The women were each filmed, then interviewed on the advantages of living alone and how they spent their time and money. This was followed by observations from the people they had encountered in the years leading up to their decision to remain unattached.
Fee presumed that the aim of this miniature version of This Is Your Life was to establish in the viewers’ minds that the three modern spinsters paraded before them were neither rejects nor closet lesbians. As it was, Imogen Banks had skillfully linked the three cameos with general statistics about the proportion of single women in each age group and how this compared with post-war and more recent figures. She’d also referred to the economic power that single women wielded – and which had not yet been fully realized by many in the market place. Les Haslem woke briefly to be told that 62 per cent of cars costing over £25,000 were purchased by unattached females.
Superficially, the film appeared fair but, to Fee, it conveyed the idea that she and the other ‘female pioneers’ were emotional cowards by any other name.
For instance, Claire, in a brief interview, commented, ‘I believe that Fee’s problem is not that she prefers to stay single but that deep down she’s fearful of taking personal risks. If you call that exercising a choice, then yes, I suppose she’s chosen to be a spinster. But it’s not what I would call choice.’
‘Thank you, Claire,’ Fee muttered in the dark.
As she and the other guests watched the film, Angela Stead, one of the two researchers, ran through the line-up with the male presenter who was due to chair the discussion.
‘One bishop, pro marriage, in favour of a government-sponsored campaign to make the institution more sexy to the average secular refusnik. Say “I do” and collect £50, sort of thing—
‘One lesbian . . . spokesperson for SOS. Need I say more?
‘One woman from the film. Let the others push her hard, so we can get some fireworks.
‘One Catholic mother of six, married twenty-seven years, husband known to play around but other guests will probably be too polite to point this out. Pro-wives.
‘One right-wing academic and free marketeer who believes that women have a spiritual and civic duty to marry men, on the grounds that matrimony saves a man from barbarianism. Argues that the shame and stigma which was once associated with the spinsterhood must be restored in order to push more women into marriage. Confirmed bachelor himself, of course—
‘One Israeli-American psychiatrist, thirty-four, will say either that the rise in spinsters is a disaster, a feminist plot designed to undermine society. If it goes on, the crisis in masculinity will reach danger levels. You know, the usual kind of thing. Or, he’ll argue that the rise in spinsters is a sign of the first real breakthrough in the battle of the sexes, the inevitable result of men failing to change to suit a more egalitarian society. It’s warning to men and, if heeded, may mean a renegotiation in the contract of marriage and a much needed revival in matrimony – i.e. spinsterhood is good news.
‘In short, he’ll say what you feel is most required to give it all a bit of fizz. The deal is he prefers his left profile to camera.’
Hostilities commenced between the guests even before the discussion began. It soon transpired that the bishop also preferred to have his left profile to camera, and he too laid claim to the one seat that made this possible.
‘It helps my hearing, so I must insist,’ he said firmly.
‘I’m sorry, but I’ve already reached an agreement,’ the psychiatrist countered.
Chris Odell intervened. ‘Why do you men always have to be so puerile?’
‘Sexist generalizations like that, madam,’ the academic pronounced, ‘are sloppy, insufferable and an indicator of the kind of trouble we’d all be in if women ruled the world.’
‘Now, now,’ the Catholic wife and mother of six began in a placatory fashion, ‘we don’t need to behave like children, do we? Why don’t I take this chair and then we won’t have a problem any more, will we?’
‘Don’t you patronize me,’ the psychiatrist snapped.
Fee watched wearily. She had come not to champion a cause but simply to explain her decision. But, as the evening unfolded, the very small hope she had held that this might be possible had slid further and further away. Not least because Imogen Banks had told Fee that there would only be one other opponent; now she faced five. Still, Fee consoled herself, she had helped Shona to get her man. What more could a good cowboy ask?
Chris Odell moved to fill the chair next to her.
‘Thirty seconds to go,’ the floor manager warned. ‘And good luck, ladies and gentlemen—’
For the next twenty minutes, the chairman allowed Fee’s five fellow guests to criticize not what she had said but what they assumed she had said in the film.
At first, Fee was angry, then defensive, then resigned – not least because she was repeatedly denied an opportunity to speak.
It was only when the academic, drunk on Sancerre and self-admiration, began to lecture her that Fee decided that she had had enough.
He spoke languidly in the style of someone who is accustomed to being treated as a wit and intellectual for displays of rude and offensive twittery.
‘I have to say people like you, good lady, who advocate wholesale social engineering just to disguise the fact that Cupid has skipped on by—’ he began.
Fee smiled sweetly. ‘Is there something about a spinster that you find intimidating, perhaps?’ she asked, then added, ‘May I just make three brief points? First, I’m not advocating anything. I’m not advocating being single. But I am saying that diversity in relationships is no bad thing.
‘Second, two out of three marriages are failing, I would argue, because we place an unrealistic emphasis on the transformative power of love. We’ve become smitten with the idea that having a partner somehow makes you a more acceptable human being, ensures happiness, solves difficulties, absolves you from a duty to look after yourself.
‘Romance has become the opiate of our times. Fairy-tale romance which doesn’t require effort or sacrifice or disappointment. Most people want to buy into that kind of magic. So they panic and persuade themselves they’ve fallen in love when they haven’t at all. Or they move into a relationship and accept behaviour which they otherwise wouldn’t tolerate. Isn’t it perhaps time that some of us, a few of us, said, “Enough”?’
Fee glanced around her. The bishop, the Catholic wife and mother, the academic and the psychiatrist resembled a chorus line of goldfish as they simultaneously opened and shut their mouths.
‘Lastly,’ she added firmly, ‘logic tells us that while 97.4 per cent of the adult population will live in a relationship at some time, a good many of them may do so miserably. If we were more honest and, yes, braver, perhaps we’d discover that many of us were actually intended to live happily ever after . . . but on our own.’
Chris Odell suddenly rose to her feet, yanking the academic up with her as she did so.
‘You’re on your own,’ she hissed at him. ‘Listen to what she says.’ Chris Odell raised a clenched fist, ‘Stand single! Stand free!’ Everyone agreed that it had been bloody good television. Or at least, each member of Imogen Banks’s team told each other that it had made bloody good television. The switchboard had been jammed with calls, three tabloid newspapers were in pursuit of Fee Travers and the psychiatrist was already sitting in a corner of the hospitality room, writing what he called ‘an instant think piece’ on the psychosis of the permanently unattached.
Imogen Banks gave Fee a print-out of the first shoal of calls. For every three men and women who had phoned to say that it had been a change and inspiration to hear the positive side about being unattached, one claimed that the desolation and solitariness had been vastly underplayed.
Two calls had specifically asked for Fee Travers. One was from a woman called Anna Clarke. They had met when she worked on the local newspaper as a reporter and Fee was in her first teaching job. Anna Clarke had left her telephone number and a messa
ge to say that she now lived in Pembrokeshire and she’d love to hear from Fee again.
The other call was from Rita Mason. She had tried to leave a message but she had apparently been cut off.
Fee immediately rang the number that Rita had left. A boy in his teens answered.
‘No Rita here,’ he said. ‘Nobody here at all. It’s a phone box. I was just passing—’
‘Whereabouts are you?’ Fee asked.
‘Clarendon Street,’ the boy replied, his tone wary.
‘Clarendon Street, where?’ Fee pressed.
‘Clarendon Street, Bristol, of course,’ the boy said and added, ‘Got to go now. Bye.’
‘So what happens next?’ Fee asked Imogen over drinks in the hospitality room.
‘Marriage,’ Imogen replied, helping herself to another glass of wine. ‘You’ll get dozens of proposals. And all this nonsense will soon be forgotten.’
‘You sound just like my mother.’ Fee smiled. She would miss Imogen.
As Imogen was about to reply, Alan Munsen walked into the room. Imogen had advised that Fee should avoid her own flat for a day or so in case ‘one or two newspaper people’ decided to pester her. Alan had offered Fee his spare bedroom.
‘Now how come I haven’t met you before?’ Imogen murmured, breathing in deeply as she was introduced. ‘Fee is such a good girl most of the time but she’s got this perfectly wicked habit of keeping her nicest friends to herself.’
The features editor on the tabloid newspaper with whom Imogen usually dealt had done her proud. Several days earlier, Imogen had provided him with Bill Summers’s and Paul Denning’s telephone numbers. It was Imogen’s intention that her film and discussion should have their life artificially extended by copious amounts of follow-up coverage in the tabloid press. She had achieved this by orchestrating an exposure of Fee’s far from loveless life.
The spinster who helps herself to husbands.
Paul Denning, for understandable reasons, had refused to comment on Fee Travers, but his wife, when doorstepped and provided with the evidence of her husband’s affair, had proved extremely fluent on the subject.
Bill Summers hadn’t realized he was actually being interviewed by the reporter; he had been under the impression he was clearing up a few points.
The next morning he was appalled to see himself across two pages of a tabloid. ‘I was bedded but bored,’ read the headline over an old photograph of himself and Fee, taken on holiday years before. It was the kind of smudged and unfocused photograph that makes everyone look guilty of something.
‘I didn’t say I was bored with Fee,’ Bill Summers tried to explain on the telephone to an extremely irate Helen Travers.
‘I’m very, very disappointed in you, Bill,’ Helen lectured. ‘I thought you were going to cheer Fee up. That’s what Imogen said would happen. Instead, you behave like a rat. I suppose you got paid for all this tripe?’
Bill Summers took in this information. ‘What do you mean, “Imogen said”? I thought she wanted to see me because she was interested in my photography?’
‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ Helen replied brusquely, anxious not to be sidetracked from the main cause of her disappointment. ‘What I do know is that she and I had great hopes of you and Fee making a go of it. So I can’t tell you how upset I am with you, Bill. Very upset indeed.’
Chapter Thirty-Two
AT SEVEN thirty that same morning, several reporters had congregated outside Fee’s flat. There were also half-a-dozen women bearing SOS placards who told anyone who cared to listen that they were protesting against Fee Travers because she lacked the courage of her convictions. She had refused to condemn marriage.
‘Marriage Means Murder . . . of a woman’s individuality,’ read one of the SOS leaflets which a protester handed to Fee as she slipped by unrecognized into her own flat, followed by Alan Munsen.
Will Evans was waiting in Fee’s sitting room with a pile of newspapers. A second tabloid had ‘exposed’ her across two pages as a husband-stealing neurotic. She Stole Our Spouses, the banner headline said with photographs of Erica, Bill Summers’s wife, and Paul Denning’s wife, a woman called Cora.
‘My Nights of Passion—’ headlined a second story, in which Adam Williams had apparently given details of nights of lust – none of which tallied with Fee’s own recollections.
Other tabloids had also pursued the story. ‘The Sham and the Shame of the Celibate Spinster’ proclaimed one feature. Yet another said that Fee had taken over the leadership of SOS and intended to urge Britain’s women to break free from partnerships and ‘Stand Single! Stand Free!’
The psychiatrist with whom she had appeared on television the night before had produced yet another 750 words on the social significance of this new female rebellion, under a banner headline, ‘Why Today’s Woman Says No!’
Other columnists pontificated on the end of the family; the demise of the housewife; the ruination of romance; the collapse of the community and the selfishness of the solitary life.
‘And where the hell have you been?’ Will asked Fee, eyeing Alan Munsen extremely coolly. ‘I saw some bastard had tried to break the lock on your French window so I came in to check that everything was OK.
‘I’ve had blokes on the phone all night offering me hundreds to spill the beans on you—’ He indicated the pile of newspapers he had just dumped on Fee’s sofa. ‘Why have you suddenly become big bait?’
Fee began to flick through the pages. Mortification, embarrassment, anger, contempt and a distinct feeling of grubbiness – each waited its turn to wash over her again and again. Why was she suddenly a target? The answer came in two words. Imogen Banks. No wonder she’d looked uncomfortable when Fee had asked what would happen next.
‘It’s horrible. It’s all so, so unfair. As for Paul Denning’s wife, I only found out about her after I’d finished with him. Why isn’t he copping it for not being honest with me in the first place?’
‘I would’ve thought it’s obvious,’ Will shrugged. ‘Women, beware women. Much sexier, don’t you think? The good news’, he added, ‘is that this will all be forgotten in a couple of days. And Gerry Radcliffe called to offer his congratulations. The message is on your machine but, basically, he’s delighted with your HAH! report.
‘He’s delighted with the plug you gave F.P. & D. last night and he’s even more delighted that Harry Macklin never watches television so he’s unlikely to throw a wobbly. He suggests you spend today at home to recover.’
‘And the bad news?’ Fee asked.
‘The bad news is that Diana Woods has what he calls some useful amendments to make to your report. And he wants the three of you to have a meeting before your presentation is made to Macklin.’
Fee grimaced. Five minutes later, the phone began to ring and it didn’t stop ringing for several hours. The calls brought requests for radio, newspaper and television interviews. Singled Out, a magazine for the never married and the separated and divorced, due to be launched in six weeks, asked if Fee would consider writing a weekly column. A couple of publishers suggested that she produce a guide for older singles.
‘A guide to what?’ Alan Munsen asked, helping to field the calls.
‘To anything she likes,’ the reply came back.
At ten, when Veronica Haslem arrived, bringing fresh supplies of tea and coffee and sandwiches, courtesy of Les since Fee’s cupboard was bare, the crowd outside the flat had swollen even further.
The SOS squad had been joined by Christian activists in favour of banning all divorce; a variety of foreign print and television correspondents and several curious passers-by. Shortly after, Fee agreed to a brief radio interview on her telephone, in order to clarify the misconceptions that seemed to be mushrooming around her.
‘No, I am not urging wives to leave their husbands,’ she explained carefully. ‘No, I am not saying that living alone is always better than living in a relationship. No, I am not on sex strike. No, I am not bisexual. No, it is not tr
ue that I’ve never had a proposal. No, I am not without morals. I try and treat others as I would wish to be treated – with some respect and a sense of fair play.
‘No, this is not a publicity stunt. No, I am not about to fall for the next man who comes along. No, Imogen Banks and I are not having an affair—’
When she replaced the receiver, Fee looked at Will and Alan who had been banished to the sitting room but who remained listening at the kitchen door.
‘How many times does a girl have to say no before people accept that she means what she says?’ Fee asked wryly. Wisely, neither man opened his mouth.
Will, unsettled by Alan Munsen’s familiarity with Fee, delayed his departure for work. When he could no longer postpone leaving, he said to Fee casually on his way out, ‘Oh, by the way, Hannah and I aren’t together any more. She moved out . . . Last night actually. That’s why I didn’t see your programme.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Fee gave him a hug.
‘I wanted her to stay but there you go—’ Will shrugged wearily. ‘She told me that I’d never make a proper commitment to her . . . so, for her own sake, she was giving me the push. That’s a first, you know, Fee. First time I’ve been dumped in years. Must be losing my touch.’
He laughed without amusement, then closed the front door behind him before Fee could offer reassurance.
Coming back into the sitting room, Fee took a proper look at her sister. Veronica had taken off her coat and was peering out of the French windows at the crowd below.
‘In the hope that you don’t take this the wrong way,’ Fee remarked, ‘you looked dressed to kill.’
Veronica chuckled. She was wearing a dress and jacket in a warm, cherry red. Her hair had been cut shorter and she was wearing discreet gold ear-rings.
‘If I didn’t know you better, I’d say you’ve been indulging yourself with the housekeeping money and following in Jean’s footsteps. You haven’t acquired yourself a gigolo, have you?’ Fee asked, intrigued.
Veronica sucked in her breath. ‘Please,’ she responded in mock distaste. ‘We don’t use the word. Far too common. The answer is no, I haven’t . . . but, yes, I do have a new man.’
The Trouble with Single Women Page 33