Wife in the North

by Judith O'Reilly

  Now a new Sacred Heart stands sentry on the sill and blesses those who slide by on their aged way up and down the staircase rails. I do not like this newcomer to the family home. I think his cloak too bright, his head too big; his heart too tame a flame contains. While underneath the clay soil where tortuous rose roots grow, the broken saviour burns on and waits for resurrection day. My mother confesses to me later: ‘I think there may be someone by the bushes too. I can’t remember who.’

  Monday, 5 February 2007

  Just one of those days

  I have had one of those days where you go with the flow or you go under. After a weekend with my achy-breaky mother (‘Mummy, you have been away a hundred days,’ my four-year-old told me when I got back), I hared off to London for meetings about work. The builders started today, but I decided that since he was home, my husband could take care of them. First warning that all would not be well was the fact that I discovered on the train that my mobile was dead; I decided that was all right because I did not have to ring anyone. Until the train shuddered to a grinding halt and it emerged that someone had stolen the overhead power lines on the track. Who would do that? What do you do with second-hand power lines? Start your own train company? Do you sidle up to a likely lad in your local boozer and go: ‘Psst. Wanna buy a lot of electric cable – I mean, a lot? Like train-track lot?’

  I get to my first meeting an hour late courtesy of the copper thieves. It is an important meeting. I have not met the person before. I am already at something of a disadvantage because I am late. I am at even more of a disadvantage when I realize I have been waiting in her glass-walled office, examining the books on the shelves as you do, my back to the open-plan seating area outside, with my skirt firmly tucked into my knickers. You are not telling me nobody saw that. You are not telling me people weren’t emailing each other about the mad woman with her skirt in her knickers and deciding whether anyone was going to tell her or let her leave that way. I thought that happened in bad sitcoms. Well, it happens in real life too. It happened to me. How I laughed.

  Because I was running so late for the next meeting, I missed my train home. That should have been it. But no. I rang my husband. The builders have discovered rotten roof joists in the arches. They may all have to be replaced (the joists rather than the builders). The builders had been on the job an hour before they made their discovery. One hour.

  Tuesday, 6 February 2007

  Love letters

  When I was young and peachy, men wrote poetry for me – all of it bad. A little older, and earnest suitors would quote Dante and Marvell, at length and in letter form. I have had my share of those who missed me and wrote to tell me of their sighs. Indeed, I have done my own share of letter-sighing. But there came a time I put away the ribboned, heart-felt bundles of my youth and wed a letter writer. Married, there is little need to write your passion down. Instead you write: ‘Darling, please remember to buy milk.’ Who else then is there to write to me of love?

  This afternoon, when I got home, fatigued and city-worn, a torn cream corner of my heaviest paper was propped against a wild dog and a soft furred cheetah which both sat on a plastic stool. Welchm homw mummey,’ the letters tumbled across the page, hasty to escape. Later, my eldest, urgent boy hurtling in from school, threw himself at me. ‘Did you like my note?’ he demanded. ‘They were my spellings. I might,’ he pulled away slightly, ‘have got one of them wrong.’ ‘No,’ I shook my head and hugged him mother-tight, ‘it was entirely perfect.’

  Wednesday, 7 February 2007

  At the window

  The nights are dark here, darker yet when my husband is away. A short necklace of orange pinpricks breaks the darkness at the edge of the village across the fields, and occasionally a car’s headlights will sweep down the lane, their hurrying beam broken by wintry hedges. If I crane my neck out of the study window, I can sometimes see a light from the Accountant’s house along that lane. I like to see that homely light and think: ‘My friend lives there.’ But the brightest light around is that of the lighthouse; its white-gold beam sweeps around and out to the shushing black sea and then around again. When I have yawned enough at my desk to know that it is time for bed, I will check one last time on my sleeping and oblivious sons, pulling up feather-filled covers and kissing dangling feet. Then, shucking off the day and its clothes on the landing, I will carefully lift the iron latch to my bedroom’s wooden door, catch it with my finger, then drop it quietly back in place. I pause and listen with intent to see if the baby’s sweet breath has caught in protest at my breaking and entering into her night. If she slumbers on, I edge barefoot around her cot to wheedle my way through cold silk curtains, one naked shoulder and then the other. I lean my forearms on the horizontal bar of the sash window, then rest my warm head against my forearms and watch the beam slide round to me. I am wondering what I will do when we move into the village, where I will have no lighthouse to bid goodnight. I am wondering whether its beam will miss me or slide by oblivious to my absence at the window. Miss me, I think.

  Thursday, 8 February 2007

  Moving on

  We are supposed to move tomorrow. My husband, however, has adopted a policy position on the move and decided we do not need to pack anything. Cardboard boxes, tea chests and plastic crates are just so last year that we have refused to use any of them. What he is going to do is drive a white transit van up to the back door and throw things in it. This does not necessarily strike me as the best idea, but my husband says it will work. I cannot face doing it on my own having gone through the upheaval of moving when we came up from London; instead, I have decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and do it his way. The plan then, for want of another word, is to manhandle the contents of the cottage out into the van on a room-by-room basis, drive it two miles down the lane to the house in the village and then unpack the contents and install them on a room-by room basis in the rented house, recreating our life exactly as it was before. Perhaps he was a museum curator in a different incarnation? In fact, he could probably submit it for the Turner Prize. He could call it something like: Our Life – A Mess in Two Places’. If I videoed it while he was doing it, he would probably win. An Emmy, too.

  I blame myself. I think I am coming to the conclusion that what I have always regarded as a certain easy-going quality is, in reality, a deep passivity. Part of me thinks: ‘You have to be joking’ and wants to stand and giggle while it all goes on. But the other half of me increasingly wants to jump up and down in rage and shout: ‘We move tomorrow! Move! Do you know what that means? We need to be sorting things out, putting them in piles, throwing them away. Good grief.’ That is the point at which I take a deep breath. I honestly do not mind the chaos and relentlessness of it all most of the time. Just occasionally I wonder what it would be like to live a Von Trapp sort of life, before Maria arrived. I bet he could always find his car keys, for instance. I am partly feeling this way because I was told off by my London Diva the other day for being so meekly acquiescent to the chaos of our life. ‘Doesn’t everyone live in chaos?’ I pleaded with my sister-in-every-way-but-DNA. ‘No,’ she told me as she bundled me efficiently along a North London canal path from her high-powered office to a pastel-coloured haven that looked like a toy shop but actually sold coffee and iced cupcakes. ‘I don’t live that way. Most people don’t. You shouldn’t.’ I know she is right. I just don’t know what to do about it. I do know that all my closest friends keep telling me to get a grip on my life. I can refuse to eat the cupcakes they put in front of me, I can put my fingers in my ears and hum while they talk, but deep down I know they cannot all be wrong.

  Friday, 9 February 2007

  Mothers and daughters

  My husband had to start the move alone because the permanent amber alert we are on with my mother switched to red. Because of the pea-brained way we had decided to move house, the builders had to stop building and heft furniture and our belongings out of the cottage and into the van. My husband thought they were being nice;
I think they decided that getting rid of us was a day well-spent. Meanwhile, I went back down to Yorkshire to see what I could do. A ghastly day cleaning up old lady poo and watching my mother being brave.

  My mother is a fastidious, ever-busy little body, neatly suited and booted with hair like the Queen. She smells of Chanel No. 5 and floral perfumes that carry jasmine notes. Not yesterday though. When I arrived, her hair was spread across the pillow in an iron-grey frizz and she was lying still and sad. Loudly, I said: ‘Mum, Mum, it’s me,’ and I placed my hand against her cheek as I do with my own children and I bent to kiss her. ‘Is it you?’ she asked. She grasped my wrist and pulled me closer into her and hung from me like an eight-year-old daughter would, and cried into my neck, sobbing at the latest pain to strike. Sickness is a heartless robber, preying on the old. It carries a rubber cosh and a cold-barrelled gun that it holds smack against an old lady’s wrinkles while it shouts into her face: ‘I want your dignity, right now. Hand it over, you old bat.’ The Daily Mail should run a campaign.

  She told me the nurse was going to give her an anemone. I thought this unlikely. The bustling Scottish nurse arrived, not with flowers but with rubber gloves. Mother mine, teeth biting into the cotton pillow and tears falling on to my hand shrieked in silence as the nurse got on with it. Old age smells of shit and shame, not Chanel. Do not go there. Find another route into the hereafter. Old age is not the way to go. People are not nice to you. They do not bring you flowers. Instead they carry rubber gloves and make you cry and bite the pillow.

  My mother is the best reason I know for living a life of decadence and debauchery. No cigarillo smoke, gin slings or mistakes between the sheets for her. Instead, a life of heroic virtue, good deeds and care – her own aged and bone-tiny mother, an early husband who coughed blood and died, arthritic sister, small pupil-children taught to bake, cancer patients, the list drones on; and me, of course. The parish council, the school governing body, the Catholic Education Board. Her reward for all that goodness? An invitation to a garden party with the Queen – too sick to attend, sorry – and an old age of broken health. Well, poo and phooey! Her goodness did not keep her well. She still got old and sick, and I will learn by her mistakes. I will inhale smoke from pink cigarettes, drink absinthe and have unrepentant sex with strangers in dark places.

  Saturday, 10 February 2007

  Marriage and mayhem

  OK, the move. I am at risk of spontaneous combustion. I am at risk of the children coming to find me and discovering instead a flaming office chair and a pair of charred sheepskin slippers smelling of burnt wool and cheesy feet. What was I thinking? What was I doing agreeing to move house in such a cack-handed way? I hold myself responsible. I believed my husband when he said it would be OK. It was not OK. It is still not OK. The idea of a white transit van pulling up to the front door and loading the house into it did not work. Hah! Who said it would? Who thought it would? Ever? In a month of Sundays? I feel like I have one of those creatures inside me that gave Sigourney Weaver such hissy fits. An alien locked brooding behind my ribcage, all teeth and slaver. One that does not like my husband one teeny-tiny bit.

  Apart from the blizzards of last year, today’s was the worst weather I have come across since we arrived almost eighteen months ago: three degrees, with driving wind and rain that wanted to hurt you. At least my husband was here for it. At least he got wet. The only other good thing to be said in the day’s favour were the three friends who came to our rescue. They included the Oyster Farmer, who arrived with a horsebox because that is how you move things in the country; the Evangelical Man, who arrived with God on his side; and the Accountant, who shook his head a lot. He said things like: ‘Tell me. Why didn’t you get a removal company?’ I was so grateful to them I wanted to cry.

  At one point, I ended up driving behind my husband, who was in the hire van. I flashed him eight times and beeped the horn continually to get him to stop because we were about to go through a flooded section of the road. He drove on - oblivious. I know you should not say these things with children in the car, you should at all times present a united front, but I might have said: ‘Your father is a bloody, bloody idiot’ as he sped his way through the flood, abandoning me, the three children and the low-slung car in the black as pitch darkness on the other side of the water. We were lucky: we made it through in first gear by keeping to the centre of the road. When we got home, my traitorous six-year-old ran in. ‘Why didn’t you stop the van, Daddy?’ My son looked back at me with china-blue eyes. ‘Mummy says you’re a bloody, bloody idiot.’ I tried to look like he made the last bit up, but I do not think my husband was convinced. Over dinner, he said: ‘I think I have done really well. My arms are tired.’ Usually, I am more than prepared to play the ‘Yes, I think you are marvellous too, darling’ card in the game of marriage. Instead, I stood up and filled the kettle.

  When you get married and you stand there in an ivory satin dress with its slightly grubby train caught up in a loop that weighs down your wrist, at some point in the evening an apple-cheeked couple will totter arm-in-arm across to you. Your great-aunt, or someone who looks like she could be, will take your French-manicured hand into her little bony one. She will look up at you and say: ‘We have been married 138 years, haven’t we, Arthur?’ Arthur, who is leaning precariously on his stick, will say: ‘Coal-tar soap.’ She will put her hand on his arm and she will shout into his good ear: ‘A hundred and thirty-eight years, haven’t we, Arthur?’ and Arthur will nod emphatically and say: ‘Fish-sticks.’ ‘My advice to you,’ and she will draw you so close that you smell Parma violets on her breath, ‘is never go to bed on an argument.’ You look across their munchkin heads and you think: ‘How wise.’ When you are a wife and not a bride, you remember your great-aunt’s violet-scented advice of that night and you realize she must have been senile by then.

  Monday, 12 February 2007

  Missing keys 2

  I drive my six-year-old to school. I drive back to the wrong house because I had, understandably in my opinion, momentarily forgotten where I lived. I curse. I drive back to the rented house where I am now living to find my husband running up and down the street. As I open the door of the Saab, he tells me I drove off to school with the keys to the Volvo and to the hire van on top of the roof. He put them there. He has miraculously found the keys to the Volvo a mile down the road at the roundabout. He cannot find the keys to the hire van. He says he wants to cry and that he is going to have an asthma attack. We drive very slowly down the road with my head out of the passenger window looking for the electronic fob. As we crawl along the road, a friend’s car passes us and we wave cheerily to the driver. I am not feeling remotely cheery, but I am mindful of my husband’s reputation locally. Once, when my husband locked us out of the cottage, the driver who just passed us had to scale a ladder and vault through our bedroom window to let us in again. He must be sixty if he is a day. I am pretty sure he told people. We drive on into the village and I start going into shops to see if anyone has handed the keys in. What I really want to say is: ‘My husband is an idiot. Have you seen his car keys?’ What I actually say is: ‘You haven’t seen any car keys around, have you?’ Eventually, the lady who works in the butcher’s directs me to a woman down the road, who has handed them to another woman, who has handed them into the local school. I find them and say thank you.

  Tuesday, 13 February 2007

  Trolley-dolly bye-bye

  The rented house looks like a shipwreck. Clothes, books, toys and bedding are strewn across each and every room while in the hallway plastic bin bags breed like something from a low-budget sci-fi movie. I keep thinking: ‘Socks for school tomorrow’ and realize I have no idea where they are. Then I think: ‘Knife, I need a knife for the bread.’ No idea either. I may send the boys to school today wearing saucepans on their feet.

  Everything got much worse because my husband left to catch the train for London last night. He is away for three weeks on a work deadline. Just before he left, the ch
ildren wanted a hug so he went upstairs to kiss them goodbye. This gave me the chance to pour and swallow the remains of a bottle of Chablis in the kitchen and burst into tears. I was just getting my act together when he came down again to tell me he had screwed the tops of the children’s wardrobes on so they would not come down and kill them but I had to ring the TV repair man tomorrow because the TV is not working. I stopped crying at the thought of three weeks with three children and no TV. But by the time we said goodbye, I was already snuffling away again. As he headed into the night with his smart trolley-dolly suitcase on wheels, I closed the heavy wooden door behind him and went back to the kitchen to pour another glass of whatever I could find. Cooking oil, probably. I was just about holding it together when I heard the siren wail of my six-year-old from the top of the stairs. Two minutes later and my husband cracked open the door to slide in a stray children’s car seat; he glanced up the staircase to find a sobbing six-year-old dressed in a robot sleepsuit with his legs wrapped round his crying mother. ‘We’ll be fine. Go and get your train. Hurry up or you’ll miss it.’ I waved him away. As the door closed heavily behind him again, my four-year-old came out of the bedroom. He knelt down and kissed me. ‘I love you, Mummy,’ he said, and lay next to us on his tummy as I patted his brother’s back and rocked him gently back and forth. ‘Shush now,’ I whispered. ‘Shush. We’ll be fine.’