In Hillary Clinton’s case, it may well have been that during the Monica Lewinsky scandal the demands of being a public wife seemed greater than those of being a good one. Keeping quiet, in the sense of not openly criticising her husband and condemning his behaviour, may not have been seen by her as condoning it. Earlier in their marriage, when an affair of his had been exposed during an election campaign, she had appeared at his side on television asking voters to judge him on his political beliefs and not be influenced by what she admitted was a regrettable transgression. She was not, she emphatically stated, ‘standing by her man’ regardless. Presumably, she felt the same once he was President and accused of immoral acts – the important thing to her was not to provide ammunition for those who wished him to be impeached. She believed in him as a good President and that was more important than denouncing him as a bad husband.
But whatever stand Mrs Clinton had taken she would have been blamed. There were even those who blamed her for her husband’s ‘need’ to resort to extra-marital sex of the variety he chose. If he had been happily married, this argument ran, he would never have thought of looking for satisfaction outside his marriage. The same kind of monstrous reasoning was used by the judge in the Jeffrey Archer case. ‘Is she not fragrant?’ he famously asked the jury to consider of Mary Archer, and if she was, how then could anyone believe her husband would go to a prostitute? A good wife, and in Mrs Archer’s case a highly attractive one, was therefore the best alibi a husband could have.
All one can hope is that in private these public wives speak their minds. If they don’t, then they are failing their husbands as much as their husbands have failed them. No one else is in a position to make them see themselves as they really are. No wife should, within her own home, suffer in silence and be all- forgiving to the point of cowardice. Such a wife is not worth much, such a marriage is a sham.
Jennie and Nye, when they became wife and husband, were rivals. If a married couple share the same career, they are automatically considered to be rivals. People watch married couples in the same profession with beady eyes, ever ready to spot jealousy and a subsequent souring of their relationship because one is succeeding and the other is not. Wife is measured against husband, husband against wife, and if the balance is not perfect, rivalry is suspected. I don’t know where it comes from, this assumption that husband and wife must be in competition, but I know it is based on a misunderstanding of how a successful marriage operates. The truth is, the success of one feels like the success of both – if you’re not succeeding yourself it is a comfort, not an irritant, that the other is. Success of one benefits both. Two failures are what make for trouble, not one. That, anyway, is the ideal, and it is realised far more often than the cynical allow.
But it is still far more acceptable for a husband to be more successful than a wife and not the other way round, and many a wife teaches herself to be self-deprecating to protect her husband. Crazy for a successful wife to abandon what she’s successful at simply because she is sorry for a husband stuck in a rut and hating it, but how she handles her own success needs great skill. Successful wives are frequently judged almost to emasculate husbands – it’s a sophisticated version of the ‘henpecked’ jibe – unless the husbands are successful too. Jennie, in spite of being an MP, knew that once Nye had become a Cabinet Minister, she could not match his success. She coped with this realisation by becoming a part of it – his success was truly also hers, they were both part of a plan, their joint plan to bring to fruition so many of their ideals. She was never jealous of what others saw as his success at the expense of her own ambition. They were not the rivals some people liked to see them as.
The great advantage of being in the same line of work is, of course, understanding each other’s efforts. Jennie and Nye were supremely fortunate not just in sharing the same aims in their work but in being intimately acquainted with the minutiae of Labour Party politics within which they had to operate. Writing is a little different. Hunter and I write different kinds of things and have very different styles and ways of working. The interest we take in each other’s work, and the use we are to each other, is entirely different. I don’t want him to do for me what he wants me to do for him. He wants me, as his wife, to be his critic. I am delighted to oblige. Unlike Fanny Stevenson and much more like Jennie Lee, I have the credentials for it, used as I am to reviewing and commenting on all kinds of writing. I read everything he writes when it is still in manuscript. Usually, I’m called upon to speak my mind and I love doing it. He listens, but doesn’t necessarily act on what I say – ‘I thought that bit was really good,’ he is inclined to reply, rather huffily, when I tear into some passage I think poorly written. But he likes having my opinion. I won’t read his work in front of him, though – it is too tiring because if I smile he pounces and wants to know why – and I won’t give a verdict until the very end (he’d like one after every page). It works well, being the wife-as-critic, being a good wife in that respect.
I like to think that whatever job he did I’d be useful as a critic. Difficult if his work was technical, if he were a rocket scientist or something, but I’d struggle to understand what he did so that I could hold a reasonable conversation about it. Wives who know nothing whatsoever about their husband’s work and want to know less puzzle me. Their explanation, or defence, is that the husband wants to leave his work at work, home and work completely separate compartments. How peculiar. How can a wife understand a husband’s problem, or a husband a wife’s, if they don’t know anything about what occupies the major part of each other’s life? And if she doesn’t want to understand his problem, or he hers, how can they be a unit at all? It sounds to me like a recipe for disaster, but maybe that’s because work to me, his work as well as my own, is so vital to our happiness.
Yet at the same time I myself don’t want what he wants, his involvement in what I’m doing. I don’t want him to read what I’ve written (which is quite lucky because he hates reading books). If I’m working on non-fiction, then I’ll sometimes talk a great deal about it when I’m at the researching stage; if I’m writing fiction, I’ve nothing at all to say. It’s private, secret, until it goes to my publisher.
It is fairly unusual today for couples not to have lived together before they marry. Fanny and Jennie were of course daring in having done so, and even in the late 1950s so was I, and yet today it seems incredible that this was true. Without the experience of living together, how I wonder can people be sure they can do it at all? It’s in the detail that all will be revealed, all those minor irritations which may soon loom so large and end up becoming intolerable. Sharing a house or flat or especially one room exposes all the unexpected clashes of temperament and taste and has nothing to do with sex. The phrase ‘living together’ is always used to denote sexual intimacy, which naturally it does, but it is the rest that matters more. Jennie knew, before she married Nye, that what she called ‘the chemistry’ was right between them but, though she meant the sexual chemistry, she also meant much more. They’d shared her flat and knew they could get along. The banality of everyday living needs to be tested, not just the grand passion – it’s perfectly possible to love a man and yet find you can’t stand living with him. In which case, surely it’s obvious, don’t become his wife.
Living together before we were married was by its very nature exciting, partly because it was furtive, a delicious secret from our families, just as it was for Fanny and Louis, and to a certain extent Jennie and Nye. The longest spells we had were three months, twice, those two long summer vacations while I was up at Oxford. It felt like playing at house and yet at the same time the feeling that this was how it was going to be, these details of how we managed the ordinary were what would matter.
By then, he was in London, the Daisy Bank Road flat in Manchester hastily vacated. Finding another in the great metropolis was even worse than finding that first bed-sitting-room in Manchester, but finally, just in time for me to join him, he installed himself on the t
op floor of a semi-detached house in Kingscroft Road, Kilburn. I hated it. He was deeply offended at my reaction to what he thought a perfectly decent, if tiny, flat which he’d had to struggle so hard to find, and wanted to know not just what was wrong with it but why it mattered – we were together, wasn’t that enough? It mattered to me. The flat was poky and dark and it depressed me. The rooms were claustrophobic and the furnishings garish and hideous. The windows were festooned with netting and even after I’d ripped this down they didn’t let in much light. I prowled around desperately trying to make more space and remove some of the uglier items of furniture but it was hopeless. I felt as Jennie had felt about the infamous Gosfield Street flat, without having the means she had to do something about it.
But he loved coming home to this dreary flat merely because I was there waiting for him and he couldn’t understand why I didn’t feel the same, why I was so upset about my surroundings – good grief, it wasn’t as though I’d lived all my life in some beautiful, spacious house surrounded by uplifting scenery. I wasn’t slumming it. Why, compared to Raffles estate, or even Longsowerby, in Carlisle, this was urban chic. I knew he was right. I struggled to rise above the meanness of the flat and concentrate on what was good about having it at all.
I played the little wife far more seriously than I had ever done before (or since) and discovered scores of things about the reality of living together (as did he) which were a test of devotion. For a start, I’d never realised he began each day in a coma. I’d noticed, of course, that he was slow to wake up, but I’d never realised this wasn’t because he’d had a particularly exhausting night but that it was a fact of his life – every single day it was agony for him to emerge from sleep. At first, it was funny watching him struggle to get one eye open, but then it became less amusing as I saw it was going to be my job for ever to ease him into every day.
How had he managed up to then? Why, by depending on his mother to shake him awake, and then on a whole battery of very loud alarm clocks. So I was to be his new alarm clock. One that brought him tea to help revive him, and opened the curtains, and turned on the radio. It was all easy enough to do, there was no hardship involved since I bound up in the mornings, with early morning my best time. But there was something about this routine, so quickly established, which I didn’t like. Often, that first long vacation, I had a great desire to pour the tea over his head. How on earth could we exist together if our habits were so different? I wanted him to be up bright and early with me, and not find myself doomed to waiting for at least an hour before he could even say good-morning.
And then there was the eating. I’d known he liked his food but I’d never appreciated quite how important meals were to him, though I ought to have done. Once, when we were youth-hostelling in the Yorkshire Dales, I worked out that with the money we had left (see, once I was in charge of the money) we could either have a meal that evening or extend our holiday by another day. He chose the meal. Going without food for even four hours never mind a whole day was impossible for him, whereas I quite liked doing this. Living together, the need to eat what he called ‘proper’ meals with what I thought of as absurd regularity became an issue. I maintained he never stopped to question whether he was actually hungry and he said he didn’t have to, he was always hungry. I found myself giving into this, making meals for him when I didn’t want anything myself. Wives did that, didn’t they? I sheered away from thinking I was behaving like the sort of wife I despised and never would become, and assured myself I was indulging him out of love, not any imagined duty.
There were plenty of other examples, all of them trivial, of habits which grated and had to be adapted to. I liked silence, he liked the radio on as a kind of background at various times of the day; he liked to sleep in a room with curtains tightly closed, I liked them open. There were so many ridiculous, minor clashes, all of which had to be resolved before we were really living, as well as loving, together harmoniously. Many a woman only discovers the things that irritate after she’s become a wife and is dismayed to find she must endure them or she won’t be considered a good wife – she’ll be labelled a shrew, endlessly nagging her husband to change his ways. The smaller the aggravation, the more maddening it can become and the harder to accept or escape. Mostly, it is unreasonable for a wife to want to change how her husband does things, because, by the very nature of the kind of habits which are annoying, they are harmless, but it is surely best to know about them before marriage. A whole new lot will emerge over the years, and a pattern of merely putting up with them is a bad one. These minuscule bits of grit can jam the works and bring the whole machine of marriage to a halt far more insidiously than the grand betrayal of an affair. The wise wife, never mind the good one, knows what she is getting into.
Jennie Lee didn’t share a bedroom with her husband for many years of their marriage and never for one moment seemed to think (as Nye’s family thought) that this called into question what kind of wife she was. She said she was a lark and he was an owl and they needed separate rooms so as not to disturb each other. Fanny Stevenson’s rationale for having her own bedroom was that she liked different colours from her husband. Whatever the true reasons, and neither of these explanations strikes me as telling the whole story, both women eventually claimed their own territory at night. I don’t think either of the men liked it. Louis wrote that he never slept well without Fanny at his side (though that was early in their marriage) and Jennie reported Nye as trying to induce her to come back and share his room (though that was when he was very ill).
Does a good wife have a duty to share her husband’s bed and bedroom? Of course not. Whether she has the choice or not has always been to do with space, and that in turn has to do with wealth. From the Queen downwards, those who inhabit homes with a vast number of rooms invariably have their own bedrooms, sometimes adjoining their husbands’, sometimes not. It is lower down the social scale, particularly today when few new houses have a great many bedrooms, that it is the norm for wife and husband to share both room and bed. The Bevans were bound to be shocked that Nye and Jennie did not, coming as they did from homes where there was no choice. They saw something significant in the sleeping arrangements and perhaps they were right. For married couples to choose to have separate bedrooms may indeed signal a break in intimacy, though not necessarily of the sexual sort – perfectly possible to argue that this kind of distancing could theoretically enhance that side of married life. It is a different kind of intimacy which is surely being rejected or grown tired of. The rituals of preparing to go to bed together, the lying side-by-side in the dark before sleep, the awareness of each other’s presence wakening in the night, all breed a sort of closeness which cannot be precisely explained. It is not just the obvious physical proximity but the harder-to-prove emotional, maybe even psychic, togetherness it induces. If each is alone in a separate room, that kind of familiarity recedes. Maybe that is the object of each choosing to be in their own room for the majority of nights, maybe familiarity is the very enemy of the marriage, which a couple wishes to cast out, and it is beneficial to separate in that respect.
I can’t imagine doing it, though. I like to have a room of my own to write in, I like being on my own for stretches of every day, but choosing to have my own bedroom has never appealed because of what I would lose, that very atmosphere I’ve tried to indicate. Sometimes, it hasn’t been sensible to stay in the same bed, the same bedroom. If one of us is ill, it would be better to separate temporarily, but we never seem to have done. Perhaps if we were coping with the kind of ongoing illness Louis and Fanny had to put up with we would have been forced into it. There are no rules.
Jennie believed in protecting Nye. At one time in her marriage, she saw it as her prime function as a wife. She did this quite openly, even flamboyantly, almost glorying in her own power. Few wives are as confident in their right to do this, but a lot of less brazen protecting goes on.
The role of protector has never appealed to me. I don’t want to be the-wi
fe-as-guard-dog. The only kind of protecting I do is of the mild variety, obligingly saying he is not available when he is. Sometimes I won’t even do that. He tries to get me to ask who is calling, if the phone rings and he doesn’t want to answer it, before revealing his presence or not – if it’s X, Y or Z, he is in, if it’s anyone else, he isn’t. But I won’t. I’ll agree to say an absolute no, but not to sifting the callers. But if, like Nye, he had been an important man, I suppose I would have been driven to screening calls, knowing how harassed he was and how many callers were sheer time-wasters. I’ve no doubt I could be as fearsome as Jenny if necessary.
He would like a protector. He is a friendly person who likes to be popular and finds it hard to say no. He’d love it if I were prepared to say no for him. The only time I can recall leaping to his defence was over an encounter with that redoubtable sitting tenant of ours. She spotted straight away that she could get round him, and used her age, her infirmities and her gender as a means of doing so. He dreaded her appearance in our part of the house, and for a while tried to get her to communicate by note. Our own landlord in Hampstead had always asked us to do this – he was shy and timid and hated personal confrontation, and we were only too willing to agree to write notes. Sometimes, ludicrously, we’d pass each other on the stairs, each leaving a note about something or other on the hall table.
Mrs Hall was having none of that. She believed in eye-to-eye contact and her eye was daunting. He quailed before her, groaning the moment he heard the creak of the stairs which heralded her approach. In spite of her diminutive size and frail look, she was formidable, with a hectoring quality to her voice which belied her appearance. She had a way of stumping into our kitchen which was curiously threatening – fragile body slightly stooped, legs moving strongly in spite of her arthritis, and feet, encased in heavy black shoes, looking as if they could aim a kick if provoked. She would rap on the kitchen door and shout, ‘Mr Davies! It is your tenant. I wish to speak to you, now!’ He’d invite her to sit down and then ask if she would like a cup of tea. She’d snort at the idea of tea when she’d come to complain – he was the enemy, trying to soften her up, and she was much too smart to fall for that. The force of her indignation was extraordinary, rousing herself as she did over a leaking pipe or an ill-fitting window, and always ended with ‘You’ll have to see to it, you’re the landlord, I pay my rent to you.’ He always did see to it. He would calm her down, resisting the temptation to point out that since he’d become her landlord the state of her flat had been immeasurably improved. He was so kind and nice to her, but she only complained more and more.
Good Wives Page 34
