Not Married, Not Bothered

Nathan, with this formal, old-fashioned way of talking. Drawing his tentacles in with it, covering himself like one of those sea anemones. And all this the reason why it’s so hard to reconstruct him now, making me realise how very little in the end in those four months together in Bangkok I really got to know him. Nathan with his It doesn’t matter … and It’s of no consequence. And It’s nothing to do with us, Riley.

I said to him that night, ‘My parents should have divorced,’ perhaps playing for his sympathy. There was concern anyway, a warmth in his eye when he looked up.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Are you? Why?’

‘Because it’s not good. To have unhappy parents.’

It was the first time I’d heard that, I remember. Almost thirty years ago when such things were not said so easily. When people were more stoical.

‘Isn’t it. Don’t lots of people have unhappy parents?’

‘Some do, yes.’

‘And you?’

‘Maybe. Yes. But they were already middle-aged when I was born.’ Again that look, his fork suspended in the air as if he was considering it. ‘I guess by the time I got old enough to really look at them, they were old too. Too old and too traditional to show it.’

I don’t know why our parents didn’t divorce when I come to think about it now. God knows, my mother threatened it often enough.

‘I’m off. You see. I don’t need to be stuck here with you.’

‘Good. I couldn’t be happier.’

‘The girls’ll come with me. You know that, don’t you?’

‘Not a chance.’

‘Did he really believe that?’ I said to Cass. ‘That he could take us?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But I guess, in the end, that’s what kept them together.’

All this was in a different age, like I say. A time, I guess, when people did stay together. Unlike now, when forty per cent of couples in this country divorce, fifty per cent in America. Of those people in this country who do weather the storm, eighty per cent say that they’ve given splitting- up serious consideration. Maybe it’s the thought of all that long division that stops them.

In the trauma stakes, divorce ranks second only to death and even this is up for debate. A recent survey carried out by Norwich Union found that forty-six per cent of people who’d divorced said it was more stressful than bereavement. A full forty per cent said they were determined not to marry again because of it.

Death, divorce and moving house. The great triumvirate of trauma:

‘Although as far as I’m concerned, one and two are definitely overstated.’*

You could have knocked me over with the proverbial feather when Fleur said that, wiping an exasperated hand over her forehead. This was mainly because it was the first time in our lives I’d heard her say anything remotely witty. A precursor of things to come, I couldn’t help thinking, and almost certainly, I realised afterwards, a direct result of the change in her circumstances.

It was a couple of days after Fergie had heard about his early retirement, and I was returning from the Town Council when I came upon Fleur haranguing the two removal men outside the new block of flats beside the abbey. They were carrying a white sofa up the path, which if I’d looked carefully I would have recognised. I didn’t, though, because I thought she must just be helping some friend move house. But then she caught sight of me and waved me over furiously.

‘I told them clearly. Kitchen stuff last.’ She flung a hand distractedly up to her Liberty bandanna. ‘Now the blasted tea bags are in some tea chest at the back of the wagon.’

‘There’s a corner shop over there,’ I said, pointing towards it. She put a hand up to her forehead, shading her eyes like some newcomer to the colonies gazing over a clearing in the jungle.

‘A corner shop?’ she said as if I’d used a foreign phrase she’d need translating.

‘Best let me go,’ I said. ‘I speak the language.’

Later, sitting at the kitchen table drinking mugs of tea (she’d made the smaller of two removal men wriggle through to the offending chests to find the mugs plus the kettle), she fixed me with a severe eye.

‘I thought you’d have heard.’

‘No.’ Because I hadn’t.

‘Really?’ A satirical, and I must say entirely warranted expression shot her eyebrows up into her hairline.

‘Auntie Barbara is slipping.’

Time now I think for you to meet The Other Side Of The Family.

Imagine.

Two households, both alike in dignity …

Not.

It’s a simply tale, corny too, but none the less poignant for that.

Once upon a time there were two sisters.

One married a humble motor mechanic, the other the son of our town’s only major employer.

If you’d opened up the glossy magazines in the fifties you’d have seen full-page ads for Frasers Fine Leathers, the gloves looking more like silk than skin, laid out elegantly like the spokes of a wheel. When the sixties arrived, and no one but the Queen wore gloves any more, Frasers was forced to diversify, which it did and highly successfully. The proof of the pudding is still there in the foyer, a glimpse of the past: John Lennon wearing that famous leather cap, and Patti Boyd, all gap-toothed smile in a Fraser leather skirt the width of a pelmet.

Those were the long-gone glory days of Frasers. Six hundred people worked there then, now it’s down to no more than a hundred, the skirts and bags and gloves that still bear the Fraser name turned out in the sweatshops of Eastern Europe and Asia, a boon for its sales manager, a.k.a. my Cousin Royston, younger brother to Fleur, who before Carlotta took him in hand liked to take full advantage in recreational terms of visiting suppliers.

I was still at school and Royston had yet to be even a gleam in his parents’ eyes when I had a Saturday job at Frasers. I worked in the shop, which was run by Miss Eames, a serious spinster who wore a net over her hair, which she’d blue-rinsed so many times it had turned a glorious funky purple.

The shop was just off the foyer then, busy enough to cover two floors and connected by a narrow curving staircase where Cousin Freddy, elder brother to Fleur, caught me one Saturday and tried to stick his tongue down my throat in an effort to widen his sexual experience. I like to remember this thirty years on, watching him tapping his pinky finger against his wine glass, and sticking out his Toad of Toad Hall chest and making one of his pompous head-of-the-firm little speeches at family parties.

Frasers has been part of our town for close on two hundred years. It became part of our family one day in 1946 when my Aunt Fran met my Uncle Hugh in Millington’s Café at the bottom of the High Street (now the Avalon Alternative Health and Therapy Centre). She was introduced by her sister, Babs, a lesson to us all. i.e., when pursuing the man of your dreams take care not to be accompanied by your younger, better-looking sister.

Required to explain what happened that day in Millington’s, I suspect the words ‘We wuz robbed’ would best suit my mother. At family gatherings, after her fifth gin and tonic, she likes to murmur in a noble and meaningful voice, ‘Of course, I got to know Hugh first.’ This closely followed by, ‘We met when we were serving.’

To this day my mother regards herself as having been cheated over Hugh Fraser. She’d like to bring Life to account for it, accuse it of having lost the plot, and I have some sympathy with her over this. Because not only did she meet Hugh before Fran, but they met in circumstances that it was fair to expect would have led to the most romantic of conclusions, i.e., a junior officer and a typist from the same small country town cast up in the middle of a war a couple of thousand miles from home in North Africa.

And all this while Sister Fran was back in Blighty and doing no more for King and Country than rolling bandages.

At Fraser family gatherings my mother gets very drunk, drags at Hugh’s arm, dredging up memories of Cairo.

‘Remember, Hugh, oh, remember …’ this clapping her hands girlishly. ‘Those mad nights at Groppi’s, Hugh. Martinis at Shepheards. Oh, and those wonderful Sunday night concerts…’

In all this she likes to imply to anyone willing to listen, and to those who aren’t, that something more passed between Hugh Fraser and Babs Gordon née Garland in Cairo than the mere exchange of pleasantries when the junior officer caught the West Country burr of his typist.

‘Of course, I’d met George by then,’ she’ll say with a brave smile and a demure droop of her eyes, this designed to imply a love story tragically foreshortened.

And indeed she had met our father – met him and almost certainly ruled him out of the picture. But when fate took a hand via Hugh and Aunt Fran she needed to save face and quickly. So it was that when George came to visit next time she snared him like a spider, this so that when her sister walked up the aisle she was able to watch from her pew with the satisfied feeling of her fingers tucked into husband’s elbow.

Hugh, meanwhile, always acts the perfect gentleman when she puts on her pantomime at family parties. For Hugh is a nice man. A good man. A decent man. He lets our mother reminisce for a while, before patting her hand and then gently disengaging it. But while Hugh is kind to old Babs Gordon, his only daughter, my Cousin Fleur, has never felt any similar compunction.

At the firm’s parties, where my mother likes to play the family card, act like Lady Bountiful with the workers, Fleur’s chilly little favourite is: ‘I see your mother’s enjoying herself,’ the phrase normally accompanied by a thin smile and a nod in the direction of Babs growing steadily more raucous in the corner.

(Oh God, if only our mother would get tired and emotional.)

‘I’m only surprised your mother hasn’t heard,’ Fleur said, that day she dragged me in for tea, a bitchy remark but one entirely well-founded, my mother being the human equivalent of a sniffer dog when it comes to searching out family scandal and misdemeanour.

‘HA!’ my mother said with a smile the size of a watermelon when I passed on the startling news about Fleur leaving Martin.

‘Old-Poker-Up-The-Arse’ this being the nom de guerre Babs Gordon coined for her niece close on thirty years ago when Fleur, still only fifteen, strayed fatally beyond her years to ask at one of those family parties, ‘Don’t you think you’ve had enough, Auntie Barbara?’ Suffice it to say that my mother did not approach the question in any sense as rhetorical, and that everyone standing within a radius of fifty feet took the answer to be in the negative.

To put all this into context, i.e., to appreciate the significance of Fleur leaving Martin, you need to be aware of the way in which Fleur has played the little wifey during the twenty-three years of their marriage. On the night they got engaged, for instance, she informed me in all seriousness that she considered the occupation of wife and mother ‘a woman’s highest calling’ (she used those words precisely).

‘Gosh,’ I said. ‘You and Joseph Goebbels.’

Fleur was nineteen when she got engaged to Martin. They were married two years later.

‘I’ve been the perfect wife,’ she said that day at her kitchen table, looking over the top of her mug at me, and I couldn’t argue. Apart from anything else, she’s even looked the perfect wife – her long straight fair hair sitting impeccably behind a velvet Alice band, her lobes graced with no more than small pearl earrings. She brought up her children too with this same degree of perfection, three of them – Mark and Hannah and James – all of whom have that same perfect straight fair hair and perfect teeth, and who have so far failed absolutely to do the slightest thing to disgrace their parents (Hannah at some fancy cooking school, Mark and James both at good universities).

I suppose it was always inevitable that Fleur would play the part of older wiser women with me, and this despite being seven years younger.

‘Relationships are something you have to work at, Riley,’ she told me severely on another occasion, hearing that another one of mine had bitten the dust.

‘I’ve got a job,’ I said. ‘Who needs another one?’

Over the years, Fleur’s conversation has been entirely dominated by Martin and I, and our house … our car … our holiday… our children. Her tongue would slick along those pale pink lips in self-satisfaction as she said the words. To all outward appearances she and Martin were joined at the hip. A few years ago, for instance, she offered me a free weekend in Paris she’d won in some upmarket shopping competition.

‘I can’t go,’ she said. ‘Martin’s working.’

‘Go with a friend,’ I said. ‘All else fails, I’ll go with you.’

She looked at me like I was suggesting group sex or experimenting with hallucinogenics. ‘I couldn’t,’ she said. ‘I simply couldn’t. Martin and I do everything together.’

Only not any more, apparently.

‘He’s become so boring.’

Now this was a shameful lie. A total untruth. Martin had not become boring at all. Martin was always boring. Martin is a country estate agent. He drives a Volvo. He’s a member of Rotary. He’s supposed to be boring.

In her new kitchen that day, as the small army of women washed up and put stuff away around her (apparently all in the wrong places), Fleur clattered our mugs together and got up from the table with the air of someone setting out on a journey.

‘I told Martin now the children are away I want time for ME … time to find myself, time to get my head together.’ (Time to find a new scriptwriter. R. Gordon.)

She said, ‘I need space…’ a particularly nice touch, this, I thought, since she was leaving behind an executive home with half a dozen bedrooms, a games room in the basement, an ensuite with sauna, a swimming pool and a lounge the size of Wembley Stadium.

Listening to Fleur that day I felt as though I’d slipped into some alternative reality, like someone had wound the clock back. I was hearing phrases that day I thought never to hear again, that I’d thought safely dead and buried by the end of the seventies. And if I was hoping that somewhere along the line Fleur would see the irony of all this, bearing in mind all that kinder, kirche, küche, stuff she’d put the rest of us through over the years, I was about to be disappointed. Clearly Fleur didn’t do Nazi allusions.

‘I’ve worked my fingers to the bone for him over the years.’ Her grey eyes were innocent, open wide. Challenging disagreement. ‘I’ve been nothing but a wife and mother.’

That was when it occurred to me that something seriously sinister might be happening, that maybe Fleur had been the subject of some spooky personality transplant, a kind of Stepford Wife reversal, or maybe – this would work – maybe it wasn’t Fleur at all. Maybe she’d been substituted overnight by a lookalike, possibly as part of a plot involving an alien species.

‘I’m going to do all the things I’ve never done, all the things I’ve never had time to do.’ There was something severe, dedicated, nun-like in her face. She was staring into the distance. I swear to God she was pledging.

‘Like what?’

‘I’m not sure yet. There’s so many things. I thought I might take art classes, perhaps even do a foundation course. Or there again,’ and here she paused and there was a small gleam of something that might have been spite,’ I thought I might do what you do – write some kids’ stories.’ Her arms were crossed against her chest in a self-satisfied fashion as we stood on the landing and below us the lift began clunking upwards.

‘The children have been on at me for years to do it.’

‘Really?’

‘Oh, yes. I always told them stories, you know. When they were young. They loved it.’

I was musing on the horror of this when suddenly her face was right there beside me.

‘I’m going to tell you something now.’

Her voice had changed. It was girly, confidential, which is when I thought: oh God, no. Please, God, no. Not one of those horrible marital secrets.

She said, ‘In the whole of my married life …’ and I thought, no, no. Please, no. Nothing personal. Nothing horribly intimate like she never had an orgasm with Martin, or he wanted to wear her shoes or he would only have sex with her in the back of the Volvo. Please, God, nothing that’s going to flash up over Martin’s head next time I bump into him in the High Street.

But all she said was, ‘Do you know, in the whole of my married life I’ve never even seen a gas bill.’

She pronounced the words with wonder, laying her crossed hands upon the upper part of her chest. There was about her a palpable mixture of excitement and self-satisfaction.

And while in my work I attempt at all times to follow Elmore Leonard’s Fourth Rule of Good Writing, the one which states an adverb should never be used to modify a verb, still on this occasion I find myself forced to transgress it.

‘Life’s going to be one big adventure,’ I said. And I have to admit that I said the words drily.

* Actually there’s some truth in what Fleur says. The question of whether Death should be at the top of the Death, Divorce and Moving House triumvirate is definitely up for debate. In essence, it depends upon precisely who the rating applies to. The definition of trauma, after all, is ‘a powerful shock with long-lasting effects’. Thus, while death can certainly be judged to be traumatic for those loved ones left behind, the question has to be asked whether death, i. e., the act of slipping into oblivion, into that bourn from which no traveller returns, can in any logical sense be judged to be traumatic for the person who’s died. To me, the answer would seem to be absolutely not.

‘Really?’ Magda’s voice was decidedly chilly when I made the mistake of discussing it with her. ‘Well,’ she said (distinctly offended). ‘All I can say is, you get buried alive as a vestal virgin and then get woken up fifteen hundred years later only to be burnt as a witch, see how you like it. See if you don’t think death is bloody traumatic.’

E is for … Eleutherophobia

It’s a strange thing to come from where the sea should be. I have this theory that it leaves you with an odd sense of impermanence, nothing between you and the ocean but a dozen or so miles of moorland and the few hunks of Ham stone that make up the sea defences. I have this recurring dream. I think it might be racial memory. I’m standing on a shingle beach with the sea piling up in a high grey wall and dropping down dead in front of me.

I’m bred to the bone in this town. My mother’s family goes back six generations. I’ve lived most of my life here. Still I’m convinced most of the time the place doesn’t suit me, in particular the moors, which are just too damn low, too damn brooding. As a kid I’d be scared, waking up to a lake where the fields used to be with just the tops of the gates poking up and the spiky willow branches like clutches of drowning fingers. I dislike the rhines too (pronounce them reens); distrust them. They may look harmless enough, just innocent ditches with their covering of irises and marsh orchids, but they can swallow a car whole. One did, when I was a kid, taking with it a mother and her two children.

They unsettle me, the moors that surround my home town, that’s the truth of it. I always think that, walking to the office window, looking out at them. I feel the weight of history from those old trackways, the featherlight dust of the bones of a thousand dead Monmouth rebels, the more so driving across them. I don’t care for the low roads. I feel like I’m always looking over my shoulder, expecting the sea to come back, just to take a notion one day to crash through those paltry sea defences, or the river to suddenly breach, bursting through the banks that rise higher than the car roof, pouring down on top of me.

‘This place. It’s just so damn ancient, that’s the trouble,’ I said to Sophie one day, staring out through her cottage window. ‘I mean, when you think about it, prehistoric creatures once roamed those moors.’

‘Well, you should know,’ she said. ‘You went out with most of them.’

A word about Sophie now.

Sometimes people I haven’t seen for a long time or who don’t really know me will say, ‘Are you still friends with Sophie?’ and I won’t know what to say. It’s like the words don’t make sense to me. Like they’ve got their syntax wrong or they’re speaking a foreign language.

I mumble something usually. ‘Sure … yes … of course. Naturally …’

What I really want to say is: Am I still standing here? Am I still breathing?

Sophie Aitchison and I met over the old green baize desks in the newsroom of the Free Press, our local weekly newspaper. Until I left at twenty-two to travel – hence her knowledge of my prehistoric sex life – we also shared a flat together.

As with so many things in my life – jobs, affairs – I fell into journalism. I’m an aspiration-less bastard, if you want to know the truth of it. In addition I’m lazy, bone idle. I see myself as a sort of Friday afternoon person, juddering along that old Assembly Line of Life. Suddenly someone calls out and the Angel Assistant turns. And, hey presto, there I go, juddering on past and out into the world minus that vital component of ambition.

Unlike Cass, whose name, even to this day, is emblazoned in gold in the hall of the distinguished old girls’ grammar school we both attended, I failed miserably at everything, exiting with barely an O level. In the local careers office they went through a thick book of career options from nuclear physicist at the front (not enough O levels) to Stand and Tan assistant at the back. (I lie. Stand and Tan had yet to be invented.) They said, ‘Is there nothing you want to do?’ and I didn’t feel it was appropriate to say that was exactly it, that the only thing I really wanted to do was nothing. Luckily butterflies were even at that moment beating their wings. Not on the other side of the world either but slap-bang outside my father’s garage.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a man stuck with a daughter around the house who shows no sign of getting a job will grab the first opportunity to do something about it. George Gordon was no exception. He moved swiftly the day that old khaki Ford Pop puttered to a halt. He knew that car and more importantly he knew its owner. Head bent beneath that upraised bonnet that day, he gave the sort of horror-struck intake of breath that would have won him Best Actor from the Academy of Motor Engineers if only the judges had been there to hear it. Its owner, with four children to support and a too substantial mortgage, blanched at the sound and at the mournful shake of the head that accompanied it.

Thus it was that Harry Oates, editor of the Free Press, got his car mended for free and I got a job on this paper.

My current incarnation here is my second. It’s a nice irony, although not by any means an accident, that that same Sophie Aitchison is now my editor.

Sophie and I have now spent a considerable part of our lives working together. Not long after I left to travel, she also departed, to a down-table sub’s job on the Bristol evening paper. She was still there, although rising up the table, when I returned from my travels. No sooner had I set foot in my home town, than certain circumstances necessitated a flight from it (all will be explained), so that for a while – for the second time in our lives – we lived together. Her position with the paper meant she was able to put in a good word for me when a job came up and I subsequently spent the best part of seven years there in the end, first on news and then as a features writer. I left for what would prove to be an unhappy spell in freelance public relations, something which at least had the advantage of propelling me into that English degree at the university. It was here that I started to write, producing the first of the ‘Aunts’ books for which I am now (mildly) famous.