The Desperate Diary of a Country Housewife Page 11

  Monday April 30th

  Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive.…I’m beginning to lose track of the official story line, as delivered to readers of the Sunday Times, and it’s making me nervous. Also—I was having coffee with a bunch of the mothers yesterday, and there happened to be a father there, too. For some reason. Don’t know why. Most unusual. He asked me point blank—and out of nowhere—if I was the person writing the column in the Sunday Times, and my mind went dead. I heard my heart beating inside my ears, and I literally could not speak.

  ‘It’s quite interesting, actually,’ he said. Which was nice. ‘I think she’s finding it very difficult.’

  Finally, I said something. I can’t even remember what, but I know my face was numb.

  The mothers didn’t seem to be listening, luckily. They all looked pretty blank, and I’m fairly certain it passed off OK. But what about next time? Or the time after that? The coffee mothers are the only adults I speak to these days, from one week to the next. Not only that—and sometimes it’s so hard to remember this when I’m mid scribbling about them—but they’re real people: decent, kind, friendly; nicer than I will ever be. If they somehow learned that I was…I don’t even want to think about it, actually.

  Got a crazy letter from a reader last week, advising me to join a church group and to concentrate much harder on the state of my soul. I wondered if she’d somehow guessed about Darrell.

  I wish I’d never mentioned him at all now. Not because of Fin. Fin doesn’t even realise I’m writing the column—which, in dark, illogical moments, makes me feel extraordinarily bitter and sad, in spite of the fact that he couldn’t know, since I’ve never told him, and he only ever reads the Observer.

  Anyway, I didn’t bother to reply to the reader’s letter. Hardly ever do, in fact. Mostly because people who write to newspapers tend to be lunatics, in my experience, and therefore much better left alone. Got a letter from one reader a few years ago, when I was doing a stint on the Daily Mail. It said ‘WHO THE HELL ARE YOU to comment on a Minister’s toilet habits69?’ But I hadn’t. Never. Not once. In any article I had ever written.

  Anyway. Where was I? Readers’ letters. Readers’ wives. God knows.

  I’m in the bathroom again. As usual. I’ve moved my computer in here now. And I’m wishing I’d never mentioned Darrell in the column. I’m wishing I’d never started the column…Christ, I’m wishing all sorts of things.

  Tuesday

  Fin was pretty good about the baby. He was, actually. God knows, there was so much we didn’t say. I broke it to him over the telephone, in the end. Actually I left a message on his mobile. Such is the state of our relationship. Couldn’t stand the suspense any longer. I was bloody terrified. Apart from anything else he’s always been pretty clear he didn’t want any more children.

  ‘Guess what, Fin, turns out I’m pregnant,’ I said. ‘ Better yet, there’s a more than sporting chance that you’re the daddy!’ Didn’t say that, of course. Said I had some urgent news for him. Good news, I hoped, and could he call? I think my voice must have sounded a bit weird, because he guessed, just from that. Called back much faster than usual and made a valiant effort to sound pleased. He made a joke about school fees and about me hurrying up writing the next bestseller. Or maybe I did. Maybe I made that joke. I’m only a week off finishing the novel, as it happens. So—

  Fin asked when the baby was due and I said I didn’t know. I don’t think I do know, actually. I think I’ve forgotten. It doesn’t matter, anyway. What the hell does it matter, exactly when it’s due? There are still months and months to go.

  May 7th

  Darrell called. The children were at school, and I was asleep in the bathroom. I’ve brought the telephone in here now, also a foam seat, bought for ‘sleepovers’, which folds out into a child-size…Anyway, Darrell wanted to know if I’d heard anything more from Potato Head. I haven’t. So. He asked me how I was, and I said fine. I’m fine. He suggested meeting up again and I said maybe. But we can’t, of course. Not now.

  Anyway. Fin’s back on Friday. It’ll be nice. I wish he’d come home.

  May 9th

  Finished the novel this morning! Great moment. Usually I go out and get pissed with anyone and everyone willing to join me. Trouble is, of course, I can’t drink at the moment. Plus I’ve got no one to get drunk with. Also, I feel so ill I can’t really tell if the novel’s any good. I certainly remember thinking it was, before all this madness began. But that seems like a lifetime ago now. When did all this madness begin? Or has it not even begun? I don’t think so. What the fuck am I talking about?

  I think I spend too much time alone.

  Thursday May 10th

  Very late

  Poor little Ripley. Poor darling little Dora. Hard to tell what they make of all this, but they’re being so sweet and brave and kind. This evening, after I’d kissed them both goodnight, Dora appeared at the bathroom door with the microwave in her arms. She could hardly see over the top. And her eyes looked so big and round with worry, I know she was trying not to cry. She said, ‘We can eat our tea and stuff up here with you tomorrow. And we can eat breakfast. Ripley said he wouldn’t mind, either. He’s going to help me bring all the breakfast stuff up tomorrow.’ I didn’t know what to say. I hugged her, and thanked her, and tried to reassure her, and somehow managed not to blub until after she was gone.

  I don’t deserve her. I don’t deserve either of them. Oh God. I’m going to be sick again.

  May 11th

  More blubbing. It’s funny—you think you know yourself. You think of yourself as strong, maybe, and functional. I think I did. And then something comes along. It was the same when Mum was dying. Turned out I wasn’t the person I thought I was. In fact I was nothing at all. Nerve ends. It’s all I am now. A hideous bundle of spitting, blubbing, puking nerve ends.

  I was in the car park at Waitrose this morning, turning over similar happy thoughts, and trying, feebly, to summon the energy to get out of the car. But I couldn’t. I just sat in there and blubbed. And blubbed. And blubbed. About everything—Fin, Mum, Hatty, the baby. A friend of mine who topped himself back in the early nineties; a friend of mine whose sister-in-law had a nervous breakdown about the time we were leaving school; the death of Princess Di; the cruelty of bullfighting; the pointlessness of the First World War…It was all getting pretty out of hand, and then I felt somebody’s eyes on me and I glanced up; because of all the crying I couldn’t quite focus at first, but she was standing right in front of the car, looking directly at me. And I suppose, at that point, I wanted to talk to somebody—to anybody. So I smiled. More or less. And as I smiled I recognised her—or we recognised each other. All at once she scowled, turned and scuttled off.

  It was Rachel Healthy-Snax. Running away from me. I sat there for another few minutes, blubbing with renewed fervour. I don’t think I have ever felt quite so ill or so lonely in my life.

  And then there was a little tap on the window. I almost jumped out my skin.

  It was Rachel again. Waving tissues and a packet of Jaffa cakes. In spite of all the vile things I’ve written about her here, I was never so pleased to see anybody. I could have dropped my pasty, metropolitan head onto her burgundy-fleece-covered shoulder and wept with gratitude.

  I managed not to do that. Just. Instead I smiled at her again and opened the car door. She climbed in.

  Somehow I found myself telling her all about Fin and Hatty. It was strange because it was the first time I had ever spoken about it to anyone and I hadn’t realised quite how much it hurt. Not until it all came juddering out. She was so kind. Just so incredibly kind. She let me go on, blubbering and jabbering, I have no idea for how long.

  She told me it had taken her five or six years to settle down to life in the country, which came as a surprise. She always looks so at home. Also, she told me that her own Jeremy Healthy-Snax had had an affair when they first moved to Paradise. I could hardly believe it—and I think she spott
ed incredulity in my face, because she laughed.

  ‘He doesn’t look the sort, I know,’ she said. And I quickly said that he did—or, rather, that he didn’t—or that maybe there wasn’t a sort, and she nodded very calmly.

  She said, ‘They’re all shits.’ It sounded amazingly shocking.

  I asked her if Jeremy’s girlfriend had been in London, and she shook her head. I also asked her if the girlfriend had originally been a friend of hers (Rachel’s) and she shrugged, and looked quite angry for a minute. She said, ‘You have to be careful though, don’t you?…It doesn’t matter now, anyway. It’s in the past. But I must admit I do like to keep a close eye on him. Even in London.’ She looked at me. There was a gleam of something in her eyes—possibly a small hint of sadism: ‘I’ve got him calling home a couple of times each night now. Sometimes even more. If he’s out to dinner, he has to put me on the line with whoever it is he’s dining with. I don’t care how difficult it is for him. That’s the rule. And he knows, if he doesn’t call in, I’ll be onto him.’

  It shook me a bit, that did. Made me almost feel sorry for Jeremy. In fact, looking back, I think it may even have cheered me up, which is a bit worrying. In any case, after that strange moment of intimacy we broke open the Jaffa cakes and talked about other things. She didn’t mention her children or their vegetable intake once. She told me about her days as an accountant in London, and it was pretty clear from the way her face came alive that she had enjoyed it. I asked her if she ever missed it. She said ‘sometimes’: when it was raining, and the children were at school and Jeremy was away. She said there were times when she wondered…But she didn’t say about what. She sounded wistful and terribly lonely, suddenly, and it made me wonder about all the women down here—all the smiling lady-mums, who gave up work to wheel trolleys around Waitrose in Paradise. Perhaps they’re all secretly as wretched as each other. Or as wretched as I am. I wonder.

  Anyway, Rachel isn’t the sort to dwell long on her own wretchedness, I don’t think. She changed the conversation pretty quickly, and instead told me two excellent pieces of gossip. First, that the mother of a sad little girl called Delilah, who’s in Dora’s class, had a boob job on her husband’s credit card last year, two days after he walked out on her. (He left her for a travelling masseuse who taught ‘relaxation techniques’ to City execs at their desks.) Apparently the wound went septic and she had to spend last Christmas in emergency surgery having the implants taken out.

  Second, and even more interesting: she told me that Clare Gower had an affair with Mr Robinson-Horrible a few years ago, and that everyone (except me) knows about it. Mr Robinson-Loathsome became obsessed and when Clare dumped him he’d started stalking her, calling her thirty times a night, arriving at her doorstep in tears, inundating her with bunches of flowers and so on. There had been one night when the police had apparently been called. Or so Rachel claimed. Before she changed her mind. Suddenly she couldn’t remember if it had been Clare or Robinson-Loathsome who’d been the stalker, and whether it was Mrs Robinson-Loathsome who’d needed to call the police. At any rate, she was definite that the police had been involved, and that one way or another Clare Gower had made a tremendous fool of herself.

  ‘I don’t like to say too much,’ Rachel said, her face all knotted up suddenly. ‘But the thing about Clare is she has one or two personality problems. A lot of people round here don’t like her very much.’

  I bumped into Clare about an hour later. She was standing at the fish counter when I finally made it into Waitrose. She was standing, staring blankly at the fish, and I’ve never seen anyone look so miserable in my life. She transformed in a flash when she saw me. Pinged right back to Perky. And so did I, I suppose. I hadn’t seen her for a few days—she said she’d been away visiting her sister—and I was pleased to bump into her. So pleased that I even suggested we had lunch together after we finished shopping. But she said she couldn’t. She said the beastly money-maker was at home and waiting to be fed. Poor woman.

  COUNTRY MOLE

  Sunday Times

  I was going to be perfect; a perfect, merry, country mother who only bought food from farmers’ markets; who taught her children the difference between mushrooms and toadstools; who filled the house with home-made jam and rescued baby hedgehogs, and clean, wholesome, high-pitched laughter and—oh sugar-and-shoot. It’s been nine months we’ve been living in rural paradise and it’s no good pretending things have panned out exactly as I’d envisaged.

  The hex upon me continues to gather momentum, and I now retch at the faintest whiff of the inside of our magnificent dream home. Sometimes, if the breeze is right, even the outside makes me want to vomit. Though nobody else seems to notice it, the place reeks of stale fertiliser and rotting metal. And for about a week now, I’ve surrendered to it. I’m eating, sleeping and working in the back bathroom, out of view of the witch’s house next door and presumably, therefore, beyond her hexing power. It’s the only room in the house not yet to have been renovated, and it’s the only place I can breathe without being sick.

  Actually this room stinks too, according to the children: of stale food and grime and rotting lemon peel. I can’t notice it, but they’re probably right, since my anti-smelling hex makes artificial fragrances of any kind repulsive to me now—soap, shampoo, deodorant, clothes and dishwashing powder included. There was an advertisement on television not long ago, featuring a TV chef whose name I’ve forgotten. ‘Citrus!’ he cries, squeezing out a lemon with his bare hand, making it all seem lovely. ‘Nature’s cleanser!’ In desperation, I’ve bought sacks of the bloody things. I don’t know which bit of nature his ‘citrus’ was supposed to be cleansing, but it’s certainly not cleansing anything in Paradise. And now there are lime pips all over the bathroom floor.

  My husband, fresh from the Cannes Film Festival, is now on the Isle of Man, shooting a sci-fi film about evil androids overtaking the world. Since it costs almost as much to fly to Douglas as it does to Australia, he’ll be stuck there, with the androids and Heaven knows who else, for the next three months. So. That’s him gone—and thanking God, no doubt, for exorbitant ticket pricing. He has a foolproof excuse to keep his distance from us, and who can blame him? I’m certainly no fun to be with at the moment. Not that I ever am when I’m pregnant.

  Meanwhile the children are stuck with me, poor little devils. We’ve brought the microwave and a telly into the bathroom, and I keep a little store of food in the shower cubicle. So, once I’ve fetched them from school they squeeze in here for the evening, one of them in the bath, doing her homework, the other one playing with cars in the dirty laundry basket…

  Oh, but I bet you think I’m exaggerating.

  On a more positive note…Yes…Shuffled off to another coffee morning yesterday. (Anything to escape the smell.) This one was for charity, I’m proud to announce. There was a cake sale, and a jewellery sale, and a little raffle at the end. I can’t honestly remember anything about it, except for one seemingly endless conversation with a Yorkshirewoman who was overflowing with advice about hand lotions.

  But I escaped her eventually and headed off with my laptop to the local library. Where a caricature librarian with iron-grey hair and knockers which brushed her kneecaps informed me that plugging in computers was strictly forbidden. It was a health’n’safety issue, she said. Well, of course it would be. Odd, though, because I’ve been doing it in libraries all over London for years.

  But that’s Paradise for you in a nutshell. Things are so peaceful down here, any deviation from the norm (in this instance a lot of bored old duffers leafing aimlessly through free copies of the Daily Telegraph) and the inmates start to get irritable.

  OK. That positive note went a little flat at the end. I’ll try again. On a more positive note…I’m think I’m going to be sick.

  I’ll be positive next time.

  May 18th

  Told Fin my decision and he hung up on me. He thinks I’m inventing the problem. Or he says he does. But why woul
d I? Why? Why the hell would I do that?

  The sickness is getting worse, even in the bathroom, and for the last couple of nights I’ve woken up with my stomach heaving, already half way to throwing up. I can’t really go on like this. Apart from the fact that I am truly, bloody ill, it’s not fair on the children.

  Fin won’t help. Refuses to get involved. Thinks I’m being hysterical. Well, I feel hysterical. Actually, I’ve never known him so hard. So completely detatched. It was like talking to a stanger.

  I don’t even want to think about him anyway. Luckily I’ve got money stashed for the tax man, also a cheque due in from my publisher any minute. I’ve already been on to the tourist board. Paradise, needless to say, is overflowing with holiday cottages to let.

  We’re moving out.

  Hatty called this evening. About ten minutes after Fin hung up on me. God, they’re pathetic. It’s actually the first time she and I have spoken in weeks, and I couldn’t help pointing it out. She said, ‘I know, God, sorry. Just been so busy, catching up with things at work. After all the ridiculous fuss with the Oscar and everything…I know I’ve been completely useless. Anyway, here I am! Better late than never!’

  ‘If you say so,’ I said, but she ignored me. She put on a stupid, phony laugh, which no doubt worked a treat for her in Hollywood, and said, ‘Now listen, honeybun.’ Honeybun? HONEYBUN? The silly cow is fucking my honey-bunny-fucking husband, and she’s calling me honeybun. ‘My spies inform me you’ve been living in the bathroom the last couple of weeks.’