The Desperate Diary of a Country Housewife Page 6

  February 14th

  Hatty’s being a bit odd. I think she may have a lover already, or maybe she’s had one all along and she’s not telling me about it. Which is a bit mean. She seems weirdly unphased by the end of her marriage. Also a bit shifty. Finally talked to her this morning—the first time since she told me it was all over between Damian and her—and she sounded almost pissed off when she discovered it was me calling. She couldn’t wait to get me off the line. Also—incapable of talking about anything except the bloody Oscars. She and the director are going out to LA together, she says. They’re staying in the Chateau Marmont, and, tee hee hee, they’re leaving Damian behind.

  Just noticed it’s Valentine’s Day.

  February 21st

  Darrell reckons he and the Potato Man will be more or less finished here by this time next week. He says they have to be finished anyway, because they have a big job starting immediately afterwards, and then another job lined up straight after that. I think we were very lucky to get him—them—when we did. Sod’s law, though, isn’t it? He’s the first builder in the history of builders to finish a job when he says he will, and I don’t even want him to. The kitchen looks amazing; stunning—but…But. But. I’ve lost all interest in amazing-looking kitchens suddenly. In fact I’m not sure if I ever really had any.

  We played the tennis. I don’t suppose we’ll play again. I mean I want to, obviously, but the truth is, if he hadn’t been so lovely about it the whole thing might have been a bit embarrassing. Because he wasn’t just good—and 6 foot 3—he was brilliant. Turns out he used to play for the county, which I rather wish he’d mentioned earlier, and in two humiliating sets I won exactly four points off him, three of which I’m almost certain were sympathy points. The match was finished within twenty minutes of getting on court. I was pouring with sweat. All I really wanted was to stagger into the nearest dung heap and sob, really. Nevertheless, courageously, I insisted on pretending to be up for a third set.

  Luckily he didn’t. In fact he laughed when I suggested it. He said he’d much prefer to buy me a drink in the pub opposite instead.

  We spent nearly three hours in there. The children were both staying over with friends, and Fin wasn’t due in at the train station until evening, and the pub was pretty dark and pretty quiet, and we had a corner table by the fire—and I smoked his roll-ups and we both got pretty pissed on cider. And he was lovely. He asked me questions as if he was genuinely interested in the answers, in a way that allowed me to answer them straight—without feeling the need to be clever, for once. He talked about his work and about singing, because he has a beautiful voice, and about poetry, briefly, because it turns out, oddly, that he reads a lot of it. (I don’t, of course, but because of being a writer and so on I felt under some pressure to bluff. So I dredged through memories of my English A-level revision notes and announced that I particularly admired John Donne. Darrell didn’t. I couldn’t remember a single thing Donne had ever written, so the conversation didn’t last long.) We also talked about tennis—he told me about the day he was picked out by a talent scout who came to his primary school. He told me about his sister, who has two children and no husband and who is training to be a nurse, and about his mother, who ran off to Spain when he was seven, and who he’s only seen a couple of times since. He told me about his dad dying, and about his four-year-old son, conceived during a whirlwind two-month romance with a girl called Denise.

  He told me he was divorced.

  And that was when—For God’s sake. Nothing happened. Nothing bloody well happened. And it never would have done. But I suppose—I don’t know—there was just a moment, maybe, when the clamour dimmed, briefly, and we liked each other. We really liked each other, and we were just two people, without all the baggage. And after he told me he was divorced there was a fairly obvious pause, quite a long fairly obvious pause, and I, for one, started imagining the two of us in bed.

  He said, quite quietly, with that incredibly low, soft voice of his, ‘What time’s the old man getting in?’ And it snapped me right back into the present. Finley’s train was due in any minute. I’d been meaning to go back to the house and pick up the car, but a) it was too late now, and b) I was too drunk to drive. So Darrell gave me a lift to the station in his van. We didn’t really speak on the journey. The spell was broken. The clamour was back. At the station I leapt out of the van as if the seat had been burning my bottom. I made some stupid, chirpy, facetious comment about our next tennis match, and he laughed his lovely baritone laugh, and he drove away.

  And there was Fin. Looking good, actually. I forget how good looking he is sometimes. And he was laughing and smiling and pleased to be back, and I was so happy to see him I almost—bloody nearly—cried. And I never cry. How pathetic is that? In any case we had a lovely long, cold walk back to the house, a lovely, warm evening together without the children. And then, when the children got home on Saturday morning, a really happy weekend. We took them to look for frog-spawn down by the stream, but I think it may be the wrong time of year for it, because we didn’t find any. The four of us hardly argued at all.

  And now Fin’s gone back to London, the children are at school, Potato Head has gone on to another job, and Darrell’s in the kitchen, hammering away. He’s singing along to an Elvis Presley song on the radio, but not as joyfully as usual, I think. I made him a cup of tea this morning and I’ve been avoiding him ever since. We haven’t quite looked each other in the eye all day.

  What a mess. What a shame. What a nuisance life is.

  I have nothing to do now but school runs and writing, until Friday evening, when Fin returns from his week away, and we are expected for drinkipoos with Clare Gower. What fun.

  But perhaps if I hang around at the school gate for long enough tomorrow morning, someone might invite me over for a cup of coffee.

  February 22nd

  Bingo! Rachel White spotted me lingering hopefully, pretending to look for my car keys just outside Ripley’s classroom, and she asked me if I had timeforacoffee.

  I could have hugged her. Timeforacoffee?

  Time for a thousand cups of coffee, Rachel! What shall we talk about?

  Let’s talk about sex, baby.

  Let’s talk about you and me.

  And eugenics. And Trident. And habeas corpus…

  We went to the Coffee Bean—a nice coffee shop, which is attached to the main gift shop on the high street, where the parking is quite convenient, and it was great. Fantastic, as Fin would say. We just nattered away as if we’d known each other all our lives. Simple as that. I apologised a couple more times about the dinner cancellation—which apologies she graciously accepted—and I reiterated how much we were both looking forward to the rescheduled dinner back at ours, next week.

  Then we talked about how Rachel sometimes persuades, sometimes cajoles and sometimes, when she’s desperate, even hoodwinks Martin (6 yrs) and Jenny (10 yrs) into eating an assortment of appetising vegetables each mealtime. We also talked about which vegetables Jenny preferred and which ones Martin preferred and whether girls naturally preferred more vegetables than boys or whether that was only particular to Martin (6) and Jenny (10), since Jenny (10) tended to be more partial to more vegetables, e.g. broccoli and Brussels sprouts, which she calls ‘baby cabbages’, than her brother (6), who doesn’t seem to like any vegetables at all, except raw carrots, which he will usually be willing to eat, but only if Mummy (39½) cuts them into animal shapes, and he’s allowed to dip them into organic tomato ketchup.

  Two more days until Fin comes home. The boiler’s broken in his office so he’s abandoned the new sofabed for a bed somewhere a little more comfortable. He’s staying at Hatty’s.

  Which is fine.

  Clare Gower just called to postpone the drinks. She says she’s having the front of the house reterraced. It was meant to have been finished by Friday but it’s not going to be now, and the whole place, she says, is so muddy, it looks ‘like a very muddy war zone’. Shame. I was lookin
g forward to it, actually. Anyway, the poor girl sounded distraught, almost in tears, so I’ve invited her to come and have lunch with me next week. I think, to be honest, it cheered us both up a little bit. She’s always so friendly, always laughing and chatting away at the school gate, but there’s something about her—beneath all the tinted moisturizer and so on—which seems kind of lost, and a little lonely. Or perhaps I just have loneliness on the mind.

  In any case, we’re having lunch together next week, and though the drinks party is now postponed the dinner party still stands, and is due to take place in late March. The 24th, I think. Things are definitely hotting up.

  February 24th

  Friday. I’m on the train, on a day trip to London, and I’ve left Fin in Paradise on his own—for the first time. I feel light-headed with the freedom: I have a work lunch first (justification for the trip), then I’m going shopping. And then it’s drinks at E&O with two of my best friends. (Not Hatty. Who didn’t bother to ring back when I called up to suggest it.) And then it’s back to Paradise on the last train.

  Fin and I have Rachel Healthy-Snax White and her husband coming to dinner on Saturday night. Fin says he’ll go to Waitrose this afternoon. Plus he came home with flowers last night. He does do that sometimes, because (when he’s around) he’s lovely. He is…fantastic. Sometimes even better than that. Nevertheless. I think he must be feeling a bit guilty because he also bought me a beautiful bracelet from—Ooh. Text message from Darrell! Do I want to play tennis with him next week?

  Do I?

  COUNTRY MOLE

  Sunday Times

  Clearly I’m not the only one who is desperate for a social life around here. I escaped to London one day last week, was browsing blissfully through the racks at TK Max in Hammersmith when my mobile rang and a husky, feminine voice, faintly familiar, demanded without the slightest preamble whether a woman’s name, quite well known, happened to ‘mean anything’ to me.

  I thought it was some old journalist friend, being slightly affected and pretending to be on such a pressing deadline that she didn’t have time for pleasantries. So I played along, always delighted to have my expertise referred to:

  ‘She’s an actress,’ I said briskly. ‘Or she was. Very beautiful and glamorous and all that, but she got a bit Green after she married. Gave a lot of interviews about not flushing the lavatory. Why? Who is this anyway?’

  ‘Well, yes.’ The sexy voice faltered slightly. ‘That’s…It’s me. I mean…I meant. I was talking about me.’

  ‘It’s you?’ Very odd, I thought. Also quite embarrassing. ‘Hello. What a nice surprise.’

  ‘I think we met…a long time ago. But perhaps we didn’t. Actually I don’t think we did.’

  ‘Oh, gosh, no, yes I’m sure we did,’ I said, very quickly. ‘Hello! How lovely! Gosh, how are you? It’s been…I mean seriously it’s been ages.’

  ‘Well maybe we met,’ she said impatiently. ‘Maybe we did, maybe we didn’t. In any case…’

  She’d been given my number by a mutual friend, who moved to live in the country several years ago and who has recently bought herself a couple of Hereford cows for company. Which isn’t a great sign, now I come to think of it. In any case the sexy, glamorous non-lavatory-flushing actress lived about an hour away from our own West Country idyll. And she wanted to know if my husband and I would be free to come to dinner the following Saturday.

  Is this normal, outside London? Is it? To coldcall people while they’re shopping in TK Max and ask them out to dinner? I was delighted, of course.

  Would have accepted at the drop of a hat. Would have made sure I went to the lavatory before I left, to avoid any chance of an ugly scene. But, hell, I’m going to jump at any opportunity to alleviate a fellow exile’s sense of isolation. Obviously.

  It made me wonder, though whether there aren’t quite a few of us stranded out here: dyed-in-the-wool metropolitans, feeling lonely and lost in our relentlessly green and pleasant landscapes. Perhaps there are. Maybe I should set up some kind of a website.

  In any case, tragically (not to say freakishly) my husband and I already have a social arrangement for that night. And not one shipped in from London, either. In fact we have a couple of bona fide locals coming to call! Which, clearly, is something to celebrate.

  Ages ago one of the Mothers at school very kindly asked the husband and I to a dinner party, and—needless to say—I accepted the invitation with all the gratitude and enthusiasm it deserved. For several weeks before the big event, as we waited for our children at the gate, she and I would talk about it. She said she intended to invite several neighbours, whom she believed the husband and I would get along with. She also asked, at least twice, whether either of us was vegetarian.

  But the dinner never happened, for reasons too complicated to explain. Suffice to say our metropolitan approach to last-minute cancellations (husband’s fault, not mine) caused untold offence and it took quite a lot of quite hefty spadework on my part to make amends—the consequence of which spadework is that on the night in question she and her husband have finally agreed to come to dinner at ours.

  All well and good. Peace reigns in Paradise once again.

  But it means there will be no merry cavorting with the glamorous and lonely for us. Not on that occasion. We shall be entertaining Mrs Healthy-Snax, who only likes to talk about getting her children to eat vegetables, and Mr Healthy-Snax, of course, whose real name I once knew but which I have now sadly forgotten.

  The last time I saw him was on a freezing, miserable afternoon just before Christmas. I was feeling particularly depressed at the time—so depressed, I could barely muster eye contact with my steering wheel, let alone with the human race. But there he was, ragging around on the school playing field, dressed in rugby shirt and Santa hat, and treating the Reception class to an impromptu lesson in ball control. Or something. It took all my self-control not to run him over.

  But anyway that was then.

  I’m sure it’s all going to be great fun.

  Monday February 27th

  Which is worse? Talking to Rachel Healthy-Snax White about kidz’n’vegetables for an entire Saturday evening, or running out of beauty secrets to share with Clare Gower at the school gate, or discovering that Johnny Depp, not spotted in Waitrose for several weeks now, has in fact just bought an island off Hawaii? Which is worse—all that, or to be screaming at the dog for shitting in the playroom again, and simultaneously to be receiving a text from Fin telling me that Hatty, my best friend, currently in Los Angeles, just rung him (currently in Barcelona) to tell him that Goodbye Jesus won the Oscar for Best Short Film last night.

  Which is worse?

  And I still haven’t decided what to reply to Darrell.

  Clare’s coming to lunch on Friday, so I’ve bought a copy of In Style magazine to prepare. Dora and I have been swatting over it all weekend. Extremely enjoyable it was too. Turns out I’ve been Stuck in a Style Rut for ages now, and so has Dora. I have promised to take Dora on a day trip to the Primark in Hammersmith one day very soon, because I feel her Style Rut might be more easily and cheaply remedied than my own. Everything she wears looks beautiful on her, even when it costs £2 from Primark. It would be impossible to say which of us is looking forward to the trip more. I’m almost tempted to pull her out of school for it.

  Rachel Healthy-Snax and her husband Jeremy Healthy—Snax came to supper on Saturday night. As expected, they were not very interesting.

  I had tried to forewarn Finley, who’s done almost no socialising in Paradise yet, that he needed to be on his mettle, that the evening was not going to be a breeze, and that he was likely to encounter difficulties maintaining concentration as the night wore on. But he didn’t listen. Actually he snarled at me. He said I was the boring one, for always being so negative about new people. Then he said, as the doorbell was ringing (promptly, at 8.01 on the button): ‘It is possible, you know, not to live in Notting Hill Gate and not to write novels or work in the media, and sti
ll to be an extremely interesting person. I’ll bet Rachel and Jeremy are fascinating. In their own way. The problem isn’t them, it’s you, because you are such an intolerant, narrow-minded, bitchy, metropolitan snob…’

  Wanker. What the hell’s Notting Hill got to do with it anyway? Only bankers live in Notting Hill these days. As he knows perfectly well.

  So the evening got off to a good start, with both of us spitting at each other as we tripped off to open the front door.

  And then Fin, who’s been working very hard recently, fell fast asleep in the middle of pudding.

  He might almost have got away with it too, funnily enough. I’m not sure our guests would have noticed, they were so busy chatting away. Except he suddenly let rip with a table-shaking, deep-throated, nasal-passage-grouting snore. Disgusting. And it was just as our guest, Jeremy Healthy-Snax, was reaching the climax of his story about a chap at Paradise train station who had the same briefcase as his, even though he—Jeremy—had bought his at Geneva airport. So. The timing was unfortunate. Jeremy had been expecting laughter, maybe a murmur of surprise, perhaps even a follow-on question:

  What took you to Geneva, Jeremy? Business or ski-ing?

  Instead he got Finley. Being rude and disgusting at the same time. Rachel and Jeremy were both pretty shocked. They pretended to laugh, but I could see that their feelings and their sense of decorum were both quite seriously offended. They left soon afterwards, pretty much immediately after coffee.