by Daisy Waugh
Anyway, I asked her if she wanted me to fetch the children and maybe stay with us tonight, but she looked at me as though I was insane. ‘Why would I want to do that?’ she said. I had no idea. I didn’t really know why she had come to see me at all. Nevertheless, here she was, and in need of support, apparently. After all her kindness to me, which I will never forget, I wanted to help her in any way I could.
I felt a bit silly. ‘Why? I don’t know. Maybe you and the children might enjoy the company.’ But she said not. Turned out I had misread her completely, once again. She said she’d only come over here to tell me. Because she wanted me to know.
‘You always sat there looking superior when we talked about Clare Gower. But I was right, wasn’t I? That bitch has screwed every husband within a twenty-mile radius of here…So.’ She paused, and then added, spitefully: ‘If your husband wasn’t already…doing the business with…’ She had forgotten Hatty’s name, and I didn’t feel inclined to remind her.
‘He’s not, actually. I was wrong.’
‘Well, I’m just warning you. That’s all. No reason your husband’s going to be any different.’
She left eventually. I offered to drive her home since she clearly wasn’t in a state to do it herself. But her hatred of Clare had apparently contaminated her feelings towards me, too. She shook my hand from her arm as if the contact repulsed her, and she stumbled off down the hill muttering half-hearted thanks for the drink, with the credit card bill and the Ivy matches still clutched tightly in her hand.
I felt a bit shaken up after she left. Called Fin to take my mind off it, and asked if he was the only husband within a twenty-mile radius of Paradise who had yet to have ‘done the business’ with Clare Gower. He laughed very heartily at that. Said he was in the middle of a meeting. Big surprise. And could he call me back.
Needless to say I’m still waiting.
August 19th
Smartypants answered her telephone by mistake this morning. She sounded very put out when she discovered it was me. She said, ‘Oh, hi,’ like she’d just trodden in something nasty—almost certainly dog shit. I asked her if she’d read the piece about Tamsyn (which I filed almost a month ago now) and she informed me, with a hint of self-righteousness, that she hadn’t had time yet.
‘It’s been crazy here,’ she said. ‘Absolutely crazy.’
Nevertheless she promised me she’d ‘grab a mo’ sometime this morning, and call me without fail before lunch.
Which of course she didn’t. So. Called her again at the end of the afternoon, once again taking care to disguise my number, and once again fooling her into picking up. I could hear her inhaling despondently, wretched to discover it wasn’t someone more exciting on the other end. ‘Oh. Yeah. Hi. I was just about to call you actually,’ she lied. ‘Yeah. Your article looks…pretty good. From what I’ve seen. I’ll need to look at it again, of course. But I had a flick through. It looks…pretty good. Well done!’
Well done, indeed. I was tempted to test her on it.
So you didn’t mind, I asked her, that the piece didn’t turn out exactly as I had said it would?
‘Mmm? No! Not. At. All!’ she said adamantly.
I told her we were going on holiday at the end of the week. Suggested that if she needed me to do any changes to the article before that, then she would need to…But suddenly she couldn’t wait to get me off the line. Presumably because she’d spotted that the door to the Fashion Cupboard had been left ajar.
So. It occurs to me, suddenly, that she may never actually bother to read the bloody thing. After all my efforts. She may never discover that Tamsyn wasn’t quite the pretty suburban housewife we had all hoped for, but an anarchist lesbian aged 73. And a remarkably likeable one at that. In the meantime, perhaps I should quickly send in an invoice. And move on. There are plenty of other features editors in the sea. I’ve just got to stop being so bloody wet, and telephone them.
COUNTRY MOLE
Sunday Times
A freakishly social evening down here in Paradise. First a hearty ‘Hog Roast’ laid on by one of the school parents as a mid-holiday welcome for our new headmaster, who has at last arrived in the area. And then a dinner party, nothing less. The two combined involved more human interaction than I’ve had all summer, and more polite conversation than I’ve endured in a lifetime. But needs must. My cheeks are stiff from so much harmless laughter. My forehead aches with ladylike concern. It was a rotten evening. But who cares? As a result of it, I feel more liberated than I have in years.
Ever since Easter, when news of the appointment first broke, Paradise mothers have been a-frott with excitement at the prospect of the children’s new headmaster. Rumours were rife that he was dangerously, outrageously attractive. He looked, according to the few who’d met him, like a younger, taller version of Mel Gibson, and on the strength of that information some women had gone as far afield as Plymouth to kit themselves up with outfits for the evening. If I hadn’t been pregnant I might have gone too. Attractive men are in short supply here in Paradise. As, indeed, at least at this early evening Hog Roast, were men of any calibre at all. It was Friday night, you see, and les mortgages payeurs were still wending their way home from the battle-fields of London.
It meant Mr Gibson had the territory more or less to himself, and with so many male-starved women to gratify it was impossible to get anywhere near him. I decided to wait my turn (too proud to join the scrum). In the meantime I chatted drearily with two other matrons, both of whom, like me, had husbands who were running late. It emerged they were all on the same train.
Perhaps the train was delayed, we murmured. Perhaps there was a long queue at the taxi rank. In any case (lest anyone start complaining: a big taboo in Paradise) conversation quickly turned to the enormous advantages of our lonely, commuter-wife lifestyles: of easy parking versus congestion charging; of good clean fun and fresh-air-for-the-kids, versus tube bombs and random stabbings; of never having to worry about what to give our absent men for din-dins. Of, er…I was doing well. On my absolute best behaviour. About to keel over with so much head nodding. About to keel over with boredom, actually, when at last I spotted my husband, pale, drawn and scowling, still on the mobile and writing something in biro on the back of his hand. Knights, it transpires, arrive in many guises. I was never so pleased to see anyone.
Not for long. He was in a terrific temper. The supper we were due to go on to was film-industry related, a work dinner for my husband, and frankly, it’s a measure of my desperation that I ever agreed to go along. In any case he’d got the time wrong, and as he arrived to save me from the matrons his dinner host was already on the telephone, berating him for lateness. So we left the Hog Roast squabbling, as usual, and I never did get to meet the Gibson looka-like. I shall have to last out until the beginning of term—which, judging by the glimpse I caught on my way out, shouldn’t be too trying. Between the sea of summer frocks, I only saw his slim, blazer-clad shoulders, the point of his pointy nose, his neat and tidy, tiny little head. But it was enough for me to know that he looked nothing like Mel Gibson. He looked like a mildly conceited sports presenter for local TV.
They sat me at the end of the table during dinner, next to another wife. It was after she’d explained to me the pros and cons of biological versus non-biological washing powder and after we’d complimented ourselves on living so close to the fresh air—actually, it was when I heard myself asking for her recipe for birthday cake that I was finally struck with the thought:
This Good Life isn’t working.
And there it was, my second epiphany in Paradise:
Something Has Got To Change.
August 29th
France. Lovely Alexis and husband have rented a place in the Languedoc. So—an entire week with a house-full of intelligent adults to talk to, and Ripley and Dora reunited with their old friends. Joy. Bliss. Heaven. No need to write the diary at all. We’ve rented our own place for Week Two. Got Hatt and her very excellent new boyfriend, Angus,
and their seven children arriving. So. Luckily Hedge Fund Hatt’s also bringing a supernanny.
September 3rd
Still in France. Came in from the pool at lunchtime to discover not one, but four messages from Smartypants on my mobile.
Message Number One: 11.45 a.m.
‘Ya. Hi. Sounds like you’re abroad. Having a fab time. Where are you? Listen—finally snatched a mo to have a look at the copy, and I must say the editor loves the pics. But I’m a bit confused. Could you call? Soon As Poss. I’ll give you my direct line. Also the mobile. I’m on…’
Message Number Two: 12.05 p.m.
‘Ya. Hi. Don’t know if I said it was urgent. Could you call?’
Message Number Three: 12.35 p.m.
‘Me again. Where are you? Can you call?’
Message Number Four: 12.45 p.m.
‘Ya. Me again. Really need you to call me. Where are you? Could you please call. I think you have my numbers but I’m going to give them to you again…’
I telephoned her at 1.05 p.m. but she’d obviously already gone out to lunch, and then again at 3.45, but she was obviously still out to lunch. In any case I’ve not heard a squeak from her since and it’s after 7 o’clock now, so I guess she’ll have long since waddled off home.
Back to Paradise tomorrow. I’m dreading it. Funny to think—sad to think, actually—almost exactly a year ago we were travelling back from a different part of France, only then we were so full of hope for our future; looking forward to a new life of guilt-free, child-friendly whole-someness. I was so excited. We all were. This year I’ve spent most of the holiday formulating secret plans to escape.
Hatt’s on my side. She has promised to start scouting out properties for us back in London…and also, more importantly, without saying anything about it to Fin. She says we were mad ever to have left London in the first place, given how obviously urban we both are. (She might have said so before. Actually, maybe she did. Actually, maybe quite a few people did. Never mind.) She also says we’d be mad to stay away too long given a) the cost of getting back onto the London Property Ladder, b) my obvious unhappiness, c) the impossibility of getting a pram from house to road without two burly men to help me, and d) the dire state of Fin’s and my marriage. We don’t even fight any more. We just don’t speak. I’ve never known Fin so cold. He won’t talk about the future. He won’t talk about the baby—let alone the problem of the bloody pram. He won’t even discuss babies’ names. Ever since—I don’t know when exactly—I guess I only really noticed it after I started making an effort myself—after I made up with Hatty—but he seems to be completely wrapped up in his own world. Cold, cold, cold, he is. Sometimes I catch him looking at me…
So. I don’t know. Moving back would be such an upheaval, especially for poor Ripley and Dora. They’ve been through enough this year, what with—everything. Plus I don’t suppose I could ever get them back into their lovely London school. And God knows what Fin would say.
On the other hand, he’s already so detached. And really, I don’t see how things can get any worse between us.
Sometimes I catch him looking at me and I think he hates me.
COUNTRY MOLE
Sunday Times
Just back from a couple of weeks’ holiday in the sunny French countryside. Which was lovely, in a way. Lovely all round. Except as we wended our way homewards, through pretty French fields and then through pretty English ones, I found myself wondering what the point had been of getting-away-from-it-all, when we started off away-from-it-all in the first place. We live in a rural idyll, for heaven’s sake, and Waitrose, with its remarkable Camemberts, etc., is only a short drive away. It would have been cheaper to have invited all our friends to Paradise and stayed put. More importantly, it would have avoided the dreadful, miserable thud of the homecoming.
So, anyway, so much for absence making the heart grow fonder. At the end of our French adventure, sight of the Dream Home did not exactly fill me with glee. Nor did the prospect of the long school term ahead.—It occurs to me, actually, when I picture their cheerful, brittle faces, that my fellow lady-mums are every bit as desperate as I am, possibly even more so, since they don’t even have a decent outlet (hello, reader) into which to vent their lonely groans. Over the holiday I’ve been ruminating about their situation and mine. Mostly mine, of course. I’ve been forming secret plans.
Which is why, as our journey ended and the car drew up beneath the house, instead of simply bolting, as all my senses swore I should, I stuck around and helped with the unloading. We—husband, daughter, son and dog—scrambled up the long hill to the front door, squabbling about who was carrying what, and how carefully. And then the children slithered quietly away to reunite themselves with the television.
They did not, nota bene, slither quietly into the back garden to build dens and pick blackberries; nor into the nearby fields to be reunited with the local fox. Come to that, neither did the husband or I immediately set about exploiting any of the rich advantages of our life here in Paradise. No bracing walk in the fresh country air for us, nor even a tea break to admire the view from our beautiful, undulating terrace. No. He disappeared into his office to talk to a film producer in Bombay. And I, having discovered no chocolate biscuits in the biscuit tin, spent an unsatisfactory half-hour on the internet, skimming through Popbitch.
Meanwhile, yet again, the dog escaped. I’m not especially fond of the dog, as it happens, but, as a fellow Prisoner of Paradise, I’m developing a grudging admiration for her relentless quests for freedom, which is partly why I don’t police her as well as I probably should. She has my mobile number on her collar and I get a call at least once a day from a sour-mouthed, disapproving killjoy who has taken it upon themselves to entrap her yet again. Poor thing. I had to rescue her from the dogs’ home once. Some officious bastard, presumably wanting to teach her owners a lesson, had dumped her there instead of telephoning. The dog was on the edge of a breakdown by the time I found her, and the wretched home wouldn’t release her until I’d written them a cheque for £50.
In any case I was still on Popbitch when who should arrive, huffing and panting at the front door, but the unstable Missionary’s Daughter. She was clasping our dog under one beefy arm, seeping with sweat and animal lovers’ indignation.
‘Alison!’ I cried, full of phony friendliness. ‘And the dog!’
‘I found her,’ she spat, ‘all the way down at the garden centre. You’re lucky she didn’t get run over.’ And without another word she dumped the dog at my feet and stomped away.
Alone again, we looked at each other, the animal and I. She seemed cowed and vaguely uncertain and yet, in spite of everything—her hopeless plight, the sure knowledge of the trouble she was in—her docked tail still wagged obstinately on. Something about it reminded me of my lady friends at the school gate…
There is no doubt in my mind any more. Somehow or other, I’ve got to get out of here.
September 12th
E-mailed Smartypants soon as I got home. Also left her a couple of messages. Nothing. Obviously all the urgency wasn’t quite so urgent after all. Called her accounts people and discovered there’d been a payment put through for £150. So. I guess that’ll be the kill fee. Never mind. Truth is, what with the baby and everything I’m finding it increasingly hard to concentrate on anything, really. Except escape.
Fin’s away again.
Eating breakfast with the children this morning, I happened to mention—ever so casually—the possibility of our going back to live in London again.
Dora just laughed. ‘You’re completely crazy, Mum,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why we even moved here in the first place.’ And then, after a pause: ‘Does that mean we’ll go back to our old school?’
Ripley took it less well. Said he definitely never wanted to live in London again, ‘because of the disgusting chicken legs’. Still can’t work out what the hell he was talking about, but he did eventually concede that if said chicken leg problem could be ove
rcome he would be more than happy to go home again.
Home.
Oh, I don’t know…Maybe Fin will spend a bit more time with us in Paradise this winter. Maybe, between us, we’ll work out a way of getting the baby pram up the garden path. Maybe I’ll get used to all this quiet. Maybe I’ll find some friends. Maybe I’ll be able to forge a career for myself, writing about farming. We’ve only been here a year and a bit. Even if it does feel like an eternity.
Maybe we should just keep on trying.
COUNTRY MOLE
Sunday Times
Vincent, new partner to the old kitchen builder (handsome, non-biscuit-eating etc, etc arrived at last to mend our wobbly tap. I think poor Vincent, though we’d never met before, was disappointed not to find the film producer at home, because Paradise is a small place, and it turns out we all know each other’s business. He brought with him a heavy box file filled with his screenplays, and also a film proposal written by his 90-year-old father. It was his father’s proposal which seemed to excite him the most. ‘It’s like The Da Vinci Code,’ he explained, standing very close to the wobbly tap, but not looking at it. ‘I mean, it’s like The Da Vinci Code. Only more complicated, and also it’s better.’
