Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman

by Elizabeth Buchan

  Minty

  I read and reread that letter, with its so-called honesty, its specious explanation and breathtaking assumptions, which were a mask for Minty’s hungers. Rotten fruit and rotten meat: she disgusted me and I rejoiced in my disgust.

  I could not put off any longer telling Ianthe and I rang her up, got into the car and drove over to Kingston.

  ‘Cheap and cheerful, Rose, just what we need,’ had been Ianthe’s masterly verdict, delivered with typical Mrs Miniver good cheer, on Pankhurst Parade. Number fourteen was sited in one of several identical roads in the housing estate outside the town. Why Kingston? The reasons for Ianthe’s uprooting both of us from Yelland to down south were too complicated for either of us to attempt to disentangle at the time. Cheap it had been, cheerful, no.

  Today, dressed in a Viyella shirt and wool skirt, she was sitting in her chair with her hands folded. This was Ianthe’s waiting pose. You see it in paintings: a female form – it is more often than not female – composed on a chair, or a bench, or a sofa, waiting for orders, or for life to begin or be over.

  For such a busy woman, Ianthe had an extraordinary gift for it – waiting for me, waiting for a meal to cook, waiting for God in church in a hat and a tweed coat, waiting for events to right themselves, providing she observed the rules. Patience is as patience does, she said.

  Unusually, she was pale and unmade-up, hair not properly seen to. ‘Tell me what’s wrong, Rose.’

  I bent over to kiss her, sat down and took her hands in mine. ‘I’m in trouble.’

  ‘I thought as much.’ Ianthe’s fingers dug into my hands. ‘Not the children?’

  ‘No.’ I had to force myself to go on. ‘It’s Nathan. He’s decided to leave me for another woman. Actually for Minty, my assistant.’ I swallowed. ‘And I’ve lost my job… also to Minty.’

  Ianthe shook her head. ‘I think you’ll have to tell me again.’

  ‘Nathan w-wants his freedom. He thinks that Minty will give it to him.’

  She struggled to absorb the news, and tried to equate it with the image of the son-in-law she cherished.

  It was a family joke that Nathan and Ianthe defied every mother-in-law cliche, for they loved each other. On holiday Nathan sent her extra-sized postcards, brought home presents of chunky jewellery and honey in china pots with overweight bees embossed on them. He fussed over her pension, arranged her tax and insisted on paying for medical insurance, of which she disapproved. ‘I don’t want to be a nuisance, and I don’t like private doctors,’ she told me. ‘I don’t like their hands. Too manicured.’

  She dabbed at the wisps of hair at her neck. ‘You were always so busy, Rose. Never any time. Always on the run.’

  I concede that we can only see events from our own point of view, but her reaction stung. ‘Is that all you can say?’

  ‘This is terrible.’ Ianthe leant back in the chair. She looked hurt and, suddenly, worn out by expectations that had turned out to be increasingly cruel in their disappointments. I got up and stood by the window. ‘That awful girl.’

  That did not surprise me. On the one occasion Minty and Ianthe had met at a Sunday lunch, Minty had been unable to deal with Ianthe. ‘I don’t do older people,’ I overheard her explaining to a friend on the office phone. ‘I don’t get them.’ And Ianthe had displayed a surprising blind spot. ‘People like her make such a point of being youthful, which is very selfish. It makes the rest of us feel so redundant.’

  ‘Rose, you have talked to Nathan, tried to sort it out?’

  ‘Nathan did not give me much choice.’

  Her tone sharpened. ‘Marriages don’t end just like that. You’ll see. Men are such funny creatures. They need a lot of looking after.’

  ‘That’s bad luck on Nathan, then, Mum. Minty’s only interested in number one.’

  ‘Perhaps Nathan needs reminding of how much he means to you. He’s had a little rush of blood to the head and, at the moment, he can’t see straight.’

  ‘Hardly to the head, Mum.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  I did. Ianthe had been taught her views by her mother, who had been taught by her mother before her, women who had scrubbed their doorsteps, made their own bread, had their babies at home. She had bowed her head and made it her life’s work to obey their strictures.

  The doorbell rang and I went to answer it. With surprising speed, Ianthe got to her feet and nipped into the downstairs cloakroom where she kept her emergency supplies of lipstick and powder, emerging half a minute later with smoothed hair and orange-pink lips.

  Charlie Potter was delivering the bridge timetable. I observed my mother flirt gently and declare that, yes, she would be on time and she was planning to make a plate of his favourite egg sandwiches.

  While they talked, I went upstairs to my old room, which remained unchanged but had a trick of growing smaller each time I went into it. At this rate, it would not be long before the white candlewick bedspread and the lamp with the pink shade dwindled to the size of doll’s-house furniture.

  Downstairs Charlie Potter gave a belly laugh and my mother accompanied it with a discreet chuckle. It was a nice sound, Ianthe’s innocent flirting.

  My childhood seemed very far away and I needed to grab something of it, anything. I opened the cupboard in which Ianthe stored my childish, but not discarded, objects. Dust filmed the boxes and there was a dry, musty scent of decayed lavender. Propped up at the back was a collage of newspaper cuttings and pictures from magazines and portraits of favoured authors pasted on to hardboard. It had occupied me for years and colonized the room. Ianthe hated it, but it had been my way of marking who I was and the interminably slow passage of growing up. I begged, salvaged, hoarded and squirrelled away cuttings, photographs, postcards, and from these images I built kingdoms. One of the earliest was a picture of an ordinary family having a picnic by the sea: Mum, Dad and two little girls.

  I had studied that picture for clues as to what I was missing: smiles, a gingham tablecloth, potted-meat sandwiches, a father with his arm around his eldest, a mother busy with the picnic. How I had wanted to be that family. How I had wanted my father back, and to see my mother pat her hair into place when she heard his step in the evening. How I wanted him sitting at the table.

  A family.

  When I became a teenager the collage changed. My chosen images breathed of escape. Here was the picture of the ox-bow lake, and an aerial view of a Patagonian wilderness, pink, blue and grey-green, stolen from the National Geographic magazine. The glue had made its corners curl like apple peel. Here were the deserts, jungles and strange locations to which I ascribed magical powers to transform and enchant. Only step into them, and the girl in a cheap blue school uniform would become powerful and knowing. The more different and alien from Kingston they appeared, the stronger their fascination and the more I dreamt over them.

  ‘I’ll see you tonight, Charlie,’ called Ianthe downstairs.

  I touched the postcards of Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, part of a picture sequence of writers, which formed the other side of the collage. The cards were brittle and darkened from age and handling, and drawing-pins had punctured the corners, but the pinched, intelligent faces of the women remained unchanged. They knew the secrets of men and women, and how they behaved, and I imagined, too, that I was going to help myself to their knowledge and that pinched intelligence.

  After I came back from Brazil, I took Nathan to meet Ianthe for the first time and, wonderfully, they fell for each other on the spot. In the kitchen Ianthe served up beef stew and carrots with mashed potato. She arranged a careful spoonful of the latter on Nathan’s plate, and said with a shy, awkward tilt of her head, ‘You’ll think I’m silly because I’ve got no brains. I’m not like that lot up on Rose’s collage.’

  Nathan leant over the table. ‘I don’t go for bonnets either. Never could get the hang of them.’

  Ianthe had smiled, and dished out a plate of stew for me.

  Now, sneezing, I we
nt downstairs.

  ‘Such a nice man…’ Ianthe watched Charlie Potter’s retreating back. ‘Such a terrible wife.’

  We sat and drank tea from a tray laid with a starched cloth, china and a plate of digestive biscuits arranged in a fan. Ianthe snapped off a tiny piece of one and ate it. ‘Do you think you helped Nathan enough? Do you think that he wanted more help from you?’

  This was a reasonable question from the woman who yielded up all claims to a teaching career when she married and my father gained, in one clean economical pincer movement, an unpaid secretary, counsellor and cleaner to help run his practice.

  ‘We helped each other.’ I was careful to make the point. ‘Both of us did. But I’ll have to get another job. As soon as I’ve sorted my severance package.’

  ‘Oh, work.’ Ianthe raised her shoulders in a dismissive gesture.

  ‘Mum, I have to earn my living. It won’t be easy – I can’t not work.’

  Ianthe regarded her tea thoughtfully. ‘That’s what I mean,’ she said finally, the ace barrister wrapping up her case.

  To keep me, Ianthe had been employed for fifteen years in a travel agent’s in Kingston, issuing tickets and timetables. (And I’ll have none of your snobbishness about that,’ she said, more than once. ‘It does me fine.’) She looked at me sadly. ‘I worked because I had to take on your father’s role. You didn’t have to.’

  My ringless hand, which held the cup, felt odd, weightless, unfamiliar.

  Ianthe warmed to the attack and bore down on me, as she always had. ‘Nathan loves you. I know he does. You married each other and that has not changed. There are the children to consider. They suffer, too, you know, even in their twenties. Look at me, Rose. A woman must think about others.’ With an angry gesture, she refilled her cup and added the milk, a widow who bore the scourge of her conviction, a sense of duty and her decades of waiting with an unsettling grace. ‘Go home, ring Nathan and make him come to his senses.’

  *

  As always, I ignored Ianthe’s command but fretted about doing so. She had that effect. Instead I rang Mazarine in Paris.

  ‘Oh, the stranger,’ she said, coldly. ‘I’ve been waiting for some sign of life. Vee and I were just saying the other day how little we hear from you.’

  ‘I wanted to ring you, but I’ve been busy’

  ‘Too busy for your oldest friend?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, you need to look at your life.’

  A ball bounced back across the court. Fifteen years ago I had told Mazarine something similar when she was in danger of losing Xavier, the man she eventually married. ‘Mazarine, listen, Nathan has left me.’

  There was a silence. ‘I didn’t mean that much of a change.’

  ‘Will you listen?’

  ‘You know I will.’

  I was so tired that I faltered over my French – we always talked in French – and Mazarine corrected it as patiently as was possible for someone as rigorous as she. She was as quick to take a point of view. ‘You mustn’t be too hysterical, Rose. This is only an interlude. Nathan will come back.’

  ‘Would I want him back?’

  ‘Whatever happens, you will adapt.’

  ‘What do I do?’

  ‘Do? You look for a job and wait for Nathan to find out that he has made a fool of himself. Rose, you must smooth this over. Be practical and wise, it’s our role in a crazy world. An affair is not such a huge thing, you know. Of course you know, and Nathan is bound to you. He just doesn’t see it that way at the moment. What have you eaten today?’

  ‘A biscuit. I think.’

  ‘Don’t be so conventional. It’s exactly what every abandoned woman does. Be different and eat a proper meal.’

  Mazarine could not see the wry smile on my lips. This was the woman who, incoherent with shock, called me after Xavier, who had been eating foie gras, had dropped dead of a heart-attack in a restaurant. (‘So serve him right,’ said Poppy. ‘Foie gras.’) I had caught the next train to Paris and fed her soup, coaxing spoonful after spoonful into her unwilling mouth.

  ‘I’ll try’

  ‘You will do more than try, and you will come and see me. By the way, I thought Vee was looking a bit dowdy last time I saw her.’

  ‘Vee is happy and she’s lost her sense of style. It happens.’

  ‘In that case, there must be an awful lot of happy English women.’

  I laughed until I was forced by lack of breath to stop, and I thought how odd it was to be laughing when my life was in ruins.

  Chapter Eleven

  A silence between Nathan and me stretched for well over a month – and the frost of anger, incomprehension and unforgiveness crept into the crack and forced it wider. During that time, I was advised by my solicitor to accept my severance package, and the features editor of Vee’s paper rang me to ask if, in the context of the suicide of the minister’s wife, I might like to contribute a short, touchy-feely piece on being abandoned?

  This polite request contained various pieces of trickery, not least the chance to expose the marital mishaps of an executive on a rival paper. When I said no, but I was happy to research and write a piece on the difficulties of being a political wife, the features editor’s interest disappeared. ‘Yes…’ He sounded vague. ‘We have our regular journalists to do that sort of thing.’

  Then, one evening, Nathan turned up on the doorstep carrying a brand-new suitcase. With a stranger’s formality, he asked, ‘Can I come in?’

  The mixture of hope and despair in my breast was unbearable. ‘Of course.’

  He stepped into the hall and put down the case. It was clear that it was empty. ‘I need my things, so I thought I’d pack them up.’

  My hopes took a realistic turn, and I said coldly, ‘Do as you wish.’

  ‘Fine.’

  He went up the stairs to our bedroom and I went into the kitchen, where I could hear him moving around. Drawers were opened and shut, shoes hit the floor, a chair scraped. After a while I could not bear to hear those sounds. I scooped up Parsley, bore her into the sitting room, sat down in the blue chair and held her tight.

  I tried to see events through Nathan’s eyes. I really tried to see what had changed, what had recast his philosophy – apart from the obvious excitement of sex.

  On our twentieth wedding anniversary he took me out to La Sensa. (‘My God,’ exclaimed Vee. ‘He must have been taken out a second mortgage.’) He fussed over the choice of champagne, which was so dry that my mouth tingled. He picked up his glass. ‘I want to thank you, my darling Rose.’

  It seemed to me that the boot was on the other foot. ‘I should be thanking you. You came to the rescue.’

  It was not the right thing to say – but it was not so very heinous a slip.

  Immediately Nathan frowned, and I rushed on, ‘You came to the rescue and taught me about real, proper love.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, with the soft, private expression that belonged to me and the children. ‘I see what you mean.’

  My relief that we had got over the misunderstandings that litter any marriage and had reached this point was overwhelming. ‘I love you, Nathan. You know that.’

  He reached over, took my hand and kissed it, the seal on our bargain.

  Eventually, there was the slither and clump of a suitcase being manhandled down the stairs and Nathan reappeared. ‘Rose, if you let me know when you won’t be here, I’ll arrange for the rest of the stuff I need to be collected.’

  Parsley used me as a springboard into the garden. I rubbed at the pinprick of blood on my thigh left by her claws. ‘I take it you’re being let into Minty’s personal space.’

  ‘As it happens, yes.’

  I took the opportunity to study my husband. The gleam that freshened his skin and straightened his shoulders was different. I closed my eyes and asked the question that I needed to ask more than once. ‘Have I become so undesirable, Nathan?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  I opened my eye
s. ‘You do.’

  ‘No.’ His were kindly, and I was terrified that he was lying. ‘You are still… very lovely’ He gave a strained smile. ‘Your hair is still the same too. Still honey chestnut.’

  ‘Then why?’

  He shoved his hands into his pockets. ‘I’m as astonished as you are. I never imagined that I would leave you.’

  ‘Then why, Nathan? Your reasons are usually so clear and thought-out.’

  ‘I know.’

  I looked down at my hands, at the whorl of the fingerprint, at the heart-line, the life-line. Perhaps I had never known Nathan properly. Perhaps he had kept hidden from me a part secret to him. Probably. If I was truthful, there were the deep, dark spaces in myself of which he knew nothing. ‘Please think again.’ Nathan did not answer and I tried once more. ‘Was it when I started working?’

  Those times when he came home and found me still in my office clothes, thin, exhausted, dervish-like, giving supper to one child, supervising the homework of another. Then he was pulled away from contemplation of his own day and forced to consider mine. Had he been panicked by this dull, dun, harassed creature? More than once he must have wondered if all women, all mothers, lose their sexual luminosity and turn into wild, anguished figures, and why the transformation should be so unfair to both parties.

  On one of the worst days, when I was weeping from the battery and assault made on me by my children and by the work that Nathan had been against me doing anyway, he took me in his arms and stroked my hair. ‘Shush,’ he said. ‘We’re in this together.’

  Now I said, ‘Ianthe thinks I didn’t help you enough. Is she right?’

  Nathan shrugged. ‘God knows, Rose. There were times, yes, when I could have done with you more on side but I am sure it was the same with you.’

  We were back on skates, veering round the rink, neither of us reaching the heart of the matter. Automatically, I rubbed my shoulder, which plagued me with stiffness, an on-going condition from too much typing.

  ‘Is it hurting?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Badly?’