by Sue Townsend
I had to admit that it wasn’t.
Thursday December 12th
An email from William asking me to go to Nigeria for Christmas. As if! As I write, I am completely penniless, there is no petrol in the car and my fridge freezer contains two croissants and a wizened lemon.
Direct debits have snatched my wages from my account.
Friday December 13th
My credit card bill arrived. I was gobsmacked to see how much Barclays were charging me per month for the money I had borrowed for my deposit on Rat Wharf.
My solicitor, Dave Barwell, has sent me a Christmas card of a robin wearing a Santa Claus hat. Inside was a bill for £569.48 for ‘professional services’.
I ate the croissants and squeezed the lemon juice into a mug of hot water. I felt like a monk in a monastic order.
I was glad when lunchtime came and Mr Carlton-Hayes offered me one of his cheese sandwiches.
Saturday December 14th
Barclaycard are a truly magnificent organization. I received a letter from them today which said, ‘As a valued Barclaycard customer we are delighted to advise you that your credit limit has been increased to £12,000. Your new credit limit is available to use straight away and will show on your statement.’
Perhaps there is a God. Barclaycard have given me £2,000 to spend immediately.
Sunday December 15th
My fridge freezer is packed with food. The car’s petrol tank is full. However, so are all the car parks within two miles of the city centre, so I walked along the towpath to Water Meadow Park, the out-of-town shopping centre. I kept a wary eye out for the swans. A cruel east wind was blowing around the squat buildings.
Next, Marks & Spencer, WH Smith and DFS looked as though they had been dropped on to the former water meadows from outer space, and the shoppers streaming into their front entrances looked to me to be similarly alien.
Cars were queuing to get into the car parks and also to get out of the car parks. The main approach roads were clogged with shoppers. A police motorcyclist was trying to unjam the traffic. A police helicopter hovered overhead and car horns were blaring. It sounded more like Rome than the East Midlands. When I passed a makeshift garden hut/Santa’s grotto that had been erected in the north car park and saw a queue of shivering children waiting their turn to see the great man, I had a moment of utter desolation and I turned around and walked home.
*
Marigold rang me eleven times tonight. I didn’t ring her back. She makes me unhappy.
Monday December 16th
Two teenage girls wearing miniskirts, crop tops and thin cotton jackets came into the shop this morning and made immediately for the fire. The sight of them filled me with irritation. If they were so cold, why didn’t they wear more clothes?
Since they showed no interest in the books, I tried out a bit of sales patter. I asked them if they had done their Christmas shopping yet. They said they hadn’t.
I told them that books make very good Christmas presents, and one of them said, ‘Yeah, my mum sometimes reads a book when there’s nowt on the telly.’
I asked her what her mother’s interests were.
She said, ‘I don’t think my mum is interested in owt really.’
After a few more probing questions, I ascertained that the girl’s mother was called Pat, that she was forty-three, that she worked part-time in a light-bulb factory, that she was the mother of three children, that she drank cocktails when she went out on Saturday nights with her husband, that she was an Elvis fan and grew her own tomatoes.
After a few minutes I brought the girl a selection of suitable books: One Hundred Cocktails to Make at Home, Elvis – a Life in Pictures and Vegetables on Your Window Sill. None of them was more than £3.
She said she would take the cocktail book and asked if I could gift-wrap it. Young people today are so spoilt.
Before they left the shop, I asked the girls why they were wearing skimpy clothes on such a cold day.
They giggled, and after the shop door was closed I heard one girl say to the other, ‘What an old perv!’
I wanted to run after them and explain that I wasn’t a dirty old man, but, feeling that this would have made matters worse, I stayed inside the shop.
Tuesday December 17th
Marigold came into the shop at lunchtime and said that she was unable to eat or sleep. She said, ‘If I had known that falling in love with you was going to make me so miserable, I would have frozen my heart against you.’
She asked Mr Carlton-Hayes if he would display a poster advertising the mummers’ various performances.
He was too kind to refuse, though the poster was badly designed. The group of mummers looked more like characters from The Night of the Living Dead.
She asked if I would be there when the mummers make their debut outside the Ball and Wicket at Thrussington Parva on Thursday night. I couldn’t think of a suitable excuse, so I said yes.
After she’d gone, Mr Carlton-Hayes said, ‘Forgive me if I’m speaking out of turn, Adrian, but that young lady seems to have you wrapped around her little finger.’
Diary, I should have fallen on his neck and confessed that I needed to talk to him about my Marigold dilemma, but pride would not allow me to be open and honest with him. Because the truth is, diary, I never want to see Marigold or her horrible family again, though I exclude Daisy from the above statement. I would like to see a lot more of Daisy. In fact I would like to see the whole of Daisy, every inch of her, inside and out.
Wednesday December 18th
Dreamed that Ken Blunt and Marigold had gone into Habitat with my Visa card and bought a king-size bed.
Thursday December 19th
Full Moon
Mr Carlton-Hayes was very kind to me today. He said, ‘Adrian, my dear, you don’t have to go to this mummery-fummery thing tonight, you know. Simply tell the young lady that you do not care for her and wish to be free of any obligations.’
I wish I had taken his advice. I drove to the Ball and Wicket at Thrussington Parva and had half a lager shandy in the bar.
The landlord, a surly fat man, told me that the mummers were in an upstairs room getting changed into their masks and costumes.
A group of Morris men and Morris women in civilian clothes came into the bar. They looked almost normal, though there was rather a lot of facial hair. They were joined by a group of folk musicians carrying strange-looking instruments that later turned out to be medieval. Among them was Poppy. Her hair was tied at the back with a holly-printed ribbon, but it still cascaded over her bum.
The surly landlord laboured behind the bar, pulling pints of real ale. He went to the bottom of the stairs and shouted, ‘Noreen, Noreen, I’m down ’ere on my own!’
I bought Poppy a drink and we sat in the corner. I asked her why she was not taking part.
She said, ‘Medievalism is not my thing. The clothes were terrible. I prefer the Romans.’
I said, ‘But the Romans were invaders.’ She pulled a hank of hair over her shoulder and stroked it as though it were an animal, and said, ‘The Romans were a civilizing force. They had hot baths and amazing hair products.’
I asked her how often Daisy came to Beeby on the Wold.
She tossed her hair back and said, ‘Often enough to cause a row.’
At 8 o’clock a bearded man wearing a smock and gaiters came into the bar and announced in a stentorian voice, ‘My lords, my ladies, gentle folk of the parish and those that toil by thy hands, please be of knowledge that the mummers be about to enact the story of how Jesus be born.’
It was drizzling outside and I had not brought an umbrella. My mother had borrowed it and failed to bring it back.
The street lights were on and several of the mummers held old-fashioned lanterns aloft, but it was still hard to see what was going on, even though the moon hung above Thrussington Parva like a globular ceiling light.
It was a peripatetic performance. We trooped around the village. Marigold/pagan M
ary gave birth to Jesus outside the former post office. I think it was a mistake for her to have worn her glasses over the top of her mask; it made her look like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly.
The three kings presented their gifts outside Mrs Briggs’s Internet tea room. The madrigals were sung in that peculiar sort of English that only singers use. It was impossible to understand the words.
Afterwards in the pub I told Marigold that she was ‘very brave’. She took this as a compliment.
Friday December 20th
Woke up and had a panic attack about the arrangements for the writers’ group Christmas dinner. I texted:
Pandora, cancel Brown, VIP dinner more important. U O me a favr. Adrian. X.
Saturday December 21st
We were busy all day in the shop. There was a run on Marilyn Monroe memorabilia and snooker autobiographies. We almost sold out of Dickens, and all six copies of Barry Kent’s second anthology, Making Love with Wendy Cope, were bought by a man with a baby strapped to his chest.
We didn’t close until 7.30.
Mr Carlton-Hayes had brought in a bottle of sherry. For some reason, sherry always reminds me of old women’s corsets. But it was very pleasant winding down, sitting by the fire.
Mr Carlton-Hayes told me that he is most appreciative of my help and hoped that I was happy working for him. He said that I sometimes looked distrait.
Emboldened by the sherry, I told him that a combination of worries – money, Marigold and the swans – kept me awake at night. He nodded sympathetically but didn’t offer any solutions, such as increasing my wages.
As I walked down the High Street towards the towpath, I passed crowds of marauding, drunken teenagers of both sexes. A youth in a vest was being sick in the doorway of Dixons.
The moon lit my way home along the towpath. The swans came to meet me halfway, but didn’t get out of the water. Gielgud wasn’t there. I hope he is dead.
My apartment was unbearably hot when I got home from work. The thermostat which controls my underfloor heating seems to have a life of its own. I opened the sliding doors and sat on the balcony to cool down.
With a sinking heart I saw Gielgud swim across the canal. I told him to push off, but he stayed there, motionless, trying to stare me out. I stared back, determined not to drop my eyes first. Eventually his wife came to join him and two pairs of eyes glittered in the darkness, but it was the cold that drove me back inside.
I could not get rid of the image of Gielgud and his wife, floating side by side. I wondered how long they had been together, and why they had been attracted to each other in the first place. I envied them their relationship.
Suddenly adrenalin surged through my body and propelled me out of the door and into my car. I drove to Beeby on the Wold and waited outside the Flowerses’ empty house. It was 11 o’clock before they arrived home.
Marigold’s parents went inside the house. A man with a big nose followed them. Marigold came round and opened my car door and sat next to me. I asked if the man with the big nose was Roger Middleton.
She said, ‘Yes. They’re starting the open marriage thing tonight.’
I said that I had something to tell her.
She said despairingly, ‘Oh, no, not again! Why does this always happen to me? Why do men satisfy their lust and then throw me aside like a dirty tea towel?’
I was longing to go home, but I knew I was in for at least half an hour of tears and self-denigration from Marigold.
First of all I told her I was not worthy of her, was not ready to commit, blah, blah, blah, etc., etc., etc. Then I told her about Plato’s allegory – that the first humans had four legs, four arms and two heads and were perfectly happy cartwheeling around the earth, but the gods looked down on them and became jealous and cut each human in half. The humans now had two arms, two legs and one head each. They seemed happy enough on the surface, and they were able to walk and to play, but inside they were in turmoil, and were forever looking for their other half, so that they could feel complete again.
I said, ‘Marigold, you will find your other half one day. He is out there now, looking for you.’
She peered through the windscreen as if expecting to see her other half standing by the laurel hedge.
There followed ten minutes of loud crying, five minutes of silent weeping and sniffing, and a couple of minutes of broken-voiced pathos.
I was relieved when she said, ‘I’m going to bed. I just want this dreadful day to be over.’
I escorted her to the front door. She let herself in and we stood for a moment in the hall, then I gave her a friendly pat on the shoulder and said, ‘Well, goodbye then.’
I drove home with my Abba tapes playing at full volume. I think I must have broken the speed limit several times. It felt as though the car had wings.
Sunday December 22nd
Michael Flowers rang me at 8.30 this morning to tell me that Marigold had been admitted to the Royal Hospital in the early hours with suspected appendicitis. He said that she had been calling for me. He said, ‘I phoned that mobile contraption you carry with you, but the bloody thing kept repeating, “It has not been possible to connect your call. Please try again later.” She’s in a great deal of physical and psychic pain, Adrian. Please go to her. She needs you.’
I went to the balcony and looked out. I could see the lights of the monolithic Royal Hospital in the distance. Gielgud was standing by the driver’s door, barring the way to my car. Was he trying to tell me not to go to the hospital? Since meeting the Flowers family I see signs and portents everywhere.
On the way to the hospital I phoned Pandora. She answered at once. I begged her to come to Leicester tomorrow. She laughed.
I asked her if she had Keith Vaz’s number. She said she had but refused to give it to me. I asked if she knew any celebrities who would help me out at the last minute.
She said, ‘On December 23rd, with one day’s notice, for no fee and no expenses, are you mad?’ Then she dropped her voice and said, ‘Seriously, Aidy, are you mad? The last time I saw you you seemed a bit lonely and sad. And that bloody loft, it’s so white and cold.’
I told her that Marigold was in hospital and she said, ‘It will turn out to be nothing. She’s a bloody diva.’
I pointed out that Pandora had not even met Marigold.
But she said, ‘Wayne Wong likens her to Chairman Mao’s wife, small but lethal.’
It took for ever to find Marigold. She had been moved from Accident and Emergency to an overnight observation ward. I eventually found her in Surgical 2, in a bay with five other women. The nurse on the desk said, when I enquired about Marigold and gave my name, ‘Oh, you’re the fiancé.’
I should have contradicted her and asserted my single status, but she had already turned away and was almost running down the ward.
Marigold was watching the small TV set next to her bed. But when she saw me approaching she closed her eyes and turned her head away and appeared to fall into a deep sleep. I had no wish to ‘wake’ her, so I sat by her bed and watched the news.
Mr Blair was speaking about the danger to the world if tyrants like Saddam Hussein were not challenged. How anybody could doubt Mr Blair’s word is a mystery to me. The man radiates honesty and sincerity.
Eventually Marigold ‘woke up’ and appeared to be surprised to see me sitting there. She held her little hand out and I took it and squeezed it. I had bought her Hello! and a bunch of seedless black grapes from the hospital shop.
She pointed to the notice above her bed which said ‘Nil by mouth’ and told me that until the doctors had finished their investigations she was not allowed to eat or drink in case she had to have an operation to remove her appendix.
And she rejected Hello!, saying that she pitied rich, famous people and couldn’t care less about their clothes and houses.
I tried desperately to find a topic of conversation but failed, and we sat in an awkward silence and watched Scooby-Doo! on television.
At the end, af
ter the janitor had ripped his face mask off and exposed himself as the evil scientist who threatened to blow up the world, Marigold started to cry and said, ‘I’ll be in hospital for Christmas, and I so wanted us to spend our first Christmas together, Adrian.’
She had completely blanked our conversation of the night before.
An exhausted-looking African doctor came to examine her abdomen.
I tried to leave, but the doctor said, ‘No, stay where you are. You’re Miss Flowers’s fiancé, are you not?’
Marigold said yes and I could hardly contradict her in the current circumstances.
I watched as the doctor palpated her lower torso. Marigold reacted as though the doctor’s fingers were burning rods searing into her flesh.
After she had rebuttoned her pyjama jacket, the doctor said, ‘Your pain is a mystery to me. There is no swelling, you have no temperature, your blood pressure is better than mine. I do not think you have appendicitis. Have you suffered an emotional disturbance recently?’
Marigold said, ‘I have been in agony all night.’
The doctor looked at me and said, ‘I presume you are having normal sexual relations with your fiancée?’
I took offence at this and said, ‘Are you asking me if I am a sexual deviant?’
He said, ‘No, you have misunderstood me.’ And he turned to Marigold and said, ‘Is there pain on intercourse?’
She replied, ‘No physical pain.’
I sat with her for another hour, until her mother and father turned up.
*
Netta gave Marigold half a dozen cards. One was an invitation to Tania Braithwaite’s New Year’s Eve fancy dress party.