‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘but to tell you the truth I might even get around to revising that opinion, Archie.’
The bill was lying on the plate before him and he was reaching into an inside pocket for his wallet when he said, ‘There’s something I’ve wanted to ask you. I hope you don’t mind.’ He was staring down at the bill, although I had the distinct impression he was only pretending to check it. He said, ‘Cass and Fergie, they’ve never known … you’ve never told them … you know, what happened between us?’
I didn’t really want this at the end of the evening, to tell you the truth. I’d have preferred it the way it was before, the joking, the careless sparring. It was like someone had rolled something in the middle of the table – not a grenade exactly, more a canister, which was beginning to fizz lightly, emitting a smell, a smoke not unpleasant but still disturbing.
‘No. I don’t ever want them to know.’
‘Why? I’m just curious.’
‘Because I never told Cass at the time and now it would break her heart to find out that at that time in my life I never turned to her for help.’
‘Right. I see that, Riley.’
I left it there. Actually, there was another reason but I figured it could wait or maybe I would never tell him. That I knew that Cass wanted kids, and that she and Fergie were already trying, and I thought that this might sway her judgement, make her try and talk me out of what I was determined to do.
He was tossing down a credit card now, carelessly, the way people do when they don’t have to worry about money. He said, ‘There you are, you see,’ and now he was looking up at me, and his face was straight and his eyes flat so I couldn’t make out if he was joking. ‘If I was the nasty bastard you’ve sometimes accused me of being, I could blackmail you over all this.’
I thought it best to treat it as joke. ‘Wouldn’t do you any good. Not with my finances.’
‘Yeah, but then maybe I wasn’t thinking of money.’
‘Are you flirting with me, Archie?’
‘I’d say we’ve come too far for that, Riley.’
We decided to walk back to my place where he’d call a taxi to go back to Cass and Fergie’s, where he was staying. It was a warm spring night.
He said, ‘Tell me something, if you had your time again, would you do things differently?’
‘Not a sensible question.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because if you just had your time again, you’d be the same person, wouldn’t you? You’d make the same decisions.’ We were passing the abbey and those same fingers of ruins were still pointing upwards like they were determined to be a leitmotiv for the whole damn story.
I said, ‘Now if they let you have another go at it?’
‘You’d do it differently?’
‘Well, of course. I mean, there wouldn’t be any point in doing everything the same way again, would there?’
‘Then you could compare?’
‘No, no.’ I shook my head vehemently. ‘Not to compare. Not to see if one was better than the other. Simply to do it differently.’
‘It’s a bastard, though, isn’t it?’ We were at the cottage by then and he paused, his hand on the gate. ‘Just getting the one damn go at it.’
‘A flaw,’ I said, as I pushed it open.
‘You’d think someone would have thought of it.’
Inside, as he reached for the phone, he said, ‘I guess a wild night of unconditional sex is out of the question.’
I said, ‘You know me. I don’t put out on the first date, Archie. Anyway, I’m not even sure I remember how it’s done.’
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘The way I do it, it’s much like riding a bicycle.’
It’s my guess that you’d like to know what happened then, i.e., the precise details of how we said good night.
Was it:
a) a warm friendly hug, the sort girl scouts give at the end of particularly successful summer camp?
b) those air kisses, one on each cheek, so favoured of Europeans and corporate events managers?
c) a full mouth-on-mouth job, lingering, investigative?
I’d say it was a little bit of all of them. Furthermore, it’s none of your damn business.
The taxi was idling when he turned at the gate. His words blew a stream of white into the air.
‘I’ll tell you something, Riley.’
‘What?’
‘Bearing everything in mind, your situation, your finances, and everything, you could do a lot worse than marry me.’
It was so full of the old Archie, so full of bravado and with a touch of that truculent air, I crossed my arms over my chest and burst out laughing.
I said, ‘Yeah. But let’s face it, it wouldn’t be easy, Archie.’
It was only later, reporting all this to Sophie, that it struck me what a seminal moment it had been.
‘Apart from anything else, it’s the only time in my life when anyone’s actually asked me to marry them.’
She said, ‘Uh-huh,’ but I could tell she wasn’t really listening. Instead she was studying the manly frame of a thirty-year old army gym instructor keen to widen his experience with an older woman.
Life moves on, like I say, and not least for Sophie. She’s back seriously on the on-line dating scene, this because Denis is no more – not dead, just taken early retirement. Unlike Fergie, however, he’s not spending it down the bottom of the garden. Instead he’s bought a villa, moved with his wife to Malaga.
‘Gosh,’ I said when Sophie told me. ‘The Costa Crime. He’ll probably bump into Lennie.’
Sophie’s taken this with what I can only describe as total equilibrium, an approach assisted in no small way by the prospect of the likes of of the above-mentioned army gym instructor.
She was browsing among the ‘Absolutely Original’ (arty, sporty, confident) and the ‘Self-employed and Stylish’ (friendly, talkative, intelligent), when I said, ‘This thing with Archie – I wouldn’t want you to think it’s a zing, zing, zing went my heartstrings, job.’
She said, ‘Of course not,’ distinctly drily, turning for a moment from the screen to stare at me over her glasses. ‘We all know they’re well past the plucking.’
I settled back contentedly on her sofa. ‘Anyway,’ I said, taking a self-satisfied slurp of my wine, ‘it would never work with Archie.’
She said, ‘I’m not clear,’ the words surprisingly chill, cutting through the air. ‘Why exactly does it have to work, Riley?’
They broke over my head, those words, like some sort of clear white light on that old Road to Damascus. Because I saw it then, all these years I’d been telling myself, kidding myself that I was different, a dyed-in-the-wool spinster, and yet each time someone new had come into my life, I’d done exactly the same as the rest of the world, wondered, instinctively, if the thing had a future, if it would work out, if it would turn into one of those things, those mysteries, called A Relationship.
‘Good God,’ I said, ‘I’m just the same as everybody else.’
Sophie didn’t take her eyes from the screen, just went on clicking away calmly.
‘Really,’ she said. ‘I imagine that must be devastating.’
We’re coming to the end of this Spinster’s Alphabet now, all the way from Attitude to Zinging heartstrings. I’m still no nearer to figuring out how or why I ended up a spinster, whether I was born or bred to the calling, or whether it was merely accidental, pure serendipity, just falling one side of that solitude/companionship crossbeam rather than the other. Or perhaps it really was all down to that old bridesmaid’s curse the way Archie alleged all those years ago when he wanted to save me from it at Cass and Fergie’s wedding.
Thanks to Archie, meanwhile, I won’t be doing any of that if it falls to me stuff I envisaged at beginning of this Alphabet. In short, while many may be the calls for it upon publication of this volume, I won’t be forming the Spinster Appreciation Movement.
I don’t think so … (This in reply to
one of my e-mails.)
Why not? I see stickers, I see badges … I see T-shirts …
My point exactly.
Sorry?
Look, do you really want SpAM across your chest when you go
on Richard and Judy?
As regards Archie, I regret to say it is exactly as I feared and indeed alleged that day to Fergie. There are indeed olive groves surrounding his villa. I can see them dropping away down the hillside in the jpeg that arrived with his latest e-mail this morning. In addition, I can see bougainvillaea, something you may recall I also foresaw. It crawls up, some might think appealingly, around the roof stanchions of the terrace. In the subject box Archie’s typed ‘WHEN ARE YOU COMING?’ and beneath the picture: ‘IF YOU NEED A CHAPERONE BRING DANNY.’
‘Ooooo … now, you never mentioned this,’ said the man in question, who unfortunately happened to be passing as I opened it.
Whether I shall go, I don’t know yet. Whether, in particular, I shall be able to conquer my aviophobia to get there, or indeed, and for that matter, any other phobias that you might feel, dear reader – knowing all that you know and having come this far – are applicable to the situation. Finally, if this has ended up like one of those self-help books, the sort crowding on Magda’s shelves, or if it’s more like those fake funky sociology tomes with their racy titles and covers, I don’t know. But if there’s a moral or motto to it all then it’s probably this: that there’s a little bit of a spinster in all of us, the very reason to stop regarding her as slightly inferior, odd, different.
Finally, as regards the Life of Riley, I can only repeat what I said at the beginning. It’s been a good life. Leading apes in hell would be a small price to pay for it, although personally I don’t think it’s going to happen. I’m with Beatrice on this. I think I’m bound for Spinster Heaven.
I imagine Spinster Heaven like a paradise – white beach, blue sea, and palm trees, like the one in Zamboanga where I opened up that letter from Cass all those years ago, or the one in Southern Thailand where Jonah is now, and which you can see behind the band of beautiful baggy-shorted young men and bikini-ed young women all laughing into the camera with him, he laughing most of all, in the middle of them.
‘What do you think?’ said his mother. ‘Do you think he’s alright? What do you think he’s doing?’
I said, ‘All the things you’re supposed to do at that age. All the things we don’t want to think about, so let’s not do it.’
And this because I knew that ‘David’ was right, that worry was the price that you pay, and I’d like to cut it down as much as is humanly possible.
Meanwhile, back in my spinster heaven, I’ll build a palm-roofed wooden hut, set out my gramophone and my records à la Desert Island Discs, my Bible and my Shakespeare along with Cornelia’s solar vibrator. I’ll scratch out ‘Spinster’ on a piece of bark, nail it up over the door proudly.
In Spinster Heaven, a demographic time-bomb will have resulted in a serious excess of good-looking, intelligent men, of varying age and all with a terrible sense of humour (this because Sophie, who knows about these things, says anyone who puts GSOH in an ad almost certainly doesn’t possess one).
Their hobbies will include wine, water sports and quiet nights around the campfire … oh, yes, and the films of Martin Scorcese.
They will have been brought up to believe that women of a certain age and of a certain persuasion are to be prized beyond rubies.
For them the word ‘spinster’ loosely translates as The Great Blonde Haji For Whom We Have Waited.
The Author gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance received from New Writing North through its Time to Write Award during the writing of this book.
Thanks also to Faber and Faber and the Eliot estate for permission to quote from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.
* Clang, clang, clang went the trolley,
Ding, ding, ding went the bell,
Zing, zing, zing went my heartstrings …
‘The Trolley Song’, words and music Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane from the film Meet Me In St Louis
* Have you noticed how no one ever dies peacefully in bed in a previous incarnation?
* Always a problem in Hocus Pocus. It’s a mistake to think those intent on pursuing the Higher Path won’t half-inch some Tibetan bells and The Sayings of the Buddha to start them on their journey.
* It’s worth pointing out here that I had made an effort, little black dress, etc. Plus I wield a mean hairdryer when I try, not to mention face-pack and razor.
About the Author
NOT MARRIED, NOT BOTHERED
Carol Clewlow’s first novel Keeping the Faith was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize, while her second, the bestselling A Woman’s Guide to Adultery was translated into 15 languages and turned into a TV mini series. A further novel, Love in the Modern Sense, plus a number of her short stories have been broadcast on Radio 4 and a fourth, One For The Money, performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. She is a founder member of Operating Theatre, a groundbreaking organisation which brings health professionals and members of the performing arts together. She lives and works in the North East of England.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.co.uk for exclusive information on Carol Clewlow.
Also by Carol Clewlow
A Woman’s Guide to Adultery
Keeping the Faith
Love in the Modern Sense
One for the Money
Copyright
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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This paperback edition 2005
First published in Great Britain by
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Copyright © Carol Clewlow 2005
Carol Clewlow asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Contents
A Is For … Attitude
B Is For … Bridesmaid (As In Three Times A …)
C Is For … Cliché
D Is For … Death, Divorce And Moving House
E Is For … Eleutherophobia
F Is For … Finances
G Is For … Gamophobia
H Is For … Heroines
I Is For … The Importance Of Aunts
J Is for… Jane
K Is For . . . Kinder
L Is For … That Old Lost Love Story
M Is For … Marriage
N Is For … Nature Or Nurture?
O Is For … An Old Maid
P Is For … Philophobia
Q Is For … A Question Of Sex
R Is For … Regret
S Is For … Solitude (Or Sunday In The Park With Riley)
T Is For … Titles
U Is For … The Unsuitable Liaison
V Is For … Values (I.E., Family)
W Is For … Weddings
X Is For …
Y Is … For That Old Yellow Brick Road
Z Is For … Zing Zing Zing (Went My Heartstrings)
About the Author
Also By Carol Clewlow
Copyright
About the Publisher
Not Married, Not Bothered Page 30