sideways as she clicks her teeth, there’s a look of what I can only describe as utterly satisfied dissatisfaction, one that would please the powers that be who produce the paper, could they but see how they’ve hit pay dirt with my mother this morning.

  ‘If I’d
been like that.’

  ‘Like what, Mother?’

  ‘I could have been happy with just your sister, you know?’

  This is a rhetorical question. It does not require an answer. For now Babs Gordon has her saintly Mother Theresa look about her. Were her hands not at this very moment folding up that newspaper and laying it aside with customary reverence on the kitchen table, they would almost certainly be folded nun-like in her lap.

  ‘But then, of course, in those days it was different. In those days you were supposed to have two. In those days they said having just the one was bad for them.’

  The most surprising thing is the bile in my mother’s voice. It glugs up like dirty water in a blocked sink. The suppressed snarl plumps out her cheekbones. But then we’ve heard it before.

  ‘Hey …’ because Cass has just slid in the back door with my mother’s dry cleaning, ‘Mommy Dearest is about to rewrite history.’

  ‘Oh, good.’

  ‘You can laugh but I was always there for the pair of you.’

  ‘There for us?’ I hoot over the words. ‘Jesus, Mother, you’ve been watching too much daytime television.’

  It’s at this point I always think it might be true what my mother says about me. Maybe I do get any talent for fiction I possess from her because for certain she has a rich imagination. Like now, for instance, when I can see by the look on her face that she has a vision of herself, the perfect hausfrau in a mythical world, with gingham curtains at the windows and a pan on the boil and a scrubbed pine table covered with bottles as she makes jams and chutneys for the family.

  ‘I always had a proper meal on the table for you.’

  ‘You’re kidding. You turned me into a Vesta Paella junkie.’*

  ‘You said you liked it.’

  ‘Not five times a week.’

  See, you have to understand my mother doesn’t lie. It’s like I said: she simply redraws history and, make no mistake, she believes it.

  ‘There’s a lot you wouldn’t have had if it wasn’t for me.’

  She’s by the fireside now. In her mind, she’s rocking in a chair, grey-haired and with a sock and one of those mushroom things. Dear God, she’s darning.

  ‘I made all your clothes.’

  Not true. Thank God. Although she did try. And there wasn’t an armhole that didn’t sag, or a buttonhole that closed or a skirt without a hem that waved like the ocean.

  ‘What did she do, actually?’ I look around from the wheel with furrowed brow at Cass as we pull away from my mother’s front gate. ‘Can you remember? I mean, what did she do with her time?’

  ‘She shopped.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. Of course. How soon do we forget?’

  Even in the early days, in the fifties, in our one-horse town where it was like the Marshall Plan never happened, still our mother managed to come home with carrier bags of all shapes and sizes. Gloves she didn’t need. Scarves she’d never wear. She was forever buying bric-a-brac, vases, pictures, obscure kitchen implements.

  ‘And handicrafts.’

  ‘Oh God, yes.’

  ‘Rug making.’

  ‘Tufts of wool all over the house.’

  ‘And ikebana.’

  ‘Bits of branches everywhere.’

  ‘Oh, that stuff with nails and pieces of wire she made into pictures we had to hang in our bedrooms.’

  Once – I must have been about twelve – in the middle of one of their rows, I saw my father sweep an arm across the surface of the sideboard. There was the sound of tinkling clinking china as a dozen tiny ornaments and knick-knacks fell to the floor.

  ‘All this junk,’ he shouted.

  The action, the voice, were full of such viciousness that I cowered behind the kitchen door. Through the crack where the door joined the wall I saw my mother’s face pucker up – the only time I ever remember seeing her cry. All the hopelessness was in it, all the misery of what they were. I saw my father’s shoulders, which had risen high up to his ears with his fury, drop. He seemed to deflate. When he spoke again it was not tender exactly, but weary and sorrowful.

  He said, ‘It’s all right. Don’t worry. I’m sorry.’ He said, ‘It doesn’t matter. Don’t cry, Barbara …’

  Declaring his (reluctant) love for Beatrice, Benedick (thinking woman’s tottie, if ever one existed) proclaimed: ‘The world must be peopled.’ However, as is clear from the figures in my mother’s morning newspaper, in certain parts of the world, most notably our own, it isn’t being.

  ‘I’m not a bit surprised.’ This from Cass as she scrabbles in the medicine cabinet after yet another argument with her daughter over the matter of her attending an all- night party. ‘Have you any idea how the sales of Neurofen would plummet if people stopped having children?’

  In fact, that’s exactly what’s happening. Not only are couples choosing to make do with one child, a number of them – the Dinkies and Thinkers* of this world – are dispensing with the idea altogether.

  ‘Shallow and hedonistic’ my mother’s leader writer calls them, singling out for particular reprobation the one in four women now prepared to say outright that they don’t want children. ‘Playing games with their fertility’, ‘Defying their biological destiny’, ‘Condemning themselves to remain unfulfilled as women …’

  ‘Very sensible,’ according to the wife and mother now lying on the sofa, hand to her forehead in a vain attempt to counteract the sound of Elsa’s music thumping accusingly down through the ceiling.

  We thought we were trailblazers, didn’t we, we, the peace-and- love generation? We thought we were turning the world upside down but as it turns out, in terms of procreation, we were wildly conventional (clearly I’m using the generic we here). A full ninety per cent of us had become parents by thirty, this as opposed to the 1970 generation coming along behind us and turning thirty at the millennium, only fifty-two per cent of whom have so far done the decent thing and continued the species.

  To the leader writer’s obvious delight, the outlook for these women isn’t that good in terms of procreation. Two- thirds of those who leave it until forty to become pregnant won’t be able to do so naturally, and the odds drop right down to a three to five per cent chance for those who postpone it few years further.

  ‘Thinking science can solve everything …’

  What’s clear from all this – and hence the wrath of my mother’s paper – is that the establishment of the nuclear family (or the ‘normal’ family, as the paper prefers to call it) is no longer the aim of an increasing section of society, something that begs the question, why, since this is the case, should the words ‘the Family’ continue to be repeated in hushed tones, and in the manner of received wisdom, by Left and Right alike along with the concomitant mantra ‘family values’. Why, to put it more bluntly, when forty per cent of households in this country will soon be made up of single people, should the ‘the family’ continue to be referred to unceasingly as ‘the backbone of the country?’*

  In the not-too-distant future, half the households in the country will be single ones. And when they are, will we still be attracting that same palpable lack of interest from the politicians? Will it still be the case, as it is today, that only the mythical, iconographic ‘Family’ will be courted, that not one of these politicians will be considering us worthy of targeting or even tailoring his or her language to. And if it is, will it just be our own fault?

  Because according to a recent voting survey in the States – where, incidentally, the fifty per cent single household figure has already arrived – single women are some twenty per cent less likely to vote than their married sisters.† They don’t vote, according to the survey, because without children in school, or such things like joint retirement plans to consider, they see themselves as having a much less vested interest in society.

  Which is crazy. Utterly paradoxical. Because the fact that single people use less of society’s resources, e.g., schools, health service, etc., and pay proportionately more for everything, sh
ould be the very reason why they need to make their voice heard, why they should be voting.

  While this may as yet not have got through to the singles across the water, it certainly has to all those Dinkies and Thinkers. Pressure groups are already up and running in the States and Canada to fight for tax breaks for child- free couples, plus the right not to be forced to admire little Johnny’s painting or listen to Miranda piping ‘Frère Jacques’ on the recorder.

  ‘There is something inextricably selfish about the decision not to have children,’ according to the leader writer in my mother’s paper.

  ‘Quite right,’ according to my mother, as she slapped down her paper. ‘Supposing I’d been that selfish. Put it off. Had just the one. Maybe not even bothered at all …’ She looked at me triumphantly with the face of a woman who’d won the argument. ‘Well …’

  ‘Well, what?’

  ‘Well … you wouldn’t even be here, would you?’

  Now, no argument with my mother is easy. It’s like playing tennis with someone so bad they keep hitting off the wood, or else they do those little shots that crawl over the net, quite by accident and always when you’ve already turned your back and are walking back to the base line. Even a relatively simple question, for instance, whether the monarchy should be abolished, can lead you into uncharted waters.

  ‘You should be glad we’re lucky enough to have all this tradition. I mean the Queen …’

  ‘Gawd bless her …’

  ‘Yes, you may mock, Adeline. But remember, the Queen still wears gloves.’

  Imagine, then, trying to debate with her the metaphysical question of my not actually existing.