Not Married, Not Bothered

by Carol Clewlow

  ‘Me?’

  ‘You and your ilk.’

  Because, like I said to him, Mother Nature did everything she could to ensure there’d be no more Roystons, coupling him with Sandra, who couldn’t get pregnant, even lowering his sperm count to zero.

  Across the room there was an agonised howl as yet another guest got mown down by Chuckie.

  ‘It should have been foolproof,’ I said ‘A perfect plan.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Fergie said, and he gave a sigh. ‘And along came science to fuck up a beautiful system.’

  * As in kinder, kirche, küche children, church and kitchen, Herr and Frau Goebbels’ receipe for success.

  * I won’t go into details, it being ever my intention that this book be one you could lend at all times without fear to your servants.

  † For more in this vein you need Flesh of My Flesh, Poems on a Birth, written and illustrated by Magda MacBride, Circean Press, £4.99; available from Hocus Pocus, Avalon Alternative Health and Therapy Centre and by mail order).

  phallic mother

  parthenogenitor

  patchwork of blood and breast and bone

  etc. etc …

  * I smiled to myself when I first thought of this, which I now find unforgivable. Because now I see something grand in all that unflagging devotion, in that absolute refusal to acknowledge all Rochelle’s snarling. I think my heart might have broken if it had happened to me. All of which confirms me in my opinion that it’s an absurd, ludicrous, crazy thing to have children.

  I wondered if that’s what I wanted to say that night to David?

  L is for … that old Lost Love Story

  1972 is history, I see that now.

  In 1972 a man had not long since walked on the moon. How historical is that?

  Brezhnev was still in the Kremlin, Nixon in the White House.

  And the war was coming to an end in Vietnam.

  In 1972, at the fag end of that year, at the fag end of the affair, I woke next to Nathan, broken from sleep by the dull heavy throb overhead.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked him drowsily.

  For Nathan’s eyes were already open. His hands at the back of his head as he leant back against the wall, the arms with their rich deep fur of hair, formed dark triangles against the institutional cream of the paint work. The neon light filtering through the blinds from the massage parlour opposite lit up his face in red flashes, making each new glimpse of him, the big bull head with its crew cut, the taut skin around his temples, the hardness of his mouth, all freshly unfamiliar, freshly compelling and erotic.

  Nathan turned his eyes down from the ceiling at my words but in the half-light they were no more than empty sockets. Without speaking, he lifted back the sheet, swung his long legs slowly out of the single bed, lowered them to the floor as he pushed himself upwards with his knuckles. He walked to the window, the familiar determined steps placing his feet hard and flat to the floor, straining and rucking the legs of the old-fashioned white undershorts, making them ride up on his haunches. His bull head was down, the way it always was, the fur-covered back slightly bent, as if all this hugeness, this weight of head and body was all just too much for him.

  At the window he poked a finger through the blinds, the big bull head lifting up and back as he craned out to look as the heavy rumbling throb continued overhead.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ he said without turning. ‘Go back to sleep, Riley.’

  Let me tell you, if I had a time machine now, if I had a choice of all the finest moments in history, if I was offered personal audiences with the most famous, the most gifted, the most holy and wise of men, still it would make no difference, still I would chose from everything to go back to that moment with Nathan, to take myself back to that room, to put myself in that bed, have myself say, ‘Nathan,’ very softly to his back, making him turn; still I would hold out my hand to him, hold it out in such a way, beckoning with such imperious yearning that he could not refuse; that he would take those long loping heavy steps back to the bed where I would take his hand, that Nathan hand, big with the long thick fingers, take the middle one, stroke it very slowly from the bottom right up to its tip, lay the hand flat against my face so I could feel it on my cheek. So I could feel that hand against my cheek, every last infinitesimal fraction of it…

  ‘Hey … hey … hey …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’ve never talked about this before, Riley.’

  And I hadn’t. I’d never told anyone. Not Sophie. Not Cass. Not even Danny, who was staring at me now from the end of the sofa.

  ‘So why now?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe with Jonah travelling and everything. Going to Bangkok. I guess it got me thinking.’ I said, ‘Just think. If it had worked out we could have been divorced by now.’ I was trying – and I wasn’t sure why – to make a joke of it.

  ‘All of these years …’ Danny has a hand over his heart.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Locked away inside you.’

  I said, ‘It’s just something that happened, that’s all. It’s no big deal.’

  ‘Yeah … right.’ He’s looking sceptical.

  I said, ‘Don’t turn it into one of those Great Lost Love Stories, Danny.’

  Because that’s what everyone wants, isn’t it? Maybe you too, dear Reader. An old lost love story. Another of those clichés. What the spinster is supposed to have (besides a cat), what makes her what she is, what lends her that enduring air of loss, the Lost Love Story, like some stole thrown around her shoulders, protecting her decency, her modesty, and not because she wants it, but because the world requires it of her, this faintly tragic respectability, making the world more comfortable with her, providing the necessary explanation, the justification for her state.

  ‘Some people just seem happier if you can give them a good reason why you’re single, Riley,’ Olive Jepson said, and close on forty years ago too, and if that’s not depressing I don’t know what is. And, surely she was right. Because in a world where people are worn down trying to make their relationships work, who needs the spinster standing by and smiling amiably and refusing to bother? All this makes the lost love not just the excuse, the defence, the mitigation for the presence of the spinster, it also makes it a panacea for those who need it, a camouflage for the horrible truth of the thing: that actually, as far as the spinster is concerned, her state has nothing to do with absence, or loss, or missed opportunity. It’s not Second Best at all but First Choice. In fact the view up here on the shelf is pretty damn good from where she’s looking.

  ‘Hey,’ I said to Danny, ‘I’m not Miss Havisham. ‘There’s no wedding cake mouldering away in the middle of my table.’

  I’d been two months at the Oasis when Nathan arrived and I guess you could say I was overprepared for him. But that was Angel’s fault because she wouldn’t stop talking about him.

  ‘Nathan’s coming,’ she’d say, clapping her hands in delight like a child. ‘Soon you see Nathan.’

  You’re taking a chance introducing a bar girl called Angel, I know that. And it doesn’t help that this was her name, or at least what everyone called her. And I don’t want to dress the thing up now. I don’t want to make it more than it was. I want what comes through from this to be the truth, not some sentimental wish-wash. So that if I tell you that I can still feel a catch in my heart thinking of Angel’s face, then you can believe it. And not because that face was beautiful. In fact, she wasn’t especially beautiful, with a small pointed chin and large brown eyes that gave her face the look of some small, good-natured animal. But it was her smile that made her beautiful, a smile that seemed to stretch back to her ears when she bestowed it on you, which was most of the time, a smile that, just like Lee’s, belied everything that had happened to her.

  ‘She’ll be dead by the time she’s thirty.’ I’m shocked at the weary, unsentimental way Nathan says it.

  ‘But why? What of?’

  But he just shrugs. ‘Her heart. She has a
weak heart.’

  And anyway, what does anyone such as Angel die of in Thailand?

  Nathan was a favourite of Angel. He’d known her since the beginning, which was five years before, when she’d met Barnie, then one of Nathan’s Ph.D. students doing his research in Thailand. But then one night, in the way of these things, he’d met Angel in a bar, thrown up his studies and got a job as a barman.

  ‘You and Nathan,’ she would say, this before he arrived and with a knowing nod, her delicate fingers church-steepled over her mouth and her eyes shining. Once or twice when she did it I caught Barnie’s brows drawing together and on one occasion, turning suddenly, I found his eyes on me with an expression I could not fathom. The day before Nathan arrived he finally cracked, her breathless merriment undoing him. He banged a glass down hard on the bar top.

  ‘For Pete’s sake, shut up about Nathan,’ he said.

  She threw him a haughty look before turning back to me. ‘You like Nathan,’ she said, her small pointed chin giving a small nod as if everything was settled.

  But I didn’t. I didn’t like Nathan at all.

  ‘Come,’ she said that night he arrived. ‘You meet Nathan,’ and she led me across the bar to him like a marriage prize to a wealthy potentate. Never was one more proudly born. And it comes to me now, all these years on, how much her innocent hopes must have been dashed that first night. For Angel would never be a matchmaker. She didn’t have the stomach for it. She adored Nathan, and the disappointed hopes of that evening were plastered all over her face. She sat forward on the bamboo sofa, her hands clasped around her knees, gazing steadfastly at the pair of us. She was willing us to come together but, despite this urging, a cool unfriendly space persisted between us. His affection for her was strong but, even so, he refused point-blank even to acknowledge me.

  ‘I’m sure I did not.’

  ‘I’m sure you did.’

  Safe in his arms a few days later, in a small wormhole of time, and sucked dry by his lovemaking, we were able to discuss it.

  I sat there twenty minutes or so that first night while he ignored me. I smiled, but only for Angel. I didn’t care. Not for Nathan or for the way he was treating me. All I cared about was the effect it was having on Angel, the way her characteristic calm was entirely disrupted. Her finger, interlocking on her lap, made small unhappy twisting movements as all that excitement and anticipation drained away. She sat on the edge of the sofa as if trying to urge the business forward, throwing small hopeful glances backwards and forwards between the two of us. She was like a benevolent spider, weaving a web, trying to draw us into it. But I was content with the way things were. I was twenty-two years old. I looked from the corner of my eye at this man with his tall, stooping body and his serious bearing and pronounced him an oddity – more, an irrelevancy, something and someone outside my desires or understanding. In the end I got up, carelessly, making my excuses, leaving him.

  That was the way it was that night, and the next one and the one after that, and I don’t recall in that time speaking to Nathan. I don’t recall one look, one smile or one glance. Neither do I register at all his eyes upon me. Thus I have none of those traditional precursors of love that might serve to make what happened the more convincing or explicable. All I know is that on the fourth night everything changed between us.

  And I want to go rushing on now. I want to get to the moment of our fingers entwining, Nathan’s and mine, which is not right, not right at all, because I do not remember the moment of our fingers entwining. All I remember is the being entwined, the way we suddenly were, and the feel of our fingers caught in the space between the bamboo sofa’s overstuffed cushions, locked fast between our thighs, mine bare in the short pink gingham dress, his in the conservative grey lecture-room trousers.

  I think it must have been the stillness that did it that night, that made everything seem to spool down around us. It was early, with just a handful of customers. It was Zoe’s night off and I sat at the bar talking to Priya, who worked behind it, and when she was busy just sat there silently. Barnie and Angel, who Nathan normally came in to see, had gone out to dinner, so that when he came in this night he sat down with a curt nod, leaving a vacant stool between us. For some minutes, I don’t know how many, we sat there staring together straight ahead at Priya and the line of bottles behind the bar, the stillness mushrooming up between us. I seemed to see everything in great detail, the precise tone of the flecks of black on the fake marble bar, the way Priya’s fingers in the mirror appeared to caress the tops of the bottles as she wiped them. It was as if we sat, Nathan and I, in separate pools of silence, like spotlights, so that when the coin came it appeared like some third circle of light between us. His finger on it pushed it forward slowly and deliberately across the bar top, the thick black hair on the back of his hand reaching almost to the cuticle. The finger gave a tap, not once but twice, as if deliberating the wisdom of the movement. I can hear every last inflection of the way he said the words, the way he spoke them in that husky, embarrassed growl. And although they could not be more banal when repeated here on the page, still they come out to me now just the way they did then, bathed in glory.

  For they were not said in any patronising way, neither as some cheap peace gesture. Instead they were said quietly and firmly as if this simple request was truly the thing he most wanted.

  They say that time stands still when lovers meet, don’t they? But it’s not true, it’s not true at all. It’s so much better than that. Time doesn’t stand still. It runs, it dances, it disappears down black holes.

  As his long thin finger pushed that coin slowly along the bar towards me, it seemed like time collapsed, that everything we were or had been or ever could be was caught in that long lazy movement.

  ‘Put something on the jukebox,’ he said as Time bent and stretched and danced around us.

  I put on ‘Vincent’.

  It was 1972.*

  * I’d put it on again later, in a restaurant, a few months into the affair. I’d say, proudly, as if he couldn’t know, it being pop music, my music, ‘It’s about Van Gogh.’ He’d pass a sad, tired hand across his eyes as if something was too difficult to explain. He’d say, ‘I think I guessed that, Riley.’

  M is for … Marriage

  Pensioners Stan and Ada Vowles reckon their marriage fits like a glove.

  The two, who met at Frasers factory when they were in their teens, have just celebrated 72 years of marriage

  Stan worked all his life at Frasers, eventually retiring from the post room at 70. Two of the couple’s three children followed him into the firm, along with three of their six grandchildren. One of their eleven great-grandchildren, Sharon (pictured with the couple), now works in the firm’s dispatch department.

  ‘The family has been very much part of Frasers and continues to be to this day,’ said managing director, Freddy Fraser, at the party for the couple laid on by the firm at the Swan Hotel.

  ‘We’re very proud of Stan and Ada …’ blah de blah de blah.

  I hate going to a Fraser function in my persona as reporter. Frankly, it makes me feel like a poor relation. I was hoping to get away with it, hiding behind the mass ranks of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren as Cousin Freddy pontificated, tapping his little pinkie finger on his glass, and sticking out that Toad of Toad Hall chest.

  ‘More than seventy years of marriage. Such a wonderful achievement …’

  Later, though, as Danny clicked away at the family group, Freddy caught me.

  ‘Bad business all together about Fleur and Martin.’ He was trying to be conversational but there was a frown between his eyebrows. ‘Mother’s very upset. Can’t accept it at all. Coming on top of the whole thing with Royston and Carlotta.’

  I mmm-ed a bit, made a few consolatory noises, ‘Well … you know… and ‘These days … all the while staring over at Stan and Ada.

  I said, ‘Let me ask you something, Freddy. Can you imagine, honestly, being married seventy-two years?
’

  ‘Of course.’ But he’d said it too quickly.

  ‘No, come on, seriously… can you imagine it?’

  He dropped his eyes, took another swig of his wine. The pompous chest seemed to dropped inwards and for a moment it was like there was another Freddy hiding there.

  ‘No.’ He was looking straight at me now and I knew it was a sudden moment of truth from Freddy. I found myself wondering about him, if he’d had an affair in all the – what must it be – thirty years he’d been married, cheated on Brenda with her loud horsy voice and her passion for corgies.

  I think a lot about marriage. But then why wouldn’t I? In its own way it makes me what I am, i.e., by virtue of my lack of participation in it. I think about it rather in the way that an anthropologist might, studying some rare tribe and faced with a puzzling ritual or ceremonies.

  Look, as I understand it, in order to make something work for you, I mean really work, as a concept, you have to be able to visualise it, to imagine it as a possibility.

  ‘Maybe it’s something to do with our new here today, gone tomorrow world. Maybe people just can’t imagine being married for years any more.’

  ‘God, even if they wanted to.’ This drolly, eyes rolling, from Sophie.

  I tried the argument out on Cass too, and to an even worse reception.

  I said, ‘Maybe that’s why the Stan and Adas of this world are disappearing. Maybe that’s why the divorce figures are going up.’

  She said, ‘Oh, for God’s sake. People don’t waste time imagining when they first meet. They don’t visualise. They just get on with it. Then they turn round one day and thirty years have passed. And if they’re lucky they’re still together.’

  Still, you’d have to wonder, these days, why in that grand moment in the wedding ceremony when the congregation is asked if anyone knows any reason why the two shouldn’t be married, someone doesn’t have the decency to raise a hand and step forward: ‘Well, not exactly, but since you ask, have you seen the statistics …?’