But I didn’t ignore him. I thought a lot about what he had said, and worried. What worried me most wasn’t even the career bit but more that I was denying this husband of mine a side of life he enjoyed. He liked parties, he was gregarious. I was making him suppress part of his personality. I fretted over how to resolve this difference between us – couldn’t he go to parties on his own and I stay at home? But apparently not. Invitations were for couples, for both of us. If I didn’t accept, he couldn’t, it wasn’t done, it would be thought odd and upset the balance of the dinner-party. This insistence on joint acceptance seemed mad to me, but that’s the way it was.
The solution was, of course, to compromise, and for at least two decades we did. If he really, really wanted to accept some invitation which required me as his wife to accept too, then I agreed. I went with him and tried to go with good grace. And we had dinner-parties ourselves, and even big-thrash-type parties. Not many, but some. Organising these events was no bother. I like cooking and enjoyed preparing the food, and I like making the house look attractive – oh, I could do him credit as a good wife when I tried and for a while I tried very hard indeed. But I couldn’t be doing with these performances, everyone doing their turn and nobody really ever getting to know each other. It wasn’t the sort of entertaining I liked. I liked having real friends with their children for lunch and then a walk on the heath.
My mother approved of that kind of entertaining, whereas of course dinner-parties were middle-class inventions to which she had no wish to aspire. When I was growing up, hospitality was extended almost exclusively to family, and it meant mostly the giving of big teas involving a massive amount of baking, so that the table groaned with scones and cakes. The preparations for these teas were lengthy and included not only the baking but the starching of a white tablecloth and the ironing of a smaller, embroidered one to go over it diagonally, and the polishing of her only bits of silver (a tea-pot and sugar-bowl). If it was her sister Jean who was coming from Motherwell, with her husband and two boys, then the entertaining went on for days and my mother was driven to distraction trying to work out how we would all sleep. My father had to be persuaded to let Jean and Dave have his double bed while he and my mother slept on the couch in the living-room. My cousins slept with my brother in the other bedroom and when we were very small my sister and I slept end-to-end with them in the same double bed. It was all very exciting, this ‘entertaining’, but there was an air of almighty relief when it was over. I thought about my mother often during my dinner-party phase, especially afterwards when I too felt such relief.
Eventually, I stopped trying to be a good wife in that particular way. Times changed, and it was no longer quite as impossible for a husband to accept an invitation and say his wife didn’t want to come too, thank you. He does now go places on his own and we are both happy. But once more, my behaviour brought a warning, from a woman this time. She’d seen Hunter at some party or other on his own and told me that if I let this go on I was ‘heading for trouble’. I asked with false politeness what on earth she meant, and she said, ‘He will forget he has a wife and it’ll be your fault.’ This time, I did laugh. I said I wouldn’t mind being forgotten ‘as a wife’ but was quite sure I wouldn’t be forgotten by him as a person, so that was all right, wasn’t it?
I think that as marriages lengthen it is reasonable for husband and wife to take some of their social pleasures separately, especially if, like us, tastes are different. I love it when he goes to parties – though very rarely, and usually work-related – and comes back and tells me about them – it’s so much more enjoyable than actually being there myself. In fact, sometimes these days I urge him to go when he isn’t really keen just so I can have the pleasure of hearing his account afterwards. I tell him it will do him good, he’ll have fun, oh go on do go …
Holidays are another matter. Fanny benefited enormously from having her own holidays – being a wife didn’t mean she always had to have Louis as a companion to enjoy herself. Mostly these breaks were described not as holidays but as ‘rests’ for health reasons, sometimes involving treatment of some kind, but it came to the same thing. The urge to get away on her own became strong and so she went.
It is an urge, surely, felt by almost every wife at some point in a marriage – to get away, to think of oneself for a change, to escape all the domestic routines, and, indeed, to escape the husband however much he is loved, not to mention the children. All completely understandable and yet somehow thought not quite the thing for a good wife to want to do even today.
I approve of wives holidaying alone but I’ve never actually done it. The times I went away on my own in the first twenty years of marriage were not for holidays. I went to Carlisle to visit and look after sick parents and there was nothing remotely holiday-like about it. It was more like a punishment and I came back exhausted. Then, in the next two decades, I went away, very occasionally, for work, weeks in Cornwall researching a book about Daphne du Maurier, that kind of thing. When I did leave, for these two reasons, the preparation before I left was daunting. Being, in this respect at least, what I imagined to be a good wife (before I saw I was being a foolish one) I felt obliged to leave my husband all his meals. I shopped for him (and, in the days when they were young, the children) and I left detailed instructions for him, insultingly simple ones but he wasn’t insulted, he pleaded for them – ‘Put casserole in oven, Regulo 4, to reheat for one hour. Test hot enough before eating.’ I pandered to his feebleness in the kitchen because I thought it was my job to. In time, it drove my growing daughters mad and, shamed, I stopped. It had taken me something like thirty years to see that it was not a wifely duty to allow a husband to be so pretend-helpless. When he asked, ‘What shall I eat?’ as I was about to go away, at long last I replied, ‘Whatever you like, it’s up to you.’ Did he therefore shop and cook? No. He went to local cafés or existed on toast and cheese, hating it. More fool him. I’ve been a bad wife letting him get to this state.
But the fact remains that mercy-dashes north and research trips (few) aside, I have never left him to go on holiday. I wouldn’t say, though, that I never had any yearning to. A week in the sun on my own, with him at home looking after the children, often seemed a deeply attractive idea. I feel annoyed with myself, looking back, that I never did do it. Wives should, mothers should if they can. It was not the organising which held me back, but more the sheer boldness of the thing and a slight guilt that I wanted to do it at all. He didn’t, apparently. He says he has never had the slightest desire to go off on his own or with anyone else other than me. Now, isn’t that extraordinary? When he does go away, it’s always work-related, though considering that lately this has meant going round West Indian islands, it hasn’t felt so much like ‘work’. He would like me to go with him. I could go, no ties now, no babysitting worries, nothing to hold me back, but apart from once a year, our real holiday, I never do. I’d rather stay at home and write.
And that’s how I have my holiday on my own, by staying at home. I love it. I love him to go off and leave me in our house. There is nothing I do while he is gone that I cannot do while he is there – it is just that somehow I savour the solitude. It is very confusing, at least to me. The days proceed precisely as they do when he is there – I write, I read, I walk – but they feel different. It makes me wonder if more energy goes into being a wife than I’ve ever calculated, yet when he returns there’s a rightness about it which in turn makes that thought seem nonsense. I think about war-wives, those women who suddenly had husbands again after gaps of months or years. We’ve never been apart more than two weeks, not nearly long enough to be put to any kind of real test. Gaps for us, for me at any rate, have been refreshing not destructive. I think they are necessary, especially if, like us, a couple works at home (or are both retired).
I’ve never wanted to go on holiday with friends, so that’s not arisen – there’s no attraction to be with another group, it’s on my own or with him. And the truth is that we’re very
compatible on holiday. We like the same kind of things – the sea and swimming, long exploratory walks, islands, the quieter the better – and we both relish sun. Holidays are good times, as they should be. They are better with him than they would be on my own. The same doesn’t apply to holiday days in London. Saturday is my holiday day, my weekly day off and I don’t want him with me at all, I don’t want to be a wife with her husband tagging along. I want to be a single woman. ‘I’ll come with you,’ he sometimes says on Saturday mornings when he’s bored, because there is no football and no junk sales he can ferret around for his many collections. ‘No,’ I say, ‘you will not,’ and off I go, selfish woman that I am. I want to wander as a free spirit, changing directions as I change my mind, without having to discuss where I’m going and especially without having to think about eating. I want to sit on my own in parks and observe others, I want to go to plays and films and feel isolated among the audience, I want to walk miles and miles along the river, over the bridges, through the squares, an oldish invisible woman. I emphatically do not want to be part of a couple, a wife. No one notices me and that’s exhilarating. I don’t speak for the whole eight hours or so that I’m out, except to ask for tickets and so forth, whereas, together, we never stop talking.
All this, obviously, is about independence. I don’t think it makes me a bad wife. A wife needs to remember that she is not just part of a couple but an individual too with a separate identity.
In 1881, a year after his marriage, Robert Louis Stevenson expressed the opinion that ‘Marriage is one long conversation, chequered by disputes’. Hearing the disputes between him and Fanny, Adelaide Boodle was only half-joking when she remarked, in her memoir of the Stevensons, that the sound of the two of them arguing as she approached their house might have made a stranger wonder if she should call the police. She had been genuinely alarmed, when first she knew Fanny and Louis, by their ferocious-sounding rows. It was Fanny’s participation which alarmed people most: wives were not supposed to argue with husbands and certainly not meant to shout at them. Mary Livingstone never in her entire life shouted at David – wept, sighed, yes, but shouted, no. Fanny shouted a lot, both at Sam and at Louis. She didn’t see it was any part of being a good wife to control her anger or stifle her opinions, and she didn’t expect Louis to behave any differently. She thought arguments between husband and wife in a loving marriage were healthy.
So do I. We have argued our way through forty years, though rarely about anything that could be described as serious. I have to think very hard indeed to remember what our arguments have been about and even then I find it difficult. I know we used to argue about the children a lot, about what should be done with respect to some aspect of their behaviour, especially when they were teenagers. He was never a disciplinarian and yet he wanted them to be disciplined. By me. When we lay awake in the early hours of the morning, waiting for one of them to come home, the anxiety made us argue. He’d say they should have been told to be home by a certain time or they wouldn’t be allowed out again, and I’d say they had been told, of course they had, and something must have gone wrong and it wouldn’t be their fault, and he’d say why did I always defend them and I’d say I didn’t … then, blessedly, we’d hear the key in the lock and relax. But we might still argue about it in the morning. ‘Have you said that’s it, no more staying out after midnight?’ he’d ask, and I’d say why didn’t he say it and he’d say they’d take more notice of me, and I’d say whose fault is that – and we’d be off again.
We argued, too, and more seriously – Adelaide Boodle would definitely have heard us – about the children’s happiness. If one of them was clearly unhappy I’d become utterly miserable because of it and this would exasperate him. He’d say I exaggerated their wretchedness and was being ridiculous, letting it cloud my whole life. And I’d say he didn’t really care, he didn’t take their distress seriously, he just ignored it and assumed everything would work out in the end and meanwhile there was no point in letting their state of mind interfere with his. But we never argued over the things so many parents seem to argue heatedly over. We never argued about their education, for example. They’d go locally to state schools, no discussion necessary. There have been no great matters of principle that have divided us. I’m forced to conclude that most of our arguments have been over essentially trivial things. Like Fanny, I shout loudest, and I’m the more powerful in arguments, mostly because I enjoy them. I like to argue. He doesn’t. He hates arguing, and quickly retreats into a defensive silence. He knows that often enough he is right, but he struggles to prove it, complaining that I can talk my way out of anything. A husband with a different temperament faced with a wife like me would have been driven to blows, but he manages to stay calm. All he wants is that the verbal fight be over. He forgives and forgets with astonishing ease. Nothing ever festers – these eruptions are, if not meaningless, not in the least dangerous.
But to other people they must seem so. A wife overheard screaming at her husband has always been thought to be a harridan, a virago. Witnesses inevitably misinterpret in terms of stereotype what they hear – they hear (as people heard Fanny) what sounds like contempt, and they judge accordingly. Whenever I hear couples shouting at each other, especially if the wife is the more vociferous, I too feel the alarm and unease people must experience when they hear me. It is ugly, this marital arguing, unseemly, and one turns away from it horrified. But no chance witness can possibly set this kind of thing in its proper context – they can’t know what has gone before or what comes afterwards and this knowledge can change everything. Louis usually knew why Fanny was moved to argue with him, he knew her state of mind, and health, and the pressures which caused her to be so volatile, and all this put their arguments into a different perspective. He rather relished Fanny’s fury (except towards the end of his life when she really was mentally ill) seeing it as part of her passionate nature, which he loved. A married pair who claim never to argue but always to be in harmony puzzle me. To exist together, ever in agreement, suggests either a stultifying blandness about their relationship, or boredom. If you’re bored, you don’t argue, you just endure. And many a wife considers it worth doing that – she sees it as her duty, part of being a ‘good’ wife. I never have, any more than Fanny did, but unlike Fanny, I’ve had time to find the shouting fades out. When we argue now, as we still do, it is in a much more controlled way, quite dull really. It’s more like having an over-animated discussion, both of us getting irritated but nowhere near upset.
Anyone who imagines that a wife who argues is somehow the dominant partner, as many people did in Fanny’s case, is mistaken. Henley finally realised that, though all his circle assumed Fanny to be the stronger partner, because of her vocal dominance in so many instances, she was not. Louis was. In our case, in some ways Hunter is, and in others the balance is equal. What often happens is that we argue, he concedes – and then he does exactly what I have proved to him with my splendidly convincing arguments that he should not do. He does what he wants, which is what I do not want. When I tell him this, and wail that he agreed that I was right, he shrugs and says, ‘I know.’ So he goes ahead and carries out some plan which obviously (to me) will end in trouble; and then he groans and it is he who says I told him so, not me. ‘Stop me next time,’ he says. Sometimes, when he invites argument, when he begs me to tell him what I think about a project, I tell him that I know he’s going to go ahead whatever I say, so I won’t waste my breath putting the arguments against it. But he knows I will, because I can’t resist it, and that’s what he counts on.
We are a couple who argue. I am a wife who thrives on argument and however much I want to be a so-called ‘good’ wife I won’t give it up.
Fanny’s success as a daughter-in-law was twofold: not only did she woo the Stevenson parents, but tried to make her husband a better son. She saw it as part of her duty to make Louis more responsive to his parents’ needs. Often enough, before Fanny came on the scene, he had admitted to himsel
f that he was selfish and that he didn’t consider his parents’ feelings nearly enough, but he had never tried to change his attitude. Fanny made him do so.
It worried me from the start that my husband didn’t do enough for his mother, though he thought he did – didn’t he let her do his washing every week when he was away at Durham University? So thoughtful of him, to go to all the trouble of parcelling it up and posting it, not easy when you’re a busy undergraduate. And didn’t he let her send him her delicious gingerbread with the clean clothes? When he was home, he allowed her to nag him into cutting the grass and clipping the hedges. He also let her lend him money. Did she have any to spare? Of course she didn’t – she hadn’t even enough for herself, but she always managed to scrape together a few pounds for him.
The truth was, he didn’t need to be a better son because his mother had his sisters and his younger brother to depend on, but once they had all also left home, which was some years after we were married, the situation was different. His mother was living on her own, a widow like Margaret Stevenson, and she didn’t like it. She was a woman who liked company (as he himself does). She enjoyed being at the centre of a busy household, and preferably one with children around. Unlike Fanny, I never urged her to come and live with us, though I’ve often thought I should have done. But trying to make her son into that kind of good son would never have worked, and I wasn’t a good enough wife to suggest that it might. Much though he cared for his mother, and much though I admired and liked her, we were not compatible. She smoked and that in itself would’ve caused trouble, because her son can’t tolerate it. So it was in other practical, financial ways that I tried to nudge him towards making his mother’s life easier and more pleasurable. He was easily enough persuaded. But when Marion, one of his sisters, gave me the credit rather than him, I argued about it with her. She was firmly of the opinion that a man’s wife was responsible for his assuming this kind of family responsibility. Men, she alleged, needed to be shown the way since they are not naturally sensitive to their duties nor do they have much imagination in this respect. She saw it as a wife’s job to enlighten her husband. More alarmingly, she went so far as to blame the wife if her husband failed to come up to scratch. Feminist that I am, that attitude seemed to me decidedly unfeminist. If Fanny’s suggestion that Louis’s mother should join them had been turned down why would this have been her fault? And if, when I’d pointed out to Hunter ways in which he could help his mother, how could it have been a failure on my part if he hadn’t? As in so many other instances, too much seems still to be expected of wives.
Good Wives Page 23