by Eleanor Wood
Ann still managed to train as a teacher while she had a baby, had one more, and then had a fabulous life living all over the world. She and her husband made a very glamorous couple. She looked after him when he became ill and died much younger than he should have. She now has a flat in West London, near where they all grew up, and a house in Cyprus. Both of her children live in Australia and she spends a lot of time out there. She spends all of her time being fabulous.
None of their lives turned out the way they thought they would. All of them are happy. All of them consider themselves lucky. Not least because we all have each other and we all get on so well. It’s quite an achievement, really.
‘Just look at where we started and where we ended up,’ Nan says now. ‘I’m so very proud of all of us.’
It’s easy to look at older people, especially when they have children and grandchildren, and to assume that their lives were always smooth and predictable. This is almost never true. Everyone has had hard times; everyone has had their heart broken. Nobody gets everything they ever wanted. If we’re lucky, life is long enough that it all works out in the end, somehow.
I try to bear this in mind when things don’t go my way, or it feels like a run of bad luck might be endless. For better or worse, things can change in a minute. Who knows where we’ll all end up? They certainly had no idea at times. So … might as well try to ride it all out and stay staunch.
Present Day
I come back from India, not into normal everyday life, but into something straight out of I Capture the Castle.
Months earlier, before the India trip had been booked, my girlfriends and I had decided that we needed something to look forward to in January. We booked a long weekend in a Landmark Trust house: Wilmington Priory, overlooking the Long Man and less than an hour’s drive outside Brighton.
When Nan booked the India trip, I realized that the two almost coincided. Fortunately for me, I was still able to do both, but I ended up with approximately two hours at home between getting in from Gatwick and my friend Emma coming to pick me up to go into the countryside.
The booking confirmation for Wilmington Priory warned us that there was no central heating and the parking space was a walk away from the house. This was for hardy travellers only. And so, I dropped my suitcase off at home, put on two jumpers and my wellies, and shoved some thick socks and extra layers into my rucksack.
‘You are the dictionary definition of the word “trooper”,’ Em said, as she picked me up and saw my jetlagged face.
I hadn’t realized I looked quite that bad, but I guess I have missed a night’s sleep and was, to put it kindly, somewhat disorientated. Despite my suntan, when I am very tired, my face goes pale and puddingy. We all have our tells.
We pick up Natalie, and we meet Saoirse on the way, at Waitrose in Lewes, where we stock up for the weekend. I reflect that our grocery shopping choices reflect the in-between space we currently occupy in life. I mean, when I was younger we didn’t used to shop in Waitrose when we stocked up on the way to Glastonbury – I guess we are coming up in the world. We still buy far too much booze – more wine, gin and beer than four people should be able to drink over the course of a long weekend (and still Saoirse and I will have to do an emergency extra booze run to downtown Seaford by the second night, because we got over-excited and drank it all too quickly). But, on the other grown-up hand, Natalie has made a list and we buy all the ingredients to make lovely family meals together: cooked breakfasts, a Saturday night chilli, Sunday roast lunch. We are growing up. Sort of.
It’s the cosiest weekend imaginable. At times, I am so jetlagged and shell-shocked, I can barely string a sentence together. Fortunately, I am with such good friends that nobody minds. They have a million questions about my trip but I haven’t processed it yet. All I seem to be able to say is that it was ‘incredible’.
I get to have the bedroom that I wanted the most – luckily for me, everybody else thought it was too chilly and far away from the main house. Half of the priory is in ruins, and the rest is sprawling and ancient. There is still a secret passage (sadly, long disused) into the local church. We discover a secret cellar that is full of scary caverns and possibly bats.
My room is tucked away beyond the huge unheated hall that is now used as a ping-pong room. It has a little writing desk with a view of the Long Man of Wilmington, lying there in the rolling green hills.
It’s all enough to short-circuit my brain. This time yesterday I was still among the smells and sounds and colours of India. The palette here is entirely different. I miss the reds and the spices and the chaos. It is so boring that there are no cows wandering around the roads, that people don’t chat to you – or even look at, or acknowledge, you – as you walk down the street. Everything here seems so organized and prescriptive and bland by comparison. The vibe here is just not mystical at all. That’s something I’m going to have to preserve myself.
I’m so glad I have come home to this, though. While in some ways the timing is ridiculous, in fact it could not have been better. I am so grateful to have this stopgap, to put off doing the washing and being in my damp house by myself. Here the atmosphere is green and lush and the countryside quintessentially English. I have come back to the best of it.
Also, I think it would have been lonely to have gone straight home alone after these weeks of camaraderie and excitement. I’m grateful for the company.
Mostly, I am grateful to continue to be around great women. I am with such good friends, they don’t mind when I shuffle about the house in my flannel nightshirt (it was a present from my aunt in Austria and it’s the warmest thing I own), knitted American Apparel knee socks and a blanket at all times.
Still, I feel faintly guilty that for once I am not the life and soul of the party. I have a lovely time, but I feel quiet, slightly withdrawn. It’s not my usual role; ordinarily, I would make sure everyone is having a good time all of the time.
Natalie does pretty much all of the cooking and I worry slightly I’m not pulling my weight, but I have to admit it’s lovely to be looked after a bit. She has the most energy of anyone I know. We both wake up early every morning and have a couple of hours, just the two of us, drinking tea and reading our books on separate sofas in front of the fire in the grand Georgian sitting room. I love our time together: Natalie perpetually brims over with positivity and I love just being around her.
I am so grateful for these women. For Emma, who is the most solid and principled person I know. For Saoirse, who is endlessly empathetic.
We go for long walks, build fires, drink lots of wine, play board games and talk about anything and everything. It strikes me that we’re not so different from my nan and her sisters, not really. I just like being around great women and hearing their stories.
For some reason that weekend – with a glass of wine, in front of the fire – I tell my friends a bit more about what happened between me and the Bad Boyfriend. It’s the first time I’ve said any of it out loud, except to my therapist.
Over the previous months, my therapist has gently questioned me on my reluctance to talk about this; she worries that I don’t have the support I need and that I’m keeping it quiet because I am somehow ashamed of myself over the whole situation.
‘Why should you be the one to carry this?’ she asked me. ‘Are you the one who has done anything wrong? Did you spit in his face and call him a whore for no reason?’
I have to admit that, no, I did not.
When I tell my friends about what happened, I am taken aback by how shocked and upset they are by it. It reminds me that however much I make jokes and try not to think about the whole thing too deeply, it was actually pretty bad.
‘I’m so sorry that happened to you,’ Natalie said.
‘I can’t believe it,’ Saoirse said.
‘I want to fucking kill him,’ Emma said.
For the first time, I don’t try to play it down or make it into a funny story. I’m glad I have told them. These women are o
n my team and I don’t always have to play a role or make everything fit my fuck it’s cool, everything’s great narrative.
It is not embarrassing to be struggling sometimes. It’s OK to admit it – which, up until now, is not something I have been doing.
I’ve made some questionable decisions along the way, but it’s not all my fault. For me, it’s just been circumstantial, a pile-up of stuff and a run of bad luck. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. I decide not to be, any more.
Present Day
Then, the following weekend, The Lecturer comes to stay.
I am so excited to be seeing him again. While I’ve been away, we’ve been texting every day, a constant conversation that I always look forward to continuing. Every time I saw anything interesting in India, or some tiny funny thing happened, I couldn’t wait to tell The Lecturer. Basically, I live to amuse him. He’s so world-weary and sardonic, making him laugh feels like winning the lottery. I fear I’ve become a bit addicted to it.
It’s been a long road for me and The Lecturer. It’s been on and off, full of grey areas and misunderstandings, and things left unspoken. For a long time, he was such an enigma to me. However, while I’ve been away these past few weeks, I have become convinced that this is going to be the turning point. All obstacles have receded; we are both single. We have been growing closer and talking to each other about everything. Also, I have come back from India really feeling myself, what with the suntan and the daily yoga routine. How can he resist, right?
Preparing for a visit from The Lecturer is a military operation that requires careful planning. He is highly fastidious, a fussy eater, with unusually keen observational skills and an unabashedly critical eye. He doesn’t miss a trick. It makes me very self-conscious around him. As such, my house and I are both required to be in immaculate order before he arrives.
Although he claims to have no friends and no social life, it’s always hard to pin him down to a date and he has actually only ever come to stay at my house once before. I have never been allowed to set foot in the flat where he lives. He always makes the same joke whenever I ask him about it: his landlady has two rules, no prostitutes and no kebabs (so I’m barred on both counts, ha ha). Obviously on hearing this I always laugh and pretend I don’t care about the fact that I am not really a proper part of his life.
He claims that I am his favourite person to spend time with, yet he never comes over. Last time, I tried to impress him in the morning by making him a bacon sandwich while wearing only Agent Provocateur lingerie. Surely every man’s dream, right? He barely gave me a second glance and then told me off because I used the same chopping board for the bacon and the bread. The Lecturer is something of a germophobe and finds my lack of rigorous kitchen hygiene very painful. He likes to joke about how this is his abiding memory of that entire experience, and that he still has nightmares about it. I have to admit, it’s pretty funny the way he tells it, but it’s not brilliant for the old self-esteem.
So, this time I want things to be perfect. Then he can get on with realizing he’s madly in love with me and can’t live without me, obviously.
The Lecturer drives down to Brighton in his rickety old car, which I adore. It’s somehow always covered in mud and looks more suited to a grizzled old farmer than a long-haired academic who lives in London. Then again, The Lecturer is always surprising me. It’s one of the intriguing things about him. Just when I think I know everything about him, he’ll casually throw into conversation that time he lived in the rural Australian outback, or made a living playing in a swing band, or was a teenage athletics champion.
In retrospect, I suppose these should all have been red flags, warning me against this unknowable man. But for over two years (on and off), the drip feed of these random facts just seemed fascinating.
‘You look like you’re planning a kidnapping,’ I say as I run outside and he gets out of the car.
Characteristically, there is a length of rope, a box of ammunition (not quite as sinister as it sounds, he’s into clay pigeon shooting) and a bottle of champagne visible within the utter tip that is the boot of his car.
‘Shut up,’ he says in his brusque Yorkshire accent. ‘And come here.’
You have to admit, he has his moments, this one. This is what has made me persevere with him for so long.
He walks towards me with his arms outstretched and his eyes unusually soft.
‘I haven’t seen you in so long,’ he says.
He has a pleasingly snuggly jumper on and he seems unusually glad to see me. Despite this, I don’t kiss him even though I would really like to. I’m never sure if he wants me to. He does not kiss me and the moment passes.
Ostensibly, we have a lovely evening. We drink wine and we order dirty takeaway burgers. And we smoke cigarettes and we sing along to music and we sort-of talk about things. Except we don’t really.
For months now, I’ve been saying all this indecision is not his fault. He’s been having a hard time. He’s had a strange and unsettled year. He went through a big break-up. He has left his job without another one to go to, and now he isn’t sure what to do next.
He talks in vague terms about moving to the countryside and writing a book. He has offers for other high-powered academic jobs that he might or might not accept. He is considering chucking it all in and, at the age of almost forty, ‘going travelling’. We both agree that is an objectionable term, and instead start referring to it as ‘going for a wander’.
We are always manufacturing intimacy in this way; we have so many obscure words and phrases and nicknames for each other, it’s practically a secret language. It is very seductive. Although he is an awkward academic who we agree is more than likely somewhere ‘on the spectrum’, as they say, he doesn’t half know how to pull out all the classic fuckboy tricks that a million Instagram memes are built on.
It’s all in-jokes and pet names, and he’s always going on about how nobody understands him like I do. He says he finds it difficult to talk to people, so he doesn’t understand why it’s so easy for him to talk to me. This has allegedly never happened to him before. He tells me I know more about him than anybody else on the face of this planet. In short, he makes me feel special. It’s only as time has passed and I realize I’ve constantly been fed this convenient and neatly constructed little narrative of Poor Awkward Socially Inept Lecturer and Special Magical Me that I start to wonder whether I have in fact been played by a major player.
He talks about his crippling awkwardness, his chronic indecision and his low self-esteem. Yet somehow he has managed to get a PhD and a series of high-flying jobs and sustain other relationships, just not with me. Sometimes I think he is clinically depressed. Sometimes I think he is just being stubborn. It doesn’t really matter which. He certainly does not seem to want to be happy. I could make him so happy. I am convinced of it. Why doesn’t he want me to?
For nearly two years I have been waiting. For his life to settle down, for things to get better. Mostly for him to realize he is madly in love with me. I don’t understand why he says he’s so unhappy and yet refuses to choose happiness. He claims that he thinks I’m wonderful and beautiful and brilliant, yet he knows he could be with me and he just … isn’t.
So, we listen to Bob Dylan and eat burgers and drink more wine (and whisky, and absinthe). He has brought with him the small collection of vintage guitars he owns, the purpose being that over the course of the evening, I will help him narrow down which ones he should keep and which ones he should sell, as most of his belongings will be going into storage when he decides whether he is moving house or ‘going for a wander’.
I tell him about India and about Wilmington Priory, although he already knows most of it because I have been texting him constantly and sending him pictures of all of it.
‘That sounds magical,’ he says. ‘Your life is magical. I wish I had friends and fun and a lovely time like you do.’
You could, I think. I am literally offering you that. I don’t know how many m
ore times I can tell him this.
I tell him that my friends and I are planning to go back to Wilmington again in the summer, as we think it would be extra wonderful when it’s warm enough to have cocktails and dinner outside in the ruins. There was even a grand outdoor dining table especially for that purpose.
‘You should come with us!’ I exclaim, undeterred as always. ‘We were thinking of July, so obviously you’ll be back from your wander by then. And we decided we’d let boys come next time.’
I’ll wear a diaphanous 1930s dress. He will impress my friends with his intellect and his haughty cheekbones. We’ll drink French 75s and sneak down to the bottom of the garden, where he will kiss me up against a tree and tell me how much he loves me and how lucky he is. It will be perfect. Obviously.
‘Maybe. Who knows? I’m just going to go wandering until I get bored. I might be gone for a year, or maybe more.’
In all the time we’ve been talking about his ‘going for a wander’, we’ve never talked about timescales. It’s never occurred to me that it might be for longer than a month or two at most. I feel so stupid, I don’t even question the fact he might be going away for a year. I don’t say anything and just pretend I knew this all along. Being the cool girl and constantly hiding your feelings is so exhausting sometimes.
Then comes the real kick in the teeth.
‘I expect you’ll have found yourself a real boy by the time I get back and I’ll just be left feeling sad and regretful.’
He sighs extravagantly and his pretty brown eyes beg me to please feel sorry for him. Like he’s Pinocchio or some shit, and he really doesn’t get a say. He just can’t help it; it’s not his fault.
I suddenly – belatedly – realize that, even though he texts me every day, I am not part of his decision-making process at all. I am irrelevant. Finally realizing this for sure feels strangely good. It feels liberating. Sort of. Even if I do really, really want to cry.