Not Married, Not Bothered

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…