by Gill Sims
I was just drifting off to sleep and so was slightly disgruntled when Simon woke me up by taking my hand and sitting up to block my sun as he said something.
‘Wha’?’ I mumbled sleepily.
‘I said, I think we should get married. What do you think?’
I sat up so fast that I nearly headbutted Simon in the nose, the romantic moment only being saved by his quick reaction of flinging himself backward onto the sand.
‘Oh my God! Yes! I think that’s a fabulous idea! Yes, let’s get married!’
And so, just like that, we were engaged. We drove back to the city in Simon’s antiquated Fiesta, that he insisted he couldn’t ever wash because the dirt was the only thing keeping it together, holding hands (which made changing gear tricky for him, but nonetheless, he didn’t let go) and beaming with happiness. The next day, he bought me a ring, a small and inexpensive but gorgeous moonstone and silver ring, from one of the crafty hippy shops on the West Bow.
We had planned to get married straight away in some tiny romantic ceremony, possibly just the two of us, and two strangers dragged into the registry office as witnesses, but as soon as my mother and Simon’s mother got wind of the engagement, that was the end of that, and a Proper Wedding was in the works, complete with florists and bridesmaids and canapés and yards and yards of taffeta and quarrels between Mum and Sylvia over who got to wear the biggest hat. So it was two years before we actually managed to get a suitable wedding arranged that the mothers deemed appropriate, and we had very little say in our actual day (apart from my insistence that I MUST have puffed sleeves on my wedding dress, my fashion choices having been influenced from an early age by Anne Shirley – a decision I rather regret now when looking back at the photos).
The tiny moonstone ring was replaced by a ‘real’ ring shortly before Jane was born, after a brief and heady period of financial security and two full-time incomes with no childcare to pay for, and then we were caught up in the whirlwind of babies and property ladders and mortgages and catchment areas and school applications and parents’ nights and homework, and somehow, bit by bit, I feel like we’re becoming strangers and those two besotted kids, lying on that beach, so happy to be spending the rest of their lives with each other, are people from a book or a film.
Why am I even thinking about those kids and that beach on a pissing-wet Wednesday morning in February, when I am supposed to be paying attention in a Very Important Meeting? Oh, yes. February and leap years and proposals. Anyway, I should like February, but I don’t because it is just such a MEH month. It should be spring, the daffodils should be flowering, there should be hope and joy in our hearts, but instead February just squats there like a big miserable grey bastard, cockblocking the spring and the sun. Fucking February.
Friday, 10 February
Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho, it’s off to the in-laws we go! In a fit of extraordinary organisation, I managed to remember the approach of half-term, and even more extraordinary, Simon had even announced he would be taking the week off as he wanted to go and see his parents.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to take all of next week off, as Lydia has booked it off too, as she also appears to have a Busy and Important husband who believes childcare is a woman’s issue. Simon is not entirely thrilled that I will therefore only be able to take Monday and Tuesday off next week, and will have to get an early flight back on Wednesday morning and go straight to the office (though there is something about going straight into the office from the airport that makes me feel really quite jet-setty and go-gettery – I will have to shoehorn it into conversation several times on Wednesday morning ‘On my way here from the airport …’), leaving him to travel back alone with the children.
I felt quite bad, though, when poor Lydia remarked that she was surprised I wanted to be off the same week as the school holidays, because it’s so much more expensive to go away then, but, she added wistfully, she supposed that was the thing about having no children, your life isn’t ruled by term dates and I probably hadn’t even realised it was half-term, had I? I felt even worse when Alan, who had been muttering darkly about Lydia’s time off and how she always gets first dibs on booking holidays just because she has kids and it wasn’t fair, wished me a lovely break as I tripped out of the office for our long-overdue visit to Simon’s mental parentals at their ‘bijou chateau’ (as his mother likes to call it) in France. In truth, the aged in-laws themselves are not so bad. Michael and Sylvia can be a little wearing, but ultimately mean well, and although Sylvia used to be a bit of a nightmare, she has thawed of recent years, due to a combination of her being forced to realise that her precious daughter is a clusterfuck of epic proportions, said daughter only being bailed out from her shitty life decisions with the profits from my own cleverness in designing that very lucrative app, and me teaching Sylvia of the joys of internet shopping, all of which caused her to decide that my horrid and uncreative computing job wasn’t quite so bad, even though deep down I suspect she would still rather that I was an interior designer like Sukey Poste’s daughter. I don’t actually know who Sukey Poste is, but I have been treated to every detail of her daughter’s brilliant career in wallpaper and soft furnishings. I suspect my own mother would also rather I was more like Sukey Poste’s daughter, if only so I could get her a trade discount at Laura Ashley.
My main reservation about visiting Michael and Sylvia is, of course, that we will also have to endure my fragrant and delightful sister-in-law Louisa – and I use the term ‘fragrant’ very loosely, since she has shown no signs of becoming any cleaner since abandoning her New Age Wanker husband Bardo, and the ‘holistic retreat’ they had run together that she sank every penny she had into along with a large chunk of her parents’ savings. Post-Bardo and retreat, Louisa found herself somewhat high and dry with six children and no income, until I was persuaded to step in and use the remaining proceeds from my Why Mummy Drinks app to buy her a house next door to Michael and Sylvia, so she and her offspring were not rendered homeless, and her parents could attempt to keep her on the straight and narrow (and also French property prices were, thankfully, much more reasonable than prices round us).
Despite all this, Louisa has not become any less irritating, any less sanctimonious or any less of a massive fucking tit. Every time I see her, I am suffused with fury and outrage at all the other things I could have done with my lovely windfall app money instead of propping her up in her deadbeat life. Simon usually has to remove me from the room and encourage me to take deep breaths, while reminding me that we didn’t do this for Louisa, but for her children. All six of them.
Anyway, we managed to journey to France with relatively little drama, apart from Simon swearing profusely while loading the car with the eleventy billion bags required for us to go away for a week, and demanding why we needed so much stuff, and also questioning the need for Peter and Jane to be quite so well furnished with so many snacks for travelling, while I pointed out that if they were eating and glued to their iPads, then there was at least a chance they would ignore each other instead of twatting the everlasting fuck out of each other for the next eight hours. We obviously arrived at the ferry port ridiculously early due to Simon’s worries about Delays on the Road and his conviction that if he is not early, then somehow the ferry people will trick him and send the boat out early for no reason other than to spite him, and we had to stop several times as Jane thought she might be sick while Simon muttered that the only reason she felt sick was three packets of Pom-Bears and a vat of Percy Pigs.
Once in France, Simon went into his strange Racist British Driver Abroad incarnation, swearing and shouting at the innocent French people for driving on their side of the road (sometimes I wonder if Simon was some Important Official of the Raj in a former life, such is his conviction that Foreigners Do Things Wrong), but as I said, everything is relative, and for us that was a fairly uneventful journey.
The fun really started when we got to Michael and Sylvia’s bijou chateau. Firstly, Sylvia had neglected
to inform us that she had got herself a replacement for the late, lamented Napoleon Bonapug – a little pug bitch, called, unsurprisingly, Josephine. Apparently Sylvia had thought it would be a nice surprise for us and my beloved Judgy Dog, who had accompanied us, farting rancidly all the way due to Jane sharing her crisps with him. This would have been a nicer surprise had the unfortunate Josephine not been in the midst of her first season.
Despite my warnings of potential molestation, Sylvia insisted that the dogs would get on fine, just fine (having seemingly forgotten the bitter blood feud that had raged between my poor boy and Napoleon Bonapug), and so she popped Josephine down to ‘say hello’.
Judgy is a Proud and Noble Terrier, and disinclined to let a little thing like having no balls get in the way if there is a bitch in season around. And, I have to say, Josephine lived up to her name and was an absolute trollop, waggling her little puggy bum in his face, as he tried nobly to resist, but eventually he succumbed and leapt aboard, to Sylvia’s horror. Fortunately, Josephine (who perhaps should be renamed Lolita) had her virtue left intact (if not her dignity), due to Sylvia’s having clad her in a dreadful device called a ‘doggy diaper’, which is basically a canine sanitary pad. Thus it was that we were at least able to separate them easily enough, while Sylvia screamed ‘NOT TONIGHT, JOSEPHINE!,’ though I sighed as I looked forward to a long week of trying to keep them apart, as family relations may get strained if Sylvia accuses my dog of rapey tendencies and I respond that clearly Josephine was asking for it.
On the plus side, there is always lots of wine at Michael and Sylvia’s, and one needn’t even feel greedy for quaffing it in gargantuan quantities as one is en Français and so it is only about €0.50 a litre. On the downside, one bloody well needs it to cope with Louisa.
Talking of the unwashed one, Michael and Sylvia grimly updated us on her latest antics over dinner – Louisa herself had not deigned to appear and say hello, despite living at the end of the driveway. Apparently, for reasons known only to herself, Louisa has decided to turn her home into a ‘Woman’s Co-operative’. When I asked Michael what exactly that was, he replied that as far as he could tell she had filled the place with a load of females who didn’t seem to own a single hairbrush between the lot of them.
‘But where does she put them all?’ I said in confusion. ‘I mean, between her and the children, there’s not exactly space for anyone else in the house.’
‘No,’ said Sylvia gloomily, ‘I know. Some of them have brought camper vans, and the rest have put up yurts in the garden.’
‘Place looks like a bloody gypsy encampment!’ said Michael crossly. ‘But apparently men are now barred from the premises, so we don’t have to worry about the stupid girl sprogging again, like we did a few months ago when she was teaching “Life Drawing” and modelling for the classes at the same time, flashing her bits at every Tom, Dick and Harry who signed up. Not until she gets bored and finds her next hare-brained scheme to pursue, anyway!’
Saturday, 11 February
Louisa finally wafted in to say hello today, accompanied by her full complement of vagabond children, whom she announced she would be leaving at Michael and Sylvia’s for the day as she had so much to do, and it would be nice for them to spend some time with their cousins. Michael and Sylvia paled at this prospect, and Louisa’s poppets and Peter and Jane shot murderous looks at each other. The battle lines between them had been firmly drawn a few years ago, when the eldest, Cedric, had attempted to steal Jane’s iPod and she had responded by trying to stab him in the eye, and relations were further soured when Oillell, the youngest girl, then a toddler, now five(ish), had done a shit in Peter’s bed, which Louisa had brushed off as being a ‘perfectly natural part of practising her elimination communication’!
Louisa’s oldest daughter, Coventina, at least seemed to be continuing on her life mission to thwart Louisa’s determination to make her poor children be as feckless and irresponsible as she is, by washing, brushing her hair and being normal. On closer inspection, she also seems to have turned the second girl, Idelisa, onto her path of rebellion, as they were both clean, had their hair in ponytails and were sporting Gap T-shirts, I assume provided as part of Sylvia’s eBay bounty. The others (I think the order is Cedric, Coventina, Nissien, Idelisa, Oillell and Boreas, and they range now from around eleven to three) looked like they had been raised by wolves. Coventina and Idelisa confirmed their revolution by asking Sylvia if they could go and do their piano practice, while Louisa looked disapproving and sighed that she didn’t know what was wrong with those two. The others, meanwhile, continued their wolf-children impressions.
Louisa then turned to me. ‘I am sorry to be so busy when you’ve just arrived, Ellen, but I have rather an important evening planned. We’re having a poetry reading to celebrate the publication of my book, and I’d like to invite you to come along tonight. You too, Mother!’ she barked at Sylvia. ‘But not you, Si. I’m sure Mum and Dad have explained that no men are allowed in the Commune. We are an all-female group, dedicating ourselves to overthrowing the patriarchy and freeing ourselves from the chains of male oppression, and so having men present is counter-intuitive to all our work.’
‘I didn’t know you’d had a book published, Louisa,’ I said, partly in astonishment that someone would publish Louisa’s ramblings, and partly in the hope that she might actually start earning some money instead of living rent-free in my (I mean our) house and leeching off her parents each month when she’s frittered away the child support from her ex-husband.
‘Yes!’ said Louisa smugly. ‘I mean, obviously I’ve had to self-publish, because the patriarchy has such a stranglehold on the media that there was no way that they were ready for the raw truths contained in my poetry, but that’s fine, because I was not going to submit to their censorship anyway. My work is too important to let The Man butcher it to satisfy the maw of commerce. But once my words are out there, in their full and uncompromised state, well, this book is going to really change things.’
‘That’s nice,’ I said weakly.
‘So, 7 p.m. Don’t be late, the readings will be starting promptly. And Mother, can you bring some wine and snacks for everyone?’
‘What?’ said Sylvia, who had drifted off into a reverie, probably having heard Louisa’s speeches on censorship and the patriarchy eleventy billion times now. ‘Oh no, darling, no. I can’t come tonight, sorry! Josephine is in season. I can’t possibly leave her at such a delicate time.’
‘What?’ said Louisa in outrage. ‘It’s my special night and my own mother will not come and support me because her dog needs her more?’
‘Well,’ said Sylvia, ‘I’d have thought you’d be more understanding, Louisa. This being an important feminine time for Josephine.’
‘Oh, fine!’ huffed Louisa.
‘Um, maybe I should stay here with Sylvia, you know,’ I suggested. ‘Just in case my poor dog tries to do anything nasty to Josephine. Defend her honour!’
‘Ellen! Someone from my family has to be there to represent me on my special night,’ shrieked Louisa. ‘And also someone needs to bring the food and drink that Mum promised me.’
‘I did not!’ said Sylvia.
‘Well, it’s the least you can do,’ snapped Louisa. ‘Since it seems you prefer that dog to me!’
‘I wonder why …’ murmured Simon.
‘And also, if you’re not bothering to come, you can keep the kids overnight, so I can concentrate on my readings.’
With that, Louisa stalked off, leaving Sylvia and Michael mouthing helpless objections to having six feral monsters dumped on them (well, four, and Coventina and Idelisa, who were playing ‘Für Elise’ rather nicely in the drawing room), as well as the four of us.
It is quite remarkable how often Louisa gets her own way, simply by refusing to listen to anyone’s arguments against what she has announced will be happening. In some ways (though not in any that relate to hygiene issues), she is very like my sister. But given the option of spen
ding the evening jammed in a corner while the children fought or going to Louisa’s and possibly getting a chance to have a good judge, curiosity at seeing the Commune and hearing Louisa’s poetry won out.
Michael gave me a lift down, as they had caved in and were providing four litres of red wine and some bags of crisps, which were about the only ‘snacks’ available in rural France that could fulfil Louisa’s vegan and gluten-free requirements. Louisa came flapping out when we arrived, shouting that Michael should not even be on the property and forbidding him to get out of the car, and complaining about driving such a short distance while he remonstrated that I couldn’t very well have carried everything down myself. Louisa swept back into the house dramatically, leaving me to lug in all the wine and crisps.