The Desperate Diary of a Country Housewife Read online

  Where was I? Darrell and me. Darrell et moi…We talked about our travels in Florida. Darrell went to Orlando the year before last, but didn’t manage to make it to Miami. He said he thought Orlando was mind-boggling. I said I thought so too, though truth be told I’m not convinced I’ve ever been there. I went to Jacksonville once, I think. In any case it didn’t matter at all…Florida has a lovely climate and a hell of a lot of alligators. We agreed on that. What else did we talk about?

  I don’t know. The kitchen, obviously. But I didn’t want to focus on that. It would have put too much of an emphasis on—lots of things I didn’t particularly want to emphasise at that particular moment. Anyway, I drank slightly more than half a bottle of wine in the time it took him to finish his two cans of lager—which, I think, is a slight improvement on the last time. I certainly wasn’t reeling by the time he left, but I had taken up smoking again. Darrell smokes roll-ups. He offered to roll one for me. I know perfectly well how to roll my own, of course, but I decided not to mention it. I let him do the rolling and then I said oooh, because they did come out very neat. Oh dear. Oh dear.

  Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

  I can’t help it. He’s got such a fucking sexy laugh.

  January 21st

  Going to Clare Gower’s coffee morning this morning.

  Oddly enough I’ve never been to a ‘coffee morning’ before. Well, it’s not that odd. Up until now I’ve made a fairly conscientious effort to avoid them. I have a nasty feeling this one may be quite a formal affair. Otherwise why would I have been invited to it almost a fortnight in advance?

  She had to postpone the last one because she was having the outside of the house repainted, and she thought scaffolding might somehow ‘confuse matters’. Not certain which matters, and I didn’t like to ask. In any case the scaffolders have apparently packed up now, and taken with them all danger of confusion. The house is nicely repainted, Clare says, and the coffee morning is Back On. I have high hopes for it. Clare says she’s expecting about ten guests—all women, of course. There must be one among them who might possibly be a friend?

  I’m going upstairs now to put on some mascara in her honour.

  COUNTRY MOLE

  Sunday Times

  There haven’t been many times in my life when things have seemed so wretched that I really, truly wanted to press my own ejector seat and power into eternal space. But since leaving London for the West Country and a new existence of Healthy Family Fun, I find my fingers more often groping for the button.

  Forget the pain of childbirth; the long, drawn-out death of a loved one; forget being eaten alive by piranha fish, or having a nail slowly hammered into the back of your neck. Hell is a coffee morning with the unemployed lady-mothers of idyllic rural Britain. Hell is knowing you stick out like a sore thumb and that you’ll be stuck there, sticking out, for an hour minimum, smiling until your face cracks, before you can politely slip away again. Time hasn’t passed so painfully since my last triple physics class, back in 1985. What a culture shock.

  Nevertheless, I definitely tried to fit in. Said mmmm about the organic carrot and ginger nibbles, which were truly delicious; hooted with naughty laughter at the wicked ‘willy’ jokes, which were abysmal; managed (most impressively of all) to bite my tongue when they talked about their husbands’ domestic predilections as if they were not only interesting but paramount, and left—a little early, admittedly, but full of gratitude and enthusiasm.

  They saw through me. Maybe they could sense I didn’t truly believe. At the school gate I bumped into the Hostess Lady-Mum, Queen Bee Lady-Mum, whose very delicious nibbles I’d mmm’d over so wholeheartedly, and I think she pretended not to see me. I sort of hopped this way and that, grinning, trying to catch her eye. She turned away. Somehow or other, I must have blown it.

  In any case I shan’t dwell on it. I mustn’t obsess. They obviously all hate me, but I have to move on. It was a bad morning. A failed experiment. Suffice to say, the quest for a decent social life continues in earnest and I have decided once and for all that the ladies’ coffee mornings are not, and never were, a realistic recruiting ground. Unless of course they happen to invite me again.

  In the meantime I think I’d do better looking closer to home. At the builder, for example. Actually we have two builders, a painter, a landscape gardener and five carpet layers on the property as I write. I’m talking, of course, about the good looking one, the tea and biscuit-refusing installer of our new and exorbitantly tasteful, pale green kitchen, who sings Fred Astaire songs while he works, and who is, by the way, among the most handsome men I have ever met.

  While the husband was hard at work in Bucharest yesterday, the builder told me, in his lovely West Country burr, that he used to play a lot of tennis.

  Well, blow my cotton socks off, and so did I!

  In fact there’s a run-down, faintly depressing old tennis club in the local town and I go there once a week in search of a match. So far I’ve not had any joy. It appears that everybody in the club already has ‘their tennis organised’.

  So it’s with a mixture of desperation, loneliness and, obviously, lust that I’ve been trying to summon the nerve to ask him for a match. Trouble is—what if he thinks I’m propositioning him? Or—Christ, what if I am propositioning him? Crickety-crackety, what if he thinks I’m propositioning him and he says Yes?

  OK. Obviously, that was silly. Over-excited and very, very silly. He’s much too young for me. Apart from which, of course, we moved down here to be more of a family, not less: to pursue a life of good, clean, decent, honourable, innocent, monogamous fun. And that’s what we’re doing, dammit. For example, we went out in the woods yesterday, the children and I, and we built our very own bows and arrows. Out of natural sticks. God, it was fun! Or it would have been, except it was raining and the children wanted to watch telly and I was terrified about the slugs, and the arrows didn’t really work and—

  Anyway the main point is, I’m married.

  February 1st

  Well, here’s a peculiar fact. Clare Gower, maker of immaculate ginger nibbles and agonisingly feeble willy jokes, has decided to overlook my spoddish performance at her coffee morning the other day. I was convinced she hated me, but it turns out she doesn’t hate me at all. In fact she seems quite keen to become my friend.

  Not because she likes me. She couldn’t. We have nothing in common, beyond the whole life-cycle thing. I catch her looking at me sometimes with an expression of dull, vaguely pitying confusion. Nevertheless, in spite of that, in spite of my obviously being a misfit, something about me has obviously tickled her fancy. Or possibly she feels sorry for me. In any case she has invited Fin and me to a drinks party in three weeks’ time and to a dinner party—not this Saturday, not the Saturday after that, nor the one after that, nor the one after that, nor, in fact, the one after that. But the next one. Though I know that under normal circumstances Clare and I would never dream of being friends, I am, of course, extremely happy and grateful for this new development.

  Clare’s pretty in an Alpen-eating, Daily Mail-reading kind of way: quite slim but not very, carefully dressed, with shoes and bags and nails and highlights and happy thoughts all nicely co-ordinated. She is always made up. Always tidy. Always smiling. And judging by her house (endlessly refurbished, late Georgian, with tennis court and swimming pool outside) she’s pretty damn rich, too. Or her husband is. But above all, and in spite of her enthusiasm for swapping beauty secrets and a vaguely contemptible obsession with home décor, Clare is (and this is what I need to focus on) an incredibly nice woman; infinitely nicer, kinder, gentler, more patient and more generous-spirited than I will ever be.

  Is she happy? That’s the mystery. She’s always perky—but it’s hardly the same thing. She also doesn’t have any frown marks. But that, she confided to a group of us the other day, is partly due to Botox and partly because for the past ten years she has slept every night in a special, tightfitting rubber hat which stops her face from sagging. A
lso, she claims to sleep in a pair of lotion-infused fitted plastic gloves, which keep her hands looking young.

  In any case she looks a lot younger than I do. And she’s a very nice woman, and very kind, and anyway I reckon she’s a better bet than Rachel White—who, incidentally, has finally managed to forgive Fin and me for that lastminute cancellation and has agreed to come to us for dinner. It’s due to take place in about three weeks’ time and I’ve warned her and her husband they’ll be coming on their own, due to the fact that we don’t know anyone else round here to invite them with. I suppose I could invite Clare (and husband), but I’ve seen the way Rachel looks at her, and I don’t think they like each other very much.

  February 5th

  Hatty just called. She’s told Damian to pack his bags. Turns out he’s been having it off with his lead actress ever since they finished shooting back in November. The success of Goodbye Jesus has given Damian, for the first time in his wretched, bone-idle life, a certain amount of attention and success. And this is how he responds to it. Quelle surprise. What a wanker.

  Hatty’s wretched, needless to say. And very angry. All this time she’s been paying for Damian and the director—so she thought—to fly around the world, promoting themselves at different film festivals. Little did she realise (until the director called her up to complain about it yesterday morning) that Damian’s actually been leaving him at home in his Muswell Hill bedsit, and taking Tallullah Suckette—whatever the silly tart calls herself—instead.

  Hatty and the children are coming down to Paradise for a couple of days to regroup. They should be arriving some time tomorrow.

  Awful to say so—and I realise the circumstances aren’t exactly ideal—but I’m really looking forward to it. Not to Hatty being miserable, obviously. But to the company.

  Better get off to Waitrose then.

  Busy, busy.

  February 9th

  I finally summoned the courage to ask Darrell if he fancied playing a game of tennis. I waited until Potato Head was out of the room and then I just spurted it out. It sounded very unnatural. Darrell turned round—he had his back to me, hammering away—and his expression wasn’t unfriendly exactly, but he was obviously quite surprised. I gave a chirpy laugh, and I could feel myself blushing, and my head wobbling slightly, while I waited for him to respond. Which he didn’t immediately. He put the hammer down and stretched across to turn off the radio and we looked at each other, me blushing, with the head wobbling this way and that.

  ‘I’m quite good,’ I said, to break the silence. Which I am. I mean I am. But he doesn’t know that. Anyway, for the first time since I ever laid eyes on him I found myself slightly not fancying him, because after I said that his incredibly handsome face creased into an incredibly complacent smile. He laughed. He said, ‘What do you want me to do? Play on one leg, shall I?’

  I said he could play any way he wanted, if he believed it might help him—which I thought was quite quick. And he threw back his head and laughed so loud I spotted the new breakfast bar shaking. Which doesn’t, I realise more clearly now, bode fantastically well for his handiwork. But it’s not the point.

  The kitchen’s coming along fine, I’m sure. It looks lovely. It does, actually. It looks amazing. Like something out of Interiors magazine.

  And we’ve made a date to play tennis this Friday afternoon. Fin’s due home from London on the 8 o’clock train, which means—he’s coming back at that time. Obviously.

  And that’s lovely, as it so happens. I’ve missed him a lot this week. The Commuter Widows at school endlessly assure me that, like them, I will get used to these long absences. And I suppose I will, when I turn into a nibblebaking, wrinkle-hat-wearing bloody Stepford robot like the rest of them.

  Actually that’s not quite what I meant.

  What I meant was, for the moment I find I’m getting less accustomed to his absences every week rather than more, and—much as I despise myself for sliding into any kind of wifely cliché—increasingly resentful of his freedom to come and go as he pleases.

  In any case, Darrell says that, regardless of how much work he has, he makes a rule of stopping at 3 o’clock on Fridays. Which is news to me. Not that I care. Far from it. I’m in no rush for him to finish his work here. At all. In fact, I worry he’s getting through it all a bit too quickly. So I’m going to arrange for the children to have tea with their school friends on Friday, and Darrell and I are going to shimmy down to that tennis club together.

  I think it’s about time I bought some new sportswear.

  …And perhaps a short spell on a sunbed, if can find one somewhere…

  Hatty cancelled in the end. She texted me just after I’d hauled the final shopping bag up the hill from Waitrose. She said at the last minute she had to go to Frankfurt. Some crisis at work, apparently. I hope she’s all right. Her mobile’s been switched off and I haven’t managed to speak to her since.

  February 10th

  God, this house is cold. Why’s it always so cold? Every room in this bloody house seems to have a howling gale blasting through it. I’ve got three jerseys on and a sodding vest and I still can’t get warm…

  Anyway. Column day today. Only my third instalment and already beginning to get nervous about it. Nobody’s mentioned the coffee morning article. I don’t think the ladies really read newspapers around here. Or not the big ones. But what if they did? Would Clare Gower be able to recognise herself? Would she? Christ, I hope not. A couple of times, at the school gate, when I’ve been talking to her and the others, I get a flash of something I’ve written—or, worse, of something I’m going to write—and I feel sick. Sick with my own duplicity and viciousness. How can I do it? How can I be so mean? But then the next minute, there I am, in front of the computer, and the adrenalin’s going—I find my imagination going into overdrive and I can’t resist.

  So—what am I going to write about this week? That won’t make me feel sick with self-loathing the moment after I’ve filed it?

  COUNTRY MOLE

  Sunday Times

  Our eldest child, Dora, who’s eight, has been campaigning for a life surrounded by green fields since long before there was any serious suggestion we might move out of London. In Shepherds Bush, where her bedroom overlooked three vast, grey, BBC satellite dishes and a multi-storey car park, she used to sit on her bed and draw pictures of houses in green fields with eight-year-old girls living inside them.

  Today, in our new house, she has fields directly behind the house. So that’s good. The lady wanted fields. We got them for her. That’s how modern families work. Except yesterday, when I suggested she might actually go and play in them, Dora replied: ‘It turns out fields are a bit boring.’ And it’s not that I want to kill her or anything, because I don’t. Obviously. But there was another house, which didn’t have fields. And we chose this one instead. It’s the last time I ever give her what she wants. Ever. She’s getting a tin of slug repellant for her birthday, whether she likes it or not. It turns out no girl can ever have too much of that.

  The other house, without the fields, was £50,000 cheaper, I’m remembering now. It had a nice flat garden and a kitchen already built. And it wasn’t ‘uniquely positioned’ either, as our imaginative estate agent chose to put it. The house we live in now is so uniquely positioned I doubt we’ll ever be able to sell it again. It perches on a slope so sheer that we can’t get the car to the front door. To reach the house, we have to park about 70 foot below, clamber up 33 steps (each one counted, often) and over a slippery, winding, unlit garden path, where there may be giant slugs and murderers lurking. All of which seemed droll and refreshingly rustic when we first spotted the place that distant, sun-dappled day back in May.

  At some point, to be fair, I did ask the previous owners if the lack of any sensible access had proved much of an inconvenience. They looked at me as if I was mad. They were quite horrible people, as a matter of fact. A tight little family of cold fish, strangely snooty and addicted to all things taupe. In
any case they were adamant, in their snooty way, that the heart-palpitating scramble required to reach their own front door had barely registered on their consciousness, and they told me so with such disdain—all three of them: mummy, daddy and the spooky eighteen-year-old—that I felt quite silly having brought up the subject at all.

  I’ve since learned (from a friend of their former neighbour) that the problem used to keep them awake at nights. They had submitted plans, all refused by the council, to build underground garages into the face of the hill, with a linking subterranean tunnel to the front door. Or something along those lines. So they were being a little economical with the actualité, on top of all their other crimes—their appalling addiction to beige, their lack of books or senses of humour…

  But so it goes. All’s fair in love and real estate. The kitchen ceiling’s on the point of collapse. Ditto what’s left of the guttering. Ditto the vaulted cellar room, built into the hill of the back garden. There is no water in the children’s bathroom; the central heating doesn’t work properly; the supporting beams in the roof are riven with woodworm; and it turns out the entire county is infested with giant slugs. But none of it matters. Or mattered then. We loved the house from the first viewing. Its snooty owners might have thrown themselves to the ground and sobbed for hatred of their impregnable hill and the fact that their entire, uniquely positioned house was almost certainly in the process of sliding down it. The truth is we wouldn’t have listened.