by Mavis Cheek
He looked like a Leaky, she decided (putting the notion of drips firmly out of her mind). He was long and rangy and hands-in-pockets and dangerous lopsided looks. He dealt in fine old vintage cars. She just said, 'Mmm, mmm -1 love old cars ...' And tried desperately to name one. 'Lamborghini!' she almost shouted eventually.
He nodded as if it were a great truth. 'Did you know’ he said, 'that there are spare parts for cars like Lamborghinis still available in places like Honduras and Poona?'
'Fascinating,' she said, over and over and over again.
Then she talked about lying in bed reading Austen or Tolstoy or Hardy by night.
And he said, 'Fascinating,' as if it was. She managed to imply that she was lying in bed reading alone.
Ian's new wife was pregnant; Claire and Andrew were disgustingly delighted - 'a sister, a brother...'
'Half-sister, ‘’half-brother,' she reminded them curtly. But 'ooh ooh, aah aah' they went. Vile renegades. To be shunned. Not that they noticed. So Leaky arrived just in time.
Call me Pandora, she thought. Hope. But she forgot that Pandora was burdened with all the ills of the world for her trouble.
Then one evening when she had gone to the theatre with Grade to see Carol Churchill's Top Girls, Leaky turned up in the foyer. 'Hi, darling’ he said. 'Decided to come along too...'
He barely spoke to Gracie. And the discussion afterwards was hampered by neither of them wishing to offend Leaky. Who said the play was interesting, but unresolved. At which Gracie raised an eyebrow and Angela felt uncomfortable. It was many things, but it was not unresolved. It said very firmly, and in a very resolved way, that it was hard being a woman in a man's world and that you had to make sacrifices in order to succeed on masculine terms. That, in her book, was pretty resolved.
She said, 'Marlene gets to the top after abandoning her daughter, her class, her femininity...'
'Don't give me all that silly nonsense, Mrs Fytton’ he said, smiling at her tenderly and patting her cheek.
Gracie blinked. Is there anything worse than reading Ditch This Person in your friends' eyes and not having the courage to do so?
'Goodbye, Leaky,' she wrote. And she booked a holiday to coincide with when the baby was due. There was some satisfaction in seeing Claire and Andrew's innate selfishness at work, for despite the thrill of 'Ooh, a sister' and 'Ooh, a brother' they wanted a holiday too. Despite Ian asking them to be around for the event, they declined and came to Crete instead.
It may have been then, in that moment of revelation regarding her children's naked selfishness, that she began to form the tiniest little embryo of an idea... Whose fruition she was bringing about in this mistress plan of moving to the country. The one which would bring Ian back to her like a fly to sweet glue. Women, take control of your lives! There were many other ways to skin a cat, she thought, with a haziness matched only by her historical commentary on the bones of Aborigines. At least, if it failed, there would be no one who knew her to see.
Now she was driving along small, hedge-lined roads. Passing wistaria-clad cottages and ruddy-bricked farmhouses, proper, safe, untouched by London madness. She went slowly, enjoying the peace. And she smiled. That moment of rebellion - that moment when Andrew and Claire stuck out their teenaged lips and said, 'No,' to their father - was sweet, sweet, sweet.. . She remembered sipping her Olympic Airways gin and tonic and praying that the baby came on time. They had only a fortnight.
She gave Ian the wrong hotel telephone number so that he could not contact them as the proud father. Her children discovered the windsurfing and the nightclubs of Crete and never looked back. Well, certainly not at her lying on the beach. But there, in the warm blue waters, paddling around the lacy edge of the Med, she met Otto. Unpartnered Otto, who was there with his family of two grown-up children and assorted grandchildren. And who had a ground-floor bedroom in their villa. An accessible ground-floor bedroom.
So that was all right. A few stolen trysts, a few nice relaxed mezes washed down with the local paint-stripper. Quite a lot of paint-stripper. And bingo - the beginnings of a light-hearted relationship. Neither Andrew nor Claire noticed if she slept in the villa on account of the fact that they were never back to sleep in it themselves. She felt happy again.
Otto, from Hamburg, was a translator. Short, bald, creative, stylish, a little ponderous but nice. Fifteen years older than she was. Long-divorced. He did nice things like trailing along the beach to find her and producing a bucket of icy water full of beers. And despite the myth, he had a sense of humour. He once crept up behind her while she lay on a sun-lounger, threw his towel over her and said that it was the traditional way for a German man to bag a woman. He then produced yet another bottle of very cold paint-stripper and two glasses. He was so thoughtful.
'Haf lap-top, vill travel’ he said, smiling cheerfully. Within two months of their Cretan idyll, Otto had decamped from Hamburg to a small flat one tube stop away. She might have been flattered, instead she was horrified. The bell-like poetical words, 'What the fuck did you do that for?' fell from her lips. He was terribly hurt.
'Sorry’ she said. 'Sorry, sorry, sorry.' She must not give him the baggage of her previous experiences. He was new, he was kind, he loved her (he said) and he was German - different from the English men of her acquaintance; continental men were much less screwed up. She gave him the benefit, put her anger to one side and forgave the encroachment. In a way ... it was nice. The thoughtfulnesses were still there. Including, rather oddly, the coolers of cold beers and the ice buckets of chilled wine. Rather a lot of them.
Within three weeks she discovered that he had a nasty little problem called alcohol.
First he slid under a pink-tableclothed restaurant dinner. Bringing the pears in marsala down with him. Then he crashed his car. Then he crashed her car. Then he clung to her fence railing one night singing what was possibly a Bavarian love song, until she came out and hauled him in. He promised it would never happen again.
He did it two nights later and he called her a whore for not letting him in. She called Ian. Ian rang the police. The police came. There was something about their smiles as she stood shivering in her pyjamas on her front step at three in the morning that made her realize it was still a man's world. Something in their smiles that said he was a bit of a rogue and she was a miserable cow to keep him out here. Which balance may have been helped by the way Otto clung to the officers' arms and told them he 'Luffed zem all and his liddle strudel dumpling...'
Angela was free once more. Ian told her she should stay that way. She thanked him for calling the police and said he should mind his own business. He said he bloody well intended to mind his own business, but he couldn't if she kept ringing him up about lunatics. She did not apologize. She had spent a lifetime protecting him from the ills a husband and father is heir to. No more.
She watched his back as he walked down her path and closed the gate. She saw him turn as if to wave, think better of it and walk away. She heard the car accelerate. And she knew that she still loved him. She still loved him because she had fashioned him. As he had fashioned her. What she saw was her twin leaving.
It was then that she had three revelations, each one quite as disturbing for Angela as a Pale Horse, Seven Seals and several Pillars of Fire.
First, she decided that she would move away to - as Goldsmith so sweetly put it - 'Dear lovely bowers of innocence and ease . . .' She would go and find a lovely bower of her own, a little plot, a humble cot, and turn her back on this miserable urban world.
Second, she suddenly remembered the naked selfishness of Andrew and Claire about the birth of the new baby - a boy (who very kindly arrived in the world two days after they arrived in Crete and thus did Ian have twelve days of going up and down a very greasy pole trying to track them down to tell them. Good, thought Mrs Angela Fytton on learning this. Good.) And that it is the hallmark of adolescence and young adulthood to be the last gasp of supreme self-focus to the point of cruelty before it must wither o
n the vine of adulthood.
And third, she realized that she had spent all her married life absorbing the brunt of life. Ian, given a bit of a brunt to bear, would not know he was born... And neither would Little Miss Fang. Not if she, Mrs Fytton the First, left her teenagers behind for them to play with...
Thus, telling no one of her plans, she set about doing just that. The end of Ian's happy little universe was well on the way.
Yes, it was a battleground. Yes, it was Stalingrad. And yes, she would give not an inch in the fight.
She stopped the car beside a little pub called Ye Olde Black Smock - all mellow bricks and well-kept woodwork and rainbow tubs of primulas - with a stream running by. Perfect. She picked up the estate agent's details from the seat beside her. She was nearly there and she had a feeling, a very strong feeling, that this one would be the one. Something told her that everything about it was just right. Like Goldilocks and the porridge, she had tried a few, but this one, this one...
She jumped as a yapping veteran of a sheepdog ran out of the pub door and up to the car. 'Staithe Road?' she called out to the owner.
'Round the bend,' he replied, rather appropriately.
Good, thought Mrs Angela Fytton. Good.
April
In my experience, if you have to keep the lavatory door shut by extending your left leg, it's modern architecture.
nancy banks-smith
If she had scarcely bothered with the purchase of Francis Street, she savoured this new choosing now. The property was called Church Ale House and if it looked good on the estate agent's sheet, it looked superb in reality. A foursquare Georgian house, as neat as a child would draw, with three upstairs windows and two windows and a door with a porch on the ground floor.
The heavy brass knocker, in the shape of a fist, was loud against the sturdy, panelled door. She had a terrible, frightened feeling that beyond this door she was lost. Even the knocker sounded triumphant. Footsteps echoed on an uncar-peted floor, a dog barked and the way was opened. Here we go, she thought. Here we go... For some reason her heart was beating as loud as any village girl on a first date.
'Mrs Fytton’ said Angela. 'From Pinnocks, the estate agent's.'
The woman wiped her palms down her faded floral pinny before shaking Angela's hand. Angela liked faded floral. Angela liked pinny. Faded and floral and pinny was light years away from west London witch-hunters daywear. Faded and floral and pinny allowed you a bosom, hips and simple acceptance of the march of time. I will have faded, I will have floral, thought Angela, as she marched through the door to her doom. 'Let the rich deride, the proud disdain’ she thought, 'these simple blessings of the lowly train...'
She smiled, very brightly. 'May I come in?' The woman did not smile brightly back but merely said, 'Yes.'
Angela turned to take one more look behind her. At the bricked path mossy with age and flanked by cottage-garden beds bright with daffodils and tulips, just beginning to hint with the green of summer plants to come. She could imagine, later, the lupins and hollyhocks, the sweet Williams and the scented stocks. Even now one or two dozy-looking bees hovered about in the sunshine, hanging precariously off bowing tulip heads.
'Thank you,' she said crisply, when the door was closed behind her.
'This way,' said the woman.
'Thank you,' she said again. It was all she could do not to throw her arms around the woman's neck and weep tears of joy on to the pinny front. If it is true, she thought, that you only know you have been sad when something makes you happy, then here is the moment. I am happy again. Or on the way to it. For the worst thing about sorrow is that it takes away all relish. And this place she was going to relish. She could feel it in her new-warmed bones.
‘I am Mrs Perry,' said the woman shortly. She did not look very delighted about it.
And Mrs Fytton followed, wiping her car-clean shoes carefully on the mat, though the hallway was stuffed with Wellington boots and piles of newspapers and assorted outdoor accoutrements that made the odd bit of dirt from a passing shoe mere grains in the desert sand.
The woman had fairish, greyish, fading hair, sun-dried skin and a figure that deserved to be called comfortable. She might have been sixty, she might have been eighty; it was hard to tell. I shall be like that, thought Angela, staring at her back view as she strode off down the long, bare-boarded hallway. She was curiously lopsided. One side of her hips was definitely less rounded than the other. Country ways, thought Angela vaguely. Inbreeding. Rickets. But her mind was already engaged, if not enchanted, with the house itself.
'I'll put the kettle on,' said the woman over her shoulder. 'And then we'll start.'
Angela said a very bright, 'Oh, yes’ and went on noting, in an interior-magazine way, that the floorboards were broad and even and certainly eighteenth-century or older - maybe elm; she daren't hope for oak - and perfect for polishing up. That the walls were grubby white-emulsioned plaster, that the ceilings were of medium height but not oppressive, and that it was certainly the kind of symmetrical Georgian house in which any Jane Austen heroine would be comfortable. The sort of house in which you would pop on your sprigged muslin and hope for a visit from the squire's eldest son. Instead of a dull-eyed young duster-seller purporting to be homeless and likely to break your windows if you refused to buy.
Why was it, she wondered, that the so-called Age of Enlightenment seemed so enchanting to her and others of her sex? Why was it that Austen-land still captivated female hearts when Jane herself would have told them, very firmly, to buzz off with their stupid yearnings? Women were oppressed in those days. Women died young. Women were not free. Women lived in the landscape, but if they wanted to go for a walk in it they either needed permission or were considered wayward and faery weird. And as for Austen-land's near neighbour Bronte-land...
She stood still, momentarily captivated by the perfect scale and symmetry of the hallway and its adjoining rooms, before scuttling onwards and returning to the past. As for Bronte-land, it was just the same. Rochester meeting Jane Eyre on the road does not think, 'What-ho, out for a little jolly exercise, then, dearie?' No, he thinks she must be a non-human flitting about the countryside. Normal women stay in. You had, she reminded herself, to be careful about getting too romantic about the past... But then again, there used to be rules. You might not like where you were, but at least you knew where it was.
She smiled. Unlike first appearances in Church Ale House. For, as they progressed towards the back of the house, all symmetry vanished. Odd little windows and doorways began to appear, high up, low down, narrow and rounded. And now they seemed to be walking down a wedge - a wedge with rooms and bits added on like a child's Plasticine model. The house was beginning to go out of shape. The Age of Enlightenment gave way to the Age of Mongrel in building terms - bits tacked on higgledy-piggledy with no thought for form.
'This is unexpected,'she said.
'It gets older as you go back,' said the owner, without turning round. 'The front bit was added when they bought more land. In the golden days of farming. Or one of the golden days. But fortunes come and go. They sold it all again eventually. We had the local history society making noises about the place once.'
'Interesting,' said Angela brightly. 'This round window must be a later addition, then.'
'Oh, yes, they liked their windows’ said the owner. 'Put them in all over the place.'
Angela stopped for a brief moment and peered through the roundel at the sunshine and warmth beyond. She could almost hear the sound of chattering and laughter as the earlier occupants of the house donned their holland aprons and went about their tasks. Mrs Perry went on walking.
As the owner she was not exactly doing her bit. Unless, thought Angela, it was double bluff and she was just being cool. Somehow, looking at that back view, she doubted it. Mrs Perry's back view looked just about as free of fancy as you could get. Nevertheless she tried again.
'Even in the Age of Enlightenment the women still had to stay in the house for
most of the time, didn't they? I mean, they couldn't just go wandering off. No wonder they liked big windows . . ‘ she finished lamely. 'Or small ones.' She peered through the roundel again. Part of her, like Alice, wanted to step through into that other world.
'I dare say,' said Mrs Perry, without turning round.
She walked through a low-arched opening and down a step. Angela followed her guide's lopsided bottom reluctantly, down the step and along the much narrower passageway beyond. There was nothing of eighteenth-century harmony in the layout now. Ah well, she decided, coming back up to date, no one wore sprigged muslin nowadays, they just threw it over a pole and let it drape artfully at the window. As for the benign squire and his sons, or a charmingly attentive Colonel Brandon on the neighbouring estate, they would never come a-calling in these modern times, being too busy helicoptering up to town for meetings with their London-based business consortium and dining out at merchant banks.
