Not Married, Not Bothered

Instead it came up ‘Word Not Recognised’.

‘I felt like I’d committed some crime against the state. I thought a grille was going to come down, some card-carrying cadre was going to escort me from the building.’

Danny grinned. He said, ‘I guess someone PC-ed the PCs, girlfriend.’

‘Listen, they got so scared of spinsters back in the 1850s they hatched a plan to ship them off to the colonies.’

‘Wooooh. Imagine it. All those brawny farmers.’

‘Hey, hey. It wouldn’t be like The Piano, you know. There’d be all that ringworm and tapeworm. And it wouldn’t be like Harvey Keitel or Sam Neill would be waiting for you.’

Most people think of post World War One as the high spot of spinsterdom (or the low spot, according to which way you look at it) but the rot had set in long before then. In the 1850s, thanks to a demographic imbalance, there were 400,000 more women than men. One in four women was single and one in three would never marry, a situation referred to in the letters columns of the daily papers as a ‘disturbance’ and a ‘mischief’, and debated in Parliament under the title The Problem of Surplus and Excess Women. The spinster became the scapegoat and all-round repository for society’s perceived ills, among her most vocal critics being her married sisters. Consider, for instance, this little number, from the allegedly liberationist Freewoman, in which the spinster is described as ‘a withered tree … an acidulous vessel under whose pale shadow we chill and whiten … silent, shamefaced, bloodless and boneless, thinned to the spirit … our social nemis …’

It’s amazing just how much the spinster has been left out of history, feminist history in particular, more’s the shame of it. Plenty of married women in there, gay women galore, but precious little of the defiantly straight and single. All I managed to turn up in Women’s Studies that day was one measly chapter on spinstas. Still it contained details of that old spinster Export Plan. It foundered in the end, that plan, but only on the rock of sheer impracticality, the problem, according to one regretful letter in The Times being ‘the mechanical conveyance of these women to where they are wanted, given the average passenger limit of fifty persons per ship,’ a shame, this, since it almost certainly deprived some waggish old salt of the chance of urging every last woman on board with a cackle of laughter and some corny crack about not wanting them to miss the boat second time round.

‘Missing the boat’ is a cliché when applied to spinsters. So is ‘left on the shelf’ and ‘old maid’ and that very word ‘spinsterish’. But then, spinsters attract clichés.

‘So what? So do married women.’ This from my sister, Cass.

‘No they don’t. At least not in the same way.’

Which I believe to be true. Because while it may be the case that somewhere in an alternative reality, accessible only to ad men through some wormhole of time, there are indeed mothers whose major concern in life is the softness of the wash and the germ-free nature of their kitchen floor (asopposed, for instance, to how they can slide into work late without anyone seeing them because they had to take little Johnny to the doctor, or how they can get away from some garrulous over-shot meeting to pick him from the child-minder), still clichés no longer cling to the married woman the way they do to the spinsta, sticking to her like burrs, and turning her into some metaphorical horse chestnut.

‘Hummph …’

It’s the nearest I can get to the sound Cass makes but from it you can deduce that she is unimpressed with my campaign to reclaim ‘spinster’.

‘It’s a horrible word. No matter how you spell it. Nobody uses it any more.’

‘John Major does.’

‘I rest my case.’

You may not remember this but some years ago our former Prime Minister had a dream of Old Albion which had all to do with warm beer, the sound of leather on willow from the village green, but most important and heart-warming of all, the sight of a spinster, all tweed and lisle stockings, pedalling through the early morning mist to Holy Communion on her sit-up-and-beg bicycle.

Tweeds and lisle? Sit-up-and-beg bicycle? Excuse me?*

Yeah, C is for cliché alright, also for Caricature, that picture of her as ‘bloodless and boneless, thinned to the spirit,’ this being anti-spinster speak for ‘celibate’ under which she’s listed in Roget’s Thesaurus, also for Cardboard Cut-out, the picture of her in tweeds and lisle stockings peddling through the early morning mist, also for Calumny – another cliché, this, a favourite of film and play and novel, the lonely spinster with nowhere to go on Sunday afternoons but the homes of relatives, married with children.

Ha!

Behind every successful single woman there are other successful single women. Show me a spinster and I’ll show you the proud and grateful possessor of a fine circle of female friends – in my case Mad Magda, for instance, who you’ve already met, Sophie and Connie who have yet to appear, others too who you won’t meet but only because they have no particular part to play in this drama. I think of them as a sort of Greek chorus, standing at the back of the stage and carrying the narrative of life forward with visits to the cinema, the theatre, Ikea, dinners out, dinners in. Because the fact is that far from being lonely and with a duff social life, the spinster can generally be counted on to have a wider circle of friends than those who spend their lives as part of a couple, this for the obvious reason that she has more time and energy to expend on her friendships than those with partners and/or children. More likely than not, her friendships will be long and deep, this because she knows the truth of the thing – that friendships, the ones that count, are relationships too, and go through the same traumas and tensions, and require the same amount of time and energy, faith, hope and charity to keep them going.*

In all this, these canards, these cock-and-bull stories, C stands for contempt, for a curl of the lip. On the other hand, C also stands for Cat, biggest of all spinster clichés.

Which is why I won’t have one, despite all Cassie’s urging.

‘Cats are not just for Christmas, Cass,’ I say when she starts in on me as fat old Hughie, her favourite, leaps up and starts purring contentedly on my lap. ‘It’s all that responsibility. Bringing them up. Finding the right schools. Putting their paws on the right path in life. I just don’t feel I’m up to it.’ And there’s more than a scrap of truth in all this.

‘But you like cats,’ she says reproachfully, and I do, I do.

But cats are like husbands to me.

I just prefer them in other people’s houses.†

A word about my sister, Cass, now.

Cass, full name Cassandra, was named after Lady Cassandra Something or Other who clacked away at her typewriter next to my mother in Cairo. My mother still likes to refer to her in the manner of a bosom buddy.

‘Poor old Cassie. Getting divorced again …’ This like she’d just heard it from a mutual friend as opposed to reading it in the gossip column of her morning paper.

In fact Lady Cassandra dropped all that social levelling crap the minute the war was over. Wedding Number One was in Westminster Abbey, to which my mother and the rest of the girls from the Nissan Hut Nine were not invited, and where Lady C wore a mile-long train carried by a dozen bridesmaids, although not including me despite my long and distinguished service. Number Two, to some zillionaire Nazi gaucho was in some Chilean registry office, and Number Three (to her personal trainer, it lasted a week) in a Las Vegas wedding chapel.

None of this matters, however, since it’s our Cassie who concerns us here, not Lady Cassandra; Cass to me on most occasions, Cassie who I have come to the conclusion I love more than life itself, something I discovered thanks to a dark period in our lives when she got cancer.

The day Cass told me she had cancer, I shook my fist at heaven, cursing the fact that there no system, no Great Cosmological Swap Shop where we were allowed to trade our lives to save another’s. I knew then that I’d give my life cheerfully for Cass, which was no big deal. It’s just the same thing that’s been discovered, and in similar circumstances, by countless other people.

I still feel humbled, inadequate at the memory of the stern courage with which Cass faced her cancer, the extraordinary determination not to be brought down by anything, chemo, hair-loss, contemplation that she might not be here in the future. Still, I think it was Fergie who was the big surprise.

People talk about others in time of trouble as a ‘rock’ but that’s exactly what Fergie was, a slab of absolute determination, refusing to accept under any circumstances that Cass could do anything but live. The day they told her she was clear – I mean really clear, no more check-ups, go away, don’t come back – we drank champagne beneath that sweet soft Somerset night in the back garden and I clinked my glass against his while Cass was in the house.

‘You were fantastic too,’ I said, but he shook his head.

‘Nah. Purely selfish.’

‘Selfish? No. I don’t think so.’

‘Yes. Absolutely self-interested.’ He turned to face me. ‘I knew that I wouldn’t survive without your sister.’

I didn’t give up the spinster thing with Cass. I said, ‘Now here’s a thing I bet you didn’t know. The actual definition of spinster is a single woman beyond the age of marriage.’

‘That’s me.’

‘What?’

‘Beyond the age of marriage.’

‘But you are married.’

Now I know Cass is married, and not just because I was the bridesmaid at the wedding. The real clincher on this occasion was that only moments earlier I had been in the kitchen with the man I know to be her husband discussing plans for his retirement party.

‘Of course. But what I’m saying is, I’ve done the marriage thing now. And I don’t know what it’s supposed to be but, by and large, I reckon with the kids and Fergie and everything, I’ve had just about as good as it gets.’

‘So?’

‘So if anything happened to him, God forbid, I wouldn’t bother doing the thing again, that’s all. I’d make a new life for myself. Do something different.’

And then she said it.

‘I’d be perfectly happy on my own.’

Because it turns out that C is also for compromise, this according to Cass who says, ‘It’s wrong to separate out the married and the single. You do it all the time.’

‘What exactly?’

‘Make the mistake of thinking that people who marry and people who stay single want different things from life.’

‘Don’t they?’

‘No. Everyone wants the same thing at the beginning.’

‘Which is?’

‘A mixture. Companionship with solitude. Intimacy, but with distance.’

The way Cass describes it, there’s this long line, and we’re all standing on it, and through that line goes another one bisecting it like a cross. And one side of that central line is labelled Companionship and the other side Solitude.

‘And everyone – at least every sane person – wants a bit of both.’

‘Only you can’t have it.’

‘Well, you can but never in equal measure.’

And that’s the bastard of the thing, isn’t it? In the end that’s what shocks you. That life has such a damned limited amount of options. That in the end you have to fall one side of that bisecting line or the other.

Of course, you can pretend, if you like. You can tell the world you’ve found some grand, adventurous new way of living, get yourself interviewed for one of those life-style features and boast about how you and your Significant Other have cracked the whole companionship and solitude/ intimacy and distance thing, how you have this perfect relationship, which allows you both space and comfort, sanctuary and safety. And you can even imagine, if you like, that anyone out there is believing you when all they’re really asking is how significant is that Significant Other anyway, when what you really want is to go off and fuck other people.

I said, ‘I guess what everyone wants is the best of both worlds. To have their cake and eat it.’

‘And why the hell shouldn’t we?’ Her words were combative, deserving of an answer. She said, ‘Life’s a compromise however you look at it. Single or married, it’s all the same. Doesn’t mean we didn’t start off wanting the same thing. Doesn’t mean we still don’t, one way or another.’

Meanwhile, truth to tell, I wasn’t that thrilled at the prospect of celebrating Fergie’s retirement. Not that I had anything against him retiring. Quite the reverse. I was delighted for him. I figured he deserved it, teaching science for close on thirty years.

‘Selfless years, dedicated years.’ I clinked my glass against his in the Apple Tree.

‘Cherishing young minds … nourishing them.’

‘Ripping off all their duty-free allowances so you could bring back all that wine and Stella.’

Some people, politicians mainly, like to retire to spend more time with the family. Fergie was retiring to spend more time in his shed at the bottom of the garden. It’s there he makes lovely mellow imitation Shaker chairs and tables, which he sells for such wonderfully inflated prices to owners of weekend cottages, the reason he’d been pushing for early retirement.

He’s a craftsman, is Fergie. Watch him lathing and planing. Watch the way he runs a hand along with something approaching joy, something so much more than satisfaction. It’s the same look I’d see on our father’s face, bending inside a bonnet, which was why, I guess, the pair of them got on so well from the moment Cass and Fergie first got together. They’d spend hours together in the garage, Fergie alongside my father, learning, working on whatever was his current old banger. Taking tea out to them, you could feel the mutual appreciation, the companionable nature of the silence.

Anyway, like I say, I wished Fergie well in his new life. I just wasn’t that crazy on the idea of a party to celebrate it.

‘Oh God, it’ll be full of teachers moaning about their pensions.’

Look, the way I feel about teachers is this: whereas it’s just possible that putting the proverbial monkeys in a room for a trillion years with a bunch of typewriters might result in the plays of Shakespeare, teachers would still be talking about their pensions.

I’m only jealous, of course. I don’t have a pension. Something of which my mother constantly likes to remind me.

‘I don’t know what you think you’re going to do. There won’t be anything from me, you know. I’ll need the money from this house for a nursing home.’

‘No you won’t.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Oh, I’m sorry. I thought I’d mentioned it. I fully intend to murder you.’

For the record I have made no provision for my retirement, my only plan being a note in my diary to steal a supermarket trolley and put it by, this because I expect there to be a run on them from the several million or so old sixties swingers who, when we all come finally of age, will start moving, pensionless, around the country, probably in marauding gangs, our progress charted each night just before the news using those little triangular symbols rather like the ones for rain, and sleet and snow, which will be slapped onto the weather chart then as now by one of those eternally smiling, highly irritating young women clearly enjoying flaunting her fingernails.

From all this you will deduce that my economic position can best be described as precarious, a major reason why the news that Archie had been invited to the party fell like a dead hand on my heart.

‘Oh God. Not Archie.’

Cassie raised an eyebrow in that elder sister way she has, denoting disapproval. ‘Of course. Why not?’ There was an edge of irritation in her voice. ‘Really. I don’t know. What is it with you and Archie?’

Precisely how Archie got his squillions is a mystery to me, but then high finance has never been my chosen subject. All I know is (I have chosen not to know more) he was involved in some dot com company selling pet food, or perfume, or toys or something on-line. When it went public he became a zillionaire along with everyone else including the tea lady. Not, you understand, that I am remotely jealous. Something I constantly have to make clear to my mother.

‘See … see …’ she said the day the news broke on the financial pages. (‘See …’, such a small and insignificant word and yet so pregnant with meaning.) Just in case I should fail to appreciate every last nuance of her wrath, she thundered a pan down on the stove top.

My mother is unable to mention Archie’s name these days without adding the rider, ‘He’s worth a fortune now. You know that, don’t you?’ And of course I do know it. I know it very well and it doesn’t improve my temper, so that to save face I have to come back with a lofty little rejoinder.

‘Really, it’s of no conceivable interest to me, Mother.’ Which is totally untrue because in my heart of hearts I’m as mad as hell, in fact possibly even more pissed off than my mother. Something Danny understands perfectly.

‘I mean, the least you can expect from an ex-lover is that he’ll have the decency to remain an abject failure.’

‘It’s not like you’re asking for skid row or anything.’

‘He doesn’t have to be in the gutter.’

‘Just respectably hard up.’

‘Decently overdrawn.’

‘But not, definitely not, a fucking dot com millionaire, darling.’

Despite all the above, Fergie remained firmly unashamed of his decision to invite Archie to the party.

‘Never thought he’d accept, if you want to know the truth of it.’ He smiled amiably, clutching a pint of his beloved Butcombe to his chest. ‘I mean, these days it’s practically impossible to get him off that island of his.’

‘Of his. His?’ My mood was getting decidedly nasty. ‘You’ll be telling me next he owns the bloody thing.’

‘No, of course not. He’s just got a villa there, that’s all.’

‘Oh, a villa. Excuse me.’

‘Well, probably it’s not really a villa.’ He was backtracking now and I knew it. ‘Probably it’s just a house. A very small house. Really no more than an apartment.’

‘Bollocks. It’s a villa. You know it’s a villa. And I bet it’s got its own pool.’

‘I wouldn’t know.’

‘Yes you would. You’ll have seen pictures of it.’

‘OK. Yes. It’s got a swimming pool.’

‘And I suppose the whole thing is surrounded by olive groves.’

‘I believe I saw olive groves, yes.’

‘And I’ll warrant it’s set on the side of a hill overlooking the bay.’

‘It’s true. You can see the sea.’

‘And, no doubt, just for good measure, it has one of the terraces where you can sit out in the evening with a glass of wine in your hand and smell the bougainvillaea.’ I positively spat the ‘b’ out at him.

‘Well …’

‘And it’ll be furnished with antiques – wooden chests and expensive rugs and brass incense lamps, the sort of stuff you see in House and Garden.’ And since I was spitting blood by now I thought I might as well end with a flourish. ‘And for sure there’ll be a fucking maid who comes in every day so you don’t have to lift a finger.’

‘Ah, now there you’re wrong.’

Fergie had found something to take issue with. A relieved smile flooded across his face. ‘There’s definitely not a fucking maid.’

His head bent to mine as his voice became distinctly gossipy and conspiratorial. ‘Matter of fact he was quite open about that last time we spoke. Said things were a bit thin in that department.’

* For the record, I’ve never set foot in a Holy Communion service, this mainly thanks to my mother who neglected to send me to confirmation classes. I do, however, have a bicycle. It’s a Rock Hopper. Twenty-four gears, chrome alloy frame. A thousand quid’s worth of off-road riding.

‘Look … you want it, you don’t want it. What?’ – Lennie, like Autolycus. A snapper-up of unconsidered trifles … Again, more (oh so much more) of Lennie later.

* An interesting point is that single men generally do not possess this supportive ‘Greek chorus’, something reflected in the grim reality of the mortality figures. According to Department of Health statistics, single men living alone after the age of forty-five, particularly those single second time round, post divorce or separation, are twice as likely to die prematurely as single women in the same situation. They’re also more likely to succumb to a whole range of ‘quality of life’ illnesses – rheumatism and diabetes that sort of thing – allegedly because their evenings are more likely to be spent playing the couch potato, washing down a takeaway curry with beer, this as opposed to the spinsta, who’s probably out with friends at the gym or an exercise class, returning home to share low-fat lasagne and a pot of yoghurt.

‘How awful…’ This from Magda with a shudder. Magda won’t do any sort of exercise that requires special equipment or clothing. She does yoga (of course), some special variety known only to herself and some swami halfway up the Himalayas.

† Some late news re cats and spinsters. According to some new research, a cat can make a woman more sexy and attractive, this thanks to a parasite that can leap from little Tigger on to humans, causing a condition called Toxoplasma gondii. This condition, which may be infecting up to half the population, is good news or bad, depending on whether you’re male or female, i.e., whereas females who catch it may well begin to suffer from the sex kitten effect, men become more scruffy and grumpy. Apparently, in the most serious cases Toxoplasma gondii has been known to lead to entire personality changes – depression, antisocial behaviour, but most interesting of all schizophrenia, the last of which, it seems to me, could have serious implications for Magda. She has, after all, four cats, so there’s every chance she has, in fact, contracted Toxoplasma gondii and is now suffering from schizophrenia. This would explain her decision to marry herself.

D is for … Death, Divorce and Moving House

It may seem trite, it may seem like something straight off the self-help shelves, it may even, in its own way, appear radically revisionist in these dangerous Me-generation times. But still I believe it’s worth taking a Count Your Blessings approach to Life, focusing on the plus points rather than the minuses. In this vein, think, oh, think, oh lucky spinster, more to the point, thank your lucky stars.

Divorce will always be something that happens to other people.

You’ll never have to:

divide up: the dishwasher

the washing machine

the fridge freezer

separate out: the duvet covers

the cutlery and crockery

the garden implements

sort through: the holiday snaps

the DVDs

the CDs

the videos

You’ll never have to fight for that complete set of Jeffrey Archer.

It’s amazing how many Ds you can find to go with divorce.

‘Discord … dissent … dismemberment …’

‘Dissection … disruption … um … dissolution …’ Nathan, with his lips drawn back in the eternal faintly mocking smile as we played the game together.

That was the night he told me he was divorced; Nathan, like an old iceberg, only a small jagged part of him poking up out of the water.

‘I didn’t know.’

‘There was no reason why you should. I hadn’t told you.’ The way he leant back calmly in the plastic-strung chair, a hand curved around his chin, his face all white and bright from the street stall’s fizzing gaslamp dangling above us.

‘So who was she? How did you meet?’

But his lips were clamped closed now and the shutter had dropped down over his face. Nathan. The Man in the Iron Mask.

‘It doesn’t matter, Riley. It was a long time ago.’ Buttoned- up Nathan. Tight-lipped Nathan. Nathan, with what seemed to be a loathing of sharing this tittle-tattle about himself, as if he believed it was frivolous, idle, unnecessary gossip. ‘It’s of no consequence.’