As a new mother Magda was, natch, radiant. Breast- feeding with six shows a day (doors open half an hour before performance).
‘I feel so utterly POWERFUL.’ I can see her now tracing a finger around the rosebud lips clamped to her breast and gratefully guzzling. ‘It’s so wonderful. To know that you can be loved by something so utterly unconditionally.’
I find it impossible to think of that moment now without seeing those rosebud lips the way they are today.*
Meanwhile, if spinsters have their heroines then I guess they have their bêtes noires as well, and top of my list would be that other Old Testament matriarch Rachel. Rachel, most famous of late mothers, clutching her fist and shaking it at her husband and at empty heaven too, I guess.
‘Give me children or I die.’
I’ve never had much sympathy for Rachel. There’s something so petulant, so goddamn unhealthy about that peevish blackmailing cry.
Maybe it cuts me out of the argument, not having that body clock ticking away. I don’t know. On the other hand, from where I’m looking it seems like anyone who wants a baby so much they’re willing to get pregnant past the bus pass age, or have it in someone’s else womb, or clone it in a Petri dish, should probably be prevented by law from having one. What worries me more is that, as far as I can see, there’s still a sort of unspoken but residual feeling that any or all this behaviour is marginally more sane, certainly more understandable and societally acceptable than deciding in a cool, calm level-headed way that you don’t want children.
‘Don’t you want to be a woman?’
I remember the words from my spell in public relations, the one that propelled me into university, writing copy on everything from nappies to narrow boat holidays, and this for a brace of neanderthals (a nice touch of alliteration), one of whom, leaking ash down his lapels, over the restaurant table as we celebrated winning the bonny baby paddy puffy nappy contract, leant in at me, leering too (which is peculiar), and this after I’d disclosed how wildly unqualified I was to write about such products, never having wanted children.
Don’t you want to be a woman?
Which is a good question, I’ll give him that – one, I guess, that gets to the heart of the business, this by expressing the notion that the state of being a woman can be formalised, summed up and circumscribed in this way, i. e., by the production of a child. A further question being, why so? Because if being a man doesn’t have procreation written into it by definition, doesn’t require this for its legitimacy, why then should it dog the feet of women?
‘It doesn’t.’
‘Yes it does. You don’t see it, Cass. But that’s because you’re not single and childless.’
Within ten years, or so they say, infertility will be a thing of the past. It’s big business and growing bigger by the day, this while whole areas of misery in terms of human health grub for funding – migraine, for instance, from which Danny’s father has suffered viciously all his life, preaching his way through the pain; and lupus which Fergie’s mother, Etty, now has, confining her to the sofa for half the day, depressing her beyond the reach of medication, conditions going to all intents and purposes unregarded while money pours into infertility treatment.
‘As if we really are a brave new world,’ as I said to Cass. ‘As if we really are a throwaway society, and the not-yet-born have become more important than the living.’
Personally, I can’t see how the whole infertility business is anything but a step backwards in the advancement of women. And maybe we have heaven to blame for this, that first judgement that set the precedent, that saw the justice of Rachel’s case after she’d hurled up that outraged cry, so that when she gave birth, it was not just to a child but more ominously to her right to produce one. But if every woman has a right to have a child – the axis on which the whole baby business turns – then having a child must be at least part of what it means to be a woman, and my ash- covered friend was right. It becomes a defining feature, perhaps even – and this is the next step – the defining feature. And where does that leave women who don’t want children? Because if not being able to have a child is deemed a sickness, something to be healed with all this money and effort, what does this say about those who deliberately infect themselves, those who inflict themselves with the disease of deciding to remain childless?
Fact of the matter is, I’m a hard-liner when it comes to all that babies-on-demand stuff.
‘We don’t get everything we want in life. I don’t see babies should be any different.’
But Connie shakes her head. ‘They’re not on demand. You can’t say that, Riley. A woman may go through the whole IVF thing three times and then not get pregnant.’
I guess Connie and I are bound to disagree. She sees the sorrowful side of the business, after all.
Apart from anything else, she was the one who had to break the bad news to Sandra.
When I think of what happened to Sandra, it makes me yearn for old certainties, for a heaven and a hell, the latter in which to consign Royston.
In any good Victorian saga, Cousin Royston would end up sinking slowly, cries unheard, in some boggy marsh, or drowned in a stone pit. In this regard I’ve looked longingly at many a rhine, I can tell you. A hundred and fifty years ago he’d be riding a two-hundred-guinea hunter he couldn’t afford, beating it mercilessly with a whip. Now he does much the same thing but with forty grand’s worth of metallic blue Audi Quattro. Only this morning he cut me up in it on the roundabout at the end of the ring road, giving me the finger – his most common form of communication – when I blasted the horn at him. The ‘Baby on Board’ sign swinging merrily in his back window as he disappeared over the horizon only added insult to injury.
A latecomer to the Fraser family, Royston was born a full ten years after Fleur. I guess he was something of a surprise to Aunt Fran, which is why she so hopelessly spoilt him. It gives me no pleasure to say it. She knows what she’s done. From puberty onwards, when Royston’s obnoxious personality began to seriously assert itself, it was possible to detect a sad little smile hovering about her lips when she looked at him. In Hugh this translated as an unhappy frown that drew in his eyebrows when his youngest was near him.
The worst thing that happened to Royston is that he was given the best of everything, including the statutory public school education, never a good move for someone not overbright but imbued with a vacuous sense of his own importance. His main problem is that he thinks of himself as Alpha Male whereas in fact he’s way down the end of the hatchery.
Royston’s job as sales manager at Frasers (a job mostly done by the minions beneath him), his name on the door, the smart suits he wears, his succession of flash cars still can’t disguise the truth of the matter – that there’s something of the spiv about Royston. He should be flogging black market nylons off the back of a wagon. Naturally my mother adores him.
‘Royston. You wicked boy.’
‘Babs. More beautiful than ever.’
When it comes to isms, Royston has the full house. Chauvinism, sexism and racism, they’re all there positively vying for supremacy. He’s grown up with the knowledge that being a Fraser gets him everywhere in this town so he uses the name unsparingly. ‘Never pay full price for anything,’ is his proud boast, and one that has earnt him a more-than-average degree of loathing among the purveyors of goods and services in the neighbourhood.
Few of us in the church among the pomp and ceremony, the bouffant frocks and the garlanded pews ten years ago when Royston married Sandra, thought the hat we’d purchased specially for the occasion was anything else than a gross waste of money. And to this day I think every man jack of us there bears a responsibility. After all, to be legal in this country, the participants must be of a sound mind. Thus when the vicar asked if anyone knew any just cause why the two of them should not be wed, one of us should have raised our hand, stepped forward.
‘Stop the marriage,’ we should have said. ‘The bride’s quite mad. No one in their r
ight mind could consider marrying Royston.’
Royston first saw Sandra on the front page of our paper, this when she made it into the early heats of the Miss England competition. Seeing her, he wanted her, more for his own vanity than anything else. Being what he was, i.e., a Fraser, he had little difficulty in enticing her away from her carpenter boyfriend.
Sandra had always wanted children. No. It’s more than that. Sandra had always wanted children.
‘Even when I was a kid myself I used to think about it,’ she told me at her wedding. Her eyes shone innocently, like the teenager she still was. ‘Six I want, six at least.’
‘And Royston?’ I remember I asked.
‘Oh, yes. He wants a big family too.’ This with a wide- eyed confidence that was heartbreaking.
Weddings don’t mean much to me. They don’t make me go choky. They don’t make me coo or flutter either. Still, I’d say that however brides are supposed to look, then that was the way that Sandra looked that day. She was breathtaking, a corny word but I use it advisedly. She looked like something from an old Viennese fairytale, as exquisite in the flesh in her off-the-shoulder gown with wide crinoline skirt as she’d been in the spread in Bride, where she’d been featured a month earlier.
All this should have been enough for any man, shouldn’t it? But they’d been together four years by the time they married so that the gilt was already off the gingerbread for Royston. He started in on that marriage the way he intended to continue, bonking one of the bridesmaids at the reception. This I know thanks to Fergie, who, wandering around the hotel grounds, caught them full at it through the gazebo window.
Royston led a rich and full sexual life during the marriage. The pity of it was that it wasn’t with Sandra. All this was public knowledge in the town. Everyone knew his pick-up spots: local gym, the sleezebag country club, and Bristol, where he’d go ostensibly to watch the match from the directors’ box, but actually to take full advantage of the R and R at various nightspots afterwards. When no children arrived, despite the stated aim, most thought it was because by now Royston was depositing his seed just about everywhere but Sandra. But then Sandra underwent tests, as a result of which it fell to Connie to tell her the terrible truth – that she suffered from endometriosis, a condition that would make pregnancy all but impossible. She let out a terrible cry, according to Connie, something that sounded like a wounded animal.
After this, Sandra became a wan and tragic figure at family parties, collapsing in floods of tears and disappearing into the bathroom at the most innocent mention of the word ‘children’.
‘It isn’t fair… it isn’t fair,’ she wailed one night when I found her out on Hugh and Fran’s terrace, and frankly I agreed with her. I didn’t think it was fair, any of it, not least of fate to allow her fall in love with an arsehole like Royston. But then, when did fairness ever have anything to do with the human condition?
I’d say she cried as if her heart would break that night, great heaving sobs that lifted her shoulders up to her ears, but how absurd that would be. Her heart was already broken. And it should go without saying that she received precious little comfort or tender loving care for any of this from Cousin Royston. I caught a glimpse of his face poking out through the French windows. He raised his eyes when he saw her, blew contemptuously out through his thin, mean lips, pulling back sharply.
‘I don’t usually say this,’ I said that night, ‘but you’re a cunt, you know that, don’t you, Royston?’
He raised his hands with one of his proud laddish grins. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘women’s stuff. What can I do about it?’
In the end that night, Hugh ordered Royston to take Sandra home, this after Aunt Fran had failed with her pleading. Royston sighed as at some terrible imposition.
‘Fetch her coat,’ Hugh said sharply, and Royston did, but in the darkness of the hall, I saw him half throw it at her. Outside, she stumbled into the front seat of the car, still weeping. He got in the other side, turned the stereo full up with a flick of his wrist. Loud mindless music pumped out as he drove off, spraying the gravel.
The worst part about all of this is that Sandra – I think, I truly believe – was just beginning to get her shit together when Carlotta appeared on the scene. I’d seen her – Sandra – in Safeway one day. She’d grasped my hand, given me a shy look. She said, ‘We’re talking about adoption.’ I doubted the ‘we’ even then, rumours already abounding about Carlotta.
Carlotta came for an interview for deputy marketing manager at Frasers. She turned up with a height of heel and a hardness of eye that had Royston’s tongue lolling out and down over his chin within half an hour of their meeting. Naturally she got the job. Within a month or so she also had Royston.
It’s my belief that nothing moves faster than a woman with her body clock ticking away – faster than the speed of light – which will give you some idea of how long it took Carlotta to whisk Royston away, tongue flapping, from the failed family home and into a newly constituted love nest at a safe distance in Bristol.
Being thirty-seven, and four years older than Royston, Carlotta was in no mood to hang about as regards procreation, so that when nothing happened after those first few months, she had not just herself but Royston as well down to the clinic, and this before you could say assisted conception. There the awful truth was revealed – that it wasn’t just Sandra’s fault they had not conceived.
‘Poor boy … poor boy …’
‘For God’s sake, Mother. He’s got a low sperm count. It’s not cancer.’
In fact I breathed a sigh of relief when I heard about Royston’s condition; so did Cass and Fergie.
‘Good old Mother Nature,’ I said, raising my glass in what turned out to be entirely premature celebration. Eighteen months later, thanks to the appliance of science, in particular six thousand quids’ worth of IVF, Carlotta gave birth to Charlie.
‘Great,’ I said, when my mother passed on the news with delight. ‘Just what the world needs. Another Royston.’
Meanwhile, as regards Sandra, it’s my belief the word ‘devastated’ is overused, but in the case of her reaction to Royston’s departure, it’s entirely appropriate.
I’d say it was pretty lucky that a teacher friend of Cass’ was taking the air one night with her labrador. Walking past Royston and Sandra’s house she was witness unwittingly to a most unhappy scene: Royston carrying a few prize possessions to the car, CDs, clothes, a yard of ale stick, Sandra trying to pull him back, falling on the gravel, holding on to his legs and being dragged across it, eventually spreadeagling herself across his bonnet, slipping off as he drove away. Knowing the family connection, the friend called Cass who went round, tried to sponge off Sandra’s bloodied knees and phoned the doctor, because by now Sandra was hysterical.
She was in hospital a while after that. A private clinic. At Hugh and Fran’s expense. And it was thanks to them, only thanks to them, for Royston didn’t care, that when she came out eventually it was at least to a good divorce settlement.
They’ve continued to treat her as part of family, selling the house for her while she was in hospital, this being what she said she wanted, helping her move into the new place they bought for her in a development at the foot of the Tor near her mother.
Like a woman caught in a crazy hall of mirrors, Sandra turned from rake thin to pudgy in the hospital. When she came out her skin was doughy and her hair lank. Meeting her in the street she was scarcely recognisable as the lovely young thing who represented Miss West of England in the UK finals.
She’s still this way, spending a fortune on all manner of wacky witch doctors and counsellors. They diagnose everything except the thing that counts, which is simply that she’s desperately unhappy.
I guess she’s tried just about everything in the Avalon Alternative Health and Therapy Centre. Every time I meet her it’s something new.
‘Reiki, Riley,’ she said to me, stuffing down a vegetable samosa at the opening of the phobia clinic. ‘It’
s wonderful. You should try it. You can’t imagine how much better I feel.’
Only she didn’t look any better, that’s the trouble. She never does after all these new and wonderful therapies. At the same time she still spoke in the overbright voice, the one that seems intent on proving she’s so much better.
‘Peter thinks he might also try me on kinesiology,’ she said, and then, after a small pause, making a miserable attempt at carelessness, ‘How’s Royston?’
She always says this and I always answer the same way.
‘Just like he always was. A total arsehole. You’re better off without him, Sandra.’
Like I say, in any good Victorian novel Royston would come to a bad end. But bad ends are hard to come by these days, certainly when it comes to producing children.
Charlie is three now, known to our side of the family as ‘Chuckie’, and for obvious reasons. There can’t be any doubt about his parentage, that’s for sure. He’s a chip off the old block and already displaying the full range of his father’s lager lout tendencies.
At the last Fraser Christmas party, for like it or not Hugh and Fran have had to accept Royston and Carlotta, we watched as Charlie smashed his pedal car with an obvious sense of delight into the backs of the legs of the guests as they stood talking.
‘Makes you wonder if we haven’t been too hasty over this whole business of eugenics,’ I said to Fergie. ‘I blame you.’
Not Married, Not Bothered Page 12
