Wife in the North

by Judith O'Reilly

  Wives up here say things like: ‘I’ll ring my husband.’ I am thinking: ‘When I ring my husband, the air is going to be blue. He was supposed to fill the sodding car with sodding petrol.’ But farmers’ wives have farmer husbands who can get you out of a hole rather than into one. Hers appears in a muddy Land Rover with a sheepskin hat, a large and well-prepared boy scout. He has a metal canister of petrol with him, an empty plastic bottle and a knife. He saws off the end of the plastic bottle and shoves the cap end into the petrol tank to use it as a funnel. I am so grateful I would have had sex with him if it were not snowing, we were not in the school car park and his wife were not standing next to us. I am so grateful I would have had sex with her too if she were not a woman. Talk about conforming to the stereotype of a city girl adrift in the country. I think: ‘Thank God I am not wearing high heels.’ I check to make sure I am not wearing high heels. The snow has got worse. The Sheep Farmer says: ‘Do you want me to follow you home?’ I think: ‘He believes I am an idiot and shouldn’t be out on the roads.’ I shake my head and say: ‘No. Golly. You’ve done enough. I’ll be fine.’ The Sheep Farmer’s Wife drives off in her car, grinning, and he follows. He gives me a friendly wave. It is difficult to tell, but I think he is shaking his head from side to side as he pulls away.

  I get back in the car and start up. I make it up the slight hill and round the sharp bend. Along the track, through a very narrow bridge and up a very steep incline, then round another sharp bend and along a narrow twisty-turny road. Luckily no one else is about. I take the hill down to the level crossing excruciatingly slowly and drive across it looking both ways in case a train is going to complete the morning by killing me. It is slow and slippy. I have narrowly avoided a couple of hedges and a cold-looking chicken but have not yet crashed. I pull out on to the hill about a mile and a half from home. I slip into second gear, then take it down to first and start driving up it. I take it back to second and I am almost at the top when the car loses its grip and starts sliding; it hits a patch of ice and I find myself jackknifing in reverse, the car twirling round and careering back down. By the time I reach the bottom of the hill, I am even less happy than I was when I ran out of petrol.

  I am critically aware I have a three-month-old baby in the back. I know this because I can hear her screaming. She is hungry and I am late feeding her with my unfeasibly large nipples. I try the hill again and make it no more than halfway this time. The same again. My hands are damp and trembling on the steering wheel. I press the accelerator to find the wheels have no purchase on the road at all. I am stranded. There are no cars on this road. It is still snowing. I reach for my mobile phone and ring my husband. Unusually, there is a signal. This is good news for me, bad news for my husband. I shout at him. Then I cry. I say things like: ‘You moved us here. You bugger off. You let the car run out of petrol. I have a baby. We are stuck in a blizzard and you are a bastard.’ I may have got louder as the conversation wore on. Mid rant, I notice a car pull up ahead of us and a concerned-looking man starts walking towards us. I stop shouting at my husband. I want the nice man to feel sorry for me rather than frightened of me. He puts me and the baby in his car, which has pink fun-fur seats. He cannot get my car up the hill either but does manage to tuck it into the side of the road so it is less of a hazard. He takes me home.

  Monday, 20 February 2006

  Kicking away the chair

  Half-term. The Dairy Farmer’s Wife is on holiday, my husband is in London and both boys are sick. First one, then the other. They stop watching television only long enough to retch into a bucket. I mop it out. The other one retches. This one into a bowl. The baby cries. I start to feed her. One boy retches. The other retches. I have to put the baby down. She cries again. My husband rings. He says: ‘How are things?’ I say: ‘The children are sick and I hate you.’ He says: ‘OK. Bad time. I’ll call back.’ A child retches. I say: ‘Don’t bother.’

  I was holding the bowl for the three-year-old while trying to quieten the screams of a hungry baby when I decided I was in a post-natal dip. If that is what you call wanting to kill yourself. I am trying hard not to want to kill myself. I first saw the health visitor not long after I came back up with the baby. She would turn up on my doorstep. I would tell her I was fine. Then she would come back. I couldn’t work out if she thought I was at risk, or enjoyed my company. For some reason, I never knew she was coming. Apparently she would ring, or write a letter, but I never seemed to get her messages. She is patently an extremely kind and capable woman and I know she has a job to do, but that does not mean to say that I did not resent her visits in a very British way. I would say: ‘Tea?’ I did not say: ‘I do not want to tell you, exactly, in so many words, out loud at least, to fuck off. That would be rude. But could you please take the hint and fuck off anyway.’

  I have had enough babies to know I do not like health visitors. If I were to write a dictionary for mothers based on experience accumulated over the years, my definition of a ‘health visitor’ would read:

  Someone who arrives uninvited on your doorstep soon after you have returned from an overcrowded maternity ward with your new baby who screams like a banshee if put down for a blink. You are so frightened by the noise that you decide you are a believer in kangaroo care and that you do not want to put the baby down even for a cup of tea. This is the first of many lies you tell yourself as a mother. You neither know, nor care, where your husband is. You do not like him any more. You are, of course, holding the baby when there is a ring on the doorbell. You are wearing a grubby cotton waffle dressing gown. It is tied with a worn pair of black nylon maternity tights and you sport a muslin square on your shoulder. You and the muslin square do not smell nice.

  ‘Hello,’ says the woman on the doorstep on Anywhere Street, Anyplace Town. ‘I am your health visitor. This is Mary Jane’ – and she points to a large girl with a bob standing next to her. ‘She is training to be a health visitor. I hope it’s all right if she sits in.’

  Black-eyed with exhaustion and grim-faced from the agony of learning how to breastfeed, you nod at Mary Jane, who nods back.

  ‘Right,’ says the health visitor, settling herself into the only armchair without laundry on it. Mary Jane perches her ample posterior on the sofa. The health visitor gets out a clipboard and a Biro. ‘We haven’t met before, have we? How are you getting on? Is that the baby? Sweet.’ She asks a few questions, ticks a few boxes. She leans in a little, pen poised. ‘ “In the last seven days, the thought of harming myself has occurred to me …?” ’ She looks straight at you. ‘ “Quite often, sometimes, hardly ever, never?” ’ She waits. Mary Jane waits.

  The noose is knotted and swinging expectantly from the plastic flex going into a dusty cream lampshade on the landing. In the sitting room, you widen your eyes slightly. ‘No. Gosh. Suicide? Golly. Never. I’m fine, thank you.’

  She ticks a box.

  I do know I cry too much these days. I had dropped the children at school and was shovelling the baby back into her seat. I was snuffling out my new mother’s grief as I strapped her in. Fat hot tears ran down my face. Suddenly there was a voice of another mother next to me wanting to see the baby. She looked slightly taken aback when she realized my sorry state. I said: ‘I’m fine. Baby blues. Really. I’m fine,’ sounding all the time like the depressive I am but have been so careful to keep hidden in a box. She put an arm round me, said all the right things about ‘having been there’ and ‘must be difficult’. It made me realize I had better do something.

  I went to the Doctor. She is a friend of the Oyster Farmer’s Wife, who said the other day I ought to meet her. She meant socially, maybe for a coffee and a cheese scone rather than for pills. She has pictures of her three children on the door of the surgery. The Doctor did not ask me whether I thought about killing myself; instead, as I walked up and down her surgery, jiggling the baby, she leaned back in her swivel chair and pushed it slightly away from her computer. She said: ‘Do you ever think about going away?’ I spend
a great deal of time thinking about going away somewhere and how to manage it and still leave the children safe and cared for. Is it an accepted euphemism for killing yourself, I wonder? Is it my euphemism? My world has tilted; I am unbalanced, clinging on as life spins by. I must fetch myself back before I lose my grip. It will come right again. My world has tipped before. I just need a moment.

  Tuesday, 7 March 2006

  Books and groups

  I was invited to join a book group by the Oyster Farmer’s Wife, who set it up and promptly announced she was leaving it. She is already a member of another book group and decided she could not manage two. How on earth am I going to get to know her any better than I do already? I walk into a stranger’s sitting room. There is a fire roaring in the grate and tea and cake on the table. The Doctor is already in the room; she has also been invited to join. I am thinking: ‘This gets worse. This is what it is to have an affair.’ I know that she knows that I feel suicidal. But does everybody else in the room know that she knows that I feel that way? The Doctor smiles and says: ‘Hi. How are you?’ I wonder how she wants me to answer. Do I say: ‘Fine,’ and wink? Say: ‘Not so good,’ and cry? Country life! I had two brilliant and very kind female doctors in London who could easily have been my mates. The thing was I already had mates and once someone has seen your perineum it is difficult to eat carrot cake with them.

  Tuesday, 14 March 2006

  Friendship

  My Best Friend From School came up. She always makes me feel better about everything. Never judges me. Not true: she says I live in chaos. Aside from the ill-founded chaos accusation, she never judges me. Low: she listens. Make a joke: she laughs. Some man I once loved said: ‘Kiss me’; she did not. Sometimes, to embarrass her, I say: ‘I love you.’ She hates that. She does not do emotion. Does ‘doing things’ and ‘getting on’. I named my daughter for her; she plants spring bulbs for me to get me through the winter. Says: ‘Throw that out. You do not need it.’ I say: ‘I can’t. I might.’ She never needs me. One day she might; but I think it unlikely. Too practical for that. Too capable for need. When we are both old and our menfolk dead, when my children find me dull and burdensome, I will hunker down with her in widow black. We will drink gin, keep lap cats and grow cacklesome together.

  Friday, 17 March 2006

  Running on empty 2

  I cannot believe that after the blizzard my husband would let it happen again, but he did. I ran out of petrol. Again. I was driving into the village to go to the shops with all three kids when shudder, shudder, stop. I must have looked desperate because another car stopped and a young girl with a child seat in the back of her car got out and offered to go to a garage for a can of petrol for me. I gave her £20 and when she arrived back, it was with an enormous battered metal petrol can which looked like it had been used to fill tanks up during the Second World War. At some point during the intervening sixty years it had lost its nozzle, and since I did not have a bottle or a knife or a handy sheep farmer, I ended up throwing it at the open neck of the petrol tank in the hope of getting a dribble in which would be enough to get me to the garage. I looked like I was getting ready to burn the car out to get rid of fingerprints and DNA evidence. I decided I hated my husband. I can only hazard that he let it happen again because he thinks I intend to drive back down to London without him.

  Monday, 20 March, 2006

  Granny in the attic

  We had a few days in the house in London for the last time before tenants move in. When he comes down for work, my husband is going to have to stay with our friends. Shame they have all gone off him.

  If I needed a reminder that the city can be a hard place to be, one knocked on my door. The Thai lady from next door bowed slightly and pressed her hands together as if in prayer: ‘Plees,’ she said. ‘Rittle rhume. I just need rittle rhume.’ I drew her in and closed the door behind her. ‘Come in and sit down,’ I said. She would not sit down. We stood in the empty hallway and she repeated her plea. ‘Plees. Rittle rhume.’ She brought her hands together so they were an inch apart from each other. ‘Rittle. Not big.’ She shook her head free of the very idea of a big room. The baby was asleep in the sitting room while the boys hung about me. I pushed them away to play but they were too intrigued by the stranger’s distress. I do not think she saw them.

  I took a closer look. She was older than I had realized. When I had glimpsed her over the past few years, she had worn a long black coat and large sunglasses, her long black hair tied in a ponytail. She would bustle by, heedless of you at your door as she let herself in and out of the shabby house next to us. I knew the house was rented out to tenants and that she lived in a small room at the back while youngsters filled the rest of the house.

  The coat and glasses were a disguise. They covered up the truth of an old lady sliding into confusion. Her coat hung loose; underneath it, her oversized T-shirt was grubby and her gilt shoes down at heel. I put my hand on her arm. ‘Why do you want a room?’ I asked. I wondered whether she knew we were renting out the house or if she thought she could live, hidden and mouse-quiet, within our family home. I suspected she did not realize we had moved. ‘You not know I there. Rittle rhume,’ she repeated, insistent now on her claim for mercy. It took time and coaxing; eventually, she explained. Her landlords had given her notice to quit some time before. She had a week left on her lease before she was homeless.

  I wondered what to do. I wondered whether the young professionals we were hoping to attract as tenants would notice a Thai granny stashed in the attic. I wondered about taking her back to Northumberland with us and what I would say to my husband as I unpacked her. I did not want to ring the council and declare my neighbour homeless, in case she was here illegally and I brought more trouble into her world. I was also concerned that if I involved the authorities and she went into a bed and breakfast, her confused state and age would make her an immediate victim to the villainous.

  She had come over from Thailand to work in a hotel in King’s Cross where she ironed laundry. She paid her landlord £50 a week for her ‘rittle rhume’, in which she kept all her worldly goods, which I imagined to be few. She had a niece. I sent her back next door for the niece’s phone number. While she was gone, I sat the children in front of the television to distract them from the casualty of city life who had been standing in our hallway.

  I called the niece, who told her aunt not to worry, she would come and get her at the end of the week and find her somewhere else to live. I wondered how long it would be before she forgot the niece’s promise. When she went back home, I rang the niece again, said what I could not say in front of the old lady: that her aunt was confused and in a state of considerable distress, that she could not be left on her own any longer than she had to be. The niece told me that she had already invited her aunt to live with her but her aunt thought her house too far away from the hotel where she worked. She assured me her aunt would be picked up within a few days and looked after. She thought it time for her to return to Thailand, where she could live with her family and be looked after by them.

  It saddened me, the idea of an old lady ironing out her days, slipping into confusion in a plasterboarded room and listening to the banter and noise of young people she barely knew, while fretting to find a place to sleep at night. She knocked on my door and I was in. What if she had knocked and I had been out? Or in Northumberland? What if she had not had a niece who loved her? Would she have folded her clothes and packed them in large gingham plastic bags, let herself out of the house which was no longer her home, left her front-door key hanging on a hook in the hallway and launched herself on to the streets? Would she have found a little room?

  Saturday, 25 March 2006

  Party animals

  Had a lot of work on this month, which has been good but hectic. At least it will help pay some bills. Writing about how rich people make their money for a Sunday newspaper supplement which ranks the wealthiest people in the country – something that always makes me want to go out and
spend furiously. We actually went to a party last night. A father at school had a fiftieth party in a village hall. We talked to quite a few people, but I find the men quite different from the men I am used to down south. I suspect that some of them who farm or work outdoors are not naturally at ease with women. I have no work in common to talk to them about. They tend to eye me warily – I imagine in much the same way as they eye livestock which they have brought on to the farm and whose parentage is unknown to them. To fill out their side of the conversational bargain, I find myself chatting inanely with them like some feathered flapper who has quaffed one pink gin too many.

  At the party, I asked the Oyster Farmer to dance. I stood in front of him, waiting. The farmer is a man who thinks carefully before spending a word he may need later in life. My husband watched. It was a long wait. The Oyster Farmer thought about my question and the consequences. To move out of the darkness, to dance in the coloured light, to talk to a stranger. His silence spread to the circle of farmer friends where he was standing. After several days and nights of waiting, courtesy won out over caution; he slowly put down his pint on the table behind him. His wife’s jaw dropped as she saw me haul him away to the gallows. ‘He doesn’t dance. He never dances,’ she called out to me. ‘You never dance with me.’ She laughed out loud at the sight. As we jigged away, he shouted out his youth into my bass-battered ear; he used to come as a twelve-year-old boy to discos in this very village hall. I could see him, standing in the shadows with his young and spotty friends, drinking warm shandy from plastic cups and hoping the mad girl who never stopped jabbering would not ask him to dance …