‘We’ve been married six years, James. I can see the big three-0 coming up, and you were forty last birthday.’
He winced.
‘We can afford this house, it’s near enough to commute – only about eleven miles to Bedford station. I’ll come off the pill as soon as we move, and we’ll eat a healthy diet and take long walks to get fit.’
James looked slightly punch-drunk. ‘I suppose it
might
be quite nice here,’ he conceded reluctantly. ‘And,’ he added brightening, ‘Gerry and Viola live only a few miles away, and I’m sure he drives into work. Must leave pretty early. I’ll ask him what it’s like.’ He put his arm around me. ‘I can see you like this place, darling, but don’t set your heart on it. I think we ought to look at a few more first, and once I’m a senior partner we could afford something detached.’
‘I want this one, a real country cottage, not a detached mock-Tudor somewhere. I want to be a country dweller, with muddy wellingtons and a cottage garden. And you used to like the idea of being self-sufficient – you had all those books about it. I think they’re in the back bedroom cupboard. I’ll look them out when we get home.’
He didn’t look too enthusiastic, but he’s a man of short-lived crazes, as I’ve learned the hard way. While I would have expected someone to warn me had I been about to marry a serial killer, no one felt it necessary to inform me that I was about to marry a serial hobbyist. Perhaps it should be written into the marriage ceremony? Thou Shalt Not Become A Serial Hobbyist. Still, I don’t see why he can’t have the same one twice, like the measles, with a bit of exposure to the germ.
He was rather dampening when I enumerated the cottage’s many advantages on the way back to Mother’s house in darkest suburbia for Granny’s birthday tea. I’ll have to work on him; but I’m in love with my cottage, and am beginning to have distinctly now- or-never feelings about making the move.
I think it’s something to do with thirty looming ahead (my birthday is in February) and so few of my ambitions realised. And if I’m going to take the plunge and have a baby, then my sell-by date is just peeping up on the horizon.
One definite plus point to living in the cottage at Nutthill would be that James wouldn’t be so tempted to call in at the pub on his way home from work in the evenings if he had such a long drive ahead of him. (Networking, this is called, apparently.) And with so much to do to the house and garden he won’t have either the time or the money for his Friday night sessions out with ‘the boys’, or our regular show or film and restaurant on Saturday nights.
I never feel relaxed in big, pretentious, expensive restaurants anyway, and would always have preferred to save the money towards the cottage. I’m not much of a social animal, in fact. I like a quiet life and time to write after work, and I enjoy a trip to a museum or art gallery more than anything else.
James’s friends are all about ten years older than I am, with self-assured, well-dressed, boring wives, against whom I stand out like a macaw among a lot of sparrows. They’re all so well-groomed and
taupe.
If they mix two colours together in a scarf they think they’re daring.
Living so far out into the country would also distance us from James’s appalling old school chum Howard, ageing hippie extraordinaire, who has recently moved back to London after a brief spell crewing on a yacht, where I should think he was as much use as a twist of rotten rope.
He managed to acquire a rich girlfriend in the interval between jumping ship in Capri and being deported. (I hadn’t realised that he knew Comrades came in two sexes, but there you are. She must be deranged.)
James may not immediately see all the cottage’s
advantages …
He dropped me at Mother’s in mid-afternoon (and I can hardly wait to put some distance between myself and Mother – another plus) and drove off to the office to pick up some papers (allegedly) though I did tell him that if he wasn’t back within the hour I’d kill him.
I stifled the ignoble thought that perhaps he just wanted to see his ex-girlfriend Vanessa, recently reinstalled as secretary. When she got divorced and had to find a job, she pleaded with James to put a word in for her, and he felt so sorry for her he persuaded his uncle Lionel to take her on again.
He explained how it was, so I’m not in the least bit worried or jealous about her being there every day, even though she’s another bubbly blonde. From the sound of it, her bubbles may have gone a bit flat; James said her husband was a brute and she’s looking very worn and
years
older.
Mother was a bit pensive and hurt when he drove off, and nearly as dismal as James when I described the cottage. She only really cheered up again when he returned and fell like a famished wolf on the rather nursery spread of food she associates with birthdays.
Then the cake was brought out and we had to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ with James and Mother trying to harmonise, slightly hampered by Granny, who had already loudly announced that she didn’t want any fuss made about birthdays at her time of life, ignoring us and turning the TV up loudly, so that a repeat of
Top of the Pops
drowned us out.
Mother keeps trying to persuade everyone that Granny is losing her marbles, but I think anyone who can learn to preset a video recorder deserves Mensa membership, because I’ve never managed it.
‘You can’t possibly want to watch that, Maud!’ Mother broke off to exclaim crossly.
Granny briefly unglued her boot-button eyes from the screen. ‘Why not?’ she demanded belligerently. ‘All them funny clothes and lewd dancing. Best entertainment on the box.’
She returned her avid gaze to the gyrating row of young men clad in enormously baggy trousers and no tops. ‘Eh! There’s more hair on the back of my hands than there is on them poor boys’ chests. And call that a beard? Bum fluff!’
Mother sighed long-sufferingly and cast her baby-blue eyes heavenwards. ‘So vulgar,’ she whispered. ‘Dear James, she’s such a trial to me – and getting more senile by the day.’
I wouldn’t agree with that, though she certainly seems to be reverting to her Yorkshire roots at a gallop!
James squeezed Mother’s hand. ‘At least she has you to look after her, Valerie,’ he said, which I thought was pretty rich considering he
knows
Mother is the giddy, spendthrift widow of the two. But Mother is the tiny, fluffy fragile sort who seems to appeal to a certain type of man. (She’s tough as old boots really.) She spends large amounts of money she doesn’t have on beauty treatments, make-up and clothes, which is mainly why Granny decided to move in and take over.
I’m sure she thought she could sort Mother out and then leave things running smoothly while she moved to the retirement bungalow she’d set her mind on. Only, as she soon discovered, you can’t organise fluff, it just drifts away with every passing breath of wind.
She’s had to bail Mother out of major financial difficulties at least twice, and even the house itself now belongs to her, so it’s fortunate that Grandpa was a jeweller and had lots of what Granny calls ‘brass’. He was a warm man, she always says, though she won’t say precisely what his thermostat was set to.
Mother has entirely failed to see that she is Granny’s pensioner, not vice versa, and tells everyone she’s trying to make her declining years a joy to her.
Granny hasn’t shown much sign of declining yet, and not much joy either.
So Mother now squeezed James’s hand with sincere gratitude and batted long mascara-lagged eyelashes at him: ‘Dear James – so understanding. So very wise.’
Granny’s deafness has an astonishingly intermittent quality about it unrelated to whether her hearing aid is switched on or off (or even which ear she happens to have plugged it into).
She now remarked without turning her head, ‘Dearest James knows which side his bread is buttered on, and so do you. He—’
She broke off so suddenly that I swivelled round in my chair in alarm, only to find her attention riveted by the appearance on the screen of a dark, extremely angular face: a familiar, very masculine face, framed in long, jet-black hair and with eyes as green as shamrocks.
‘Well, I never did, Tish!’ she gasped. ‘It’s that Fergus who used to live next door – the one you were sweet on. Now that’s what
I
call a man!’
‘Fergal,’ I corrected automatically. And he’d been what I called a man, too, until fame and fortune had beckoned and he’d gone off without a backward look. It’s not what I call him now.
Still, it gave me a peculiar feeling to see him on screen moodily singing, bright eyes remote and hooded. And even more of a funny feeling in the stomach when the guitars crashed in and he started throwing his lithe body about the stage.
Age does not appear to have withered him or staled his infinite variety.
Top of the Pops
seemed an unlikely venue, since Goneril has more of a cult following than a mainstream pop one. They sort of blend Celtic folk music and heavy metal and … and I’m sounding like a groupie, which I never was.
I became slowly aware that conversation at the tea-table was suspended, and I could feel James’s gaze swivelling suspiciously from the TV to me and back again, like some strange radar dish, but until Fergal vanished from the screen to be replaced by shots of the audience, drooling, I couldn’t somehow detach my eyes.
The surprise, I suppose.
‘You went out with
him
?’ demanded James incredulously. ‘You never said!’
It was a relief to find I could turn my head again. ‘Didn’t I? I’m sure I told you I’d been out with someone who let me down badly, and—’
‘Yes – but you never said it was
him
.’
‘Well, does it matter? It was all ages before I met you. His parents were renting the house next door and I met him when he came to visit them. We … sort of bumped into each other. But in the end he got famous and went off, and I went to university and then met you, darling.’
‘At least he was a man, and not a big girl’s blouse masquerading as one,’ Granny said with a scathing look at poor James. ‘First time I thought the girl might have some Thorpe blood in her after all, when she took up with him.’
James’s outraged stare almost made me giggle.
‘So foreign – I never liked him,’ Mother said, primly ignoring Granny’s remark, although her cheeks had grown slightly pink. ‘The whole family was volatile. You could hear his parents shouting six houses away. And look how he’s turned out – always in the papers over some scandal, and with a dreadfully cheap girl in tow.’
‘He wasn’t foreign,’ I said weakly (and certainly none of the girls I had ever heard of him being connected with could be described as
cheap
). ‘His father is Italian born – Rocco of Rocco’s restaurant chain, you know – but his mother is Irish and Fergal was born here in London.’
‘That’s what I said – foreign,’ Mother said triumphantly, recalling unendearingly to my mind all her tactics to blight my romance with Fergal. Not that it would have lasted anyway: Romeo and Juliet fell in love, grew up, argued, and parted. Juliet became a boring suburban housewife getting her kicks from writing romantic novels, and Romeo became a drug-crazed sex-maniac rock star.
Shakespeare for the New Era: not many dead. And all water under the bridge now.
James was still goggling at me as if he’d just noticed for the first time that I’d got two heads, so I smiled rather nervously and hastened to change the subject.
‘Are we going to eat this cake now the candle’s gone out? And
Top of the Pops
is finishing, so perhaps Granny would like to open her presents, Mother?’
Easily distracted, she began to bustle about, and the subject of Fergal was thankfully dropped.
In the car James was very quiet, which suited me, since it had made me feel very peculiar seeing the real Fergal in action, as opposed to the fantasy, sanitised version who lives a life of his own in a specially constructed holding-pen in my head, and off whom I’ve been vampirically feeding for several years to fuel my writing.
Actually, I should be grateful to Fergal for leaving me in that callous way, because it set me on to a really character-forming curve – even though it might have felt like a downward spiral at times – culminating in my having my first romantic novel accepted, and discovering True Worth and Dependability in James’s sturdy and attractive form.
It was therefore a bit of a shock when Dear Old Dependable James broke the silence by saying sourly, ‘That old boyfriend of yours – what’s his name? Rocca?’ He laughed but it came out as more of a disgusted snort. ‘I suppose they all change their names, but
Rocca
.’
‘Rocco, James. And it’s his real name.’
‘Of course you’d know that, wouldn’t you, having been the Great Star’s girlfriend? Funny you never mentioned it before, isn’t it? If your grandmother hadn’t let the cat out of the bag I’d still be in the dark.’
‘So would the cat,’ said my unfortunate mouth, which doesn’t always refer to my brain before uttering.
James’s expression became even more sombre, so I hastened on soothingly, ‘And really, James, there was no cat to let out of the bag, if by that you meant a guilty secret. If I’d thought a detailed list of all my old boyfriends would amuse you I’d have given you one.’
‘You didn’t
have
any other boyfriends. Valerie told me.’
I felt distinctly ruffled both by the idea of him and Mother discussing my suitability (I mean, she probably assured him I’d only been round the block once, low mileage, practically a born-again virgin), and the fact that it should matter who else I’d been out with (or
in
with) if he loved me. I bet she also tried to smooth over my unattractive points: i.e. my height (I always wear flat shoes), the cleft chin (Mother calls it a dimple) and the strange colour of my hair (strawberry blond).
‘I wouldn’t have thought you were Fergal Rocco’s type anyway, since he’s so extrovert and wild, and you’re as prissy as Snow White and Little Red Riding Hood rolled into one,’ he added unforgivably.
‘Prissy? I am not prissy!’ I exclaimed, hurt and angry. ‘Anyway, when you proposed you said it was my being so reserved and home-loving that attracted you in the first place!’