Wife in the North

by Judith O'Reilly

  Friday, 31 March 2006

  The only black man in the village

  Friends came up for a weekend with their little boy, who is my five-year-old’s best friend in London. My son was desperately pleased to see him and show him his new world: the bedroom he shares with his brother, the garden jungle, the beach. Despite the months apart, they picked up as if it were just a moment. My three-year-old still hankers for London – maybe he senses that I do. The five-year-old adjusted very rapidly to living here, but seeing him and his friend hurtling round together makes me realize he has also paid a price for the move even if he does not know it himself.

  The mother is beautiful, Spanish and works in the fashion industry, while the tall and handsome father is an actor-cum-model. And black. The only black man in the village. I have hardly ever seen a black or Asian face here – apart from the occasional holidaymaker. There is a Chinese takeaway, but other than that, redoubtably white. There are Polish people – everyone tells you that. In the East End, my children never saw colour, never saw a difference. How it should be. At least half my son’s nursery class was something other than indigenous Cockney Brit. In the nearest city, when we went to a restaurant recently, the five-year-old whispered when our waiter arrived: ‘That man is a different colour.’ In London, on our latest weekend visit, he said: ‘That lady is wearing lots of material’ as a woman drifted by in her burka. The nearest thing to an ethnic minority in my son’s school now are the redheads.

  Friday, 28 April 2006

  The affair

  Discovering your husband is having an affair is not easy, as any number of sore-hearted women will tell you. I should have recognized the signs – a certain distance in his suddenly steely eyes, money missing inexplicably from the joint account and a mysterious answerphone message I picked up on his office phone yesterday morning about a meeting I did not know he was having.

  When he rang me later that day and, indeed, when he came home that evening, he never mentioned the meeting; I sat tight, waiting for the inevitable. Eventually, he confessed. He had fallen in love with a topless sixteen-year-old Swede with ‘fantastic bodywork’ and wanted to bring her home. What? He had also spent £3,600 of our money on her. What? She just needed the odd tweak and a little bit of tarting up. I’m sorry? I was only marginally appeased when I realized he was talking about a car, a Saab 900 classic convertible, in a colour my husband describes as cherry red, which is actually closer to rusty brown. He bought a car without telling me. I woke up last night, saying the words out loud. ‘He bought a car without telling me.’ If I keep saying it, I might eventually believe it.

  In London, we lived in a partnership of trust and equality. My husband did not do anything without telling me – trim the hedge, have his hair cut, buy rigatoni instead of penne pasta. All of a sudden, he hits his forties and decides he is going to buy a car. Without telling me. Without my realizing, he has fallen into the arms of a mid-life cliché: he is a forty-something man heading for the border in a soft-top. I am supposed to take comfort in the fact it is ‘just a summer romance’ and that she will be sold by the end of the year. Yeah, right. He is a man of habit, keeping his cars till they go mouldy. Literally. Our last car went entirely white inside because the sunroof let in water and even then he made us all sit on black bin bags and wipe the mould off the seat belts for two months before he sold it. He has no intention of a brief encounter with this mechanical floozy whose bodywork, in my opinion, leaves a lot to be desired. She is for keeps and I am going to have to live with her. There is only room in it for four. ‘So, the baby then?’ I asked. ‘There’s no room for the baby?’ ‘No,’ he smiled blissfully. ‘But she’s very shiny.’

  Saturday, 29 April 2006

  Pulling the plug?

  My mother and father are up again. Courtesy of steroids and anti-arthritis drugs, my mother seems to be over her health crisis for the moment. Well enough for me and my one true love to leave the sleeping children with the two of them and go out for a ‘chat’. If I am honest, it is long overdue. Sitting side by side at a bar table in a local hotel, my husband told me he needed the ‘consolation’ of the convertible. I looked to see if it was possible he could be drunk already. He did not look drunk and did not slur his words. ‘I bought the car to make myself feel better,’ he said. ‘I presume we are pulling the plug on Northumberland. You seem so unhappy.’ Full marks for observation, then. He went on: ‘We said we’d give it a go, but I don’t want you being unhappy.’ He stared down at his pint of beer. ‘We’ll go back to London.’ By now, I was wondering whether this was a very clever device to turn the tables. He is the offender, the one who bought a car without telling me. He should be the one in the wrong. Instead, I am the one in the wrong for being miserable and wanting to leave for London. In the car he had to buy because I made him so unhappy.

  The conversation moved on from car to ‘Life’, quicker than a blink. I said: ‘Actually, I have been miserable. But lately I have just been getting on with it.’ I could have added: ‘Because I didn’t think I had a choice. Do I really have a choice? Looking at your face, unless I am ready to leave you, I don’t think I do.’ I picked up my glass and my glass picked up the bar mat for a bit of company on the way up. ‘I am not anything in particular,’ I lied. I picked the bar mat off the wet foot of the glass and put it down on the glossy wooden table. ‘I am too busy trying to hold everything together for all of us. Too busy living life to think that much about it.’ I cannot say I am happy still to be here, but I do not want to crawl home defeated. The experiment in northern living is not over. It goes on. Life in Northumberland is back on. Oh, and the car? Staying.

  Monday, 1 May 2006

  King-sized bed, queen-sized smile

  I was lying in my king-sized bed in a wallow of cotton sheets and tumbled duvet, gazing at my rompered baby, when she looked up from her bean-filled, pink velour bear to smile into my heart. A smile so dawn-breaking in its loveliness that I thought: ‘Kerboom. Crash. Bang and Wallop. I am mended.’ I thought: ‘Life can’t be so bad when you have this plump-cheeked and queenly baby to smile at you like that.’ She is all glory hallelujah. A beauteous and a smileful child, enough to make your heart sing out its joy and her majesty.

  Saturday, 13 May 2006

  Running on empty 3

  My husband was at least with me this time when we ran out of petrol on the way to the village. He said: ‘I’ll run to the garage; it isn’t far.’ He tucked his inhaler into his back pocket and set off. My five-year-old leaned into the front of the car and watched his father disappear down the road. ‘Why do you keep running out of petrol?’ he asked. ‘That’s a very good question,’ I said; ‘let’s ask Daddy when he gets back.’

  Monday, 22 May 2006

  Mr Bump

  The five-year-old has been accidentally hit with a wooden bat as he passed behind a boy playing rounders in the playground. He is remarkably proud of the large egg in the middle of his forehead.

  Monday, 29 May 2006

  Batman

  The planners are driving us bonkers. The architect handed us over to an architect colleague who came up with a plan to knock the two cottages together which no one likes but us. The council warned us they would turn us down because of something to do with sewerage. We resolved that one; now, they have turned us down because of bats. Any excuse, it strikes me. Apparently, bats are protected. I ask you, why protect bats? Did they ask for our protection? They may be libertarian in their batty inclinations, feel patronized and cope well enough on their own. We could well get dragged into something and find it difficult to retreat. We may lose men out there.

  To keep English Nature happy, we had to get the local Batman out. The boys got very excited, but were unimpressed when a nice chap in a Barbour arrived rather than a guy with psychosexual issues, a black rubber face mask and swirly cape. He listened on his receiver for the screams of the common pipistrelle. If there was screaming by this point, it was mine rather than any bat’s.

  Luck
ily, we did not have bats in the arches we want to convert into a sitting room, bedroom and shower-room for my parents when they stay. The prospect of bats circling overhead as my aged parents slept, the bats scuffling as they roosted with their leathery tinies and pooing furiously, was appalling to an urbanite like me. My mother would have been even less impressed. Country people like bats. Say ‘bat’ to someone living up here and they say: ‘Yes, I like bats. Our only flying mammal. We have some our way.’ Say ‘bat’ to a city type like me: I hear ‘flying rat’, think ‘blood, gore and fangs’. Batman, naturally, was a big fan. We did not want to make him cross with all our London prejudices, so we did a lot of fascinated mmm-ing, took his leaflets and tried not to look too relieved when he said we did not have them. We may even have said: ‘Shame!’ He did manage to find a nesting wood pigeon which we must not not disturb until after September. I mean – a pigeon. I admit my sympathetic nature-loving smile slipped slightly at that one. I compromised on leaving it in peace but gave it a very hard stare as we walked away.

  Saturday, 10 June 2006

  The other woman

  The red convertible otherwise known as ‘that old banger’ arrived. Saab apparently believed she would be driven by idiots judging by the sign inside: ‘Do not attempt to drive car until top has been fully latched or lowered.’ You don’t say. The boys have immediately fallen in love with her. Like any self-respecting mother I am brainwashing my children not to want to smoke cigarettes (dirty, smelly, they kill you), climb mountains (high, cold, they kill you) or ever get on the back of a motorbike (far too fast, far too dangerous and – did I mention? – they kill you). Their father, on the other hand, has now introduced them to the concept of speed as a god to be worshipped.

  This morning, I watched him drive away with my three darlings, their chubby little arms reaching over the crunched-up roof to wave, the baby’s pink flowered hat just visible, my husband all Ray-Bans and beaming smile in his side mirror. I make my children wear bicycle helmets if they so much as look at their bikes, and the stabilizers are coming off around about puberty. Suddenly, however, I am expected to shout a cheery ‘Ta-ra, then’ as Daddy takes them for a spin in his convertible. It hasn’t got a roof, for God’s sake.

  London Diva comforted me as I explained my shock at the discovery of my husband’s infidelity and his new infatuation. ‘It was either going to be a car or a woman. Just be glad he went for the car.’

  Monday, 3 July 2006

  Haunted by the past

  One of the mothers wants to get something published in the local paper where I trained as a journalist twenty years ago. I like her and said I would try to help. She is, as many women are, married to a farmer. She has a picture-book six-year-old girl with dimples and black wavy hair, beautiful and autistic. A little girl who struggles to survive in a world she cannot understand and that does not understand her, who screams if you pull the plug out of the bath, flush the toilet for her or switch off the television. You learn to leave her to her habits. She cries real tears and runs away if she hears the vacuum cleaner, hides if an unexpected visitor calls, covers her ears when there is music at school assembly. When the frustration becomes unbearable, she hits out and kicks her mother; overwhelmed with anger, she can attack other children. As her mother was telling me this, I thought: ‘How desperate.’ I thought: ‘You must be very patient.’ You would weep tears of blood for such a child. The Patient Mother will not risk another baby, fears the next child too would be autistic. In any case, she said, the needs of her autistic daughter come first. ‘To me, she’s everything,’ she smiled. ‘The world.’

  Saturday, 15 July 2006

  Beach babe

  I am not immune to the summer glory of Northumberland: the magnificence of the castles and the beaches, endless skies, sand-blasted, freckled children. We went to the beach today. I pummelled the boys into their wetsuits. This is not easy. Occasionally, you lift up the wetsuit by the neck with your child in it, let his legs dangle, then shake it vigorously up and down to free the suction. The only thing harder than getting a child into a wetsuit is getting him out of it again.

  I am entirely supportive of bodyboarding. In theory. I want my children growing into blond and sandy teenagers clutching surfboards and equally sandy friends. In theory. It is just the practicalities that drive me to distraction and back in a beach buggy. It is hard enough getting on to the beach. I staggered from the car, down the slope, on to the beach and across the sands with the buggy and the baby. The boards across the top, bags and buckets dangling from the buggy’s handles, the two boys dropping spades and reluctantly dragging towels behind them through the sand.

  You get wet when you pull the children along through the surf on the board. As I rammed the boys into their suits to muffled screaming, I jealously watched two small swimsuited tots playing nicely in the water while their mothers stood, dry-foot and chatting. I thought: ‘Why can’t I do that? Why am I expected to drag screaming banshees through the waves?’ Today, I had a plan. I am fed up with getting wet and cold while pandering to my own salt fantasies of a perfect childhood. I unrolled the wetsuit I bought in the Aladdin’s cave of a gift shop in the village. I looked at it. I thought: ‘Who designs a wetsuit for a middle-aged woman with large white stripes down the side, hips and thighs?’ I squeezed my less-than-svelte figure into the stretchy, synthetic rubber, gazing in awe at the bulges of natural flab which suddenly emerged. The white stripes pointed inwards to the flesh on my inner thighs. Do I need arrows pointing to my cellulite? This is not a good look for me. With the help of careful upholstering, I can manage ‘respectable’, if the light is kind, the alcohol flowing and I wear something that drapes. Sober, in wet and chilly daylight, my shortcomings are evident. I began to hope my nipples would poke through the rubber and act as a distraction. I thought: ‘At least I can hide in the sea.’

  The boys decided they did not want to play in the sea, they wanted to play in the little stream that spills out from God knows where, just down from the car park. Holidaymakers ambling down to the beach with their dogs and windbreaks paused. I would like to think they were admiring the sight of mother and boys playing lightheartedly together in the water while the baby slept close by. I do not, for one moment, think they were saying to themselves: ‘What does she think she looks like?’ and ‘Someone should tell that poor woman about her arse.’ OK, I wore my new wetsuit and I am not wearing it again unless I am drunk or in the dark and my husband asks. Repeatedly. He too would have to be drunk. If he was drunk enough, I could say: ‘Why don’t you wear it, darling?’

  Monday, 17 July 2006

  Is there anybody there?

  I went for tea at the Patient Mother’s stone-built, hill-top farm, surrounded by green slopes and sheep. Her husband is twenty years older than her; she also has an elderly father-in-law sat by the old range, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. He cannot leave the tenanted farm, for lack of funds. The Patient Mother cannot be patient with everyone. She says he expects her to wait on him hand and foot, but that she is wife to a different man and a different generation. She showed me a room full of ruin: broken furniture, eggs in cardboard trays and old newspapers. The father-in-law, she says, will not allow them to renovate and turn it over to anything useful. It stays as it is, a monument to his awkwardness. Occasionally, she says, the husband and his father stop speaking to one another over one thing or another and weeks can pass before they speak again. To top it all, she thinks the house is haunted: she smells steak-and-kidney pie and her long-dead mother-in-law’s perfume on the stairs, heavy wooden doors swing open then close again, rocking horses move in the night. She said: ‘I like the spirits to visit me. This is how you let them know they are welcome,’ and rang a crystal bell. I swallowed down hot tea and thought: ‘I hope they didn’t hear that.’

  Friday, 21 July 2006

  Missing keys

  We live in a state of permanent chaos. Why is that? I couldn’t find the car keys when I went to bed last night. That is never a good
sign. It tends to mean that I won’t find them first thing in the morning either. My husband only got back from London after I had gone to bed, and we both looked for them this morning. Nothing. I took my eldest to school and kept searching. It was important we found them because we are due to set off on holiday tomorrow – five days in Wales with family, the weekend in London with friends and four days in Disneyland, Paris.

  Suddenly, I hear the whirr of a bicycle. That whirring noise precedes the arrival of the Evangelicals, rather as the sound of wings precedes the heavenly host. They are natural enthusiasts and hideously fit, but I like them despite that. They watch the God Channel. I have never known anyone who watches the God Channel. When one of them first said: ‘We were watching the God Channel the other night,’ I thought: ‘Is there a God Channel?’ Then I thought: ‘Does God watch the God Channel or does he prefer the BBC?’ The Evangelical Man is an artist. Recently, I asked him what he planned to paint. He told me he was considering the four horsemen of the apocalypse riding along the beach. I said: ‘Really? How interesting.’ He said: ‘I believe the world will end, the four horsemen of the apocalypse will come among us, death and destruction, the whole package, you know. I would only say this to another believer.’ I shifted uncomfortably in my seat and thought: ‘How can I tell you that I am not? Not ‘a believer’. Not like you.’ ‘Evolution?’ I enquired. Evolution he dismissed as ‘a theory’. ‘Homosexuality, then?’ Homosexuality an ‘abomination’ – it says so in the Bible. I said: ‘Slavery’s in the Bible.’ But slavery too went through on the nod, providing it met the biblical caveat of justice within it. I said: ‘You can’t have justice within slavery, can you?’ He knows now I do not share his views; there is a chance my new friend thinks me damned, but I have not liked to ask.