Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman Read online

  ‘Everybody’s grumbling about it. There’s a protest meeting being organized.’

  This information excited Mr Sears so much that he took his first mouthful and I relaxed.

  Ours was a carefully developed friendship, which had taken years to mature. Before he had become housebound, Mr Sears had spent his days riding the buses. They were his passion and he had mastered the network of interconnecting routes, a king of the city. What he did not know about timetables, tickets and bus territory nobody knew. So, in a small way, I had made buses my business too. I told him about breakdowns, the latest adverts I had seen pasted on to their sides, and sometimes swung by the depot in Stockwell to give him an update.

  Mr Sears’ other great passion was Parsley, who treated number nine as her second home. If the subject of buses ran out, we talked about her and Ginger, the cat Mr Sears had once had.

  I checked up on the rota to see which of his Homecare nurses would put him to bed. ‘Marilyn’s coming this evening, Mr Sears. She’s the one you like.’ I heard that falsely cheerful note creep into my voice. It made me wince.

  Mr Sears shot me a look.

  ‘I hope you enjoy your lunch,’ I said.

  ‘Chicken gives me a headache,’ he said, to punish me.

  Immediately after we had eaten, Sam left Lakey Street, and I insisted that Nathan and I took our coffee out into the garden. ‘See?’ I said, flinging open the french windows. ‘Perfect’

  The first growth of the Buff Beauty was struggling for space through the bullying Solanum jasminoides. The Marie Boisselot clematis had already put out a few leaf buds and the Rambling Rector rose was readying itself to dust, later, in the spring, its tiny creamy buds – like Poppy’s baby fist along the fence. In fact, all the plants were poised to shake out their plumage for their annual show. Lavendula ‘Nana alba’, Artemisia nutans ‘Silver Queen’ – my lovely, tender children. I almost forgot the olive tree in the stone pot. That, too, had a silvery gleam in the thin light.

  During the winter, moss had edged over the stones and colonized the bench. They required dousing and scrubbing with disinfectant and I fetched a bucket. Nathan scuffed the patio with his shoe, revealing grubby streaks of the stone underneath.

  ‘You’ve been very quiet, Nathan.’ I scrubbed at the bench and wiped it over with a cloth. He watched me.

  ‘It’s far too cold.’ He sat down but did not look at me and I wondered if he was angry with me.

  I tried again. ‘I think I saved the clematis.’

  ‘I don’t know why you’re obsessed with white. Can’t we ever have a bit of colour to liven things up?’

  It had crossed my mind more than once that Nathan was jealous of the garden. ‘I don’t know. I love white – but maybe as a change I could go for red.’

  Now Nathan said something that struck me as strange. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever understood you, Rosie.’

  It was too serious a statement not to treat it as a joke. ‘You don’t have to.’ I leant over and kissed him. ‘That’s part of my mystery’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  Why did I love white in a garden? No doubt some of the books that passed over my desk offered explanations of the white period in a gardener’s history. Picasso had had a blue one, and plenty of print had been devoted to analysing it. Perhaps white gardens revealed an unconscious yearning for purity. More likely, the fat, innocent buds butting their way through chocolate earth, the tender, reliable goodness of a garden, provided a direct contrast to what took place in the world. Yet any fool can tell you that it is not the answers which are significant, but the garden itself. My white beauties traced pathways over rotting fences and spread their cool canopies over tired city soil. It may be true that I was gripped by the longing for clarity and resolution that white suggests, which I could not explain to Nathan, but it was the visible beauty that was the real point.

  Nathan stood up. ‘I’m going indoors.’

  ‘Would you like to go for a walk? I can do this another time.’

  ‘No. I know you want to tackle the moss. I might take myself off for a stroll.’

  ‘Fine.’

  I refilled the bucket at the outside tap, poured in disinfectant then got down on my hands and knees and began to scrub. The disinfectant was astringent and clean-smelling and made my skin tingle. Nathan moved about inside the house. He washed something up, made a phone call, and then I heard the bang of the front door.

  The scrubbing brush was new and bit hard into the moss. A swathe of freshly minted stone flag appeared. A cheap substitute for limestone, this stone had been imported from India, hewed from hot, dusty plains. It was old and some of the flags had fossils imprinted on them. A foamy leaf. A fishbone of fern.

  I traced the fern with a wet finger. Nature produces her enormous variety from only ten basic patterns: the whorl, the spiral, the crystal, the branch, etc. I learnt that while I was a student at Oxford. I loved that piece of information. I found Nature’s strictness reassuring – and I was the woman who still cherished a silver medal engraved ‘Rose Uttley: for Tidiness and Not Being Late. Form 3’. I liked the notion of such order, such simplicity. It was one of the reasons I had married Nathan.

  Etc., etc.

  I finished the patio and embarked on the garden furniture. It was hard work and I grew pleasantly warm. Every so often I looked up – just for the pleasure of looking – at the green and brown of the waiting garden. When we had moved in, forty-five feet of bleak, leached London clay, tangled with briars and rubbish – the same imaginative estate agent had called it ‘a mature prospect’ – had greeted me. ‘Try me,’ I fancied it was saying. ‘I dare you.’

  The fountain was situated at the bottom and the water fell out of a pitcher, held by a woman in drapery, into a brick pool into which I had piled stones collected with Sam and Poppy on Hastings beach. I saw in it an amorphous, eternal quality. Things changed, but they also remained the same.

  My eyes travelled over the lilac, which was old and woody. Yet it had that pregnant look about it – so, too, did the roses, the leaf clumps from which the black and white poppies would emerge, and my treasured tawny verbascum. Everything, in fact. Spring was coming. Once again, the cycle had travelled back to the beginning, ready to start again.

  Chapter Four

  On Monday, the group reverberated with the Charles Madder scandal. All over the building phones rang, lawyers were consulted and journalists chewed over evidence. The atmosphere was shrill and rancorous and, I suppose, we were too.

  The smell of bad coffee from the vending machines was particularly offensive. Someone had spilt a cup over the red carpet just outside my area. It left a dark stain, like blood, over which I had to tread.

  By Tuesday, the furore was less intense. It was reported that Charles Madder had resigned as a minister to spend more time in cherishing his constituency. The consensus among his constituents was that he had had it coming. Only one person was reported as saying that he was a good and decent man. The ship sailed on, leaving polluted water, and the ex-minister’s wife, Flora Madder, drowning in shock and distress. ‘Don’t be woolly,’ said Minty, when we queued for lunch in the canteen and I expressed sympathy for her. ‘A wife must know if her husband is straying. As for the undeclared interests, it’s collusion, surely. She’s in it up to her neck too.’ She checked herself. ‘Don’t look like that, Rose. You know as well as I do that sometimes the nice explanation will not do.’

  I was used to Minty’s cynicism, but it was not like her to be quite so harsh. ‘If you mean human beings are never straightforward, well, yes,’ I said.

  She flushed and it was then I realized that she must be having an affair with a married man. I felt a stab of… what? Complicity? Not exactly – more curiosity, but not, I think, envy. Relief, too, that her choice was not my business. Mine had been made.

  I looked at her hard. Her heightened colour made her look young and hopeful. ‘And what are you up to, Minty?’

  She grabbed a fat-free
yoghurt. ‘Nothing.’

  Long ago, I had settled on what I wanted. Put crudely, my ambitions were to be a good mother, a Good Wife (to Nathan, of course), and have my career. I wanted others in my life to nurture. Not very grand, certainly not earth-shattering, some might say boring. Convenient? Yes and no. We have to choose something, opt for some species of shelter – and I found those ambitions immensely absorbing, ever changing.

  As she often reminded me, Minty was different. She was bold and, to Ianthe, shocking in her outspokenness – her gender was not a problem. She was courageous and upfront – ‘I want to go places.’ She had no family to speak of – ‘Who wants one?’ – and hated the idea of children: ‘Why put a millstone round your neck?’ She chose her role models from Hollywood and television. She did not take drugs but reckoned you had to be good-looking to get on. She liked sex, and rated presentation and PR. It was a generation thing, she argued, a mentality thing.

  Sometimes Minty seemed as old as time. Sometimes she was the child in a sweet shop, desperate to try out all the sticky humbugs and gobstoppers. And why not? She had flown in from another planet and she fascinated me. At twenty-nine, smart, sharp, glossy, free-ranging, she was as different from me at that age as it was possible to be.

  ‘I hate my bust.’ This was the first of several intimacies she had dropped during our first lunch together after she joined the office. ‘It’s the kind that promises much, but delivers little. But I use it all the same.’

  ‘I see.’ Any shortfall in Minty’s breasts would be made up for by her mixture of honesty and greed. ‘Men are easily led,’ she said also, and her dark eyes flashed subversive knowledge. ‘Easy, easy. Especially if you tell them there are no ties.’

  ‘But where are they led to?’ I asked.

  She fixed me with that unblinking, comforting gaze.

  By Wednesday, Charles Madder was regulated to page five, it was on, on with the news, and the atmosphere had changed to shock and something must be done: the daily paper now focused on a medical scandal. As a result of acute lack of funding a hospital porter with no medical qualifications had been acting as the triage nurse in a Cornish hospital’s A &E department. A woman had died as a result of his ignorance. The journalists shed their rancour and became the nation’s social conscience, the exposers of society’s ills.

  On Thursday…

  On Thursday, Minty arrived – unusually – more than an hour and a half late. She was wearing a floaty skirt, a tight Lycra top, and kitten heels in glacé pink. She looked dewy and flushed but, also, curiously determined. Apologies, Rose.’

  It was copy day, time was extra tight and the phone had not stopped ringing, mostly with authors and publishers complaining about unfair treatment. They all had to be placated. ‘You might have phoned.’

  ‘I said I was sorry.’

  I was not angry often, but when I was, I was. ‘Go and check with Steven that the pages are OK this week.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’ Minty hung up her jacket.

  ‘What?’

  She sat down at her desk and switched on her terminal. ‘We should hold our firepower.’

  This was the first time that we had openly disagreed on policy, and I was puzzled. ‘Minty, I don’t know what is going on in your private life but you could do as I ask and not treat me to the fallout. If you feel differently, we can discuss it later.’

  ‘Fallout?’ she queried.

  I glanced at my watch. ‘I don’t care what we call it, just get on with it. Please go and talk to Steven.’

  Phones rang, computers whined, the post trolley, pushed by Charlie, swayed through the desks. The walls of the building shut out goodness knew what weather. Scowling, Minty got to her feet – she reminded me of Poppy when she had been outflanked. My lips twitched. ‘We’ve got off to bad start. Let’s be friends and then thrash out the policy. Or, rather, get the pages to bed.’

  She thought for a moment. ‘That’s the trouble with you, Rose. You bring things down to the personal. It’s very female.’

  ‘So do you.’

  ‘Not like you.’

  It was a truce. Of sorts.

  At the end of the day, Minty got up from her desk, put on her jacket and said goodnight. She did not look back as she clattered out on the glacé kitten heels.

  By Friday, a royal had been photographed in a compromising position and a row was ding-donging over privacy. How far? How much? Whose?

  The news desk in the goldfish bowl seethed and hummed. When I arrived, dead on nine o’clock, Maeve Otley was hunched over her desk, white and speechless. A bad rheumatism day. I made her a cup of tea and took it over but it was not the moment to commiserate. Charlie delivered a stack of post and a couple of boxes of books.

  Minty rang. ‘I can’t come in. I’ve got a… migraine.’

  This was unlike her. ‘Shall I phone later to check if you’re OK?’

  ‘No.’ She sounded choked. ‘Don’t do that. No need.’

  ‘I hope you feel better.’

  But Minty had put down the phone.

  In planning terms, summer was on the doorstep, and I spent the day teasing out ideas for the June pages. Ringing the changes was almost impossible on the familiar categories of ‘travel’ and ‘holiday reading’, but I was toying with the idea of a section on books ‘to be read for a second time’.

  Meanwhile, for this week’s travel slot, we had covered books on India, Thailand, Greece, HalThorne’s A Thousand Olive Trees, of course, and a thick, illustrated travelogue devoted to Rome.

  Long ago, when I had been Rose-the-traveller, I had gone to Rome.

  *

  The sun shone on my bare arms and boiled the sweat on my back. My feet spread damply inside my cheap sandals and I knew I would get blisters. I did not care. I was sixteen, in Rome, and in love for the first time-with being there, out of England. Rome was noisy, filled with smells – coffee, exhaust, sweat, hot buildings – and its flux of life, noise and sensation flowed through me, intensely, luxuriously felt.

  I was in Rome. I was intoxicated.

  Life, wrote Virginia Woolf, was a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope. Oh, no, it was not. Not for some. Some of us lived in a plain brown envelope. It took the trip to Rome to see the luminous halo, the semi-transparent one.

  Ianthe nearly me talked out of it: I did not have any proper summer clothes or shoes, and my underwear was not good enough, she said, unless I wanted to wear my gym knickers and plimsolls.

  A godmother had taken pity on Ianthe’s penniless widowhood, not to mention her hungry, sensation-starved daughter (who had read her E. M. Forster and reflected seriously on Lucy Honeychurch’s experiences) and paid for a place on the school expedition. Ianthe clicked her tongue and did her I-am-a-Yorkshire-woman-I-am-not-a-cause-for-people-to-patronize-and-lighten-their-consciences bit. I had been forced to abandon Lucy Honeychurch and to adopt Jane Eyre: ‘Please, please, Mother… “Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless?”’ before she ungraciously allowed my godmother to get out her cheque book.

  Perhaps it was really my lack of wardrobe that bothered Ianthe but it was unlikely: Ianthe, in make-do-and-mend mode, could fashion a dress from a sack. I sought a better explanation. I knew from my reading that mothers found it hard to let go of their adored children. They dreaded the end of their womanly role and death beckoning, the logical finale. This left me with a moral quandary. Should I sacrifice my yearning to give back my mother her role?

  I calculated she could manage without it for a week. In return, I decided to pay three pounds into the charity box, which was then a considerable sum and, therefore, a conscience appeaser.

  Lips tight, Ianthe set about preparing my wardrobe between working and running the house. Scrupulous as ever, she washed all my clothes by hand and dried them over the clothes-horse in the kitchen.

  The day before I left, she set up the ironing-board. A ham-bone boiled on the stove, and the kitchen grew
steamy with starch and stock. The radio played softly. Every so often, she dipped her hand into a jug of water, and shook drops over the ironing-board. The iron bit into the material with a hiss. When she had finished, she folded each garment with exquisite neatness.

  I watched dreamily. She was wearing her everyday flat shoes, polished to within an inch of their lives, and there was a careful darn in her stocking, but her hair had escaped its coil and a frown puckered her forehead. Every so often, she glanced up at me, the movement emphasizing her extreme thinness. I knew what she was thinking. She will get ideas above her station. My mother had been so careful not to raise my expectations.

  ‘Rose,’ she cut sharply into my reverie, ‘don’t just sit there, let down that dress. And don’t look like that.’

  She was not taking her defeat lightly, nor did I expect her to, and my victory was too precarious to jeopardize. I pulled out the sewing-box and set about the dress, which had already been rehemmed twice. I cut and snipped and eventually the remaining spare inch of material, which was of a much darker colour, had been tacked into place. I held up the dress. ‘It’ll look awful.’

  ‘Beggars can’t be choosers.’ Ianthe was at her most maddening, but her eyes were cloudy with distress. This was final proof, if she needed it, that I was growing beyond her reach.

  So, there I was: a creature in a seersucker dress with an obviously let-down hem, from a cool, wet island, without a history of my own, bewitched by a city that had almost too much.

  There they were: the great fontane of the Trevi and the Barcaccia, or the more playful ones, like the Fontana delle Tartarughe with its bronze tortoises, which I found tucked behind the ghetto, and at street corners the intimate fontanelle. Plump women reclined with their breasts displayed, sea gods grasped tridents, nymphs crouching at their feet, while dolphins, seahorses, lions and amphorae emerged from bronze and stone. Creatures of myth and legend had been summoned from the four quarters of the world.

  Those sleek, gleaming men, women and animals had nothing to do but ensure that water was tossed from shell and mouth, and how happy they seemed to me as they guarded the arcs of water in the sun. But I also figured, with a little help from Keats, that they were happy because nothing ever happened to them.