The baby, a boy they called Andrew after his grandfather, was born easily. The women's group seemed disappointed. Everyone could have sworn it was going to be a daughter. But Angela, delighted to be in control of her destiny, just smiled and planned ahead. She found a large, crumbling house in west London which would be big enough for both their home and their office. She would refurbish it herself to save money, and from these premises she would be mother to their child and partner in the business. Which was agreed.
'A bit pre-industrial revolution,' she said to Clancy and Rosa when they came to coo over the baby. 'But we're equals.'
When Clancy said, 'Whose job is it to clean the lavatory?' she pretended not to hear.
Finding the house was like a military exercise. All she wanted was something with three floors, six bedrooms (because the upper floors would be their living space) and a garden for their son. In whatever condition it came. Apart from that she was entirely without sentiment. And thus, very quickly, when Andrew was less than three months old, she found it. No.
13
Francis Street. Perfect.
She donned her old dungarees. Once they had been mere symbols of her political determinism; now they were its evidence. Here was true liberation, here was true breaking down of traditional gender roles. Ian learned not to be gallant as he watched his wife pick up the stepladders and trundle them upstairs, and he learned not to be embarrassed when he closed the door after her and went back to his desk. It was a joint undertaking, this life of theirs, and each did what they could. She hired a young woman who could look after the telephones and do simple office tasks, and also double as a mother's help.
Ian had no role in all this. Within their empire each had separate responsibilities. From each according to his ability. And hers. His job was to get out there and do what a man had to do.
She worked hard on no.
13
Francis Street, beginning with the ground-floor rooms, which Ian used as his offices. A small cloakroom was installed in the downstairs corridor so that visiting clients did not need to brave the big, cold upstairs and the scruffy family bathroom. The big, white, back kitchen was extended and fitted with double doors to muffle offending domestic noise, and a spiral staircase was driven through its centre, which made the prospect of caring for small children a nightmare. On the second and third floors there were the family rooms, all in dire need of care and attention. She dealt with those last. She learned glazing, tiling, basic woodwork and decorating and she felt that this great plan was unravelling just as it should.
Ian's business acquaintances began to
compliment him on this superwif
e of his. He basked in the praise. And the business went on expanding. And then, as far as Ian was concerned, disaster struck. When Andrew was only seven months old, Angela became pregnant again. The following year she gave birth to Claire.
'Don't worry,' said Angela.
‘I
can handle it.'
And she could. She was young. Life was sweet, life was solid and life was happening just as she planned. Through the hard times she kept in mind the glowing grail of a future in which she and beloved husband had filled all life's pigeonholes and could fly away and do whatever they wanted. Every time she pricked her finger sewing up a curtain hem or got paint down the back of her neck from those high ceilings, she would smile to herself and say, 'One day, Angie. One day
...'
While Clancy finished her MA in California, and Rosa got her first b
ook commission to consider the !
Kung, Angela went right on building up her world the way she wanted it. Claire was born, Ian was there by her side, and immediately after the birth Angela had her tubes tied. Mission accomplished.
When their office assistant and mother's helper left to have a baby, Ian tutted. Next time, he said, he would employ a man.
No danger of that happening then.
He did so. And Angela employed a part-time mother's help for herself and carried on. She was young, she had energy, she could fit her work in between the requirements of mothering and helping with the business. And - if there was any time left over - she used it to gradually make the rest of the house nice and warm and attractive to live in. What she managed to do in the way of soft furnishings with yards and yards of cheap mattress ticking would have filled a book by Conran. But one thing she knew - young as she was - and it was this: men go walkabout if they don't like what they get at home. When Rosa or Clancy came to stay and poked fun at her, Angela would whistle Tammy Wynette's 'Stand by Your Man'. With, as she would say, irony. But she adhered to the principles of Tony Bennett's 'Wives Should Always Be Lovers Too', as if Marilyn French had never been born: 'Hey, little girl, comb your hair, fix your make-up, soon he will walk through the door
...'
She might wink at her friends, but she also meant it.
Ian told her that he loved her, and that he admired her, and that he did not know what he would do without her. If she remembered that Henry II once wrote something very similar to Eleanor of Aquitaine before putting her in a chateau and throwing away the key, she dismissed it. Man might learn from history that man learns nothing from history, she told herself, but women do. She supported and was supported, she loved and was loved, she admired and was admired. It was enough.
She attended PTA and parents' evenings and did her bit for fund-raising events. She loved her children but, like her own parents with her, she knew that one day they must fly the coop and she was happy to let them go. The better they did at school, the freer they would one day be, and so would she and Ian.
Her local married women friends bemoaned the passing of romance from their lives. By the time most of them had two children of school age, the private pleasures of their marriages had long since faded against the brilliance of the domestic burden. Not so Angela. She kept down the cellulite and kept up (or down) the seductive underwear, and enjoyed it all for the game it was. Whatever she did now went into the pot for later. Ian Fytton could only look out of the window or up to the ceiling when one of his male colleagues bemoaned the passing of fun, romance and marital relations
...
By the time Andrew and Claire began senior school, the office had long since moved from Francis Street to fine new premises further into town. Angela turned the house back into a complete family home again, so quickly that it was almost a conjuring trick. Let's get it out of the way, she thought. And she did. She worked with Ian three days a week and on the other two she did all the other things a mother and wife and business partner needs to do to survive. Now Ian employed a large staff of young men besides himself, and an unmarried woman of fifty to oversee the office side of things and to be his secretary. Young women came and went in the more menial areas and it therefore mattered not, as he said, when they left to get married.
At Angela's suggestion, they took on a partner. Ian agreed, saying he could do with the help and the extra capital. Angela nodded, keeping quiet about wanting the new working partner to take over for good, eventually, while she and Ian, finally unencumbered by their offspring, circumnavigated the globe. Still young and vigorous - just as she had always planned.
As the years passed, Ian went from love's delight in all she did to apparent awe of her capabilities. 'My wife,' she once heard him say to his new business partner, Bernard Ball, 'could easily have
been
a bloody rocket scientist. Put her in Cape Canaveral and she'd have an interplanetary probe on Mars by Monday
...'
Angela smiled to herself. It was true, she would, if Mars be where her husband stood waiting. She never lost that memory of the God of the Cambridge Union and hot sex in small beds with mulled wine. It was there, waiting for them still, just below the surface, and they would find it again. The day was drawing near.
To fill up the evening and as a little additional interest she began to look hard at the financial papers and suggested, from time to time, where they might invest any small surplus. Ian could not deny her skill in this department either.
‘I
sometimes feel redundant
’
he said playfully to her one evening.
'Redundant is it?' She smiled back, and hauled him off to the bedroom to redress such foolishness.
It was as well that these investments had been made. During the lean times of the early nineties not only did Ian's father die but his mother needed capital as the paternal business went to the wall.
'Well done, Angie,' said Ian, almost to himself, as they cashed in the investments she had once advocated. Partner Bernard slapped him on the back and congratulated him on his foresight in the matter of stocks and shares and he - rather awkwardly - took the praise as his due. Angela just smiled and said nothing.
'Where would I be without you?' said her husband again one evening as she slid back his shirt collar and massaged his tired neck.
Mrs Fytton senior was moved to a comfortable new house in Taunton, from where she observed the world with increasing sourness and immobility. Angela arranged for a daily companion and went down to visit her mother-in-law whenever she could. The children, now teenagers, refused. Angela withdrew their monthly allowances. The children, now teenagers, agreed. Ian saw this through a haze of firm and peaceful family discussion. He never interfered in the rows, or felt obliged to deal with a door slammed in anger. That was
Angela's department and she dealt with it - as in all things -extraordinarily well. Never once, in anger, did Angela say, ' You deal with this, I've had enough.. .'
Though she asked his advice, of course. Her job, her
business
,
was the family. His part in it was to be there for it and enjoy it. He played tennis with his son at weekends and he took his sweet little teenaged girl shopping occasionally and bought her and her friends hamburgers. They knew better than to give their father a hard time. Or their mother, mostly, come to that. She ruled the roost with a velvet glove covering a hand of razor wire. She even knew how to disengage the woofer from the hi-fi if they played the bass too loud. When their father was at home they behaved. Life ran as smoothly as a well-oiled clock. Whatever, in those days of digitalization, such an old-fashioned item might be.
Business colleagues and the men of the neighbourhood looked upon Ian with envy. They were working twice as hard as before in the harsher economic climate. They had wives who screamed and threw crockery when they were late home from the office. He had a wife who stayed late at the office with him or went on occasional business trips with him. Or who was waiting, powdered and painted, in his bed, when he returned. They had wives who were passing their sell-by dates, had hot flushes, cold sweats and neurotic syndromes. He had a wife who was still young enough - just - to be a floozie from the typing pool, with legs to match, and from whose clear eyes shone nothing but the light of admiration. They had wives who thought computing was as exciting and sexy as running an abattoir. He had a wife who not only knew what he did for a living but understood it, respected him for it and - if he was ill - could step into his shoes. Ian, when this was pointed out to him, found it quite hard to smile the smile of the Pantocrator. For some reason.
As the tough early nineties gave way to easier times, Angela still worked with Ian, but only for a day a week. The technology
- as he pointed out to her - was getting more and more difficult even for him to understand and he and Bernard really needed another full-time partner. She acceded cheerfully. Another working partner would make it even easier for Ian to devolve when the time came. Of course, at the moment he had to work flat out because the scars of the early nineties were still healing. But they were on course .
..
Definitely on course
...
And Angela needed to give a little extra attention to the children, who were in the process of completing their GCSEs. David Draper - a lively Jack the Lad - came on board with Ian and Bernard and the future seemed assured.
It was at this point that Ian said, very firmly, that she should take some time for herself. He had two partners now -and all the help he needed. She had paid her dues. Why not release herself from the office entirely?
Take me to Venice for a week and I might consider it
’
she said.
He told his secretary to fix it and a fortnight later there they were. No longer staying in the unpretentious La Calcina, hotel of their honeymoon and overlooking the Giudecca, but in the Gritti Palace, looking down on the Grand Canal. Which just about symbolized their every achievement.
In the course of the next seven days they screwed like rabbits, drank like fishes, ate like pigs and walked around the city wrapped in their eel-like arms. Ian had kept his golden hair and she had kept her twenty-five-inch waist. It was as if, she thought, they had only just met.