Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman

She sat down at her desk and switched on her terminal. ‘We should hold our firepower.’

This was the first time that we had openly disagreed on policy, and I was puzzled. ‘Minty, I don’t know what is going on in your private life but you could do as I ask and not treat me to the fallout. If you feel differently, we can discuss it later.’

‘Fallout?’ she queried.

I glanced at my watch. ‘I don’t care what we call it, just get on with it. Please go and talk to Steven.’

Phones rang, computers whined, the post trolley, pushed by Charlie, swayed through the desks. The walls of the building shut out goodness knew what weather. Scowling, Minty got to her feet – she reminded me of Poppy when she had been outflanked. My lips twitched. ‘We’ve got off to bad start. Let’s be friends and then thrash out the policy. Or, rather, get the pages to bed.’

She thought for a moment. ‘That’s the trouble with you, Rose. You bring things down to the personal. It’s very female.’

‘So do you.’

‘Not like you.’

It was a truce. Of sorts.

At the end of the day, Minty got up from her desk, put on her jacket and said goodnight. She did not look back as she clattered out on the glace kitten heels.

By Friday, a royal had been photographed in a compromising position and a row was ding-donging over privacy. How far? How much? Whose?

The news desk in the goldfish bowl seethed and hummed. When I arrived, dead on nine o’clock, Maeve Otley was hunched over her desk, white and speechless. A bad rheumatism day. I made her a cup of tea and took it over but it was not the moment to commiserate. Charlie delivered a stack of post and a couple of boxes of books.

Minty rang. ‘I can’t come in. I’ve got a… migraine.’

This was unlike her. ‘Shall I phone later to check if you’re OK?’

‘No.’ She sounded choked. ‘Don’t do that. No need.’

‘I hope you feel better.’

But Minty had put down the phone.

In planning terms, summer was on the doorstep, and I spent the day teasing out ideas for the June pages. Ringing the changes was almost impossible on the familiar categories of ‘travel’ and ‘holiday reading’, but I was toying with the idea of a section on books ‘to be read for a second time’.

Meanwhile, for this week’s travel slot, we had covered books on India, Thailand, Greece, HalThorne’s A Thousand Olive Trees, of course, and a thick, illustrated travelogue devoted to Rome.

Long ago, when I had been Rose-the-traveller, I had gone to Rome.

*

The sun shone on my bare arms and boiled the sweat on my back. My feet spread damply inside my cheap sandals and I knew I would get blisters. I did not care. I was sixteen, in Rome, and in love for the first time-with being there, out of England. Rome was noisy, filled with smells – coffee, exhaust, sweat, hot buildings – and its flux of life, noise and sensation flowed through me, intensely, luxuriously felt.

I was in Rome. I was intoxicated.

Life, wrote Virginia Woolf, was a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope. Oh, no, it was not. Not for some. Some of us lived in a plain brown envelope. It took the trip to Rome to see the luminous halo, the semi-transparent one.

Ianthe nearly me talked out of it: I did not have any proper summer clothes or shoes, and my underwear was not good enough, she said, unless I wanted to wear my gym knickers and plimsolls.

A godmother had taken pity on Ianthe’s penniless widowhood, not to mention her hungry, sensation-starved daughter (who had read her E. M. Forster and reflected seriously on Lucy Honeychurch’s experiences) and paid for a place on the school expedition. Ianthe clicked her tongue and did her I-am-a-Yorkshire-woman-I-am-not-a-cause- for-people-to-patronize-and-lighten-their-consciences bit. I had been forced to abandon Lucy Honeychurch and to adopt Jane Eyre: ‘Please, please, Mother… “Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless?”’ before she ungraciously allowed my godmother to get out her cheque book.

Perhaps it was really my lack of wardrobe that bothered Ianthe but it was unlikely: Ianthe, in make-do-and- mend mode, could fashion a dress from a sack. I sought a better explanation. I knew from my reading that mothers found it hard to let go of their adored children. They dreaded the end of their womanly role and death beckoning, the logical finale. This left me with a moral quandary. Should I sacrifice my yearning to give back my mother her role?

I calculated she could manage without it for a week. In return, I decided to pay three pounds into the charity box, which was then a considerable sum and, therefore, a conscience appeaser.

Lips tight, Ianthe set about preparing my wardrobe between working and running the house. Scrupulous as ever, she washed all my clothes by hand and dried them over the clothes-horse in the kitchen.

The day before I left, she set up the ironing-board. A ham-bone boiled on the stove, and the kitchen grew steamy with starch and stock. The radio played softly. Every so often, she dipped her hand into a jug of water, and shook drops over the ironing-board. The iron bit into the material with a hiss. When she had finished, she folded each garment with exquisite neatness.

I watched dreamily. She was wearing her everyday flat shoes, polished to within an inch of their lives, and there was a careful darn in her stocking, but her hair had escaped its coil and a frown puckered her forehead. Every so often, she glanced up at me, the movement emphasizing her extreme thinness. I knew what she was thinking. She will get ideas above her station. My mother had been so careful not to raise my expectations.

‘Rose,’ she cut sharply into my reverie, ‘don’t just sit there, let down that dress. And don’t look like that.’

She was not taking her defeat lightly, nor did I expect her to, and my victory was too precarious to jeopardize. I pulled out the sewing-box and set about the dress, which had already been rehemmed twice. I cut and snipped and eventually the remaining spare inch of material, which was of a much darker colour, had been tacked into place. I held up the dress. ‘It’ll look awful.’

‘Beggars can’t be choosers.’ Ianthe was at her most maddening, but her eyes were cloudy with distress. This was final proof, if she needed it, that I was growing beyond her reach.

So, there I was: a creature in a seersucker dress with an obviously let-down hem, from a cool, wet island, without a history of my own, bewitched by a city that had almost too much.

There they were: the great fontane of the Trevi and the Barcaccia, or the more playful ones, like the Fontana delle Tartarughe with its bronze tortoises, which I found tucked behind the ghetto, and at street corners the intimate fontanelle. Plump women reclined with their breasts displayed, sea gods grasped tridents, nymphs crouching at their feet, while dolphins, seahorses, lions and amphorae emerged from bronze and stone. Creatures of myth and legend had been summoned from the four quarters of the world.

Those sleek, gleaming men, women and animals had nothing to do but ensure that water was tossed from shell and mouth, and how happy they seemed to me as they guarded the arcs of water in the sun. But I also figured, with a little help from Keats, that they were happy because nothing ever happened to them.

Our hotel was in the via Elisabetta, on a corner, and its top storey almost collided with its opposite neighbour’s. It was a simple place, with hard beds, white cotton covers and a tiny niche in each bedroom that housed a plastic statue of the Virgin, which we had been warned not to touch. ‘I dare you, I dare you,’ cried Marty, my roommate. Marty was going to be beautiful. She came from a better-off family and her wardrobe was extensive. She was contemptuous of me and, because I feared her, I accepted her dare and hung the door key off the Virgin’s plaster hand.

Later that night, I lay and listened to the traffic snarl past and waited for Marty to go to sleep. When I was sure that she had, I slid from under the rough sheets, crept over to the Virgin and removed the key. Mother of God, forgive me. I knew not what I did. Where had I read that? In the half-light, jeering Marty slept, almost like an angel.