by Mavis Cheek
Truth was, despite the sorrow, there was something liberating about breaking out of that urban ghetto, that citadel of self-congratulatory private-sectorites pushing their nannied children into smelly little crammers so that the privileged brats could one day inherit the earth. And she included her own in that. Oh dear, yes, she did. Angela Fytton, she thought with shame, This Was Your Life.
Scone-reaching distance? No, Angela Fytton intended to live a lot further away than that. A lot. They could keep Francis Street and its environs. The barbarians were not at the gates, they were living inside the keep - and very comfortably too. But she was going to do a barbarian bit of her own and Visigoth off out of it. She put her foot down and exalted in the engine's tinny roar. It was wonderful, wonderful, to no longer drive a space wagon. So what if the horse she had backed had come in lame (the pity of it was that he had not come in minus his balls as well)? At least she was now free. To go wherever she chose. Beyond those scones. How a right-on liberated idealist, as she once was, could have become that nice Mrs Fytton with the high-flying husband and two sets of school fees she could scarcely tell. But she had. From now on she would have no more of it.
Mrs Fytton, Mrs Fytton, Mrs Fytton, she repeated in her head. She liked the name. It complemented Angela, which was too soft on its own, and it was considerably better than her maiden name, which was Lister and therefore rhymed too easily with blister - and anyway, since no name was anything but patriarchal, as she had spent so long telling the world in the seventies, it was as good as any other. Fytton. She never embraced the announcing of herself to complete strangers as Angela, and - despite those seventies - she still thought it a bit of a cheek when she received letters from women she had never met beginning 'Dear Angela' and signing themselves 'Naomi' or 'Ruth' or 'Portia'. A given name, Christian name, call it what you will, was the intimate passport of friendship, and friendship was precious. You earned it, you did not assume it as of right just because you were the same sex...
'Crap, Angela’ she said to the mirror. The reason she called herself Mrs Fytton was because it got right up the new Mrs Fytton's nose.
The road pulled her on. Away, away. Away from the bourgeois ideal and the brittle friendships of urban living. Now she was free, she observed that among the dilatory women of the middle classes a combination of intellectual and applied success was viewed as extremely suspicious. At best it was getting above yourself, at worse it was a separator - the modern equivalent of witchcraft. Instead of these silly women celebrating knowledge, they shunned it. They drove to Perigueux and avoided Angouleme. They stayed in Tuscany and avoided Florence. She had once made the mistake of mentioning Capri and the Villa Jovis and Tiberian reticulated brickwork in mixed company while wearing a clinging rose-pink frock and two days after her divorce came through. You could have heard a pin drop. Sorry, she felt like saying, sorry. It was then, looking into the hostile eyes of the assembled women, that the chilling notion occurred. Had she lived a few hundred years ago, a witchcraft trial would have been inevitable. And in our good Christian community too. Those eyes said they would definitely like to see her sitting on hot faggots. She was too young and too womanly to be single and live. 'Let not widows remain unwed lest they grow to prefer the state,' wrote one jolly philosophizing burgess in fifteenth-century Bristol. Nothing was ever new... Across those prating dinner tables the proud doyennes still dispatched the guilty.
She nearly hit the hard shoulder it made her so cross. So where did the fucking sisterhood go, then? Nobody ever said you had to look like the back end of a bus and think that Defoe was someone with whom you had Defight to be part of it. Besides, somewhere under that rose-pink frock were several lines of stretch marks, a couple of varicose veins and quite a lot of floppy bits . . . Perhaps she should have stripped off there and then and shown them. If Pliny berated the women of ancient Rome for honing their fingernails into talons, he should have leapt a couple of millennia and seen the women of modern-day west Londinium. Theirs came up spiky as gimlets to rip at the flesh of her tearful eyes, excoriate the tissue of her bruised, dumped heart. And she so innocent, so vulnerable, so-o-o...
That is not entirely true, now is it, Mrs Fytton? said the eyes in the driving mirror. There were a few other contributory factors, were there not? A few other factors that led to this excoriation that makes you bleed as you drive?
Well. Perhaps. Of course. A few ... But I never, really and truly I never, ever thought that the old ways of the medievals persisted and that a new-made single woman must appear quiet, meek, humble and virtuous and keep her ankles covered. I thought we were all post-modernist feminists nowadays. I thought, I thought...
The eyes widened. There was something fiery in their lights. You thought, they said, wrong. That is only in magazines. Society still wishes to protect itself from the free woman, the loose canon, the wronged women who will not lie down and take it. Especially if she is anything over thirty and therefore beginning the road to wisdom.
I suppose it would have been all right if I had run down the road to unwisdom naked and cutting the heads off everybody's petunias and wailing like a Greek chorus before being carted off to a psychiatric unit?
That would have shown a thoughtful sensitivity to the situation, certainly. Instead of which...
What?
Instead of which . . . First time out solo and you stand accused of discussing the virtues of Apple Macintosh over IBM with a nice man from the local newspaper at David and Marcia's party while wearing fishnet stockings and a shortish leather skirt!
Bravura - I have legs like tree trunks.
Or the red satin minidress at your own party, with a little help from daughter Claire's Wonderbra. Daughter Claire usefully absent and not consulted about either the loan or the appropriateness of wearing such a provocative garment. Well, I bought the vulgar thing.
May I remind you that a 36-C cup is perfectly able to stand alone. Any more help and they'd have been strung round your ears. It was an action, a dress code not designed to make the ladies feel relaxed while the gentlemen gawped. Angela Fytton - wipe that smirk off your face... And it was unlikely, wasn't it, that dancing with their twenty-three-year-old builder at the Coopers' twenty-first anniversary bash would endear you further to the sisterly assembly?
It sure as hell endeared me to the brotherly one.
We are talking about the lost sisterhood. Smirk off, please.
OK. Maybe I did lick his ear a bit. But these things are surely acceptable for a newly dumped wife? It is called getting through. To be looked upon with kindness, with a sense of there but for fortune... No?
No. Shall I go on?
Oh no, thought Angela, suddenly weary, you do not have to.
She might just as well have done a Godiva down Francis Street with Finale tattooed on her bottom. So far as the be-ghettoed west Londinium witch-hunters were concerned, those knives, which they pretended were but pruning shears, came out sharp and strong. A woman who loses her husband, who discusses reticulated brickwork and who snogs a builder should be careful. Or leave.
Of course, if her husband had returned to her, tail between his legs, all would have been well. But he did not. She was left, small-waisted, big-titted, younger than most of the barbarians, high and dry and alone. If she had gone on with the chocolate and become gross - well, that might have made a difference, might . . . though you never could tell with the witch-hunters. But by then, by chocolate time, the little bit of London where she lived had already turned into an absurd replica of the school playground. If you play with her you can't play with us. Or it replicated something even more ancient, more sinister. It takes only one or two mad ones, like stinking lumps of tamarind, to sour the pot. So Clancy said, to comfort her. But then Clancy had moved away, now wrote for the Irish Times, and was allowed a fancy turn of phrase. And what, anyway, would Clancy know, being safely out of it nowadays with her nice husband, Jack, and her nice daughter, Philomena, and her comfortable Dublin life? And, by the way, how could C
lancy and Jack have got away with calling their daughter Philomena and still have an apparently excellent relationship with her? The world, truly, was unfair in every respect.
When women turn against women they take the fascist approach. A Jew, a leper, a South Selma negro - or a woman in a respectable part of London with too much of something and no protector. Someone must embody the evil we feel we have in ourselves, she'll do. It was not hard to see where cruelty lay, just beneath the skin of civilization. Years ago, if they had not burnt her, they would have strung her up. And, just as in those far-off days, they would have paid no attention to her pleadings that she did not give Goody Grote a poisoned finger, so now what use was it to say, 'But I do not want your husband, I want my own'? Who would believe that - despite most of those husbands looking like advertisements for the immediate need for health insurance?
When Clancy, still living nearby, went blonde, everyone just said lovely. When Angela went blonde and met Lydia Curzon in Sainsbury's, she watched her practically hurl herself in front of her twinkly and semi-decrepit husband, lest he be in need of saving from the golden curls ... Lydia Curzon had not spoken to her since. Clancy, on being taken to task for this by Angela, said, 'Yes, but I'm blonde and plain and I write about the history of things like the vacuum cleaner’ As if it explained everything. Perhaps it really did . . . How depressing.
And so Mrs Fytton, travelling west on this beautiful April morning, donned the armour of compromise. She was not on her way to war, she was retreating from it. If she negotiated terrain that fetched her up further than scone-burning distance, she knew she would be safe. Country good, town bad. That was the way of it. Like the plague-beset victims of yore, she was fleeing to the countryside and health. To a place where she would not be thought a witch but a wise woman. She re-read Goldsmith's Deserted Village with a manic gleam in her eye: 'Ah! Sweet Auburn...' Indeed. And now, with the countryside whizzing past her windows, she began to recite, ripping it out at the sweetly clouded blue and those trembling verdant grasses.
'A time there was, ere England's griefs began...'
'Please yourself’ she said, to a rapidly retreating winged speck in the sky. She began to sing it, and even more loudly, more defiantly. When they were small, the children used to plead with her not to sing to them on long car journeys. 'Don't sing, Mummy,' they implored. Now, in a moment of joyous liberation, she gave it all she had got:
'When every rood of ground maintained its man; For him light labour spread her wholesome store, Just gave what life required, and gave no more: His blest companions, innocence and health; And his best riches, ignorance of wealth. ... de dum de dum...
I still had hopes, my latest hours to crown, Amidst these humble bowers to lay me down...'
Presumably, if every rood of ground maintained its man, might it not also maintain its woman? Whatever a rood was.
Simplicity she was going for. Back to basics. Just a housewife. How wonderful.
Peace at last.
She accelerated. If that blue sky above was anything to go by, it was a day for finally finding the right humble bower. Mrs Fytton, she repeated. Mrs Fytton goes to the country. She smiled a not altogether Sweet Auburn! sort of a smile. And Mrs Fytton it would be. Ian, beloved husband, now beloved ex-husband, would have two of them to contend with. There might now be another Mrs Fytton, a younger Mrs Fytton, who was not six foot under like the sour old dowager Mrs Fytton (more's the pity and that could be arranged), but she -quite frankly - could go and piss up her leg. This Mrs Fytton, the first Mrs Fytton, was keeping that name. She had a use for it and both church and civil said that she could. She tooted and waved at a passing lorry. Mrs Fytton she was and always would be. Strong in her armour, free to do whatever she liked, able to leave behind those silly female pygmies and, like poor Goldsmith, after a youth of labour seek an age of ease.
She might even get her husband back. In fact, she fully intended to get her husband back. For Mrs Fytton the First was not going down this route without a plan. Most definitely she had one. And it was a corker.
When it was clear that Ian was not coming back, she was told by a counsellor to get on with her life, and she had tried. Getting on with her life was, she felt, justifiably interpreted as finding and keeping another bloke. After all, she told herself grandly, that was the only thing she lacked.
She had therefore tried, and she had, somewhat ignominiously, failed.
She did not see why she should try any more.
She had put a lot of effort into her marriage.
A lot of spadework.
A lot of manure.
So why
should she endup eating dirt? And besides, she really and truly still
loved him. Ian.
If they weren't castigating her, those London folk, they were pitying her. It was hard to say which was worse. In her little bit of west London, pity had begun to spread all over her like measles. A woman alone and incapable. Pity from the man at the garage, who showed her exactly how to use ‘I-Cut to get a real shine. As if she had either the time or the inclination to want a shiny car. 'I just want to swap this space wagon for something nippy. Got it?' He looked at her even more kindly. Women! Always changing their minds.
Pity from the doctor's receptionist, who told her that Prozac got her through, while smiling happily upon a small boy drinking the daffodil water. 'And it still is’ she added proudly. 'I'd never have known’ said Angela.
Even the postman, George - a part-time poet and fond of calling himself a man of letters (oh, the wit of these people) -said to her, 'You can get too fond of your own company, you know’ with a sad little screw of his eyes. Fuck me, she thought, unusually aroused, philosophical jewels sharding through her letter box from the bloody postmanl And when she retorted that, as a matter of fact, she was really very enamoured of her own company, it being loyal, affectionate, quite sexy and totally in tune with the things she enjoyed, he shook his head, as if she were tripping down the path of madness. And probably went off to talk to the man at the garage.
It was in that very same doctor's waiting room, with the eyes of the sympathetic, be-Prozacked receptionist upon her, that she had flicked through one of the superior women's magazines, only to find that its editor, reeling from the statistical news that 40 per cent of women of child-bearing age considered themselves celibate, asked in a headline, 'And where does all that sexual energy go?' Like a hypochondriac, Angela Fytton read this and felt a terrible clutch at her heart. 'Failed again' echoed through her shrinking brain, and she immediately switched to Country Life, the magazine that seeks not the depth of one's psyche.
Too late. Despite the fact that she was attending the surgery only for her tetanus booster, she imagined all that sexual energy whizzing through her system, imploding her energies, drying out her knee joints, draining off her hair pigment, creeping round her retina to suck away the sight. A gammer, a harpy, a crone - a.k.a. Mrs Angela Fytton of Francis Street in the town of L—, in the year of 19—, in the process of decomposing.
Did all human beings need to shag on a regular basis in order not to go crazy? Like the old-fashioned idea that if men didn't get It on a regular basis they went off pop. Or became serial rapists and paedophiles. Now - hello, equality - were women getting the same treatment? Post-feminism, it was imperative to have sex. No sex for some time meant imminent disaster. This way to the loony bin, via infanticide, kleptomania, peculiar eating habits, hemlock for hubby and all those other well-known things the average potty, sex-starved female is heiress to. Never mind that some of the most dangerously peculiar women she knew were having lots of sex all the time and imploding all over the place. To be seen to be unshagged was definitely outer darkness.
'All that sexual energy' indeed. She vowed never to pick up that particular magazine again. Country Life was much better. And much more useful. For wasn't she here, on this beautiful spring morning, because of it?
She changed into fifth gear, glad to be nearing the end of the motorway n
ow, and overtook a silver Saab. Cars for boys, she thought grandly, and nipped on, allowing her brain to expand once more to its true and mighty size. You see, it got to you if you weren't careful. At least, once upon a time, women had the right to say no. Now they seemed to have the right only to say yes and make sure the world knew about it. She suspected it was the same for men too. Otherwise why would rock bands, as she had read, have to put shuttlecocks down their trousers when performing? Her stunned mind went walkabout for a moment. A shuttlecock? Why a shuttlecock?
She glared at a distant lone donkey in a field. Sex was not, she told it, the problem. Sex was always out there if you wanted it. Even if you had two heads and a third eye, there was always someone, somewhere, advertising for just that combination. Of course they were. You just had to believe in yourself. If George Eliot could get a man of thirty-nine when she was sixty, after being told by at least two suitors that they rejected her on the grounds that she was too ugly (one hoped she head-butted them out of the room with that remarkable nose of hers), then anyone could do it. Celibacy as failure? Not at all... No one, male or female, needed to be without sex if that was what they wanted. But it was not sex that people sought, not really; it was love. She had loved every minute of loving her husband and being made love to by him. There was never a time when it was not a delight to welcome and be welcomed into his arms. And frankly, when you had known that the prospect of a quick shag with someone as a way of dealing with 'all that sexual energy' was wholly unedifying.
