Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman

a wet, dispiriting summer, too, and a dank autumn, and one day a van stopped outside Medlars Cottage.

‘These nice men are coming to take our furniture,’ a red-eyed and now wraith-like Ianthe announced. ‘We don’t need it, Rose, and we will have a little extra money for a new home. We’re going to a new home. Isn’t that a lovely surprise? Don’t worry, it will be fun.’ She held my hand tight as the men tip-tupped our possessions over their shoulders and carried them out to the van.

Tears streamed down her face and every line of her body shouted protest. Yet… ‘Rose,’ she proclaimed, through those tears in her trained way, ‘isn’t it lucky we have a new home to go to? We have lots to be grateful for.’

I looked from my mother to the rapidly emptying room. I had not realized that the skirting-board sagged, that the paintwork was so shabby, or that the floorboard under the window was rotten.

Why had I not realized, either, that Ianthe told lies?

How’s my little chickaninny? I heard my father murmur, deep in my head. I wanted him to be there, I wanted Medlars Cottage to remain ours, even with the cracks, and space, and emptiness. ‘But there’s nothing to be grateful for,’ I cried.

‘Shush.’ Ianthe drew me close to her body. I felt her hip bones press into me, smelt clean cotton and soap. ‘Shush, now’

But fathers came and went, homes were emptied, mothers were duplicitous. Despite the council’s best endeavours, death could not be ordered into obedience and the bright, scrubbed surfaces of my home hid secret caches of snow and ice.

For the first week books, sent by publishers hoping to bypass the system, continued to arrive. I did not bother to open the packages for I could guess what they were. The heavy biography. The large illustrated cookery book. A manuscript.

By the second week news had got round. The packages dwindled and, soon, the postman no longer rang the bell.

Minty wrote me a letter.

Dear Rose,

You won’t believe me when I tell you that I did not know what Timon planned until very recently. However, presented with the idea, I was not going to turn it down. I reasoned that you had had your turn, had your day in the sun, and now it was someone else’s, mine, and there was a natural justice in that. I know that natural justice is a concept you believe in and I hope one day that you will acknowledge that I made the right choice for me. But the purpose of this letter is to tell you that Nathan did not know. I miss our conversations.

Minty

I read and reread that letter, with its so-called honesty, its specious explanation and breathtaking assumptions, which were a mask for Minty’s hungers. Rotten fruit and rotten meat: she disgusted me and I rejoiced in my disgust.

I could not put off any longer telling Ianthe and I rang her up, got into the car and drove over to Kingston.

‘Cheap and cheerful, Rose, just what we need,’ had been Ianthe’s masterly verdict, delivered with typical Mrs Miniver good cheer, on Pankhurst Parade. Number fourteen was sited in one of several identical roads in the housing estate outside the town. Why Kingston? The reasons for Ianthe’s uprooting both of us from Yelland to down south were too complicated for either of us to attempt to disentangle at the time. Cheap it had been, cheerful, no.

Today, dressed in a Viyella shirt and wool skirt, she was sitting in her chair with her hands folded. This was Ianthe’s waiting pose. You see it in paintings: a female form – it is more often than not female – composed on a chair, or a bench, or a sofa, waiting for orders, or for life to begin or be over.

For such a busy woman, Ianthe had an extraordinary gift for it – waiting for me, waiting for a meal to cook, waiting for God in church in a hat and a tweed coat, waiting for events to right themselves, providing she observed the rules. Patience is as patience does, she said.

Unusually, she was pale and unmade-up, hair not properly seen to. ‘Tell me what’s wrong, Rose.’

I bent over to kiss her, sat down and took her hands in mine. ‘I’m in trouble.’

‘I thought as much.’ Ianthe’s fingers dug into my hands. ‘Not the children?’

‘No.’ I had to force myself to go on. ‘It’s Nathan. He’s decided to leave me for another woman. Actually for Minty, my assistant.’ I swallowed. ‘And I’ve lost my job… also to Minty.’

Ianthe shook her head. ‘I think you’ll have to tell me again.’

‘Nathan w-wants his freedom. He thinks that Minty will give it to him.’

She struggled to absorb the news, and tried to equate it with the image of the son-in-law she cherished.

It was a family joke that Nathan and Ianthe defied every mother-in-law cliche, for they loved each other. On holiday Nathan sent her extra-sized postcards, brought home presents of chunky jewellery and honey in china pots with overweight bees embossed on them. He fussed over her pension, arranged her tax and insisted on paying for medical insurance, of which she disapproved. ‘I don’t want to be a nuisance, and I don’t like private doctors,’ she told me. ‘I don’t like their hands. Too manicured.’

She dabbed at the wisps of hair at her neck. ‘You were always so busy, Rose. Never any time. Always on the run.’

I concede that we can only see events from our own point of view, but her reaction stung. ‘Is that all you can say?’

‘This is terrible.’ Ianthe leant back in the chair. She looked hurt and, suddenly, worn out by expectations that had turned out to be increasingly cruel in their disappointments. I got up and stood by the window. ‘That awful girl.’

That did not surprise me. On the one occasion Minty and Ianthe had met at a Sunday lunch, Minty had been unable to deal with Ianthe. ‘I don’t do older people,’ I overheard her explaining to a friend on the office phone. ‘I don’t get them.’ And Ianthe had displayed a surprising blind spot. ‘People like her make such a point of being youthful, which is very selfish. It makes the rest of us feel so redundant.’

‘Rose, you have talked to Nathan, tried to sort it out?’

‘Nathan did not give me much choice.’

Her tone sharpened. ‘Marriages don’t end just like that. You’ll see. Men are such funny creatures. They need a lot of looking after.’

‘That’s bad luck on Nathan, then, Mum. Minty’s only interested in number one.’

‘Perhaps Nathan needs reminding of how much he means to you. He’s had a little rush of blood to the head and, at the moment, he can’t see straight.’

‘Hardly to the head, Mum.’

‘You know what I mean.’

I did. Ianthe had been taught her views by her mother, who had been taught by her mother before her, women who had scrubbed their doorsteps, made their own bread, had their babies at home. She had bowed her head and made it her life’s work to obey their strictures.

The doorbell rang and I went to answer it. With surprising speed, Ianthe got to her feet and nipped into the downstairs cloakroom where she kept her emergency supplies of lipstick and powder, emerging half a minute later with smoothed hair and orange-pink lips.

Charlie Potter was delivering the bridge timetable. I observed my mother flirt gently and declare that, yes, she would be on time and she was planning to make a plate of his favourite egg sandwiches.

While they talked, I went upstairs to my old room, which remained unchanged but had a trick of growing smaller each time I went into it. At this rate, it would not be long before the white candlewick bedspread and the lamp with the pink shade dwindled to the size of doll’s-house furniture.

Downstairs Charlie Potter gave a belly laugh and my mother accompanied it with a discreet chuckle. It was a nice sound, Ianthe’s innocent flirting.

My childhood seemed very far away and I needed to grab something of it, anything. I opened the cupboard in which Ianthe stored my childish, but not discarded, objects. Dust filmed the boxes and there was a dry, musty scent of decayed lavender. Propped up at the back was a collage of newspaper cuttings and pictures from magazines and portraits of favoured authors pasted on to hardboard. It had occupied me for years and colonized the room. Ianthe hated it, but it had been my way of marking who I was and the interminably slow passage of