by Mavis Cheek
By the time Andrew and Claire began senior school, the office had long since moved from Francis Street to fine new premises further into town. Angela turned the house back into a complete family home again, so quickly that it was almost a conjuring trick. Let's get it out of the way, she thought. And she did. She worked with Ian three days a week and on the other two she did all the other things a mother and wife and business partner needs to do to survive. Now Ian employed a large staff of young men besides himself, and an unmarried woman of fifty to oversee the office side of things and to be his secretary. Young women came and went in the more menial areas and it therefore mattered not, as he said, when they left to get married.
At Angela's suggestion, they took on a partner. Ian agreed, saying he could do with the help and the extra capital. Angela nodded, keeping quiet about wanting the new working partner to take over for good, eventually, while she and Ian, finally unencumbered by their offspring, circumnavigated the globe. Still young and vigorous - just as she had always planned.
As the years passed, Ian went from love's delight in all she did to apparent awe of her capabilities. 'My wife,' she once heard him say to his new business partner, Bernard Ball, 'could easily have been a bloody rocket scientist. Put her in Cape Canaveral and she'd have an interplanetary probe on Mars by Monday...'
Angela smiled to herself. It was true, she would, if Mars be where her husband stood waiting. She never lost that memory of the God of the Cambridge Union and hot sex in small beds with mulled wine. It was there, waiting for them still, just below the surface, and they would find it again. The day was drawing near.
To fill up the evening and as a little additional interest she began to look hard at the financial papers and suggested, from time to time, where they might invest any small surplus. Ian could not deny her skill in this department either.
‘I sometimes feel redundant’ he said playfully to her one evening.
'Redundant is it?' She smiled back, and hauled him off to the bedroom to redress such foolishness.
It was as well that these investments had been made. During the lean times of the early nineties not only did Ian's father die but his mother needed capital as the paternal business went to the wall.
'Well done, Angie,' said Ian, almost to himself, as they cashed in the investments she had once advocated. Partner Bernard slapped him on the back and congratulated him on his foresight in the matter of stocks and shares and he - rather awkwardly - took the praise as his due. Angela just smiled and said nothing.
'Where would I be without you?' said her husband again one evening as she slid back his shirt collar and massaged his tired neck.
Mrs Fytton senior was moved to a comfortable new house in Taunton, from where she observed the world with increasing sourness and immobility. Angela arranged for a daily companion and went down to visit her mother-in-law whenever she could. The children, now teenagers, refused. Angela withdrew their monthly allowances. The children, now teenagers, agreed. Ian saw this through a haze of firm and peaceful family discussion. He never interfered in the rows, or felt obliged to deal with a door slammed in anger. That was
Angela's department and she dealt with it - as in all things -extraordinarily well. Never once, in anger, did Angela say, ' You deal with this, I've had enough.. .' Though she asked his advice, of course. Her job, her business, was the family. His part in it was to be there for it and enjoy it. He played tennis with his son at weekends and he took his sweet little teenaged girl shopping occasionally and bought her and her friends hamburgers. They knew better than to give their father a hard time. Or their mother, mostly, come to that. She ruled the roost with a velvet glove covering a hand of razor wire. She even knew how to disengage the woofer from the hi-fi if they played the bass too loud. When their father was at home they behaved. Life ran as smoothly as a well-oiled clock. Whatever, in those days of digitalization, such an old-fashioned item might be.
Business colleagues and the men of the neighbourhood looked upon Ian with envy. They were working twice as hard as before in the harsher economic climate. They had wives who screamed and threw crockery when they were late home from the office. He had a wife who stayed late at the office with him or went on occasional business trips with him. Or who was waiting, powdered and painted, in his bed, when he returned. They had wives who were passing their sell-by dates, had hot flushes, cold sweats and neurotic syndromes. He had a wife who was still young enough - just - to be a floozie from the typing pool, with legs to match, and from whose clear eyes shone nothing but the light of admiration. They had wives who thought computing was as exciting and sexy as running an abattoir. He had a wife who not only knew what he did for a living but understood it, respected him for it and - if he was ill - could step into his shoes. Ian, when this was pointed out to him, found it quite hard to smile the smile of the Pantocrator. For some reason.
As the tough early nineties gave way to easier times, Angela still worked with Ian, but only for a day a week. The technology - as he pointed out to her - was getting more and more difficult even for him to understand and he and Bernard really needed another full-time partner. She acceded cheerfully. Another working partner would make it even easier for Ian to devolve when the time came. Of course, at the moment he had to work flat out because the scars of the early nineties were still healing. But they were on course . .. Definitely on course... And Angela needed to give a little extra attention to the children, who were in the process of completing their GCSEs. David Draper - a lively Jack the Lad - came on board with Ian and Bernard and the future seemed assured.
It was at this point that Ian said, very firmly, that she should take some time for herself. He had two partners now -and all the help he needed. She had paid her dues. Why not release herself from the office entirely?
Take me to Venice for a week and I might consider it’ she said.
He told his secretary to fix it and a fortnight later there they were. No longer staying in the unpretentious La Calcina, hotel of their honeymoon and overlooking the Giudecca, but in the Gritti Palace, looking down on the Grand Canal. Which just about symbolized their every achievement.
In the course of the next seven days they screwed like rabbits, drank like fishes, ate like pigs and walked around the city wrapped in their eel-like arms. Ian had kept his golden hair and she had kept her twenty-five-inch waist. It was as if, she thought, they had only just met.
'One day soon,' she whispered as they stared into the moonlit waters of the Grand Canal. 'One day soon it will be like this all the time...'
'Yes,' he responded firmly. 'Yes.' He was looking at the water and he was thinking how lucky, how very lucky, he was. He could not have achieved the half of it without his wife. It was what he predicted at the Cambridge Union all those years ago. All those years ago... He turned to his wife. 'Take a break,' he said, even more firmly.
She did not argue. A woman who seeks to control should make sure - just as with a girdle - that the control is well hidden and quite out of sight.
She stopped going into the office from that day forth. And she allowed dashing, dynamic David Draper to accompany Ian on their foreign business trips. Though she did take the one to Hong Kong for the handover. She too relaxed enough to enjoy an almost dowager status. Yes to Hong Kong, no to boring old Brussels and the flatlands.
Just as she felt safe enough to retire a little, to unplug herself from a world where she felt she must be one jump ahead.
Just as she sat back in her sunny garden, smiling and waiting for the final piece to fall into its correct place and Andrew and Claire to go off safely and happily to university.
Just as she thought, ‘I am still only thirty-nine. Bliss. Brilliant. All is going perfectly to plan’ Recalling that 'Women! Take control of your lives' had once been her watchword in the seventies.
And just as she congratulated herself that, after all, the famous old adage set down by Robbie Burns that 'the best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft a-gley' says nothing of wome
n, and only applies to small rodents and the male of her species... Something in the blue sky darkened above her.
But when she looked up and shaded her eyes she could see nothing.
Nothing at all.
Which perhaps, after attending that Cambridge Union debate, was her second big mistake.
For just at that precise moment, in a small, smart restaurant at 's-Gravenhage, a pretty little woman, attending a conference on Europe and dentistry, and wearing too-high heels, slipped and fell at the feet of a tall golden-haired man, who bent to help her up and Who insisted (as she brushed the pretty little tears from her eyes, and shook her pretty little curls into place, and whose dainty vulnerability was written all over her round little figure and quivering little mouth, and who kept drawing her skirt hem above her sweetly rounded knee and rubbing it to show that she was being brave), who absolutely insisted, that she should join him and his colleague, David, at their table and have a drink until she was calm again. Which same David it was who winked and nudged him and said, much, much later, 'What's The Harm?'
Blue skies, on the whole, are never to be trusted further than you can see them.
Part One
1
April
If I can't have too many truffles, I'll do without.
colette
The day was a warm one. April gold. The sky was celebration blue. Clouds floated by like spoonfuls of buttery mashed potato, and the verdant grasses below them were all sparkling with dew. It was a harbinger of a day, a day of portent, a day of opportunity and possibility that was not to be missed. A heavenly day. The kind of day, surely, that Milton had in mind when he suggested one should 'Accuse not Nature! she hath done her part... Do thou but thine’ In short, it was a day upon which to get up, get out and get cracking.
Mrs Angela Fytton put her black thoughts behind her. Good, she thought, instead. Good. And she shook out her once-sleek hair until it was fluffy and wriggled her body, with its newly acquired half-stone and waistline that was an inch and a half bigger than it had ever been and all made entirely of chocolate, into something loose, floaty and cotton.
Good.
Her fingers hovered over her dressing table and her makeup bag. Hovered, clicked the familiar thing shut decisively, and moved on. Her feet slipped into flat, canvas shoes, once worn to besport herself during family holidays upon the beaches of Portugal. The T-shirt she pulled over her head had a distinct feel of slackness, the softness of many washings. Whatever else she was going to be on this heavenly day, she was going to be comfortable. Very comfortable. One might almost say At Last.
She looked down to where her little-friend-chocolate protruded. She patted it. It gave her, she decided, the look of a naked Eve by Cranach or Memling, with that very female curve so beloved of the Northern Renaissance. She winced at the thought of the Art of the Flatlands. Had she only cared a little more for that and a little less for putting her feet up in the garden of life, she would not now have this new curve. Ah, well. . . She patted it again. Little-friend-chocolate. She refused to even consider the word plump. That new curve was female and it was art. Chocolate art. Testimony to pleasure. She had stopped the chocolate for now, but the sweet swelling remained. Good, she thought again. Good.
The something loose, floaty and cotton was a little creased, due to its having been squeezed to the back of her wardrobe for more years than she cared to remember. It was possible that she had worn it once or twice in the last stages of pregnancy with Claire. In which case that would be eighteen years ago. It had an elasticated waist. On a day like today, an elasticated waist - a slightly perished elasticated waist - was suddenly the most perfect sartorial requirement. It gave her the illusion - or was it illusion? - that she could breathe again.
Here you are, world, she said to the mirror reflection, pulling and releasing the elastic which slumped rather than snapped back into place. Ill draw no analogy from that, she thought, as she watched it sag. Oh no. This is the new me and it is comfortable, she thought. Very comfortable.
She had one last pull at the elastic. No restrictions, no constraints. After all those years of wifehood, workhood and motherhood, Mrs Angela Fytton let it all hang out. In fact, she stood there letting it All Hang Out so committedly that she was suddenly extraordinarily and wonderfully tired and almost picked up her copy of Country Life and got back into bed. But the beauty of the day, with all its challenges, beckoned through her window. A day to get up and go, she reminded herself. And taking her slight hangover carefully down the stairs (she had stayed up late, writing her last will and testament, which seemed, last night, to be a wise and holy thing to do, requiring much thought and Rioja), she prepared to venture forth. For if she did not, she reflected, as she closed the door of her vast Victorian semi and set off down the M3 towards the west in her new and zappy little three-door hatchback, she would scream. And the scream might never stop.
She negotiated the zappy little three-door hatchback down streets full of large cars containing baby seats, of houses with funny cut-out pictures stuck on to upstairs windows, of fat or thin, plain or pretty, pale or ruddy nanny-girls pushing strollers, with a vacant air. Little houses, big houses, clematis, wistaria and conservation, all the same: safe, secure, middle management or media moguls, top professionals or just starting out. Houses all cluttered with baby alarms, little bicycles, big bicycles, skate boards and the odd bit of dope tucked behind the biscuit tin.
With one bound I am free, she thought. The perished elastic lay about her waist as light and gentle as gossamer.
Good, she thought once more. Good.
2
April
Be plain in dress, and sober in your diet; In short, my deary, kiss me and be quiet.
lady mary wortley montagu
The motorway was smooth, which was soothing, and not full at this time of the morning. She would be spared the knuckle whites of power-crazed sales reps and the merry quips of lorry drivers as they tried to run her off the road. She relaxed. Nothing like a nice long drive to give you time for sorting out the brain. Thinking. She had quite a lot of that to do.
She passed the crenellations of Windsor, the gravel pits of Slough and the amazing ugliness of Basingstoke. She could identify with Basingstoke. Once Basingstoke had been an innocent little market town, full of attractive byways and good will. Now it was a modernized, brutalized mess of misplaced planning. Somewhere beneath its ugly, post-war craziness lay the foundations of its goodly, ancient past. As, she thought, did her own.
The only difference between her and Basingstoke was that she might find hers again if she dug down deep enough. She could lift off the layers of what time had done and from underneath resurrect her old self. Poor Basingstoke, ugly hulk, was probably stuck like that for ever.
She drove past it, eyes fixed on the horizon. London never seemed to be quite far enough away until you reached beyond that point. When the children were growing up she would base getting away from it all on the simple rule that she was never far enough away from it all until she was too far down the motorway to turn back and save a forgotten tray of scones in the oven.
And did this rule of thumb denote a lively, imaginative mind? No, it did not. It was just that once she did leave a tray of scones in the oven when they were travelling to Ian's mother for the weekend. And Ian drove back in time to save them. The hero. They were inedible, of course, but not burnt. She rechristened them biscuits and set off with them cooling in the boot, because Ian's mother liked her daughter-in-law to cook her things. Well, you would, thought Angela, and she had certainly obliged. Ian was delighted with the way she obliged his mother. And she was delighted with the way her husband was obliged. Left to her, of course, old mother Fytton could have whistled for home-baking. But if her husband loved her the more for doing it, do it she would.
Well, she would not be cooking scones or biscuits for the dowager Mrs Fytton ever again, her being six feet under. Nor would she be cooking scones or biscuits for family consumption at h
ome either. She had done her best over the years to star in the play called Family Life and personally she felt she deserved an Oscar. She had been mumsy in the kitchen, whorish in the bedroom, stylish in the world and efficient in the workplace. And now she was alone for all her pains. Curtain. No applause. Even on a glorious day like today, the little bubble of bitterness would rise. She wished it would not. Bitterness was a waste of energy. Bitterness pulled you down into the bog of despair. Bitterness fashioned those little lines around your mouth - the kind her mother-in-law once wore - and she was not going to let it win. All the same ... Acting? Acting? Most women could take to the stage any day of the week and be convincing in any part written for them. She, Angela Fytton, certainly had. And just as with the actresses of her acquaintance, so there came a time in ordinary life when you were too old for the part. And a younger actress got it. There were just some rainy days you could not plan for. Apres toi le deluge...