Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman

growing up. I begged, salvaged, hoarded and squirrelled away cuttings, photographs, postcards, and from these images I built kingdoms. One of the earliest was a picture of an ordinary family having a picnic by the sea: Mum, Dad and two little girls.

I had studied that picture for clues as to what I was missing: smiles, a gingham tablecloth, potted-meat sandwiches, a father with his arm around his eldest, a mother busy with the picnic. How I had wanted to be that family. How I had wanted my father back, and to see my mother pat her hair into place when she heard his step in the evening. How I wanted him sitting at the table.

A family.

When I became a teenager the collage changed. My chosen images breathed of escape. Here was the picture of the ox-bow lake, and an aerial view of a Patagonian wilderness, pink, blue and grey-green, stolen from the National Geographic magazine. The glue had made its corners curl like apple peel. Here were the deserts, jungles and strange locations to which I ascribed magical powers to transform and enchant. Only step into them, and the girl in a cheap blue school uniform would become powerful and knowing. The more different and alien from Kingston they appeared, the stronger their fascination and the more I dreamt over them.

‘I’ll see you tonight, Charlie,’ called Ianthe downstairs.

I touched the postcards of Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters, part of a picture sequence of writers, which formed the other side of the collage. The cards were brittle and darkened from age and handling, and drawing-pins had punctured the corners, but the pinched, intelligent faces of the women remained unchanged. They knew the secrets of men and women, and how they behaved, and I imagined, too, that I was going to help myself to their knowledge and that pinched intelligence.

After I came back from Brazil, I took Nathan to meet Ianthe for the first time and, wonderfully, they fell for each other on the spot. In the kitchen Ianthe served up beef stew and carrots with mashed potato. She arranged a careful spoonful of the latter on Nathan’s plate, and said with a shy, awkward tilt of her head, ‘You’ll think I’m silly because I’ve got no brains. I’m not like that lot up on Rose’s collage.’

Nathan leant over the table. ‘I don’t go for bonnets either. Never could get the hang of them.’

Ianthe had smiled, and dished out a plate of stew for me.

Now, sneezing, I went downstairs.

‘Such a nice man…’ Ianthe watched Charlie Potter’s retreating back. ‘Such a terrible wife.’

We sat and drank tea from a tray laid with a starched cloth, china and a plate of digestive biscuits arranged in a fan. Ianthe snapped off a tiny piece of one and ate it. ‘Do you think you helped Nathan enough? Do you think that he wanted more help from you?’

This was a reasonable question from the woman who yielded up all claims to a teaching career when she married and my father gained, in one clean economical pincer movement, an unpaid secretary, counsellor and cleaner to help run his practice.

‘We helped each other.’ I was careful to make the point. ‘Both of us did. But I’ll have to get another job. As soon as I’ve sorted my severance package.’

‘Oh, work.’ Ianthe raised her shoulders in a dismissive gesture.

‘Mum, I have to earn my living. It won’t be easy – I can’t not work.’

Ianthe regarded her tea thoughtfully. ‘That’s what I mean,’ she said finally, the ace barrister wrapping up her case.

To keep me, Ianthe had been employed for fifteen years in a travel agent’s in Kingston, issuing tickets and timetables. (And I’ll have none of your snobbishness about that,’ she said, more than once. ‘It does me fine.’) She looked at me sadly. ‘I worked because I had to take on your father’s role. You didn’t have to.’

My ringless hand, which held the cup, felt odd, weightless, unfamiliar.

Ianthe warmed to the attack and bore down on me, as she always had. ‘Nathan loves you. I know he does. You married each other and that has not changed. There are the children to consider. They suffer, too, you know, even in their twenties. Look at me, Rose. A woman must think about others.’ With an angry gesture, she refilled her cup and added the milk, a widow who bore the scourge of her conviction, a sense of duty and her decades of waiting with an unsettling grace. ‘Go home, ring Nathan and make him come to his senses.’

*

As always, I ignored Ianthe’s command but fretted about doing so. She had that effect. Instead I rang Mazarine in Paris.

‘Oh, the stranger,’ she said, coldly. ‘I’ve been waiting for some sign of life. Vee and I were just saying the other day how little we hear from you.’

‘I wanted to ring you, but I’ve been busy’

‘Too busy for your oldest friend?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, you need to look at your life.’

A ball bounced back across the court. Fifteen years ago I had told Mazarine something similar when she was in danger of losing Xavier, the man she eventually married. ‘Mazarine, listen, Nathan has left me.’

There was a silence. ‘I didn’t mean that much of a change.’

‘Will you listen?’

‘You know I will.’

I was so tired that I faltered over my French – we always talked in French – and Mazarine corrected it as patiently as was possible for someone as rigorous as she. She was as quick to take a point of view. ‘You mustn’t be too hysterical, Rose. This is only an interlude. Nathan will come back.’

‘Would I want him back?’

‘Whatever happens, you will adapt.’

‘What do I do?’

‘Do? You look for a job and wait for Nathan to find out that he has made a fool of himself. Rose, you must smooth this over. Be practical and wise, it’s our role in a crazy world. An affair is not such a huge thing, you know. Of course you know, and Nathan is bound to you. He just doesn’t see it that way at the moment. What have you eaten today?’

‘A biscuit. I think.’

‘Don’t be so conventional. It’s exactly what every abandoned woman does. Be different and eat a proper meal.’

Mazarine could not see the wry smile on my lips. This was the woman who, incoherent with shock, called me after Xavier, who had been eating foie gras, had dropped dead of a heart-attack in a restaurant. (‘So serve him right,’ said Poppy. ‘Foie gras.’) I had caught the next train to Paris and fed her soup, coaxing spoonful after spoonful into her unwilling mouth.

‘I’ll try’

‘You will do more than try, and you will come and see me. By the way, I thought Vee was looking a bit dowdy last time I saw her.’

‘Vee is happy and she’s lost her sense of style. It happens.’

‘In that case, there must be an awful lot of happy English women.’

I laughed until I was forced by lack of breath to stop, and I thought how odd it was to be laughing when my life was in ruins.

Chapter Eleven

A silence between Nathan and me stretched for well over a month – and the frost of anger, incomprehension and unforgiveness crept into the crack and forced it wider. During that time, I was advised by my solicitor to accept my severance package, and the features editor of Vee’s paper rang me to ask if, in the context of the suicide of the minister’s wife, I might like to contribute a short, touchy-feely piece on being abandoned?

This polite request contained various pieces of trickery, not least the chance to expose the marital mishaps of