Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman

dirty, dusty, happy, we were on our way home. In Kieros we sat under a clump of olive trees and waited for the bus to take us north to Athens, and ate bread and feta cheese. The sun blazed and dry harvest dust drifted in the hot air. Up in the valley, laden donkeys toiled up the slope and poppies bloomed at the edges of the fields and by the road. I leant back on my rucksack and thought that I had never seen anywhere so harshly beautiful: grey-green olives, stony scrub, scarlet poppies and the blue of the sky. He chose that beautiful, wonderful, hot moment to tell me that he planned to stay in England for the time being. Why? I asked. He got out his penknife and scrambled to his feet. You know why, he said, with his back turned.

He excised a twig with a wedge of bark at the end and presented it to me. Cosseted in dampened tissue, it lay hidden in my rucksack until we got home. I mixed earth and compost in one of Ianthe’s pots, but not too rich for a tree that likes heat and dust, and planted it. Olive trees didn’t grow in this climate – Ianthe was suspicious and unhelpful – hadn’t I noticed?

But I persevered and, one day, two buds were pushing through.

Now I pinched a leaf between my fingers. A breeze had sprung up and, depleted by illness, it made me shiver.

As I paced the garden, depression settled over me like a cold fog. In the absence of my care, the Iceberg had grown thin and attenuated. The Buff Beauty was half buried by the Solanum and I had failed to go to its rescue. My roses were unused to neglect and poured over their stems, feeding on the infant buds, was an undulating sheath of greenfly. I stopped, seized a branch of ‘Ispahan’ and, not caring that the thorns drove into me, ran my finger and thumb down it. That was the way to kill green-fly.

A yellow and green stain flared over my fingers. I bent down and wiped them on the grass. Then I went indoors, closed and locked the french windows behind me.

I did not want to go back into the garden. I cannot explain, but I felt it had let me down.

Ianthe made her weekly call. ‘Have you talked to Nathan? Have you?’

Robert Dodd rang (calls charged at twenty pounds). Nathan had asked him to discuss the separation details with me, the settlement of which was going to be expensive.

Poppy rang from God knew where to report that she was alive.

Mazarine rang from Paris. ‘You must come.’

‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to go anywhere.’ I looked out of the window at the street, which appeared unimaginably wide, and felt my knees tremble. The more time went by, the less I felt capable of negotiating the outside. ‘I’m finding it difficult to leave the house.’

‘Listen to me. You can. It will help you to forget the terrible Nathan and your little job.’

‘It was not a little job.’

‘If you say so, chere?’.

Curator of a left-bank art gallery, Mazarine still cherished her high intellectual standards and the tussle between her exacting vision and my populist leanings had given us much pleasure over the years. According to the flyer she sent over, the current show was a deconstruction of the mythology of underwear.

I made a huge effort and pulled myself together. ‘How are the knickers?’

‘Stop it,’ she hissed down the phone. ‘I will expect you next Thursday’

*

Nathan did not like Mazarine. At least, not in the days before I went to work when Mazarine and I spoke so often and were so close. ‘Not my type,’ he said, which was nonsense, for Mazarine had brains, looks and the kind of outlook Nathan relished in women. His dislike was because Mazarine was associated with Oxford and Hal, the bit of my life he had had nothing to do with.

Nathan’s dislike did not stop us making regular trips to Paris to stay with her. (After Nathan was promoted, we opted to stay in hotels, which steadily became more luxurious.) In the Mazarine days, we piled the children into the back of the car. They punctuated the journey with cries of Are we there yet?’ When the questions turned to wails, which they always did, I executed a precarious manoeuvre into the back and sat between them in a rubble of toys and biscuits, holding them close and shouting to Nathan above their noise and that of the engine.

One particular trip we left the children – Sam, thirteen, Poppy, eleven – with Ianthe. The car sped south down the autoroute from Calais and, in the adult peace, I brought up the subject of returning to work.

The effect on Nathan was instant. He frowned, hunched over the wheel, did his disappearing act into himself. ‘Why? Aren’t you happy?’ He glared ahead. ‘You wanted the children so badly. Why not look after them? We’re managing.’

‘You wanted them too.’

I sensed his struggle, against what I was not sure. ‘My mother looked after me,’ he said at last.

My mother-in-law was not a subject I wished – ever – to pursue. ‘And mine did too, just as well, only she combined it with work.’

He transferred his attention to overtaking a lorry loaded with livestock. ‘An alternative would to be work from home. Would you consider that?’

I was puzzled. ‘How strange, Nathan. I had no idea that you would be opposed. I thought you would encourage me.’

The suggestion of any shortfall angered him. ‘I know that plenty of mothers work. I’m not against. Far from it. But should you? We’re talking about us. The older they grow, the more the children will need you.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ I snapped. ‘There is a compromise. If you feel so strongly, you look after them.’ He did not reply. Ah. Not so keen to do that, are you?’

‘It’s not you working,’ he repeated, ‘of course not. It’s the children I’m thinking about.’

‘And me?’ But Nathan had shaken me. I had considered every angle of working in a rational manner, and it stung that Nathan assumed I had not thought of the children first.

‘Why do you feel the need? Are you missing something?’

The flat reaches of the Pas de Calais flashed by. ‘Isn’t that rather an odd question? Can you imagine not having your work? Nathan, I’m getting older, too, not just the children, and if I’m not careful it will be too late. Is that so very selfish?’

‘No,’ he answered, the closed look in place. ‘Of course not. It’s just that I thought we were happy as we are.’

‘But we are,’ I cried. ‘Nothing alters that.’

He asked me what I was thinking of doing, and I told him that I had ambitions to be a books editor on a paper. ‘If I work my way up.’

‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘That’s not a job. No, I don’t mean that – I don’t know what I mean.’

I shouted ‘Bloody hell’ back and ordered him to stop the car at the next lay-by, which he did. I wrenched open the door and got out. A family was sitting at one of the benches the French are so good at supplying, eating a midday picnic. A stream skirted the edge of the area, flanked by a sward of grass. I walked down to it and stood looking at the water. Someone had thrown in a child’s disposable nappy and the white plastic eddied dismally in the current.

Nathan came up behind me. ‘I didn’t mean it about it not being a job. Of course it is.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t patronize me.’

‘I’m not,’ he was genuinely bewildered, ‘but you have to consider who is to look after the children and if all the upheaval would be worth it.’

I was icy with rage. ‘I’m so angry with you – I can’t remember when I’ve been so angry. We might as well go home. Now,’ I added.

Nathan ran his hand over his hair and scratched the back of his neck. ‘It’s taken me by surprise, that’s all. I don’t like surprises.’

‘It’s not so surprising.’

‘It’s just that we seemed so settled, and it was working.’ With his hands he mimed the shape of a box. ‘We all fitted in so well.’

I moved away towards a group of poplar trees that soared skywards and shouted at him, furiously, ‘I’m allowed to change. Everyone changes. Even you.’