Good Wives

by Margaret Forster

  But we made a go of our relationship over the decades. Both of us wanted to, both of us thought we had a duty to, so we did, overcoming differences of temperament and clashes of personality. I admired my mother-in-law – anyone would have done so, when she was so kind and had performed marvels against the greatest odds, to bring up her family almost single-handed. But there were some tricky moments. She could feel isolated sometimes and become paranoid. With her daughters around, she was invincible, but alone with us before we had children she could occasionally feel squeezed out. Once, in the middle of Hampstead High Street, after a silly incident over a banana (she’d wanted to buy over-ripe ones, I’d said they were uneatable, and Hunter had agreed) she said, ‘I’m going home, I’m not wanted here,’ and she suddenly crossed the road and started walking away. We ran after her, apologising, begging her to forgive us, ready to thrust a ton of black bananas into her arms if it would persuade her to stay. I remember feeling absolute panic at the thought of her going back home to Carlisle (though she’d never have managed it). I felt a total failure as a wife – it was awful to have caused such unusual anger. But she was quickly mollified and the little storm blew away with, what else, a nice cup of tea.

  Nothing is said in the marriage service about its being a wife’s duty to be a good daughter-in-law, but it is implicit in the contract. No one ‘takes’ a husband on his own, unless he is an orphan – the bride ‘takes’ his family too. I never thought that was unfair, though I can see some wives might. My husband owed an incredible amount to his family, especially to his mother.

  But how I would have coped with Neil Livingstone, I dread to think.

  *

  Most of Mary’s years as a wife seem so desperately serious that it was a relief to find her touching on an essentially frivolous duty, one I could identify with strongly: trying to choose David’s clothes. She couldn’t bear his always looking scruffy and, though no stylist herself, she saw it as part of her duty as a wife to try to smarten him up, hence the plea to his sisters to send a new jacket.

  I know how she felt, and yet at the same time I can’t agree with her. I wish my husband didn’t seem to concentrate most of the time on trying to look like a tramp, but if that’s how he wants to look, fine. ‘How do I look?’ he asks as he is leaving the house. ‘Like a seedy old tramp,’ I say, to which he always replies, ‘I think I look very nice,’ and I reply, ‘Fine,’ again, then this little charade is over. I care how he looks, but I don’t care enough to do what Mary did, and many wives still do: try to make him get some decent clothes. Plenty of wives see shopping for their husband’s clothes as one of their wifely duties. I don’t. I might buy him an article of clothing as a present occasionally, but that’s it. It’s bad enough shopping for myself without the boredom of trailing round shops for him. He can do it himself, but he rarely does and then he has neither the patience nor the interest to search for what he wants. He regularly buys what he does not want just to have the task over with. He even buys things he knows won’t fit. ‘You’re a 36-inch waist,’ I point out when he comes home with a new pair of trousers, size 34. ‘I know,’ he says, ‘but they didn’t have size 36.’

  What he likes to wear are not trousers anyway, but shorts. All the time. When he was a boy, he longed to get out of short pants and into long trousers, but now he’s a man he says he hates trousers. He has six pairs of shorts, ranging from what are solemnly called Town shorts to Gardening shorts, and all of them would give even Mary Livingstone a fit. They are all virtually the same in style – style! – but different in colour and with slight variations in type of material. He buys them from Lands End’s or Hawkshead’s mail-order catalogues. Enough said. He wears them with a collection of vile T-shirts, unless he is trying to look smart when he wears them with short-sleeved seersucker shirts (yes, same catalogues). On his feet he has sandals. ‘They are Reeboks,’ he says, and waits, in vain, for my admiration. I don’t care what they are, they are awful. He spends every walk we take together stopping every ten yards to fiddle with the fastenings. Sometimes, he wears socks with them and then I absolutely refuse to accompany him. When it rains, he pulls over his feet but under his sandals a pair of thin, green, rubber galoshes. He looks exactly like a caricature of a frog and the noise his feet make is dreadful.

  In the winter, the clothes situation is even more dire. It is a matter of the Coat. This is an extremely heavyweight, good-quality herring-bone tweed coat, bought at what he thinks of as vast expense some years ago at Aquascutum. It was far too big for him when he bought it and at sixty he wasn’t going to grow into it, as I felt obliged to point out. After he’d tripped up a couple of times, because it was so long, he took it to our little local dry-cleaning shop to have it shortened. There was a woman there, never actually seen, who did alterations. Whatever the alteration required, her Greek husband, who fronted the shop, always confidently announced, ‘She do it.’ She did it. It made very little difference. He still looks drowned in it, but he loves it. ‘I look distinguished in it,’ he says. He wears it with a woollen hat, the sort men wear on building sites. When it rains, the coat smells like a wet dog. But he is happy. The marvellous thing is, what a good self-image he has. Now why, in that case, should I bully him to change his clothes? A good wife, in my opinion, makes it clear what she thinks her husband looks like, but only if asked, then stays silent.

  Sometimes, my clothes-conscious, elegant daughter says, ‘Mum, why do you let him go out like that?’ I say because it isn’t my business to dictate what he should wear. ‘But he can look good,’ she wails. True. He can look good. In a suit. He loathes suits, however, making the most absurd fuss about wearing one, except for a battered off-white thing he boasts is a designer item (the designed part being the thousands of wrinkles in the material which gives this suit the appearance of having been slept in). But it isn’t this suit I’m thinking of. The suit he looks good in is a dark suit, worn with a pristine white shirt – which transforms him. I think he’s worn it twice since I bought it for him years ago – a birthday present less than rapturously received. He wouldn’t wear it for his son’s wedding, a Christmas wedding, but clung instead to his white summer suit which next to the bridegroom’s Paul Smith number looked even more of a rag than usual.

  But I leave him to dress as he likes, not as I like. I am not his mother, he is not a child, and I am not, just because I am his wife, responsible for his appearance. I don’t want to be. I reject this as being part of my role. I reject, too, that the way I dress should reflect on him. Those criticisms of Mary because she didn’t look as a famous man’s wife should were based on the pernicious idea that a wife’s appearance should enhance her husband’s reputation and standing. It’s an idea still heavily in evidence. Look at what the wives of recent Prime Ministers have had to put up with – poor Norma Major, sneered at for wearing the same blue suit two days running when her husband won the election, and Cherie Blair, ridiculed for a pair of trousers worn to some public event as well as for countless other so-called sartorial gaffes. Wives are still thought of as trophies, which have to glitter and shine and do credit to a husband by the way they look. It takes a brave wife to ignore the sniping and rise above the attacks.

  I’ve never had to, but on those few occasions when I’ve attended functions as a wife, I’ve never worried about how I will look, though I’ve always taken trouble. I like clothes, though I don’t like shopping for them. He always seems pleased with how I look, but I doubt if I would change if he didn’t. He did once say, many years ago, that he wouldn’t like me to have grey hair, which I thought a liberty and laughed. When I was fifty-five, the first grey hairs started to appear and as a joke my sister-in-law gave me one of those easy-to-use colour rinses. I’d always wished that when I was young I’d had the fun of dyeing my hair the way one of my daughters dyed hers as a teenager – a wonderful purple, then green, then orange – so I used these rinses until I was sixty. Then I thought, this will become serious soon. The rinses won’t be enough in a year o
r so because the grey is gaining ground. So I stopped. He now has a growing-daily-greyer wife. I haven’t asked him if he minds being seen with me and as yet he hasn’t dared to say he wants me to dye my hair. Luckily, he professed not to like make-up so he accepted my unpainted face, though I do recall that he expressed the solemn opinion when I was twenty that he thought the time would come, around the age of forty, when I might benefit from it. Forty came, and though I might have benefited I didn’t choose to.

  I remember only once, and that was before I was married, feeling distressed because I knew I looked wrong and – I can hardly bear to acknowledge this – let him down by my appearance. It was a ball, in his final year at Durham University. I’d never been to a ball (nor ever wanted to go, except out of curiosity) but was told evening dress was essential – he’d be in the full rig-out, and I should wear a long dress. I didn’t have a long dress, so I made one. I couldn’t sew, but in Carlisle in the 1950s there were few dress shops and none had the sort of long dress I liked or could afford. I bought yards of blue taffeta and set to. I looked terrible in the resulting horror but, by God, it was long, long and full and sleeveless and entirely wrong for me. I could hardly breathe and tripped up when I walked and I felt a fool. I scowled even more than I usually do and the whole night was the most awful ordeal. He said I looked lovely and he knew I knew he knew it was a lie. Never again. Thank God, times have changed and women can wear anything and even if I had to go to another ball – as if! – I wouldn’t have to wear a long dress. But fate has been kind to me, shielding me from the kind of scrutiny a public wife still faces.

  Mary’s dependency upon him was a great trial to David Livingstone. In one way, a Victorian way, it was also, of course, flattering – he was the strong man, the paterfamilias, she was the little woman who needed him. Better by far was the kind of wife Livingstone’s mother-in-law had proved to be, able to function perfectly well on her own. Robert Moffat never needed to worry that everything would go to pieces when he left his wife in charge. He knew it would not.

  I think a good wife is very definitely an independent wife, one who does not rely entirely on her husband for sustenance of every kind. It makes me uneasy somehow to hear the words ‘I can’t do without him’ from any wife. I feel that she should be able to do without him even if that is not doing as well as when she is with him. It isn’t so much a matter of being able to run a household herself in all the practical ways but in being able to stand alone mentally and emotionally if necessary. Mary’s inability to keep herself together when apart from her husband was finally a terrible handicap and made her a bad wife for him.

  Maybe I go too much the other way, maybe I am too much of a Mrs Moffat and a threat to a husband’s ego. I’ve been too fond of being determined to manage on my own even when I’ve known I was struggling – independence has been of such vital importance to me that I’ve perhaps made it into a rod with which to beat my back. ‘Please help me’ are not words I’ve found easy, which has often made me a foolish wife and not a good one. Husbands should not be allowed to think their wives can do everything. I learned at last, though only after several years, that however kind my husband was, however amiable and willing, he did indeed have to be programmed to help – it was up to me to carve out the time to myself which I needed. So programme him I did. I stole Mondays from him when family life was at its most hectic. It was his day off then, since he worked on a Sunday newspaper, and I handed the children over to him for most of the day. It gave me about six hours on my own and I seized it deliriously. If I didn’t actually leave the house I pretended to do so – left loudly, door banging, and then sneaked back in and up to the top of the house where I lurked contentedly. What a way for a man to spend his day off, some people might think, but I didn’t and neither did he. He hadn’t suggested this little plot, though. I had. He’d only readily agreed.

  But I’ve never claimed the same kind of emotional ground as Mary did in her poem. During bad times, I seem to have to battle away in my own head, to close up rather than open up, which is not to say that he hasn’t done everything possible to help but more that nothing much is possible. I can’t look to other people, not even to him, to whom I am so close, for that sort of help.

  The worst part of being a wife such as Mary Livingstone was the way in which she seemed forced to put being a wife before being a mother. I’ve never had to face the agonising choices she had to make, but I’ve always known I would have put the children first in any clash of loyalties. Easy to say, at this distance of time, that I could never have left Anna behind, that I would never have obeyed those ‘orders’ that came. Some wives, though, still make that choice today, feeling there is no alternative, that they have to go with their husbands and leave their children behind (if they are diplomatic or service wives, for example). Like Mary, they are able to put husband, marriage, before the needs of the children.

  For wives like me, those women who haven’t been put to the test, there are only the small battles of allegiances, but these can be quite telling. Being a good mother seems to me so much harder than being a good wife – I’ve worried so much more about the welfare and happiness of my children than I’ve done over my husband’s. He’s big and strong (well, not very big or very strong, but still …) and can take care of himself. They couldn’t when they were young. I found it almost impossible to leave them when they were babies, which he found annoying – surely finding someone to be in the house in the evening for three or four hours while we went to the cinema and had a meal in a restaurant wasn’t asking too much? No, it wasn’t, but the baby might wake and scream and the babysitter not know what to do. All the more reason, said he, to go out regularly so that the baby becomes accustomed to the babysitter – oh, he was so sensible and I was so silly. I tried. The sitting tenant in our house, Mrs Hall, had a friend who had been a nurse. This friend, always referred to as ‘Nursey’, came and went all the time and often paused in the hall to admire my baby. Why not ask Nursey to babysit? She was delighted to oblige. Aged seventy, but seeming fit and strong, she was duly collected from her flat by car and brought to our house to babysit. I left milk, and precise instructions as to where we would be, and off we went to the cinema in Camden Town. Halfway through the film, the manager walked down the aisle, shouting ‘Emergency call for Mrs Davies! Is there a Mrs Davies with a baby?’ I was out of my seat in a flash, rushing in a panic after the manager who had disappeared once he’d made his startling announcement. Nursey had phoned to say my baby was in agony and I should come at once. The drive home was torment – but the moment I picked her up, I knew there was nothing wrong with her. She stopped screaming at once. Nursey was shame-faced but defiant – never, it seemed, in all her years of experience had she seen a child so demented. We never, of course, used her services again, but it took me a long time to learn to laugh at the absurdity of the incident.

  I got better about the babysitting problem eventually, but not much better. There were teenagers in plenty wanting to earn money, and other people’s au pair girls too. I never really trusted any of them (and when years later my own children were babysitting I couldn’t credit that they were trusted either). Clearly, I had what would be termed ‘separation difficulties’, having confidence only in my own caring. That may have made me a good, if over-protective, mother but it made me a bad wife. He had no trouble leaving his babies with someone else – he simply couldn’t understand my attitude. More important than trips to the cinema were the chances of going away for weekends. I refused absolutely to go abroad without my children when they were very young. Trips were offered to him, journalistic freebies, fun weekends to the south of France, or New York, but I would never go. I put what I thought of as the best interests of my children before his pleasure. And he didn’t like it. Husbands don’t. They dislike playing second fiddle to their own children, however devoted they are as fathers. They don’t see the need for it or the sense. Many a tussle we had over this sort of thing, especially when times were rough, when
we had nights so broken they just ran into the days and there was no sleep ever to be had. Then I would be told that what we needed was a week in the sun away from bawling babies. He was right. We did need it. But I couldn’t do it. There was no one I could trust who was available to take my place, and I wouldn’t engage a stranger from an agency no matter how brilliant the references. I couldn’t go. I wouldn’t go, not for years and years. So far as I was concerned, being a good-enough wife never included giving way to a husband’s wishes if these might mean upsetting a child by leaving it.