The Desperate Diary of a Country Housewife

by Daisy Waugh

  Alison?

  Obviously, not thinking that hard. It didn’t matter. It was like having the fantastic Fin I married back home with me at last.

  He didn’t notice how tidy the house is looking, or if he did he hasn’t mentioned it. He didn’t ask where all the books had gone either. They’ve gone to Oxfam. Or most of them have. Two men came up the day before yesterday and spent all morning rifling through the packing cases. They needed a van to take the books away. I spent the afternoon (before Fin came back) carrying their rejects in mini-loads down the garden path to the dustbin. Must have been about forty journeys, and I’m slightly disappointed they didn’t bring the baby on. Babies are often born three or so weeks early, aren’t they? God, it would be lovely not to be pregnant any more. I can’t remember what it feels like to be normal.

  Fin says he bumped into Jeremy Healthy-Snax in Soho. He was looking terrible. Like an old man, Fin said. Fin seemed quite shaken up by it. So I updated him on the Healthy-Snax marriage meltdown, Rachel’s decision to go back to work and divorce poor Jeremy even though it turned out he’d done nothing wrong.

  ‘She knows he did nothing wrong?’ Fin repeated. ‘You mean Rachel now knows it wasn’t him in the restaurant, and she’s still divorcing him?’

  That’s right, I said.

  Fantastic, Fin said.

  Fantastic?

  Fin just shrugged. Jeremy may be dull, but I thought that was a bit tough.

  COUNTRY MOLE

  Sunday Times

  Having estate agents round to value one’s property can be quite addictive, I discover. They arrive on the doorstep at exactly the time they say they will, wreathed in convivial smiles, bringing with them a guaranteed half-hour not just of adult conversation but of solid, unceasing flattery. Exhilarating stuff. I’ve just waved the fifth one off. She was still burbling about Wow Factors and negotiable percentages as she tottered down the path to her car.

  Actually she may have over-egged the omelette a little bit. I don’t think we’ll be using her. Because there’s convivial—and then there’s outright obsequious, and I think she may have crossed the line. She put out a hand as she was leaving and, instead of shaking mine, laid it softly on my enormous belly. ‘You’ll want to be settled by the time your darling, special little baba arrives,’ she said, her mouth all crimped into kiss shape. Crikey. I nearly baba-barfed all over her.

  ‘It’s not very likely,’ I said to her, politely swatting the hand away. (The baby’s due in less than a month.) And then I reminded her—as I’ve reminded all the agents—not to mention our meeting to anyone. ‘It’s a small community, and news does tend to whiz round. Only we haven’t quite told the children that we’re moving back to London yet,’ I said. ‘We can’t quite decide how to break it to them.’

  I said ‘we’ haven’t told the children. Obviously what I meant was ‘I’, since the husband isn’t exactly in the loop yet, either. He’s coming back this weekend and I keep practising different ways to broach the subject. ‘How can we go on like this?’ I’m going to begin. ‘We didn’t marry—we didn’t have all these children—only to wind up leading separate lives!’

  Sound good? God, I hope so. Last time we had a conversation about my misery in Paradise it degenerated very quickly into a disgraceful blubfest. Well, he didn’t blub (though he must have felt like it), I blubbed for the both of us. It was a few months ago, and the first time we’d officially acknowledged to each other that the move from London might have been a mistake. He suggested we give Paradise another five years and then maybe think about heading back…

  Until that moment it hadn’t occurred to me, what with the Stamp Tax and everything, that escape from Paradise would ever be possible. I had assumed we were destined to die here. So I should have been delighted. And yet somehow the mere mention of actually spending another five years away from London sent me lickety-spit into meltdown. ‘But. I. Just. Hate. It,’ I blubbed. ‘I HATE EVERYTHING. I Hate The Walls.’ (What walls? I hear you asking. Well, any walls, at that point, but most particularly the ancient, moisture-oozing walls of our next-door neighbour’s garden. They obsessed me for a while, along with the trees. Blame the pregnancy.)

  In any case, soon those oozing walls will be nothing but a fading memory. Yesterday I called the children’s old school in London: amazingly, there are places available for them. Not only that, all the various estate agents seem to agree that if we sell up now we might even be able to cover our losses. Or if not, they’re confident we can let the place out. This part of the world is filled with rich London refugees, all of them cash buyers, all of them hovering—sometimes for years on end—waiting to pounce on the perfect place with the perfect Wow Factor. Silly fools.

  In the meantime, the market for rentals is booming. So it’s going to be fine. I mean it’s going to be wonderful. As soon as this baby’s born, we’re going home.

  All I need to do is tell the family.

  October 25th

  Fin’s in New York again and will be for the rest of the week. He promises it’ll be his last trip away before the baby is born. But we shall see. In any case it’s much better he’s not around at the moment. I’ve arranged to take the children up to London so they can refamiliarise themselves with their old school. It was the school’s idea, actually. What a lovely school. Nobody I’ve spoken to there has laughed at me even once—or at least not to my face, which is all that counts.

  When I think of the ridiculous hullabaloo I made at the time the children were leaving—handing over bunches of flowers to the teachers, and possibly even blubbing, and generally being an embarrassing, emotional idiot—I’m actually quite amazed I dared to contact them at all. Even more amazed anyone bothered to call me back. Anyway, they did. Ripley and Dora are nervous and excited. They’re going to meet their new form teachers, etc., and then I’m going to spoil them rotten. Force-feed them with Pizza Express, and cinema outings and trips to Madame Tussauds, so that all they associate with the new London is Treats. We’re staying with Hatt. Two nights, in fact. Hatt’s bought tickets to Mary Poppins for the first night.

  Obviously I can’t ask Ripley and Dora to keep the trip a secret from Fin. Unfortunately. So—I could try broaching the subject with Fin over the telephone. I could do that. On the other hand I could sort of bank on the fact that children tend to live in the present, and that they will have been home four long days by the time Fin gets back to Paradise. The children may remember to mention the trip, but by then they should have long forgotten the purpose of it.

  …Am I completely insane? Am I really going to see this through, and haul us all back to London again? God, I hope so…Or am I simply wasting mine and everybody else’s time? I want to believe it’s going to happen. I want to believe that I’m not just dreaming. That we’re going home. And perhaps, if I say it enough—‘We Are Going Home’—

  We Are Going Home.

  …It may even come true.

  I was rifling around the children’s playroom, throwing out broken toys and other bits of plastic, preparing—as ever—for the big move back. Should it come. When it comes…I opened a drawer in the dresser, which I don’t think anyone’s opened since the week we moved in here. It was unfeasibly tidy. There was a brand new, bumper box of pencils with no tips neatly laid out in there, a bumper box of erasers, a box of sharpeners, several pristine pads of drawing paper, three large, unopened tubs of glitter; an unopened stick of glue; some paper scissors…And the sodding nametags.

  God. I remember it, now. All the puerile optimism that went into arranging that stupid little drawer. It was meant to be the Craft Drawer. We were going to be the sort of household which had sticky-back plastic. That was the plan. Sticky-back plastic, and glue, and sew-on nametags. I was going to be like Clare Gower and Rachel Healthy-Snax. I was going to be the sort of mother who spent happy, fulfilled hours on rainy days making useless glittery objects with her children.

  Where did that dream go?

  October 27th

  Co
lumn day. Bad day. Bloody bad day to be column day. How the hell am I going to spin this one? Somehow I’m going to have to make it all make sense—with the biggest part of the jigsaw left out. But I’m not writing about it. I’m not. It’s absolutely nobody’s bloody business but mine. Ours.

  Ours, I mean.

  Christ, I’ve been such a fool. I feel such a fool. How could I have been so blind?

  COUNTRY MOLE

  Sunday Times

  The husband, looking unusually cheerful, arrived back from London early last weekend, in perfect time to pick up the children from school. He said he had good news. Ah, extra money, I thought. (It’s all I think about these days. Have you seen the cost of property in Shepherds Bush?) I told him that I, too, had some news which I hoped he would think was good, if not immediately, then in the long run. But he wasn’ t really listening. He had been approached by a film company setting up in the West Country, he said. It might mean he’d be able to spend more time at home.

  Traffic, I felt, was moving in the wrong direction. So I took that moment to inquire about the speed-camera people, who have been bothering him a lot of late.

  ‘Any more communications?’ I asked casually, ‘because I don’t see how we can survive out here if you lose your driver’s licence.’

  He will lose it, too. We both know that. Sometimes the gods play into our hands, even when they are expressly trying not to. I shall be writing a beautifully worded thank-you letter to the magistrates as soon as their sentence is passed.

  Anyway we went together on the school run after that, mostly because I thought it might be our last peaceful half-hour as a quasi-married couple before my good-news-in-the-long-run goes and ruins it all and he calls in the divorce lawyers.

  Needless to say, when we got to the school gates he was treated like a soldier returned from the front. (We Paradise ladies do love a man who pays attention to his children.) It was while he was doing his final lap of honour and I was waddling beside him, a monstrously swollen limpet, that we were accosted by a small, fat woman I had never laid eyes on before. I could see the husband wincing as she loomed towards us.

  However, by the look in her beady eye it wasn’t him she was interested in. ‘I hear you’re writing all about your experiences in the West Country in one of the newspapers,’ she boomed at me. Out of nowhere. Who was this woman? I denied it passionately, of course. ‘Ha-ha! If only!’ I cried. ‘Crikey! Imagine all the fun I could have!’ But she didn’t seem to want to. She said she had also heard on the grapevine that Our. House. Was. For. Sale.

  I was still winded from the newspaper bulletin. (Still am, in fact. Is it possible that my secret cover has been blown all this time, that everyone here in Niceland has always known about the column, and they’ve just been too damn polite to mention it? Has the joke been on me all along? What a prospect —quite a comforting one, now I think about it. Perhaps that’s why I’ve never made any real friends.) In any case, by the time I came to she was already asking about the house price. She said she ‘thought’ she knew which house was ours and that she wanted to come round for a viewing. My husband was staring at me, I think—I didn’t like to check. I stood very, very still and looked straight ahead, as if lost in contemplation.

  ‘Everything all right?’ he asked eventually. I said it was, but I must have turned a bit pale because our fat little spy threw a funny into the abyss: something about fetching hot water and towels. Oh, how I laughed. I laughed for ages, until it became embarrassing for all of us.

  This, clearly, was one of those deciding moments in life. I could either retreat and deny everything, or I could take full advantage of my temporarily fragile condition and plunge courageously, while people still pretty much had to be kind to me, into the great unknown.

  …I shall draw a veil over the private ‘conversation’ that took place later on that afternoon. Suffice to say, I spent the night on my loathsome in a very nice hotel. The little fat monster is coming for a viewing on Monday. And I am still pregnant and still married. Just.

  November 7th

  Fin did not want me to go with him on that school run. I realise that now. I climbed into the car beside him, and he was tetchy about it. He looked tense. We didn’t talk much on the journey. Then, just as he started the engine his mobile rang, so we swapped places. I drove, and he talked. There was a moment when he signalled at me for a pen and I pointed at the glove compartment. He rifled around, brought out a pen that didn’t seem to work; and then there was no paper. He brought a box of matches out of his pocket and started writing numbers with that cramped, untidy handwriting of his. I felt annoyed—but nothing more than that. It was meant to have been a half hour for the two of us, before the children joined in. Instead, it was him and me—and his bloody mobile, yet again. He hung up. I wasn’t paying attention to the road, almost drove into the back of a tractor, and because of that we started squabbling. We were still squabbling when we got to the school gates. He suggested I stay in the car to ‘rest my feet’ while he went out to the playground.

  I was tempted, actually. But something—something edgy about his manner made me uneasy. It felt almost as though he was ordering me to stay in the car, and I didn’t like that. So I followed him. Clambered out behind him, and then had to struggle a bit to catch up.

  Hello Finley! cried all the mothers.

  And there was Clare. In her goldy-beige, silk-and-cashmere twinset. And her stupid brown suede trousers. And her stupid fucking Chanel boots.

  She saw him. He gave her a casual wave, I think. But didn’t approach. Very impressive. Very cool. Fantastic Fin.—No, it was Clare who gave it away. She saw him and me together, me waddling along just behind, and she looked…terrified. She looked just like Mabel does when I catch her mid-shit in the children’s playroom.

  I thought of her swaying across that stupid sitting room in peachy négligé, So, Mr Film-Producer…

  I thought of his raucous laughter when I called him up to ask if he was the only man within a twenty-mile radius…

  I thought of the way Clare had been avoiding me all this time…

  And still, at that point, unbelievably, I didn’t know for sure. Until something made me think of the wretched matchbox. Why had it never occurred to me before? Fin goes to the Ivy all the time. Of course he does.

  So—I was standing there, watching all the mothers crowd around him. All the mothers, that is, except for Clare. And I shuffled over to stand beside him. Not sure why. I wanted to know if the other mothers knew. Did they? It was impossible to tell. I wanted to be sure that Clare stayed as far away from him as possible. And that was when the woman came up to me and asked me about the column. And about selling the house. It was also, I think, the moment when I knew, finally, once and for all and without a shred of doubt, that our little sojourn down here in the Paradise Theme Park was over. Is over. We have to go home.

  The children were with us when we got back into the car, of course. I asked Fin if he’d mind showing me the matchbox. That’s all. He didn’t ask why I wanted to see it, because he knew. He put his hand into his pocket; looked me directly in the eye, and passed the matchbox over.

  From the Ivy. Of course. It didn’t tell me anything. Of course. Nothing at all. Fin goes to the Ivy all the time.

  ‘I think,’ I said, ‘we need to talk.’

  ‘Oh, you think that,’ he said. And he laughed. ‘Yes, I think so too.’

  We sent the children into the fields behind the house. (How they complained!) And the talking began. And the funny thing is, it was a relief in a way. At least the man that I married—lying, angry cheat that he is—turns out to be still alive. Which is something. At least he has a pulse. At least now, when we talk to each other, we can look at each other again.

  In any case. The story.

  Fin and Clare saw each other on and off for about a month, maybe two. The ‘relationship’, if I can call it that, and I suppose I must, started almost immediately after he and I went over to their house for that drin
k. She called him up about the builder who was mending our kitchen ceiling. Said she was going to be in London. Went to London. It continued from there.

  By the time I was driving to Bournemouth to interview Tamsyn, and Clare was insisting on having Fin and the children for lunch, it had been over for some time. Fin had ended it. Fantastic Fin had come to the conclusion that she was unstable, and that her increasingly hysterical affection for him was endangering his cosy situation at home.

  Men are all the bloody same.

  On the other hand, I’m hardly one to preach, am I?

  Clare found his rejection hard to accept. Impossible to accept. Hence the sobbing at the Ivy.

  Hence Fin’s irritability at being cajoled into taking the children over to lunch that day.

  Hence all sorts of things, of course. His refusal to laugh at rumours about her being a prostitute, apart from anything else. Ha ha.

  Her hounding of him, so he says, was just one more reason for him to avoid coming home. Clare was calling him ten times a day. She turned up at his office. Blah blah blah. And then, out of the blue, she rung him up to tell him she’d moved on. She had a new man.

  So Fin was off the hook.

  But I wasn’t.

  ‘…I think you know him,’ Fin said. ‘Actually we both do. But I think it’d be accurate to say you know him rather better than I do.’ I must have looked completely blank. ‘Happily, though,’ he said, ‘Clare tells me that he tells her that you told him…that he wasn’t the father. Out by a month, apparently. Is that right?’