ruse to allow them to move out with minimal hassle while sorting out their financial affairs to their own benefit.
I wasn’t going to be caught on the hop like that. The next day, when I checked our bank accounts and found that Simon had withdrawn a considerable sum – apparently to cover the rent on Geoff’s flat, as it had turned out that Geoff wasn’t letting him house sit rent free, as Simon had implied – and after listening to Simon’s excuses that the joint account was ‘living expenses’ and me pointing out that it was his choice to move out into an expensive flat and why the fuck should I be part-funding that, I called the estate agents and the lawyers, removed my share from the remains of the joint accounts and got the ball rolling. Unfortunately, our house turned out to have gone up in value since we bought it, and neither of us could afford to buy the other out, so it had to be sold, all while Simon bleated on that I was being too hasty and he hadn’t meant this to be permanent.
Competitively priced family homes in catchment areas for decent schools tend to sell fast, though – rather faster than I’d expected, leaving me without much time to find somewhere for me and the children to go. And so, I find myself lying awake, staring at the ceiling, contemplating a future where I’ll not be growing old with Simon in a little stone cottage with roses round the door. However, on the plus side, I will be growing old in a little stone cottage with roses round the door. That is what I need to focus on – the positives, not the negatives. The fact is that Simon had always baulked at my visions of quaint and rustic cottages, and muttered darkly about energy efficiency, and lack of double glazing, and low ceilings (surely the low ceilings would make it easier to heat, as I used to point out). He’d tut and point out all the flaws in the survey reports of the Dream Houses I showed him, sighing over wet rot and dry rot and rising damp and crumbling pointing, crying, ‘Money pit! Money pit!’ as I cried, ‘Character and soul! IT HAS CHARACTER AND SOUL! What’s a little mildew compared with THAT?’
As an architect, Simon was always able to trump me (a mere ‘computer person’, as he used to refer to my job) on all things house by hurling technical words around and citing the terrible costs of a new roof (according to him, every house I fell in love with would need a new roof, despite the clearly functional and vintagely slated roof having done perfectly well for over a hundred years), and so, one by one, my dreams were crushed under the weight of tedious practicalities.
But now, Simonless, with no unfaithful naysayer crushing my visions of stone-flagged kitchens and mullioned windows anymore, I’ve found the cottage of my dreams, and we’re moving in today. Well, it’s possibly not quite the Cottage of My Dreams. My finances didn’t entirely stretch to that, despite a small stroke of luck in my batshit-mental ex-sister-in-law Louisa deciding her latest blow struck against the patriarchy would be to become a lesbian and move to a women’s commune with her new lover Isabel, thus finally vacating the house I’d been emotionally blackmailed into buying for her several years earlier. My lingering resentment at being forced to bankroll Louisa’s feckless lifestyle with the profits of the one financially successful thing I’ve ever achieved, my lovely app called Why Mummy Drinks, obviously in no way contributed to the breakdown of things with Simon at all. But she’s gone, her (my) house is sold, and the resulting cash injection added to my share of the Marital Home meant I was able to afford to buy a Vaguely Dreamish Cottage, with not too crippling a mortgage. Hurrah! It will be magical. If you overlook the damp. Which is probably nothing that can’t be painted over. And the fact that I didn’t have much time to wait around for the perfect house to come on the market so, to afford a house with a garden for Judgy Dog and three bedrooms for the children and me, I’ve had to move miles out of town.
But anyway. I shall have a vegetable garden, and look adorable in wellies and an unfeasible amount of Cath Kidston prints (well, probably not real Cath Kidston, as it’s very bloody expensive and I’m a Single Mother now, but I can probably find some affordable knock-offs on eBay). I’m going to keep chickens – Speckled Sussexes, I’ve decided, because I liked the name and when I googled them they were described as very chatty chickens. Who even needs a man when you have chatty chickens? I just have to hope that Judgy Dog does not attempt to eat my chatty chickens. I’ve had stern words with him to this effect, but he just gave me one of his ‘I’m paying no attention to your foolish witterings, woman, and I shall do as I please’ looks. Luckily, Judgy being my dog, having got him somewhat against Simon’s will, despite Simon coming to love him almost as much as I do, there was no question of who got Judgy in the divorce. I’d probably have let him have Peter and Jane if he’d really wanted, but I’d have fought tooth and nail for sole custody of Judgy …
Peter and Jane are not entirely enamoured of my Splendid Plan to move to the country. Although in actual fact we’re not moving that far into the country, we’re still (just) within the catchment area for their school, so they’ll not be further traumatised by changing schools, as well as being from a Broken Home (do people even still say that? I just remember, in Coronation Street, Tracy Barlow shouting about coming from a Broken Home at Ken and Deirdre when they had one of their frequent divorces – not that it really mattered with Ken and Deirdre, of course, as they’d be back together again by the Omnibus).
Despite this, the children were still horrified at living ‘out in the sticks’ and the lack of late buses to transport them home from parties and bouts of underage drinking. Well, at fifteen, I suspect Jane at least has been dabbling somewhat with the Bacardi Breezers, or whatever over-sugared shit the Youth of Today drink. Peter is only thirteen, so hopefully I’ve a year or so’s grace before he too starts on the path of depravity. I live in hope, however, that they might both yet declare themselves to be teetotallers, as I’ve been a Terrible Warning rather than a Good Example when it comes to the Evils of Drink. I attempted to placate them with rash promises of providing plenty of lifts home, and brightly reminded them that every second weekend they’d be staying over at their dad’s flat in town, and so it would be a) his problem and b) nice and easy to get home from parties and the dubious pubs that serve underage teenagers. Simon was there when I announced this, and I must say he did not look entirely thrilled at the prospect.
He has meanwhile found his Dream Flat, the minimalist White Box he’s hankered after for years. He’d practically drool while watching Grand Designs whenever anyone built one of those spare, modern cubes as a house, as he looked round our cluttered sitting room and sighed in despair. There were some rows about his flat too, because, as I pointed out, he could not buy an open-plan loft, because he needed somewhere for his CHILDREN to sleep when they came to stay – something that did not seem to have occurred to him. He finally grudgingly compromised on somewhere that had one decent-sized bedroom, one small room he announced he’d use as a study and put a futon in for Jane (I didn’t know you even still got futons – I thought they had vanished after the Nineties, along with my youth and the perkiness of my tits), and what he optimistically called a ‘boxroom’ for Peter, which Peter and I called a ‘cupboard’. Apart from having to shut his only son and heir in a cupboard every second weekend, from the photos it looks like an annoyingly nice flat, although the sideboard will look bloody awful there, so ha!
Anyway, I might as well get up and have a cup of tea in peace, before starting the lengthy and painful process of trying to prise two teenagers from their pits. There’s a part of me that wonders if it would be easier to just leave them in their beds and let the removal men load them onto the lorry and install them still slumbering in their new rooms at the other end. And also, how long would it actually take them to notice they were in a different house? In fairness, Peter would notice almost straight away when he walked towards the fridge on autopilot, ready to inhale the entire contents in the name of a ‘snack’, and found it in a different location, thus delaying his ‘snack’ by an essential and life-threatening thirty seconds.
It’s a strange feeling to think that this is the last time I’ll wake up in this house. There have been a lot of ‘last times’ over the previous few days. Some of them have been quite sad, like the last time I’d say goodnight to the children in the rooms they’ve slept in since they were tiny. Peter and Jane were less moved by my tearful attempts to tuck them in
