Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman Read online

  ‘Actually, yes. I must have slept on it awkwardly.’

  Automatically, Nathan moved towards me. If I rub here, is it better? Or here? At the last moment, he turned away.

  ‘Rose, I don’t know what to say about the job.’

  ‘Timon took a risk firing a group executive’s wife and replacing her with his mistress.’

  ‘They took a risk in taking you on in the first place.’

  This was true. ‘They will pay me reasonably, if I go quietly and agree not to take on a similar job for six months. The usual thing. I will probably accept.’

  He nodded. ‘Timon is anxious to push for extra numbers. There has been a lot of discussion and strategy meetings.’

  Circulation, policy, revenues… Nathan and I were used to talking to each other on those subjects, and on those subjects Nathan trusted me. They sounded prosaic, but they were not. Revenue and circulation figures can be just as much of a glue as poetry and passionate sex.

  People are rude about habit. It is supposed to suggest sloppiness and laziness, but I don’t think they have thought about it properly. Habit is useful and comforting: it rides over the bumpy bits, it is the track that cuts across hills and valleys and carries passengers safely through.

  ‘How are the figures?’ I asked, grown cunning and devious.

  Quick as a flash, he replied, ‘I haven’t seen Wednesday’s but judging by…’ The sentence remained unfinished for Nathan suspected, rightly, that the old conversations might entangle us.

  ‘Nathan, Minty knew she would probably take over from me and she didn’t tell you.’

  As cool as if he was negotiating, he had his answer ready: ‘Minty was protecting me. Chinese wall…’

  ‘Nevertheless, it was Timon who told you, not Minty’

  The implications were obvious, and Nathan flushed a harsh red. ‘The situation was tricky and Timon had to think carefully how to play it. It was impossible for Minty to say anything.’

  I drew an obscure and shameful comfort from this admission. Early on, Nathan and I had made a pact to tell each other everything.

  ‘Look on the bright side, then,’ I said, and hated what I was saying. ‘At least you didn’t have to worry about split loyalties between Minty and me.’

  We stared at each other. In a low voice, Nathan admitted, ‘Minty’s secrecy should make a difference, I know, but it doesn’t.’

  It was this extraordinary exchange that finally convinced me Nathan was serious. He loved Minty enough to be honest, so honest about her ambition and duplicity that he could not, would not, grant me the grace of a little verbal deceit.

  I gave a shaky laugh. ‘And I had been preparing to forgive and forget.’ I went over to the french windows and looked out. Despite my efforts to dig it out the bindweed was back in force under the lilac tree and I wondered why, until now, I had failed to notice how invasive it had become. ‘I hope they don’t sack you, too, Nathan.’

  ‘Anything’s possible.’

  ‘Be honest, Nathan. Tell me what’s wrong.’ I wrapped my arms across my chest, ready to ward off the worst.

  Nathan began to speak. ‘I can’t get over how much Minty reminds me of you when I first met you. You were so young, so hurt, but so determined that what you had done was right.’

  I cried, ‘Minty is nothing, nothing like me,’ and my shoulders shook with the effort of not weeping. Nathan came up behind me and placed his hands on them.

  ‘Minty reminds me of how you were before… I don’t know, before we all changed. Became middle-aged, I suppose.’

  ‘But that’s not fair,’ I cried out passionately. ‘How could I not change? I am older. I can’t avoid that. Neither can you. I couldn’t avoid being changed by having children. Neither could you.’ Nathan removed his hands from my shoulders. ‘What have you been telling her?’ I asked. ‘What have you made up to convince her that you are so misunderstood? Or so she tells me.’

  Nathan sat down in the blue chair. ‘Are you sure you want me to go into this?’

  I turned round and faced him. ‘You might as well.’

  ‘If you must know, I told her that living in a crowded marriage is worse than being in a cruel one, and she looked at me with her great steady-as-you-go eyes. “But Rose is devoted to you,” she replied.’

  ‘She could not have said otherwise,’ I interjected. ‘She listened to me often enough.’ I turned my head away. ‘How could you have said it was “crowded”? I don’t understand.’

  Nathan’s face darkened. ‘Whenever there was trouble between us, when one of the black periods that descend on all marriages descended on ours, I just could not get out of my head that you were taking refuge in an old love story and it was his image that comforted you. Minty said she was sure you didn’t know you were doing it.’

  ‘Nathan, I can’t believe you allowed it to matter. To be so afraid. To not trust me. At this stage, I’m far more likely to fantasize about a face-lift or writing a seriously good book than to hark back to an old love affair… however much it meant to me once. We don’t think like that any more.’ I swivelled on my heels to face him. ‘It’s a cheap excuse, and I can’t bear it.’

  Nathan paid no attention. ‘I knew when that man bootlegged his way back.’

  ‘You are too clever for fantasy, Nathan.’

  An obstinate look settled over Nathan. ‘I was up against a fantasy’

  ‘Nathan, I had left Hal for good when I met you. I had made a choice.’

  ‘So I thought. And I had just got it settled in my mind. Then… why did you tell Minty about it?’

  ‘Girls’ gossip. Not something you usually concern yourself with.’

  ‘Minty says I should. She thinks it’s good for my emotional health.’

  ‘And what else does Minty say? How else does she manipulate you? For that’s what she’s been doing.’

  ‘She told me that she has had a good time in the past, but it would not come with her.’

  ‘And that makes everything all right? That gives you clearance? Oh, Nathan, what a fool you are.’

  ‘Enough.’ Nathan got to his feet. ‘I’ll be going now.’

  I kept my arms wrapped tight across my chest. ‘I see.’

  Nathan picked up the suitcase. Then he put it down again. ‘This is dreadful. You won’t believe this, Rosie, but I love you very much, and I can’t believe how I’m making you suffer.’

  I was not listening. I was searching for some logic in my dark, dark despair. For some guidance. ‘And she will help you in your career? Will she put in what I apparently did not?’

  A faint smile flickered over Nathan’s lips. ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Minty’s very ambitious, you know. For herself

  ‘Minty is strong, energetic and free. It makes me feel that I can be the same.’

  ‘And she has style. It takes style to steal her boss’s husband and her job in the same breath. Economy and thrift, too.’

  Nathan looked at me with a kind, caring look that suggested he did not expect anything else from me. I felt sick with humiliation. ‘Go away,’ I ordered him, ‘before I say something really awful.’

  He turned for the door, halted and pulled an envelope from his pocket. ‘I nearly forgot, Rose. Here’s a cheque for the time being, to see you through until things are sorted out.’

  ‘I don’t want it.’

  ‘I expected you to be stubborn.’ He tucked it behind the vase on the mantelpiece that had belonged to his mother. It was a dreadful thing, early Rockingham, I think, stuck all over with china flowers that trapped dust, but Nathan cherished it.

  ‘Take the cheque back,’ I said.

  ‘No.’ He started when he spotted my wedding ring on the shelf, then picked up his mother’s vase. ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll take this with me.’

  At the front door, he placed a hand on the latch and pulled it down. ‘Rose, I know Hal was hanging around at our wedding. I saw him.’

  I swallowed, and the burden of the past sat heavy on my shoulde
rs. ‘He came to say goodbye, Nathan.’

  Having no experience of what to do next after a husband has walked out finally (leaving a thoughtful cheque to cover contingencies) I wondered if Flora Madder had received a cheque when Charles Madder departed for the mistress with exotic tastes. Perhaps being paid off was the final straw that made her search for the rope and a revenge with a long tail that, for years to come, would lash at those left behind.

  It was silent in the bedroom. The newly liberated Nathan had not bothered to shut the wardrobe door or close the drawers in the chest we shared. This was a piece of sentimentality left over from the early cash-strapped days when we had had no money and limited furniture. The symbolism of having our underwear so close together amused us, and we had retained the habit.

  The drawers were half empty. Reasoning that it was wise to embark on an unavoidable painful process sooner rather than later, I shifted a folded nightdress into Nathan’s vacated half. The movement dislodged the lavender bags I kept tucked into the corners, releasing a spicy fragrance.

  But even smells were a problem – too spicy, too evocative, too sickly-and I dropped everything, went downstairs and phoned Maeve.

  ‘Hi,’ I said. ‘I just wanted to know how things were.’

  ‘Oh, Rose,’ she said, as if she was trying to place me – remember me, even. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Not terrific. I just wanted to touch base. See how you were. Perhaps have lunch. I owe you one and it would be on me. We could meet somewhere neutral.’

  ‘Things are very busy,’ she said quickly. ‘Timon is putting on pressure. We don’t have a moment to call our own. I suppose you want to know how Minty’s doing.’

  The trouble was, I did.

  ‘Early days there.’ Maeve was guarded. ‘Look, I would like to have lunch… sometime, but I’m too busy at the moment to make any plans. The one free day I can see in the near future I’ve earmarked for the hairdresser. I must go. I need to get the grey hairs seen to.’ She gave a short laugh. ‘I daren’t let them show. But, Rose, do keep in touch.’

  As usual, everyone’s coats were jumbled on the pegs by the back door. I shrugged on my old grey mac, which had seen many years’ tramping the cliffs in Cornwall, tied the belt round my waist and left the house. It was raining, a fine, penetrating drizzle that crept down my neck and back in a V of damp.

  Panting a little, stomach growling, as it did these days, I walked across the park, stopping every so often because I felt so shaky, and plunged through the doorway of St Benedicta’s.

  The nave and transepts were empty but there had been a wedding or a christening recently, because vases of white lilies had been placed on the font, on the altar, and in tiny bunches at the ends of the pews. Only one candle burnt under the Madonna whose pinkness glistened like the makeup of an ageing actress.

  I had no idea what I was doing there, or what I hoped to find.

  I extracted a candle from the pile, lit it and wedged it into the iron claw.

  How was I going to get through this? Had I deluded myself that if and when the difficult times arrived I would cope? Now, at this moment, I possessed nowhere near the required reserves, or the courage. Search as I might for the brave face, I could not find it.

  The candle guttered, flamed up, resumed burning.

  When it was half-way down, I got up, brushed at the damp on my mac and walked back along the aisle. As usual, the table was littered with the hymn books and pamphlets. I did not think anyone would mind if I tidied them up.

  Chapter Twelve

  ‘You don’t want to go there,’ said Ianthe, when I announced I was going to try for a place to read English at Oxford. Her lips pursed and her eyes grew cloudy with distress, as they frequently did the older and more independent I grew. She scented a dash for freedom. The Oxford idea presented a more serious, realizable threat than dreams of travelling through the Patagonian wilderness and deserts. ‘You don’t want to go there,’ she repeated. ‘Anyway, they don’t like girls, whatever Mr Rollinson tells you.’ She thought a bit further. ‘He shouldn’t put ideas into your head. They don’t take people like us.’

  ‘He’s giving me special classes. He thinks they’ll offer me a place.’

  ‘And what sort of job will you get at the end of it?’

  At that moment I hated my mother, who was, as always, adept at slipping a knife under my shaky confidence and prising it loose. But I toughed it out. ‘Watch me,’ I said.

  I was eighteen, so very nearly nineteen. On the first day of term, of my first year, Ianthe accompanied me on the coach, and we found ourselves by mistake outside Christ Church, not St Hilda’s. At the entrance, Ianthe took one look at the enfilade of courtyards and the confident architecture, and slapped down the cheap suitcase. ‘I’ll say goodbye here,’ she said. ‘You make your own way there. It’s best.’

  As I kissed her, I tasted salt tears and caught the faint, elusive reminder of her lavender cologne. Ianthe grabbed me by the arm and, for a second or two longer, held me close. Then she pushed me away. ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Enjoy your new life.’

  What did my mother feel as she climbed back on to the coach and began the journey back to Pankhurst Parade, to issuing tickets and timetables in the travel agent’s? She left me with the burden of her apprehension and disapproval, but I often think about that neat, stubborn, retreating figure in the tweed coat. She might have believed that she had been shucked off like a nutshell. The womanly role finished. Or, maybe, she was free to retreat into her unhappiness, to explore it more fully.

  ‘My God,’ Hal Thorne was reported by Mazarine to have said when, a month later, he knocked me off my bicycle in the high street, ‘I’ve killed her.’

  She also told me that Hal had behaved impeccably, placing me in the recovery position, summoning the police, detailing Mazarine, his passenger, to take the names of any witnesses. He was heroic in his actions and his guilt, she said, and knew it. The last was said with the light, glinting irony that Mazarine commanded.

  Hal was a rotten driver, but not bad enough to kill me. I had not been aware of his white van snouting up behind me, and I did not hear the screech of the brakes, but even now I am plagued by a memory of throwing up my arms to defend myself before I plunged down.

  There was another memory… of Hal sitting beside the gurney, rolling my tights into a ball, and of the low autumn sun, which shone through the window and invested him with a halo of light. Memory informs me that he placed the tights beside the neatly stacked pages of my essay on Donne and the bicycle lights, which had been retrieved from the accident.

  Past and present swirled helplessly in my shocked, puzzled mind and I imagined I was back in the square at the via Elisabetta in Rome… for the strange, fair-haired man, so absorbed in tidying my possessions, seemed to my unreliable vision to possess the perfection of the stone youth who guarded the Barberini fountain.

  I must have shifted, and my shocked bones cracked against each other. This made me groan and his head flicked up. ‘Hi.’ He leant over and took my hand gently, as if he knew how to handle people who were hurting. ‘I should be shot. It was my fault, and I’m afraid your bicycle is a write-off. You nearly were too.’

  I registered that his accent was American and I made the mistake of frowning, which hurt. I whimpered, and he was quick with reassurance. ‘You have a cut on your head but it’s above the hairline, thank God, and you’re massively bruised. They’ve X-rayed you and nothing’s broken.’ His smile was clever, confident and enigmatic. ‘I haven’t destroyed your beauty, for which I would never have forgiven myself.’

  Still only half conscious, I was bothered more by the idea of Death having brushed past me than any destruction of my possible beauty.

  ‘Are you an angel?’ It seemed sensible to check that I was not being addressed by one, preparatory to being ushered into a nether region.

  ‘If you want me to be one, I will be.’

  ‘Not yet, I hope.’

  I fixed on the movement of h
is lips, the inclination of his head. Those figures in the fountains had brought with them the blare of tropical sun, the whiplash of polar cold, the rustle of savannah grasses and the silence of the desert – and one was here, holding my hand.

  It began then.

  Each day for a week, Hal visited me in hospital. A Rhodes scholar from the American Midwest studying archaeology and anthropology, he imported objects for me to look at as far removed from the trolleys and sluices of the Annie Brewer women’s ward as it was possible to be. A Tuareg blanket, a Naudet photograph of a nude woman as plump and pearly-skinned as a corn-fed chicken – all part of a strange convalescence.

  On the last day I was in hospital, he arrived dressed in khaki fatigues with a red scarf wrapped round his neck and held up a piece of barbed wire. ‘An early example used by the American pioneers. It’s a collector’s item.’

  My face was still bruised and swollen, and it hurt to talk. ‘People collect barbed wire?’

  ‘There’s a museum of it.’ He pressed it into my hands and the barbs, which had an unfamiliar configuration, bit into me. ‘The pioneers developed it to mark out the boundaries of the homesteads and farms.’

  I imagined coils of barbed wire looping over the dry dust terrain. Inside the pale, there was a cackle of geese and hens, dogs, children, the smell of home baking, women in dusty pink prints and sun-bonnets, rough wooden furniture and a stoop of water. Outside in the wilderness were the watchful Red Indian, the buffalo, the slinking coyote and the prairie dog.

  ‘Don’t you mean defend? It’s an aggressive thing. That’s its point.’

  ‘Very funny,’ said Hal, and retrieved it. He paused. ‘Of course, property is theft.’

  I lay back on the pillows. ‘You stole that line.’

  With a swift movement, he bent down and smoothed the hot tangle of my hair. ‘Of course I did. We steal from each other all the time.’

  Apparently Hal lived in a small, unheated house (the ferenghi ghetto), in the part of Oxford called Jericho, which he shared with two other Rhodes scholars and a couple of foreign-language students, one of whom was Mazarine. (Very chic, very BCBG,’ Hal said, in his amused way, ‘and I, on other the hand, am just a redneck hick.’ I had no idea what he was talking about, only that his knowledge and self-assurance were way beyond mine.)