Not Married, Not Bothered

by Carol Clewlow

  ‘Actually he ran off with another comrade.’

  I was fifteen when she told me this. It was the last time I saw her. She died from cancer very suddenly a few months later. It was winter, with a hoar frost on her lawn and I was sitting in her lounge. Outside the window, my father was blowing on his fingers beneath the Healey bonnet. She picked the picture up from the top of her grand piano: her and her fiancé sitting on some hard-baked earth, in fatigues and with packs on their backs, smiling. She smiled back as she looked at it.

  She said, ‘Sometimes it’s really useful to have a dead fiancé, Riley.’ She put the picture back on the piano top, turned to look at me. She said, ‘This is a small town, Riley. I don’t know why but some people just seem happier if you can give them a good reason why you’re single.’

  That day I heard my mother call Olive a ‘skinny sex-starved old woman’. I saw my father’s hands clench and unclench at his side. There was a set look on his face and, spying from the top of the stairs, I thought he was going to hit her. But then he went to the sink, turned on the tap, began lathering his hands under it. When he spoke his words were very clear and very cold and deliberate.

  He said, ‘Well, you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you, Barbara?’

  That was how it was at home when we were kids. A terrible ongoing argument that raged along like a swollen stream, all the time underground but sometimes bursting out above the surface.

  Meal times were the worst. Our father could be cruel and very cutting.

  ‘Maybe you could tell your mother to pass that grey slop she likes to call mash,’ he said once. Another time, tasting one of her stews (and they were pretty bad), he strode to the sink and spat it out. ‘For God’s sake, woman,’ he said, ‘are you trying to poison us?’

  The serving spoon was still in her hand. She held it up as if wanting to strike him with it and her eyes were white with fury.

  ‘I wish I could. I tell you, I wish I could poison you. It would be worth going to gaol for.’

  Once, when they were arguing, Cass put her hands on the side of her head. She must have been about eight; I was three years younger. She began screaming, ‘Stop it, stop it, stop it …’ over and over.

  In the end our father jumped up and put his arms around her. Tears ran down his face. He nursed her, crying, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Cassie.’

  Mostly I solved the problem by eating very fast, throwing it all down, getting down from the table as soon as possible.

  It’s a habit that continues to this day. I still eat far too fast. I remember it was one of the things Nathan noticed about me. That first time he took me out for a meal he stared curiously across the table.

  ‘You eat like a caveman, Riley,’ he said. ‘You throw your food down. You must hardly taste it.’

  When he said it, I felt the tears prick behind my eyes. I picked up my napkin, slapped it petulantly down on the table.

  I said, ‘Don’t criticise me,’ and he stretched a hand immediately across.

  He said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m just interested, that’s all. I wondered why you ate so fast.’

  But it’s too early for Nathan.

  More, much more about Nathan later.

  Cassie and Fergie’s wedding was my last outing as a bridesmaid. It was a wedding much of its time. Proof of this is the photograph that stands on the mantelpiece of their front room, a courageous act, bearing in mind the presence of their two children.

  ‘God, you look bad, Dad.’

  ‘Thank you, son.’

  He does too, clad in the sort of cheap-looking white suit with a width of flare and lapel that could only have been expressly designed to engender scorn and derision from any fruit of the loins that would follow him.

  Not so Cassie and I. In fact we look pretty good, both of us in Biba, with big floppy hats, Cass in cream and me in that unsurpassable Biba mulberry.

  Fergie likes to say that his father would have paid Cass to marry him. A bewhiskered old major-general in the old tradition, he sent Fergie to boarding school in the same way he’d been sent. In the same way, Fergie was as thoroughly miserable.

  According to Fergie, it left him with the same inability to communicate with women that had afflicted his father, which is why he still regards himself as being rescued the day that new art teacher Cass Gordon turned up in the staff room of the local comprehensive where he was already teaching science.

  ‘No sooner looked than they loved … no sooner loved than they were screwing like bunnies.’

  ‘Yes, thank you, Archie.’ This from my sister, Cass.

  ‘Such a charming sentiment and written in such large letters, as I recall, on the wedding card Fergie’s mother opened.’

  True too. Fergie and Cass moved in together a bare few months after they met, a radical thing in our Land That Time Forgot back in the early seventies. A year later the major-general died so that Fergie was able to put down a deposit on a rambling cottage in Haviatt, a small village several miles to the west of our loony tune town, all of this occurring while I was out of the country on my travels.

  They were married a year later in their local parish church, St Michael’s where, thirty years on (God, can it be that long?) Fergie is now Tower Captain. On practice nights during the summer I sometimes bike out, and sit on the wall beneath the shadow of the church to listen to the bells and watch the evening fall on the mellow mustard-coloured stonework. Afterwards Fergie and I walk across the fields to the pub where the talk will be of the mystery of sallies and bobs and touches, bell-ringing being a foreign language to those who don’t speak it.

  From this you may deduce that I delight in the company of my brother-in-law, that I love him close on as much as I love my sister. I could call him a big cheese in his home village of Haviatt, only this would be a terrible pun on account of the fact that the place is famous for its prizewinning Cheddar. A parish councillor, Fergie also runs the pub skittle team and its folk club. This last I refuse to attend on account of a congenital dislike of beards and sandals, but, more importantly, miserable one-hundred-and-eight-verse ballads where women no better than they should be get rolled in the hay, and pregnant and/or dead afterwards. (Fergie says it’s not like this any longer but I’m not willing to take a chance on it.)

  It was a lovely wedding at St Michael’s, I’ll say this – although weddings are definitely my least favourite ceremonies – a balmy late September day with a first fine twinge of autumn about it.

  I liked Fergie from the first; not so Archie.

  We met at the rehearsal the night before. His first words, having been told of my travels, were; ‘So, Bangkok,’ this with a distinctly lecherous look in his eye. ‘Was it like Emmanuelle, then?’

  Scarcely have a best man and a bridesmaid had so little to say to each other at a reception. Forced eventually on to the dance floor with him, I said – rather cleverly, I thought – ‘Fergie’s such a nice guy. How come you ended up friends?’

  He just grinned, refusing to be insulted. ‘Cut and thrust of the rugger field, darling,’ he said. ‘All that male bonding in the showers.’

  Archie was delighted to learn this was my seventh outing as a bridesmaid. Flapping his hands and faintly bending his knees in what passed for dancing in the period, he said, ‘It’s a curse.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Absolutely. Only one way to get rid of it.’

  ‘Surprise me.’

  ‘Violent sexual congress with the best man at the immediate conclusion of the reception.’

  As Fergie revved up his battered old Ford Capri in the fond but as it turned out faint hope that it would actually carry them as far as Scotland, Cass hurled her posy in the traditional devil-may-care manner back over her shoulder. Archie, towering above the rest of the crowd of well-wishers, caught it, neatly deflecting it into my accidentally upraised hands. In a moment my mother was upon me cooing.

  ‘Oh, darling … oh, darling …’

  ‘Oh, darling … what?’ I tossed the pos
y over to her like it was radioactive.

  It was the early hours of the morning and I was collecting my coat from the hotel cloakroom when Archie finally caught me.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So … what …?’

  ‘Are you going to bed with me or not?’

  ‘That depends.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘On whether the alternative is having my toenails pulled out one by one without the benefit of anaesthetic.’

  My mother took the wedding posy home, put it on the kitchen windowsill in a vase where it withered and wilted and fell apart in the manner of Miss Havisham’s on that bridal table. The mortal remains she pressed and put in her favourite photograph album.

  Some people take the sight of a primrose as the first sign of spring, others the cool clear sound of the cuckoo. For me it will always be the moment each year when, regular as clockwork, my mother reaches up to the sideboard for that album. Opening it up, she pulls out those crumbling remnants, holds them up to the light.

  ‘Oh, you,’ she will say in tones of irritation, which have grown more intense with each passing year, and which, faced with the horrible truth of Archie’s financial elevation, now threaten to overwhelm her.

  ‘Oh, you …’

  ‘Oh, me … what?’

  ‘You … you … you could have married Archie.’

  * Discovering the derivation of this old saying, ‘Three times a bridesmaid, never a bride’ has proved surprisingly difficult, in particular why or how the figure of three came to be established as the one at which all hope should be abandoned. Listerine, the US mouthwash company, used ‘Often a bridesmaid but never a bride’ for its adverts in the 1920s, this itself an adaptation of the old British music-hall song ‘Why Am I Always the Bridesmaid?’ made famous by Lily Morris a few years earlier.

  Why am I always the bridesmaid

  And never the blushing bride?

  The very question this volume seeks to answer.

  * In fairness it should be pointed that at the time (see D for Divorce) she was in dire need of a husband.

  * A nice touch, this, from a woman who not that long hence would prove to be so much happier being single.

  C is for … Cliché

  It was Danny who gave me the idea to reclaim the word ‘spinster’.

  ‘Why not? I mean, you reclaimed queer, after all.’

  Which is true.

  Queer.

  Dyke.

  Nigger.

  Personally I’ve always thought the last a little premature, bearing in mind not everyone in the world has a burning desire to use it with affection. And I was about to say But that’s another story … And then I thought maybe not. Because all insults come from fear, after all. Witness my cousin Fleur in her Frau Goebbels days, her shoulders doing those delicate little convulsions beneath her cashmere cardigan.

  ‘I’m sorry, Riley, but I’d just be terrified at the thought. I mean, to be on my own. When I got older.’

  I decided to do a little research on the subject of the spinster. One evening I drove the twenty-five miles to Bristol to use the library of the university where I did my degree as a mature student what seems like yesterday, but is actually twenty years ago. I always go in the evening. It’s almost empty then. You could have full sex in Philosophy and no one would notice. I tapped in ‘spinster’, expecting a list to show up. You know the sort of thing, textbooks pretending to be something more interesting with racy covers and titles: Niggers with Attitude: Black Pride in the Nineties; Queering the Pitch: The Law and the Homosexual; Finger in the Dyke: A History of Anti-Woman Humour…

  Instead it came up ‘Word Not Recognised’.

  ‘I felt like I’d committed some crime against the state. I thought a grille was going to come down, some card-carrying cadre was going to escort me from the building.’

  Danny grinned. He said, ‘I guess someone PC-ed the PCs, girlfriend.’

  ‘Listen, they got so scared of spinsters back in the 1850s they hatched a plan to ship them off to the colonies.’

  ‘Wooooh. Imagine it. All those brawny farmers.’

  ‘Hey, hey. It wouldn’t be like The Piano, you know. There’d be all that ringworm and tapeworm. And it wouldn’t be like Harvey Keitel or Sam Neill would be waiting for you.’

  Most people think of post World War One as the high spot of spinsterdom (or the low spot, according to which way you look at it) but the rot had set in long before then. In the 1850s, thanks to a demographic imbalance, there were 400,000 more women than men. One in four women was single and one in three would never marry, a situation referred to in the letters columns of the daily papers as a ‘disturbance’ and a ‘mischief’, and debated in Parliament under the title The Problem of Surplus and Excess Women. The spinster became the scapegoat and all-round repository for society’s perceived ills, among her most vocal critics being her married sisters. Consider, for instance, this little number, from the allegedly liberationist Freewoman, in which the spinster is described as ‘a withered tree … an acidulous vessel under whose pale shadow we chill and whiten … silent, shamefaced, bloodless and boneless, thinned to the spirit … our social nemis …’

  It’s amazing just how much the spinster has been left out of history, feminist history in particular, more’s the shame of it. Plenty of married women in there, gay women galore, but precious little of the defiantly straight and single. All I managed to turn up in Women’s Studies that day was one measly chapter on spinstas. Still it contained details of that old spinster Export Plan. It foundered in the end, that plan, but only on the rock of sheer impracticality, the problem, according to one regretful letter in The Times being ‘the mechanical conveyance of these women to where they are wanted, given the average passenger limit of fifty persons per ship,’ a shame, this, since it almost certainly deprived some waggish old salt of the chance of urging every last woman on board with a cackle of laughter and some corny crack about not wanting them to miss the boat second time round.

  ‘Missing the boat’ is a cliché when applied to spinsters. So is ‘left on the shelf’ and ‘old maid’ and that very word ‘spinsterish’. But then, spinsters attract clichés.

  ‘So what? So do married women.’ This from my sister, Cass.

  ‘No they don’t. At least not in the same way.’

  Which I believe to be true. Because while it may be the case that somewhere in an alternative reality, accessible only to ad men through some wormhole of time, there are indeed mothers whose major concern in life is the softness of the wash and the germ-free nature of their kitchen floor (asopposed, for instance, to how they can slide into work late without anyone seeing them because they had to take little Johnny to the doctor, or how they can get away from some garrulous over-shot meeting to pick him from the child-minder), still clichés no longer cling to the married woman the way they do to the spinsta, sticking to her like burrs, and turning her into some metaphorical horse chestnut.

  ‘Hummph …’

  It’s the nearest I can get to the sound Cass makes but from it you can deduce that she is unimpressed with my campaign to reclaim ‘spinster’.

  ‘It’s a horrible word. No matter how you spell it. Nobody uses it any more.’

  ‘John Major does.’

  ‘I rest my case.’

  You may not remember this but some years ago our former Prime Minister had a dream of Old Albion which had all to do with warm beer, the sound of leather on willow from the village green, but most important and heart-warming of all, the sight of a spinster, all tweed and lisle stockings, pedalling through the early morning mist to Holy Communion on her sit-up-and-beg bicycle.

  Tweeds and lisle? Sit-up-and-beg bicycle? Excuse me?*

  Yeah, C is for cliché alright, also for Caricature, that picture of her as ‘bloodless and boneless, thinned to the spirit,’ this being anti-spinster speak for ‘celibate’ under which she’s listed in Roget’s Thesaurus, also for Cardboard Cut-out, the picture of her in tweeds and lisle st
ockings peddling through the early morning mist, also for Calumny – another cliché, this, a favourite of film and play and novel, the lonely spinster with nowhere to go on Sunday afternoons but the homes of relatives, married with children.

  Ha!

  Behind every successful single woman there are other successful single women. Show me a spinster and I’ll show you the proud and grateful possessor of a fine circle of female friends – in my case Mad Magda, for instance, who you’ve already met, Sophie and Connie who have yet to appear, others too who you won’t meet but only because they have no particular part to play in this drama. I think of them as a sort of Greek chorus, standing at the back of the stage and carrying the narrative of life forward with visits to the cinema, the theatre, Ikea, dinners out, dinners in. Because the fact is that far from being lonely and with a duff social life, the spinster can generally be counted on to have a wider circle of friends than those who spend their lives as part of a couple, this for the obvious reason that she has more time and energy to expend on her friendships than those with partners and/or children. More likely than not, her friendships will be long and deep, this because she knows the truth of the thing – that friendships, the ones that count, are relationships too, and go through the same traumas and tensions, and require the same amount of time and energy, faith, hope and charity to keep them going.*

  In all this, these canards, these cock-and-bull stories, C stands for contempt, for a curl of the lip. On the other hand, C also stands for Cat, biggest of all spinster clichés.

  Which is why I won’t have one, despite all Cassie’s urging.

  ‘Cats are not just for Christmas, Cass,’ I say when she starts in on me as fat old Hughie, her favourite, leaps up and starts purring contentedly on my lap. ‘It’s all that responsibility. Bringing them up. Finding the right schools. Putting their paws on the right path in life. I just don’t feel I’m up to it.’ And there’s more than a scrap of truth in all this.