CAROL CLEWLOW

Not Married, Not Bothered

An ABC for Spinsters

Spin-ster (spinsta) n. 1. an unmarried woman regarded as being beyond the age of marriage. 2. Law (in legal documents) a woman who has never married. Compare feme sole. 3. (formerly) a woman who spins thread for her living. [C14 (in the sense: a person, esp. a woman, whose occupation is spinning; C17: a woman still unmarried): from SPIN-STER] –

spinster-, hood n, – spinsterish adj.

Contents

Title Page A Is For … Attitude B Is For … Bridesmaid (As In Three Times A …) C Is For … Cliché D Is For … Death, Divorce And Moving House E Is For … Eleutherophobia F Is For … Finances G Is For … Gamophobia H Is For … Heroines I Is For … The Importance Of Aunts J Is for… Jane K Is For . . . Kinder L Is For … That Old Lost Love Story M Is For … Marriage N Is For … Nature Or Nurture? O Is For … An Old Maid P Is For … Philophobia Q Is For … A Question Of Sex R Is For … Regret S Is For … Solitude (Or Sunday In The Park With Riley) T Is For … Titles U Is For … The Unsuitable Liaison V Is For … Values (I.E., Family) W Is For … Weddings X Is For … Y Is … For That Old Yellow Brick Road Z Is For … Zing Zing Zing (Went My Heartstrings) About the Author Also By Carol Clewlow Copyright About the Publisher

A is for … Attitude

If you ask me how all this got started, I’d say it was with Magda deciding to marry herself.

You may wish to read that line again.

She was packing up one of her Spells for Beginners for a customer when she caught me.

‘RILEY! IMAGINE! JUST THE PERSON!’

Magda used to be in television, which is why she speaks in one of those loud overenthusiastic TV researcher’s voices. Then one day she found her hair was too high and her fingernails too long. Now she runs Hocus Pocus at the bottom of the High Street.

Deciding to get married was a big thing for Magda.

‘After all, I’ve been single all my lives.’ (She was previously a vestal virgin and after that a witch. Obviously this was before she went into television.)

Magda got the idea of marrying herself from some Weirdo of the Day paragraph in her morning paper. Except, of course, being Magda, she didn’t think it was weird at all.

‘I THINK IT’S WONDERFUL. TOTALLY EMPOWERING.’

Apparently the woman who married herself said she’d lived with herself for forty years. She felt she knew herself. She felt ready for the commitment.

‘Um … where did this happen exactly?’

‘California.’

Only in California.

Only in the loony tune town of my birth.

Over cappuccinos in her coffee shop, I said, ‘So how will it work, Magda? Will you promise to obey? Will you have a joint account? You’re a woman of substance. I hope you’ll insist on a prenup.’

She said, ‘I’m sorry you feel the need to mock, Riley. I’m surprised you don’t see it. I’m making a statement. For all of us.’

‘Us?’

‘Single women.’

And then she said it: ‘Spinsters, Riley.’

And that was where it started. Because it was like I was hearing it for the first time. That much-maligned, charming, noble, splendid old word.

Courtesy of Magda MacBride. Spinster of this parish.

Magda said, ‘It’s time for a new attitude, Riley.’

‘Damn it, she’s right,’ I said later to Danny.

This after I found the spinster sites on the Net: Be at peace with your singleness. Do not apologise for your chosen life-style …

‘For God’s sake. It’s all so goddamn craven.’

It was after that I started noticing things. What things? Well, this for instance, from one of those ‘Things I Wish I’d Known’ columns by some doyenne of the women’s movement.

I wish I’d known that breaking off my engagement didn’t mean resigning myself to eternal spinsterhood …

‘Resigning herself?’ I said. ‘Excuse me.’

And this too, from a celebrity journalist (female, to her shame) interviewing a hot-shot female film producer.

Despite, perhaps because of, what they are, a certain air of loss, of sadness will always cling to such women …

‘A certain air of loss and sadness …’ My Ss spat out on to the table. ‘Ssssimply because she can’t produce a husband and children.’

So that all of a sudden I’m beginning to get that old Jonathan Aitken feeling, that whole If it falls to me thing. I want to swish that old Sword of Truth in the air. And why? Because the more I think about it, the madder I am, and this because as far as I can see, it’s spinsters that have kept this damn country going. Teachers, civil servants, nurses, secretaries, plus a hundred other occupations, years of faithful service from the single woman and not just after World War One either. And for what? To go on being patronised and condescended to, to have her life considered so much of less worth than that of her married sister. Worse – and this in the new millennium – to continue being the subject of grubby jokes and prurient conjecture, to be caricatured as fey, grey and miserable on stage and screen and in all those fey, grey miserable novels.

‘We’re the last minority group,’ I said to Danny. ‘We suffer from prejudice. We need a campaign. T-shirts. Car stickers.’

Look. Once upon a time, spinsters were just that – women who spun for a living.

‘See …’ I said, jabbing a finger down on the dictionary, open like a Bible. ‘Once spinsters were just ordinary working girls.’

‘Still are,’ Danny said, diving a hand into his pocket. ‘Here’s your gas bill, Spinning Jenny. They stuck it through my door by mistake.’

From all this you will deduce that Danny is my neighbour. He’s also my workmate, both of us being employed – me as reporter, he as a photographer – on our weekly newspaper. More importantly, however, he’s my Obligatory Gay Male Friend and I am his …

‘What am I to you, Danny?’

‘My help in ages past, my hope for years to come …’

Danny comes from good Methodist stock and sometimes the past comes back to haunt him.

Over the years of our friendship (ten), and over many bottles of wine and/or the odd joint, Danny and I have debated all the major questions – whether there’s a God, if Keanu Reeves can act, if Google really is the only search engine.*

Gay men and spinsters will always be natural allies, according to Danny.

‘Gay men look at spinsters and know that’s pretty much where they’re going to be.’ He lays a hand on his heart. ‘Take me, for instance. Without you, I would never have known how truly rich and fulfilling life could be for the single person in their twilight years.’

Yes. Thank you, Danny.

Still, you can pretty much bet that any single woman of uncertain years these days will have a friend like Danny. Not that my years are remotely uncertain.

I was born at the turn of the decade, the year of Korea, the year they gave the Nobel Prize to Bertrand Russell, principally for his book on marriage (with three of his own he’d been able to research it closely), the year George Bernard Shaw died, who wrote, among other things, ‘All great truths begin as blasphemies’ (something to bear in mind, dear Reader). Also the year in which Peggy shcroft played Beatrice and to much acclaim at Stratford. Beatrice, that great spinster heroine, a woman with serious attitude, not curst like Kate, who also I love, but zot half as much as Beatrice, who was just so much more damn merry about the whole thing.

Born in a merry hour, surely?

No, sure, my lord, my mother cried …

‘Damn right. What a time I had of it with you … You were bloody hours coming.’

Oh, why not? She’s like Banquo’s ghost, after all. Don’t invite her to the feast and she’ll show up anyway.

Might as well start where all spinsters start.

Folks …

My mother.

Once in the back garden my brother-in-law, Fergie, put his arm comfortingly around his wife’s shoulder. He cast his eyes up into the soft sweet Somerset night.

‘Ah yes …’ he said. ‘Somewhere up there the mother ship is circling and it’s looking for Babs Gordon.’

Because our mother is barmy Our mother is bonkers. Our mother is barking, dippy, daft as a brush. Our mother is Madame Defarge at the foot of the guillotine, but in the words of the late great Freddie Mercury, only knitting on that one solitary needle.

Not that the comparison with the revolutionary Ms Defarge would at all suit our mother, she being one of those old-fashioned, unreconstructed Thatcherites doing such a stirling job holding back the party. (Oh thank you, thank you, thank you mother.)

And yet, and yet … if only this was the end of it.

If only the gods in their wisdom, in their compassion, had given Cassie and me a straightforwardly mad hang-em-and-flog-em Fascist for a mother. For instead Babs Gordon oscillates. Babs Gordon is a human fan, swinging eternally left to right, and for no discernible reason, blowing out the first vacuous, entirely illogical and idiosyncratic opinion that drops into her lovable Carmen-curled head. And while you, in your folly, might think it adds a certain piquancy, a certain frisson to life to walk up your mother’s front path of a morning never knowing, when the door opens, whether you’ll be confronted by Mother Theresa or the winner of the Genghis Khan Most Promising Newcomer Award, trust me, it doesn’t.

Shall we, for instance, be sympathetic to single mothers this fine morning?

‘Well, of course, I am. I’ve been one myself haven’t I?’*

Or shall we, by contrast, be taking a stronger line?

‘It’s all taxpayers’ money. You and me, we’re paying for them. You know that, don’t you?’

Or – I know – asylum seekers. An oldie but goldie. Shall we be extending the hand of friendship today?

‘I mean, I feel so sorry for them. Imagine having to shop with vouchers.’

Or shall we be in favour of putting them up against the wall and shooting them?

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Adeline, I really resent the way you do that.’

‘Do what?’

‘You know.’

‘What?’

‘Make me out to be some sort of … oh, I don’t know …’

‘Burbling, featherbrained, six-short-of-a-box reactionary old swinger?’

I lied.

Regrettably this is not something I’ve ever managed to say to my mother.

Meanwhile please note the reference to shopping in her sympathetic response to asylum seekers. To say that shopping plays a big part in Babs Gordon’s life is to indulge in the deplorable British habit of understatement. Shopping is Babs Gordon’s faith, her hope, the nearest, viz. the voucher argument, she’ll ever come to charity. Brought up as a wishy-washy Baptist, Babs Gordon thereafter converted to shopping. A card-carrying member of the Royal Society of Shoppers (Visa, Mastercard, Debenhams, John Lewis, but in particular M & S), at least once a month she drives the thirty miles to our nearest out-of-town Marks, a massive thing the size of the British Museum, there to walk the aisles in the same spirit, a dutiful tourist looking at all the exhibits and making her way through women’s wear, footwear, underwear, handbags and shoes, home furnishings and, of course, menswear, the last for which she heads expressly just so she can flutter her eyelashes like some sixteen-year-old virgin, and say with that deceptively careless, entirely self-satisfied and proprietorial air: ‘I’ll just slip in. See if I can get anything for Tommy.’

A word now about Tommy.

What is Tommy to my mother?

In other circumstances you might call Tommy my mother’s lover. But I don’t believe it. Not for one minute. And if you think this is the response of an anally retentive spinster daughter, well, frankly I don’t give a toss. Suffice it to say on the matter of sex, I wish my mother was having it, I wish I was having it, I wish you were having it, I wish we were all having it, I’m that generous. Still I’d lay a pound to a penny that my mother is not and never has been en flagrante with Tommy. Or with anyone else. Including our father. For while I recognise that the existence of Cass and myself would indicate some form of interchange between our mother and our father (I think we can safely rule out any of that early test tube stuff with the sperm of actors and vicars), I have every confidence that, at least on my mother’s part, we represent entirely token copulations.

Not that Babs does not like men. No, no. Our Babs adores men, a fact she is given to asserting frequently in her cups at parties.

‘I’ve always got on so much better with men.’ That’s one of her particular favourites, accompanied by those eternally fluttering lashes and that familiar hand laid deprecatingly upon bosom.

In short, there’s a word for what my mother is but I don’t intend to use it. Let’s just settle for flirt, a quaint old-fashioned term that would thrill my mother to her skinny marrow should she overhear it being used to describe her. For were you to venture, machete in hand, through the impenetrable jungle that is my mother’s mind, you would find there a scary image, the one she bears of herself, a Mata Hari figure, a femme fatale, condemned (hand fluttering upon bosom again) to wreak havoc and confusion in the hearts of men. As for Tommy, well, I guess the best thing to call him is her consort, the man she goes bowling with, on chaste single-room coach-tour holidays to the Swiss Alps, the Scottish Highlands and the Dutch Bulb Fields, as well as to all and every event at the Conservative Club, where Tommy is bar steward and chairman of the entertainments committee. And the fact that this entirely sexless relationship unquestionably suits Tommy down to his last buffed-up blazer button is not something my mother feels a need to take on board. And strange as it may seem, neither do I. It is one of only a handful of things for which I feel a need to defend my mother, and this because I am, at heart, a sixties person and therefore a fully paid-up member of the Whatever Is Your Bag/Whatever Turns You On Party. Furthermore, if it is the case that in an age and a world different from the one into which he was born, Tommy might otherwise be more merrily engaged flicking a towel at the firm buttocks of a handsome young pool boy … well … that’s his business. And long may the pair of them, my mother and he, ignore it.

This is a small town and with a small-town mentality. Despite, or possibly because of, this, as far as their friends and neighbours are concerned, Babs and Tommy are respectably à deux, occupying their own remarkably similar, chintzy, cushiony, squeaky-clean homes, each with matching pine block freshner down the toilet, pink seat cover and frilly Kleenex holder.

It’s been this way since our father died the best part of thirty years ago when the funeral baked meats, metaphorically at least, began to coldly furnish forth the marriage table.

‘Don’t go there,’ has been Cass’s advice from the first, counsel I followed reluctantly at first but, as time passed, increasingly easily.

To all intents and purposes, Tommy is now part of the family, not least thanks to thirty years of Christmas Days spent together. In essence, he still looks the way he looked at our father’s funeral, like some old-fashioned stiff-upper-lipped colonel with a stick beneath his armpit. His back is still ramrod straight, or at least it would be was it not for the shaking that has begun to afflict him and that may or may not be the onset of Parkinson’s. This shaking gives him the air of a man trying to control his anger but nothing could be further from the truth. In fact he’s an astonishingly peaceable man, miraculously so bearing in mind he spends so much time with my flighty, wildly irritating mother.

All of this would be fine was it not for the fact that, in clear contradiction of her own eminently comfortable lifestyle, she still feels the need occasionally to harass her spinsterdaughter

‘Hey, I’ve not noticed you’re in that much of a hurry to get hitched again, Mother.’

‘I’m not talking about getting married, Addy. No one has to get married these days.’ (Babs likes to think of herself as excessively modern.) ‘There just never seems to be anyone in your life, that’s all.’

‘Well, thank you for mentioning it. I don’t believe I’d noticed that, Mother.’

A strict diet of booze and fags plus the odd lettuce leaf pushed in a desultory way around her plate at what passes for meal times ensures that my mother’s size 8 figure never gets any bigger. Despite this unhealthy life-style she gets a clean bill of health every time she goes to the doctor (and while we’re on the subject, why do you go to the doctor, Mother; is it because he’s young and good-looking, you shameless hussy?). Given half a chance, she’d still do that Cleopatra thing of hopping forty paces through a public street. Robbed of the opportunity, she contents herself putting in a full day’s shopping at Marks & Spencer on a pair of heels that would provide training for a stilt walker.

Like Cleopatra, my mother believes with passion and spirit that age cannot wither her, an opinion most often expressed when she stands before her hall mirror patting her washboard stomach and uttering the now familiar words: ‘Haven’t put on a pound since I was sixteen,’ this always followed by a critical stare in the direction of whichever daughter has the misfortune to be caught in the mirror next to her, and the rider, ‘Darling … do I dream it … or are you a size 14?’ (Or 16 in Cassie’s case.)

I have learnt over the years that all my mother’s snips and snides are prefaced by the word ‘darling’. As in:

‘Darling … do you have to buy such clumpy shoes?’

‘Darling … is that a motorbike jacket you’re wearing?’

And now, of course: ‘Darling, all I’m saying is, do you really think your hair suits you that short?’ (The italics in all cases, I promise you, are my mother’s.)

As regards my hair, I’ve always worn it long. I’ve had every style known to man or beast (perms, pleats, plaits, highlights, low-lights, etc., etc.) but still it’s never risen much above my shoulders. Thus the day I came in with it ice white and shorn, my mother fell back against the sink like she was having a heart attack.

‘Oh, what have you done… what have you done?’ she moaned, clutching her chest.

‘I’ve had an arm amputated. I’ve shot the Prime Minister. Oh no. I’ve just remembered. I’ve only had my hair cut, Mother.’

She continued keening for a while. ‘Oh, your hair … your beautiful hair.’ But in the way of these things, grief soon turned to anger.

‘It was your saving grace, Adeline, you know that, don’t you?’

‘Oh, and I thought it was my crowning glory.’

Please note here my mother’s use of the name Adeline to address me, she being the only person on the planet to do so, and this on account of it being the one she gave me – a fancy French name, according to my dictionary of first names, although not in this instance, since I was named after an Adeline from Bromsgrove whose bridesmaid I later became and who had the bed next to my mother’s in the barracks in Cairo.*

The name was and is entirely unsuitable, one I would have had to wear like a bolt through my neck was it not for my father, God bless him. In a move that my mother would forever regret, she deputed him to register my birth, something that allowed him to pull one of only two known flankers over her in the history of their time together (the other was when he died to get away from her).

Afterwards he would claim that the middle name he gave me was that of a close friend killed in the war. He’d even take the trouble to look suitably mournful when he said it. Once, though, bending beneath a bonnet in his ramshackle old tin-roofed garage on one of our long evenings together, me standing beside him handing him his spanners, he told me he’d named me after his favourite car, a Riley Sprite he’d owned in the halcyon days of his youth, which translated means those days before he met my mother.

‘Lovely thing, she was. Four cylinder push-rod-operated overhead-valve engine.’

I assume he was talking about the Riley.

Thus I am Adeline Riley Gordon, but to all and sundry ever since (except, natch, my mother), Riley, not least because my father, keen to compound his crime and irritate my mother whenever possible – the revenge, raison d’être and principal calling of his married life – referred to me as that from Day One, firmly instructing my sister Cassie, three at the time, to follow his example.

In all this I count myself lucky. Not just because Riley suits me infinitely better than Adeline ever could (or, the horror … the horror … the appalling ‘Addy’), but because if I’d had the misfortune to be born a generation later, God knows, I might have had to put Golf or Mondeo or Fiesta at the top of my O level paper.

Anyway, I like Riley. It suits me. It has a jaunty, freedom-loving air that I like to think entirely encapsulates what I am. I think, I hope that, like Beatrice, a star danced when I was born.

‘Not from where I was looking it didn’t.’

Yes, thank you, Mother.

Anyway, I’m more than happy, just like Beatrice, to pay for my state by leading apes in hell when I die, this being the mythological punishment for spinsters, but one that holds no fears for me, coming of age as I did at a time and in a place where men were still getting used to the upright position. Confronted by the word ‘clitoris’, there’s still a few would guess at one of the lesser known Greek islands.

All in all I’d say the only downside, if downside there be to my name, is the jokes it provokes. Or rather, The Joke. Because there is only one. I’ve heard it a thousand times but, trust me, that’s not something that ever spoils the enjoyment of the joker.

‘Ri-l-ey …’ he’ll say, and I’ll watch as that geeky smile dawns and behind the skin of his face those old wheels and cogs start turning. ‘I suppose you live the life of Riley, then?’

And if you want know what all this Spinster’s Alphabet stuff is about I’d say it’s just that.

Because as a matter of fact, I think I do.*

* Answers in reverse order: Yes, No and How could we know?

* Author’s note: Cass was 29 and I was 26 by the time our father passed peacefully and gratefully away from our mother.

* Among many others. See B for Bridesmaids.

*As will be clear by now, the aim of this book is ever to inform. Thus you may be interested to know whence comes the term Life of Riley. It first appeared in a popular song performed by one Pat Rooney in 1880s America, ‘Are You the O’Reilly’, which describes all the things said O’Reilly would do if he was rich. Another song, ‘The Best in the House is None Too Good For Reilly’, shortened the name to the one we know and introduced the notion of R (e) iley as a carefree soul. The actual words the ‘Life of Riley’ appear in a third and later song, ‘My Name is Kelly’.

Faith and my name is Kelly Michael Kelly,

But I’m living the life of Reilly just the same.

With ‘My Name is Kelly’ the metamorphosis was complete. Reilly had become the idle, ne’er do well of popular fiction, and in particular of my mother’s morning newspaper for whom the phrase is indispensable, especially when applied to that vast amorphous body of people whose sole unifying feature is that they’re all somehow not just getting something for nothing but something due, by rights, to readers of said paper. This body includes but is by no means confined to:

 single mothers

 students

 gays

 lesbians

 blacks

 any teacher, vicar, lawyer, film or theatre director deemed by her morning newspaper to be ‘trendy’

 anyone with a good word to say for the sixties

 criminals (unless they’re actually members of the Tory Party)

 and last, but definitely not least, anyone receiving Unemployment Benefit.

‘Scroungers,’ is my mother’s rallying cry as she waves her paper in the air. ‘On the dole. Lying in bed all day. Leading the Life of Riley.’

B is for … Bridesmaid (as in 3 times a …)

According to The Guinness Book of Records, the world’s most prolific bridesmaid is believed to be one Euphrenia LaFayette of Big Flat, Arkansas. A combination of a large family and lack of good bridesmaid material in her mountain home is said to have led to Ms LaFayette being called on no less than sixty-three times. Interviewed by the Arkansas Sentinel upon her retirement at the age of forty-four, Miss LaFayette said, ‘Ah been up that damn aisle in every kinda dress, n’ carried every damn kinda posy. I’ve had every damn kinda contraption on ma head too, and dang me, if a gal caaaint get tired o’ that sorta thang.’

Ms LaFayette has never married.

I lied.

There is no Most Prolific Bridesmaid category in The Guinness Book of Records. Which is a pity.

I could have been a contender.

When I told Cass about Mad Magda deciding to marry herself and asking me to be one of her bridesmaids, she said, ‘Well, it’s not like you don’t have the experience.’

It’s a weird thing when you think about it that once upon a time the best way to bless the bridal pair, to wish them good luck in their marriage, was to have them met upon the church steps by a raggedy, smutty-faced boy chimney sweep complete with pneumoconiosis and brushes. You can still find the scene depicted on wedding cards, although it’s harder to lay your hands on the real thing these days, boy chimney sweeps having gone the way of so many of our great traditions – children down the mines, nimble-fingered seamstresses working by candlelight, blind and starving match-girls on every street corner. However, whereas we now balk at sticking young boys up chimneys, we show no such compunction at grabbing some innocent young female, thrusting her into a bad dress and bonnet, and pushing her, posy in hand, up the aisle behind the bridal party.

I know. I was that bridesmaid.

Look, the way I see it is this. Some people are born bridesmaids (particularly if they’re cursed with blonde ringlets); some people achieve bridesmaidhood; others, thanks to what can only be termed sheer dereliction of duty on the part of their sisters, have the bridesmaid thing thrust upon them. (Cassie, are you listening?)

Because if that whole ‘Three times a bridesmaid, never a bride’ thing* really is the ancient curse that Archie alleged all those years ago at Cass and Fergie’s wedding, then all I can say is my fate as a spinster was sealed early on. Six times – and this before the age of ten – I was forced into taffeta and tulle, to my mind a human rights abuse of the first order. In part this was due to Cassie cleverly throwing up on her frock within sight of the altar on her first booking (you’re pretty much finished on the bridesmaid circuit after that). But mainly it was due to all those Buffies and Madges and Snowies.

There’s a picture on the mantelpiece in my mother’s front room. More than a picture, an icon. Because the fact is that she looks wonderful in that photograph. They should have used it for a recruitment poster.

‘They did. How many times must I tell you?’

There’s not a ruck or a tuck or wrinkle in that uniform. The cap sits squarely on her head as she gazes straight-backed and grave into the camera. She sheds a tear over that picture sometimes and, trust me, my mother sheds a tear over very little.

‘All this will go when I go,’ she says, dabbing at her eyes pitifully with one of her customised floral Kleenex. ‘You two’ll just throw it away.’

‘Never, Mother, never.’

‘We’ll hang it on the wall.’

‘Light a candle beneath it.’

‘We’ll have one of those dippy little finger bowl things underneath so we can flick holy water on our foreheads as we pass.’

‘Oh, you.’ But there’s real pain in her voice.

It’s one of the few occasions when I feel genuinely sorry for my mother. For herein lies the source of my mother’s madness, the reason for all that lunacy. My mother, you see, never got over the war.

One night, helping her to the car from some wartime reunion night at the Conservative Club, Tommy on one side, me on the other, she clutched at his arm as he lowered her into the front seat.

‘They don’t understand, do they?’ she said. Her eyes were full of tears but, more than that, a terrible yearning sorrow. ‘I was twenty years old, Tommy. I was in Cairo …’

‘It’s alright, Babs, it’s alright,’ he said very gently, and in that moment I did understand, not just all that madness, but also her relationship with Tommy, and what this too might be about, this secret that belonged only to themselves and others of their ilk: what it had been like to be plucked from a small country town, not even full grown, and dropped down into a foreign, utterly exotic place – in my mother’s case Egypt; for Tommy, India. All this with that added ingredient of war. That what? Frisson? No, no, so much more that that. Something we’ve never known, please God will never know. Something that, for all the books and the films, we still can’t really imagine.

Ask my mother about the war, and you won’t hear anything about those bit part players like Hitler and Churchill. Instead you’ll get, ‘Did I ever tell you about the night Madge and I got caught by the curfew and had to climb in through the window after we’d been out all night at the Deck Club?’ Or, ‘Did I tell you how Buffy and I hired a truck and went out dressed as sheikhs to the Pyramids?’ Or, ‘Did I tell you about the night Snowy got drunk on arak and almost threw up over Larry Adler?’

Oh, yes. Many times. So many times, Mother.

As a child, I measured out my life with those visits from the Madges and Buffies and Snowies.

Upstairs in her bedroom, revelling in her round National Health glasses and her straight coarse blunt-cut hair from which slides and flowers and Alice bands would slip as if deliberately, Cassie would sit bent over her book, point-blank refusing to come down and join the party. Thus it would always be just me standing outside the lounge door waiting to be paraded on the rug in preparation for yet another outing as bridesmaid. Through the crack I’d hear the plop of the sherry cork, the sound of all that merciless, melancholy Chalet School laughter.

‘There we are, look … in that funny little place we found that day near the Continental Hotel. There’s you, Buffy, and you, Madge. And is that Snowy?’ A blood-red fingernail would stab the page of the photograph album in something I recognised even then as resentment.

They look so damned happy in those pictures, those young women, that’s the thing. All that leaning in, all that loving and laughter. They make war look such fun. Which is not their fault. The best of times in the worst of times among those elegant potted plants and wicker chairs in the pictures. Blame the table tops full of glasses if you must blame something, or the rakish nature of uniform. Blame Carpe Diem written in the wreathes of cigarette smoke over every table.

Our father is in those photographs. George Gordon, leaning forward, laughing. Battledress most rakishly unbuttoned of all. The man who betrayed our mother, double-crossed her with the oil-stained overalls that became his uniform after the war, that would replace the dashing airforce blue in which he had wooed her.

‘How many times must I tell you not to wear those bloody things around the house?’ she would rage at him. ‘You only do it to annoy me,’ which probably was the truth of it.

I asked my father once, in a blaze of teenage bravery, ‘Why did you marry her?’

He didn’t raise his head from beneath the bonnet. He said, ‘I was mad about her.’

As always he tried to make a joke of it. ‘Must have had a touch of the sun,’ he said, ‘desert fever,’ only then he turned serious. He raised his eyes, gave me a hard look across the engine. ‘It doesn’t do to be too romantic, Riley,’ he said.

According to my mother – this told with relish when he was alive – my father pursued her against her will, even after the war was over and they returned home from Cairo.

‘What could I do?’ she liked to simper. ‘Eventually I relented.’*

To say that our father disappointed our mother is to indulge again in that appalling habit of understatement. All their married life she made it clear that she despised him. Even the way she looked at him said she’d been fooled, deluded, cheated.

‘Oh … George,’ she’d say, this so often that as a child I thought this was his name. Oh … George. Always accompanied by a disgusted click of the tongue and a contemptuously raised eyebrow. Or sometimes a derisive snort and the stab of a bitter red fingernail on the photo album for those Buffies and Madges and Snowies.

They used to say in our home town that George Gordon could mend an engine with a piece of string and a six-inch nail. Old-timers I bump into in the street still sometimes repeat it, a fine thing, I always thought, to have chiselled on your tombstone. Not so my mother. She hated our father’s business. Each month on bill day the air would be full of her fury. It swirled around, mingling with the blue of her cigarette smoke as she sat there poring over the invoice books on the kitchen table. Over at the sink my father would be Swarfegaing his hands calmly, running them under the tap like some grease monkey Pilate.

‘How much?’ my mother would ask, her pen poised on the bill head.

‘Oh, I don’t know … charge her a tenner,’ whereupon a howl of wrath would rise up to the ceiling.

‘No … no … no. How much …? How much …? How much did it cost you to do the bloody job for her?’ And it was so often a her because there’s no question that my father could be a soft touch when it came to elderly single women, convincing my mother that it was the spinsters of our town who were ruining my father’s business.

‘Bloody old maids, they pull the wool over your eyes,’ she’d yell at him. ‘Well, they’re not doing the same to me, I can tell you.’

As far as she was concerned, the entire Spinster World was engaged in some sort of conspiracy.*

‘See … see …?’ she would scream, thrusting the local paper at him, folded at the wills page where the horrible truth was revealed – that yet another of my father’s ‘impoverished’ customers whose car he had mended for next to nothing had bequeathed her small fortune to a cat’s home or some charity rescuing pit ponies. Worse still, though, was when Olive Jepson died and left the lot to the Communist Party.

It’s a tribute to Olive Jepson that the mere mention of the word ‘spinster’ will bring her instantly to mind. She remains for me the Ur, my über-spinster, which I guess is what she also was for my father.

He liked to take me to see Olive Jepson. I figure now there were a number of reasons for this, not all of which I want to go into. Once, in the summer, as I sat on her lawn drinking lemonade, I saw my father clash closed the bonnet of the Austin-Healey, and walk up beside her where she sat sipping gin and tonic in her deck chair. As he got to her, he reached his hand down and she reached up hers, and for a moment their two hands were clasped in the air in the sort of strong, firm comradely grasp that I knew, even then, was unimaginable between him and my mother.

Olive was the town’s librarian. She drove a large green growling Austin-Healey, and in the summer did her gardening in a checked bikini no bigger than a brace of pocket handkerchiefs.

‘Honest to God … sixty if she’s a day …’ my mother would say with a sniff, and ‘mutton dressed as lamb,’ this last said too loudly once as Olive pulled weeds up in her front garden. Unabashed, Olive raised herself and gave a long mocking baaaaaaa over the hedge, something for which my mother never forgave her.

Olive was secretary of the local Communist Party, a small outfit, probably with scarcely more than a dozen members. She’d been in Spain with the International Brigade, where, rumour had it, her fiancé had been killed.

‘Actually he ran off with another comrade.’

I was fifteen when she told me this. It was the last time I saw her. She died from cancer very suddenly a few months later. It was winter, with a hoar frost on her lawn and I was sitting in her lounge. Outside the window, my father was blowing on his fingers beneath the Healey bonnet. She picked the picture up from the top of her grand piano: her and her fiancé sitting on some hard-baked earth, in fatigues and with packs on their backs, smiling. She smiled back as she looked at it.

She said, ‘Sometimes it’s really useful to have a dead fiancé, Riley.’ She put the picture back on the piano top, turned to look at me. She said, ‘This is a small town, Riley. I don’t know why but some people just seem happier if you can give them a good reason why you’re single.’

That day I heard my mother call Olive a ‘skinny sex-starved old woman’. I saw my father’s hands clench and unclench at his side. There was a set look on his face and, spying from the top of the stairs, I thought he was going to hit her. But then he went to the sink, turned on the tap, began lathering his hands under it. When he spoke his words were very clear and very cold and deliberate.

He said, ‘Well, you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you, Barbara?’

That was how it was at home when we were kids. A terrible ongoing argument that raged along like a swollen stream, all the time underground but sometimes bursting out above the surface.

Meal times were the worst. Our father could be cruel and very cutting.

‘Maybe you could tell your mother to pass that grey slop she likes to call mash,’ he said once. Another time, tasting one of her stews (and they were pretty bad), he strode to the sink and spat it out. ‘For God’s sake, woman,’ he said, ‘are you trying to poison us?’

The serving spoon was still in her hand. She held it up as if wanting to strike him with it and her eyes were white with fury.

‘I wish I could. I tell you, I wish I could poison you. It would be worth going to gaol for.’

Once, when they were arguing, Cass put her hands on the side of her head. She must have been about eight; I was three years younger. She began screaming, ‘Stop it, stop it, stop it …’ over and over.

In the end our father jumped up and put his arms around her. Tears ran down his face. He nursed her, crying, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Cassie.’

Mostly I solved the problem by eating very fast, throwing it all down, getting down from the table as soon as possible.

It’s a habit that continues to this day. I still eat far too fast. I remember it was one of the things Nathan noticed about me. That first time he took me out for a meal he stared curiously across the table.

‘You eat like a caveman, Riley,’ he said. ‘You throw your food down. You must hardly taste it.’

When he said it, I felt the tears prick behind my eyes. I picked up my napkin, slapped it petulantly down on the table.

I said, ‘Don’t criticise me,’ and he stretched a hand immediately across.

He said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m just interested, that’s all. I wondered why you ate so fast.’

But it’s too early for Nathan.

More, much more about Nathan later.

Cassie and Fergie’s wedding was my last outing as a bridesmaid. It was a wedding much of its time. Proof of this is the photograph that stands on the mantelpiece of their front room, a courageous act, bearing in mind the presence of their two children.

‘God, you look bad, Dad.’

‘Thank you, son.’

He does too, clad in the sort of cheap-looking white suit with a width of flare and lapel that could only have been expressly designed to engender scorn and derision from any fruit of the loins that would follow him.

Not so Cassie and I. In fact we look pretty good, both of us in Biba, with big floppy hats, Cass in cream and me in that unsurpassable Biba mulberry.

Fergie likes to say that his father would have paid Cass to marry him. A bewhiskered old major-general in the old tradition, he sent Fergie to boarding school in the same way he’d been sent. In the same way, Fergie was as thoroughly miserable.

According to Fergie, it left him with the same inability to communicate with women that had afflicted his father, which is why he still regards himself as being rescued the day that new art teacher Cass Gordon turned up in the staff room of the local comprehensive where he was already teaching science.

‘No sooner looked than they loved … no sooner loved than they were screwing like bunnies.’

‘Yes, thank you, Archie.’ This from my sister, Cass.

‘Such a charming sentiment and written in such large letters, as I recall, on the wedding card Fergie’s mother opened.’

True too. Fergie and Cass moved in together a bare few months after they met, a radical thing in our Land That Time Forgot back in the early seventies. A year later the major-general died so that Fergie was able to put down a deposit on a rambling cottage in Haviatt, a small village several miles to the west of our loony tune town, all of this occurring while I was out of the country on my travels.

They were married a year later in their local parish church, St Michael’s where, thirty years on (God, can it be that long?) Fergie is now Tower Captain. On practice nights during the summer I sometimes bike out, and sit on the wall beneath the shadow of the church to listen to the bells and watch the evening fall on the mellow mustard-coloured stonework. Afterwards Fergie and I walk across the fields to the pub where the talk will be of the mystery of sallies and bobs and touches, bell-ringing being a foreign language to those who don’t speak it.

From this you may deduce that I delight in the company of my brother-in-law, that I love him close on as much as I love my sister. I could call him a big cheese in his home village of Haviatt, only this would be a terrible pun on account of the fact that the place is famous for its prizewinning Cheddar. A parish councillor, Fergie also runs the pub skittle team and its folk club. This last I refuse to attend on account of a congenital dislike of beards and sandals, but, more importantly, miserable one-hundred-and-eight-verse ballads where women no better than they should be get rolled in the hay, and pregnant and/or dead afterwards. (Fergie says it’s not like this any longer but I’m not willing to take a chance on it.)

It was a lovely wedding at St Michael’s, I’ll say this – although weddings are definitely my least favourite ceremonies – a balmy late September day with a first fine twinge of autumn about it.

I liked Fergie from the first; not so Archie.

We met at the rehearsal the night before. His first words, having been told of my travels, were; ‘So, Bangkok,’ this with a distinctly lecherous look in his eye. ‘Was it like Emmanuelle, then?’

Scarcely have a best man and a bridesmaid had so little to say to each other at a reception. Forced eventually on to the dance floor with him, I said – rather cleverly, I thought – ‘Fergie’s such a nice guy. How come you ended up friends?’

He just grinned, refusing to be insulted. ‘Cut and thrust of the rugger field, darling,’ he said. ‘All that male bonding in the showers.’

Archie was delighted to learn this was my seventh outing as a bridesmaid. Flapping his hands and faintly bending his knees in what passed for dancing in the period, he said, ‘It’s a curse.’

‘Really?’

‘Absolutely. Only one way to get rid of it.’

‘Surprise me.’

‘Violent sexual congress with the best man at the immediate conclusion of the reception.’

As Fergie revved up his battered old Ford Capri in the fond but as it turned out faint hope that it would actually carry them as far as Scotland, Cass hurled her posy in the traditional devil-may-care manner back over her shoulder. Archie, towering above the rest of the crowd of well-wishers, caught it, neatly deflecting it into my accidentally upraised hands. In a moment my mother was upon me cooing.

‘Oh, darling … oh, darling …’

‘Oh, darling … what?’ I tossed the posy over to her like it was radioactive.

It was the early hours of the morning and I was collecting my coat from the hotel cloakroom when Archie finally caught me.

‘So?’

‘So … what …?’

‘Are you going to bed with me or not?’

‘That depends.’

‘On what?’

‘On whether the alternative is having my toenails pulled out one by one without the benefit of anaesthetic.’

My mother took the wedding posy home, put it on the kitchen windowsill in a vase where it withered and wilted and fell apart in the manner of Miss Havisham’s on that bridal table. The mortal remains she pressed and put in her favourite photograph album.

Some people take the sight of a primrose as the first sign of spring, others the cool clear sound of the cuckoo. For me it will always be the moment each year when, regular as clockwork, my mother reaches up to the sideboard for that album. Opening it up, she pulls out those crumbling remnants, holds them up to the light.

‘Oh, you,’ she will say in tones of irritation, which have grown more intense with each passing year, and which, faced with the horrible truth of Archie’s financial elevation, now threaten to overwhelm her.

‘Oh, you …’

‘Oh, me … what?’

‘You … you … you could have married Archie.’

* Discovering the derivation of this old saying, ‘Three times a bridesmaid, never a bride’ has proved surprisingly difficult, in particular why or how the figure of three came to be established as the one at which all hope should be abandoned. Listerine, the US mouthwash company, used ‘Often a bridesmaid but never a bride’ for its adverts in the 1920s, this itself an adaptation of the old British music-hall song ‘Why Am I Always the Bridesmaid?’ made famous by Lily Morris a few years earlier.

Why am I always the bridesmaid

And never the blushing bride?

The very question this volume seeks to answer.

* In fairness it should be pointed that at the time (see D for Divorce) she was in dire need of a husband.

* A nice touch, this, from a woman who not that long hence would prove to be so much happier being single.

C is for … Cliché

It was Danny who gave me the idea to reclaim the word ‘spinster’.

‘Why not? I mean, you reclaimed queer, after all.’

Which is true.

Queer.

Dyke.

Nigger.

Personally I’ve always thought the last a little premature, bearing in mind not everyone in the world has a burning desire to use it with affection. And I was about to say But that’s another story … And then I thought maybe not. Because all insults come from fear, after all. Witness my cousin Fleur in her Frau Goebbels days, her shoulders doing those delicate little convulsions beneath her cashmere cardigan.

‘I’m sorry, Riley, but I’d just be terrified at the thought. I mean, to be on my own. When I got older.’

I decided to do a little research on the subject of the spinster. One evening I drove the twenty-five miles to Bristol to use the library of the university where I did my degree as a mature student what seems like yesterday, but is actually twenty years ago. I always go in the evening. It’s almost empty then. You could have full sex in Philosophy and no one would notice. I tapped in ‘spinster’, expecting a list to show up. You know the sort of thing, textbooks pretending to be something more interesting with racy covers and titles: Niggers with Attitude: Black Pride in the Nineties; Queering the Pitch: The Law and the Homosexual; Finger in the Dyke: A History of Anti-Woman Humour…

Instead it came up ‘Word Not Recognised’.

‘I felt like I’d committed some crime against the state. I thought a grille was going to come down, some card-carrying cadre was going to escort me from the building.’

Danny grinned. He said, ‘I guess someone PC-ed the PCs, girlfriend.’

‘Listen, they got so scared of spinsters back in the 1850s they hatched a plan to ship them off to the colonies.’

‘Wooooh. Imagine it. All those brawny farmers.’

‘Hey, hey. It wouldn’t be like The Piano, you know. There’d be all that ringworm and tapeworm. And it wouldn’t be like Harvey Keitel or Sam Neill would be waiting for you.’

Most people think of post World War One as the high spot of spinsterdom (or the low spot, according to which way you look at it) but the rot had set in long before then. In the 1850s, thanks to a demographic imbalance, there were 400,000 more women than men. One in four women was single and one in three would never marry, a situation referred to in the letters columns of the daily papers as a ‘disturbance’ and a ‘mischief’, and debated in Parliament under the title The Problem of Surplus and Excess Women. The spinster became the scapegoat and all-round repository for society’s perceived ills, among her most vocal critics being her married sisters. Consider, for instance, this little number, from the allegedly liberationist Freewoman, in which the spinster is described as ‘a withered tree … an acidulous vessel under whose pale shadow we chill and whiten … silent, shamefaced, bloodless and boneless, thinned to the spirit … our social nemis …’

It’s amazing just how much the spinster has been left out of history, feminist history in particular, more’s the shame of it. Plenty of married women in there, gay women galore, but precious little of the defiantly straight and single. All I managed to turn up in Women’s Studies that day was one measly chapter on spinstas. Still it contained details of that old spinster Export Plan. It foundered in the end, that plan, but only on the rock of sheer impracticality, the problem, according to one regretful letter in The Times being ‘the mechanical conveyance of these women to where they are wanted, given the average passenger limit of fifty persons per ship,’ a shame, this, since it almost certainly deprived some waggish old salt of the chance of urging every last woman on board with a cackle of laughter and some corny crack about not wanting them to miss the boat second time round.

‘Missing the boat’ is a cliché when applied to spinsters. So is ‘left on the shelf’ and ‘old maid’ and that very word ‘spinsterish’. But then, spinsters attract clichés.

‘So what? So do married women.’ This from my sister, Cass.

‘No they don’t. At least not in the same way.’

Which I believe to be true. Because while it may be the case that somewhere in an alternative reality, accessible only to ad men through some wormhole of time, there are indeed mothers whose major concern in life is the softness of the wash and the germ-free nature of their kitchen floor (asopposed, for instance, to how they can slide into work late without anyone seeing them because they had to take little Johnny to the doctor, or how they can get away from some garrulous over-shot meeting to pick him from the child-minder), still clichés no longer cling to the married woman the way they do to the spinsta, sticking to her like burrs, and turning her into some metaphorical horse chestnut.

‘Hummph …’

It’s the nearest I can get to the sound Cass makes but from it you can deduce that she is unimpressed with my campaign to reclaim ‘spinster’.

‘It’s a horrible word. No matter how you spell it. Nobody uses it any more.’

‘John Major does.’

‘I rest my case.’

You may not remember this but some years ago our former Prime Minister had a dream of Old Albion which had all to do with warm beer, the sound of leather on willow from the village green, but most important and heart-warming of all, the sight of a spinster, all tweed and lisle stockings, pedalling through the early morning mist to Holy Communion on her sit-up-and-beg bicycle.

Tweeds and lisle? Sit-up-and-beg bicycle? Excuse me?*

Yeah, C is for cliché alright, also for Caricature, that picture of her as ‘bloodless and boneless, thinned to the spirit,’ this being anti-spinster speak for ‘celibate’ under which she’s listed in Roget’s Thesaurus, also for Cardboard Cut-out, the picture of her in tweeds and lisle stockings peddling through the early morning mist, also for Calumny – another cliché, this, a favourite of film and play and novel, the lonely spinster with nowhere to go on Sunday afternoons but the homes of relatives, married with children.

Ha!

Behind every successful single woman there are other successful single women. Show me a spinster and I’ll show you the proud and grateful possessor of a fine circle of female friends – in my case Mad Magda, for instance, who you’ve already met, Sophie and Connie who have yet to appear, others too who you won’t meet but only because they have no particular part to play in this drama. I think of them as a sort of Greek chorus, standing at the back of the stage and carrying the narrative of life forward with visits to the cinema, the theatre, Ikea, dinners out, dinners in. Because the fact is that far from being lonely and with a duff social life, the spinster can generally be counted on to have a wider circle of friends than those who spend their lives as part of a couple, this for the obvious reason that she has more time and energy to expend on her friendships than those with partners and/or children. More likely than not, her friendships will be long and deep, this because she knows the truth of the thing – that friendships, the ones that count, are relationships too, and go through the same traumas and tensions, and require the same amount of time and energy, faith, hope and charity to keep them going.*

In all this, these canards, these cock-and-bull stories, C stands for contempt, for a curl of the lip. On the other hand, C also stands for Cat, biggest of all spinster clichés.

Which is why I won’t have one, despite all Cassie’s urging.

‘Cats are not just for Christmas, Cass,’ I say when she starts in on me as fat old Hughie, her favourite, leaps up and starts purring contentedly on my lap. ‘It’s all that responsibility. Bringing them up. Finding the right schools. Putting their paws on the right path in life. I just don’t feel I’m up to it.’ And there’s more than a scrap of truth in all this.

‘But you like cats,’ she says reproachfully, and I do, I do.

But cats are like husbands to me.

I just prefer them in other people’s houses.†

A word about my sister, Cass, now.

Cass, full name Cassandra, was named after Lady Cassandra Something or Other who clacked away at her typewriter next to my mother in Cairo. My mother still likes to refer to her in the manner of a bosom buddy.

‘Poor old Cassie. Getting divorced again …’ This like she’d just heard it from a mutual friend as opposed to reading it in the gossip column of her morning paper.

In fact Lady Cassandra dropped all that social levelling crap the minute the war was over. Wedding Number One was in Westminster Abbey, to which my mother and the rest of the girls from the Nissan Hut Nine were not invited, and where Lady C wore a mile-long train carried by a dozen bridesmaids, although not including me despite my long and distinguished service. Number Two, to some zillionaire Nazi gaucho was in some Chilean registry office, and Number Three (to her personal trainer, it lasted a week) in a Las Vegas wedding chapel.

None of this matters, however, since it’s our Cassie who concerns us here, not Lady Cassandra; Cass to me on most occasions, Cassie who I have come to the conclusion I love more than life itself, something I discovered thanks to a dark period in our lives when she got cancer.

The day Cass told me she had cancer, I shook my fist at heaven, cursing the fact that there no system, no Great Cosmological Swap Shop where we were allowed to trade our lives to save another’s. I knew then that I’d give my life cheerfully for Cass, which was no big deal. It’s just the same thing that’s been discovered, and in similar circumstances, by countless other people.

I still feel humbled, inadequate at the memory of the stern courage with which Cass faced her cancer, the extraordinary determination not to be brought down by anything, chemo, hair-loss, contemplation that she might not be here in the future. Still, I think it was Fergie who was the big surprise.

People talk about others in time of trouble as a ‘rock’ but that’s exactly what Fergie was, a slab of absolute determination, refusing to accept under any circumstances that Cass could do anything but live. The day they told her she was clear – I mean really clear, no more check-ups, go away, don’t come back – we drank champagne beneath that sweet soft Somerset night in the back garden and I clinked my glass against his while Cass was in the house.

‘You were fantastic too,’ I said, but he shook his head.

‘Nah. Purely selfish.’

‘Selfish? No. I don’t think so.’

‘Yes. Absolutely self-interested.’ He turned to face me. ‘I knew that I wouldn’t survive without your sister.’

I didn’t give up the spinster thing with Cass. I said, ‘Now here’s a thing I bet you didn’t know. The actual definition of spinster is a single woman beyond the age of marriage.’

‘That’s me.’

‘What?’

‘Beyond the age of marriage.’

‘But you are married.’

Now I know Cass is married, and not just because I was the bridesmaid at the wedding. The real clincher on this occasion was that only moments earlier I had been in the kitchen with the man I know to be her husband discussing plans for his retirement party.

‘Of course. But what I’m saying is, I’ve done the marriage thing now. And I don’t know what it’s supposed to be but, by and large, I reckon with the kids and Fergie and everything, I’ve had just about as good as it gets.’

‘So?’

‘So if anything happened to him, God forbid, I wouldn’t bother doing the thing again, that’s all. I’d make a new life for myself. Do something different.’

And then she said it.

‘I’d be perfectly happy on my own.’

Because it turns out that C is also for compromise, this according to Cass who says, ‘It’s wrong to separate out the married and the single. You do it all the time.’

‘What exactly?’

‘Make the mistake of thinking that people who marry and people who stay single want different things from life.’

‘Don’t they?’

‘No. Everyone wants the same thing at the beginning.’

‘Which is?’

‘A mixture. Companionship with solitude. Intimacy, but with distance.’

The way Cass describes it, there’s this long line, and we’re all standing on it, and through that line goes another one bisecting it like a cross. And one side of that central line is labelled Companionship and the other side Solitude.

‘And everyone – at least every sane person – wants a bit of both.’

‘Only you can’t have it.’

‘Well, you can but never in equal measure.’

And that’s the bastard of the thing, isn’t it? In the end that’s what shocks you. That life has such a damned limited amount of options. That in the end you have to fall one side of that bisecting line or the other.

Of course, you can pretend, if you like. You can tell the world you’ve found some grand, adventurous new way of living, get yourself interviewed for one of those life-style features and boast about how you and your Significant Other have cracked the whole companionship and solitude/ intimacy and distance thing, how you have this perfect relationship, which allows you both space and comfort, sanctuary and safety. And you can even imagine, if you like, that anyone out there is believing you when all they’re really asking is how significant is that Significant Other anyway, when what you really want is to go off and fuck other people.

I said, ‘I guess what everyone wants is the best of both worlds. To have their cake and eat it.’

‘And why the hell shouldn’t we?’ Her words were combative, deserving of an answer. She said, ‘Life’s a compromise however you look at it. Single or married, it’s all the same. Doesn’t mean we didn’t start off wanting the same thing. Doesn’t mean we still don’t, one way or another.’

Meanwhile, truth to tell, I wasn’t that thrilled at the prospect of celebrating Fergie’s retirement. Not that I had anything against him retiring. Quite the reverse. I was delighted for him. I figured he deserved it, teaching science for close on thirty years.

‘Selfless years, dedicated years.’ I clinked my glass against his in the Apple Tree.

‘Cherishing young minds … nourishing them.’

‘Ripping off all their duty-free allowances so you could bring back all that wine and Stella.’

Some people, politicians mainly, like to retire to spend more time with the family. Fergie was retiring to spend more time in his shed at the bottom of the garden. It’s there he makes lovely mellow imitation Shaker chairs and tables, which he sells for such wonderfully inflated prices to owners of weekend cottages, the reason he’d been pushing for early retirement.

He’s a craftsman, is Fergie. Watch him lathing and planing. Watch the way he runs a hand along with something approaching joy, something so much more than satisfaction. It’s the same look I’d see on our father’s face, bending inside a bonnet, which was why, I guess, the pair of them got on so well from the moment Cass and Fergie first got together. They’d spend hours together in the garage, Fergie alongside my father, learning, working on whatever was his current old banger. Taking tea out to them, you could feel the mutual appreciation, the companionable nature of the silence.

Anyway, like I say, I wished Fergie well in his new life. I just wasn’t that crazy on the idea of a party to celebrate it.

‘Oh God, it’ll be full of teachers moaning about their pensions.’

Look, the way I feel about teachers is this: whereas it’s just possible that putting the proverbial monkeys in a room for a trillion years with a bunch of typewriters might result in the plays of Shakespeare, teachers would still be talking about their pensions.

I’m only jealous, of course. I don’t have a pension. Something of which my mother constantly likes to remind me.

‘I don’t know what you think you’re going to do. There won’t be anything from me, you know. I’ll need the money from this house for a nursing home.’

‘No you won’t.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Oh, I’m sorry. I thought I’d mentioned it. I fully intend to murder you.’

For the record I have made no provision for my retirement, my only plan being a note in my diary to steal a supermarket trolley and put it by, this because I expect there to be a run on them from the several million or so old sixties swingers who, when we all come finally of age, will start moving, pensionless, around the country, probably in marauding gangs, our progress charted each night just before the news using those little triangular symbols rather like the ones for rain, and sleet and snow, which will be slapped onto the weather chart then as now by one of those eternally smiling, highly irritating young women clearly enjoying flaunting her fingernails.

From all this you will deduce that my economic position can best be described as precarious, a major reason why the news that Archie had been invited to the party fell like a dead hand on my heart.

‘Oh God. Not Archie.’

Cassie raised an eyebrow in that elder sister way she has, denoting disapproval. ‘Of course. Why not?’ There was an edge of irritation in her voice. ‘Really. I don’t know. What is it with you and Archie?’

Precisely how Archie got his squillions is a mystery to me, but then high finance has never been my chosen subject. All I know is (I have chosen not to know more) he was involved in some dot com company selling pet food, or perfume, or toys or something on-line. When it went public he became a zillionaire along with everyone else including the tea lady. Not, you understand, that I am remotely jealous. Something I constantly have to make clear to my mother.

‘See … see …’ she said the day the news broke on the financial pages. (‘See …’, such a small and insignificant word and yet so pregnant with meaning.) Just in case I should fail to appreciate every last nuance of her wrath, she thundered a pan down on the stove top.

My mother is unable to mention Archie’s name these days without adding the rider, ‘He’s worth a fortune now. You know that, don’t you?’ And of course I do know it. I know it very well and it doesn’t improve my temper, so that to save face I have to come back with a lofty little rejoinder.

‘Really, it’s of no conceivable interest to me, Mother.’ Which is totally untrue because in my heart of hearts I’m as mad as hell, in fact possibly even more pissed off than my mother. Something Danny understands perfectly.

‘I mean, the least you can expect from an ex-lover is that he’ll have the decency to remain an abject failure.’

‘It’s not like you’re asking for skid row or anything.’

‘He doesn’t have to be in the gutter.’

‘Just respectably hard up.’

‘Decently overdrawn.’

‘But not, definitely not, a fucking dot com millionaire, darling.’

Despite all the above, Fergie remained firmly unashamed of his decision to invite Archie to the party.

‘Never thought he’d accept, if you want to know the truth of it.’ He smiled amiably, clutching a pint of his beloved Butcombe to his chest. ‘I mean, these days it’s practically impossible to get him off that island of his.’

‘Of his. His?’ My mood was getting decidedly nasty. ‘You’ll be telling me next he owns the bloody thing.’

‘No, of course not. He’s just got a villa there, that’s all.’

‘Oh, a villa. Excuse me.’

‘Well, probably it’s not really a villa.’ He was backtracking now and I knew it. ‘Probably it’s just a house. A very small house. Really no more than an apartment.’

‘Bollocks. It’s a villa. You know it’s a villa. And I bet it’s got its own pool.’

‘I wouldn’t know.’

‘Yes you would. You’ll have seen pictures of it.’

‘OK. Yes. It’s got a swimming pool.’

‘And I suppose the whole thing is surrounded by olive groves.’

‘I believe I saw olive groves, yes.’

‘And I’ll warrant it’s set on the side of a hill overlooking the bay.’

‘It’s true. You can see the sea.’

‘And, no doubt, just for good measure, it has one of the terraces where you can sit out in the evening with a glass of wine in your hand and smell the bougainvillaea.’ I positively spat the ‘b’ out at him.

‘Well …’

‘And it’ll be furnished with antiques – wooden chests and expensive rugs and brass incense lamps, the sort of stuff you see in House and Garden.’ And since I was spitting blood by now I thought I might as well end with a flourish. ‘And for sure there’ll be a fucking maid who comes in every day so you don’t have to lift a finger.’

‘Ah, now there you’re wrong.’

Fergie had found something to take issue with. A relieved smile flooded across his face. ‘There’s definitely not a fucking maid.’

His head bent to mine as his voice became distinctly gossipy and conspiratorial. ‘Matter of fact he was quite open about that last time we spoke. Said things were a bit thin in that department.’

* For the record, I’ve never set foot in a Holy Communion service, this mainly thanks to my mother who neglected to send me to confirmation classes. I do, however, have a bicycle. It’s a Rock Hopper. Twenty-four gears, chrome alloy frame. A thousand quid’s worth of off-road riding.

‘Look … you want it, you don’t want it. What?’ – Lennie, like Autolycus. A snapper-up of unconsidered trifles … Again, more (oh so much more) of Lennie later.

* An interesting point is that single men generally do not possess this supportive ‘Greek chorus’, something reflected in the grim reality of the mortality figures. According to Department of Health statistics, single men living alone after the age of forty-five, particularly those single second time round, post divorce or separation, are twice as likely to die prematurely as single women in the same situation. They’re also more likely to succumb to a whole range of ‘quality of life’ illnesses – rheumatism and diabetes that sort of thing – allegedly because their evenings are more likely to be spent playing the couch potato, washing down a takeaway curry with beer, this as opposed to the spinsta, who’s probably out with friends at the gym or an exercise class, returning home to share low-fat lasagne and a pot of yoghurt.

‘How awful…’ This from Magda with a shudder. Magda won’t do any sort of exercise that requires special equipment or clothing. She does yoga (of course), some special variety known only to herself and some swami halfway up the Himalayas.

† Some late news re cats and spinsters. According to some new research, a cat can make a woman more sexy and attractive, this thanks to a parasite that can leap from little Tigger on to humans, causing a condition called Toxoplasma gondii. This condition, which may be infecting up to half the population, is good news or bad, depending on whether you’re male or female, i.e., whereas females who catch it may well begin to suffer from the sex kitten effect, men become more scruffy and grumpy. Apparently, in the most serious cases Toxoplasma gondii has been known to lead to entire personality changes – depression, antisocial behaviour, but most interesting of all schizophrenia, the last of which, it seems to me, could have serious implications for Magda. She has, after all, four cats, so there’s every chance she has, in fact, contracted Toxoplasma gondii and is now suffering from schizophrenia. This would explain her decision to marry herself.

D is for … Death, Divorce and Moving House

It may seem trite, it may seem like something straight off the self-help shelves, it may even, in its own way, appear radically revisionist in these dangerous Me-generation times. But still I believe it’s worth taking a Count Your Blessings approach to Life, focusing on the plus points rather than the minuses. In this vein, think, oh, think, oh lucky spinster, more to the point, thank your lucky stars.

Divorce will always be something that happens to other people.

You’ll never have to:

divide up: the dishwasher

the washing machine

the fridge freezer

separate out: the duvet covers

the cutlery and crockery

the garden implements

sort through: the holiday snaps

the DVDs

the CDs

the videos

You’ll never have to fight for that complete set of Jeffrey Archer.

It’s amazing how many Ds you can find to go with divorce.

‘Discord … dissent … dismemberment …’

‘Dissection … disruption … um … dissolution …’ Nathan, with his lips drawn back in the eternal faintly mocking smile as we played the game together.

That was the night he told me he was divorced; Nathan, like an old iceberg, only a small jagged part of him poking up out of the water.

‘I didn’t know.’

‘There was no reason why you should. I hadn’t told you.’ The way he leant back calmly in the plastic-strung chair, a hand curved around his chin, his face all white and bright from the street stall’s fizzing gaslamp dangling above us.

‘So who was she? How did you meet?’

But his lips were clamped closed now and the shutter had dropped down over his face. Nathan. The Man in the Iron Mask.

‘It doesn’t matter, Riley. It was a long time ago.’ Buttoned- up Nathan. Tight-lipped Nathan. Nathan, with what seemed to be a loathing of sharing this tittle-tattle about himself, as if he believed it was frivolous, idle, unnecessary gossip. ‘It’s of no consequence.’

Nathan, with this formal, old-fashioned way of talking. Drawing his tentacles in with it, covering himself like one of those sea anemones. And all this the reason why it’s so hard to reconstruct him now, making me realise how very little in the end in those four months together in Bangkok I really got to know him. Nathan with his It doesn’t matter … and It’s of no consequence. And It’s nothing to do with us, Riley.

I said to him that night, ‘My parents should have divorced,’ perhaps playing for his sympathy. There was concern anyway, a warmth in his eye when he looked up.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Are you? Why?’

‘Because it’s not good. To have unhappy parents.’

It was the first time I’d heard that, I remember. Almost thirty years ago when such things were not said so easily. When people were more stoical.

‘Isn’t it. Don’t lots of people have unhappy parents?’

‘Some do, yes.’

‘And you?’

‘Maybe. Yes. But they were already middle-aged when I was born.’ Again that look, his fork suspended in the air as if he was considering it. ‘I guess by the time I got old enough to really look at them, they were old too. Too old and too traditional to show it.’

I don’t know why our parents didn’t divorce when I come to think about it now. God knows, my mother threatened it often enough.

‘I’m off. You see. I don’t need to be stuck here with you.’

‘Good. I couldn’t be happier.’

‘The girls’ll come with me. You know that, don’t you?’

‘Not a chance.’

‘Did he really believe that?’ I said to Cass. ‘That he could take us?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But I guess, in the end, that’s what kept them together.’

All this was in a different age, like I say. A time, I guess, when people did stay together. Unlike now, when forty per cent of couples in this country divorce, fifty per cent in America. Of those people in this country who do weather the storm, eighty per cent say that they’ve given splitting- up serious consideration. Maybe it’s the thought of all that long division that stops them.

In the trauma stakes, divorce ranks second only to death and even this is up for debate. A recent survey carried out by Norwich Union found that forty-six per cent of people who’d divorced said it was more stressful than bereavement. A full forty per cent said they were determined not to marry again because of it.

Death, divorce and moving house. The great triumvirate of trauma:

‘Although as far as I’m concerned, one and two are definitely overstated.’*

You could have knocked me over with the proverbial feather when Fleur said that, wiping an exasperated hand over her forehead. This was mainly because it was the first time in our lives I’d heard her say anything remotely witty. A precursor of things to come, I couldn’t help thinking, and almost certainly, I realised afterwards, a direct result of the change in her circumstances.

It was a couple of days after Fergie had heard about his early retirement, and I was returning from the Town Council when I came upon Fleur haranguing the two removal men outside the new block of flats beside the abbey. They were carrying a white sofa up the path, which if I’d looked carefully I would have recognised. I didn’t, though, because I thought she must just be helping some friend move house. But then she caught sight of me and waved me over furiously.

‘I told them clearly. Kitchen stuff last.’ She flung a hand distractedly up to her Liberty bandanna. ‘Now the blasted tea bags are in some tea chest at the back of the wagon.’

‘There’s a corner shop over there,’ I said, pointing towards it. She put a hand up to her forehead, shading her eyes like some newcomer to the colonies gazing over a clearing in the jungle.

‘A corner shop?’ she said as if I’d used a foreign phrase she’d need translating.

‘Best let me go,’ I said. ‘I speak the language.’

Later, sitting at the kitchen table drinking mugs of tea (she’d made the smaller of two removal men wriggle through to the offending chests to find the mugs plus the kettle), she fixed me with a severe eye.

‘I thought you’d have heard.’

‘No.’ Because I hadn’t.

‘Really?’ A satirical, and I must say entirely warranted expression shot her eyebrows up into her hairline.

‘Auntie Barbara is slipping.’

Time now I think for you to meet The Other Side Of The Family.

Imagine.

Two households, both alike in dignity …

Not.

It’s a simply tale, corny too, but none the less poignant for that.

Once upon a time there were two sisters.

One married a humble motor mechanic, the other the son of our town’s only major employer.

If you’d opened up the glossy magazines in the fifties you’d have seen full-page ads for Frasers Fine Leathers, the gloves looking more like silk than skin, laid out elegantly like the spokes of a wheel. When the sixties arrived, and no one but the Queen wore gloves any more, Frasers was forced to diversify, which it did and highly successfully. The proof of the pudding is still there in the foyer, a glimpse of the past: John Lennon wearing that famous leather cap, and Patti Boyd, all gap-toothed smile in a Fraser leather skirt the width of a pelmet.

Those were the long-gone glory days of Frasers. Six hundred people worked there then, now it’s down to no more than a hundred, the skirts and bags and gloves that still bear the Fraser name turned out in the sweatshops of Eastern Europe and Asia, a boon for its sales manager, a.k.a. my Cousin Royston, younger brother to Fleur, who before Carlotta took him in hand liked to take full advantage in recreational terms of visiting suppliers.

I was still at school and Royston had yet to be even a gleam in his parents’ eyes when I had a Saturday job at Frasers. I worked in the shop, which was run by Miss Eames, a serious spinster who wore a net over her hair, which she’d blue-rinsed so many times it had turned a glorious funky purple.

The shop was just off the foyer then, busy enough to cover two floors and connected by a narrow curving staircase where Cousin Freddy, elder brother to Fleur, caught me one Saturday and tried to stick his tongue down my throat in an effort to widen his sexual experience. I like to remember this thirty years on, watching him tapping his pinky finger against his wine glass, and sticking out his Toad of Toad Hall chest and making one of his pompous head-of-the-firm little speeches at family parties.

Frasers has been part of our town for close on two hundred years. It became part of our family one day in 1946 when my Aunt Fran met my Uncle Hugh in Millington’s Café at the bottom of the High Street (now the Avalon Alternative Health and Therapy Centre). She was introduced by her sister, Babs, a lesson to us all. i.e., when pursuing the man of your dreams take care not to be accompanied by your younger, better-looking sister.

Required to explain what happened that day in Millington’s, I suspect the words ‘We wuz robbed’ would best suit my mother. At family gatherings, after her fifth gin and tonic, she likes to murmur in a noble and meaningful voice, ‘Of course, I got to know Hugh first.’ This closely followed by, ‘We met when we were serving.’

To this day my mother regards herself as having been cheated over Hugh Fraser. She’d like to bring Life to account for it, accuse it of having lost the plot, and I have some sympathy with her over this. Because not only did she meet Hugh before Fran, but they met in circumstances that it was fair to expect would have led to the most romantic of conclusions, i.e., a junior officer and a typist from the same small country town cast up in the middle of a war a couple of thousand miles from home in North Africa.

And all this while Sister Fran was back in Blighty and doing no more for King and Country than rolling bandages.

At Fraser family gatherings my mother gets very drunk, drags at Hugh’s arm, dredging up memories of Cairo.

‘Remember, Hugh, oh, remember …’ this clapping her hands girlishly. ‘Those mad nights at Groppi’s, Hugh. Martinis at Shepheards. Oh, and those wonderful Sunday night concerts…’

In all this she likes to imply to anyone willing to listen, and to those who aren’t, that something more passed between Hugh Fraser and Babs Gordon née Garland in Cairo than the mere exchange of pleasantries when the junior officer caught the West Country burr of his typist.

‘Of course, I’d met George by then,’ she’ll say with a brave smile and a demure droop of her eyes, this designed to imply a love story tragically foreshortened.

And indeed she had met our father – met him and almost certainly ruled him out of the picture. But when fate took a hand via Hugh and Aunt Fran she needed to save face and quickly. So it was that when George came to visit next time she snared him like a spider, this so that when her sister walked up the aisle she was able to watch from her pew with the satisfied feeling of her fingers tucked into husband’s elbow.

Hugh, meanwhile, always acts the perfect gentleman when she puts on her pantomime at family parties. For Hugh is a nice man. A good man. A decent man. He lets our mother reminisce for a while, before patting her hand and then gently disengaging it. But while Hugh is kind to old Babs Gordon, his only daughter, my Cousin Fleur, has never felt any similar compunction.

At the firm’s parties, where my mother likes to play the family card, act like Lady Bountiful with the workers, Fleur’s chilly little favourite is: ‘I see your mother’s enjoying herself,’ the phrase normally accompanied by a thin smile and a nod in the direction of Babs growing steadily more raucous in the corner.

(Oh God, if only our mother would get tired and emotional.)

‘I’m only surprised your mother hasn’t heard,’ Fleur said, that day she dragged me in for tea, a bitchy remark but one entirely well-founded, my mother being the human equivalent of a sniffer dog when it comes to searching out family scandal and misdemeanour.

‘HA!’ my mother said with a smile the size of a watermelon when I passed on the startling news about Fleur leaving Martin.

‘Old-Poker-Up-The-Arse’ this being the nom de guerre Babs Gordon coined for her niece close on thirty years ago when Fleur, still only fifteen, strayed fatally beyond her years to ask at one of those family parties, ‘Don’t you think you’ve had enough, Auntie Barbara?’ Suffice it to say that my mother did not approach the question in any sense as rhetorical, and that everyone standing within a radius of fifty feet took the answer to be in the negative.

To put all this into context, i.e., to appreciate the significance of Fleur leaving Martin, you need to be aware of the way in which Fleur has played the little wifey during the twenty-three years of their marriage. On the night they got engaged, for instance, she informed me in all seriousness that she considered the occupation of wife and mother ‘a woman’s highest calling’ (she used those words precisely).

‘Gosh,’ I said. ‘You and Joseph Goebbels.’

Fleur was nineteen when she got engaged to Martin. They were married two years later.

‘I’ve been the perfect wife,’ she said that day at her kitchen table, looking over the top of her mug at me, and I couldn’t argue. Apart from anything else, she’s even looked the perfect wife – her long straight fair hair sitting impeccably behind a velvet Alice band, her lobes graced with no more than small pearl earrings. She brought up her children too with this same degree of perfection, three of them – Mark and Hannah and James – all of whom have that same perfect straight fair hair and perfect teeth, and who have so far failed absolutely to do the slightest thing to disgrace their parents (Hannah at some fancy cooking school, Mark and James both at good universities).

I suppose it was always inevitable that Fleur would play the part of older wiser women with me, and this despite being seven years younger.

‘Relationships are something you have to work at, Riley,’ she told me severely on another occasion, hearing that another one of mine had bitten the dust.

‘I’ve got a job,’ I said. ‘Who needs another one?’

Over the years, Fleur’s conversation has been entirely dominated by Martin and I, and our house … our car … our holiday… our children. Her tongue would slick along those pale pink lips in self-satisfaction as she said the words. To all outward appearances she and Martin were joined at the hip. A few years ago, for instance, she offered me a free weekend in Paris she’d won in some upmarket shopping competition.

‘I can’t go,’ she said. ‘Martin’s working.’

‘Go with a friend,’ I said. ‘All else fails, I’ll go with you.’

She looked at me like I was suggesting group sex or experimenting with hallucinogenics. ‘I couldn’t,’ she said. ‘I simply couldn’t. Martin and I do everything together.’

Only not any more, apparently.

‘He’s become so boring.’

Now this was a shameful lie. A total untruth. Martin had not become boring at all. Martin was always boring. Martin is a country estate agent. He drives a Volvo. He’s a member of Rotary. He’s supposed to be boring.

In her new kitchen that day, as the small army of women washed up and put stuff away around her (apparently all in the wrong places), Fleur clattered our mugs together and got up from the table with the air of someone setting out on a journey.

‘I told Martin now the children are away I want time for ME … time to find myself, time to get my head together.’ (Time to find a new scriptwriter. R. Gordon.)

She said, ‘I need space…’ a particularly nice touch, this, I thought, since she was leaving behind an executive home with half a dozen bedrooms, a games room in the basement, an ensuite with sauna, a swimming pool and a lounge the size of Wembley Stadium.

Listening to Fleur that day I felt as though I’d slipped into some alternative reality, like someone had wound the clock back. I was hearing phrases that day I thought never to hear again, that I’d thought safely dead and buried by the end of the seventies. And if I was hoping that somewhere along the line Fleur would see the irony of all this, bearing in mind all that kinder, kirche, küche, stuff she’d put the rest of us through over the years, I was about to be disappointed. Clearly Fleur didn’t do Nazi allusions.

‘I’ve worked my fingers to the bone for him over the years.’ Her grey eyes were innocent, open wide. Challenging disagreement. ‘I’ve been nothing but a wife and mother.’

That was when it occurred to me that something seriously sinister might be happening, that maybe Fleur had been the subject of some spooky personality transplant, a kind of Stepford Wife reversal, or maybe – this would work – maybe it wasn’t Fleur at all. Maybe she’d been substituted overnight by a lookalike, possibly as part of a plot involving an alien species.

‘I’m going to do all the things I’ve never done, all the things I’ve never had time to do.’ There was something severe, dedicated, nun-like in her face. She was staring into the distance. I swear to God she was pledging.

‘Like what?’

‘I’m not sure yet. There’s so many things. I thought I might take art classes, perhaps even do a foundation course. Or there again,’ and here she paused and there was a small gleam of something that might have been spite,’ I thought I might do what you do – write some kids’ stories.’ Her arms were crossed against her chest in a self-satisfied fashion as we stood on the landing and below us the lift began clunking upwards.

‘The children have been on at me for years to do it.’

‘Really?’

‘Oh, yes. I always told them stories, you know. When they were young. They loved it.’

I was musing on the horror of this when suddenly her face was right there beside me.

‘I’m going to tell you something now.’

Her voice had changed. It was girly, confidential, which is when I thought: oh God, no. Please, God, no. Not one of those horrible marital secrets.

She said, ‘In the whole of my married life …’ and I thought, no, no. Please, no. Nothing personal. Nothing horribly intimate like she never had an orgasm with Martin, or he wanted to wear her shoes or he would only have sex with her in the back of the Volvo. Please, God, nothing that’s going to flash up over Martin’s head next time I bump into him in the High Street.

But all she said was, ‘Do you know, in the whole of my married life I’ve never even seen a gas bill.’

She pronounced the words with wonder, laying her crossed hands upon the upper part of her chest. There was about her a palpable mixture of excitement and self-satisfaction.

And while in my work I attempt at all times to follow Elmore Leonard’s Fourth Rule of Good Writing, the one which states an adverb should never be used to modify a verb, still on this occasion I find myself forced to transgress it.

‘Life’s going to be one big adventure,’ I said. And I have to admit that I said the words drily.

* Actually there’s some truth in what Fleur says. The question of whether Death should be at the top of the Death, Divorce and Moving House triumvirate is definitely up for debate. In essence, it depends upon precisely who the rating applies to. The definition of trauma, after all, is ‘a powerful shock with long-lasting effects’. Thus, while death can certainly be judged to be traumatic for those loved ones left behind, the question has to be asked whether death, i. e., the act of slipping into oblivion, into that bourn from which no traveller returns, can in any logical sense be judged to be traumatic for the person who’s died. To me, the answer would seem to be absolutely not.

‘Really?’ Magda’s voice was decidedly chilly when I made the mistake of discussing it with her. ‘Well,’ she said (distinctly offended). ‘All I can say is, you get buried alive as a vestal virgin and then get woken up fifteen hundred years later only to be burnt as a witch, see how you like it. See if you don’t think death is bloody traumatic.’

E is for … Eleutherophobia

It’s a strange thing to come from where the sea should be. I have this theory that it leaves you with an odd sense of impermanence, nothing between you and the ocean but a dozen or so miles of moorland and the few hunks of Ham stone that make up the sea defences. I have this recurring dream. I think it might be racial memory. I’m standing on a shingle beach with the sea piling up in a high grey wall and dropping down dead in front of me.

I’m bred to the bone in this town. My mother’s family goes back six generations. I’ve lived most of my life here. Still I’m convinced most of the time the place doesn’t suit me, in particular the moors, which are just too damn low, too damn brooding. As a kid I’d be scared, waking up to a lake where the fields used to be with just the tops of the gates poking up and the spiky willow branches like clutches of drowning fingers. I dislike the rhines too (pronounce them reens); distrust them. They may look harmless enough, just innocent ditches with their covering of irises and marsh orchids, but they can swallow a car whole. One did, when I was a kid, taking with it a mother and her two children.

They unsettle me, the moors that surround my home town, that’s the truth of it. I always think that, walking to the office window, looking out at them. I feel the weight of history from those old trackways, the featherlight dust of the bones of a thousand dead Monmouth rebels, the more so driving across them. I don’t care for the low roads. I feel like I’m always looking over my shoulder, expecting the sea to come back, just to take a notion one day to crash through those paltry sea defences, or the river to suddenly breach, bursting through the banks that rise higher than the car roof, pouring down on top of me.

‘This place. It’s just so damn ancient, that’s the trouble,’ I said to Sophie one day, staring out through her cottage window. ‘I mean, when you think about it, prehistoric creatures once roamed those moors.’

‘Well, you should know,’ she said. ‘You went out with most of them.’

A word about Sophie now.

Sometimes people I haven’t seen for a long time or who don’t really know me will say, ‘Are you still friends with Sophie?’ and I won’t know what to say. It’s like the words don’t make sense to me. Like they’ve got their syntax wrong or they’re speaking a foreign language.

I mumble something usually. ‘Sure … yes … of course. Naturally …’

What I really want to say is: Am I still standing here? Am I still breathing?

Sophie Aitchison and I met over the old green baize desks in the newsroom of the Free Press, our local weekly newspaper. Until I left at twenty-two to travel – hence her knowledge of my prehistoric sex life – we also shared a flat together.

As with so many things in my life – jobs, affairs – I fell into journalism. I’m an aspiration-less bastard, if you want to know the truth of it. In addition I’m lazy, bone idle. I see myself as a sort of Friday afternoon person, juddering along that old Assembly Line of Life. Suddenly someone calls out and the Angel Assistant turns. And, hey presto, there I go, juddering on past and out into the world minus that vital component of ambition.

Unlike Cass, whose name, even to this day, is emblazoned in gold in the hall of the distinguished old girls’ grammar school we both attended, I failed miserably at everything, exiting with barely an O level. In the local careers office they went through a thick book of career options from nuclear physicist at the front (not enough O levels) to Stand and Tan assistant at the back. (I lie. Stand and Tan had yet to be invented.) They said, ‘Is there nothing you want to do?’ and I didn’t feel it was appropriate to say that was exactly it, that the only thing I really wanted to do was nothing. Luckily butterflies were even at that moment beating their wings. Not on the other side of the world either but slap-bang outside my father’s garage.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a man stuck with a daughter around the house who shows no sign of getting a job will grab the first opportunity to do something about it. George Gordon was no exception. He moved swiftly the day that old khaki Ford Pop puttered to a halt. He knew that car and more importantly he knew its owner. Head bent beneath that upraised bonnet that day, he gave the sort of horror-struck intake of breath that would have won him Best Actor from the Academy of Motor Engineers if only the judges had been there to hear it. Its owner, with four children to support and a too substantial mortgage, blanched at the sound and at the mournful shake of the head that accompanied it.

Thus it was that Harry Oates, editor of the Free Press, got his car mended for free and I got a job on this paper.

My current incarnation here is my second. It’s a nice irony, although not by any means an accident, that that same Sophie Aitchison is now my editor.

Sophie and I have now spent a considerable part of our lives working together. Not long after I left to travel, she also departed, to a down-table sub’s job on the Bristol evening paper. She was still there, although rising up the table, when I returned from my travels. No sooner had I set foot in my home town, than certain circumstances necessitated a flight from it (all will be explained), so that for a while – for the second time in our lives – we lived together. Her position with the paper meant she was able to put in a good word for me when a job came up and I subsequently spent the best part of seven years there in the end, first on news and then as a features writer. I left for what would prove to be an unhappy spell in freelance public relations, something which at least had the advantage of propelling me into that English degree at the university. It was here that I started to write, producing the first of the ‘Aunts’ books for which I am now (mildly) famous.

After some success I was able to give up the day job (I had moved the twenty-five miles back to my home town by then; bought this cottage). Over the years the media group that owned Sophie’s paper had acquired various weeklies, one of them being the Free Press. When the job of editor came up she applied for and got the position, which proved to be a godsend for me, since by this time my life, for various reasons, no one reason, had fallen into financial disrepair and I was in dire need of some extra income. Treating accusations of nepotism with the contempt they deserved, she offered me a job so that today my life has come full circle. I’m back where I started, something which no longer worries me.

Thus now I work three days a week at the Free Press (Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays should you wish to contact me). This helps cover the bills and at the same time leaves me plenty of time for my writing. Lest you should think I am the subject of any favouritism from my editor, given our previous association, I can assure you this is not the case. I get the same treatment, the same bum jobs as everyone else in the newsroom, something confirmed one Wednesday a couple of weeks after the Fleur episode when I found myself marked down to cover the latest example of New Age lunacy in my home town – the opening of Bad Ponytail Peter’s new phobia clinic.

OK: some facts about my home town. First off, I won’t be naming it because there’s a pair of genuine olde worlde sixteenth-century stocks at the bottom of our High Street and I don’t want find myself sitting in them.* And while I don’t believe in all this witchcraft crap, still, with a coven on every street corner (each with accompanying website) you can’t be too careful.

You see it’s Flake City, my home town, the Wacko Capital of the Kingdom. Other places have the Town Band, the Soroptomists, the Gardeners’ Club. We have the Tantric Drummers, the Wicca Society and Friday Night Channelling. Some people believe the ley lines conjoin in my home town. Some think we’ve been visited by aliens (something I give more credence to than most but only because of my mother). Some think that Joseph of Arimathea visited, that King Arthur is buried here.* What’s certain is that the myths are pressed down hard, layered like the peat in the moors, and that now we dig them up and shovel them out the same way in every New Age shop and emporium. It’s been this way since the mid-sixties when the first tepee went up, the first long-haired aristo clip-clopped in on his horse-drawn caravan.

Today, you can buy fifty-six different varieties of Tibetan Bell in the High Street of my home town along with every conceivable shape of crystal and candle.

The problem is you’re screwed if you want half a pound of tomatoes.

Bad Ponytail Peter’s already on the pavement outside the Avalon Alternative Health and Therapy Centre† when I arrive with Danny snapping away in front of him. Once approaching him from the back like this would have been the best way to observe the long straggle of greasy grey from which he got his name. But then one day, possibly because of that grey, he shaved it off.

‘Shocking,’ Danny said the first time we saw him without it. ‘The loss of a national treasure.’

It was more as a tribute than anything else that we decided to keep the name. Thus, shaven-headed as he is, he remains Bad Ponytail Peter, a.k.a. Peter Tarantine, Reiki Grand Master, author,* Thought Field Therapist, re-birther, channeller, chakra cleanser, aura diviner, director of the Wicca Academy …

‘He’s also a Grand Vizor …’

‘I’d never have known.’

Which is why Bad Ponytail Peter will be conducting the ceremony at Magda’s wedding.

This being the Flake Date of the Month it’s no surprise that Magda’s here drinking her dandelion wine, biting into her lentil vol-au-vent, or that there are more aromatherapists, reflexologists, Indian head massagers, I Chingers, crystals healers and white witches that you could shake a stick at (shaking a stick somehow seeming an appropriate piece of imagery for this bunch with their assorted weird modus operandi).

‘So, you think there’s a demand?’ I asked Peter (my standard business start-up question). He gave me a pitying look through the new rimless glasses he’s adopted, probably to make him look more like a therapist.

‘My dear,’ this is in his smooth, creepy Aleister Crowley voice, ‘the world is awash with phobias.’

Now, before we go any further, I should like to point out that whereas I don’t have the first idea where my chakras are, I do know I’d have to be held down by a team of ten before I let Bad Ponytail Peter cleanse them, plus I wouldn’t let him near my aura.

‘Many people’s lives are ruined by phobias, not least because they don’t even realise they have them,’ he said, and I pretty much knew what was coming. ‘For instance, they may have problems with relationships.’

He pronounced the word in the manner of an accusation, so that I figured if I could open up his forehead, pull it down like a hatch I’d see the vision he has of himself, in Joy of Sex mode, leading some luckless female through an ecstatically gymnastically challenging position. He’s pitiless when it comes to sex, according to Magda, who had an deeper than usual channelling session with him one Friday night.

‘He’s just so serious,’ she said after one glass of wine too many. ‘He won’t give in. You just feel this terrible responsibility to have an orgasm.’

Meanwhile, it seems there’s no end of the weird things people can be scared of. The list on the leaflet I picked up from Peter was full of them – clowns, chickens, feathers, chins …

Chins?

‘I mean, how can you be scared of chins?’

But Danny’s looking sideways in the office mirror. ‘Easily.’ He slaps a hand at his throat. ‘Particularly when you think you might be getting another one.’

It’s tough life being a gay man, the way I hear it from Danny. He’s ten years younger than me but still he says, ‘On the scene, let me tell you, I’m past it.’ Not that he’s really interested in the scene. He only goes occasionally to clubs although he does do the odd personal ad and online dating.

I nag him sometimes. ‘You’re burying yourself down here in the country. You should get out more. Go up to town. Meet more people.’

He says, ‘Look who’s talking.’

He’s been pretty much single since he moved down here nine years ago, and this in part to start a new life without Doctor Jack, the big love of his life, who spent most of their time together turning him over emotionally before finally dumping him.

‘You’re getting too comfortable, too contented, that’s your trouble,’ I say to him sometimes. ‘Trust me. I know about these things. I’m a spinsta.’

Sometimes I’ll wave exotic job ads in front of him, and he’ll take them with a show of interest but somehow he never applies for them. More often than not he’ll use his parents as an excuse. ‘I like to be near them.’

Danny loves his parents, not least because of the way his father handled Danny’s coming out, which occurred with supremely bad timing at his sister’s wedding.

Danny got rather drunk at Ruth’s wedding, having not long been dumped by Jack. Thus when he was asked by an ancient aunt when he too would be getting married, he answered glumly that he couldn’t say, first because Jack had just dumped him, but more importantly because as yet it wasn’t legal. His mother, standing close by and overhearing this, thus had her worse suspicions confirmed. She promptly burst into tears, refusing to stop until Danny’s father shouted in exasperation, ‘For God’s sake, woman, stop your snivelling. The boy’s queer, not dead.’ Thus instead of pointing a quivering finger at the door and quoting Leviticus (a particularly useful Old Testament book, apparently, especially if you’re in two minds about how to sacrifice your bullock) he merely gave Danny a severe dressing-down for the way he’d broken the news to his mother.

‘Totally thoughtless.’

Which as a matter of fact, growing more penitent, not to say sober, by the minute, Danny agreed with.

Ten years later, Danny’s brother-in-law now being a high-flying academic and his sister all over the place (they’re currently en famille in America), Danny, the gay son (as is so often the case) is the mainstay of the family. Truth to tell, he plays the spinster daughter, visiting his parents once a week (they live in Bath) and accompanying them on their annual cultural trips to Europe (Italian painters, Echoes of Byzantium, etc., etc.). More often than not it’ll be some single attractive woman he makes friends with, and I can’t help imagining the disappointment they must feel with this handsome forty-two-year old, with his serious air and his cropped head and his rimless glasses. Because apart from the odd eye-rolling moment, he hates the whole campy thing and is undemonstrative in the main. A gay man would spot him, of course. Eye contact would do that. But for a straight woman … how sad.

‘Don’t worry,’ Danny says, patting my hand. ‘They soon get the picture when they realise we’re after the same waiter.’

Meanwhile there are fears from Arachnophobia to Zemmiphobia on Peter’s list. Zemmiphobia? Fear of the Great Rat?

‘Fear of the Great Rat?’ Danny shook his head, reading out from the list. ‘What the hell’s that about?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But I guess if I’d had it, I’d have been ready for Lennie.’

‘Deipnophobia? A fear of after-dinner conversations. Wooh, that’s weird too.’

‘Not at all. It’s the reason I don’t do personal ads and on-line dating.’

That was when I felt a tap on my arm and found Fleur standing beside me.

The phobia clinic opening was the last place I was expecting to see her. Turned out she’d given up the art course idea, and writing a children’s book (for this, much thanks). Instead she was thinking of signing up for a course in aromatherapy.

‘I have to think of ways of making a living,’ she said. ‘I’m on my own now.’

‘Well, not exactly,’ as I said later to Cass, ‘bearing in mind Martin’s renting the flat for her, and that Fraser family money.’

But Fleur was enjoying herself, I could see that. There was a definite air of nobility about her.

‘I married so young,’ she said, a hand on her chest now and faintly tragically.

‘What?’ as I said to Cass. ‘Like she’d been given in marriage at thirteen to some European crown head.’

‘Of course, I realise it’s going to be hard at first,’ Fleur said, ‘paying my own way and everything, strange too after all our years together.’ She gave me one of those flat-faced challenging looks, the sort you get from government ministers in unsound regimes when they’re shamelessly rewriting history for the cameras. ‘I’m just so looking forward to having time to myself,’ she said, ‘to being on my own.’

‘Un-bloody-believable,’ I said, reporting it. ‘This from the woman who used to shiver at the mere thought of it.’

‘I can’t tell you,’ Fleur said, ‘how much I’m looking forward to being single.’

‘How dare she?’ I said. ‘Calling herself single.’

‘Well, I suppose she is.’

‘Not at all. She’s just claiming the title.’

But the final outrage, as far as I was concerned, was still to come. I was crossing the road from the Avalon Centre, glad to be getting away from her, when suddenly there she was again, beside me.

‘I feel wonderful,’ she said, thrusting her arm chummily through mine, making me feel like I’d been caught by a stalker. She flung her head back, face to the sun in a grand flamboyant gesture. ‘Ah … freedom,’ she said, and there it was, the final insult, the ultimate profanity.

Freedom.

My lodestar. My guiding light. Appropriated by Fleur as part of her new-found persona.

There’s a name for fear of freedom. I found it on Peter’s list. It’s eleutherophobia. A fancy word for the fear of it, but no mention – mark you – of a term for the terror of losing it.

‘I just want to feel free,’ I said to Nathan one night, not long before the end.

He said, ‘It’s just a word, Riley.’

I said, ‘I just want to do what I want to do, that’s all … go where I want to go… live the life I want to live.’

In the silence the air conditioner clattered while somewhere in the distance, a mah-jong piece was slapped down heavily on a table.

He said, ‘I’m not trying to tie you down. That’s not what love’s about, Riley.’

I don’t know why I went travelling. All in all, I could have just stayed at home. Waited for all that bead-and-bangle hippy shit to come walking up the High Street.

Still the facts of the case are that in 1972 I did what it seemed at the time like half the country was doing, at least those of my age and inclinations. I bought a large orangey-red rucksack with a steel frame that bit into my back and rose up over my head like the beak of some giant bird, packed it full of toilet rolls and soap and shampoo and salt tablets, although not all the other weird stuff – mosquito netting and the malaria pills – which Tommy, with his war service in India, insisted I’d be needing.

Some said we did this thing because of a war, others because of a lack of one. Whatever. I did the same as everyone else anyway, went on the Hippy Trail, joined that crazy, grand, absurd, pretend peace and love diaspora.

It was the day before I left Nepal for Bangkok when it came to me, that thing about freedom. I’d hired a bike, cycled out of Kathmandu. I was lying down on the grass verge with the scent of the pines in my nostrils, the wheels of the bike still whirring and clicking beside me.

As I stared up into the crystal-blue canopy above me, I thought about everyone back home and, in particular, I thought about them working and I felt a deep, satisfied sense of pleasure that I was here doing nothing.

I thought, this is what freedom feels like. And the revelation seemed so real and so true I could have reached out and touched it.

It seemed to come right out of the heart of all that blueness.

* Still, if you’ve done the West Country tour, which I’ll warrant more than a few of you have, you won’t have too much trouble identifying it.

* Even though those who know say all this is just early spin-doctoring on the part of the abbey.

† Previously, you may recall, Millington’s Café where Aunt Fran shamelessly stole Uncle Hugh from my mother.

* Nettles for Health, Your Aura and You, Chakra Cleansing for Beginners, Mysteries of the Tarot, etc., etc., all Demeter Press, available from the Avalon Alternative Health and Therapy Centre, Hocus Pocus and by mail order.

F is for … Finances

I guess I should go back to Bangkok now. Because that’s what writers do, isn’t it? When they want the past and the present to collide in their head. They go back to the scene of the affair. Which is what I should do – hole up in some backstreet hotel, beat out the story on an old upright Smith Corona with the sounds of the city outside the window, and the sun slanting through the dirty dusty Venetian blinds and making patterns on the wall, all of which would remind me conveniently of Nathan’s hotel room and our afternoon lovemaking sessions. Except that I don’t remember us making love in the afternoon, and anyway I can’t go back because I never go anywhere now. For one thing I can’t fly.

‘Can’t?’ Archie’s look was curious over the top of his glass as the hubbub of Fergie’s party rose and fell around us.

‘No.’ I could feel myself growing defensive. ‘Look, it’s no big deal. I just don’t like flying, that’s all.’

He said, ‘No one likes flying, Riley.’

Being an aviophobe (thanks, Peter) or if you prefer it a pteromerhanophobe, isn’t the only thing that keeps my feet on the ground. The other reason I don’t travel is that I can’t afford it. Not a problem that afflicts the former, now reformed Frau Goebbels.

A week on from the phobia clinic opening I met her in the High Street. She was all Nike-ed up on her way to the gym. In training. For her holiday. Seems she’d done another rethink, this on the aromatherapy course. Now she’d signed up for one of those heavy-duty hi-adventure holidays, white-water rafting, hang-gliding round Everest or something. In Hocus Pocus, where she dragged me for a coffee, she thrust a brochure in my face. It was full of bronzed surfer types with very white teeth doing exciting things in lifejackets and baggy shorts and very black sunglasses.

‘Ah, bless,’ as I said to Cass. ‘And Martin, the poor mutt, still thinks she’s coming back to him.’

I know this is what Martin thinks on account of the fact that he told me. I bumped into him by chance a few days later although ‘bumped into’ is scarcely the right term. Alerted by the merry strains of the accordion and seeing the knot of visitors in the Market Place, and thus the lie of the land, I leapt into a shop doorway. But too late. Mid-leap he caught my eye above the crowd and gave his handkerchief an extra loud snap in the air to show that he’d seen me.

Against all the odds, Martin is a morris dancer, although perhaps not, bearing in mind that for him morris dancing represents the raffish and unpredictable side to his nature. Like so many of his kind (i.e., the bank manager, two solicitors, surveyor and accountant who constitute the rest of the troop) he thinks it’s evidence of the fact that he’s not boring, an allegation apparently that Fleur not only made to me, but more cruelly flung at him at the time of their parting.

‘Boring. Can you believe it? That’s what she called me.’

There’s a sorrowful confusion on his face that would have touched my heart if I hadn’t remembered just in time that he was an estate agent.

Even Martin’s ankle bells had a mournful tinkle to them that day. His mood could be detected in the half-hearted way he flapped his handkerchief.

‘It’s just a phase she’s going through,’ he said, using it to mop his brow as we sat on the town hall steps. ‘She just needs a break, that’s all – a bit of space. That’s why I agreed to get her the flat.’ The misery was beginning to subside by now and his eyes were becoming matter-of-fact and hopeful. ‘What do you think, Riley?’

I couldn’t answer, not for the lump in my throat – there wasn’t one (like I say, in the last analysis Martin is still an estate agent) – merely for the memory of all those beautiful baggy-shorted young men and Fleur’s lustfully glowing enthusiasm.

‘I should have thought this would be the sort of thing you’d fancy, Riley,’ she said that day, pushing the page towards me from which a particularly appealing tousle-haired young Icarus stared out at me, dark glasses exploding into stars of sunlight.

‘Not me,’ I said, flipping the brochure closed and pushing it back across the table. ‘Me, I get all the adrenalin rush I need just opening the post in the morning.’

Listen, do you ever get the feeling that Life’s a card game, and that you’re the only one at the table busking it because you don’t know the rules? Well, that’s pretty much the way I’ve always felt watching other people get married. I’d poke in and around my own heart, trying to find something, a yearning, an inclination, finding only a gap, an absence where both were supposed to be. At the same time I’d know it had to be me, that there had to be a good reason why people got married, since most of them did it. And now I’ve discovered it. The explanation. The reason it’s so popular. The hitherto unspoken, undisclosed Official Secret that everybody else knew but forgot to mention to me. The biggest cliché in the book. So bloody obvious it was staring me in the face.

Two can live as cheaply as one, right? And while it’s not Isaac Newton and the apple, or Archimedes and the bath, still it explains why any sensible human being should want to get married.

You wouldn’t think it would take so long to dawn on me, would you? This simple truth. Or that it would appear in the manner of that Great White Light on the Road to Damascus. But that’s exactly what happened as I complained to Cass about Fleur’s cavalier use of the word ‘single’.

‘Look, I’ve earnt the title. I’ve paid all my own bills all my life.’

Which is the precise moment when it exploded over my head like some sort of revelation, the simple fact that all those marrieds and cohabitees, being à deux, only have to find the cash for half of the bills that drop down on their doormat every month while I, being one alone and single, have to fork out for the whole damn lot of them.

Question: if two people can live as cheaply as one, then how much is one alone paying as compared with one living as part of a twosome? Write on both sides of the page, preferably using graphs and pie charts.

‘When you think about it, it really costs to stay single,’ I moaned one day to Sophie.

‘So what?’ she said. ‘Everything in life costs one way or another.’ And I see that. But still …

According to a recent survey* the average married fifty-year-old with a mortgage, pension and all the other joint accumulated financial paraphernalia assembled after the best part of thirty years spent together, is worth about fifty grand. By contrast the average never-married single of the same age is likely to be worth only half of that (in my case, if only, but that’s another story), good grounds for getting married, I can see that (although personally I’d want at least a couple of mill, plus a peerage and the thanks of a grateful nation).

The main reason why married couple’s finances are supposed to be better in general than those of single people – and this according to the same survey – is that coupledom forces those involved to do more financial planning, this because most will be wanting children, and therefore know that up ahead somewhere, sometime they’ll be faced by major financial considerations like university fees and, in the case of daughter or daughters (unless they can be persuaded to elope), large and expensive white weddings.

Being part of a couple, it’s alleged, acts as a brake on spending, because individuals in the relationship have to account for their purchases to a partner and are thus unlikely to indulge in splurges in the manner of single people. ‘Absolute rubbish,’ according to Cass, citing somewhat tersely as evidence her discovery only minutes earlier of Fergie reading the paper, in his dirty overalls on the new white sofa she’d bought in her lunch time and had delivered. His excuse, shouted in an injured tone from halfway up the stairs where he’d been sent to change, ‘Well, no one mentioned a new sofa to me,’ appears to further bear out her argument.

Tie the knot at thirty, according to the survey, and merely by doing so you’ll increase your personal financial potential by some fourteen per cent. Come seventy-five, and the Marks and Spencer’s slippered pantaloon, oh, married sister, you’ll be worth a full thirty per cent more than the spinster.

There’s a catch to all this, though, and I’ll warrant some of you have already spotted it and quite possibly from bitter experience. To stay in the money, you have to stay married.

For spinsters, as it turns out, are not at the bottom of the pile financially. That honour goes to the newly single, those people currently in the middle of a separation.

Clearly there are exceptions to this rule. I’m sure we can all name one from within these pages. In general, however, the income of a woman, especially one with a young child or children, nose-dives on the break-up of a marriage.

Widows may also suffer the same fate. On the other hand, they may just emerge from their husband’s death doing the Merry Widow waltz. Which you might say is what happened to our mother.

George Gordon died one wet Wednesday afternoon returning from a car auction in his well-loved, much-mended old Humber Snipe, a tank of a car, which when it left the road on the bend, managed to crash through a hedge and fence before hitting a tree, and all this with only a small dent to its bumper.

George’s death was his finest hour, as far as Babs was concerned, thanks to the discovery of the insurance policies in the bottom drawer of his desk. This, plus the sale of the much-depised garage, left her what she always wanted to be, comfortably off and still respectably married in the eyes of the world, but without the day-to-day irritation of a husband.

Words cannot describe the speed and dexterity with which our mother metamorphosed from carping, miserably mis-married wife to tragic heartbroken widow. Oh … George … achieved with his death what he could never have achieved in his lifetime. He became ‘Poor George’, and ‘Dear George’, and finally, ‘My George’, this a last self-satisfied little sideswipe at all those damned spinsters.

Cass and Fergie had been married only six weeks when our father died. Still, it was lucky in its way, this because at least it meant that Fergie was now a member of the family and was thus able to officially identify the body. It was his first experience of mortality being still a young man. He came back shaken and with Archie who’d come down to help.

‘Why are you here?’ I said to Archie, unreasonably angrily.

‘Why do you think?’ he said, which I thought didn’t answer the question.

In fact he did prove to be helpful, not least to me. He provided me with a butt for my anger. I was hurting inside and out over my father’s death. I wanted to vent all that hurt on someone and Archie seemed eminently suitable.

‘What is the matter with you?’ Cass said, angry herself after I’d shouted at him to leave me alone when he’d tried to comfort me.

‘He shouldn’t be here,’ I said. ‘It’s family.’

‘Don’t be so bloody unreasonable,’ she said. ‘Can’t you see how useful he is, particularly for Fergie?’

At our father’s funeral, our mother carried her wreath before her like the Queen at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday. Afterwards she stood at the lich-gate in her new little black suit and her six-inch heels and her Jackie O pillbox, dabbing at her eyes through the veiling.

The line of mourners stretched down the church path. Most were customers, people whose cars he’d repaired for next to nothing with that string and those six-inch nails, among them a small flotilla of spinsters.

‘Paying their respects,’ our mother snarled in an aside, dropping the tragic widow act for one blissful moment. ‘Why not? They paid for bugger all else in his lifetime.’

I wanted to shout at her then, I remember. I wanted to shout, ‘So what? What does it matter?’ I wanted to tell her right there, under the lich-gate, what an awful human being I thought she was. How much better I believed he was than she. How angry I was that by sheer bad luck the only decent part of my parentage was now dead with the stupid, rotten vain part left behind. I stormed away, up the path, beside the line of mourners to get away from her, to be alone. I found a quiet spot hidden from view in the furthest corner of the graveyard where I sat on an ancient gravestone that had fallen flat, and was resting under a tree, which is where Archie found me.

‘I’m sorry …’ he said, the words hesitant. ‘Cass sent me. They’ve left for the house. I’ve to give you a lift.’

‘I don’t want a lift with you,’ I said, astonished because I hadn’t been crying before but now I was. Suddenly tears that had not been there a moment before were running down my face. ‘I don’t want to go with you. You of all people. I never wanted to see you again, you know that.’

He took a step towards me. He said, ‘Look, Riley … please … I just want to say something.’ But my shouted words stopped him in his tracks.

‘I don’t want you to say something. Don’t you understand? I just want you to go away.’ I laid a hand on my heart, feeling suddenly faint. Violently sick. ‘Go away …’ I said. ‘Go away. How many times do I have to ask you? Just leave me alone, will you?’ and I dropped down on the stone.

I heard his steps receding behind my back as I threw up in the long grass beside it.

I didn’t join my mother in that large overwrought wreath. Instead I bought a dozen red roses. When I’d finished being sick, I went back to the grave where the gravediggers were just picking up their shovels.

I threw one of the roses in and it landed on the coffin with a soft empty swish and an air of finality.

I stood there beside the open grave that day listening to the unforgiving sound of the spades and the whump of the earth as it landed on the coffin. I felt as if something had been cut away from me.

To be frank, it’s a feeling that’s never left me.

* Carried out for BestInvestment.com and reported in my mother’s paper.

G is for … Gamophobia

I am not the only one to suffer from fear of flying. The list of famous aviophobes is long and distinguished: Twiggy, who takes Dr Bach’s Rescue Remedy for it (it’s never worked for me); Stanley Kubrick, who had to recreate the Vietnam War in Pinewood because of it; Dennis Bergkamp, the Arsenal and Dutch player who leaves several days ahead of the rest of his team to get to European matches, plus some American female rock star who can’t tour because of it but whose name, unfortunately, I can’t remember. On behalf of all of them, I’d like to ask – and particularly of Bad Ponytail Peter who insists it must be cured – what is so damn phobic about being scared of being locked up in some aluminium tube half a mile in the air, and this in the full knowledge that any moment some crazy might take over the cockpit or Jonathan Livingstone Seagull do a nose dive into one of the engines. From this you will deduce I don’t regard fear of flying as remotely phobic. To me aviophobia is like ballistophobia (fear of bullets and missiles) or lilapsophobia (fear of hurricanes and tornados) or nucleomituphobia (fear of nuclear weapons), all of which are on Bad Ponytail Peter’s list, and all – as far as I can see – utterly inapplicable as phobias since they concern things which by their very nature only a complete idiot would not be scared of.

I feel much the same way about gamophobia.

Fear of marriage.

I used to think I was some sort of oddity, some beast with a brand on my forehead with regard to my gamophobia but now I don’t think so. Tell you the truth, I think that, as a condition, it’s getting as common as measles. For a start, people are putting it off. The average age for marriage now is thirty for men, twenty-eight for women, a rise of five years over the last quarter of a century.* The way things are going, in fifty years’ time, people will be hitting the big four-oh before they clamber into their wedding clobber.

As much as anything, of course, this has to do with the increased social acceptance of cohabiting instead of, or prior to, marriage. A quarter of the nation is now shacked up without benefit of clergy – or Living In Sin as my mother prefers to call it – a figure expected to double over the next ten years. As a result of this more than forty per cent of the nation’s babies are now born to cohabiting couples, a ten per cent rise over the last decade. Cue a bout of enthusiastic tutting from my mother when she read it in her morning paper.

‘All those children born out of wedlock.’

‘Out of wedlock. For God’s sake, you’ll be saying “wrong side of the blanket” next. We’re not living in a Catherine Cookson novel, Mother.’

Meanwhile there’re no prizes for guessing just why society got a taste for cohabitation as opposed marriage. It’s because it’s not marriage, that’s why. Because it’s not quite that final. Because it represents a resting place, a place to draw breath, to hold back, think twice. A place where there’s still a let-out clause, a light still shining at the end of the tunnel. All the marriage-shy spinster does, as usual, is raise her head that bit higher above the parapet.

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