Wife in the North Read online

  All told, it has been a damnable summer. Over the past few months, between arranging the move from one end of the country to the other, working, looking after a four-year-old, a two-year-old and being pregnant, I have been up and down to Yorkshire hospitals and moved the entire family to North Wales for ten days when my mother took up convalescence with her niece. I did not want to spend that much time away from the children, so my husband came too. Every day, he would take the boys on expeditions to the beach or adventuring while I was with my mother. Every night, he would clear the knives and forks and marmalade pots from the table in the dining room of the bed and breakfast where we were staying to do his work on his laptop, then come to bed at three.

  We had been back from Wales a week when we moved house. I am an only child. That was bad planning on my part. I was utterly and entirely grateful to my cousin for stepping in to care for my mother, whom I know she loves. But another reason I agreed to the move is that I need this chance too. In London, it would be difficult to afford a house which could have a comfortable set-up for my parents, room for three children and an office for us. In Northumberland, it becomes a runner. When illness and age strikes again, my mother can come to me. My husband lives where he wants to live; the children get small classes and large beaches; my parents get space in our house when they need it. All I have to do is hold it together long enough to have a baby and create a new life for everybody. If this move does not work, I am busted.

  Tuesday, 6 September 2005

  Park and ride

  My four-year-old’s first day in the reception class at his new school. It is a small school on the outskirts of a stone-built village, set next to grazing sheep and across the fields from a spired church. It has a pupil roll of around forty. His London school, where he was in the morning nursery class, had a roll of 400. I loved the London school. The only problem: I was old enough to have given birth to the other mothers. Not insurmountable. I wore more lipstick. That solves more problems that you would think.

  In London, we would walk him along a canal and through a park to school. In the country, we drive. About a mile into the journey, my four-year-old said: ‘I liked my old school.’ ‘I’m sure you’ll like your new school too, darling,’ I replied. He kept looking out of the window. ‘Look, there’s a horse,’ I said. He harrumphed. ‘Why do I have to go to school anyway?’ ‘And a chicken,’ I said. ‘They have chickens up here, too. Hello, chicken.’ He harrumphed again. My two-year-old piped up: ‘I like the soldiers. Where are the soldiers?’ My two-year-old is obsessed with the Changing of the Guard. I said: ‘The soldiers are in London, darling.’ He started to cry.

  When we got back, I said to the two-year-old as we got out of the car: ‘Shall we go for a walk in the woods?’ Next to the cottages and across the road there is a steeply sloping wood of huge beech and sycamore trees. He shook his head. ‘Bears might eat me.’ ‘There are no bears,’ I said. I stroked his hair, crouched down, asked: ‘Are you OK with the move, with living here?’ He shook his head again. ‘Bears might eat me.’ ‘There are no bears,’ I said as I looked into the darkness and the growling started.

  Wednesday, 7 September 2005

  Kiss and make-up

  Yesterday afternoon, when I picked up the four-year-old, I said: ‘How was it then?’ ‘Can’t remember.’ ‘Did you play with anyone?’ ‘Can’t remember.’ Later, slumped against my mother in her chair, his arms around her, I heard him confide: ‘I don’t have any friends.’ ‘You will,’ she said, ‘it takes time.’ He thinks he has it bad making new friends in school. Life in London was simpler in many ways. Cafés knew how to make a decent skinny latte with an extra shot, muddy wellies weren’t de rigueur and most importantly I had friends. Quite a few of them. Those who had children juggled their responsibilities, adjusted their career expectations and got on with it. Those who didn’t tried not to talk too much about the exotic holidays and how long they spent in bed on a Sunday. I had things in common with my friends: work, children of the same age, an outlook. Now I have to start again. I said to my mother: ‘I don’t have any friends either.’ She patted my arm, said: ‘Give it time.’

  This is me at the school gate. Hand extended for warm, professional handshake. Big smile. It says: ‘Trust me. I’m a mother. Just like you.’ The fact I am shaking hands at all, however, is a giveaway. Shaking hands is something you do in an office. Or to a stranger. I tend to do it to men. ‘Do you shake hands with other women out in the real world?’ I suddenly wonder. They do not know this, but it could be worse. I could be doing that metropolitan swoop to air-kiss their cheeks. A blur of women shake my outstretched hand. A few look like they might even have done it before. Some of them wear gilets. Some wear wellies. One looks like she climbs off a horse to get into her 4×4, picks up her child, drives home, then climbs back in the saddle. Another wears tweed and a strange furry hat. Her husband farms oysters as well as cows. She used to teach mathematics in secondary school and has a very ‘County Set’ accent – an intimidating combination. Hardly anyone seems to wear make-up. Do they have natural make-up down to such a fine art that I cannot spot it? It takes me an hour and a half to look as if I am not wearing any. No one took it upon themselves to introduce themselves to me. Perhaps I just leapt on them with my class-president campaign buttons a little too early.

  Thursday, 8 September 2005

  Have you heard? Love is blind

  My mother is registered blind. Macular degeneration affects the central vision of the eyes and is the most common cause of blindness in the UK. Fragile capillaries grow underneath the ‘macula’, the central area of the retina at the back of the eye. In my mother’s case, they have leaked and bled, leaving her with peripheral vision – the edge of things. My mother, who can see to the heart of the matter in moments, now lives at the margins. I find it almost unbearable to see her hold a grandchild’s face between soft palms and turn her head this way and that to snatch at what is hers by right. Later, she sits sideways pressed against a television screen, squinting hopelessly at a letter tilted and close against her eyes, struggling to find her way in a place of darkness and fighting it every moment.

  Deafness makes it worse. She cannot hear you in a crowded room. Cannot hear you in a room with the two of you unless she concentrates. Unless you are saying something you do not want her to hear – that she can do. Two hearing aids help her get by. She buys a watch for the blind and has to lift it to her ear to hear the voice. She buys scales for baking, made especially for the blind. The scales, too, have a voice. They ring out: ‘One pound and seven ounces.’ ‘What was that?’ she asks, and presses it again. ‘One pound and seven ounces.’ ‘No, didn’t get that,’ she says, and presses it again. As for me, I laugh, and she laughs herself and says: ‘Don’t laugh,’ and, helpless, I say: ‘I’m not laughing,’ and I am not laughing – inside I am weeping, it just looks like laughter.

  I watch her face sometimes. In company, she sits too quietly, smiles a moment late, nods when she should shake her head. She misses the beat. You accept the rebukes when she says you do not speak clearly enough, speak too fast, sit too far away. You move closer, speak more slowly, raise your voice. Even as my father holds her hand, age isolates her. Age is terrible. I am not signing up to it. God is an ingrate. My mother’s goodness and her Catholic reverence brought her decay and sickness. She got old, blind, deaf. These are sins to be reckoned with. These are sins he should forgive. Step up to the mark, Jesus. Lay on hands. Heal the sick. It’s been a while.

  Friday, 9 September 2005

  Haunting houses

  I am down in London for work – two nights away for a media consultancy job, then back to Northumberland on Saturday morning. Our London house is nothing special apart from the fact it was ours. End of terrace, Victorian. It looks as if it suffered some damage during the Second World War when bombs rained down on the East End. It has a kitchen with wooden cupboards and a faux stable back-door into a paved garden with Peace roses and a frenzied Russian vine. The w
all between the sitting room and the dining room was replaced by shuttered doors, which we pulled across to make a downstairs office. I covered them with charcoal and pencil nudes from my life-drawing class. When I needed inspiration I would look across from my computer and think: ‘I should really lose some weight.’ The house has a cellar we filled with junk, stripped floors, a small bathroom with antiqued gold taps, and three bedrooms – just enough for who we were. At night we would fall asleep to the sound of police sirens and other people’s conversation as they staggered home. We could walk to a good school, a market and the library, catch a bus to Canary Wharf or a tube to the West End. I felt safe, alert, busy. I loved my London life. I never went to clubs, never danced till dawn; I gave birth, drank coffee, spent hours in parks and far too long at work. But this book shop here I love, this shop for clothes, and this bridge lifts my heart whenever I cross the river. I had some fancy jobs and met some fancy people, but I never did anything extraordinary. It is London which is extraordinary: the teeming, urgent streets; palaces; power; the history of a nation, casual, standing with pigeons on a plinth.

  I do not want to sell the house until we decide whether the move north is a permanent one. The plan is to start renting it out early next year. We cannot do it before because we need somewhere to come back to after I give birth – then we will buy furniture and get it ready for tenants. When I visit it like this, the city itself seems strange. As for what was my home – I know how it is to haunt a house. You move around it in silence. You look into unfamiliar rooms emptied out of the people who once lived alongside you. Disconnected and unseen. It has nothing for you unless you count dustballs and memories.

  Monday, 12 September 2005

  Careering out of control

  In London, when I worked full time in a newsroom, I had a professional nanny with a degree and a reasonable wage. That is to say, I signed over virtually everything I earned to her and her best friend, the taxman. When I freelanced from home and worked less, I kept my nanny but she worked fewer days. I have thought about it but there is no way I can look after everyone, organize the house, be this pregnant and do any work at all. I know some women could, but they are better women than me. I am permanently exhausted and enormous. When my husband goes back down to London, it will get worse. We advertised in the local newspaper. I admit it: I need help.

  One applicant, a sales rep, told me: ‘I want to come in off the road – I’ve just had a really bad car smash. I have a permanent headache and a ringing in my ears.’ I liked her, but I thought: ‘A “permanent headache” and you want to work with children?’ One had removed a nose ring for the interview. I do not want to think about how she did that. Another honest applicant told me as she drank my tea: ‘I don’t know why I’ve applied.’ I liked her too, but thought: ‘Well, if you don’t know, how am I supposed to?’ My mother and father are still with me. Deaf as she is, my mother misses nothing. If you did not know her, you would see her sitting with a blanket round her knees, hearing aids, white stick by her side and enormous black glasses perched on her tiny nose and think her an entirely harmless old lady. But as each candidate left, my mother’s mouth turned down and she shook her silver, permed, curl-perfect head. ‘Absolutely not,’ she would say. A hanging judge.

  Then the Dairy Farmer’s Wife appeared. Long, glossy hair with a fringe and an auburn tint. She has a trim, curvy figure; girlish-looking, despite the fact she is two years older than me. She had seen the advert but already knew about the relocating Londoners courtesy of the local farming grapevine. She laughs easily, which I always like. She told me she was married at twenty-one and has three girls of her own, a twenty-year-old at university, an eighteen-year-old about to go and a thirteen-year-old. All privately educated. A swimming pool. Milking 150 cows. She is going to do three days a week for me because she wants to do something out of the house now the family is grown – I think perhaps she does not feel as needed as she once did. She makes me feel embarrassed to be pregnant at my age. Makes me think: ‘What have I been doing with my life?’ Women look at other women. They think: ‘Nice legs. Good teeth.’ They think: ‘Could I be her? Should I have trod her path? Was her way the better way to go? If I had gone this way as she did, not that way when I did, would I be happier today?’

  I have a friend. This one a perfect mother. She too stayed looking young – perhaps because she did it right: had her kids early, sidelined the nursing career, made family her life. Her children are adolescents now. She knows what to do when they are knocked or sick or broken up; lets them have hairy pets; cooks meals from scratch. I wonder whether she, too, looks at me and thinks: ‘What has she been doing with her life?’ OK, I have had a career. Marvellous while it lasted, but what after all is a career and where did it get me? I am a geriatric mother. I am clever, or so I thought. I said: ‘I know I will shape my brilliant career to fit my life as a mother. I will give up my well-paid, glamorous, high-status job. I will cut my days and freelance from home. That way, I can exercise my brain, take back control of my life and see more of the children.’ How stupid can a well-educated woman be? Look where I am. An old mother, struggling to keep up with two small boys and about to have another baby. No figure. No ‘career’. No time to make another. No salary and no status. Without a salary and an office, I could not defend myself from pleas to relocate. I am a has-been living in a world which thinks I am a never-was.

  Tuesday, 13 September 2005

  Absent with leave

  My husband left for London for two weeks. Let me see, how long have we lived here? Oh yes, three weeks. How pregnant am I? Seven months. How many children do I have? Two and a bit. Do I want to be here? No. Excellent. He has a deadline. He always seems to have a deadline. He is the one who wants to live up here, yet he is the one who has to work away for weeks at a time. I knew he would have to go back soon after we moved: he can do part of his job down the line but not all of it. Seeing him go – not having him here – is about as hard as I thought it would be. He called me. He said: ‘I miss you.’ I gripped the phone, said: ‘If we lived in London, you wouldn’t have to miss me.’

  Real friends I count like beads on a rosary. Among them, my Best Friend From School, who knows the worst of me and still loves me. My Gay Best Boyfriend from university – the one who knew that guy I liked was gay before I did. London Diva, ahead of me in wisdom and in life; the Perfect Mother I turn to for advice; and Islington Beauty, a fellow working mother. You do not keep every friend you ever make. If you are lucky, you keep one or maybe two from the pigeonholes of life: study, jobs, children. One of the best places for making friends is, of course, the office. I have friends from all of the places I have worked: newspapers and TV. If you invest wisely, you double them as they grow old and marry. Some friends become another family. Some friends you talk to once a year. A few are there in every crisis and extremity. You hurt when they hurt. There are times when you put down a phone after they have read you the latest chapter of their life, and you weep for them. Some, occasionally, disappoint. Occasionally, you disappoint back. You try to listen. In sadness and disaster, you say: ‘I love you’ and hope they can hear between their shouts of pain. You say: ‘I’m here for you’ and hope they can see you in their darkness. It seems the least that you can do.

  My friends. Each precious and shiny to me. They have two things in common: they love me back and, apart from my Best Friend From School, they tend to live in London. Bastards all, those London livers. I have betrayed them. I have challenged them and I do not want to challenge my friends. I want to get drunk with them on expensive wines that taste of sunshine. I want to tell them: ‘Whatever you do is fine with me.’ I want them to say the same to me. I have let the side down. My friends would not have approved if we had moved to suburbia. You can at least explain an escape to suburbia. You can shrug your shoulders and show them the palms of your hands. Sorrowful. You can tell them: ‘The children. Schools.’ You can look sombre. ‘Fees.’ You can shake your head. ‘Just not possible.’ Try
telling a serious career woman who does something indescribably complicated with television satellites the same in husband-speak. Try saying: ‘My husband. His dream.’ Her diva blue eyes narrow. Try saying: ‘Love. His happiness.’ Try saying: ‘Northumberland. It’s not far – you can visit.’ She spits on your stripped and polished floor.

  Wednesday, 5 October 2005

  The kindness of strangers

  Northumberland is considered by many to be the cradle of English Christianity, courtesy of the saints and holy men who once lived on its rocky outcrops among the seabirds and the seals. It seems fitting then, somehow, that so many people we meet appear to be so very faith filled. The school community, at least, seems very religious; Church of England, although many of those connected with it worship at a Baptist church. I asked one volunteer who plays the guitar and wears small Jesus fish for earrings how she came to be at the school. She smiled and said: ‘The Lord wants me here.’ At toddler group the other morning, I admired the child-crafted art on the walls. Then looked again. I asked Guitar Girl: ‘Are the little cut-out people being burnt up by the flames of hell?’ (My Catholic interpretation of red and licking fire.) It was nothing so infernal – Pentecostal art, apparently. Tongues of flame come down from heaven to lend the silhouettes the power of babbling speech, not to burn up paper toes.

  Moving after the baby was born would have meant making my four-year-old start school in London in September and then start another school a few months later in Northumberland. It did not seem fair to him. But moving when we did has made me more reliant on the kindness of these devout and earnest strangers. Three women linked to the school, the Head Teacher, the Evangelical Woman who chairs the governing body and Guitar Girl, have all told me to call them if I need help while my husband is away. I waddle into school with my enormous pregnant belly, my mother’s arm tucked in mine, she tip-tapping with her dark glasses and her white stick, with the two big-eyed boys clutching at my knees. These people are Christians. Naturally they want to help me. I am amazed they have not had a sponsored walk on my behalf. They make me tea at toddler group on Monday mornings and thrust scraps of paper with telephone numbers into my hands. ‘For emergencies,’ they say, ‘or any time.’ I am a stranger come among them to live in barley fields. In London, I do not think anyone would have noticed had my husband been away. Of course, the need would not have been there either. I gratefully nod my thanks; I drink their tea; I cannot remember where I put their numbers.