The Desperate Diary of a Country Housewife

We danced after that, Fin and I. To a deafeningly loud and intermittently off-key rendition of FYC’s ‘She Drives Me Crazy’. And—it was kind of lovely. London seemed a long, long way away.

January 18th

The carpet layer is here. He shouldn’t be, of course, because we still have a lot of building work to do; but he said he needed to shift the carpets quickly (storage space problems, apparently) which meant we either had to fit them this week or not fit them at all, and since his quote came in at £2,000 under everyone else’s ‘this week’ seemed like the way to go. No doubt we shall come to regret it.

He’s an obvious crook, by the way. Or he looks like one. Darrell suggested him. Darrell specifically advised me not to be put off by his appearance, but it’s hard not to be. He has shifty eyes, one of which doesn’t open properly, numerous studs and hoops in both ears, and a large, shaved head with a small swastika tattooed on top. Not that I care, so long as we get the carpets in, but his villainous appearance clearly troubles him. Every time he hears my feet in the hall he comes rushing out from whichever room he’s measuring, and delivers another homily on integrity/importance of: especially in carpet layers. I nod like a puppy, of course. Nobody mentions the swastika.

In any case he’s brought four teenage boys with him today, all of them a little damaged, by the look of things. Between them they have now removed all but one door in the house. There’s a teenager calling himself Stewart, who doesn’t seem to go in for eye contact, nor for the spoken word. But he obviously gets a hell of a lot of text messages, because for the last hour or so, while I’ve been working, he’s been standing outside the hole where my office door used to be, deleting them one by one. And each time he deletes, it goes ‘tring’, like he’s waving a magic wand.

Which is of course reassuring, because at least it’s proof that someone, somewhere, at some point, has been communicating with him. And not just once, but thousands and thousands and thousands of times. It means that maybe someone out there actually likes him. Or he’s a drug dealer, of course. In any case he has a relationship with the world, and that has to be something to celebrate. Maybe he’s not quite so damaged as he appears.

January 19th

Hatty called—for the first time in ages. I was giving the children a bath and I didn’t get to the telephone on time. She left a message, sounding high as a kite, and not saying anything of any consequence really, except that her and Damian’s five-minute film Goodbye Jesus, which has already won three minor awards at little film festivals around Europe…

Has just been nominated for an Oscar.

January 20th

Darrell stayed late this afternoon—late enough for me to offer him beer instead of the usual tea and biscuits. Fantastic, as Fin would say, while texting his location manager in Bucharest.

So I offered Darrell some beer, and he said yes! Fantastic. I think he fancies me. Maybe. A bit. Not nearly as much as I fancy him, obviously. But a little bit. Perhaps. Or he might do. I don’t know.

Anyway it was just him and me, that’s the thing. His partner (Ralph, I think30? He’s OK but he has a nobbly head, like a bad potato; also, I suspect, beneath the friendliness, a simmering rage against toffs: both of which traits, for obvious reasons, I find a little off-putting. ) His partner ‘Ralph’ had already left. Ditto the carpet layers. Ditto Mark the painter. Ripley and Dora were in the playroom entertaining themselves—and Fin is away. (Actually he’s with his location manager in Bucharest, so no need for texting tonight. No need for worry either. Not on this occasion. She’s young, but she’s no beauty. Also, unusually stupid. I took the children to visit one of Fin’s film sets a couple of years ago and we were introduced. ‘H-E-L-L-O, M-U-M-M-Y!’ she said to me, V-E-R-Y S-L-O-W-L-Y. And that was it. Amazing.)

Where was I? Darrell and me. Darrell et moi…We talked about our travels in Florida. Darrell went to Orlando the year before last, but didn’t manage to make it to Miami. He said he thought Orlando was mind-boggling. I said I thought so too, though truth be told I’m not convinced I’ve ever been there. I went to Jacksonville once, I think. In any case it didn’t matter at all…Florida has a lovely climate and a hell of a lot of alligators. We agreed on that. What else did we talk about?

I don’t know. The kitchen, obviously. But I didn’t want to focus on that. It would have put too much of an emphasis on—lots of things I didn’t particularly want to emphasise at that particular moment. Anyway, I drank slightly more than half a bottle of wine in the time it took him to finish his two cans of lager—which, I think, is a slight improvement on the last time. I certainly wasn’t reeling by the time he left, but I had taken up smoking again. Darrell smokes roll-ups. He offered to roll one for me. I know perfectly well how to roll my own, of course, but I decided not to mention it. I let him do the rolling and then I said oooh, because they did come out very neat. Oh dear. Oh dear.

Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

I can’t help it. He’s got such a fucking sexy laugh.

January 21st

Going to Clare Gower’s coffee morning this morning.

Oddly enough I’ve never been to a ‘coffee morning’ before. Well, it’s not that odd. Up until now I’ve made a fairly conscientious effort to avoid them. I have a nasty feeling this one may be quite a formal affair. Otherwise why would I have been invited to it almost a fortnight in advance?

She had to postpone the last one because she was having the outside of the house repainted, and she thought scaffolding might somehow ‘confuse matters’. Not certain which matters, and I didn’t like to ask. In any case the scaffolders have apparently packed up now, and taken with them all danger of confusion. The house is nicely repainted, Clare says, and the coffee morning is Back On. I have high hopes for it. Clare says she’s expecting about ten guests—all women, of course. There must be one among them who might possibly be a friend?

I’m going upstairs now to put on some mascara in her honour.

COUNTRY MOLE

Sunday Times

There haven’t been many times in my life when things have seemed so wretched that I really, truly wanted to press my own ejector seat and power into eternal space. But since leaving London for the West Country and a new existence of Healthy Family Fun, I find my fingers more often groping for the button.

Forget the pain of childbirth; the long, drawn-out death of a loved one; forget being eaten alive by piranha fish, or having a nail slowly hammered into the back of your neck. Hell is a coffee morning with the unemployed lady-mothers of idyllic rural Britain. Hell is knowing you stick out like a sore thumb and that you’ll be stuck there, sticking out, for an hour minimum, smiling until your face cracks, before you can politely slip away again. Time hasn’t passed so painfully since my last triple physics class, back in 1985. What a culture shock.

Nevertheless, I definitely tried to fit in. Said mmmm about the organic carrot and ginger nibbles, which were truly delicious; hooted with naughty laughter at the wicked ‘willy’ jokes, which were abysmal; managed (most impressively of all) to bite my tongue when they talked about their husbands’ domestic predilections as if they were not only interesting but paramount, and left—a little early, admittedly, but full of gratitude and enthusiasm.

They saw through me. Maybe they could sense I didn’t truly believe. At the school gate I bumped into the Hostess Lady-Mum, Queen Bee Lady-Mum, whose very delicious nibbles I’d mmm’d over so wholeheartedly, and I think she pretended not to see me. I sort of hopped this way and that, grinning, trying to catch her eye. She turned away. Somehow or other, I must have blown it.

In any case I shan’t dwell on it. I mustn’t obsess. They obviously all hate me, but I have to move on. It was a bad morning. A failed experiment. Suffice to say, the quest for a decent social life continues in earnest and I have decided once and for all that the ladies’ coffee mornings are not, and never were, a realistic recruiting ground. Unless of course they happen to invite me again.

In the meantime I think I’d do better looking closer to home. At the builder, for example. Actually we have two builders, a painter, a landscape gardener and five carpet layers on the property as I write. I’m talking, of course, about the good looking one, the tea and biscuit-refusing installer of our new and exorbitantly tasteful, pale green kitchen, who sings Fred Astaire songs while he works, and who is, by the way, among the most handsome men I have ever met.

While the husband was hard at work in Bucharest yesterday, the builder told me, in his lovely West Country burr, that he used to play a lot of tennis.

Well, blow my cotton socks off, and so did I!

In fact there’s a run-down, faintly depressing old tennis club in the local town and I go there once a week in search of a match. So far I’ve not had any joy. It appears that everybody in the club already has ‘their tennis organised’.

So it’s with a mixture of desperation, loneliness and, obviously, lust that I’ve been trying to summon the nerve to ask him for a match. Trouble is—what if he thinks I’m propositioning him? Or—Christ, what if I am propositioning him? Crickety-crackety, what if he thinks I’m propositioning him and he says Yes?

OK. Obviously, that was silly. Over-excited and very, very silly. He’s much too young for me. Apart from which, of course, we moved down here to be more of a family, not less: to pursue a life of good, clean, decent, honourable, innocent, monogamous fun. And that’s what we’re doing, dammit. For example, we went out in the woods yesterday, the children and I, and we built our very own bows and arrows. Out of natural sticks. God, it was fun! Or it would have been, except it was raining and the children wanted to watch telly and I was terrified about the slugs, and the arrows didn’t really work and—

Anyway the main point is, I’m married.

February 1st

Well, here’s a peculiar fact. Clare Gower, maker of immaculate ginger nibbles and agonisingly feeble willy jokes, has decided to overlook my spoddish performance at her coffee morning the other day. I was convinced she hated me, but it turns out she doesn’t hate me at all. In fact she seems quite keen to become my friend.

Not because she likes me. She couldn’t. We have nothing in common, beyond the whole life-cycle thing. I catch her looking at me sometimes with an expression of dull, vaguely pitying confusion. Nevertheless, in spite of that, in spite of my obviously being a misfit, something about me has obviously tickled her fancy. Or possibly she feels sorry for me. In any case she has invited Fin and me to a drinks party in three weeks’ time and to a dinner party—not this Saturday, not the Saturday after that, nor the one after that, nor the one after that, nor, in fact, the one after that. But the next one. Though I know that under normal circumstances Clare and I would never dream of being friends, I am, of course, extremely happy and grateful for this new development.

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