by Holly Seddon
While she had been a teenager on their wedding day, he was thirty-three. A success already. A self-made man from a working-class background he’d long since rejected. A staid and steady hand. A man of property and means.
Suki didn’t want him for his money. The thought would not have crossed her mind. She came from nobility that was born rather than earned, she thought nothing of the world my father had created for himself. She didn’t need it or want it, because it was just air, just water, she knew no different. She wasn’t grateful or ungrateful, she just didn’t really notice. I think my father might have liked that because at least it was honest. I’d heard him talk to Ted about other businessmen, vain fools with young brassy wives only there for the cash.
Yes, my mother was far younger than my father. And she was golden and beautiful. But she was no gold-digger. Her interests in life extended far beyond being bought things because being bought things was just par for the course.
My mother had gone to art college in London for a bit, until I came along. She dallied with jewellery design, fashion, painting, sculpture. The huge studio on our grounds was set aside for her, but she rarely went in.
She’d mostly gone to art college for the social scene, she once told me. And her friends were wild. While I was still small and portable enough to be taken with her, there were picnics and bottles of champagne in lush gardens. I remember clambering around sleeping adults and wobbly drives home.
Mum was nineteen when I was born. She was still a girl and she remained girlish her whole life. Her art friends, as I remember them, loved me like a mascot. I was dressed up, and had my face painted. I was carried on knobbly shoulders, thrown in the air and petted. It was all very good fun. Looking back, it wasn’t really my fun, I was just the recipient of fun being had anyway, but I didn’t care.
When I started prep school, at nearly four, their fun carried on but I wasn’t privy to it any more. Instead, I was in a huge classroom with fifteen or so other children and a strict woman in a blue dress. All the children at my school came from money, but they had all been more properly turned out than me. There were some patches in my etiquette and I never really recovered from being on the back foot. A girl from a very rich family, in one of the best private schools in the country, somehow I managed to be the hick.
Private-school kids attend from three until eighteen and their memories are long. And it’s easy to stand out for the wrong reasons.
At eleven, I was taller than most of the girls, with no boy pupils to balance things out. I stood out just by standing up. And then of course there was the red hair. In a sea of golden pigtails and mahogany French plaits, my red hair pulled back into a ponytail did nothing to increase my social standing.
At home, I would read my mother’s discarded copies of Vogue. I would look at the leggy, alien-looking women staring out from the pages. They looked more like me than the girls in my school did. That didn’t really help me day-to-day, but it did draw me into daydreams. Those models and Mum’s David Bowie records – which became my David Bowie records. Aladdin Sane and Ziggy Stardust looked back at me knowingly and I felt okay.
Sometimes, my mum’s friends would post down copies of trendier magazines for her, like I-D and The Face. I’d plead with my mum to hurry up and finish them. She would savour them because they were so hard to find in Somerset. The waiting just enhanced my excitement. There was an almost animal tribalism, a war-paint feeling to the looks and the poses. I cut out my favourite pictures and stuck them in my scrapbook and then I tucked my scrapbook and magazines back under my bed, pulled on my jeans and carefully selected top and went out to find Paul.
For a boy, Paul was into clothes too. He was very particular about the colours he wore, and even more so the textures. Refusing jeans Viv had bought him because the waistband irritated him or he only wanted zips and no buttons. He’s still like that now. If anyone ever asks if I buy his clothes, something I’m astonished so many wives do, we laugh and slap the table like that scene in Goodfellas.
In the end, when he was thirteen or so, Viv stopped bringing clothes home for Paul and just went along to monitor and pay as Paul and I traipsed around Yeovil looking for the perfect yellow polo shirt or new pair of drainpipes. I brought my own cash, rolled up in a velvet handbag that I loved, but mostly I was there in an advisory capacity.
Jeans were always the uniform, but we were both fussy about which type and Paul would petition and petition for Wranglers, back and forthing with Viv until they settled on a pair from C&A or BHS. When I was with them, I’d buy one or two things, off the shoulder sweaters (which would actually be very en vogue now) or leg warmers (which wouldn’t). I once snapped at my mum for bringing back some miniature Guess jeans from London that matched her own. ‘Why can’t you get me some Clockhouse jeans from C&A?’ I pouted, and she nearly spat out her drink in surprise.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
November 2012 – Monday afternoon
In the quiet of our temporary bedroom I strip off to get changed into some comfier clothes, and catch sight of my pinkness in the long mirror I’d been trying not to notice. It isn’t a bad body, fair to middling. Everything is a bit droopier, the wrong things are flatter. But it could have been worse. It has been worse.
Mine was once a tangled knot of a body, angular and dwarfed by T-shirts and sweatpants. Once you’ve experienced your own body disappearing, scrunched up like a Coke can, it’s hard to shake it. The memory lurks in the mirror like a phantom.
I’m a tall woman. When you’re slim and curvy, that makes you willowy. When you’re thin, it makes you frightening, like some kind of spiky tree. Like the bent and bumpy old trees that my parents should now be. Of course, my mother died with her green leaves in place and I don’t think my father ever had them, but I like the idea of it. I imagine them stooping to fuss over my children. It’s wishful thinking to the point of delirium.
Anyway, I was pretty gaunt on our wedding day. My skin pale and dry, my eyes sinking into their holes. A few years ago, I floated the idea of renewing our vows. I could replace those long-hidden photos. I could grow my hair long for one last time. Our children could be pageboy and flower girl. How adorable and restorative. Paul wasn’t keen. ‘I married you then, not now. It’s not healthy to rewrite the past.’ I argued that it was a celebration, a triumphant declaration. He argued it was vanity.
How simple that argument seems now. To think, I was able to huff and puff about his accusation of vanity, but I’ve had to keep something far deeper, and darker, inside for weeks now. Boiling me from the inside while I smile like a statue on the surface.
I perch on the bed, my stomach skin collapsing like a lopsided smile, my breasts frowning downwards. The letter feels endangered in my lap, although I know it back to front and could recite it in my sleep. I cannot recite it in my sleep, for all our sakes.
I was born slight, my limbs were long like my mother’s and my appetite was twitchy like my father’s. If I don’t pay proper attention to it, I can become raw-boned. Losing my curves to a desert flatness, a constant chill settling on my skin.
Luckily, I went into advertising after university with its steady stream of client lunches, brunch meetings, biscuits on the boardroom table and booze on tap – literally.
My agency had a bar in the basement where the whole company would descend after work. Evenings would often turn into group dinners or swaying in a queue for a take-away if things had gone sideways. Even us grad-schemers took part, making the most of the free provisions and then peeling off for junk food on the way to the tube.
I started there at twenty-two, just after graduating. The agency, TMC, had visited my faculty during a careers fair and I’d made a beeline for the stand.
TV advertising had been such a constant element of my formative years that I almost didn’t realise that it was a construct. I found it a revelation that it was an industry with a set of jobs. As kids, Paul and I would play the ad game, where we had to race to name the product as soon as a jin
gle started on the box. Or we’d take it in turns to point to something in the local shop and the other had to yell out the tagline.
‘We all adore a Kia-Ora!’
‘A home’s not home without Homewheat!’
‘Hands up if you use Right Guard!’
I didn’t realise at the time quite how much I soaked up, but whenever I was involved with brainstorming any TV campaigns at TMC, I would always think to myself, ‘Would we have sung along with that?’
Of course, in those early days, most of what I did was grunt work. And I certainly wasn’t coming up with any jingles.
In 1994, I started working on a bank of desks that had a fax machine at one end and a huge printer at the other. We each had computers, great big boxes with bulging screens. And we had phones with headsets and three thousand buttons. It looked like a typing pool.
I was a trainee account executive so I sat with junior account executives. Which sounds like almost the same thing but I was perched precariously on a significantly lower ladder rung.
For the first three months of the scheme, the ten of us grad-schemers had rotated through five different departments: account management, planning, project management, TV production and development. I’d imagined that TV production would be the sweet spot. Glamorous and creative. Making good use of all the artistic sentiment I’d carefully constructed throughout my three years at university. I hated it. And not only that, I was terrible at it. Project management was my second doomed assignment. In short, my projects were badly managed. I started to wonder if I was for the chop. And then I wondered what the hell else I could do. College hadn’t really prepared me for much outside of creating impractical clothing that would disintegrate in most everyday situations and/or weather.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed college. It wasn’t the free-for-all party time that my dad had worried about, but it was fun. Free from Somerset and new to everything, I felt scrubbed clean. A fresh canvas that could be splattered with any colours. I could try anything, safe in the knowledge there was always someone else trying something worse, wearing something brighter or saying something louder. I drank a bit, smoked a bit, took ecstasy and did not act cool. After swallowing my first pill, I convinced myself I was having a heart attack and told anyone who’d listen. Ecstasy was strong then, not the chocolate buttons you get now. For a while I went out with a Doors fan who was studying fine art. One night, we ate magic mushrooms while painting. It wasn’t the mind-expanding experience that he’d billed. I ended up with five brown canvases, severely bitten nails and an anxious headache.
University is supposed to be transitional, that’s the point. Three years is significant but not for ever. The years after university, that was my for ever and I wanted to make them count. Anyway, by the time I’d cycled through the other departments at TMC and arrived at account management, I was in last-chance saloon. Thankfully, through luck or design, it clicked.
If you watch Mad Men, you see Don Draper owning the room with his charm, laying out breath-taking ad campaigns that the whole fictional country will talk about, everyone hanging off his every word. Well, that is not account management. Account management is what Pete Campbell does.
So I finally found my calling – my work home – in the account management department.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
1984
Because of our September birthdays, Paul and I were nearly twelve when we started secondary school. Albeit my secondary school was the same school as my primary school, I just moved into a different building.
Mick seemed to be absolutely loaded the summer holiday running up to secondary school. He also seemed to finish work at lunchtime most days and we were often taken to a beer garden for ginger beer and crisps. Sometimes we just strolled over to The Swan and bobbed between the beer garden, Paul’s house and the recreation ground.
Other times, some of Mick’s friends would be in other village pubs and we’d be brought along in the back of the Allegro, sliding across the seats as we careened around narrow lanes.
With characteristic melodrama, Paul and I considered it to be our last summer as children. We played the fruit machines in the pubs or sat on the grass and talked, sometimes stringing a blade of grass between our fingers and blowing solemn reedy tunes like we were blind old blues men.
Paul had always complained about his primary school, but I knew he was nervous about his first day at Big School – Ansell Secondary School. ‘It’ll be alright,’ I said, not really knowing what else to offer.
‘Dad says I need to find the biggest boy in my class and hit him in the face,’ Paul said.
‘What? Why?’
‘He says if I do that, I’ll get left alone,’ Paul said, nervously.
‘I don’t think that’s a very good idea.’
‘I know.’
‘You’ll be left alone anyway, why wouldn’t you be?’
I started back at Sunnygrove the same day Paul started at Ansell Secondary School.
By then, I had spent nearly nine years getting used to a school I hated. Nine years with people who left me, at best, cold and, at worse, in tears. School had always been something I had to get through, not something I could enjoy.
Before Ansell, Paul had attended a primary school where the mums took it in turns to watch the kids on the playground at break time, where the dinner ladies cuddled you and gave you an extra pudding on your birthday and there was a sleepy corner in the classroom if you wanted a lie down or felt poorly. He rolled his eyes about the lads playing football with a tennis ball and the girls stretching elastic to jump over while they sang ‘stupid’ songs. But when I told him what it was like at Sunnygrove, he stopped complaining quite so much.
For all my vague reassurances and Mick’s bad advice over the summer, Paul wasn’t left alone when he started at Ansell. From day one, he was a target. He wasn’t allowed to just be like he was at his old school. In his first week, his choice to sit on a wall reading a book had led to his book and bag being thrown over the wall and into a neighbouring field, guarded by a line of thistles and stingers. His lunch was frequently ruined by kids tipping water into it.
So we banded together tighter than ever that year, our time outside of school a kind of salvation. It just felt easy. Unlike at school, we could breathe and just be still. We trusted each other to be kind, and felt safe to be ourselves.
At Sunnygrove, the emphasis was on learning the classics. Classic literature, art, history, language, philosophy. Even now I can reel off titbits of Latin as party tricks. Did you know that ‘nihil taurus crappus’ means ‘no bullshit’? As impressively useless as my residual Dog Latin is, the only things that really started to stick for me were literature and art. I’d always enjoyed a story, but as I started my later prep years, I began to read like a fever. And after years of him devouring books like most kids eat sweets, Paul was delighted. Finally we could talk about books the way some kids talked about Panini stickers or pop trivia. Paul’s own school library was patchy and was largely used by Ansell’s pupils as a quiet space in which to heavy pet. By contrast, my school library groaned with the weight of words. Its huge bookcases needed slide-along stairs to access the top shelves and you could get lost in its wooden corridors for hours, the perfume of the old paper other-worldly. I knew Paul would have loved to spend just a day in there. A field trip for one. But an Ansell boy would never have been allowed in the library. A boy, in fact, would never have been allowed through the front gate of the school. But I could check books out for him under my name. Every week Paul gave me a list. And the following week, he’d give the books back with a new list on top. We did that for years. He read far more of my school’s books than I did.
It may not have offered many books but Ansell did furnish Paul with one wondrous gift, which he generously shared. An outright bottom-of-the-barrel vocabulary that covered every disgusting sexual indiscretion or toilet situation two pre-teens could ever hope to describe – never mind if they understood it. We practised the new w
ords in whispers, laughing hysterically and trying them out in different contexts. One day, when I had come back into the school changing rooms from P.E. to find my clothes had been taken from my gym bag and hoisted up on a flagpole on the school front lawn, I let rip at the giggling perpetrators with such a stream of filth that my father was called into school.
Ted drove us home in silence. My father had, of course, smoothed things over behind the thick mahogany door of the headmistress’s office. Without needing to be told, I went to my room for the rest of the day and night, and left the next morning before I could be noticed. Or not noticed. Alongside books, we started to pay more attention to music. Rifling through Viv’s record collection and putting her seven-inch singles in order of our preference. ‘Fire’ by the Crazy World of Arthur Brown was our favourite and we loved ‘(If Paradise Is) Half As Nice’ by Amen Corner, ‘Pretty Flamingo’ by Manfred Mann and everything by The Small Faces.
We put ‘Flowers in the Rain’ by The Move on the turntable repeatedly and took bets on how long it would take Mick to tell us – again – that this was the first full record ever played on Radio 1. If Viv was home, she’d always say ‘yes, Mick’ the moment he opened his mouth and we’d snort with laughter.
It wasn’t just that we liked the old music, it was about abundance: there were hundreds and hundreds of shiny black singles, all lined up in proper record boxes.
Years before, Viv had arrived at Mick’s with only her clothes. Buying records was a treat that Viv had allowed herself when she started to earn nursing wages at the end of the sixties. It took Paul and me holding a handle on each side to shift the boxes into the living room ready for a rummage.
But we were also becoming interested in the music of the time too. We were obsessed with Frankie Goes To Hollywood because there was so much outrage about their song ‘Relax’. We liked Bronski Beat, loved ‘Small Town Boy’, and felt that it reflected us, even though it really didn’t. I loved songs like ‘Dr Beat’ by Miami Sound System and Madonna’s ‘Like a Virgin’. We loved ‘When Doves Cry’ by Prince and Paul liked Howard Jones and Nik Kershaw. We both loved David Bowie. Always, and to this day. We have a Ziggy Stardust telephone box painted in our study in Blackheath; it was one of the first things I did when we moved in, dragging paints out that hadn’t been prised open since college but had been moved from home to home.
