The Trouble with Single Women

by Yvonne Roberts

  ‘So?’ Claire said aggressively. ‘So, why shouldn’t that mean they won’t get on? Opposites can attract, you know—’

  Fee shrugged noncommittally. ‘Of course they can. But don’t you think it’s ridiculous to believe that a computer can come up with a perfect match?’

  The question remained unanswered because Shona had risen unsteadily to her feet and announced she was going to bed. Fee steered her towards the front door. En route, Shona remembered her manners.

  ‘Did I tell you what a lovely couple you make?’ she addressed Claire and Clem drunkenly. ‘It’s a rare and beautiful sight. Something to treasure. You take care of her, understand,’ she said to Clem. ‘Tell me, Fee, how did those two meet? I adore a bit of romance—’

  Fee laughed. ‘Come on, Shona, it’s time for bed.’

  Shona swayed in the doorway. ‘Did you meet at a party, Claire? Or on a train? I love train meetings. So mysterious . . . All those dark tunnels and wet platforms—’

  Claire smiled. ‘It was much more down to earth than that, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘We’ll tell you about it one day when we’ve all got more time—’

  Booze had made Shona bold. ‘That’s a definite date then,’ she shouted over her shoulder as Fee propelled her towards the front door. ‘Don’t think I’ll forget . . .!’

  Fee eventually managed to fold Shona into the car and pull the safety-belt across her body. ‘I won’t forget, you know,’ Shona said, peering into Fee’s face in the gloom.

  She smiled sleepily. ‘That man is so gorgeous, I will never forget.’

  ‘Clem Thomas? Gorgeous?’ Fee was now exasperated with Shona’s physical floppiness, as she attempted to buckle her safety-belt.

  ‘Shona Spannier, you really are talking bullshit.’

  Chapter Thirty

  ‘ARE YOU sure you won’t marry me, Walt?’ Fee asked, laughing. ‘I could make you a very happy man.’

  Walt Whiting chuckled. ‘Don’t try to distract me when I’m winning. OK, question number 4. What was Roy Rogers’s real name?’

  Fee shrugged, ‘Haven’t a clue.’

  ‘Leonard Franklin Slye,’ Walt answered with glee, ‘You are rusty, girl. Your father would be ashamed of you. Question number 5. Name two types of cacti in the Arizona desert—’

  Fee didn’t hesitate. ‘Prickly Pear and Organ Pipe . . . Both featured in The Man from the T-Bar Ranch by Gus Arnold—’

  ‘Not bad,’ Walt conceded. ‘OK, your turn to ask the questions but make ’em tough—’

  He had contacted Fee at work that morning and told her that the landlord had threatened to dump Rita/Rose’s belongings in a skip if she didn’t pay her rent.

  ‘We pay monthly and she’s a couple of months behind,’ he explained. ‘Jimmy and I have said we’ll pack her stuff up but we’ve nowhere to store it. Can you help?’

  Fee agreed to come at lunchtime. Walt Whiting had insisted on feeding her. Homemade vegetable soup had somehow led to a conversation about cowboys and that, in turn, had led to a contest to see who really knew the Wild West. Walt was ahead.

  Fee looked at her watch. ‘I’ll have to go soon,’ she said. ‘Is there much stuff to store?’

  Walt shook his head. ‘Sad, really,’ he said and then smiled wickedly. ‘Unless, of course, she’s kept all her best stuff for one of her other lives?’

  Two suitcases, five black plastic bags and a box of books had been placed in the middle of Rita Mason’s denuded room. Once she saw these few possessions, Fee knew she didn’t want them in her flat. It wasn’t the space they would occupy; that wasn’t a problem. It was the fact that they meant that Rita could reintroduce herself back into her life again. And Fee wanted this loose end tied in the largest possible knot.

  ‘I’ll take the lot to Cardiff,’ she announced. ‘I’d planned to visit Rita . . . Rose’s mother anyway. Then I got waylaid. I’m sure she’ll have somewhere to keep her daughter’s belongings safe.’

  ‘Does she know Rose is missing?’ Walt asked.

  Fee shook her head. ‘She’s not in the phone directory so my guess is she’s got a different name—’

  ‘Well, there’s a surprise,’ he commented drily. ‘When do you plan to go?’

  Fee took only a few minutes to consider.

  ‘Tomorrow. I can get there and back in a day or so and I’m owed lots of time off.’

  ‘Tomorrow suits me,’ said Walt. ‘You don’t mind if I come along with you, do you?’

  Fee smiled at him, delighted.

  ‘You’re a man after my own heart, Walt,’ she said. ‘Are you sure you won’t marry me?’

  The next morning, they left for Cardiff early. The address wasn’t difficult to find. It was one of a row of terraced houses, each with its own neatly kept front garden. Number 48 had a red door, net curtains and two empty milk bottles on the doorstep.

  A small woman – under five foot – but solidly built, was weeding a flowerbed. Her face was tanned and deeply lined and her hair pulled back into a bun. Her energy was almost tangible and faintly frightening in its ferocity. She wore Wellingtons, a large pair of what might have once been men’s corduroy trousers and a plaid flannel shirt. She certainly didn’t look like the type who would have a crush on Rita Heywood, as Rita had reported to Veronica.

  ‘Yes?’ the woman said curtly when she saw Fee and Walt Whiting at her garden gate. The accent was Scottish. She didn’t return Fee’s smile.

  ‘I wondered if I might speak to Rita . . . Rose, please?’ Fee asked. The woman’s manner made her feel unusually hesitant.

  ‘Who?’ the woman asked impatiently but Fee guessed from the way she seemed to square herself that she knew exactly who Fee was talking about.

  She cleaned her hands on her trousers. ‘I’m seventy-two years of age and I’ve never known a Rita or a Rose. Sorry I can’t help,’ she added and turned away to walk into the house.

  Fee and Walt followed her. Fee decided she was tough enough to stand a little gentle harassment. The woman turned again to face Fee.

  ‘I know you don’t have a Rita or a Rose,’ Fee began. ‘But this person gave this address as her mother’s home. I’m very keen to know if this person is all right—’

  ‘Of course she’s all right.’ The woman folded her arms in front of her. ‘She’s always all right . . . it’s everybody else she brings trouble to—’

  Walt Whiting raised his hat by way of a greeting. ‘Madam,’ he began graciously. ‘We mean well, we really do. May we have a few words? Perhaps indoors, if that might be possible?’

  The sitting room appeared not to have changed for thirty or forty years. It was overcrowded with dark, utility furniture and bric-à-brac which marched like a tin and china army across every available surface.

  Family photographs were in abundance, the more recent ones incongruously framed in opaque lilac and turquoise and bright orange. None figured Rita or Rose.

  ‘If you’re looking for snaps of her, I burned them all,’ the woman said bluntly. ‘I knew in the womb she’d be nothing but trouble. And she soon proved me right.’

  Fee sat down slowly on a straight-backed chair with a torn brown leather seat. It was the first time in her life that she had heard a mother openly express such dislike of her own child.

  ‘Even as a baby I couldn’t stand her. Loved the others, but couldn’t stand her. She was selfish, always wanting, always after attention, always leading the others into trouble. She was the first of the four,’ the woman explained without emotion.

  ‘I told people that I didn’t like her. Why not be honest? But it’s not what you’re supposed to say, is it? You can think it, but if you’re a mother you can’t say it. Well, I did. I’ve always called a spade a spade. And proud of it.’

  The woman suddenly got up from the chair she had taken by the window. ‘I’ll make tea,’ she said. ‘My name is Thomasina Hastings. Don’t bother to tell me yours. There’s been too many over the years.’

  The story of Rita Mason, as recounted by her
mother, wasn’t very long in the telling. Rita’s name on her birth certificate was Mary Hastings.

  ‘Plain Mary,’ her mother said.

  The Hastings had moved to Cardiff from Glasgow after the war so that Peter, Thomasina’s husband, who had died in his sixties, could take up a job working for a ship’s chandler. Rita had been born six months after the marriage, when her mother was just nineteen.

  At fourteen, Rita became pregnant. The child, a boy, was born in a mother and baby home and then adopted. ‘A year later, I told her to get out,’ Thomasina Hastings’s tone indicated she had nothing to repent. ‘It was the lies. Always lying. Inventing stories. Being who she wasn’t. “What’s wrong with who you are?” I used to ask her.

  ‘After she left, she went from one fella to another. The few times she’d come back, she’d be dressed to the nines, dishing out expensive presents. Always managed to get some boy to spend money on her. I told her to keep her presents. I believe in honest money.’

  ‘So how was she earning a living?’ Fee asked.

  ‘Don’t know. But I could guess. Never asked what she was doing or where she was living, because I knew she’d only give me lies.

  ‘My guess is when she got too old to hook the men, she started to latch on to women. Called herself a lady’s companion at one point. Frightened one old woman half to death. Wouldn’t let her live her own life.

  ‘The woman’s relatives called the police to chuck Mary out of the house . . . Mary said she was only trying to do what was best by the old woman and her relatives were all thieves—’ Thomasina Hastings gave a grim laugh. ‘She’s greedy, Mary is. Always was, always will be. Wants too much of what others have got—’

  She leaned closer to Fee. ‘I haven’t seen nor heard from Mary in months and, if I were you, I’d forget about her too. If she’s not doing harm, that girl, she’s not happy . . . The other three have married, settled down, raised families, never caused a day of worry. But Mary?

  ‘I used to look at her sometimes and think she’s not my child. She can’t be my child. She’s nobody’s child.’

  At the garden gate, Walt Whiting, hitherto silent, laid a hand on Fee’s arm. ‘What ghosts in that woman, do you think, made her punish her daughter so?’ he asked gently.

  Shona sat in Veronica’s kitchen with the large diary that normally hung on Veronica’s wall. Each month was illustrated with a lurid watercolour in which a tinned peach had been crudely inserted into the scenery. The calendar had been a gift when Salamanca, ‘purveyors of the world’s finest canned peaches’, had tried to woo Les Haslem as a customer.

  Shona stared at this month’s illustration. It showed a blood-red skyline on a tropical island. The ‘sun’ beginning to set was a large tinned peach.

  ‘Look at June,’ Jean Stoker instructed.

  Shona did as she was told.

  ‘Do you see the ring around the eighth?’ Jean asked. Shona nodded. ‘That’s our deadline for the money. If we haven’t raised it by then, we’ve lost our chance of buying the business.’

  ‘Edward’s been behaving exceptionally well since he tried and failed to find the cassette,’ Shona said. ‘Do you want me to ask him for the cash? He’s so desperate that I turn up for his selection meeting next week that he’d more or less agree to anything. After next week,’ she added resignedly, ‘who knows what will happen?’

  Veronica shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘We don’t want his money, we want your help.’

  Shona took a good look at Veronica. She hadn’t realized when she first arrived, but now it was obvious: something had happened to Veronica. She had had her hair restyled and she was glowing. If Shona hadn’t known that Veronica was fifty-one, she would have said that she had that early look of pregnancy. Her eyes had a sparkle, her skin had a gleam. Something had happened to her.

  ‘So, Shona, will you give us a hand?’ Veronica asked again.

  ‘Me?’ Shona queried. ‘How can I help? I’m sorry, I wish I could . . . but it’s so long since I had a job. I’d be more of a liability—’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Jean reassured her. ‘If you can persuade Imogen Banks to do something she doesn’t want to do, you can persuade anybody to do anything . . . Veronica and I have talked it over and we’re sure you’re perfect for what we want. So what do you say?’

  Half an hour later, an agreement had been reached. Veronica checked her watch and told the other two women to move into the sitting room, turn on the television and she would bring in the wine. ‘It’s almost time.’

  Les Haslem was upstairs in his office. He shunned the word ‘study’ as too pretentious. Hearing the women move from one room to the next, he closed his door and surreptitiously turned on his television too. He’d told his wife that he hadn’t the remotest interest in what Fee had to say on the subject of marriage, spinsterhood or, for that matter, Brussels sprouts, on or off the box.

  He knew he would warm to her again, given time, but she had been the catalyst for too many unsettling events in his life recently for him to entertain positive thoughts quite yet.

  He changed channels, keeping the volume low. Give Fee her due though, he told himself, she had helped put a stop to Veronica’s problem. For now. Les settled down to watch his sister-in-law’s television début.

  The Perfumed Pound was a third of the way through before Fee Travers was introduced to the viewer. By then, Les Haslem had been snoring gently for several minutes. ‘Women’s stuff’ always had that effect on him.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  CHEESE AND pickle sandwiches, curling at the ends like a genie’s slippers, and several bottles of warm white wine had been placed on a table along one side of the room. Half-a-dozen office chairs faced a large television. Two female researchers shepherded people to and from the make-up department.

  Participants in the studio discussion that was to follow The Perfumed Pound, due to go on air shortly, had not been formally introduced. So, unsure of who was an enemy and who might be an ally, they said little and concentrated instead on imagining the various ways in which they might be about to make a fool of themselves on national television.

  The bishop, of course, was more confident. TV studios were his preferred pulpit. He discreetly examined Fee Travers. She looked normal enough; feminine, well kept, quite attractive, not even overweight. In his experience, so many of these sorts of females were, well, large; starved of love, stuffed on chocolate wafers.

  The bishop had already been tipped off by Imogen. She had told him that Fee was one of society’s subversives. She was extremely anti-family. She was also in favour of the elimination of the institution of marriage and its replacement with annually renewable contracts, which should also be available to same-sex couples.

  The bishop sighed. Life had become so much more complex since Consumerism had replaced Christianity in most people’s lives. Once upon a time, it used to be ‘I believe’ or even ‘I think I believe’ . . . now it was ‘I want; I buy.’

  ‘I’d like My Money Back’ was the closest the average pew-filler came to redemption, he mused, on his second glass. Even marriage had become as dispensable as last year’s cassock. It had all been so much easier when everybody knew their place . . . the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate . . . And the wife?

  The bishop sighed again and glanced at the woman to his right. She wore a dark-brown trouser suit and open-necked cream shirt. The hair was cropped with one curl literally glued to her forehead. She wore brogues and a large gold ring on her wedding finger. The bishop was fairly positive that her spouse was unlikely to be male.

  ‘Chris Odell,’ the woman said, catching his eye and taking the opportunity to introduce herself. She stuck out her hand and the bishop found himself in a grip so powerful he could have sworn his own hand had been neatly folded in two, like a napkin on a side plate.

  The woman smiled. ‘I’m spokesperson for SOS . . . Save Our Spinsters . . . We want to reclaim the word ‘spinster’ and make it synonymous with joy, celebrat
ion, pride, choice—’ Chris Odell spoke as if she had written one too many mission statements.

  ‘We believe that a woman’s natural choice is to be single . . . roam free . . . to opt for no long-term partner. Study nature, bishop. It’s all right if I call you bishop, isn’t it? I find, “Your Grace” politically indefensible—

  ‘Well, bishop, study nature and what do we see? Females of the species copulating with whoever takes their fancy, then going on to live as independent beings in colonies of females. Is this taught in the national curriculum? Of course it isn’t, it’s far too revolutionary. But we know the truth. The truth is that marriage, wifedom, is an unnatural state—

  ‘SOS’s intention is to reverse the brainwashing of girls today. Too many mistakenly believe that spinsterhood means only one thing – rejection, misery, failure—’

  The bishop tried and failed to suppress a yawn. ‘Isn’t that three things?’ he remarked mildly.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong, bishop,’ Chris Odell continued, oblivious to his reaction, ‘I’m not talking about the patriarchy here. I’m talking the next step. We don’t know where that step may take us, but we do know that the new spinsters will lead the way because who—’

  The young researcher interrupted forcefully. ‘Excuse me, but could you hold all controversy until we get to the studio, please?’ she ordered crisply. ‘The director is worried that if you do it in hospitality, there won’t be anything left to say . . . Here we go,’ she added, as someone dimmed the lights.

  ‘I hope you enjoy the film, everybody.’

  The Perfumed Pound was Imogen Banks at her best – or, at least, that’s what she’d encouraged others to write in a number of television previews. The film focused on three women, a GP of forty-five; a woman who ran her own import-export business, aged thirty, and Fee, who received the most attention, as she was the least equivocal.