You have to be old and sad to go to a school reunion. It was a reunion of girls who had gone to what used to be a boys’ independent school in York. When I was a pupil, there were around twenty girls in the sixth form; now the school is co-educational throughout. They were the children of businessmen and farmers. My father sold cheese and sliced bacon in a city-centre shop; my mother worked part-time as a bank clerk and looked after my grandmother. When I got myself to that school on two scholarships, I wanted to be Prime Minister; now I just want to get through the day without crying. Mind you, that is probably how the Prime Minister feels.
Standing in the old assembly hall, drinking warm Buck’s Fizz with our names emblazoned on our breasts, I elbowed my best friend in the stomach. The self-made millionaire has a personal trainer. She is wearing expensive clothes she picked up in ‘some airport’ in Europe which cling to her taut, sculpted figure. A figure which is better than it was when we were at school. ‘You so owe me,’ I said. ‘I’m going to this reunion when I’m fat, I don’t have a job and I don’t even live in London any more. At least it would sound glamorous if I lived in London.’ ‘No, it wouldn’t,’ she said. I carried on: ‘I’m a washed-up hack who had her children too late and who is living in the wastelands. I’m telling everyone I’m a teacher.’ She poured the remains of her warm Buck’s Fizz into mine. ‘There you are’ – she pointed at an old school photo of me, all bangs and flounces. ‘You were fatter then.’
There were six of us from our year and others I knew from the year above. You found yourself looking for the girl in the mumsy figure in front of you. I suspected a few had eaten the girl they used to be. You would peer at the woman to see through to the sixteen-year-old you knew was in there. In her turn, she would peer back at you. You thought: ‘Who were you? Who was I? Who are we now?’ Looking around, I thought: ‘This is who buys those strange clothes you see hanging on the rails in certain department stores, the rails you walk by and wonder: “Who the hell wears those?” ’ We do.
I had no memory at all of one girl, not a shred. I recognized neither her nor her name. Am I so forgetful? Or was she so unmemorable? Did she remember me or was I equally unremarkable? One of my contemporaries had to leave straight after lunch to get home to make a birthday cake for her son. I thought: ‘This is the first time you have seen these women in twenty-four years. Buy a cake for him. As if he will care.’ Perhaps I am wrong, perhaps he does care and she is a better mother than me in the same way she got better A-levels and went to a better university. This is what going to a school reunion reduces you to. How do I compare to this overblown summer rose? Do I look better? Or fatter? Have I done better? Am I married? How many times have I been married? Have I more children? By how many fathers? Does my husband love me more than her husband loves her? Do I make my children’s birthday cakes or do I buy them from a shop? I buy them from a shop.
Monday, October 9 2006
Running on empty
I rang my husband from the pub car park I had juddered into off the A1. I was slewed across the asphalt where the car had crawled with its last breath of petrol and died. He picked up. I said: ‘The mobile is about to die. I have two seconds to tell you where I am,’ which I did. I said: ‘And I probably just have time to tell you, you are a …’ when the battery died on me too.
Thursday, 19 October 2006
Buncase
Girl Friday seems lovely. Naturally she has great hair, blonde and highlighted, since her sister is a hairdresser. When she started, she told me she couldn’t cook. I said that was fine – anything we needed her to cook for the children would be very straightforward. Unfortunately it turns out she is naturally a great cook. She appears to be on a permanent diet – unlike me; everything she bakes, I eat. Occasionally I throw a bun at a child, but basically the baked stuff is mine. It is a catastrophe.
Friday, 20 October 2006
Knock knock. Who’s there?
One of my acute frustrations living up here is the lack of space. Outside it’s all glorious green rolling acres everywhere while the beaches are empty stretches of washed sand. Inside this rural dream of country life, it is hell. Five of us squished together in what is effectively a two-bedroomed, toy-strewn hovel. Six, counting Girl Friday when she is here. But the house is like something from eighteenth-century pre-Industrial Revolution England – all cottage industry and screaming children with a little less smallpox.
We were supposed to buy and then knock through into next door to create a perfect domestic environment – full of living spaces rather than rooms, and positively bursting with Agas, en-suite bathrooms and under-floor heating. Today, we finally got planning permission to knock the cottages together. It has taken nearly nine months. I could have had another baby in the time it took.
I have decided I hate planners and builders. Irony. We finally have planning permission; we cannot afford any of the builders who have tendered for it. ‘Tender’ is just builder speak for ‘extort’. They are extortionists in hard hats. I hate builders. Why do I want to hand over good money I have not got, to build a house somewhere I do not want to live? I am going to have to think about that one. Of course, I cannot find anywhere quiet enough to sit down and think this all through, which could be where I am going wrong.
Sunday, 22 October 2006
Blackberry man
Half-term. The Perfect Mother rang, said: ‘We’ll come up.’ ‘He won’t be here,’ I said. ‘We’ll come see you then,’ she said; ‘we’re leaving the children with my parents – it will just be us.’ Her Hectic Husband took my sons on an all-boy expedition while I went for a walk with his wife and my baby. The beach was glorious, endlessly flat with horsetails whipped up by the cold winds whisking across the sands. A washed-out golden sunlight persuading walkers that winter had not yet come to it. As we walked along the beach, I confessed: ‘I’m angry with him. At being here.’ She told me: ‘I’m angry too.’ She was silent for a moment. ‘The hours he works, the endless business trips, the Blackberry. He’s better than he used to be – even so, I’ve had to tell him if he doesn’t engage with them as children, they’ll be strangers to him when they’re adults. I’ve felt as if I’m doing it on my own too often. I love him, but there was a time I thought about leaving him. Then I thought: “Why put the children through all that? I’m a single parent anyway, I may as well stay. At least we’re more comfortable financially.” ’
I believe there is an army of angry women. Each rage different but a common theme – the high-earning husband, clever, ambitious and obsessed with work. This obsession drives the man to work through nights and weekends, year after year. Unregarded, his wife will wait to be a widow, while his children can lengthen, blossom, hurt, smile and leave home, all unknown. Throughout this time, his resenting wife will do that thing commonly described as ‘picking up the slack’. This generally translates to ‘looking after the children’. Morning, she will get up with the children to allow her husband to have an extra hour lie-abed to make up for how late he stayed at the office. ‘This job is killing me,’ he will tell her, his eyes closed. His staggering wife, already clocked on for her all-day/all-night shift. Her weekends she spends as thoroughly alone, albeit with the children, as she would be if he were dead, while he ‘tidies up some loose ends’ then swims through the Sunday papers.
We walked on, ploughing the sand with the buggy. ‘I hope he’s getting on OK with the boys,’ I said. ‘He’ll be fine,’ she replied; ‘it’ll do him good.’ When we got back to the house, her Hectic Husband was looking dazed. He said: ‘I forgot I had a conference call with India and London and I didn’t know how to press mute’ – he gestured to the Blackberry – ‘so I started the call standing outside the car while the boys bounced around inside like monkeys. The call dragged on and it was getting dark so I had to drive back, and when I got back in, they’d emptied out their wellies and buckets and turned it into a beach. They were so noisy one of the bankers said: “Half-term, is it?” and I told him: “They’re not even min
e.” ’ His wife started to laugh.
Monday, 30 October 2006
On my knees
Maybe it is my friends leaving, but if someone said to me: ‘Describe yourself in one word,’ I would say: ‘Mother.’ If they said: ‘Make it two,’ I would say: ‘Lonely mother.’ My husband is away for three weeks, including the half-term week which has just gone, and I do not feel there is anyone here I can turn to in a crisis. I do not know them well enough to impose. The baby is teething, and after four sleepless nights on the trot I am desperate. I hate my absent husband, myself and my children in about that order. I spent the Saturday on my knees. When yesterday dawned, I crawled to the phone to confess to my husband that I simply did not know how I would cope, what to do with myself or what to do with the children. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you go to Alnwick garden, gather autumnal leaves and make a collage?’ ‘I know,’ I replied. ‘Why don’t you just come home and you can make the fucking collage?’
I could have called in Girl Friday. The Evangelicals or one or two of the school-gate mothers would have welcomed me if I had ’fessed up to a crisis, but I did not feel I could say the words: ‘Please. Can you help me?’ It was, truth be told, not so much a crisis as another day. How do you tell someone you hardly know that you cannot cope? That you are desperate? I was too low; my children too ghastly to inflict them on anyone. In London, I would have had no scruples. I would have thrown everyone in the car and expected those I love to welcome me into their homes even if my mood was black and my children monstrous.
I am struggling. Without work and colleagues, my main route into friendships is through school. The village church school is tiny; the potential pool of bosom mates is small. In any event, one of the perks of rural living is a free bus for the kids, which cuts down the number of mothers you see. I was gutted this term when the Oyster Farmer’s Wife started using the county bus service to take her son to school and bring him home. Unlike me, she did not consider the forty-minute round schlep, twice a day, worth a few minutes of chirpy banter, and who can blame her? Unless, my ‘chirpy banter’ was why she stopped driving him and switched to the bus. Oh God, do these women think I am stalking them?
Friday, 3 November 2006
Like mother, like daughter
My dandelion-haired babe is one of rounded cheeks and skylighting smiles. Glorious. The only problem occurs whenever she crunches up her perfect face to scowl out her frustration; in those moments, when she looks perturbed or volcanic angry, my husband will say: ‘Look. Look at the baby. She looks just like you. That’s uncanny.’ I will glance across at the small Tasmanian devil child and say to him: ‘I don’t look like that.’ He says: ‘You do. You look just like that. It’s uncanny. She’s got your face.’
He missed the baby’s first birthday. We had a small party with the Oyster Farmer’s Wife and her boys and the Evangelicals. We ate chocolate cake in the shape of a caterpillar then the children played out in the dark. I held the baby to the phone for Daddy to wish her a ‘Happy Birthday, darling’. Forlorn, he said: ‘I’m not there.’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘you’re not. You’ll be here tomorrow. I’ll save you a piece of cake.’
Wednesday, 8 November 2006
The palm of your hand
All those times, as a mother, you lay your palm against the curve of your child’s cheek in admiration or in comforting. Tonight as I was lying with the baby tucked next to me feeding, she reached out her little hand and laid it soft on my withering cheek. She left it there for half a minute, enough to let me know she cared, and in that brief touch, I thought: ‘All right, I will try again tomorrow then. Tomorrow I will get it right.’
Thursday, 9 November 2006
Cyber-scream girl
I have decided to start talking to myself and anyone else who will listen. Write an online diary. Blog it. Has to be cheaper than therapy. An MP I know blogs about politics. Now I have actually signed up and done it, I am slightly astonished to see what I am thinking out there in the blogosphere in black and white. It is all anonymous. I have called it ‘Wife in the North’. I do not think anyone would guess it was me – not unless they read it, and they would have to find it first. Even if they did, I get the impression that in Northumberland everyone knows your business anyway. There seem to be convoluted networks of distant kinship and long-standing amity in the county which means that even if they have never met you, they already know more about you than you would think possible.
Tuesday, 14 November 2006
Awake in the dark
Autumn, all stripped branches and dark damp, no getting away from it. November, a month for remembering the dead. In London, this is how we mark the day. We go to mass in the church where we married and watch the sun’s diamond rays slice through the stained glass to fall on empty oak and beeswaxed pews. We buy parrot tulips wrapped in brown paper. ‘Thank you, we won’t bother with the ribbon bow.’ We drive to a grave in an Essex churchyard, walk through wet grass and fallen down leaves, unplug a tin vase from a headstone and fill it with water, spring flowers and could-have-beens. Pray for resurrection day, get cold and wet; go to a hotel and sit in armchairs at a small round table drinking tea. Occasionally, our hands touch and our wedding bands click one against the other. If we are to stay in Northumberland, will my bones lie not in this yard but in a northern grave? My husband has already said he wants to be buried in the North. Will I rest easy if I lie with him? Or will I toss and turn in my damp silk cell and silent-call, my mouth stopped with strange soil: ‘Take me back to dear old London town’?
Saturday, 2 December 2006
A poke in the eye
We left the three-year-old and the baby with Girl Friday and took the five-year-old to hospital for a stitch courtesy of a broom being accidentally poked in his eye when the children were tidying up the classroom. He has a small cut above his eye and a facility for standing in the wrong place. He took my hand, looked up at me and said: ‘Do you think I’m brave?’ I stood still and Solomon nodded up and down and up again: ‘Very, very, very. I’d just rather you were careful.’
Tuesday, 12 December 2006
You do. Voodoo
If I practised voodoo, I would be completely out of wax and pins by now. Last November, we were told the knock-through would cost us around £75,000, according to an estimate from our cheery chartered surveyor. By February this year, that had gone up to around £100,000, according to the architect. Unfortunately, no one told the builders, and when it went out to tender, the estimated cost had climbed to £240,000 –including VAT (that’s all right then). I am currently waiting for a man and his mate, who are coming to have a look, go to the pub, get totally drunk, write down the biggest figure they can think of and attach a pound sign to it before they pass out.
Thursday, 14 December 2006
Karaoke in Soho
My husband has wafted back to London for his office Christmas party. I no longer have an office so I am saved a trip to a smoke-filled Soho den, the cringe-making karaoke and annual haka ‘God, we were good this year. Really, really good. Be proud of yourself. Really, really proud, because God, we were good.’ The amount of time he spends in London he might as well live there (oh yes, that’s right, we used to. Until he decided to stick a pin in a map and move us all to the back of beyond) and his complaints while he is there frankly only serve to irritate. ‘I’ve had such a bad day,’ he tells me from a friend’s house where he enjoys his child-free shaved-truffle supper. ‘I don’t want to be here, you know,’ he moans from my favourite Covent Garden patisserie. Really? Neither do I.
I open the front door to my world: silence and the wind, darkness flooding the fields around, filling the sky and pressing down on the cottage. I shut the door, turn back to the TV and the camera pans along a London skyline. I feel homesick – quite desperate. London Diva told me my situation made her weep for me and that I have become a ‘victim’. Oh dear. Am I indeed a victim? Maybe I have been too gloomy about my life up North. I drew up a Pollyanna list of everyth
ing that is good about living up here: empty beaches and glorious skies, school and the opportunity to make new friends (who says you should put up a ‘No Vacancies’ sign just because you are forty-something?). There is also the ‘community’ – to my surprise there really is one – and then there is the garden, which is bigger than anything we could have in London. Not to mention a happy husband – at least he had better be.
Tuesday, 19 December 2006
Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner
I am slightly daunted by Christmas. Last year, it was so very bad. This year, I escaped to London for a couple of days with a toothbrush and a certain amount of guilt. But it was worth the guilt – seeing friends, an exhibition, a movie, a haircut, a bit of shopping. Amazing what you can fit in – and how much money you can spend for that matter – when you are on a tight schedule.
As I walked out of the National Gallery, my heart pinged, I heard it; caught firm in London’s manicured grasp as dusk stole over Trafalgar Square with its Christmas tree and carollers. It was as true and lovely as any painting I had seen the hours before. An authentic masterpiece. I am heartsore. It is the feeling you have when someone you love leaves you, although I know I did the leaving. I am ashamed of myself for the teenage angst of it all. So I moved. Big deal. I should shrug in a sophisticated way, inhale hard from a cigarette held in a costume-jewelled hand and slowly blow a smoke ring into the already cloudy air. I do not live here any more and yet I carry it with me. Where is my home now? There is just one year left to go of this experiment and I cannot read the runes, do not know whether we will stay in Northumberland or come back? Whether we should stay or come back. If we did return, could I cope with the crowds, the squalor glimpsed out of the corner of your eye, the ‘body on the line in North London’ which delayed my travel back to King’s Cross station?
Wife in the North Page 9