Mrs Fytton's Country Life

by Mavis Cheek

  Mrs Fytton's Country Life

  MAVIS CHEEK

  Faber and faber

  First published in Great Britain in 2000 by Faber and Faber Limited 3 Queen Square London wcin 3AU Open market edition published in 2000 This paperback edition published in 2001

  Photoset by Faber and Faber Ltd Printed in England by Mackays of Chatham pic

  All rights reserved

  © Mavis Cheek, 2000

  The right of Mavis Cheek to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

  isbn 0-571-20541-0

  Acknowledgements

  This book would never have been completed without a spell in the friendly purgatory of the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Co. Monaghan, conducive, as ever, to that necessary combination of Hard Work and Hard Play.

  for Angela, of course

  and in loving, happy memory of her friendship and her fun, Celia Hall 1949-1999

  The seventeenth century marked the beginning of the separation of the place of work from the home... Once a woman lost the ability to support herself and her family through domestic activity centred on the household, she found herself very disadvantaged compared with men... women were in a weak position in the labour market.

  sara mendelsohn and patricia crawford,

  Women in Early Modern England

  I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.

  gloria steinem

  Prologue

  There is so little difference between husbands, you might as well keep the first.

  adela rogers st johns

  When little Angela Lister, ardent reader, went up to Cambridge to read history in the late summer of 1976 with her Kate Millett and her Germaine Greer and her Andrea Dworkin tucked under one arm, and her nineteenth-century novels and Virginia Woolfs tucked under the other, and the bib of her dungarees containing the latest copy of Spare Rib and Honey Magazine and the Guardian, she felt she could conquer the world. And she might have done, had she not, a little later in the term, attended an informal debate between a large-hipped young woman in a loud floral frock (always a statement about something) and a tall, aquiline, golden-haired, scarf-flinging young man - no, God - in rusty corduroy.

  The informal debate centred on the premise 'This house believes that Women's Liberation is righting some wrongs but also causing unacceptable levels of disruption in some patterns necessary to the good of society'. It was considered pretty revolutionary to have a man speaking against the proposition - though it did cross Angela Lister's mind that there was nothing revolutionary about it at all, really, because men had been speaking for women for thousands of years.

  'Shall we go or shall we boycott?' she asked her friend Rosa.

  Rosa said, ’If we don't go we won't know.' As Angela knew she would.

  Honour satisfied, off they went to greet another piece of enlightenment in the new dawn.

  Angela Lister leaned forward on her pew, her chin in her hands, and gazed at the God. And he struck her as so beautiful, so eloquent, so very right on, that she forgot to remember the point of principle involved, and instead, like so many of her sisters before her, she listened enraptured and did not interrupt him once.

  The hips was for the motion, and it was also considered pretty revolutionary and a bit of a wheeze to have a woman defending the status quo. Angela Lister also thought - fleetingly, it is true - that this was less of an indicator of the scrupulously fair nature of Cambridge University's policy towards the new dawn, and more something of a gimmick. But the thought just fleeted in and fleeted on out again. For Angela Lister had seen, gazed and fallen in love.

  The God caught her eye, somewhere between 'In a world of tall men, some women are tall, but men are always tallest' and 'Society penalizes women for their caring dispositions. Society must change to accommodate them.' And she smiled. That is the man I am going to marry, she found herself saying, with only the mildest of winces at the way it betrayed the legend on her ‘I-shirt, which said 'The Personal is the Political'.

  'Women have always been able to get what they want without aggression,' shouted the hips.

  Angela scarcely noted the outrage. She was trying very hard to keep her face perfectly good-natured and still. Which, she was well aware, was how she looked her best.

  Someone with very short hair and an androgynous mien called out and asked why the God felt obliged to argue the women's cause, and the God tossed his scarf and called back that he did not feel at all obliged only convinced, as a history undergraduate, that women had been given short shrift and men must help to put it right if they wanted to live in a happy and harmonious world in future.

  'Fine words!' said the short-haired androgyne.

  'I mean them!' said the God.

  'Pah!' said the short-haired androgyne.

  At which point Angela Lister stood up and said, 'You wouldn't be so down on him if he had long hair, a beard and sandals . . .' Which was, alas, quite true - since the men's support group to the women's circle comprised, entirely, doe-eyed men with a remarkable resemblance to Jesus as seen by the Pre-Raphaelites. Unfortunately, though they did much for feminist solidarity, they did not do a lot for female desire.

  A look of appreciation passed from the God to little Angela Lister, who acknowledged it by continuing to look very good-natured and still.

  A liberated husband, she thought, would be absolutely ideal.

  She rushed off to the women's room with her friend Clancy's kohl pencil and her friend Rosa's peach lipstick and a territorial determination that, had it been quantifiable, would have dented any argument regarding the weaker sex. Angela Lister was in love. And she was going out there to get her man. And once she had got him, she intended to keep him. All this she knew in those first minutes of his entering her life. Her blueprint was fashioned at the age of eighteen.

  But not for nothing was she a liberated young woman. And suddenly, very high on her agenda of the breaking down of traditional male and female shibboleths was the shibboleth that suggested a girl must wait around for a boy to ask...

  She made it known in double quick time that she was Up For It. He appeared to be Up For It too. She carried off her trophy successfully and she congratulated herself that she had made the choice. But after she got what she was Up For - that is, a steady, faithful, sexual and intellectual relationship with a man who made her heart flip every time she saw him - she had the misfortune to find that her love deepened and widened and engulfed her. In fairness to the God, who turned out to be called Ian Fytton, he found that his love deepened and widened and all but engulfed him too. The all but being the important factor here.

  At the end of their Cambridge days he had a first-class honours in modern history and a high profile as a potential anything you want, and she had an upper second. He was a bright, ambitious embracer of the world. He loved women, but best of all women he loved Angela; he loved wine and good red meat, and all the things that flesh is heir to when it has a bit of money in its pocket. And he absolutely loved and adored technology - the strange, new, ever-growing hydra that the likes of Angela Lister found alien and cold and requiring of the obsessional. But Ian Fytton's father, a businessman who loved his only son, knew the future. He lent him the capital to start
his own computing business, and his son took it with eager hands. If Angela Lister thought they would travel the world together now their degrees were complete, she was quite mistaken. The Brave New World of business and technology was expanding quicker than bacilli on ordure. And Ian Fytton intended to be at the very heart of it.

  She was twenty-one years old. There was a great deal of life left in which to travel the world, or end up with roses around the cottage door, once they had consolidated their future together. She promptly set about learning the vagaries of this brave new world. She took on the mysteries of computer software and won. Ian Fytton thought nothing of it. For women were the equals of men in their capacity to understand all things. It did not occur to him that while his delight in the subject came from, well, delight in the subject, Angela Lister's came from loving him. That was something he simply did not consider. Much, perhaps, as Pierre Curie did not bother to ascertain the true fount of Marie's dual obsessions.

  Angela's parents, who owned a hardware shop in Reigate, were happy enough. If they had hoped she would come back and live with them in leafy Reigate, they did not say. They had given the girl an education and they were not silly enough to expect her to return to the past. They were introduced to Ian Fytton and liked him and did not ask too many questions about where their daughter intended to live. Which was, of course, with her man.

  It was, Ian Fytton thought, very unfortunate that Angela became pregnant immediately they moved into their rented flat in Clapham. But Angela's genetic biology was working away. What Ian called a mistake, Angela privately called insurance. Now that she had a baby on the way, he would go out and hunt and bring back the kill for her and no other.

  'Just think’ she laughed, 'when this one is off to university we will still be young ourselves. And we will be so rich we will be able to do anything... anything at all... Jean-Paul Belmondo is still fantastic, even now’

  'And so is Brigitte Bardot’

  Nevertheless, he expressed doubt about her ability to both be a mother and help him with the business.

  'Rubbish’ she said, with her last vestigial memory of her history course before the sleep of pregnancy overcame her. 'Women always did work as well as have their families - farming or shopkeeping then is no different from running a computing business from home now. None at all’ And then she yawned.

  ‘I’m only trying to protect you’ he said tenderly.

  And she smiled. For somehow that sounded exactly and perfectly right. And so she slept easy.

  They married immediately and had a four-day honeymoon in Venice. Angela had heard it was the most romantic city on earth. Which it was. Four days was all the time they could spare, because already the business was going crazy. Ian expanded the office out of the flat and into a couple of rented rooms in Hammersmith. Angela, although heavily pregnant, continued to work with him. He installed the systems, she talked people through when they went wrong and Ian was unavailable. She was still talking to an unsuspecting client on the telephone when Ian was in Huddersfield and her contractions began. Fortunately she had kept up - though intermittently - with her local women's group and there was someone to hold her hand until Ian arrived.

  The baby, a boy they called Andrew after his grandfather, was born easily. The women's group seemed disappointed. Everyone could have sworn it was going to be a daughter. But Angela, delighted to be in control of her destiny, just smiled and planned ahead. She found a large, crumbling house in west London which would be big enough for both their home and their office. She would refurbish it herself to save money, and from these premises she would be mother to their child and partner in the business. Which was agreed.

  'A bit pre-industrial revolution,' she said to Clancy and Rosa when they came to coo over the baby. 'But we're equals.'

  When Clancy said, 'Whose job is it to clean the lavatory?' she pretended not to hear.

  Finding the house was like a military exercise. All she wanted was something with three floors, six bedrooms (because the upper floors would be their living space) and a garden for their son. In whatever condition it came. Apart from that she was entirely without sentiment. And thus, very quickly, when Andrew was less than three months old, she found it. No. 13 Francis Street. Perfect.

  She donned her old dungarees. Once they had been mere symbols of her political determinism; now they were its evidence. Here was true liberation, here was true breaking down of traditional gender roles. Ian learned not to be gallant as he watched his wife pick up the stepladders and trundle them upstairs, and he learned not to be embarrassed when he closed the door after her and went back to his desk. It was a joint undertaking, this life of theirs, and each did what they could. She hired a young woman who could look after the telephones and do simple office tasks, and also double as a mother's help.

  Ian had no role in all this. Within their empire each had separate responsibilities. From each according to his ability. And hers. His job was to get out there and do what a man had to do.

  She worked hard on no. 13 Francis Street, beginning with the ground-floor rooms, which Ian used as his offices. A small cloakroom was installed in the downstairs corridor so that visiting clients did not need to brave the big, cold upstairs and the scruffy family bathroom. The big, white, back kitchen was extended and fitted with double doors to muffle offending domestic noise, and a spiral staircase was driven through its centre, which made the prospect of caring for small children a nightmare. On the second and third floors there were the family rooms, all in dire need of care and attention. She dealt with those last. She learned glazing, tiling, basic woodwork and decorating and she felt that this great plan was unravelling just as it should.

  Ian's business acquaintances began to compliment him on this superwife of his. He basked in the praise. And the business went on expanding. And then, as far as Ian was concerned, disaster struck. When Andrew was only seven months old, Angela became pregnant again. The following year she gave birth to Claire.

  'Don't worry,' said Angela. ‘I can handle it.'

  And she could. She was young. Life was sweet, life was solid and life was happening just as she planned. Through the hard times she kept in mind the glowing grail of a future in which she and beloved husband had filled all life's pigeonholes and could fly away and do whatever they wanted. Every time she pricked her finger sewing up a curtain hem or got paint down the back of her neck from those high ceilings, she would smile to herself and say, 'One day, Angie. One day...'

  While Clancy finished her MA in California, and Rosa got her first book commission to consider the !Kung, Angela went right on building up her world the way she wanted it. Claire was born, Ian was there by her side, and immediately after the birth Angela had her tubes tied. Mission accomplished.

  When their office assistant and mother's helper left to have a baby, Ian tutted. Next time, he said, he would employ a man.

  No danger of that happening then.

  He did so. And Angela employed a part-time mother's help for herself and carried on. She was young, she had energy, she could fit her work in between the requirements of mothering and helping with the business. And - if there was any time left over - she used it to gradually make the rest of the house nice and warm and attractive to live in. What she managed to do in the way of soft furnishings with yards and yards of cheap mattress ticking would have filled a book by Conran. But one thing she knew - young as she was - and it was this: men go walkabout if they don't like what they get at home. When Rosa or Clancy came to stay and poked fun at her, Angela would whistle Tammy Wynette's 'Stand by Your Man'. With, as she would say, irony. But she adhered to the principles of Tony Bennett's 'Wives Should Always Be Lovers Too', as if Marilyn French had never been born: 'Hey, little girl, comb your hair, fix your make-up, soon he will walk through the door ...' She might wink at her friends, but she also meant it.

  Ian told her that he loved her, and that he admired her, and that he did not know what he would do without her. If she remembered that Henry II once
wrote something very similar to Eleanor of Aquitaine before putting her in a chateau and throwing away the key, she dismissed it. Man might learn from history that man learns nothing from history, she told herself, but women do. She supported and was supported, she loved and was loved, she admired and was admired. It was enough.

  She attended PTA and parents' evenings and did her bit for fund-raising events. She loved her children but, like her own parents with her, she knew that one day they must fly the coop and she was happy to let them go. The better they did at school, the freer they would one day be, and so would she and Ian.

  Her local married women friends bemoaned the passing of romance from their lives. By the time most of them had two children of school age, the private pleasures of their marriages had long since faded against the brilliance of the domestic burden. Not so Angela. She kept down the cellulite and kept up (or down) the seductive underwear, and enjoyed it all for the game it was. Whatever she did now went into the pot for later. Ian Fytton could only look out of the window or up to the ceiling when one of his male colleagues bemoaned the passing of fun, romance and marital relations...