Not Married, Not Bothered

by Carol Clewlow

  ‘We’re living too long, that’s the problem.’

  This is Sophie’s theory about society’s increasing inability to contemplate a future without that light, however faint, glimmering at the end of the tunnel. ‘Let’s face it, if you know there’s a racing chance you’re going to get carried off by cholera, or stabbed in the back in a street brawl, you’re not going to waste your time agonising about whether you’re really settling down with the right person.’

  I reckon there’s truth in this. After all, back when old age was kicking in anywhere from the late thirties onwards, we didn’t have to worry about our futures and whether they were open-ended or otherwise. All we had to do was to listen for the sound of those winged chariot wheels at our back and get the hell on with it.*

  ‘I blame medical science. It’s gone ahead extending our lives physically without giving us the mental and emotional resources to cope with it. Human kind cannot bear too much reality.’

  ‘Well, not when you realise you might have to bear it under the same roof with someone till you’re ninety …’

  What I believe is that we’re a scientific age and what we’d really like is some sort of True Love test. Why they bother taking us to the moon when this is what we really want I simply can’t answer.

  ‘We need a sort of Love Thermometer to take its temperature,’ I said to Sophie, ‘or piece of litmus paper that would turn pink.’

  ‘Or a beaker of something,’ she said. ‘Stick the thing in and see if after thirty years that it would still be fizzing.’

  But that’s the trouble with love, isn’t it? Somewhere along the line it has to become a relationship. When it comes to luuurve, it’s praxis that’s the problem. It’s not theoretical. It can’t be investigated, experimented with in the laboratory. The only way you get to see if it works, if it’s the Real Thing, is to try it out in the field. Test it to destruction. Commit. Shack up. Move in together. Get married.

  I said to Sophie once, ‘Do you love Denis?’ and she turned in surprise.

  ‘Good God, no.’ She looked genuinely shocked.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because if I loved him, I’d do something about it.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘What do you think? Live with him. Make a life together.’ And I can tell you, that was an answer that shocked me.

  Denis Dalassis is policeman, one of those disconcerting ones who look too much like the part they’re playing. Only last week one of our more distinguished local drug dealers up before the Bench claimed he’d only resisted arrest on account of the fact he thought he’d seen Denis on The Bill a week earlier.*

  Sophie met Denis at one of those death-by-buffet official functions she was attending as editor. By the end of the evening they were in bed together.

  ‘You disapprove. Why don’t you admit it?’

  ‘Not me. You know me. I’m too lazy to disapprove of anything.’

  About Denis, I say, ‘I don’t know what you see in him,’ but it’s not strictly true. I’ve never really done chunky, bald and sexy but if I did, well, probably I’d go for Denis.

  Sometimes I think Sophie was designed to be a mistress. She’s large and handsome and lush. She’s a bit like Denis in this respect. She looks like the part she’s playing. She was always this way. We had an elegant ground-floor flat in those early junior reporter days, high ceilings, swagged curtains, and in the case of Sophie’s bedroom, French windows leading into the back garden, something particularly useful even then, given that her lovers were both numerous and married.

  ‘Married men suit me,’ she told me the first time one came in through the window. ‘You’ll just have to accept it.’

  Whether I have or not is a matter of dispute between us. She says I haven’t and maybe she’s right. Whether adultery is right or wrong in any moral stroke religious sense I can’t say. I’ve had no religious training, and this thanks to my mother.* I think I can safely say I’m not up for anyone being stoned for it. I’ve tried to figure out how I feel about it in my heart, and in the end I’m forced to confess that Sophie’s probably right. I do disapprove, and this because, advanced gamophobe that I am, I don’t understand how any two people, same sex or otherwise, are crazy enough to contemplate attempting to live under one roof together. I wouldn’t try it in the same way I wouldn’t try bungee jumping, or hang-gliding or any of that other white-knuckle stuff that Fleur has signed up for, and all for the same reason. That the potential for something going wrong, for serious damage to one’s person, is clearly enormous. That some people do contemplate this folly, this Impossible Dream, I consider nothing short of a miracle, so that the least I can do is give them a round of applause and cut them some slack, this rather than circle round them like some blood-sniffing piranha.

  As in: ‘Well, anyone can see the marriage is not really working …’

  And: ‘They’ve never really been happy…’

  And, my personal favourite: ‘Of course, he only stays for the children.’

  None of which I’m happy to say my friend Sophie ever uses.

  In fact she’s Miss Moral Majority when it comes to men leaving their children.

  ‘I totally disapprove. Completely unnecessary. The last thing I’d want is for him to walk out on his family.’

  ‘That’s because you’re not interested in anything but your twice-a-week liaisons.’

  ‘Absolutely. And that suits him too. The last thing he’d want is to move in with me.’

  Still I can’t leave it.

  ‘Affairs are so yesterday, don’t you think? Just so damn corny. If he died you’d have to do that thing the mistresses do.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You know. Like in the movies. Turn up to the funeral in some bad Marlene Dietrich mac and stand under a dripping umbrella on the edge of the mourners.’

  ‘Pooh … I wouldn’t go.’

  ‘Good.’ Cause you needn’t think I’m coming with you.’

  Theoretically, spinsters should be good adultery material, I can see that. Theoretically I should be like Sophie, i.e., married men really should suit me. But the fact is that, to me, having an affair is no better than being married. In fact worse. None of the advantages, i.e., in-house sex and housekeeping money, just the disadvantages.

  Because I look at Denis, pictured in the paper, standing beside his wife at some function or other, or with his kids at some school prize-giving, and I think in some way, however distant, however tenuous, Sophie’s already a part of that, an outreach, a tentacle in this unacknowledged extended family.

  ‘Look, you still have that thing of belonging.’

  ‘No I don’t.’

  ‘Yes you do. Think about it. I mean, you’re still a part of something. You’re still joining something. Organising your life around a family diary.’

  And I never wanted that, that’s all. I never wanted to be a part of something, that’s the point. I never was a joiner.

  All of which is fine and dandy, or it would be if this was the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about my dislike of Denis. Because there’s another baser reason why I don’t like Denis and I’m pretty sure Sophie knows it. It has to do with the first time she introduced us, the words that he said, in particular the way that he said them.

  ‘So …’ he said, ‘Riley …’ all knowing, ironical and morally neutral in that way that’s a CID speciality. ‘How is our good friend Lennie?’

  * * *

  At Cass and Fergie’s party Archie stared over the top of his glass at me. He said, ‘So how come you got to be so broke, Riley?’

  I said, ‘Oh, you know. Talent. Perseverance. A feeling for the subject.’

  He said, ‘Really? I heard you threw it all away on a waster, Riley.’

  I had a dream about Lennie once. It was when I knew the thing was finally behind me. He was in a garage in my dream, in overalls working on a car, which just goes to show how ludicrous dreams can be. Because Lennie never worked on a ca
r in his life. Lennie only just about knew where to put the petrol in, and wherever he is now, dead or alive, and whatever car he’s driving, I can guarantee he hasn’t a clue how to check the oil or the tyre pressure.

  That was pretty much the only intriguing thing about Lennie. The way he played against type. How entirely useless he was at all things mechanical. Like the video he brought home, the most complicated and expensive one on the market. In the two years we were together, we never could go out when our favourite programme was on, this because he couldn’t figure out how to work the video machine. (My first major triumph, awash with grief, my first step towards recovery, would be sitting down one day to teach myself how to set it.)

  In my dream, I came behind Lennie with a cricket bat, which is also strange, bearing in mind that cricket also played no part in our relationship. In fact I’d say if Lennie had another saving grace it was that he had no interest in sport, either playing it or watching it on the television. In the dream I raised the bat high in the air with both hands and brought it down on the back of his head with a vengeance and a terrible crack that I can still hear echoing in my head all this time later. He went down when I hit him. Face forward, dropping like a stone, the way the nameless B actor does over the green baize table when De Niro hits him in Casino.

  In the dream Lennie lay there on the floor perfectly still, the blood oozing out of his head over the grey concrete and I stood there looking down at him. I knew absolutely that he was dead. I dropped down on my haunches and put my head in my hands, feeling a sick sorrow and despair, the worse sickness and sorrow and despair I knew any human being could feel in their life, this because I’d taken a life, Lennie’s life – not just because of the morality of it, not just because I knew it was wrong to kill, but because I knew I’d fucked my life up doing it; that because of this desire for revenge, it was over as well as Lennie’s, and this, again, not just because I’d be going to gaol, although I knew that I would be, but more because I knew I’d never be free of it, this thing that I’d done, that I’d never be able to wash it away, turn the clock back to a time when it had never happened. I knew that in one terrible moment I’d thrown away all my hopes of peace and happiness in my one-and-only brief stay on the planet. And that’s when I woke up shaking.

  It’s not possible to overestimate the relief I felt when my eyelids fluttered open that morning, when I saw my bedroom, all the familiar things, my clothes, books, CDs, the television, the smooth untroubled duvet beneath my fingers. But relief is a pitiful word that comes nowhere near it. Because in that moment of waking I felt the greatest joy I do believe it’s possible for any human being to feel. What I felt in that moment of waking was that I’d been given my life back, a feeling so strong that all that day, the next too, even the day after that, it wouldn’t go away. Instead it stayed with me, making everything I did, even the simplest things, washing the dishes, reading a book, seem that much richer and deeper.

  And while I’m not a religious person, and while I don’t really understand all that Christian stuff about resurrection, still I can tell you that the word that most approximates what I felt on waking from that dream, and looking round my bedroom and seeing all those familiar things just sitting there and recognising that none of it had happened is exactly that.

  It felt like a Resurrection.*

  * Figures from the Office of National Statistics.

  * Not, I hasten to add, that that greaseball Andrew Marvell would ever have got his hand on my knee with that old winged chariots at our back argument.

  * Far from being embarrassed about this, or seeking in any way to exert undue influence on Sophie not to use the story, he was delighted when she put it on Page One. Something that should tell all you need to know about Denis.

  * ‘Oh, right it would have to be my fault, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Of course it would. Dammit, you are my mother.’

  * As a matter of fact when it happened, it wasn’t a cricket bat at all, just a paper knife. A paperknife and a feeling that anything, anything, would be better than having Lennie walking around on the planet.

  H is for … Heroines

  Right. Important this. So here we are: a few spinster heroines off the top of my head and in no particular order.

  Florence Nightingale. Formerly of the Establishment for Gentlewomen During Illness in Harley Street, latterly and in one massive leap the Crimea War: four miles of beds, 2,300 wounded men (‘not an average of three limbs per man’) and, more importantly, not a basin or a towel or a bar of soap between them; fighting dirt and disease but mostly the scandalous incompetence of the (male) chief medical officers content to sit out the war filling in requisition forms in the full and certain knowledge that nothing so requested was ever going to arrive. In Sebastopol she undertook feats of organisation that make mobilising the Gulf War look like an exercise for beginners. She totally reorganised the hospital, its kitchen and laundry, instituting major improvements including repaving corridors, reflooring wards and installing a new drainage system. In the process, she not only saved hundreds, probably thousands of lives, but revolutionised battlefield medicine. Arriving home at the end of the war, the same woman who had done all of this took to her bed where she stayed for the next thirty-odd years. Some say exhaustion was responsible but others disgust, that she took one look at what was on offer to her as a spinster in the society of the time and turned her back on it for ever. She died in 1910, still a tireless pamphleteer on behalf of military medicine (‘whether the system or no-system … is to be… patched up temporarily, as you give a beggar half pence – or made equal to the wants …’). And all this in a time, let us not forget, when, as a spinster, her official status was that of a ‘surplus and excess woman’.

  The Brontës. Emily and Anne, that is, spinsters both, but minus Charlotte, who went on to marry, which wasn’t the worst of her crimes. First off little Anne, who while generally agreed to be the least talented of the trio, still manages a rivetingly truthful portrait of life before battered wives’ homes in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall; then Emily who, as they say, needs no introduction, having written Wuthering Heights, one of the few books that you could actually slap the words tour de force across the top and not be embarrassed, a fact that unquestionably so stuck in Charlotte’s craw she took a Judas-like revenge, writing a fawning apology for it after Emily’s death, and this in the guise of loving sister. In the process she propounded one of the greatest literary calumnies of all time, saying Emily ‘did not know what she had done’, making her out to be some sort of a cartoon spinster with no more knowledge of the world ‘than a nun has of the country people who sometimes pass her convent gates’. And this from a two-bit penny dreadful writer whose best effort was the simpering Reader-I-married-him Jane Eyre. (Synopsis: Oh Lord, aren’t I just the plainest thing… how could anyone ever love me? … oh, you’re blind with a scar, Mr R, so that’s alright then …). Charlotte was the last of the three to go, dying in pregnancy a few months after marrying her father’s curate. Serves her right, I say.

  Louisa M. Alcott. Whose Little Women became Good Wives, although she did not herself. The second of four daughters of Bronson Alcott, a Transcendentalist thinker and social reformer whose persona as All-Round Good Sport and Friend of Mankind was pretty much paid for by Louisa, since while he was out speechifying and receiving the praise and adoration of his admirers, she was at home teaching, writing and sewing and ruining her health to put food on the table. While everyone knows about the Little Women and Good Wives, few know about Work, something as can be seen by the above she clearly knew a hell of a lot about. It took her eleven years to write the novel, and while something less than sparky in parts, still it’s a noble attempt to paint a faithful picture of the range of work available to spinsters at the time, i.e., servant, seamstress, governess or actress. The heroine, Christie, remains single throughout the novel until right at the end, when she marries, although Louisa shows what may well be her true inclinations, dispatching the husban
d from a fever a few months after the wedding, and leaving Christie free to pursue her true destiny as single parent, and reformer seeking to better the lives of working women. While Louisa’s writing eventually brought her some financial reward, enabling her among other things to raise her dead sister’s child, in the end financial security came too late. Often ill at the end of her life, certainly dispirited, she wrote: ‘When I had the youth, I had not the money; now I have the money I have no time; and when I get the time, if I ever do, I shall have no health to enjoy life.’ She died, almost certainly from exhaustion, the day her father was buried.

  (‘God, this is miserable.’ Sophie.)

  Never mind. A few more names, all worthy of placing their handprints in the wet concrete of that spinster Pavement of Fame:

  Emily Dickinson, a woman who wrote poetry, as one critic put it, ‘indefatigably as some women cook or knit’ (Lord love the man, he was writing in 1959). Flannery O’Connor, who lived with her mother and raised chickens and peacocks, and who had lupus and never made it to forty yet still managed to write all those extraordinary stories. Jacqueline Gold, a.k.a. Ann Summers, for services to spinsters (work it out for yourself), Beatrice, of course, already mentioned, from Much Ado, so merrily grateful to God for not sending her a husband: ‘for the which blessing I am at him upon my knees every morning and evening …’ And last, but definitely not least …

  Iaia of Cyzicus, sometimes called Lalia, who gets a special mention in Pliny on two counts, first because she outsold all the male painters of her time and place (first century BC, Rome,) and secondly because she stayed unmarried. According to Gaius Plinius Secundus, scientist, historian, observer of the natural world and all-round garrulous geezer, Iaia ‘painted with a brush … and also drew on ivory with an engraving tool.’ She did mainly female portraits, including a large picture on wood, Old Woman at Neapolis, and a self-portrait done with the aid of a mirror. ‘No one produced a picture faster than she did,’ says Gaius the Geezer, ‘and her artistic skill was so great that in the prices her pictures fetched she far exceeded the most famous portrait painters of the period, namely Sopolis and Dionysis, whose pictures fill the art galleries.’ So there.