Despite the freezing temperatures, we had dinner outside by a spitting brazier: holes punched in a dustbin, small windows to hell; sparks flying up into the black north air and lighting up the jollied, flamed faces of our neighbours along the road who were also up for the New Year. I felt a self-indulgent, sleepy melancholy, an ill-behoving humour. I shall make a resolution to quit this melancholy before it becomes a habit. Diva’s twenty-four-hour flying visit flew by. Zoom. They left and I collapsed, not so much from melancholy as misery. The baby was in her Moses basket, asleep; I was draped across the arm of the sofa, weeping hysterically that my friend had gone, when the front door opened again. She had forgotten something. I stopped crying and started sniffing back the tears. London Diva gave me a brief hug, said: ‘We will see you very soon. OK?’ and walked back out again. She did not pick up the scarf she had left behind; she did not bid my body-snatcher husband a tender second adieu. I do not think she likes him any more.
Monday, 2 January 2006
Inside out
This is my London Diva girl. Beautiful, of course, as divas always are, and glamorous. Glamour, too, is the diva’s way of going on. But I call her ‘Diva’ not because of narrow, selfish ways, buffed nails or rhinestone-studded shoes; rather, because she claims her life while others – I include myself – watch their own pass by. She stands centre stage, not to own the spotlight, which is hers by right, but to anchor the performance, give depth and meaning to the words of those who surround her star. Her fellow troubadours seem small from the stalls. She will turn her head an inch to whisper: ‘Stand tall. Move up to your mark.’ When they miss their cue and lose their place in fright at life, she will say: ‘Here, try these words for size.’ I blame her for setting such a high tidemark in friendship, leaving seaweed and stripped and silvered driftwood in its wake so that I cannot forget where she has been. For never failing me when darkness came around and sadness washed right through and over me. For being there when it would have been simpler and far cleaner to give me ‘space and time’ and all those things that mean: ‘I don’t know what to say.’ For sitting and listening, feeding me and all of mine, and pouring red communion wine into my crystal glass. I hold her thoroughly responsible for all her wisdom, gentle comfort, the ringing supper laughter and the kitchen bar-stool smiles. I love her children as I love my own; if terrible things happened – and terrible things do happen – the first to come around and pick up those that had been mine would be my London Diva. Cue: applause.
Wednesday, 4 January 2006
Lily and me
My four-year-old is five today. The years scramble by in children. I thought they stood still for me. There must have been a time I did not look in mirrors. I swear I never noticed the lines come, my cheeks hang, my thighs fatten, my hair grow grey and dull. Did mirrors turn away from me when they heard my step? When I could not find them, did I think: ‘I’m sure I look OK’? So lacking in vanity, or, perhaps, so profoundly vain, I slicked my lips, gilded the lily, but never looked at my face? Never questioned whether what passed for beauty was now past beauty? Never stopped to ask: ‘Am I getting older, as my children are getting older?’
Or was I too consumed by my children and my work to note the ravages? Did I think: ‘I don’t have time to paint my face and comb my hair. Instead, did I flannel-wash a youngster’s face, slip on a power suit, not notice that years were sliding by? Foolish girl. Today, I caught a mirror before it could hide. I reached out to its gilt frame and took it in my arms. I expected to love the woman I found in there. To see her beauty and gasp: ‘My love. My familiar.’ Instead, I found her unfamiliar and bitter, an ugly sister. No, in truth I found her crone ancient mother. As my children grow slender limbs and rosy cheeks, I decay. My lily is not gilded. I have raisin-withered on the vine.
Saturday, 7 January 2006
Sweet dreams
The nights have been bad lately. None of my babies ever sleeps through the night. I hate women who smile at you with their sparkling eyes and say: ‘Gerald was only three weeks when he slept straight through.’ It makes me want to bludgeon them about the head with Gerald’s redundant baby alarm. My oldest was eighteen months before he slept through a night; my three-year-old was fourteen months. It is my own fault; I think tragedy may lurk in every night; I have to keep checking them to make sure they are still breathing. If I am unconvinced, I poke them. Quite often, they wake up with a start; look, as if to say: ‘You terrifying nutter.’ They scream very loudly for at least an hour after that.
Sunday, 15 January 2006
The loneliness of the long-distance mother
The day is grey and cold and grim. Northumberland appears to be entirely shut. What happens here in winter? What do people do? Everywhere you might want to go is closed till Easter. Where are you supposed to go when it rains? When the wind blows so hard it would carry you out to sea? When the children cry at the mention of the beach? What are you supposed to do in these dreary wintry months? Whittle? I have no knife. Scrabble? My children cannot spell. Buns? I will grow to be the size of a house. In London, I could take them to a café and pretend to be going to a museum or a gallery. They could skate on cold and marble floors, worry security guards into early retirement. In London, we could see friends. I could drink tea, my children break other children’s toys.
There is the couple who arrive, hectic, on bicycles, exuding good health and Christian vigour. The Evangelical Woman and her Evangelical Man are brave, I think, to risk themselves on us. They seem to like our company. I like to hear their knock and see them come in steaming slightly from their efforts and happy from their prayers. They are different from the people we know in London; they believe in God for a start. I like different. I am flattered they think to straddle their bicycles, push off on their pilgrim journey and come so far for us. The Accountant drops round to chat. He arrives at teatime to find food fights and misrule but stands and chats a while, enough to let me know I am seen. Then he goes and chaos breaks out again. I know people here, but we do not have friends in whom I could confide, whom I could make damp with my weeping. Friendship takes time. I have scarce arrived in my northern jail; I have not served time enough for friends. Do people just go out and get wet, then? Is this why they have farms? So they can go feed the animals when it rains? Dear God. I shall have to buy a cow.
Saturday, 21 January 2006
Dear old London town
I have come down with the children for a brief visit to London. It is growing stranger to me, even for a weekend. My move has divided old friends. There are those like London Diva and Islington Beauty who think my husband is a Bad Man who has done a Bad Thing. They believe I am a Poor Sap and Should Know Better. The morning after the baby sleeps through for the first time, they expect me to sit up in bed, shriek loud enough to be heard in Westminster and Come To My Senses. Just like that. They expect me to kiss my husband good morning, hit him roundly about the head with a cricketing almanac and start packing. Others, like my Best Friend From School, believe I have ‘Done the Right Thing’. When I was angsting before the move, they said that I should ‘Give These Things A Go’, as ‘You Regret What You Do Not Do’ and I had ‘Nothing To Lose’. We saw friends in both camps this weekend. The Perfect Mother did something similar herself when her Hectic Husband’s work took him to Sweden. She cracked after years of his pleading to go abroad. Pester power is not just a tool for children. Even though she hated it, she said she thought it right to go because it gave them an experience they would not otherwise have shared. We were sitting having dinner in their kitchen, both men nodding throughout this exchange. ‘Mind you,’ she said, topping up her glass of white wine. ‘I was bloody miserable.’ She reached for my glass and started to pour.
Tuesday, 24 January 2006
Death of hope
The big news up here has been the disappearance of a farmer’s wife with a history of depression. She went missing six weeks ago. Posters with her smiling face have been all over the windows of the shops in the local mar
ket town. Her husband discovered her gone after he came in from milking the cows one morning. She was forty-six, worked in a book shop, helped out at church fetes. In a local paper, her husband described her as ‘low in recent months’ after her eighteen-year-old daughter went to university and her twenty-one-year-old moved away to another job. ‘The house has been very quiet since they left,’ he said. The day she disappeared, they found her car abandoned by an eighteen-arch viaduct which carries the East Coast Main Line over a river, and yesterday they discovered her body. You could almost hear a county sigh in sorrow. I wonder, did she think her job was done, her girls all grown? A mother who did not want to take the pills and emptied of all hope, leaving those who loved her best to search for who had been.
Saturday, 28 January 2006
Away, away, away
My husband is away. Again. I do not cope well when he is away. I tend to think: ‘What am I doing here?’ As I look at a framed and tender beach kiss between the two of us, I rub away at him sitting there content and think: ‘I don’t much like you at the moment.’ As I look in my mirror, I think: ‘You do right to look so worried; I don’t like you either. What were you doing coming here?’ Friends have come down from Edinburgh to admire my baby and assure me that my husband may not be with me but still loves me. They know this for a fact. They have seen it in his eyes. He has told them so. That fact I do not like him at this point will not affect his loving of me. They are sure of this. They are sure I love him back. Even if I cannot quite remember. Sure that we will be for ever after happy. They are sorry, though, to miss him. As I am. I am sorry, too, he is not here with us.
Tuesday, 31 January 2006
Food for thought
Yesterday I drove down to a shopping outlet outside the nearest big city, which is almost an hour away, to buy pains au chocolat. This is my life: hosting a coffee morning. By rights, I should add ‘for my sins’. That is the sort of thing you say when you hold coffee mornings. I have to get to know some mothers. How else do you do it? Do you say: ‘Come over, we will compare C-section scars’? I do not have any. Do you say: ‘Come over, we will have lesbian sex’? I suspect they would not come.
You could tell this morning, when it emerged that the pile of pains au chocolat on the kitchen table were freshly imported, that they thought I was mad. I think in retrospect I might have been supposed to have baked something for it. What the hell? I made fresh brewed coffee in my Gaggia with hot frothed milk, and tea, Earl Grey and Tetley’s. There were bagels, smoked salmon, cake, biscuits and, of course, French pastries. I do not think I looked like I was trying too hard for one second. The Oyster Farmer’s Wife came with one of her two little boys. She has a lovely figure but I noticed she carried herself quite carefully. Apparently she has a back with metal pins up and down it, courtesy of sport and country dancing, and is on painkillers for the rest of her life. She seemed very phlegmatic about it all. She said: ‘My children know I can’t carry them so they just get on with it and walk.’ The athletic, bright-eyed Evangelical Woman also arrived on her bicycle, full of conviction, sincerity and goodness. The sort of woman who makes uncertain, insincere, bad women like me look, well, uncertain, insincere and bad. I also liked the easy laughter of a down-to-earth Yorkshire mother. She is short and smiley, with dark curly hair flecked with grey, and was the only woman at the school gate to introduce herself to me before I managed to introduce myself to her.
Wednesday, 1 February 2006
Work and other four-letter words
If you have children in London, you can find things to do to divert attention from the fact you no longer have any control over your life. If you have children in windswept, muddy Northumberland, there seems no dodging the issue. I feel like I am in a runaway wagon skedaddling along the rails in a poorly lit coal mine. I am screaming and any minute now I am going to run out of track.
I come from Leeds – I have ‘done’ the North, and you know what, I like dear old London town just fine. I feel like I am a character in one of those epic sagas of a northern lass who gets hersen down to London and suffers vicissitudes along the way. But does she let them get her down? She does not. She’s got grit has our heroine, and she makes a reet success of her life in London and she gets a posh job and brass and nice frocks and a fella, and then bugger me if the fates don’t decide to blow our scrappy heroine back up North to the mud she thought she had escaped so long ago. It is not just the mud and the loneliness. Three small children hang off our heroine at every available opportunity, and they should know that really their mam is not just their mam, she is a career girl. Well, maybe she is a little past her sell-by for the term ‘girl’, but there was a time when she definitely wanted to conquer the world. I mean, in what chapter did it all start to go so horribly wrong? Was it that fateful moment, clutching a tear-stained photo of her little ones, she handed in her resignation at t’Big Office where she had t’Big Salary? Now, her glory days behind her, she works at home, and when I say ‘works at home’, that covers a multitude of sins.
Today I took on a job to visit a North-East school, have a look round, see some teaching, do some interviews. Fine, in theory. The only problem was I had to take the baby in her sling, who cried when the mathematics lesson started. In fact, she cried every time anyone started to say anything of interest. I never judge another woman’s choices. If I do not work, I get lonely and depressed. If I work too much, I hate myself. Like many mothers, I have chopped and changed, compromised my work, felt guilty about my mothering. ‘Career’ is something I associate with too much booze and office romances. Not where I am right now. Not where I have been for a long time. Like thousands of other women with children, I work because I have to if I want to pay my bills and keep sane. I work from home and part-time so that I can see my children more than I might do otherwise.
My lack of status offends me. I am in a state of ‘becoming’. I was a working woman, a professional; I had respect. I worked for it, earned it, kept it when I married. Suddenly I am my children’s mother, my husband’s wife. The school seems confused that I have a different surname from my children. My husband strikes these strangers who surround us as glamorous, sliding up and down the railway lines between Northumberland and London. They ask him what he does. They are anxious for his opinions. I want to tell them: ‘I have opinions. I have things to say. Stop talking to my husband. Please talk to me. He would tell you himself that I’m much better company.’ They do not ask what I do. I impress no one. If, bizarrely, they ask, I say I freelance. In their minds, they think: ‘Ah, a sad-case woman pretending she still works.’ They may be right.
Sunday, 5 February 2006
Keeping holy the Sabbath
Husband still away. Thought: ‘Fuck, I’m desperate. I will take them to church.’
Somehow you get on a list. We have had invitations – by name – for a Sunday school before a family service at a local church. The Church of England knows we are here. That means God knows we are here. We arrived late, missing the games and snacks. The boys were not impressed. They kept turning to accuse me: ‘You said there would be snacks.’ I kept saying: ‘Shhh! You’re fine. Concentrate on colouring in your leper.’
Thursday, 9 February 2006
Running on empty
I feel as if my dignity is being stripped from me inch by inch by my ineptitude at coping without my husband. I woke up and it was snowing. My first thought: ‘How am I going to get them to school?’
I strapped the children in and we drove really slowly through the blizzarding snow. If you had walked the five miles, you would have got there quicker. It is a twisty-turny sort of country route with hills and curves and a level crossing. I was particularly worried about a steep hill which I just about got up; then I said a prayer and just about got down, sliding part of the way. I was trying desperately to remember all my husband’s advice about driving in the snow. Did he say ‘brake’ or ‘don’t brake’? Did he say ‘go into the skid’ or ‘fight it’? I decided he said ‘don’t brake�
�, wait for the wheels to grip in the skid, then try to get control back. About half a mile from school, I look down and away from the snowy road. The arrow on the petrol tank is in the red. I am on a slight downward slope, so I coast into the school car park and then rest my head on the wheel. My five-year-old says: ‘That was fun.’ I stop shaking long enough to press the button which tells me exactly to the mile how much petrol I have in the car. It reads a nice fat zero. I think: ‘Bugger.’ Then again: ‘Bugger.’ I heft the baby on to my hip, take the boys in to school and go back to the car. I am thinking: ‘Is there a chance I could make it six miles to the nearest garage?’ After I clip the baby back into her car seat, I check the gauge again. I did not misread it. ‘That would be a no, then,’ I think.
Another mother comes out to her car; unlike mine, it is undoubtedly full of petrol. Two things come to mind: her husband is a sheep farmer and I forgot to invite her to my coffee morning. I wonder if she bears a grudge. I wave as if she is my long-lost sister. It is still snowing. I say: ‘You couldn’t do me a favour and take the baby and me down to a garage, could you? I appear to have run out of petrol.’ I giggle as if it is not a big deal to have run out of petrol in a blizzard with a new baby in the car.
Wife in the North Page 5
