Not Married, Not Bothered

by Carol Clewlow

  Some said we did this thing because of a war, others because of a lack of one. Whatever. I did the same as everyone else anyway, went on the Hippy Trail, joined that crazy, grand, absurd, pretend peace and love diaspora.

  It was the day before I left Nepal for Bangkok when it came to me, that thing about freedom. I’d hired a bike, cycled out of Kathmandu. I was lying down on the grass verge with the scent of the pines in my nostrils, the wheels of the bike still whirring and clicking beside me.

  As I stared up into the crystal-blue canopy above me, I thought about everyone back home and, in particular, I thought about them working and I felt a deep, satisfied sense of pleasure that I was here doing nothing.

  I thought, this is what freedom feels like. And the revelation seemed so real and so true I could have reached out and touched it.

  It seemed to come right out of the heart of all that blueness.

  * Still, if you’ve done the West Country tour, which I’ll warrant more than a few of you have, you won’t have too much trouble identifying it.

  * Even though those who know say all this is just early spin-doctoring on the part of the abbey.

  † Previously, you may recall, Millington’s Café where Aunt Fran shamelessly stole Uncle Hugh from my mother.

  * Nettles for Health, Your Aura and You, Chakra Cleansing for Beginners, Mysteries of the Tarot, etc., etc., all Demeter Press, available from the Avalon Alternative Health and Therapy Centre, Hocus Pocus and by mail order.

  F is for … Finances

  I guess I should go back to Bangkok now. Because that’s what writers do, isn’t it? When they want the past and the present to collide in their head. They go back to the scene of the affair. Which is what I should do – hole up in some backstreet hotel, beat out the story on an old upright Smith Corona with the sounds of the city outside the window, and the sun slanting through the dirty dusty Venetian blinds and making patterns on the wall, all of which would remind me conveniently of Nathan’s hotel room and our afternoon lovemaking sessions. Except that I don’t remember us making love in the afternoon, and anyway I can’t go back because I never go anywhere now. For one thing I can’t fly.

  ‘Can’t?’ Archie’s look was curious over the top of his glass as the hubbub of Fergie’s party rose and fell around us.

  ‘No.’ I could feel myself growing defensive. ‘Look, it’s no big deal. I just don’t like flying, that’s all.’

  He said, ‘No one likes flying, Riley.’

  Being an aviophobe (thanks, Peter) or if you prefer it a pteromerhanophobe, isn’t the only thing that keeps my feet on the ground. The other reason I don’t travel is that I can’t afford it. Not a problem that afflicts the former, now reformed Frau Goebbels.

  A week on from the phobia clinic opening I met her in the High Street. She was all Nike-ed up on her way to the gym. In training. For her holiday. Seems she’d done another rethink, this on the aromatherapy course. Now she’d signed up for one of those heavy-duty hi-adventure holidays, white-water rafting, hang-gliding round Everest or something. In Hocus Pocus, where she dragged me for a coffee, she thrust a brochure in my face. It was full of bronzed surfer types with very white teeth doing exciting things in lifejackets and baggy shorts and very black sunglasses.

  ‘Ah, bless,’ as I said to Cass. ‘And Martin, the poor mutt, still thinks she’s coming back to him.’

  I know this is what Martin thinks on account of the fact that he told me. I bumped into him by chance a few days later although ‘bumped into’ is scarcely the right term. Alerted by the merry strains of the accordion and seeing the knot of visitors in the Market Place, and thus the lie of the land, I leapt into a shop doorway. But too late. Mid-leap he caught my eye above the crowd and gave his handkerchief an extra loud snap in the air to show that he’d seen me.

  Against all the odds, Martin is a morris dancer, although perhaps not, bearing in mind that for him morris dancing represents the raffish and unpredictable side to his nature. Like so many of his kind (i.e., the bank manager, two solicitors, surveyor and accountant who constitute the rest of the troop) he thinks it’s evidence of the fact that he’s not boring, an allegation apparently that Fleur not only made to me, but more cruelly flung at him at the time of their parting.

  ‘Boring. Can you believe it? That’s what she called me.’

  There’s a sorrowful confusion on his face that would have touched my heart if I hadn’t remembered just in time that he was an estate agent.

  Even Martin’s ankle bells had a mournful tinkle to them that day. His mood could be detected in the half-hearted way he flapped his handkerchief.

  ‘It’s just a phase she’s going through,’ he said, using it to mop his brow as we sat on the town hall steps. ‘She just needs a break, that’s all – a bit of space. That’s why I agreed to get her the flat.’ The misery was beginning to subside by now and his eyes were becoming matter-of-fact and hopeful. ‘What do you think, Riley?’

  I couldn’t answer, not for the lump in my throat – there wasn’t one (like I say, in the last analysis Martin is still an estate agent) – merely for the memory of all those beautiful baggy-shorted young men and Fleur’s lustfully glowing enthusiasm.

  ‘I should have thought this would be the sort of thing you’d fancy, Riley,’ she said that day, pushing the page towards me from which a particularly appealing tousle-haired young Icarus stared out at me, dark glasses exploding into stars of sunlight.

  ‘Not me,’ I said, flipping the brochure closed and pushing it back across the table. ‘Me, I get all the adrenalin rush I need just opening the post in the morning.’

  Listen, do you ever get the feeling that Life’s a card game, and that you’re the only one at the table busking it because you don’t know the rules? Well, that’s pretty much the way I’ve always felt watching other people get married. I’d poke in and around my own heart, trying to find something, a yearning, an inclination, finding only a gap, an absence where both were supposed to be. At the same time I’d know it had to be me, that there had to be a good reason why people got married, since most of them did it. And now I’ve discovered it. The explanation. The reason it’s so popular. The hitherto unspoken, undisclosed Official Secret that everybody else knew but forgot to mention to me. The biggest cliché in the book. So bloody obvious it was staring me in the face.

  Two can live as cheaply as one, right? And while it’s not Isaac Newton and the apple, or Archimedes and the bath, still it explains why any sensible human being should want to get married.

  You wouldn’t think it would take so long to dawn on me, would you? This simple truth. Or that it would appear in the manner of that Great White Light on the Road to Damascus. But that’s exactly what happened as I complained to Cass about Fleur’s cavalier use of the word ‘single’.

  ‘Look, I’ve earnt the title. I’ve paid all my own bills all my life.’

  Which is the precise moment when it exploded over my head like some sort of revelation, the simple fact that all those marrieds and cohabitees, being à deux, only have to find the cash for half of the bills that drop down on their doormat every month while I, being one alone and single, have to fork out for the whole damn lot of them.

  Question: if two people can live as cheaply as one, then how much is one alone paying as compared with one living as part of a twosome? Write on both sides of the page, preferably using graphs and pie charts.

  ‘When you think about it, it really costs to stay single,’ I moaned one day to Sophie.

  ‘So what?’ she said. ‘Everything in life costs one way or another.’ And I see that. But still …

  According to a recent survey* the average married fifty-year-old with a mortgage, pension and all the other joint accumulated financial paraphernalia assembled after the best part of thirty years spent together, is worth about fifty grand. By contrast the average never-married single of the same age is likely to be worth only half of that (in my case, if only, but that’s another story), good grounds for gett
ing married, I can see that (although personally I’d want at least a couple of mill, plus a peerage and the thanks of a grateful nation).

  The main reason why married couple’s finances are supposed to be better in general than those of single people – and this according to the same survey – is that coupledom forces those involved to do more financial planning, this because most will be wanting children, and therefore know that up ahead somewhere, sometime they’ll be faced by major financial considerations like university fees and, in the case of daughter or daughters (unless they can be persuaded to elope), large and expensive white weddings.

  Being part of a couple, it’s alleged, acts as a brake on spending, because individuals in the relationship have to account for their purchases to a partner and are thus unlikely to indulge in splurges in the manner of single people. ‘Absolute rubbish,’ according to Cass, citing somewhat tersely as evidence her discovery only minutes earlier of Fergie reading the paper, in his dirty overalls on the new white sofa she’d bought in her lunch time and had delivered. His excuse, shouted in an injured tone from halfway up the stairs where he’d been sent to change, ‘Well, no one mentioned a new sofa to me,’ appears to further bear out her argument.

  Tie the knot at thirty, according to the survey, and merely by doing so you’ll increase your personal financial potential by some fourteen per cent. Come seventy-five, and the Marks and Spencer’s slippered pantaloon, oh, married sister, you’ll be worth a full thirty per cent more than the spinster.

  There’s a catch to all this, though, and I’ll warrant some of you have already spotted it and quite possibly from bitter experience. To stay in the money, you have to stay married.

  For spinsters, as it turns out, are not at the bottom of the pile financially. That honour goes to the newly single, those people currently in the middle of a separation.

  Clearly there are exceptions to this rule. I’m sure we can all name one from within these pages. In general, however, the income of a woman, especially one with a young child or children, nose-dives on the break-up of a marriage.

  Widows may also suffer the same fate. On the other hand, they may just emerge from their husband’s death doing the Merry Widow waltz. Which you might say is what happened to our mother.

  George Gordon died one wet Wednesday afternoon returning from a car auction in his well-loved, much-mended old Humber Snipe, a tank of a car, which when it left the road on the bend, managed to crash through a hedge and fence before hitting a tree, and all this with only a small dent to its bumper.

  George’s death was his finest hour, as far as Babs was concerned, thanks to the discovery of the insurance policies in the bottom drawer of his desk. This, plus the sale of the much-depised garage, left her what she always wanted to be, comfortably off and still respectably married in the eyes of the world, but without the day-to-day irritation of a husband.

  Words cannot describe the speed and dexterity with which our mother metamorphosed from carping, miserably mis-married wife to tragic heartbroken widow. Oh … George … achieved with his death what he could never have achieved in his lifetime. He became ‘Poor George’, and ‘Dear George’, and finally, ‘My George’, this a last self-satisfied little sideswipe at all those damned spinsters.

  Cass and Fergie had been married only six weeks when our father died. Still, it was lucky in its way, this because at least it meant that Fergie was now a member of the family and was thus able to officially identify the body. It was his first experience of mortality being still a young man. He came back shaken and with Archie who’d come down to help.

  ‘Why are you here?’ I said to Archie, unreasonably angrily.

  ‘Why do you think?’ he said, which I thought didn’t answer the question.

  In fact he did prove to be helpful, not least to me. He provided me with a butt for my anger. I was hurting inside and out over my father’s death. I wanted to vent all that hurt on someone and Archie seemed eminently suitable.

  ‘What is the matter with you?’ Cass said, angry herself after I’d shouted at him to leave me alone when he’d tried to comfort me.

  ‘He shouldn’t be here,’ I said. ‘It’s family.’

  ‘Don’t be so bloody unreasonable,’ she said. ‘Can’t you see how useful he is, particularly for Fergie?’

  At our father’s funeral, our mother carried her wreath before her like the Queen at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday. Afterwards she stood at the lich-gate in her new little black suit and her six-inch heels and her Jackie O pillbox, dabbing at her eyes through the veiling.

  The line of mourners stretched down the church path. Most were customers, people whose cars he’d repaired for next to nothing with that string and those six-inch nails, among them a small flotilla of spinsters.

  ‘Paying their respects,’ our mother snarled in an aside, dropping the tragic widow act for one blissful moment. ‘Why not? They paid for bugger all else in his lifetime.’

  I wanted to shout at her then, I remember. I wanted to shout, ‘So what? What does it matter?’ I wanted to tell her right there, under the lich-gate, what an awful human being I thought she was. How much better I believed he was than she. How angry I was that by sheer bad luck the only decent part of my parentage was now dead with the stupid, rotten vain part left behind. I stormed away, up the path, beside the line of mourners to get away from her, to be alone. I found a quiet spot hidden from view in the furthest corner of the graveyard where I sat on an ancient gravestone that had fallen flat, and was resting under a tree, which is where Archie found me.

  ‘I’m sorry …’ he said, the words hesitant. ‘Cass sent me. They’ve left for the house. I’ve to give you a lift.’

  ‘I don’t want a lift with you,’ I said, astonished because I hadn’t been crying before but now I was. Suddenly tears that had not been there a moment before were running down my face. ‘I don’t want to go with you. You of all people. I never wanted to see you again, you know that.’

  He took a step towards me. He said, ‘Look, Riley … please … I just want to say something.’ But my shouted words stopped him in his tracks.

  ‘I don’t want you to say something. Don’t you understand? I just want you to go away.’ I laid a hand on my heart, feeling suddenly faint. Violently sick. ‘Go away …’ I said. ‘Go away. How many times do I have to ask you? Just leave me alone, will you?’ and I dropped down on the stone.

  I heard his steps receding behind my back as I threw up in the long grass beside it.

  I didn’t join my mother in that large overwrought wreath. Instead I bought a dozen red roses. When I’d finished being sick, I went back to the grave where the gravediggers were just picking up their shovels.

  I threw one of the roses in and it landed on the coffin with a soft empty swish and an air of finality.

  I stood there beside the open grave that day listening to the unforgiving sound of the spades and the whump of the earth as it landed on the coffin. I felt as if something had been cut away from me.

  To be frank, it’s a feeling that’s never left me.

  * Carried out for BestInvestment.com and reported in my mother’s paper.

  G is for … Gamophobia

  I am not the only one to suffer from fear of flying. The list of famous aviophobes is long and distinguished: Twiggy, who takes Dr Bach’s Rescue Remedy for it (it’s never worked for me); Stanley Kubrick, who had to recreate the Vietnam War in Pinewood because of it; Dennis Bergkamp, the Arsenal and Dutch player who leaves several days ahead of the rest of his team to get to European matches, plus some American female rock star who can’t tour because of it but whose name, unfortunately, I can’t remember. On behalf of all of them, I’d like to ask – and particularly of Bad Ponytail Peter who insists it must be cured – what is so damn phobic about being scared of being locked up in some aluminium tube half a mile in the air, and this in the full knowledge that any moment some crazy might take over the cockpit or Jonathan Livingstone Seagull do a nose dive into one of the en
gines. From this you will deduce I don’t regard fear of flying as remotely phobic. To me aviophobia is like ballistophobia (fear of bullets and missiles) or lilapsophobia (fear of hurricanes and tornados) or nucleomituphobia (fear of nuclear weapons), all of which are on Bad Ponytail Peter’s list, and all – as far as I can see – utterly inapplicable as phobias since they concern things which by their very nature only a complete idiot would not be scared of.

  I feel much the same way about gamophobia.

  Fear of marriage.

  I used to think I was some sort of oddity, some beast with a brand on my forehead with regard to my gamophobia but now I don’t think so. Tell you the truth, I think that, as a condition, it’s getting as common as measles. For a start, people are putting it off. The average age for marriage now is thirty for men, twenty-eight for women, a rise of five years over the last quarter of a century.* The way things are going, in fifty years’ time, people will be hitting the big four-oh before they clamber into their wedding clobber.

  As much as anything, of course, this has to do with the increased social acceptance of cohabiting instead of, or prior to, marriage. A quarter of the nation is now shacked up without benefit of clergy – or Living In Sin as my mother prefers to call it – a figure expected to double over the next ten years. As a result of this more than forty per cent of the nation’s babies are now born to cohabiting couples, a ten per cent rise over the last decade. Cue a bout of enthusiastic tutting from my mother when she read it in her morning paper.

  ‘All those children born out of wedlock.’

  ‘Out of wedlock. For God’s sake, you’ll be saying “wrong side of the blanket” next. We’re not living in a Catherine Cookson novel, Mother.’

  Meanwhile there’re no prizes for guessing just why society got a taste for cohabitation as opposed marriage. It’s because it’s not marriage, that’s why. Because it’s not quite that final. Because it represents a resting place, a place to draw breath, to hold back, think twice. A place where there’s still a let-out clause, a light still shining at the end of the tunnel. All the marriage-shy spinster does, as usual, is raise her head that bit higher above the parapet.