by Georgie Hall
It’s become much harder for Paddy to humour my parents now that his have both died. Dad drinks claret like water, has had both hips replaced, a triple bypass and several recent car prangs of his own making, yet on into his eightieth year he endures with his loud laugh and lopsided walk. Mum’s now in recovery but still sneaks the odd cigarette and she looks amazing.
*
We lost Eddie first, the gentle engineer, canal fanatic and amateur radio hound. A heart attack at sixty-four. By cruel coincidence, it was the same week my great-aunt died aged ninety-nine; Paddy never openly compared the two, but he must have, especially when Dad pointed out how unfair it was she didn’t make a hundred. Eddie had been opening a lock on his beloved Shropshire Union Canal when it struck. A year later, Ruth was diagnosed with rapid onset dementia. That was a tough one. Paddy’s sister did most of the day-to-day caring, then Ruth was in a nursing home for the last few years, but oh the guilt. She was a month off seventy when we lost her.
Paddy never makes a fuss. His grief imploded, quietly, and our love moved up a level.
*
‘For chrissake, Eliza!’ He’s exasperated.
Paddy changed a lot after Ruth’s death, his mortality closing in on him. On both of us. He needs me to be strong.
I remember to examine my breasts, then rinse off the conditioning treatment.
3
Family Time
It’s a running family joke that no matter how organised I think I am, I always leave something behind.
‘Aren’t you going to dry your hair, Mum?’ Summer demands when we troop out to the car. Her eyebrows are works of art, their current angle midway between horror and pity.
‘You said letting it dry naturally was good for it.’
‘Yeah, like when you’re not going out?’ She catches Paddy’s eye and I note the customary father and daughter alliance.
‘The thing is, Mum, it looks sort of limp?’ Summer’s on a roll.
‘I have no time to dry it.’ I miss Joe, the only one of my children who tells me I look great no matter how stressed out I am, even at Christmas when I’m wearing a novelty jumper, light-up earrings and a thin film of sweat.
I glance at Edward for backup, for the ‘you are beautiful Mum’ that so lifted my spirits earlier. But he’s already sitting in the car, noise-cancelling headphones on, playing The Legend of Zelda.
‘Five more minutes isn’t going to make much difference, Elz,’ says Paddy. In marital shorthand, he is saying: It’s Grandpa’s eightieth; you should make more effort. You’ll feel better about yourself.
‘You want me to dry my hair?’ In marital shorthand, I’m saying fuck off. The luscious brown mane of the woman he married has thinned horribly lately, but I’m trying my best, hide it from him.
He looks away.
Summer’s eyebrows re-angle themselves kindly. ‘And put on some barely there make-up maybe? A dab of tint and a swish of highlighter is such a hot look at your age.’
I don’t have the heart to tell her that, at my age, looking hot is something I do without warning.
For a moment I stand firm. But I love them too much to embarrass them with my face off. I can’t bear to think that one day my beautiful girl will also look in the mirror and say, ‘I bloody give up!’
While Summer’s obsession with her looks masks teenage insecurity, my converse vanity is no less intense. This bare poker face is denying there’s regret etched in its lines. Take me as I am, it demands. I dare you to see me for the fifty-year-old woman I am. Female beauty recedes like a slow tide nobody notices until it’s too far out to spot. What’s the point of dressing up invisibility? I still see the same face in the mirror I always have, yet when I paint it, I’m doing so from memory.
*
I loved my first foray into make-up, which was no less gilding a lily than Summer’s thick brows and tribal contouring. It was the early 1980s, and teenage girls in my small town were trending Princess Di hair, blue ‘Smurf shit’ eyeliner, frosted lipstick and orange foundation that stopped at the chin-line. Eliza ‘Finchers’ Finch was straight in there: pie-crust collar, winkle pickers, Sun-In, plastic pearls and a crush on Nik Kershaw.
By the time we all crammed into James Dutton’s granny’s sitting room in 1985 to drink cider and watch Live Aid while she was away on a Corsican package holiday, I looked like the lovechild of Madonna and Boy George. Like the rest of my pack, I wore oversized crucifixes, Doc Martens and my father’s tux. I’d crimped, backcombed, hennaed and crazy coloured; I’d pierced, painted, pouted and primped. My Top of the Pops crush had been upgraded to Morrissey. I could snog, blow smoke-rings and apply liquid eyeliner perfectly.
Fast forward again, this time to the end of the decade, and I was in a smiley-faced Shoom bandana and Wayfarers, cycling shorts and cartoon waistcoat, waving my arms around shouting ‘aciiiiid’ in aircraft hangars, liquid eye-liner sharp as calligraphy.
Did the camouflage ever come off? Maybe I just accessorised it better through proceeding decades of womanhood until I found myself wearing the battle dress of middle age. That’s when we realise in shock that it doesn’t matter what you dress it up as if your sex appeal’s been lost in action.
*
‘Back in a minute!’ I rush inside, apply two handfuls of Extra Hold Volumising Mousse and upend my head beneath the hottest setting of the dryer. When I turn the right way up, head-rush clearing, there’s a fittingly Bananarama vibe to the fright wig clouding my face. A touch of root mascara and I’m Venus with laughter lines. Unlike many women in my profession, I’m not brave enough to trade my facial expressions for a lie of youth via Botox and fillers, nor can I afford to have an on-trend white smile. (My Agent-Who-Never-Calls has told me to stop smiling at castings because ‘those crow’s feet and fox’s teeth do you no favours, darling’.)
I bare them fiercely in the mirror, alone with a hot flush and a small fireball of anger, all too familiar company. I look around for Arty, then remember she’s dead and catch my reflection’s eye again. Don’t get upset, I tell it. You’re an old pro. You can still put on the Ritz.
And you want to look better than your sister.
Seizing the eighties spirit, I paint on my reddest lipstick, big up my eyes with black kohl and a slick of liquid liner, finally applying mascara, a high-risk sport without reading glasses. I clip on my fat pearl necklace, a gift from my parents for my eighteenth birthday (seven years too late for the Lady Di trend and not a great look with Acid House T-shirts and glow sticks, but I’ve always worn it defiantly and lovingly with everything).
‘Creep,’ I tell my reflection, this unfamiliar painted lady with mascara on her nose.
In the garage to reset the alarm, I edge my way round the boat trailer to Arty’s old bed, straightening its cushion and telling her to guard the house while we’re gone. Then I scarper before I can cry, chased out by the alarm beeps.
When I climb into the driver’s seat, the others are too absorbed watching something hilarious on Paddy’s phone to comment on my mini-makeover.
‘You forgot your coat,’ Paddy points out as we drive off. Then, after a full minute, he says, ‘You look lovely by the way.’ And I don’t care that it sounds like a line he’s forgotten until the script’s moved onto the next scene. He knows how much I need to hear it tonight and I’m grateful.
‘You look great too,’ I say automatically.
Then I notice that he’s wearing a suit and tie. Oh shit. That means he wants to have sex later.
*
Having driven to The Prettiest Cottage in Warwickshire with the driver’s window open because the air conditioning has packed up and I’m boiling, I’m regretting the mousse. My hair is now gonk-in-a-wind-tunnel sideways, solid as polyfoam.
My sister’s immaculate electric Jag is parked face out next to my parents’ Leaf and Miles’s plug-in sports car, six headlamps gazing glassily at our gas-guzzler. My parents and siblings can afford to be pompously eco while I destroy the earth. I wish Joe was aroun
d because I need him to explain that thing about electric cars using lithium batteries and lithium being a limited natural resource, its mining damaging the earth’s crust. I can never remember it when I try to repeat it. Sieve brain.
Behind me, Edward’s still fighting trolls on a windswept hilltop.
Paddy’s pretending to be relaxed despite bulging neck sinews and white knuckles.
My family are surging round the side of the house to greet us, animated by our lateness. They’re all in dark glasses, which is curiously sinister. They’ve been in the garden, Pimm’s highballs down to fruit.
Summer mutters, ‘Auntie Jules has definitely had work done. That face is so not moving.’
Beside me, Paddy is nobly trying not to stare at Julia’s tits, which so are moving beneath her wrap-around dress. My parents look old and frail as they smile and wave. Between them, dressed all in white with a mahogany tan, hippy beads and dyed hair, our brother looks like Julio Iglesias.
‘I won!’ Julia’s husband Reece is in the lead, breaking through the lavender border with the Jack Russell sex assassin, both small, bearded and overly aggressive. ‘I said they’d be half an hour late. Greetings Hollanders! Great hair, Liza!’
No sooner are we out of the car than he slaps Paddy on the back and says, ‘So how’s the carpentry business doing, Patrick?’
My husband’s low groan is only audible to me.
*
Let’s examine why Paddy finds my family so overwhelming:
It’s not the Finch height. We all inherited Dad’s longshanks, but it’s Reece who has the family exclusive on Short Man Syndrome. At over six feet, Paddy’s taller than me in our bare feet.
And it’s no longer the conspicuous wealth. His socialist principles and my guilty liberalism notwithstanding, Paddy’s learned to appreciate the Finch largesse: M&S food, generous Christmas presents to our children, not to mention the odd grand bunged at us when we’re short, inevitably keeping me awake with self-loathing while Paddy sleeps better than he has in weeks.
It’s our competitive streaks he can’t handle. The mental speed, one-upmanship, intelligence and cruelty required to hold a conversation in this family has always unsettled him. All that bonhomie masks deadly rivalry. We’re nasty. Spending an evening with us is like taking part in a gladiatorial death-match panel show hosted by Stephen Fry and Joanna Lumley.
My father is both ferociously clever and annoyingly interested in everything. He can argue on both sides and rarely forgets facts. He lost his original Yorkshire accent at Cambridge, but he still affects a fabulous flat, rolling moorland roar when in full cry. He demands snappy answers, strong opinions and wit.
Paddy’s shyness bores him. That Dad doesn’t see how considered, skilful and kind his son-in-law is maddens me.
Until recently, I’d have described my mother as a huge cultural snob. To earn her respect, you’d need to have read all the books on the literary prize shortlists and heard the writers speak, and secretly think Mary Beard is a bit blousy. But since the cancer all-clear, she’s developed a lust for life which has reinvented all that so fast we’re struggling to keep up. She attends poetry slams, has had a tattoo and is going to see Kylie at Glasto. I’m just so grateful she’s still with us, I’m happy whatever her passion, although the off-grid wanderlust came as a surprise.
Paddy remains cautious around her. Rightly so. Mum’s currently scouting for a rainforest trekking buddy, and we can all guess which member of the family would survive longest in the wild. My husband’s already regularly co-opted as her handyman, just as I’m on-call chauffeur and shopper, the practicality of village life increasingly challenging for the elderly. The post office stores closed a year after they moved here, no bus stops here any more. Dad’s driving is terrible, Mum’s only marginally better, and both refuse to do it after dark. Whilst in situ, beloved son Miles is spared driving duties thanks to nine speeding points, a two-seater and a new habit of being found one over the eight in the village pub where he’s been adopted as both The Only Gay in the Village and its best karaoke singer.
*
My attention-loving little brother Miles has recently gone through a Damascus transformation of his own. One minute he was running a Midlands corporate events company with wife number four – penthouse in Brum and studio apartment in Barcelona – the next he’s in Mum and Dad’s annexe. What nobody predicted was that he’d burst out of the closet at the age of forty-seven, and with such enthusiasm to make up for lost time. He’s OUT, baby.
It’s badly affected his friendship with Paddy who finds it particularly hard to relate to this all-new Miles because the two of them used to spend hours together on the narrowboat talking engines and rugby and Miles never breathed a word about this other life he was leading. Now it’s all he talks about, mostly to Mum.
A big-hearted people-pleaser beneath the flippant façade, Miles struggled to cope with Mum’s illness and perhaps this self-revelation in all its blazing, spotlit honesty is his backlash. All her children reacted differently: Miles came out; I aged; Julia got even more controlling.
*
‘You’re driving so won’t have one of these.’ The Pimm’s jug is whisked past me and my sister hands me a pint glass of still-hissing mineral water. Jules is big into hydration, but I mean, honestly…
‘You look hot,’ she points out. She’s cool and crisp in designer linen, barely there make-up immaculate.
‘I’m not hot, baby, I’m smokin’.’
‘Sweaty.’ She’s examining me closely. ‘Are you going through the…?’
‘You’re not still SMOKING are you?’ Dad bellows from the other side of the garden where he’s showing Paddy a new raised bed. Dad has this uncanny capacity to listen to about three consecutive conversations, but it’s started to misfire now he’s going deaf.
‘No, Dad! Gave it up years ago.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Jules tells me sotto-voiced, ‘the change of life started when I turned fifty like you. I can prepare you for the worst.’ Three years older than me and five years older than Miles, Jules has always acted as though she’s the only responsible adult amongst us. Which she probably is.
‘It’s thirty degrees out here!’ I laugh. ‘It’s so not the change.’ It so is, but I argue with her as a default. I’m holding onto my younger advantage in this round.
‘You need some loose change for the carpark, you say?’ Dad bellows.
‘We’re fine, Dad!’ I then drop my voice and growl at Jules: ‘It’s still peri-menopause.’
‘Liar. Mine’s still going on three years later,’ my sister groans in a fevered undertone. ‘It never bloody ends. Have you gone off sex?’
‘Did you?’
‘Oh, I went off that years ago. Otty would be an only child if it weren’t for one too many strawberry mojitos at Ask Italian after Mamma Mia.’ Her whisper gets even lower. ‘You and Paddy were always far more sexed up. She raises an eyebrow in the direction of the rose arch where her husband has cornered Paddy to talk about music.
‘Paul Weller over Ed Sheeran any day, yes? Shall I tell you why?’ He launches straight on. Reece rarely leaves enough time for replies to his questions because he isn’t interested in what others have to say.
*
Julia and Reece take my family’s competitive streak to a whole new level.
Both barristers, their marriage is brilliantly argued, occasionally adjourned but never decided. Jules dumped him four times in their engagement year alone, once for every inch she’s taller than him. She once drunkenly told me he has a huge dick for his height, but I’ve been close enough to those budgie smugglers on holiday to have my doubts. Reece nevertheless remains a family colossus in ego terms. His current mid-life crisis – his third if you count the affair and the failed hair transplant – is a full-on cliché involving a hipster beard, motorbike and a three-piece band called Bosh, average age thirty-five, in which he plays bass. They mostly do Blur covers. Reece is fifty-four. You only have to do the maths.
My big sister runs a lot. Outdoors, on a machine, up and down stairs, along corridors. She’s completed the London Marathon twice. I used to think she was in training to run away from her marriage, but she never does. Certainly not since having children, another much-delayed event, then Ottilie came along, quickly followed by Vervain.
The girls are lovely, now ten and twelve and bright as buttons. I’m a very proud aunt. And I refuse to fall into the trap of criticising someone else’s parenting skills – at least, not unless I’ve had a drink – but aren’t those names ridiculously pretentious?
Paddy thinks I’m overly sensitive around my sister. I disagree. Forget the Page Three tits and Court and Social career; I love her even though she’s bossy and judgemental and married to a bastard, and our parents have always preferred her over me. We worship each other beneath the sarcasm.
*
‘Do you get restless legs?’ Jules is asking.
‘Only when I want to run because you’re banging on about the change of life.’
‘Victorians used to call it the “climacteric”.’
‘CLIMATE CHANGE? DREADFUL BUSINESS!’ Dad shouts from the back door as he heads inside for a ‘precautionary visit’ (him taking a pee before setting out anywhere has been built into Finch family life for decades).
‘Maybe global warming is Mother Nature’s menopause?’ Julia whispers. ‘Her last hot flush as her fertility dries up?’
‘You are so cheering me up this evening.’
‘Have you talked to your doctor about HRT?’ she demands in an undertone, mouth barely moving. ‘Mine said it was my choice, but I crunched the stats and what with Mum’s cancer, and Auntie Vi dying of it so young, it’s a no-brainer. Chances are you or I will be titless by sixty as it is.’