Woman of a Certain Rage

by Georgie Hall

  ‘I’m fine.’ For once I don’t need the loo.

  ‘I would, darling girl. You’re very sweaty.’ Mum’s voice softens. ‘Your sister told me you’re going through the change of life now too. It’s ghastly feeling so out of sorts, but it does get better, really it does. I found I was the happiest I’ve ever been afterwards: I was no longer frightened of everything; I stopped wanting to kill everyone; I even forgave Maggie Smith for stealing my career.’ She fixes me with a knowing smile. ‘Briefly.’

  I’m grateful for someone who understands the raw edge of my insecurities so well. Mum bowed out early, but she still plays What If.

  *

  I have a fridge magnet that says: Somebody Else’s Success Is Not Your Failure. Mum gave it to me; she has one too.

  It’s true, but the older we get, the more we appreciate that for many women – especially those in highly visible professions – our youthfulness and sexual allure are all too often viewed as the only measure of our worth. As I reach each of the milestones my mother crossed twenty-eight years ahead of me, I understand her disappointment more.

  While male actors my age graduate seamlessly from playing Hamlet to his uncle Claudius, with old Polonius up their sleeves for later, now that I’m fifty I have more chance of appearing as Yorick’s skull than Hamlet’s mother, a part too often reserved for women barely older than her ‘son’. Talent is all well and good but if you’re female, staying young is the hardest act of all.

  *

  Giving the kitchen a wide berth, Mum greets Joe like a prodigal, tells Dad that no, he can’t have a second Bloody Mary and orders Miles to fetch her a glass of chilled Gavi and a spritzer for me.

  ‘You and your uncle must sing for Grandpa later,’ she tells Joe.

  He catches my eye pleadingly but I do hard-eyes back because I know how much it means to Mum and Dad when they sing together at family celebrations, even if it’s mortifying for the hungover drummer of student indie band Nuanced Perverts to be seen duetting old show tunes with his fake-tanned uncle on his sister’s Instagram account.

  After Miles returns with the drinks, Mum and I take a turn around her rose beds, admiring the pink pompom blooms of her Princess Anne alongside Margaret Merril’s big white-petalled faces as she tells me in an undertone how ghastly she felt at my age, suffering in silence because ‘my generation simply didn’t talk about menopause, or if we did it was in euphemisms’.

  ‘How did it affect you?’

  ‘Oh, not too badly at all once the HRT kicked in. I didn’t know about the risks then, of course. What do you think of this peony? Too flouncy?’

  I shake my head and smile. What Mum – who’s always fashioned herself as a rebel – can’t see is that she remains precisely of the generation she’s complaining about, her empathy spoken in a shorthand of ‘chin up’, ‘you’ll get through this’ and ‘best not go into detail’.

  ‘I remember my legs itched terribly,’ she ventures in a whisper.

  We are very alike, Mum and I, right down to our knack of lifting one eyebrow with impeccable timing. But we are women born into markedly different eras. Touring the rose beds, we manage to bond over brittle fingernails and agree ‘getting jolly hot’ is a nuisance, but there’s no way we’re going near depressive insomnia, low libido, dry vaginal walls or increased stress incontinence. Besides, she’s more worried about my marriage. ‘You would tell me if something was wrong, wouldn’t you? We were all saying last night how miserable Paddy looked on Friday.’

  My defensive fires crackle. ‘That’s his resting face.’

  ‘Well, he needs to get it moving. He’s turning into his father. Eddie never smiled much.’

  ‘He smiled on the inside.’

  ‘Wives need more than that, darling. We need a sense of excitement and adventure, of being adored and desired. Is he giving you that?’

  I wonder if she’s inferring sex, then decide not. More likely off-grid travel and Glyndebourne tickets. ‘He’s suggested going out on the boat soon.’

  ‘Well, I suppose that’s something.’ She turns to deadhead a few butter yellow Charles Darwins. Then she says, ‘Everything feels so much better when you’re out the other side of this change. You’ll see. You’ll want to challenge yourself, take risks you never did. It’s like coming through fire to clear air.’

  I’d like to ask more, but there’s a loud shout of alarm from the table and we turn to see Dad’s chair tipping over backwards, depositing him in a lavender bed.

  ‘Oh my God, Dad’s head’s burst open!’ Miles screams.

  ‘Peter! NO!’ Mum cries, yellow petal flying out of her hands like confetti as everyone hurries over.

  ‘I’m absolutely effing fine!’ comes a furious roar from amid a haze of blue. ‘It’s Bloody Mary.’

  Dad’s dripping with tomato juice, a celery stick on his forehead.

  Mum bursts into tears. ‘Do you want to kill yourself, you silly fool!’

  ‘The lavender broke my fall, old girl.’

  ‘Not the chair tipping over! The cocktail! I TOLD you not to have a second one with your blood pressure.’

  *

  Sunhats, linen, parasols, citronella candles and a family in full bloom, its stems bearing blossom, our latest generation growing up fast. Sunday lunch with Granna and Grandpa Finch is a tradition my children all hold dear.

  For Jules, Miles and me, whose childhood meals were cooked in the same orange Le Creuset ware, and eaten at the same tables forty years ago in Buckinghamshire, it’s the perfect opportunity to give each other a roasting.

  Dad’s fall puts lunch back yet further. Poor Ed who needs clockwork meals is stimming back and forth in his earphones, clicking his knuckles and longing to be home eating a plain ham sandwich rather than unfamiliar dishes he’s been briefed he mustn’t be rude about.

  And I fear that hungry, hungover vegan Joe may have to forage the hedgerows.

  As I head inside to offer to carry food out, I call for Miles to help too, because cornering my brother for a word is also playing on my mind.

  Guarding an Aga-singed watercress quiche that looks like a giant sun-baked cow pat, Jules points a flan knife at me and tells me to stay where I am and await orders.

  She eyes her quiche critically. ‘This looks wrong. Is it missing something?’

  ‘Mayo?’ I suggest, edging towards the larder in search of raw food to smuggle out.

  ‘The twenty-first century?’ suggests foodie Miles, tracking me towards the wine rack.

  ‘Fuck off and open your own bloody restaurant, why don’t you? On fucking Mars with Elon fucking Musk.’ She checks the recipe book. ‘Of course, a dusting of paprika! Can you fetch it from the larder, Elz?’

  I dive inside gratefully, pocketing a bag of sultanas, some walnuts halves and an open packet of Jacob’s cream crackers.

  ‘Actually, I always fancied being a Michelin-starred chef.’ Arriving at the wine rack behind me, Miles starts studying labels.

  ‘Is that the next great business plan Mum was telling me about?’ I tease, trousering a slab of Bournville and turning to find him looking at me with troubled eyes.

  ‘Listen, I need to talk to you about Paddy later.’ I pick up a red-topped spice tub that looks like paprika and try to make out the label without my reading glasses.

  There’s an instant uneasiness. He looks at the pot too. ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Yes! You keep ignoring each other. Joe’s been trying to convince his sister their dad’s a homophobe.’

  ‘Well, he is pretty uptight about it,’ Miles selects a brace of Dad’s favourite claret, ‘especially once I told him I used to have a tiny crush on him.’

  ‘You did what?’ I clutch a larder shelf in shock.

  ‘I thought it would make him laugh.’

  ‘You have romantic feelings for Paddy?’ I’m in shock.

  ‘God no, not now, not at all! This was over twenty years ago when you were first together, and only ever briefly and from afar. When I couldn’t figure
out if I wanted to be like Bowie or be with him, Paddy was a god of cool. I used to daydream that he’d turn up in that clapped-out truck of his and invite me on a road trip to Frisco.’

  ‘Christ alive, Miles! You told Paddy this?’

  ‘I felt much the same way about Sean Bean, Mark Wahlberg and Madonna. It was nothing!’

  I can imagine Paddy’s silent shock, not knowing what to say, my reserved husband who has adapted so much from his rigid upbringing to fit in with our metropolitan, liberal-minded family and its funny middle-class ways, but still has a default setting of man’s man, his friendships resolutely down-to-earth.

  Talk about changing the rules.

  *

  Paddy and Miles had nothing to say to each other when they first met. It was obvious Paddy thought Miles was a player, and like most of my family Miles was politely baffled by my strong, silent boyfriend. Or so I thought at the time.

  My brother was Mr Festival back then, responsible for colourful marquees, tipi villages and fire-jugglers popping up all over stately homes before he figured out the big money was in corporate events. He was also already divorced and a father, having dropped law at Brasenose at twenty to wed his pregnant Aussie girlfriend, a fiery union that lasted barely two years before she fled back to New South Wales with their son.

  He met Wife Two in an Ibiza club in his mid-twenties. We all liked her, but workaholic Miles was never in the same time zone and eventually she fell in love with somebody else. Wife Three was an Internet date, ten years his senior, desperately beautiful and desperate for babies. That happened way too soon, his second son born on their first anniversary. They’d bought a dream Cotswold country house, got madly into debt and argued non-stop. Eventually she threw him out. With no money to rent his own place and Mum ill at the time, he ended up living on The Tempest for a couple of months. That’s when, sixteen years after first meeting, the brothers-in-law finally made friends.

  Paddy was permanently on call because things kept breaking down on the boat and my brother was in a terrible state about leaving his young son, history repeating itself, and Paddy became his confessor. There’s a timeless therapy to canal life and having faced his own demons on The Tempest more than once, Paddy knew her to be a great healer. Within weeks, Miles had swapped self-destructive bottles of Smirnoff for craft ale and was hooked on barging. Even after he moved to Brum to set up his new events company, the two friends cast off a few times a year to potter between waterside pubs. They were great foils.

  We had high hopes of Wife Four – his business partner, refreshingly bright and level-headed, a fellow divorcee – but all too soon after wedding vows were exchanged on a Greek island, Miles was spending more time on The Tempest, questioning what he’d done.

  When my brother came out as gay to the family over lunch on New Year’s Day, Mum was the only one to claim she’d known long before Miles realised it himself. He caught all the rest of us all on the back foot, especially Paddy.

  *

  ‘It’s not like Paddy’s insecure about his sexuality,’ Miles is saying in a hushed undertone. ‘It was just a throwaway joke when he complained that nobody fancied him any more.’

  ‘Paddy said that?’ I feel like I’ve been smacked.

  ‘Sorry, not very sensitive now I think about it, telling him boys as well as girls found him hot half a lifetime ago. Who wants reminding they’re no longer the young stud they were? But we’d had a lot of whisky, lamenting middle-age and marriage. He was supposed to laugh.’

  ‘Lamenting?’ I stand very still. ‘When was this?’

  ‘March maybe?’

  I was away working a lot then. Meanwhile, Paddy was getting drunk with my brother, saying he wanted somebody to fancy him and lamenting his marriage.

  We can hear the cottage landline ringing, its old-fashioned bring-bring like a call from the past.

  I feel the rage bubbling, ill-timed and illogical.

  ‘Everything all right in there?’ Jules calls, opening the larder door a fraction, but there’s barely enough room for two in here as it is. The phone is still ringing.

  ‘Fine!’ I have Miles backed up against the wine rack. ‘Just quickly explain what you mean by “lamenting”?’

  ‘What’s said on The Tempest stays on The Tempest.’ He clams up, spotting the mad look in my eyes.

  ‘That bloody narrowboat!’ I snarl. ‘Sometimes I wish I’d never set eyes on her.’

  ‘I feel your pain.’

  Briing-briing.

  ‘Can I just have the paprika, maybe?’ Jules suggests.

  Miles is pointing both barrels of his claret bottles at me. ‘Perhaps you should talk to Paddy about this?’

  ‘THE PAPRIKA!’ Jules forces her way into the larder with us. It’s like a game of sardines.

  ‘I am talking to you about it!’ I rail at Miles. ‘And now that you’ve revealed you and Paddy fell out when you told him he was once your secret crush, I need to know what you mean by lam—’

  ‘That isn’t why we fell out!’

  ‘ENOUGH, you two!’ Jules squeezes past Miles to snatch the paprika out of my hand. ‘This stops right now. Button it till later. Think of Dad. Miles, go out and give everyone a top up and a witty anecdote to stave off hunger pangs. Sing, if necessary. Elz, come and use your artistic flair to help me reshape a crustless quiche that’s been hurled into the sink.’

  ‘Why’s it in the sink?’

  ‘BECAUSE YOU’RE NOT THE ONLY ONE GOING THROUGH FUCKING MENOPAUSE!’

  Miles and I file meekly out the larder behind our older sister. The landline is still ringing. Jules plucks up the kitchen handset as she passes, says ‘fuck off!’ crisply and hangs up.

  As Miles bolts gardenwards, I follow her to the sink, where she stops, fists clenched, and hisses through gritted teeth, ‘I just can’t handle failure right now!’

  I take a look at the watercress quiche. It’s not pretty. Now lopsided, the cowpat crust has cracked and ruptured to reveal green-veined innards.

  ‘It’s hideous!’ Jules groans.

  ‘We’ll dust on lots of paprika and no one will know,’ I insist.

  Jules does some deep breathing, then pinches the top of her nose and says a couple of Buddhist ‘oms’ and a ‘fuck it’ before spinning round to face me. ‘Do you find you keep getting things totally out of perspective?’

  ‘All the time.’

  ‘We’re being gaslighted by our own hormones.’ She fixes me with her doomsayer stare. ‘The loss of oestrogen and progesterone directly affects cognisance. It’s why so many women struggle at work through the change. Tasks they could do without thinking twice before their hormones dwindled become almost impossible. I’m only telling you this for your own good, Eliza. It can last a long time, and a lot of crustless quiches will get fucked in the process. The three most common side effects are: memory loss, fatigue and anxiety.’

  My mind flits to the forgotten lemon drizzle and to falling asleep, phone in hand, worrying I’m no longer brave or impulsive.

  ‘Brain fog is commonplace.’ Jules is on a roll. ‘All the disturbed nights’ sleep just make it worse. We miss appointments, miss paying bills, forget things our children need for school and make big professional mistakes. It can be cataclysmic if you have a critical, high-powered job like mine.’

  ‘Lucky for me I don’t,’ I mutter.

  ‘Feelings of failure and regret are commonplace too. Your inferiority complex is going rogue.’

  ‘You used to say it’s the only complex thing about me,’ I remind her in a bimbo voice.

  ‘Actually, it was Miles who said that. Why are you two always obnoxious to each other?’

  ‘He just told me he had a crush on Paddy in the nineties,’ I justify.

  ‘We all had a crush on Paddy back then,’ she dismisses, ‘he was ridiculously good looking and never spoke. We thought he had hidden depths.’

  ‘He does have hidden depths!’

  ‘Most men do, Eliza.’ She sighs. ‘The depths to whic
h they will sink to get what they want. Now help me get this thing on a board.’

  We manage to portion it and shake on lots of smoky red paprika. Except it’s not smoky, it’s peppery. We both start sneezing violently, eyes streaming.

  ‘This is cayenne, Eliza!’

  ‘Oh God, I’m so sorry! Would a distracting garnish help?’

  Rubbing our burning noses, we look down at the red-dusted cowpat and we start to laugh. Soon we’re leaning against one another, hot eyes streaming with tears, stitches pinching at our sides.

  ‘Stop!’ I gasp. ‘Or I’m going to wee myself!’

  ‘Me too!’

  And that sets us off again.

  *

  Jules will forever remain the undisputed champion of my silliest and longest giggling fits. We once had a running joke about hypnotism that lasted years. I can’t even remember the original gist of it now, just that the words ‘You are feeling very sleepy’ would set us off, triggering hopeless, helpless laughter that actually hurt. Even today, if we catch one another at the right moment after the third or fourth glass of wine at Christmas and say ‘And sleep’, its effect is instant and leg-crossing. The first time Paddy saw it, he thought we were both possessed. He still doesn’t get it, this laughing gas effect we can have on each other.

  It’s yet another one of the ways my family conspires to mystify and alarm him.

  *

  ‘What am I going to do?’ Jules wipes her eyes with a tablecloth.

  ‘Just serve the pear salad; they won’t care.’

  ‘You’re right. Go out and distract them some more.’ She heads back towards the larder. ‘I’m going to add some blue cheese and walnuts and rustle up a quick flatbread.’ A moment later, she’s inside shouting, ‘WHERE the FUCK are those FUCKING walnuts?’