The rest of the group didn’t seem all that surprised to hear about the split-up. And it is true, now I come to think about it, that I have never once heard Alison mention her husband. I found out his name for the first time when she told me he had gone. (Derek. Never a name which bodes well. There are no good Dereks in any books – or indeed any Dereks at all, that I can recall.) Of course, there can be a bit of a thing in women’s groups about not mentioning husbands or boyfriends overmuch, not wanting to seem to be joined at the hip. Do you remember Celia Jones at college, who used to bring that boyfriend of hers from home into every other sentence, and how it used to have the rest of Women’s Action gritting their teeth and shuffling their Doc Martens in aggravation? But in WITCH, Susan talks about her boyfriend sometimes, and even Persephone refers to her ex now and again (though mainly, I must admit, to cast aspersions upon either his sexual prowess or his oral hygiene. And bad-mouthing men always goes down OK in a women’s group). I’ve never been keen on women who constantly go on about their marvellous husbands, even when they are in a professional situation. It can come over as irrelevant and jarring, even self-belittling, as if they are not independent, whole people in their own right. But for a married person like Alison never to mention Derek’s name, when she had talked quite a lot about her sons, well, I suppose I did wonder . . . I mean, Cora’s married, and she talks about Pete. He just crops up, in the normal way of things. When I first moved in, in fact, she talked about little else – though with Cora I never found it irritating, more sad than anything. And people at school tell the occasional funny story in the staffroom, or their partners come up in conversation, you know, when they tell you what they did at the weekend. Mrs Martin the deputy head, for example, has a husband who is a conjuror. Having ready access to all the kids’ dates of birth, she keeps him well supplied with bookings for children’s parties – a flagrant misuse of corporate opportunity, ripe for referral to the Office of Fair Trading. Mind you, he hasn’t been getting quite so many gigs since he produced a fluffy white rabbit out of Timothy Burgess’s mother’s piano stool too soon after the death of his beloved Thumper, reducing Timothy to howling inconsolability and transforming the rest of his birthday celebration into a wake.
But sorry, I’m rambling appallingly as usual. There is still no news of Nasreen. I’m going to go to London again at the weekend. We’re going to try putting up some of the posters round the Tube stations. Richard has kindly said I can stay at his flat again on Saturday night. But tell me about Frankie. I trust he’s got your system flowing freely?
Love,
Margaret xx
From: Rebecca Prichard [[email protected]]
Sent: 10/6/05 22:45
To: Margaret Hayton [[email protected]]
Margaret, hi. Don’t talk to me about staff meetings. Some of the old guard here could quibble for England. Last week there was a sweepstake among the younger staff after we saw the agenda. At 14 minutes, my pick was hopelessly short of the 26 and a half minutes spent discussing where to route the ducting for the new smartboard in the ICT room.
About Frankie: it turns out that he really does seem to believe that his life is a cheap porn movie, and I am not prepared to appear only in every third scene. So I have told him to take his plunger and get out.
I have looked up your Richard on the House of Commons website, by the way. He’s not bad at all – I don’t know what you are waiting for! I tell you, when things start to turn sour between me and Quentin or Quincy, you’d better watch out, hon!
Love and hugs,
Becs xx
Flat 6
14 Charterhouse Square
London EC1 9BL
12 June 2005
Dear Margaret,
I loved this weekend. I have felt more . . . useful, more engaged, more purposeful, more alive, these days that I have spent with you in London, even though our search hasn’t yet produced any results, than I have felt since my early days in politics, when it still seemed like one individual could make a difference, just by caring enough.
You looked so beautiful in your too-big shirt and your old combat trousers, like something fragile and exotic that the florist has just casually wrapped up in old newspaper. We must have visited nearly every Tube station in central London, and you would have carried on all evening, but your eyes looked unnaturally bright and there were bluish smudges appearing beneath your lower lashes. I wanted to take my thumbs and softly brush all the worry and fatigue away from your eyelids. I hailed a taxi and took you home, and this time I had remembered to shop, and there was salad as well as pasta, and it did not seem so inappropriate to open the wine.
You were too tired and drained to talk, so I suggested you choose a video from the shelf, and you said, ‘What’s Gregory’s Girl?’ I went to see it when it came out, in the summer of 1981, with Ellie Shaw; you told me you were not born then. Not born – and I was old enough to be feeling up Ellie in the darkened cinema! That blazing summer, when discontent spilled over into rioting in every major British city. Even Ipswich’s half-heartedly disaffected youth managed their own token skirmish. In that crucible, in the burning hatred of Thatcher and all that she stood for, my political convictions were forged. You were not born; your formative years had none of that bitterness and entrenched division and sharp-edged certainty. And yet you have such passion, for the things in which you believe.
We watched Bill Forsyth’s gentle, aching comedy together, and I explained to you how everyone mistakenly thinks that it is Dee Hepburn who is Gregory’s girl, whereas in fact it is Clare Grogan. You were sitting on the floor, leaning back against the settee beside me, so that I could look at the cascading curls of your hair, and the tender stretch of white skin where the slope of your neck disappeared into the collar of your shirt, as often as at the screen, or oftener. And when Gregory lay on his back in the park next to Clare Grogan at last, and taught her to dance lying down, I wanted to be lying next to you, and learning the first slow cadences of our own dance together.
Of course, I cannot send you this letter, Margaret. It is going straight in the government issue shredder. But I think I am falling in love with you.
Richard.
IPSWICH TOWN CRIER
TUESDAY 14 JUNE 2005
BINS TO GET BINS
Ipswich Borough Council’s Refuse Collection and Recycling Service yesterday launched their latest safety scheme – to put Day-Glo spectacles on all our wheelie bins!
‘It is all about being seen,’ said Director of Waste Collection and Disposal, Mr Paul Marston. ‘With the wheelie bins being black, they are not easy to see during the hours of darkness, and they constitute a potential hazard to pedestrians.’ The borough council are to issue every household in the town with a fluorescent yellow sticker to attach to their bin to make it easier to spot. ‘The glasses motif was chosen to symbolise the concept of visibility,’ explained Mr Marston, himself sporting a pair of varifocals in eye-catching blue frames.
It seems that the scheme was devised in response to intervention by Ipswich MP and new ministerial appointee Mr Richard Slater, acting upon complaints from concerned – or myopic – constituents. Mr Slater (who, as a member of the borough council from 1989 to 1997, served as chair of the Refuse Disposal SubCommittee) was yesterday unavailable for comment.
42 Gledhill Street
Ipswich
15 June 2005
Dear Gran,
How have you been this week? It was great to see you last weekend. I’m just sorry it couldn’t have been for longer. I hope you are doing your exercises – maybe Kirsty would help you with them, if you asked her?
Last weekend I went to London again, to carry on trying to trace Nasreen, like I told you. Richard spent all day Saturday, and half of Sunday, helping me put up the posters. It’s so frustrating to think that now, thanks to the change to the asylum rules, she would be safe to come back to Ipswich, to the hostel, and not be sent back home, but she doesn’t know, and we have no way of getti
ng hold of her to tell her. I do hope that wherever she is, Gran, she is safe, and has found friends she can rely on. On Saturday night I stayed at Richard’s flat. He cooked us a lovely vegetarian supper, and we watched an old video, some 1980s thing. It seemed a bit dated to me to be honest, and a lot of it was about football, so not really my thing, as you know. But it was set in a school, so some of the jokes about the staff and kids had me laughing with recognition. And it did have a rather quirky, sweet ending – which surprised me, because I wouldn’t have had Richard down as an old romantic at all!
Today he came into school to meet my class. Of course it was very nice of him to take the time, and setting it up won me some serious Brownie points with the head. It fitted in well as part of their Citizenship programme (which is not at all what you would imagine, Gran; it’s mostly about picking up litter and going to the dentist regularly). I was a bit taken aback when a photographer from the Town Crier turned up as well, but to be fair Richard seemed embarrassed about it, too. In fact he apologised to me about it at least fifteen times, until I started to feel sorry for the photographer. Anyway, he’s promised me some prints for the display boards, so it was quite useful that he came.
I have a feeling that Richard is not very used to children. He opened with a few words about his job, which he delivered as though reading a prepared ministerial statement. Then Chloë Watson asked him if he had met the Queen, and he said no, at which juncture half of the girls lost interest. Josh Cayley asked him in a slightly belligerent tone what it is he actually does, and Richard replied that he helps to make laws. Simon Aldridge said, ‘Like a sheriff?’ and Josh drawled ‘I am the law’ like in a western, so then all the boys started giggling and Richard began to look slightly panicky. Then there was an unfortunate faux pas concerning our blind kid, Jack Caulfield. It happened to be Jack who asked whether MPs have to dress up smartly for work, and Richard laughingly gave what he hoped was the disarmingly self-deprecating reply, ‘What does it look like?’ Richard winced when I explained the reason for the general merriment which greeted this, but soldiered gamely on. Abby Bentham said that her dad says all the government do is take his money in taxes, so Richard started to explain how they use the money to provide schools and hospitals, and Nicky Stefanopoulos said, ‘Oh, are you a doctor, then?’ and he said, ‘Er, no,’ and looked hugely relieved when I said that was all there was time for and thank you for coming. By then I was wishing I’d had the foresight to plant a couple of sensible questions beforehand. I’m sure Bryony Cooke would have asked him about the woolsack with every semblance of breathless fascination, if I’d promised her she could sit on the end in assembly for a week. Even when he was leaving Richard was far from comfortable – it’s the first time I’ve ever heard anyone say ‘thank you for your time’ to a bunch of eight year olds! I really thought he might shake them each individually by the hand, or give them all his card. But later, when the photographer had gone and I was in the classroom clearing up, I looked out into the playground and saw him in goal, while Josh and Nicky took shots at him, and he seemed to be doing OK.
I took Richard out for a thank you meal later (though in the end he insisted on paying half, which rather defeated the object). I suggested a little Italian place in the town centre, because he seems keen on pasta – in fact I’d just got back when I began this letter. I don’t know if it was talking to the kids earlier that made him think of it, or what, but he came over all reminiscent about his childhood. It was rather touching, I thought.
Last night I was round at the hostel sitting with Helen again. She didn’t want to talk, but she has an old Scrabble board from when she was a kid, and she suggested we have a game. I stayed until gone 1 a.m.; we must have played about ten games, sitting together on her bed, and it seemed to really take her mind off things. She says that when she is very depressed she cannot concentrate enough to read a book, it’s just too demanding, and her own troubles keep intruding and squeezing out the story. But TV or the radio don’t absorb her enough to take up her thoughts and drive out the pain. Scrabble seems to be perfect – it requires exactly the right amount of mechanical concentration to keep her brain occupied and leave no room for the bad feelings. Or at least not on the surface, for that short while.
I’ll pack up some more books to post to you at the weekend, to replace the ones I brought home with me this time. I’m only paying back the tiniest sliver of a vast debt, Gran. This week I’ve been reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader to my class, and it reminded me of when you read it to me, at bedtimes, that week I came to stay when I was seven. Mum had had her hysterectomy, and Dad was between curates. There’s something about C. S. Lewis’s prose that still gets me every time, just like it did that first time. Not just the old familiar hairs-on-the-back-of-the-neck thing, but actually a physical vibration in my stomach muscles, a thrumming, like the resonanace of recognising something loved but half forgotten, or like the beginnings of laughter. Is it just getting older, or why is it that the books I encounter as an adult never have the power to do that to me?
Oh, and don’t forget those exercises, will you?
Lots of love,
Margaret xx
From: Richard Slater [[email protected]]
Sent: 16/6/05 15:12
To: Michael Carragan [[email protected]]
Michael, I am a madman, a dolt, an addle-pate, a bedlamite – and growing worse by the day. Not only did I yesterday brave the scornful ravages of an entire classful of eight-year-old inquisitors for the sake of one of Margaret’s smiles (and why on earth didn’t she warn me that one of them was blind?), but then, having allowed her to take me out for dinner, I began prattling to her about guinea pigs. I don’t know how it came upon me, Mike, I honestly don’t. She was so relaxed and confident with that ruthless mob of small hatchet-wielders, and yet once we were alone in the restaurant she was suddenly watchful, and filled with quick tension, so that I found myself speaking softly and making no abrupt movements, as though in the presence of some nervous woodland creature. Maybe it was this mental image which set me off thinking about Napoleon, even though I swear I had forgotten all about him for years. But whatever the reason, there was no excuse for blabbering about him to another adult human being.
Even the name is embarrassing enough! Other children called their pets Toffee or Smudge, but I had to name a tortoiseshell guinea pig after a French military dictator – evidently even at the age of seven I felt stirrings towards power and statesmanship. Anyway, before I knew it I was pouring out to Margaret the entirety of Napoleon’s less than imperial history. How he was fed almost exclusively on a diet of beet sugar, for example. It was one of the side-effects of growing up in Ipswich in the shadow of the sugar works. We lived close to a low railway bridge, under which the beet lorries had to pass on their way to the factory. They always approached the bridge piled high with beet in a jauntily bouffant manner, and emerged trimmed to a short back and sides, leaving piles of spilled sugar-beet at the foot of the bridge for me to collect in my bicycle saddlebags. I can see Napoleon now, looking up at me in cavian ecstasy, with the syrupy juice dribbling down his bearded chin. However, this seductively unsuitable diet quickly cost him both his waistline and all his teeth, and for four years, having lost the ability to do other than suck his food, he lived exclusively on Readybrek and well-boiled vegetable peelings. Until I went to stay with my Aunty Sylvia, who would have no truck with rodents with special dietary requirements. Napoleon was packed off in a cardboard box to live at the house of my friend Leon, where he was dead within the month.
Margaret, not unnaturally, greeted this whole sorry tale with a look in those beautiful, untamable eyes which can only be described as pitying. Her relief was manifest when the time came to argue about the bill.
The restorative effect of beer and your steadying conversation is urgently required.
Richard.
Richard Slater (Labour)
Member of Parliament for Ipswich
WITC
H
Women of Ipswich Together Combating Homelessness
Extract from minutes of meeting at Persephone’s house, 16
June 2005, 8 p.m.
New member
We were delighted to welcome Della Robertson from number 27, as a new member of the collective. Pat T. and Emily will redraft the evening/weekend cover rota, and the rota for sitting with Helen, to include Della’s name. Alison agreed to go with Della on any emergency call-outs for her first few times.
News of residents
Helen has had a difficult week, even with the members of the collective continuing to come in in the evenings. She has cut up twice during the night, on one occasion needing to go to A&E for stitching. Helen feels that if things go on as they are, she may need to seek a full-time hospital admission, rather than just weekend respite admissions as at present.
Carole is greatly enjoying her job at the medical laboratory. Alison said that her supervisor reported that the test tubes have never been cleaner.
Any other business
Pat and Pat announced that they will be having a civil partnership ceremony on 21 December, the first day that the new legislation comes into force. Everyone is invited to attend. They had brought along a bottle of asti spumante to celebrate their announcement.
MANCHESTER ECHO
FRIDAY 17 JUNE 2005
WOMEN SEEKING MEN
Gareth? Greg? Grant? Graeme? Lady of letters (23) seeks G to pull her strings. Contact Becs on 0905 213 2130 voicebox 66094.
More Than Love Letters Page 15