by Mavis Cheek
She had finished turning the fresh-scrubbed, newly painted still room into a cool white shrine and had begun stocking it. In it she placed the three bottles of mulberry wine, radiant as rubies in the light, and the first of her preserves and stores, as well as a row of golden jars of her own honey. Every time she looked at them her heart swelled with love, as if they were yellow-haired babies asleep in their cots. Most of the honey went to a shop in Taunton which collected it exactly as they had done with the Perry honey, but nevertheless she had achieved it. Money rattled in a tin box. At least the hives were giving something back to her.
With the still room now finished, she would turn her attentions to her wilderness outdoors. She would give something back to the earth and create new herb beds to tantalize those bees. Verily Demeter herself could not have felt more proud.
Fytton honey. When Ian returned she would spread it on the soles of his feet.
13
September
Be you wise and never sad, You will get your lovely lad... And if that makes you happy, kid-You'll be the first it ever did.
dorothy parker
While Mrs Angela Fytton of Church Ale House in the county of Somerset was stomping around in Wellington boots as she dug her new herb gardens, her ex-husband was tiptoeing around, treading on eggshells, in his large, well-appointed family house in Wimbledon.
A state of anxiety that Mrs Belinda Fytton of South Common Road, Wimbledon, in the county of Surrey (now defunct) found oddly conducive.
A husband who is so angry with his ex-wife that he has gone from mild guilt to being unable to speak her name without spitting, combined with a husband who cannot do enough for his current wife to compensate for the arrival of his two large teenagers, is quite a nice mixture to have around the place, decided the Second Mrs Fytton. For while he was in that unnerved condition she felt less anxious herself.
Less anxious about her complete loss of mental faculties, about her limp, morning wakening when she could not be sure she had ever been asleep and immediately thought about going back to bed that night, about the permanent smell of old milk that she was sure hung about her, though Tristan was supposed to be giving up the breast. And -deeper and darker than all of these - about her complete lack of libido. While her stepchildren were there, and perceived to be imposing so much, Ian just wouldn't dare raise the matter (or anything else) of a sex drive. If he liked his sex (and he did, which was how she got him), he loved her more. Of that she was quite, quite certain. He always said that he liked her vulnerability. After all, at their first meeting she fell down in front of him. Well, here she was, vulnerable in the extreme. Therefore, as long as Claire and Andrew did not actually bounce Tristan down the stairs, or assault the cleaner with handguns, she accepted the situation. She was wholly dependent on her husband now. And she didn't care if she never did another stroke of root canal or bridgework ever again. Ian liked her vulnerable? Binnie would oblige.
For his part, Ian scheduled his business diary so that he could be around and not travelling the world as he used to do, and he kept up the jogging, which was good. He kept it up because he was anxious to stay youthful and fit, and she encouraged it because he got so puffed that there was very little energy left over for even remembering conjugal rights. And if he looked like faltering, she had only to hint that perhaps he needed to slow down at his age to send him off with even more determination to make an extra circuit around Wimbledon pond. And just in case the lowering effect of all this worried her husband, she hid all newspapers and magazines that mentioned Viagra. She did not want him to even think about restoring what early morning vigorous exercise and the arrival of his children had so successfully kept at bay. In short, the advent of Claire and Andrew had, like their father of late, hardly penetrated.
Besides, it was a very large house. Chosen - originally and in that sweet, innocent far-off time when Tristan was no more than a small fluttering bump, and Binnie still raced around the bedroom saying 'Catch me' and 'You can have me' - so that one day Binnie could have her own practice on the ground floor. There were acres of pale, fawn carpeting and three floors of spacious rooms and not even a nanny living in because, when she and Ian had discussed how things would be once this new baby arrived, when they were cuddled up on the white linen sofa together, on the white sheepskin rug, staring into the real fire and making their plans, life seemed so perfect that the very idea of an intrusion on their privacy was unthinkable. Ian, bearing in mind his past experience, did not feel they needed a nanny to live with them at all. Maybe a good, reliable cleaning lady, but who wanted strangers on the stairs each morning? It all came naturally to mothers anyway.
Binnie, hands clasped happily around her tiny fluttering bump, agreed out of love for him. She would go back to work eventually, she supposed, and then they would need someone more vocational. But that was a long way off. As long as Ian rearranged his working schedules so that he was based at home most of the time, they could manage perfectly well together. And the cleaner would be useful. Cleaners always were, thought Binnie vaguely. They therefore found and employed one crisp, clean young woman, of Christian principle, called Trisha, who came four days a week and kept the house like a new pin. It was all going to be fine, just fine.
As for Ian, well, it was a new sensation to feel needed. The former Mrs Fytton seemed capable of conquering everything - even his job, if he had let her. As for fatherhood, why, he had scarcely ever changed a nappy. Things would be different this time. This time they would be a team. So they thought as they sat, in happy harmony, in front of their living fire. Before Tristan. Before Andrew. Before Claire.
Of course, now that the baby was here, Binnie wanted a full-time nanny, a full-time masseuse, a full-time chauffeur and anything else you could think of. But she persuaded herself that two young adults who both loved their new little brother would more than compensate. Truth was, though Ian was doing very well, he was not Croesus, and with paying off his witch of an ex-wife and supporting his elder children, money was not infinite. Binnie kept quiet about this since she did not want to remind him that she could, if she chose, earn a good whack herself. She just didn't want to. She was just too, too tired.
'The house is large enough to absorb two young adults’ she said sweetly to her husband. And he, who had been very afraid of her reaction, loved her the more. That scheming, malicious wife of his down in Somerset who had gone through such a run of men and still remained alone to haunt him would find that he was made of stronger stuff than she was. At last.
'Why’ said Binnie, 'you have only to close the door of your own bedroom and you are at peace.'
Binnie thought endlessly about closing her own bedroom door, and having her own relaxing bath, and getting into her own soft and silent bed. Even in rare moments of mental alertness, Binnie did not stoop so low as to think that Ian's ex-wife had brought the situation about with any ulterior motive. What ulterior motive could there be? Indeed, the prospect of Ian's ex-wife leaving London for the remoter parts of Somerset was a very pleasant, very wise one. The further away she went, the better. She feared her predecessor much more when she was a short car ride away. But stuck out in the wilds of beyond with hens and hives and all those other nutty things she owned, what possible threat was she? What possible damage could she do? Binnie, in her new fragrant guise of motherhood, reinvented herself as a lily-clad Madonna, above intrigue herself and therefore seeing no evil in others. She was just too tired to think anything more complex or devious.
Ian just thanked his lucky stars and went on jogging and walking on eggshells. He even felt the stirrings of something called Being Masterful.
Claire and Andrew's worldly goods arrived in Wimbledon, as they themselves did, two days before their mother's departure and three days after their last exam, when they had just about recovered from their hangovers. Tristan spent a lot of happy hours crawling in and out of the boxes as they were emptied and left strewn about the house. Trisha kept her mouth clamped in a very thin li
ne as she went about the business of making sure the baby did not become packed into one and mistakenly left out for the rubbish men.
Eventually, a week or two on, the very last box was unpacked and carted round to the side of the house, found to be empty of baby and removed for disposal. And gradually the house came back to something approaching normal. Within reason they could play their hi-fis, within reason they could invite their friends to visit, within reason they could treat all the facilities of the house as if it was their own home. This was no revelation to them. Before they moved, their mother told them that from now on it was their home. 'You have two homes,' she said. 'Wimbledon and Somerset. But Wimbledon is the home home.'
‘I suppose,' said Claire.
'It is...' said Andrew.
'If I were you, I'd suggest you open proper accounts and have credit cards and everything,' she said. 'Now you are grown up.'
Sudden amazement. Their mother had refused, categorically, to let them open accounts and have credit cards when they lived with her. Life was looking up.
And while they were contemplating this dizzy joy, Angela said, 'Oh, I do hope you'll come and live with me. Won't you? Please...'
And she read, after the pound signs and the amazement, another set of signs in both her children's eyes that, loosely translated, said, 'Not on your nelly.'
‘I suppose you've got lovely big rooms?' she said.
They nodded. 'Huge.'
'Ah,' said Angela, with as much regret in her voice as she could muster. 'Ah.'
Their rooms were perfectly designed and decorated. Pale amber for Claire, pale turquoise for Andrew. With those perfect, perfect expanses of fawn carpet. They had nothing in particular to do for the whole of that fifteen-month period. And they felt that, after the strain of studying for so long, they deserved a bit of time and freedom. And credit cards and accounts with overdrafts. Those were the facts.
'Good job I got those rooms decorated and finished’ said Binnie, congratulating herself, at least, for something.
'Ye-e-s’ said Ian. He recalled the moment that Tristan chucked up his carrot puree over the white rug in the sitting room and how Binnie sat looking at it as if it were a hanged man for several minutes before bursting into tears and running to her bed. 'They are lovely rooms, and they are very lucky children’ he said. 'And you are wonderful.'
Just in case he was getting fruity, Binnie went to run a bath.
If she loved the idea of bed, this new mother - Binnie, she equally loved her bathroom. Even though it opened off their bedroom, she thought of it as her own and Ian tended to use the one down the corridor. All the paraphernalia of her womanliness was stacked and scattered in her en-suite. No baby stuff lined the shelves, no baby stuff dripped and dribbled down the tiled walls. It was her inner soul, her temple of femininity, her private sanctuary - full of the expensive stuff brought back by Ian from his business trips, as once a Prince of Fairy Tale would bring his Princess trophies from his travels and ask for nothing in return. Certainly not humping. Romantic love. Lancelot and Guinevere. No other favour save to adore. She loved it in there. In there she was safe.
Soon Ian was going on his first protracted business trip abroad since Tristan's birth. Binnie had shortened it to her satisfaction and was now quite relaxed about it. She had two teenagers to help her, the Christian Trisha, and she would not have to spend all day worrying about conjugal rights.
'You can bring me some more Patou’ she said, before vanishing up the stairs. 'Please, darling.' And, from the safety of the kitchen doorway, she blew him a pretty kiss.
He responded with two smacking noises made by his own lips that yearned to get themselves around more than just thin air. But with the advent of Claire and Andrew, good as they were, he knew better than to push home even the slightest of enquiries about when, exactly, that side of things might resume. He tried to remember when it resumed with Angela. Not long, he thought. But then, he also thought, with deliberate lack of gallantry, she was always gagging for it, and he wondered, as he tapped the words Belinda and Patou into his organizer, why she couldn't go out and get someone to be getting it from now. He was rather sorry for his gibe about her past lovers. If she only would remarry, then everyone could breathe a sigh of relief. Marriages ended all the time. New ones began. It was the way of the world. She'd looked so forlorn - first time ever - the night Otto got drunk that he had been very tempted. Only for a moment, of course. But if she was hooked up with someone else, it would make life so much easier all round.
The phrase 'gagging for it' suddenly re-entered his mind. Along with a picture of his ex-wife in a pose to fit the tag. He closed the organizer with a snap. Bloody woman. He was very fond of her, of course he was, mother of his children, companion for twenty-odd years. But if she thought she could break him, he'd be damned. For some reason he suddenly found himself calling on Jesus. O Jesus, he said to himself, O Jesus - if you make this one work I vow I will never be tempted to stray again. Not even for a one-nighter. Which is all it was going to be with Binnie. At first. He was still quite puzzled how he got from that to here. But he had, and he would not, he would never, ever again.
He remembered how, when he was still married to Angela, his colleagues came in to work saying that Her Indoors had had a go last night about their never contributing anything to the running of the home. And how he stayed silent because his own amazing, extraordinary, talented, clever, unbreakable, inviolable, unshakeable, capable star of a wife - whom he loved and adored and who weighed the same then as on the day he married her - she never said a critical word about it.
Just smiled. And handed him a glass of his favourite wine. And asked him intelligent questions about the day. And turned willingly, always willingly, towards him in bed each night if he required it. He longed to agree with his colleagues - to say that he too knew how a wife could undervalue a husband - to say that he needed a drink before going home sometimes and who didn't? - to be welcomed into the club of the hard-done-by and misunderstood. But he waited in vain. Much as he waited in vain for her to need him in any important sense. The one time he felt he was valuable was when she gave birth. Then she held on to him and really needed his strength. Twice in a marriage is not enough. And anyway, he'd been late for the first one. Apart from that, she made him feel like a king. It was wearying. It was relentless. It was false. And it was very tedious to live up to.
Fleetingly, he began visiting an alarming woman called the Virago, who tied him up for fifty pounds and told him he was bad. Something like 35 per cent of British males liked some form of bondage, he'd read, and he could almost understand why. Abrogation of all responsibility. The chance to be weak. He loved it when she snarled at him and spat out the words, 'Can't you do anything right?' But after a few visits he just lay there in that small back room in Bayswater and felt like a prat. 'You don't get it, do you?' said the Virago, untying him regretfully.
'No,' he said.
There was, he realized now, somewhere in between the two. And he had found it in his adorable Binnie when she landed so prettily and helplessly at his feet. Why, she'd had to import a special chair all the way from Canada for her practice, because the others did not take the patient down low enough. Little Thing.
Well, while his Little Thing was in her bathroom and Claire and Andrew were out, the baby asleep and the afternoon sun still warming the patio, he would have a beer. He went to the fridge, but where he had put half a dozen bottles of his favourite Czechoslovakia!! there were now none. Ah well, he'd have a warm one. He went to the store cupboard beneath the stairs. Two empty six-packs lay crumpled in the darkness. He felt something rising in him that he had never had cause to feel before. A rising bubble of pure rage directed towards his son. And he didn't mean Tristan.
Just then the puzzled voice of Binnie called down the stairs. 'You'd better get me some more Eau de Joy bath oil too, and some Calvin. Lotion and foam. They both seem to have vanished ...'
He began to run up the stairs. If he could p
ersuade her to take a little lie-down with him.
Her voice trailed off as the napping Tristan woke, too early, too early, from his post-lunchtime nap. Thoughtlessly, Binnie was standing right outside the nursery door.
Ian felt a rising bubble of rage yet again. And this time it was not for either of his sons. Someone in Somerset came to mind.
14
September/October
Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on...