Not Married, Not Bothered

by Carol Clewlow

  Hamlet might have been nearer the truth than he knew when he bellowed, ‘We shall have no more marriages.’ Sometimes that looks like the way that it’s going. Four out of ten marriages in this country now end in divorce, news to no one except those whose job it is to produce my mother’s daily paper, which only this morning did what it always does when the Office of National Statistics* release the figures, which is to announce it in seventy-two-point type on the front page and in the breathless manner of Joris springing to the stirrup and setting off for Aix from Ghent.*

  I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three

  In addition, doubting its readers would be able cope with the complicated arithmetical notion of four out of ten, and to add that extra End Of Civilisation As We Know It potential, it rounded up the awkward and uninspiring four out of ten to five, thus allowing it to proclaim an ‘almost fifty per cent failure rate’ for British marriage. Thus did it fulfil its prime objective in life, which is to provide a source of outrage and breast-beating each morning for that ever-Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells. And, for that matter, my mother.

  ‘I don’t know … I really don’t know …’ She might have been a novice playing with her rosary as she bent over the page on the kitchen table as I came in to give her a lift to the supermarket. She fingered her long fake gold chain of links and pearls, letting out a string of tut-tuts as she did it. ‘I don’t know. No one sticks at anything these days.’

  My mother, you see, takes a revisionist approach to history, one that allows, nay enjoins her, to view the shocking increase in divorce figures from the standpoint of one who spent almost thirty years in a contented but tragically truncated union.

  ‘Mind you, I’m not saying that we didn’t have our difficulties …’

  ‘One major difficulty being a complete inability, man and wife, to remain in the same room together.’

  Yet another of those things I have never said to my mother.

  More than hundred years ago, and this when divorce was only by a petition to Parliament, Samuel Johnson wrote:

  Sir, it is so far from being natural for a man and woman to live in a state of marriage, that we find all the motives which they have for remaining in that connection, and the restraints which civilised society imposes to prevent separation, are hardly sufficient to keep them together.

  It was old Sammy, too, who came out with that famous thing about second marriages being ‘the triumph of hope over experience’, more relevant than ever today with some forty per cent in this country now in second, third (or more) unions.

  ‘And why the hell not?’ My good sister, Cass, hates all forms of cynicism. ‘Why the hell shouldn’t people go on hoping?’

  And of course she’s right. Besides which, as with Mark Twain, so with marriage. Reports of its death have been exaggerated.

  Marriage is still the ambition of most, a fact backed up by a survey carried out by one of our leading building societies in which the participants rated it equal in the happiness it delivered to a £70,000 income.

  ‘Well, as one who’s had both …’ Fleur’s voice is severe as she flips the paper closed on the Hocus Pocus counter, also a tad tragic, ‘I can tell you, happiness is much more important than money.’ For good measure she glares at a couple of tourists whose crime is to attempt to pay for their Tibetan bells while she was talking.

  Fleur is ‘working’ now – her word, not mine, since it covers three mornings a week draping herself elegantly on a stool behind the counter at Hocus Pocus, taking any money offered with an air of forbearance. None of which, I regret to say, prevents her acting like some Little Match Girl or Mimi minus the consumption and the arias.

  ‘I have to work,’ she says with the air of a woman fallen on hard times. ‘I need the money.’ Which, to put it bluntly, is total bollocks. Something I happen to know from a chance meeting with Martin in the Jolly Pilgrim several nights earlier.

  ‘Got some shit-hot London divorce lawyer,’ he said, shoving his beer glass in the air pugnaciously towards me. ‘Says she wants half of everything.’

  Martin was surrounded by his Rotary Club mates when I saw him. He was acting blustery and cheerful in that way that separated men do when they’re pretending they’re doing well, whereas in actual fact they’re doing extremely badly.

  ‘We’ll see,’ he said, trying for defiance. ‘Two can play at that game,’ which is when I felt really sorry for him, wondering how he could possibly think that it was a game to Fleur and, more importantly, how he had a cat in hell’s chance of winning it.

  I couldn’t resist telling Fleur I’d seen Martin, this because of all that crap she was giving me about happiness v. money. In particular I wanted her to know I was au fait with her plan to take a legal chain saw to everything Martin is and has in order to neatly divest him of half of it.

  ‘And why shouldn’t I?’ Her eyes snapped defiantly over the counter at me. ‘I’ve worked my fingers to the bone for Martin all these years. It was a full-time job.’ By now her air of nobility had returned. Her hand was at her throat, although immaculately manicured and remarkably unbony from what I could see of it.

  Now before we go any further let me say that as a good old-fashioned sixties feminist, I’ve always known that my views would be tested and possibly to destruction. I just never imagined it would be Fleur who did it.

  ‘I mean, poetic licence or what?’ as I said, reporting the facts of the case to Cassie.

  Because while I accept that with three kids Fleur may have spent the last twenty years as a one-woman taxi service ferrying her offspring to football training, choir practice and ballet lessons, still the fact is that for all that time she’s enjoyed: a) the services of an au pair (at least till the boys reached their teenage years and got frisky) and b) a four-times-a-week cleaner-cum-housekeeper. Neither of which, according to Fleur, now figure in the plot of the story.

  ‘Martin had me there all those years to look after him and the kids. I’ve spent my life organising his life for him.’ Her tone had become hectoring and one of those perfect worked-to-the-bone fingers was jamming down hard on the counter. ‘I put my whole life into that marriage. I made him everything he is today. All the work I put in. All that entertaining …’

  Now this was the last straw for me. ‘La-La Land’, as I said to Cassie.

  Because while it’s well known that Fleur did indeed do a lot of entertaining, it’s equally well known that the nearest she ever got to slaving over the proverbial hot stove was to point the caters in the direction of it.

  ‘Can you believe it?’ as I said to Cass. ‘Bloody woman’s never even stuffed a mushroom.’*

  * And if you do work in the ONS, and you are reading this, I’d like you to know just how much maternal ear-bashing I have to put up with every time you release those damn divorce statistics.

  * This is a cultural reference likely to be missed by younger readers. It’s from the poem ‘How They Brought the Good News From Ghent to Aix’ by Robert Browning:

  I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he;

  I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three;

  ‘Good speed!’ cried the watch, as the gate-bolts undrew;

  ‘Speed!’ echoed the wall to us galloping through;

  Behind shut the postern, the light sank to rest,

  And into the midnight we galloped abreast.

  This plus the following six lines are embedded in my memory, thanks to the fact that I had to learn them as a punishment after Ronnie Gibson and I were discovered among the coats at the furthest end of the cloakroom poring over the dirty bits in Lady Chatterley. We received not one but three detentions for this, the severity of the sentence due in no small part to the fact that, following our discovery (this thanks to our ribald laughter), when asked by Miss Holderness, the English teacher, what exactly we were doing Ronnie answered ‘Biology.’

  Meanwhile, to my shame, and to this day, I’m not clear what exactly the good news was that Joris and Dirck and the other o
ne had to carry to Aix at such speed.

  However, for more about Ronnie Gibson, see the next chapter.

  * Life is too short to stuff a mushroom is a phrase that passed into the female language in the seventies thanks to Shirley Conran’s book Superwoman. A woman who knew a good phrase when she heard it, Conran was also responsible for one of the great lines in late 20th century fiction: ‘Which of you three bitches is my mother?’ this from her best-selling Lace, a phrase which has a certain resonance for me and not just because my own mother picked the book up secondhand and took it on her coach trip to Austria with Tommy. She didn’t read it, of course. She never actually reads books, particularly on holiday, just carries one big one around with her in her patent bag like a sort of totem.

  ‘I don’t know why you don’t write one of these,’ she said waving it at me as I dropped her off at the bus station.

  Another question I ask myself frequently.

  N is for … Nature or Nurture?

  The brain is an amazing thing. Come up with a memory, and before you know it, it’ll start flipping over and over like one of those old-fashioned carousels of cards you occasionally still see in doctors’ surgeries. And the next minute, hey presto, there it is, the name to fit the face as if plucked out by an invisible pair of receptionist’s fingers.

  Ronnie Gibson.

  Ronnie Gibson had a blonde teen queen ponytail and eyes like blue glass marbles. She was the first of our class to get married. She kicked the dust of our ancient girls’ grammar school off her feet at sixteen and was wed a year later. A year after that she was pushing a pramful of twins. She’s probably thrice married and a grandmother of ten by now.

  The day Ronnie announced she was leaving school, the door flew open and a Vision of Darkness appeared in our classroom. It strode to the platform, black gown billowing and pointed an apocalyptic finger at Ronnie Gibson.

  ‘This girl,’ it said, ‘will do nothing.’

  Miss Dawkins, first name Alicia, was the headmistress of our school. Having the prettiest of Christian names, she was thus subject to the worst sort of irony. For Miss Dawkins was ugly. More than ugly. Ugliness was, in fact, Miss Dawkins’ defining feature.

  Miss Dawkins was the daughter of a missionary couple who carried the good news to India and were ill paid for their devotion. Once there, their only child developed smallpox, leaving her face cratered for ever like the surface of the moon and with a mouth swelled out like a boxer’s.

  It would have taken a human being with the disposition of an angel to rise above the hand that fate had dealt Miss Dawkins, and it’s true to say that she did not feel called in this direction. As if to compound the horror, she filled those craters with a defiant mush of foundation and powder that hardened and cracked upon her face like a dried-up riverbed. And just in case anyone should fail to get the message she painted her mouth a violent spiteful red.

  Miss Dawkins was a mean-spirited woman with a biting tongue and a penchant for favourites, which did not number Ronnie Gibson among them. Her bulbous lips dripped bile the day she raged at Ronnie. She pulled her out to the platform but all to no avail. For as she raged Ronnie just stood there, her arms across her chest, the diamond on the third finger of her left hand winking conspicuously. At the same time she cast a look of excruciating pity on the caricature that was Miss Dawkins.

  Ronnie Gibson could spot a spinster at fifty yards, which I guess wasn’t difficult with Miss Dawkins. Still, I was only thirteen when I was outed by Ronnie. She swivelled those blue glass marble eyes sideways at me behind her raised desk top and gave me a long cool look surprisingly free of blame or censure.

  ‘Oh, no,’ she said, her voice firm and matter of fact, as if no one could think it. ‘Not Riley … Riley will never get married.’

  ‘How did she know?’

  But Cass just clicks her tongue. ‘She didn’t. She couldn’t. It was just something she said. You were just kids. Thirteen years old, for God’s sake.’ She shakes her head in mild exasperation. ‘How many times do I have to tell you? It’s all a matter of chance, Riley.’

  Ronnie Gibson.

  She who first showed me the dirty bits in Lady Chatterley.

  I had my first quasi-sexual experiences double-dating with Ronnie, snogging on a park bench at lunch times with a couple of secondary modern school boys, eyes open as we twisted and turned and watched each other over the lads’ shoulders. Later on sofas with parents safely at work, and after that the serious business – in the back seats of cars as we left the schoolboys behind and moved on to those with driving licences.

  Sophie’s jibe that day about the neanderthals I went out with in those days that we shared a flat together was not unwarranted, far from it. My favourites were always grease monkeys with fast cars (don’t go there, Dr Freud, don’t go there). I had a clear-sighted, not to say clinical, approach to sex at the time. Not knowing anything about it, i.e. how it was done (Babs told us nothing, but to be fair neither did ninety per cent of mothers) I learnt on the job and with serious application, unafraid of gaining a reputation, by contrast being determined to acquire one, Good In Bed being the label du jour among half-witted young women like myself at the time.

  It seems odd now, of course, more like the custom of another planet, having sex with someone you scarcely knew. But what does this go to prove except time moves on and if we’re really lucky we get a bit older and wiser with it.

  Some people count sheep when they can’t sleep, others count lovers. My total is not grand in rock-and-roll terms, neither is it tiny. Mostly I can’t remember about the sex, but then who can? The actual sex act, in my experience, is just about the hardest thing to recall, besides which, I was mostly under the influence. I could say that I’d been serially monogamous for most of my life, but this wouldn’t mean fidelity, it not being that difficult for a one-night stand, or a two, or a week, or at most a month, by which time I’d generally be feeling edgy. Over the years I’ve experienced a wide variety of occupations – journalism, of course (print, radio and television), this being my trade, the visual arts (photography, painting, sculpture), the army and the navy (never did manage the air force), the natural world (several forestry workers, a zoo keeper, and a mad Scotsman with deer stalker on his passport), even the Church (Roman Catholic, but before he took his vows, which in my book makes it quite acceptable). With one obvious (early) exception, I never much went in for men of letters, more for men who had served their time, e.g., electricians, carpenters, painters and decorators, something that came in particularly handy back in the eighties when, thanks to The Importance of Aunts, I was able to move back here and buy what was then this tumbled-down wreck of a cottage. I also continued to retain that early affection for grease monkeys but then I never did much want a man to recite poetry to me or explain existentialism, or as happened once (oh, the horror, the horror), correct my feminist theory.

  It may be that, looking back, I have been less aspirational than I might have been when it comes to lovers. My excuse is that I never had the need to search out good partner/procreation material. I never had to worry about whether my liaisons were respectable (a freeing thing and one I thoroughly recommend, dear Reader), whether they had prospects (more often than not they did not) or if they had more than a touch of the rascal about them (an approach, in fairness, I tested to destruction with Lennie). Whether I should feel embarrassed about this I don’t know, but one thing’s for sure: I never stayed one more minute with a guy who bored me, cheated on me, or took his hand to my cheek, and I’ve experienced all three. And whereas I’ve had my famines as well as my feasts (and God knows those famines come more often and last longer as you get older), still I’ve never played the piranha, nosing round other people’s partners. All of which has me wondering about Ronnie Gibson.

  I’m not convinced that Cassie’s right, you see, that it wasn’t some weird prescience on Ronnie’s part, that it was just the way it fell – hazard, luck, the Wheel of Fortune. Because the surprise when I look back
on my life is not that I never got married, it’s that I never ever got close to it. Never contemplated it. Never lived with anyone, not even arch-rascal Lennie. It’s as if, like having children, it just never occurred to me, hence the need I feel to ask the question that heads this chapter.

  Was it nature or nurture?

  In short, in the manner of the late, great Carrie Bradshaw: Was I born dot dot dot or did I become a spinster?

  Was it not for the presence of my disgracefully well-adjusted, well-married sister, we might come down on the side of nurture in this debate in my case, i.e., the experience of all that marital bickering in my formative years that might have put me off the condition for ever.

  ‘Oh, right, so it’s my fault again, is it?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘You might as well have done. You were always on his side but there’s things you don’t know.’

  Which I believe. But God forbid you should ever tell me, Mother.

  On the nature side, there’s the obvious consideration that I might be gay, a suggestion from Archie, I recall, some years ago at Elsa’s christening.* As usual, I wasn’t pleased to see him.

  ‘I thought we had an agreement.’ This under my breath on the church steps.

  ‘For heaven’s sake … it’s been ten years, Riley …’

  I was in that radical phase at the time, at university as well as camping with Magda outside those military bases. Perhaps it was the butch flying jacket that did it, this plus the earrings (lots of them) and the multi-coloured hair, but more likely it was the presence of Sophie, who was going out with some (married) coke-head reporter (in a nice touch, from my mother’s strait-laced morning newspaper). He’d given her some of the white stuff to make the weekend go with swing and it made her wildly affectionate. She kept slinging her arm around my neck, telling everyone how trusted and true was our friendship. Archie’s eyes were bloodshot with drink when he swayed towards me.