Getting a Life

by Helen Simpson

  Burns was exchanging the dirty dunghills of Mossgiel for lionization in the drawing rooms of Edinburgh, where his delight in educated talk sat painfully alongside his contempt for hereditary privilege. She could feel it all around her, history, these chaps, their wives, waiting to drive her back indoors. But, like Burns in the Edinburgh drawing rooms, she would not be intimidated; she had considered her position and thought out where she stood on this one.

  When Nicola was a child, her mother had existed in a maroon cloud of rage and frustration. If ever the guilt-wagon comes within five miles of me now, she thought, I remember that cloud and shout with relief. She hadn’t exactly been born with a silver spoon in her mouth, but the eleven plus had allowed her into the game. She had stretched and competed and done well. Minutes became meaningful units, hours added up to something. Then came the children and working for a partnership, and all her time management skills had come into their own.

  Sometimes the stay-at-home mothers tried to pick her brains about the best schools for their daughters. Why bother? she wanted to say, Why bother flogging them over exam hurdles if your girls are going to end up like you, sipping coffee in between school runs? And of course there were no men at home during the days—they sped off early to be where the action was. To work. To make money.

  Rory McCrindle was winding up his Immortal Memory with a few lofty homiletic insights. “That human decency and human worth have for the most part their dwelling among the poor he had a perception more constant, more pressing and more experienced than any other man of his epoch,” he intoned.

  I don’t buy that old idea of poverty being a virtue, thought Nicola. What’s wrong with money? Money’s good for people. That she should earn her living had been an article of faith. She hadn’t slaved at her exams and said no to fun for all those years of torts and statutes just for something to pass the time until she started a family. What a waste of government money, for a start. And she couldn’t take a couple of years off. No. She’d be dead in the water. She wouldn’t be allowed back in.

  Also, they needed her money. It would be too dangerous to rely on Charlie’s income alone with job security as it was. It took an incredible amount to keep the show on the road, what with the mortgage and child care, not to mention Charlie’s alimony payments to the dreaded Joanne. She felt many years old for an instant, a hard-worked horse. Driven was the adjective that had always been applied to her, usually as a compliment, but—

  Her thoughts were interrupted by a sudden pandemonium of scraping chairs and shouts of “Rabbie!” and “Rabbie Burns!” as all around her people rose to their feet, flinging back the contents of their quaichs with stagy bravado. An emotional wave of applause followed. These hardworking cautious bankers and their like had been moved to the edge of tears by this account, familiar to them all, of the poet’s reckless penurious life and of his death made fearful by the terror of debt.

  “I hear there was a fair bit of trouble over planning the speeches,” said Donald, sipping his way towards incaution. “Apparently Alistair Wallace—he’s the head of the Aberdeen branch—well, he was the obvious choice to give the Toast to the Lassies.”

  “Toast to the Lassies?” said Nicola disdainfully.

  “Yes, the Toast to the Lassies usually comes directly after the Immortal Memory, but because of the numbers involved tonight they have to take things a wee bit slower to allow for the food to be served and taken away and so on.”

  “Why Alistair Wallace?” asked Iain. “Why not a younger man? Though most of us are younger than Alistair Wallace. It wouldnae be difficult to be younger than Alistair Wallace.”

  “His Toast to the Lassies has been in demand with Burns societies all along the east coast for the past thirty years,” said Donald. “He’s a local hero. But when it finally came to the run-through down in London, much to everybody’s dismay his famous speech was obviously impossible. Offensive. Sexist.”

  “Oh, not that PC stuff again,” said Iain in disgust.

  “You could see where the problem lay,” brooded Donald. “Your average traditional Burns Supper, it’s nearly all men that go along. The wives stay at home. It’s a wee bit Masonic, if you like. And of course the organizer of this big Caledonian Federation anniversary event realized in the nick of time that mibbe half the guests here tonight were likely to be female. Things would have to be updated.”

  “So what did they do?” asked Nicola, intrigued despite herself. She loved management issues.

  “Well, they couldn’t drop Alistair altogether, that would have been offensive too. He’d never have understood, and neither would his fans. So they decided to shunt him into a less controversial slot, the Reply to the Immortal Memory. That’s usually just a brief vote of thanks if it’s included at all. And he was requested to keep the obscenities to a minimum.”

  “Oh great,” said Iain angrily. “The classic sense-of-humor failure. That’s great.”

  “Not when you think about it,” Donald demurred. “You can see their point. It would have been like asking an audience where half the guests were black to sit and laugh at racist jokes. You wouldn’t call that a sense-of-humor failure.”

  “That’s different,” growled Iain. “Anyway, who will be giving the Toast to the Lassies now?”

  “They found an academic with an interest in Scottish literature,” shrugged Donald. “Birkbeck College, I think it was.”

  “Oh how super, an academic,” said Iain. “Are they bringing back that Talisker then?”

  “Is this the man who’s been causing all the trouble?” asked Nicola.

  “The very one,” said Donald, craning his neck towards the top table.

  This controversial old speaker Alistair Wallace rattled out anecdotes in thick hawking gutturals. Nicola’s ears took in about half of what he said, while for the rest of it she sat with the strained expression of one who is hard of hearing. I can’t believe the time, she thought; we’re never going to be allowed home. His voice was like artillery, and his tone was brutal, laconic, almost east European, she decided, although there was also something purely Scottish in its blend of romantic stoicism. As far as she could tell, his speech had had nothing at all to do with Burns. At least it didn’t go on as long as the one before. Now it was drawing to a close with a joke for the bankers.

  “ ‘Och, this way of life is all fine and dandy,’ says Angus to his friend Gavin. ‘The money’s fine, the job’s great, but I find the stress is getting to me. I get that hyped up sometimes I don’t know what to do with myself.’

  “ ‘You know fine well that’s an occupational hazard in jobs like ours, big hitters in the City,’ says Gavin. ‘Big swinging dicks as we are. I’ll tell you what I do when I get that way myself, when I get stressed out. When I get like that, first opportunity occurs, I drive back to my house, kiss the wife at the front door, take her upstairs to the bedroom. And half an hour later I’m right as rain. Feeling like a million dollars. Ready to get back into the fray. You should try it.’

  “ ‘Well,’ says Angus. ‘Thanks for the tip. It certainly seems to work for you.’ ”

  The men were sniggering quietly over their whiskey. Susan Buchanan had her head cocked on one side to listen, like a bright-eyed sparrow, while Deborah Mahon had assumed her vague all-purpose smile. Nicola regarded the grin on her husband’s tired gray face. Charlie was still her darling, but he wasn’t exactly Young Lochinvar anymore.

  “A week later,” the speaker continued, “Angus and Gavin meet again. ‘You’re looking much better, Angus,’ cries Gavin. ‘You’re looking years younger, relaxed, not a care in the world.’ ‘Thanks to you,’ smiles Angus. ‘I took your advice. Next time I felt stressed out I drove back to the house. Knocked at the door. Kissed the wife. Took her upstairs to the bedroom. Half an hour later, right as rain. Just as you said. She was a bit surprised at first, your good lady, but after I explained it was you that had sent me round she was fine about it.’ ”

  The enormous room erupted. All around, hot re
d faces were disintegrating into guffaws and whinnying. Nicola smiled politely and felt a shudder run through her.

  Stress! She could handle it. She positively enjoyed jumping in its salty waves. The danger was, you got too good at it. You started to see time that was not paid time—chargeable hours— as dead time, unprofitable, unless it was directly recuperative— the gym, for example, twice a week to keep up this level of energy—servicing the machine. There was of course another rhythm, the rhythm of children and old people, being patient, watching the grass grow, but she couldn’t see herself doing that for another thirty years at least. She didn’t want to take it easy. She was young, or at least in the prime of life; she loved stirring productive movement. Stillness just didn’t do it for her.

  And why is it always down to me, thought Nicola, this talk of having it all and so on? I took the top first in my year. I’m cleverer than him, though I don’t rub it in. We have four children. But there’s no question of him adapting his hours to the family or helping manage the nanny and the house and all that that involves. There is never for one moment a suggestion that Charlie should budge.

  To be fair, he never suggested she stop working either.

  “Iain, it’s gone eleven,” said Nicola. “I don’t want to sound rude but I’m wondering about the baby-sitter.”

  “There’s a way to go yet. You can’t hurry a Burns Night. You shouldnae worry, your sitter will be fine, she’ll be asleep in front of the telly.”

  “It’s true,” said Donald. “There is no getting round it. You might as well enjoy it. Would you like another glass?”

  “No thank you,” said Nicola, not smiling.

  She must be the only person in the room who wasn’t drunk. How much more of this Burns stuff could there possibly be?

  “Here we are, Nicola,” said Iain. “Here’s the Toast to the Lassies about to start. Here’s the academic. Now we’re in for a treat.”

  As it happened, this next speech was so direct and affecting that Nicola found herself listening with all her attention for the first time.

  The poet’s mother Agnes had been the eldest of six, and when she was ten her mother had died, first telling Agnes that she must look after her little brothers and sisters. Not much later Agnes was courted by a ploughman, the two of them working daily together in the fields; but then, after seven years of this, she found him with another woman and finished with him. On the rebound she married William Burns, a tenant farmer years older than herself. Their eldest son Robert did not inherit his mother’s strict ideal of fidelity. He described himself as having a tinder heart always alight for some girl or other.

  Famously there was Highland Mary, Mary Campbell, with whom he joined hands under the current of the brook where they met in a private marriage pledge, and who died in childbirth with his baby about the time Jean Armour was having his twins. Then there was May Cameron, a servant girl, and Jenny Clow, and Agnes McLehose (his Clarinda) in Edinburgh, and Anna Park, barmaid at the Dumfries Globe, who bore his daughter Betty nine days before Jean presented him with his third son.

  Thank God I live in an age of contraception, thought Nicola. Of all the blessings of the modern world, that must be the greatest.

  It was Jean Armour he eventually married, banishing thoughts of the intellectual disparity between them in a stoutly worded letter—“A wife’s head is immaterial compared with her heart. My Jean has the kindest heart in the county, gratefully devoted with all its powers to love me. Indeed the poor girl has the most sacred enthusiasm for me and has not a wish but to gratify my every idea of her deportment.” She bore nine of his children, four of whom died. “Of the four children she bore me in seventeen months, two sets of twins, my eldest boy only is living,” he wrote to a friend in 1788. “But I reckon a twelve brace of children against I celebrate my twelfth wedding day—twenty-four christenings, twenty-four useful members of society! I am so enamored of her prolific twin-bearing merit that I have given her the legal title which I now avow to the world.”

  There was something rather fab about having had the twins at forty, thought Nicola; bringing in new life when others that age were starting to worry about death. And she still wasn’t too old, there was still just about time to squeeze in one last baby if she really felt like it.

  Once Burns had married Jean Armour, he arranged for the babies he continued to father by other women to go to her rather than to his mother as before. “Oor Rab could hae done wi’ twa’ wives,” Jean commented. On the day of his funeral, she gave birth to their ninth baby, a boy. She was left with five sons and little Betty Park. She was to live on for another thirty-eight years, two more of her sons dying early during that time.

  “In his own time Burns was criticized for immorality,” concluded the speaker. “He wrote:

  O ye douce folk that live by rule,

  Grave, tideless-blooded, calm an’ cool,

  Your hearts are just a standing pool

  Ye never stray . . .

  That sort of love, the sort that moved Burns to poetry, it’s like the sea. It ebbs and flows. It doesn’t last. What remains when it’s over? Why, the poetry, of course. And the babies.”

  “Oh dear,” said Nicola to Iain, wiping her eyes, while the applause died down around them. “That was sad. That poor woman Jean.”

  “Och aye, bonny Jean,” said Iain. “These days she’d have been a teleworker for the bank, right enough.”

  “More security in that than in farming,” said Nicola.

  “Security. Babies. I don’t know.” Iain shook his head and poured more whiskey. “I’m no being rude, Nicola, but can I ask you something? Why do you have four? We’ve got the three and that’s as much as Susan can cope with, and she doesn’t work.” Nicola was used to men asking this question. Usually it came with the unspoken accusation that she was just being greedy, which was a bit rich coming from a banker as it so often did. Because I want them and I can afford them, she felt like saying; because I’m thinking of the future, when I retire at fifty; because, more life; because—why not?

  But this man was not attacking her, he was in his befuddled way genuinely curious.

  “I would never have had so many if I’d had to stay at home and look after them myself,” she said, as she always said, to take the heat off. Then she continued, less guarded because she liked this man, “I mean, I was tempted during my third pregnancy to take some time off. Charlie was seriously worried about the mortgage, I can tell you. I’d had a bad run of nannies. I’d missed all Jade’s sports days and prize-givings that year because of work. But as soon as the scan showed it was twins, that did it. I knew I’d be back at work as soon as I could crawl out of the house. Twins!”

  “Susan says a nanny wouldn’t be the same,” Iain persisted. He was pushing it now. “She says they want her there.”

  “Yes they’d prefer a mother at home,” said Nicola crisply. “But I couldn’t do that. I’m their mother, that’s what they’ve got.”

  Iain sat, shaking his head dolefully and staring into his glass. Irritated, Nicola shifted in her seat and turned towards Donald.

  “You’ll be looking forward to the Reply from the Lassies,” he said.

  “More?” said Nicola in horror, without thinking. He laughed.

  “This should be the last. Truly.”

  In the distance a young woman could be seen standing at the microphone consulting her notes.

  “Isn’t that Fiona MacPherson’s new assistant?” asked Donald, leaning over her towards Iain. She felt his weight against her arm. “Fiona MacPherson that’s head of HR at the Auld Scotia?”

  “Don’t mess with that MacPherson woman, I’m telling you,” said Iain, mournfully shaking his head. Drink turned him into a clown, noticed Nicola.

  “Behind every successful man there’s a woman,” began the young woman at the microphone, and her voice was surprisingly loud and clear. “Behind every successful woman is . . . what? That is the question I’d like to consider this Burns Night.”


  Here we go, thought Nicola. What every woman needs is a wife. She saw Donald raise an eyebrow at Brian Mahon, and Brian Mahon reply with a comical turning down of the corners of his mouth. Did this girl realize how little people liked to be lectured? wondered Nicola, wincing for her, and at the same time admiring her; more particularly how men hate to be lectured by women?

  “Men ask, what is it women want?” the girl continued.

  “A thundering scalade, right enough!” shouted a frisky Scot on his eleventh whiskey.

  The most hurtful thing always was the assumption that because she was successful at work she must have sacrificed her children; that her children must have suffered. But if anybody had suffered, she now saw, it was her.

  “Women want love and they want work, just the same as men,” declared the girl. “And they want children to be seen as a fact of life, not as a personal weakness. So if you love your women, all you men out there, take your share of what’s called women’s work so that us women can take some of the bread-winning burden off your shoulders. Get a life. Outside the office. It’ll be better for your health. Better for your love life. And, if you’re interested, since Burns mentions it, better for your immortal soul. Aux armes, citoyens! In the name of the love you claim to feel for us lassies.”

  She left the dais to ragged applause and uncertain wolf whistles. She did not smile or look back.

  “Well, for the majority of us, of course, that’s luckily the case, the bit about having the wife at home taking care of all that side of things,” chuckled Iain Buchanan. “And don’t think it’s not appreciated, Susan, because it is! Sorry, Nicola. But it’s true. I can’t see any reason why I should change a state of affairs that works, that allows me to work. Let’s face it, this sort of job needs total support and backup. We all need a bonny Jean to keep the home fires burning.”