Because it’s an interesting argument, this one, whether those who don’t have children can be accused of being selfish. It’s one I’ve never quite got my head round although I’ve developed a permanent crick in my neck from trying.
The definition of selfish is ‘chiefly concerned with one’s own interest, advantage, etc., especially to the total exclusion of the interests of others’. Thus logically you can’t be selfish in a vacuum. You have to be selfish towards someone, and in broad terms (always a good phrase) you’d think the child-free were home and dry on this one. I mean, how can those who don’t claim maternity and paternity leave or child benefits, only use the education system themselves and one seat in the doctor’s surgery be deemed selfish towards others in society?
In fact, that old leader writer is on pretty shaky ground with the argument that we, the childfree, are selfish. In a recent survey carried out by a couple of psychologists* to determine the most common reasons for having and not having children (reported in my decent, even-handed liberal- leaning paper, but surprise, surprise not in my mothers), those who decided against came up smelling of roses compared to those who went ahead, this in terms of sheer egocentricity. Against all the odds, of the thirteen reasons given for not having children, only five were judged to be selfish: for example, financial and career considerations, the desire to have time and freedom to spend with a partner; the rest – worries about the world, the community and the child who would be born into it – were deemed positively altruistic. By contrast, eight of the nine reasons given for having children were considered selfish, all of them being concerned with the personal pleasure to be gained from having children, the fun and joy of raising them, the close bond they would provide and the status and power opportunity they would bring with them.
I suppose you could say that those who don’t procreate are selfish in terms of the species, but this’ll only stick if you can show that concern about the future of the species is the reason most people have children, which frankly I doubt. Merely wanting to pass on your genes – Number 3 in the list of Most Common Reason For Wanting To Have Children – doesn’t qualify, certainly not when it comes from Cousin Royston.
‘Couldn’t think of going to my grave without leaving a little chip off the old block,’ he said at the last Fraser party.
As if on cue, Charlie, riding high on his shoulders, poked his tongue out at me and, lifting his pudgy little hands from his father’s forehead, made what I deduced to be an early attempt at a V sign.
‘Oh, I think I could have learnt to live with it,’ I said.
So what are we left with here as regards the argument for selfishness? As far as I can make out, only the unborn child. Can he or she be the victim of the desire not to give birth? It’s hard to see how. For instance, if my mother had not had me, why or how could she be accused of selfishness? The only person to so accuse her would be me. But I wouldn’t be. So how could I do it? How could I so accuse her? On grounds of logic or any other? How could she possibly be guilty of selfishness towards something that didn’t exist? In any sense of the word. That was simply … well … not. Not merely unconceived, but never going to be. Not even a glint in her eye.
‘It was your father.’
‘Sorry?’ She’d broken in on my metaphysical musings.
‘Your father. He wanted you. The both of you. He said I’d be “selfish” not to do it.’
And so it happens. The sins of the father. Or is it the non-mothers? What goes around, comes around and all other assorted clichés.
‘Don’t be so fucking selfish.’ I remember how he said it. One last desperate throw.
‘Selfish? Jesus! How dare you? Selfish.’ I was outraged. ‘The last refuge …’
‘The last refuge of what?’ He snapped it back at me but I couldn’t think of what. I had no answer for him.
He said, ‘Look. Please …’ staring fixedly into his hands linked between his knees. ‘Please. I’m asking you. For both our sakes … Just think about it, Riley.’*
* Figures from Eurostat.
* Clearly, in the case of Australia, an opportunity to revive that old spinster deportation plan.
* This is true. Sometimes, still, I wake up in the middle of the night and have to get up and drive out to the all-night garage to score one.
* Dinkies – Double Income No Kids; Thinkers – Two Healthy Incomes No Kids. Early Retirement.
* And a memo to the Labour Party here: waffling on about ‘new family structures’ disguises the same old prejudices not one iota.
† Not only do married women vote more, according to the poll, but they also vote the way their husbands do, which is likely to be Republican. Single women, by contrast, are more likely to vote Democrat, thus had the twenty per cent or so of single women who didn’t vote in the 2000 election done so, George Bush would not have ‘won’ the presidency.
* Rathus and Nevid, 1992.
* Was this, the whole thing about selfishness, what I wanted to discuss with David?
W is for … Weddings
I had a dream once I was getting married.
It was one of those frantic ones, you know the sort, where you run around in a terrible state trying to get people’s attention but no one will help or even notice you. I was in London, I don’t know why. I don’t even know London. I was dressed in one of those big white candyfloss wedding dresses, trying to get to the ceremony, but I didn’t know where it was being held, probably the reason why taxi drivers kept refusing to take me. In the end I decided to go by tube. I ran to the station hoicking up my skirts as I went. There were a lot of people jostling and pushing around the entrance. I picked up the skirt to go down the steps, which is when I noticed the state of it – not white any longer but with a wide band of dirt around the hem.
‘And … ?’
‘And what?’
‘What happened?’
‘I woke up.’
‘Oh, right.’ Danny got up from the chair beside my desk. ‘Probably no need to check with Sigmund about that one then.’
In fact, according to Freud, dreaming about weddings doesn’t have much to do with getting married. It’s more likely to presage money or health worries.* Meanwhile, Magda, who tells dreams on the strength of a Romany grandmother† claims it’s bad news to dream about a wedding although only if you’re the bride or the groom. Dream you’re a guest and there’s good news in store, which just goes to show that in dreams, as in real life, the only safe way to attend a wedding is when other people are getting married.
Wednesdays is Weddings Day at the Free Press. And it’s a nice irony, all things considered, that it’s this confirmed spinster who on Wednesdays becomes the very patron saint of weddings. On Wednesdays I take the pile of wedding forms from the tray, dump them on my desk and thereafter attempt to winkle out the odd original feature from the homogeneous accounts of strapless gowns and hand-tied bouquets and white Rolls Royces. As in: ‘Bride Arrives in Horse Drawn Carriage …’, ‘Couple Met at School …’, ‘Best Man Flew from Canada …’.
On Wednesdays I think I understand weddings. I think I know the reason why people do it.
‘It’s the Andy Warhol thing, isn’t it?’ I said to Danny one day. ‘The fifteen minutes of fame. A day when you’re the most important person.’
Once upon a time, back in the mid-sixties when I started on this paper, ninety-five per cent of weddings were in church – Catholic, Anglican, Congregational, Methodist, Baptist. Register office weddings were rare then, even had a whiff of the risqué about them. Now less than half are in churches, the rest in the register office, or in other, more exotic, locations – a palm-fringed beach, the grounds of a grand country house, or in a glittery Las Vegas wedding chapel.
‘See, now that would be good for you, Magda,’ I said, holding up last week’s paper with the picture of the local couple smiling either side of the ‘minister’ – in this case a white-suited, jewel-encrusted Elvis impersonator. I mean, why have some boring old wedding? Co
me to think of it,’ for then it struck me, ‘why bother at all? Why not just elope? How romantic. Just the one of you …’
Magda sighed. ‘I see you’re ab-so-lut-ely determined to go on mocking, Riley.’
There are a number of basic legal requirements as regards getting married in England. (Our aim with this book, as previously mentioned, is ever to inform. Thus what follows could be useful if you’re thinking of doing it.) Both partners must be of a sound mind (a law more honoured in the breach than the observance, and not just all those years ago with Royston and Sandra). Both partners must be acting by their own consent and one – still – must be born male and one female. (Despite Magda’s groundbreaking work, those dreary old traditionalists up there in the Ministry of Marriage are still insisting there should be two of you.) If you marry in any place other than a church where the officiating clergyman is entitled to register your marriage, which means pretty much anywhere outside the Church of England, you’ll need an official to register the marriage and it’ll cost you, all of which goes to show that marriage is essentially the business of the state, a relatively modern interpretation. Up until the Middle Ages, for instance, marriages were considered merely family affairs, of little concern to anyone but the couple involved and/or their nearest and dearest. More often than not, in the case of the wealthy, it was the families who got together to draw up the nuptial arrangements; the bride didn’t even need to be there.
‘That would have suited you,’ Danny said, dusting the crumbs of Magda’s prize-winning chocolate cake off his fingers.
So true … so true.
So many things I could have done in life – marriage … childbirth … if only I didn’t have to be present.
Magda was studying the stuff she’d pulled from the Internet the day Danny and I went in for our chocolate cake. Scattered around the Hocus Pocus table were sheets on Celtic weddings, medieval weddings, Victorian, Edwardian, thirties, forties, Greek, Inca, Egyptian, etc., etc.
‘What do you think? Roman?’
‘Good choice. Going back to your roots.’
She gave me a sharp look. ‘It’s a big day for me, Riley. I want to get it right. It’s not every day you get married.’
‘Particularly to yourself.’ But luckily she’d gone off to serve a customer.
The official mourning period now being over for Mervyn – ‘I think he’d understand. I think he’d want it’ – Magda had now got around to planning the wedding.
According to the plan, the bridesmaids will form up outside the house with their flares.
Meanwhile, Magda will perform the ancient ceremony of laying her toys on the family shrine before the house god.
‘Umm … toys … family shrine … house god?’
‘It’s just symbolic, Riley.’
‘Still, it’s a while since you cleared out your toy cupboard.’
‘What about a sex toy?’ Danny’s face is bright with innocent suggestion.
‘Good thinking, Danny. Or … I know … how about a packet of condoms? That would be symbolic.’
‘Specially if they were past their use-by date.’
‘Thank you.’ Magda’s look was severe. ‘It’s supposed to be a pagan rite, not a bloody Harvest Festival.’
For the ceremony the bride will wear a long white gown and saffron veil …
‘With, I thought, a narrow plain silver band across my forehead.’
‘Matching silver sandals?’ (I’ve been doing the wedding pages too long.)
‘No, barefoot.’
‘Barefoot? Walking up the Tor. With all the glass around. Are you mad?’
But Magda’s leaning forward in the manner of a woman conveying a terrible secret. ‘Shoes,’ she says, looking over her shoulder,’ are patriarchal.’
OK, a few more things you probably don’t know about weddings. First, that old tradition of tying old shoes on the bumpers of the bride and groom’s car (something I recall Archie doing – well, wouldn’t he? – at Cass and Fergie’s wedding) has seriously unpleasant origins. It comes from the days when the bride would symbolically take off a shoe and hand it to the bridegroom, who would then hit her over the head to show who, a tad more than metaphorically, would be wearing the trousers. Also there’s the office of best man. All he has to do today is get the bridegroom up out of bed, keep the ring safe and tell risqué jokes at the reception. Once upon a time though, when a bride could be seized against her will, it was his job to help the bridegroom with the abduction.*
Still the good news, as I said to Magda, was that at least she wouldn’t need a best man. ‘And I’m sure you won’t be wanting any of that patriarchal being-given-away stuff either.’ But as always with Magda, it wasn’t that simple.
This became clear when, even as we spoke, Rochelle appeared in the back of the shop, sliding in like a little black lizard against the wall but still not silent or slippery enough to evade her mother.
‘Darling.’ Magda jumped up, receiving her customary filial look of loathing. ‘I’ve got something to ask you. A special favour. Something very important to me.’ Her voice became wheedling, almost flirtatious. ‘You will give me away at my wedding, won’t you, darling?’ She’d advanced on Rochelle, holding out her hands, trying to catch Rochelle’s own.
The scorn was stamped on Rochelle’s face like an emblem, like the pair of crossed daggers on her arm, or a hammer and sickle.
‘Yeah … right … OK … like … duuuuh …’ She clicked her tongue and raised her eyes. ‘I mean … like … that is sooooo likely, isn’t it?’
I said, ‘I think we have to take that as a No, Magda.’
In my opinion most weddings are the wrong food with the wrong drink at the wrong time of day, with the wrong people. And given my bridesmaid career I feel I can speak knowledgeably on the subject. I also have considerable sympathy with Magda over the whole patriarchal thing. Because for myself I’ve always felt there is something vaguely sacrificial about weddings, something more than a little tribal. Tapping away at my keyboard on Weddings Day at the Free Press, transcribing the forms and staring at the photographs, nothing about the habit, not even the glitter of a Las Vegas wedding chapel, can stop it seeming to be inextricably primeval. I stare at the forms, at the pictures, and I wonder. Simply that. I wonder how it was that I never wanted any of this, and I know it was more than simply not wanting it. I can still feel a shiver down to the very base of my soul at the thought of having to pronounce those vows, secular or otherwise, before a roomful of people.
‘It’s such an intimate thing to do,’ I said to Cass. ‘Honestly, I don’t know why anyone should want to do it in front of other people.’
She was at the sink with her back to me and there appeared to be no reaction.
I said, ‘You know, I look at those wedding pictures at work and I think there’s something almost, I don’t know, sadomasochistic about it, women parading up the aisle in those white dresses—’
‘It’s not about you.’ She hadn’t turned (never a good sign) and there was a sharpness in her tone.
‘Sorry?’
‘You think everything’s about you.’
‘Hey …’
‘No. You do.’ Now she turned and was facing me, hands on hips. ‘I’ve heard all this stuff from you about weddings a hundred times before. Well, who cares if you don’t like a wedding, if you don’t enjoy it, if you think they’re crap? It’s not for you. It’s for the people who are getting married.’
‘OK, OK …’ I was surprised at her vehemence but I wasn’t about to give in. ‘Still, you have to admit, Magda’s got a point. Weddings do have patriarchal overtones. I mean, that whole stuff about the bride being given away …’
‘I’m sure it is. I’m sure it’s totally unsound and no one in their right mind would still do it.’ Her voice had chips of ice in it now. ‘However, all I can say is that the way I remember it, giving me away that day brought Dad one hell of a lot of pleasure.’
If our father’s death still affects us, Ca
ss and me, all these years on, then I guess it’s not surprising. Running off the road on that bend, albeit on a grimy day with a wet surface, could still have been him taking the law into his own hands. It was, after all, a bend he knew well. And the cancer had already been diagnosed. Almost thirty years on we still pick at it like a scab, talk about it in awkward half-phrases.
‘If the car hit a skid …’
‘If he felt it go …’
‘Perhaps he thought …’
‘Yeah.’
Which is the point where we pretty much decide to go no further.
The coroner pronounced it accidental death anyway, coupling this with a glare at the lawyer who’d been sent by the insurance company. And if the coroner just happened to be a drinking buddy of my mother’s at the Conservative Club, well, who’s to say that this affected his decision? A man who liked his tipple, with a large red nose to show for it, he patted her hand that night at the bar and said, ‘Sad business, Barbara, but the way I see it, you’re a fine-looking woman. You’ll marry again.’ All of which, I can assure you, took away the sting for her. The only thing that would have improved the situation was if he’d dropped down off the bar stool on to one knee there and then and proposed to her
Our father put on a fine show of unconcern over the cancer in those last weeks.
‘At least I’ll get away from your mother.’
Had things been different, I’m sure that Cass and Fergie would have crawled off to a register office. Both hate any sort of fuss. Neither, I’m sure, would have favoured a big white wedding but they did it for our father.
We almost forgot the cancer that day. And Cass is right about it being a great day for Dad. He beamed, bringing her up that aisle, so much it almost took the grey in his face away. When the vicar asked that thing about who was giving Cass to be wed, Dad wiped away a tear as he said, ‘I do.’ Later, at the reception he was nothing but merry and you wouldn’t have been aware there was anything wrong with him. For myself, I felt utterly unreal and jagged that day, like I’d been the subject of some timeshift and had lost my bearings.
Not Married, Not Bothered Page 25
