Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman

looked uncertainly between Hal and me. ‘It’s Rose, isn’t it?’ Her forehead puckered. ‘I’m sure we’ve met.’

‘We have,’ I said. ‘You came to a Christmas party last year that I gave at the paper.’

‘Did I?’ Her face cleared. ‘Oh, of course.’

Hal got up, kissed my cheek and followed the girl out of the dining room. ‘I’ll see you,’ he said.

If I was asked to describe my mother I would reply that Ianthe was the kind of person who held vivid pictures in her mind that were no less sharp as she grew older. Young bride, happy wife and mother, the widow whose perpetual grief ratified the above. Your dad was everything. I don’t want to spoil it. I don’t want anyone else, Rose.

At first, I agreed with her position: no one could possibly have occupied my father’s chair and I loved to hear that he was irreplaceable and unique. It was only later, when my eye had become beadier, that I saw through it without understanding precisely what hampered my mother. Given Ianthe’s innate sympathy and skilful handling of men, her domestic genius and the constant terror of not making the pounds stretch, it was a deliberate waste. And why did she send us into exile down south?

‘I thought it would be easier near the big city,’ she told me. For you, she meant, the mother pelican plucking the feathers from her own breast to cushion her young. At the time, she was in the kitchen at Pankhurst Parade, mixing dough for scones. ‘Any road, home is where you make it.’ She flipped the scones on to the griddle. The kitchen was instantly flooded with a delectable smell. When they were cooked, she cut them in two, buttered them and slid the blue and white plate over to me.

But, for Ianthe, home was not down south. Home was where the drystone walls fanning up the dales resembled fish skeletons, and trees grew so close to the beck that their branches bent over and ruffled the water. When it rained, their bark turned black.

Ianthe could make scones or a steak and kidney pudding in her sleep. Her life of domesticity was as natural as breathing. At Medlars Cottage, she had coaxed vegetables and herbs out of the kitchen garden. The potatoes and carrots bore spots and blemishes, while the peas were tiny and tasted of sugar and earth. In the kitchen, she wore an apron that enveloped her tweed skirts and pastel-coloured jumpers and was tied in a bow at the back. At the sound of my father’s step in the evening, she whisked it off and ran her hand through her hair. In those days, it was short and permed into a halo.

After my father’s death, the log-pile diminished, the gutters clogged with leaves, the garden disintegrated and my hands sprouted chilblains. When I spread my fingers, the skin cracked open. More than once, I discovered Ianthe crying over her potatoes, which had developed blight, or the too-fatty scrag end of lamb that Jo at the butcher’s had sold her, thinking he could put one over on the widow. He would not have done that when she was a wife. Yet Ianthe accepted these rapidly accumulating limitations, and emulated the images she carried in her mind. Widowhood was pain. It was sacrifice and loss.

During this time, her perm grew out, leaving her hair lank and unlovely with grief and depletion. Settled in Pankhurst Parade, where there was no money to spare for a hairdresser, she gave up cutting it and put it up, which suited her better.

She knew what was what and defended her right to tackle the world with her set of rules. ‘That woman needs a good smack,’ she declared darkly, after listening to a production of Ibsen’s The Doll’s House on the radio. ‘He won’t ever settle,’ she said of Hal, her mouth set in a way that infuriated me. ‘Men like him don’t.’

We had quite an argument about it. From her standpoint, Ianthe waxed wrathful and terrible. But it was no use. I was deeply in love, wild with passion and the excitement of the venture into a new world, Hal’s world.

And during that third year at Oxford, my energy ran hot and strong and I worked myself into a stupor. ‘How nice to welcome her back,’ wrote my tutor. ‘We thought she had strayed on to other paths.’ In the spring before finals, I attended interviews for jobs. One was for a junior position in a press association where I was invited to discuss the changing nature of news. I argued that as hard news was now conveyed by radio and television, the papers should mop up other areas of interest. ‘It’s the age of the feature,’ I concluded, which seemed to go down well as I was offered a job – possibly because no one else would have been foolish enough to accept the meagre salary.

Of course Ianthe disapproved. She wanted me to opt for a steadier profession, like teaching. She did not trust or understand the media. At that period, she was the thorn in my flesh that pricked and jabbed, but I paid it no attention.

I got my first.

‘Right,’ said Hal, after the all-night celebration party. ‘We’re going on the Big One. The real expedition.’ He was feeding me with a hangover cure, teaspoon by teaspoon. Even though my head ached, my stomach heaved and a drum beat the retreat in my head, I watched his every movement with aching love. Above me, there was a blaze of candles, and angels swooped on feathery wings.

The teaspoon was inserted between my lips and I bit it. ‘Where precisely?’

Hal whipped away the teaspoon and kissed me. ‘Wait and see.’ He licked my chin and kissed me again, and we shared the hangover remedy in a very efficient way.

I was thinking about that time, when Nathan rang and asked to meet.

It was a hot, heavy day. I walked across the park to St Benedicta’s and parked myself in front of the Madonna dedicated to victims of violence. Did you overlook me? I interrogated her silently. I know you’re busy and death is epidemic but I’m selfish enough to wish you hadn’t.

I lit my usual candle and thought about it. But it’s fine, I reassured the wide, painted eyes. I have taken the point. With all the horrors you have to deal with I quite understand that the troubles of one no-longer- quite-so-young woman do not matter very much. I can cope.

I took the bus up to Mayfair and met Nathan in a bar just off Berkeley Square. It was an area where shops sold either expensive briefcases and credit-card holders or newspapers in various languages, but nothing in between.

Nathan was late and arrived with his executive expression pinned into place. He stacked his briefcase under the stool. ‘Sorry. Budget meetings.’

‘How’s it all going?’

‘Fair to middling. The Sunday paper is still in a bit of a dip.’

‘Are you doing any promotions?’

‘Well, that’s just…’ He looked at me sharply. ‘We didn’t come here to discuss the paper.’

‘No.’

‘I saw you at the dinner.’

‘Did you? I didn’t think you had.’ I added, with only the faintest tremor in my voice, ‘You seemed to be enjoying yourself.’

‘Did I?’ he replied. Automatic pilot’ A second or two elapsed. Nathan blew at the foam on his coffee. It spattered the counter. ‘Who was the man you were talking to?’

I mopped the counter with a paper napkin. ‘Lawrence Thurber, the theatre critic’ I considered my next sentence. ‘Or do you mean Hal Thorne, who I bumped into afterwards?’

Nathan became fixated by a lorry backing up the road. ‘Hal Thorne.’ He sighed. ‘Well, as you said, that was a long time ago.’ He kept his eye trained on the lorry. ‘I’ve been thinking…’ Another great pause. ‘Now that I’ve had a chance to think things over, I can see that I overreacted… to him.’

This was Nathan at his most disingenuous and I began to tremble. So much time had been wasted on the subject. For nothing. ‘Oh, Nathan. Do you know what you did? Introducing a great black spectre?’ My nail dug into my thumb. ‘Now do you believe me that, very early on, Hal disappeared? He went because I was happy’ I peered at him. ‘With you, Nathan.’

He winced. ‘I could never quite rid myself of the suspicion that your point of reference was not me but him.’ He stirred his coffee and pushed it away. ‘That’s not true. It was fine to begin with but when you started working I felt you were telling me that you weren’t happy’

‘Nathan, all I wanted was to use my mind. That was not a criticism of you.’

‘It was natural, I suppose.’ He sighed. ‘Then I began thinking about my own life, and later…’

‘Later what?’

‘I met Minty.’

‘And she came with no baggage?’