Wife in the North

by Judith O'Reilly

  Tuesday, 27 February 2007

  A note to the wise

  I admit I am mad at my husband for ripping me up from my city streets. I do not think I have ever been madder. I suspect London Diva and my Islington Beauty think I intend to scrawl a note, written in Cif and blood: ‘Darling, I am leaving you and this place. I am taking the small children, the large notes and as many houses as I can fit into my Louis Vuitton bag. Your dinner is in the hard drive of your computer.’ I know they would not blame me if I did. But all things considered – living here, the move and what-not – I rather like my husband. I think I’ll keep him till we grow old and then dead together.

  I remain unconvinced I am ever going to fit in, but I have decided to stop sitting around wittering about what I am missing in London and try out some Northumberland activities. Maybe it will help me understand where I am and what it is all about.

  Wednesday, 28 February 2007

  Bells on my toes

  The King of the Castle introduced me to his equally tall and very beautiful partner. I liked her immediately, despite the fact she is younger, blonder and infinitely leggier than I am. She rides and has said she will take me out with her. I said: ‘I don’t want to fall off.’ My Riding Pal replied: ‘You won’t fall off.’ ‘Have you ever fallen off?’ I asked. ‘All the time,’ she said. People up here like their animals, usually in bulk. They tend not to have one dog, they will have two: an old one that limps and a young one that does not. They would never have one chicken, they have to have a yardful. Occasionally they will have a horse, but they are happier if they have two. Unusually, she just has one horse, but she borrowed another especially for me.

  I arrived at their farm all panting expectation; it might have looked like cold-palmed terror, but it was merely the way we city types anticipate a close encounter with something that has bigger teeth than us. My hopes of a rapid mount were soon dashed. Despite the fact I estimate that my Riding Pal is twice as tall as I am, my head was too big for all four of her hats. She said to the King of the Castle in wonder: ‘She doesn’t fit any of the hats.’ He looked at my head. I thought: ‘He might be thinking my head is stuffed with brains, but I suspect he is thinking I have a really fat head on a really short body.’ My Riding Pal phoned a friend. No joy – apparently, we city girls do indeed have bigger heads than country gals. Much bigger. But we don’t just sit around in the country, we take action. We jumped into her 4×4 and drove to the local market town, snacking en route on the horse’s Polo mints. I only had one or two in case the horse could smell them on my breath later.

  I like country shops. They are much more interesting than city shops. You know what you are going to get in a city shop – it is going to be expensive, beautiful and a little predictable. They don’t do predictable in the shops up here. The shop sold handbags and tops. As we climbed the stairs, I said to my Riding Pal: ‘I like those big wide leather belts.’ She snorted. ‘They’re girths,’ she said. Still no idea what a girth is, but I laughed along with her and went: ‘Oh right, girths.’ There were also saddles. I had never been in a shop that sold saddles before, along with bridles, bits and crops. I could go on. It was also some sort of mecca for equine grooming products. A bizarre ‘Hair Today’ shop for the horse in your life. There was plaiting gel ‘for a truly professional finish’ and dark horse shampoo for the ‘dark horse in your stable’. It went on like this for shelves. I kept expecting to see a horse sitting in front of a mirror getting a blow-dry while it caught up on Grazia.

  Luckily it also sold fat-head hats, and away we sped again back to the farm. My hat was black velvet with a peak, a large padded button on the top and a cute taffeta bow on the back. Despite the fact it was padded, it gave me an excruciating headache after half an hour and, disconcertingly, it had not one but three pictures inside of a horse attempting to buck a rider. It also had a complex strapping arrangement around the back of your head and under the chin which felt like small hands were wrapped around your windpipe. I often feel like that. I am not sure I needed to buy a hat for it. The hat weighed slightly more than a plant pot, but would, I was assured, offer more protection.

  My horse was short (twelve hands), but then I am short so that was fine with me. She was an Exmoor pony, a breed I was told is rarer than the Giant Panda. I have never ridden a Giant Panda so I am not sure which of them would have the advantage in a Darwinian head-to-head. I was in the saddle by the time the word ‘wild’ was used. ‘She can be a bit nippy,’ I was told. ‘Great,’ I thought. ‘My feet are far too close to her teeth.’ Once I was strapped in, instructions started flying about – sit upright, press down with your heels, the balls of your feet in the stirrups, your elbows in, the reins held ‘like coffee cups’ in your hands. (Latte or espresso, I wanted to know. You would hold them differently, wouldn’t you? What if you are thinking ‘latte’ and the horse is thinking ‘espresso’?) The only thing that stops the horse are the reins. There was no brake pedal. I checked.

  My Riding Pal ambled on with her immaculate seat and immense Irish horse of seventeen hands – I couldn’t see them, but apparently they were there somewhere. The shaggy pony and I came to a working joggle; an arrangement whereby she agreed to carry me without throwing me to the hard ground and stamping on my velvet-hatted head and I agreed to go to mass every week for the next year. I even managed to look up long enough at one point to admire the wrap-around blue-grey sea, the Farne Islands, the lighthouses and the magnificence of their castle as we trotted round the green fields. My Riding Pal is very chatty. Halfway round, she starts telling me how my shaggy pony bolted across the same field with its rider the last time she had been out. I am looking at her, thinking: ‘Why are you telling me this story?’ Luckily, she saved her tales of a broken arm, a broken foot, her teeth through her lip, her black eyes and various other injuries sustained from horses until we made it back to the kitchen for tea and Aga-toasted bagels. Before we got to bagels, I had to dismount.

  You would think that if you had managed to get on a horse and then sit on a horse, you would be able to get off it. I think there is a fault in the design, because there appears to be nothing to hold on to while you take your feet out of the stirrups and swing one leg over to join the other. Neither do I know how you swing your leg over when you have lost the use of both knees. Only the incentive of getting off the horse persuaded me to attempt the manoeuvre. I used my hat to take away half a dozen eggs from my Riding Pal’s chickens. I am not sure what else I can use it for. I am wearing it as I type. Maybe I could just wear it around and about. It might help me to blend in.

  Friday, 2 March 2007

  Smile for the camera

  The album which holds my baby photographs is worn and grimy with the years – a bit like me. It is a pale and padded plastic blue with white buttons, held whole with tape that has begun to curl and a sorry silk tassel whose burlesque days are through. When you open it, joints creak and it sighs a little. The inside cover, once virgin cream, is now a rusting and unpleasant brown, as if one day I snatched it from a hearth where it was smouldering.

  Many of its flattened subjects hold me tight in there and once loved me. Some still do. But others I could not keep by me: a father, two grandmothers, godmother, godfather, a curly-haired aunt and her cross-legged son. The lost blood list goes on. Then, they were mine and I clutched their fingers. Now, they are mine only in memories and an album – for as long as they smile ‘Cheese’ and the page is open.

  I think the album sad, though it showcases a content and lace-dressed child. Perhaps the thought that these days have come and gone arrives too soon for me. On the very first page, a suited man relaxes, leaning against the rails on the windy prom at Blackpool, a cigarette between his fingers. You can only lean so long. Look again, he is sitting down on a wooden bench, my mother’s leather handbag and a parcel beside him. The snaps are of my father, who should perhaps have tossed the cigarette into the cold black-and-white sea behind him. My mother tells me I was six weeks old when she left
with him for three or four days in Blackpool. My brand-new father had not confessed to coughing blood, but pleaded for a seaside break. ‘I didn’t want to leave you,’ she tells me, ‘but I knew he wasn’t well and so we went.’

  One year and eight snap-filled pages later, the cigarette has quite gone out, the coughing stopped and there is no more suited man. Instead, another trip this time to Ireland; the camera shutter closes on a young matron in a tilted, black straw hat with her solemn fat-faced babe. My widow-weeded mother holds me for ever in her arms in front of roses, river, bridge and church. He may be gone but I am her victory over death, a triumph in pantaloons and bonnet. I think she may be sad. I’m sure she is, as she carries me around with her, a memory of him, until, in the way of things, she meets another kindly father man, marries him and smiles again.

  Here is the confusion. I opened the album up because twice lately I have had the sensation as I looked at my own daughter that I was looking at myself. I never felt that with the boys. My sons are my lions, terrorsome and grand. See how they go; march and strut and shout. But the other day, as I gazed at my baby standing proud in the grass, deciding should she walk or not, I felt: ‘That’s me. I’m looking at myself.’ Again today, I held her in my arms at the bathroom sink, glanced up at the mirror and thought again: ‘That baby in my arms. That’s me.’ So I dug out this relic of the past to see if my baby-self had escaped her black sugar-paper prison. But no, she was still there, safe in her mother’s arms.

  Saturday, 3 March 2007

  Conjugals

  So you wake up and you stretch out an arm and find a man in your bed. Your first thought as you wrap yourself around his warmth: ‘Fabulous, there’s a man in my bed.’ His hand slides down your smooth and naked thigh and he murmurs something you cannot quite make out. Your second thought, and it follows light-speed quick, bearing in mind the room is black dark and you have only just made it to the surface of the day: ‘I can have a lie-in.’ You remove his fond hand as the baby starts to mew along the corridor. ‘Darling,’ you tenderly whisper into his ear, ‘you’re on.’

  Monday, 5 March 2007

  ‘Is it … umm?’

  I have noticed a real difference having full-time help, but the problem is that any free time is immediately mopped up by the builders. Maybe I should give up on work, look after my own children and get a nanny for the builders. Site meeting with the architect and one of the builders today. There is suspiciously less house than there was. I was reconciled to the loss of the kitchen wall, but there are walls missing all over now. It is as if someone is rubbing out bits of my life. The meeting went quite well, apart from the fact Number 1 needs to be entirely replastered because of the state of the existing plasterwork. ‘Is it in the spec?’ I asked hopefully. No, it’s not in the spec, so that is an add-on cost. At least we did not have to get the roof joists replaced, only patched and sprayed. I spotted some cracks in the plasterwork upstairs. It looked as if the wall was thinking about leaning backwards to get a better view of the sea. The builder slapped a hard-skinned, dusty hand against its fragile plaster skin. ‘We’ll get a rubber mallet and we’ll make sure the wall’s quite sound before we do the replastering.’ He slapped it again – brutish and professional. I did not find that as reassuring as he expected; I could tell the wall felt the same way.

  It is the unpredictability of it all that I find mildly disconcerting, as if you had arrived at the ticket office of a railway station and said: ‘A single to … well, wherever.’ The downstairs concrete floor is uneven and I would like it to be warmer. There is a solution: polystyrene, chipboard and oak flooring. ‘Is it in the spec?’ Funny you should ask – no. We were presented with a bill for the first four weeks of work. It could have been worse. I still like my builders and the envelope could have had my name on it rather than my husband’s. Why would they put his name on and not mine, I wondered. The architect handed it to me; I looked at it and thought: ‘What the hell, it’s not addressed to me.’ I smiled cheerfully at my husband and passed it along.

  Thursday, 8 March 2007

  Daddy dearest

  When my worn-down husband comes back from the city’s fray, I think we struggle to adjust – all five of us. Men come home from war and business breakfasts and think their aproned, lipsticked wives should ticker-tape their return, break out the brass-band vinyl records and shout: ‘Huzzah! Huzzah! The hero has returned. Huzzah for him!’ Last time my husband came back, my four-year-old pointed out: ‘The baby is looking at Daddy like he’s just some old bloke.’ This time, at the railway station, as he hoisted her into his arms, she looked as if to say: ‘I know the face. I just can’t place the name.’

  Today, he took my chair at the dining table and I said: ‘You’re in my chair’ and he said: ‘No, I sit here.’ ‘No,’ I replied, annoyed, saying it slowly so he could understand, ‘you have not been here. Remember. I sit there. If I sit somewhere else, I can’t feed the baby.’ He moved, but he still hogs the phone for work and I have to wait to make a call, eats herrings in the study, assumes he will drive and I will sit beside him. When I do go out alone, the car keys are not where I left them, the jangling keys fewer and quieter than they were. ‘Where are the other keys?’ I ask. ‘I took them off. The bunch is too big for my pocket.’ Now, when I should cheer, I growl at his shadow. Family is a subtle, complex thing, petalled with strong emotions, hopes and history. I hear my six-year-old rage on the stairs when checked by his papa: ‘I don’t want him here,’ and sympathize. Yet that same night, I see his father kiss a torn finger to better mend the tender spot and think: ‘He’s home. That’s good.’

  Friday, 9 March 2007

  A table monarch

  ‘When I’m king,’ said my four-year-old tonight, fork in hand, pasta sauce on face, ‘everyone will wear pants on their head. Apart from Granny. I love Granny.’

  Sunday, 11 March 2007

  Unrepentant sex

  I am a strong believer in any number of things: dark chocolate cannot make you fat; if you can make someone feel better about themselves, you should; it is a bad idea to teach children to think for themselves; and you should be somebody’s ‘gate-bitch’ at least once in your life. That’s what I was yesterday – a ‘gate-bitch’. At least, that is how my driver described me when I joined him as a pillion passenger on his quad bike. My job, should I choose to accept it: open and shut gates while following the hunt.

  I had thought about going hunting on a horse. Difficult since I do not ride, but I do love the outfits – so very Westwood. I thought about buying the outfit, going along and pretending I had forgotten my horse. I could still do some preening, meet new people and then go: ‘Damn. You’ll never guess what I’ve done. I’ve only left the horse behind. Never mind – you chaps go on without me.’ I thought, however, there was an outside chance someone might see through me.

  Instead, my Riding Pal suggested I followed the hunt on a quad bike with a friend of hers. I met her for coffee in a hotel by the castle. She warned me it would be cold on the back of a bike. She said: ‘Put on as many layers as you can. Then put on another one.’ ‘Should I wear my riding hat?’ I asked. ‘Only if you want people to laugh at you,’ she said. My outfit was rubbish – I wore one pair of silk thermals (long johns and vest), one woollen pair (similar), one extra thermal vest, one woollen jumper, one woollen shirt, one pair of woolly tights, one pair of corduroy trousers, one cream jerkin, one waterproof coat, one thermal hat with earmuffs, two pairs of gloves, two pairs of socks and an enormous pair of walking boots for my sock-blown feet. I also had in my pocket, in the event of an Arctic winter sweeping in, a black balaclava. I was reluctant to wear the balaclava in case the hunt thought I was a ‘sab’ and mowed me down ‘accidentally’. I also thought I might look like I had got lost on my way to rob a rural post office. But I hate being cold, so I took it along.

  Sometimes the quad bikes are up among the horse riders; more often they hold back and watch from a distance. Quad-biking is basically as close as you are ever
going to get to having sex with someone without taking your clothes off. I did not know my driver before clambering on to his machine. I then spent six hours slapped against his back yelping ‘Ooh’ every time we went over a bump. We went over a lot of bumps. I said to him as we set off: ‘Do I hold on to you?’ He never really replied. He could have said: ‘Only if you want to stay on.’

  The bikes are tremendously fat and wide with enormous tyres. Half 500cc Honda motorbike and half armchair. Farmers buy them and tell their accountants they need them to check on the sheep. They need them to get from one drink to the next. Who would not want to go quad-biking? It is like Mad Max in tweeds. You are totally off-road, driving at between ten and forty miles per hour through a blissful northern hillscape, ripping past yellowing gorse bushes and cutting through wooded bridleways behind beautiful women astride muddy-legged horses. Daffodils are green-budding in the lee of the jagged hawthorn hedge, and, scenting the hounds, a deer streaks out of a coppice and across the field. Better than any of this, another cherry brandy and whisky is just minutes away.

  You obviously do not want to drink too much cherry brandy and whisky when you are on the quad bike. Sometimes you have cointreau and whisky instead. Sometimes you say: ‘What the hell. I’m worth it,’ and have cherry brandy, whisky and cointreau. This is a good thing, because if you drink enough you cannot focus on the mud-splattered instructions fixed to the bike that say: ‘Never ride after drinking alcohol or using drugs.’ That instruction is part of a long list. It comes under: ‘Never carry a passenger since it will affect balance and steering and may cause you to lose control’ and ahead of: ‘Always wear a helmet, eye-protection and protective gear’. You are too drunk on cherry brandy to care by the time you make out the words: ‘Loss of control can result in severe injury or death.’