The Desperate Diary of a Country Housewife Read online

  July 22nd

  Beautiful weather. Amazing what a difference it makes. The children go outside from the moment they wake up until the moment they go to bed. They’re down at the stream now, as usual, playing kiss-touch with Mabel and the landlord’s mangy sheepdog. I’ve decided, when we get back to the Dream House, I’m going to invite some friends to stay. I feel so much better I think it’s about time we took advantage of this beautiful countryside and our beautiful big house. It’s about time we started making ourselves more at home.

  Not only that, I think I might even have some of the locals round to dinner. Clare Gower has been so hospitable, it’s about time we paid her back.

  Anyway, the sun is shining; I have filed my article about the Bournemouth beautician, and I think, in spite of the obvious drawbacks, Smartypants shouldn’t be too disappointed with it. Turns out the salon programme’s quite famous, so the premise still stands: After Reality, Tia Maria and so on. This time last year she (Tamsyn) was being paid £750 to appear at the opening of a new sex-toy supermarket in Southampton…When I met up with Tamsyn last week she had just started working behind the bar at a Bournemouth nightclub. So. How have the mighty fallen. She was a pretty raddled old bird: very masculine, actually, what with the sixty-a-day voice and the biker uniform. Still, she said she always dressed up for her partner’s homecoming, and it was in both of our interests to hold onto that. It was the one thing, Tamsyn said, her voice dripping with emotion, that kept their fifteen-year relationship alive. If her partner didn’t return from work to find her in stockings and bunny-wear, Tamsyn insisted, then invariably she’d be in slinky kimono and fishnets…Unfortunately her other half was away when I visited, but it didn’t matter at all. I left Tamsyn, all togged up in her geisha gloriousness, blissfully hamming it up for the photographer. It’s going to be good fun, I think.

  Suddenly feel full of optimism again. Excited about moving back into the Dream House. Excited about my burgeoning journalistic career. Excited about the baby. Excited about Fin finally being back—if not at home, then at least in England. Excited about being well again.

  Said to Fin if it was a boy maybe we could call it Ruskin. But he wasn’t very interested.

  July 24th

  …or Ferdinand? Hector? Rory? Kevin? Kevin’s nice. Nice spelling.

  Wonder if I should call Smartypants? I filed my copy three days ago now, and she still hasn’t got back, lazy cow. I e-mailed her to check she’d received it and she didn’t even bother to reply. I’ll leave it another couple of days. Don’t want to seem pushy.

  In the meantime—desperately got to come up with some more ideas…

  God it’s hot today. Wish I was down by the stream. Perhaps Ripley and Dora might inspire me.

  …Playing in streams…the New 99 Something

  Farms100

  English sheep-dogs

  English sheepdogs:

  Britain’s Cleverest Dogs. Might they be sheepdogs?

  Oh, sod it. Maybe I should start packing. Or maybe not. It’s too hot. Think I’ll go and play kiss-touch with the children.

  COUNTRY MOLE

  Sunday Times

  So we moved back into the Dream House and I’ve set up camp in the old bathroom again. But I don’t think I’ll be in here for long. Paradise being what it is, and our Dream House perching as it does (we have to park at the bottom of a fifty-foot hill and climb the rest of the way), there’s not much danger of robbers up here. It feels quite safe to leave doors and windows open twenty-four hours a day. What with the fresh air, the box-load of disgusting odour-eating candles kept permanently aflame, and a strict regime of half-hourly toast-burnings, the nauseating smell of not-so-new paint and carpet is finally beginning to fade. I block my nose to cook, and eat alone on our strangely undulating, already dilapidating new terrace—overshadowed now by our neighbour’s loathsome poplar saplings. Hatred of both neighbour and her trees has returned with a vengeance, but on the whole it’s a relief to be back. The children, especially, are delighted.

  I discover that an absolute lack of wear and tear over previous months hasn’t prevented our Dream House from sliding into an impressive state of decrepitude. The new boiler is dead. The garden lights we had installed by the missionary’s daughter don’t switch on; the new shower in the guest bathroom no longer heats up; the downstairs lavatory is flooding; the guests’ lavatory has no water at all; the new carpet has come unglued at the edges, shrunk slightly, and has started fraying. Both doors have fallen off our made-to-measure wardrobe on the landing. The lights have popped in twelve of the fourteen new kitchen cupboards. And our beautiful, expensive kitchen tap has come off its hinges. Which is more of a nuisance than it sounds, since the original designers failed to allow access to the back of the sink without dismantling approx. 60 per cent of the whole kitchen.

  —The moral of which woeful litany, obviously, is never to have bought such a big house in the first place, since the more there is of a place, the more there is to be mended. Ownership is a form of Slavery, it turns out. Ah, the hell of being a fat cat.

  Months ago, when we first moved in, I took pride in ferreting out the local artisans’ lowest prices. Our carpet man, for example (an obvious crook, in retrospect), came in with a quote almost £2,000 below everyone else. And the wardrobe builder wanted £180 for something others said would cost £700-£800. Pay peanuts, you get monkeys, so the old wives have it. Once again, they turn out to be right. Nevertheless when I think of all the cups of tea I made for those monkeys…and all the thousands of perfectly decent, hard-earned peanuts we handed over, it’s difficult not to feel annoyed.

  Of all of them, though, the monkey I feel sourest about is the landscape gardener: that same missionary’s daughter who first disarmed me with her honest manner, and who then (never mind the floodlights) turned our gently sloping front terrace into a training ground for potential conquerors of Everest. When I dared to grumble about it, her transformation from lovely missionary’s daughter to evil maniac was terrifying. It was revelatory.

  Nevertheless I would have forgiven her all of that; the shoddy workmanship, my new-found nervousness around the human race—all of it—if it hadn’t been for those three unliftable cement sacks she and her lackeys left rotting, and slowly setting, by our front door.

  Not that it matters any more. I have a master plan. The children, armed with sharp new tools, are already getting 20p per cupful to tip their chiselled cement pieces over the wall into the tree planter’s otherwise immaculate garden. And if that goes unnoticed for a week or so, and the children and I can agree on a price, I’ll be sending them over under cover of night, I think, with a tree-felling saw and some strong rope. The children want rollerblades in exchange, but since both are beneath the age of criminal responsibility I think that’s a bit steep. The old wives may prove me wrong yet again, but old habits die hard. I intend to go no higher than a fiver.

  August 1st

  Beautiful weather still. Too hot, actually, with my big belly. The climb to the house is becoming more arduous every day. God knows what I’m going to do when I need to get a pram up and down here. I shall have to devise some kind of pulley system or something. Otherwise it’s going to be impossible. We shall be trapped up here, pretty much, until the baby learns to walk.

  In the meantime I have every window and every door in the house thrown open, and it smells fine. Better than fine, actually. It smells of fresh air and cut grass and roses. And I feel healthier and, excepting my obsession with the Robinson-Horribles and their infuriating trees, saner than I have in many months. Last night I moved out of the bathroom and slept in my own bed for the first time since April. Joy. I’d forgotten how comfortable it was.

  August 11th

  Back at the Coffee Bean. Once again. Rachel Healthy-Snax and the Healthy Snax league on one table; and Clare Gower and a couple of the Beauty-Secrets mummies on the other. Hadn’t realised until I saw them all in one room quite to what extent the Paradise mummies divided into one or othe
r of the gangs. I suppose, if I belong to either—which I clearly don’t—I float between the two. In any case, this morning I so happened to be with Rachel’s lot. I went over to say Hi to Clare before sitting down, and she was friendly enough, I think. Perhaps not as friendly as all that. I don’t know. But there was a definite bristle in the air as I rejoined Rachel’s table.

  Any case, a mummy called Jennifer, whom I tend to avoid, broke off, briefly, from telling me about the unusual paleness of the stool which emerged from her daughter’s arsehole this morning (despite all the healthy snax) to give me a minor heart attack:

  She said, ‘Oooh! I bumped into a certain someone yesterday, who says they did a lot of work on your house not so long ago. And they think the world of you! Couldn’t stop talking about you, in fact.’

  Wondered briefly if my head was going to blow off. I nodded very slowly, without daring to look at her. I said, ‘Well. I must say he did a great job. We were both—Fin and I—we were both really pleased with him.’

  But she wasn’t talking about Darrell. She was talking about the bloody missionary’s daughter. Of course. The missionary’s daughter had come round to give Jennifer-Mummy a quote for some reterracing, and she was bandying my name as a referee. Amazing. In any case I felt so relieved, or disappointed—or both—I almost burst into tears. Jennifer must have thought I was insane. Assuming, that is, that Jennifer is herself capable of coherent thought. Or of any thought at all. Anyway, I certainly wasn’t, at that point. I heard myself gushing about the useless missionary’s daughter as if she was not only the greatest gardener in the world but also, possibly, my closest friend. Absolutely didn’t enter my head to say anything about the cement sacks. Not that it would have made any difference. Jennifer had already decided to go with somebody else. A Man. She said she wasn’t sure why, but that she felt more comfortable having A Man ‘doing the garden-y things’.…Anyway…

  Clare Gower and co. left the coffee shop quite soon after we arrived, and there were a lot of stiff smiles and bristly au revoirs going back and forth. The Healthy-Snax were whispering about her before she’d even closed the door.

  And apparently…According to Rachel, who heard it from a mother with a son at the senior school, whose husband was having lunch there at the same time, Clare Gower was spotted at the Ivy restaurant in Covent Garden with one of the fathers from Paradise. They were having a lovers’ tiff, so the story goes, and in the middle of lunch Clare stalked out of the restaurant in tears.

  There was a lot of hissing after that. Jennifer said she wouldn’t be at all surprised if Clare Gower had AIDS, and that she ought to be forced to wear a sign on her back at all times, warning all and sundry that she was a ‘health risk’. Rachel almost wet herself.

  I asked how certain they were that it was Clare. I also asked how whoever it was who’d spotted her was so certain that the man she was with was a) her lover, and b) from around here. But nobody seemed to know, and there was a general feeling that I was being irritating for asking. So. Being the heroic sort, I shut up. Truly hate this kind of gang-style bitching. Makes me queasy.

  Nevertheless. That’s the gossip from Paradise. It’s better than nothing, I suppose.

  August 12th

  Still no word from Smartypants. It’s getting ridiculous. She’s had the article almost three weeks now. I’ve e-mailed three times and left messages for her twice. Silly cow. I’ll call her Monday. And if she doesn’t call me back then I’m going to…do something pretty radical. Not sure what.

  Came away from the holiday cottage with a dustbin bag full of nylon camisoles belonging to the farmer’s wife, also some jockeys belonging to the farmer. Obviously picked up the wrong sack from their laundry room. Or one of us did, because I think they’ve got a bag of my pants as well. Very embarrassing. Not sure what to do—except pay a visit to Marks and Sparks, and stuff the bag of farmer’s camisoles in a place where, unless he comes hunting for them, I shall never have to think about them again.

  COUNTRY MOLE

  Sunday Times

  The secret tree-felling operation had to be aborted in the end. By some terrible fluke, our evil tree-planting neighbours took it upon themselves to be in their immaculate garden one beautiful evening last week, just as my youngest was flinging his cupful of chipped cement over the wall onto their flower bed. It was bad luck. It was also a little embarrassing, because he happened to be standing right beside me at the time of the crime, and if I wasn’t quite cheering him on, I wasn’t exactly stopping him either. In any case, the incident has put our enemies on their guard.

  ‘Excuse me,’ the wife said, with that dreary, modulated, middle-England self-righteousness which tends to make me want to emigrate.—Incidentally I may, at a low point, pre-Dream House evacuation, have suggested that this neighbour-from-hell was in fact a witch who, for reasons I now forget, had cast a sickness spell on me. Now that the sickness and associated hysteria have faded, I suspect that both may, in fact, have been more pregnancy than black-arts related. Nevertheless, it’s worth mentioning that the above-mentioned ‘Excuse me’ came, in all its lifeless self-righteousness, from nowhere. She and her voice emerged from thin air, and made us both jump. ‘Are you aware that your little boy is throwing bits of rubbish into our garden?’ she asked.

  I assured her I wasn’t, and at once tore a tremendous strip off him. He looked mighty confused, poor lad, but I grabbed him before he could reply, and we both scurried back into the house.

  Since then, spurred on by the usual English protectiveness towards castle and garden, the two of them have taken to eating outside every night. Husband and wife—him changed from London commuting suit to the conventional Paradise evening wear of Airtex shirt and high-waist slacks—carry their individual food trays to a small table quite close to our wall, and nibble joylessly on their dinner—sans alcohol, I note, and sans ever exchanging a single word. It is all gratifyingly depressing.

  Of course, if they cut down the poplar trees that are blocking our beautiful view they could let a little more sunlight into their lives, and it would probably cheer them up enormously. But what can I do? They are the authors of their own relentlessly dreary discontent, and I must admit I enjoy watching them slog through it.

  I’ve taken to spying on them from my bedroom window. The children have a set of toy binoculars, with a curious bugging device attached to the top. I would be lying if I said I had never used them. Soon, of course, when their trees grow a little higher, I shan’t even be able to do that any longer, and I shall have to return to the old, disheartening campaign of trying to find a friend.

  Which campaign, incidentally, though undoubtedly creeping forward, is being seriously impeded not just by own curmudgeonliness, but also by the lack of a respectability-enhancing mate to drag along. I had no idea what a handicap his absence would be.

  Country couples, it transpires (perhaps other couples too, but I’ve never met them before), fear nothing at their social gatherings more than a woman who arrives on her own. Only yesterday I had an invitation for Sunday lunch withdrawn when it became clear that my husband wouldn’t be coming with me. Usually, though, things don’t even get that far. ‘When will your husband be about?’ the friendly people inquire. ‘We must get you both over to dinner.’ To which I quickly reply, ‘Sadly he’s never around. But I’d love to come.’ They answer with embarrassed laughter. I think they think I’m joking.

  Either that, or they think I’m trying to steal their gentlemen. Which I suppose I might, a few months down the line, if my own insists on staying away, and if ever I begin to feel human again. But right now, with a slightly disgusting, pregnancy-related spitting problem, and a bump like a balloon under my shirt, it’s hard to imagine how I could pose a threat to anyone.

  August 17th

  Rachel came round in floods of tears, waving a copy of her husband’s credit card bill and a matchbox from the Ivy. I tried to be kind to her. Poured her a tumbler of whisky and told her all men were cunts—and I chose the word
specifically because I thought it might shock some sense into her. But I don’t think she heard me. I could have said anything. She was a total wreck.

  ‘I want to kill her,’ she kept saying.

  I said something about not leaping to conclusions. That Jeremy eating at the Ivy did not automatically mean Jeremy having an affair with Clare Gower. Lots of people, I pointed out, ate at the Ivy. Hundreds—possibly even a thousand every week.

  ‘Jeremy never eats at the Ivy,’ she said illogically, and then disintegrated into tears again. ‘It’s not his kind of place.’

  ‘There’s probably a perfectly simple explanation…’

  She’s not even asked him for it yet. Or she hadn’t this morning. Jeremy was still in London, still blissfully unaware that his cosy little life was in the process of being smashed into smithereens. Rachel has an appointment with her lawyer first thing tomorrow, and she had a locksmith coming round to the house this afternoon. I tried to persuade her she was being hasty—but I had the wind taken out of my sails a bit, because it turns out this isn’t the first time Clare and Jeremy have got it together. It was Clare he had the affair with when they first moved down from London. Which explains a lot.

  Poor Rachel. Here she was, having surrendered her independence and possibly even her brain, in order to become this perfect, smiling, decent wife and mother—and for what? Her whiney children won’t eat vegetables, her husband spends all week away, and the appearance of a single, suspect credit card bill reduces her to this: a vindictive wreck, like some kind of footballer’s wife, snarling about alimony and punitive divorce settlements, seething with impotent rage. I think she was terrified. Could I ever become like this? Of course I could. Actually, I ought to be grateful to her. It reminded me to get back to work; to put in a call to Smartypants, to stop coming up with idiotic ideas about sheepdogs and to start thinking about a new book at last. I need money. My own money. I need my own life. I have got to get back to work…