to the germ.
He was rather dampening when I enumerated the cottage’s many advantages on the way back to Mother’s house in darkest suburbia for Granny’s birthday tea. I’ll have to work on him; but I’m in love with my cottage, and am beginning to have distinctly now- or-never feelings about making the move.
I think it’s something to do with thirty looming ahead (my birthday is in February) and so few of my ambitions realised. And if I’m going to take the plunge and have a baby, then my sell-by date is just peeping up on the horizon.
One definite plus point to living in the cottage at Nutthill would be that James wouldn’t be so tempted to call in at the pub on his way home from work in the evenings if he had such a long drive ahead of him. (Networking, this is called, apparently.) And with so much to do to the house and garden he won’t have either the time or the money for his Friday night sessions out with ‘the boys’, or our regular show or film and restaurant on Saturday nights.
I never feel relaxed in big, pretentious, expensive restaurants anyway, and would always have preferred to save the money towards the cottage. I’m not much of a social animal, in fact. I like a quiet life and time to write after work, and I enjoy a trip to a museum or art gallery more than anything else.
James’s friends are all about ten years older than I am, with self-assured, well-dressed, boring wives, against whom I stand out like a macaw among a lot of sparrows. They’re all so well-groomed and taupe. If they mix two colours together in a scarf they think they’re daring.
Living so far out into the country would also distance us from James’s appalling old school chum Howard, ageing hippie extraordinaire, who has recently moved back to London after a brief spell crewing on a yacht, where I should think he was as much use as a twist of rotten rope.
He managed to acquire a rich girlfriend in the interval between jumping ship in Capri and being deported. (I hadn’t realised that he knew Comrades came in two sexes, but there you are. She must be deranged.)
James may not immediately see all the cottage’s
advantages …
He dropped me at Mother’s in mid-afternoon (and I can hardly wait to put some distance between myself and Mother – another plus) and drove off to the office to pick up some papers (allegedly) though I did tell him that if he wasn’t back within the hour I’d kill him.
I stifled the ignoble thought that perhaps he just wanted to see his ex-girlfriend Vanessa, recently reinstalled as secretary. When she got divorced and had to find a job, she pleaded with James to put a word in for her, and he felt so sorry for her he persuaded his uncle Lionel to take her on again.
He explained how it was, so I’m not in the least bit worried or jealous about her being there every day, even though she’s another bubbly blonde. From the sound of it, her bubbles may have gone a bit flat; James said her husband was a brute and she’s looking very worn and years older.
Mother was a bit pensive and hurt when he drove off, and nearly as dismal as James when I described the cottage. She only really cheered up again when he returned and fell like a famished wolf on the rather nursery spread of food she associates with birthdays.
Then the cake was brought out and we had to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ with James and Mother trying to harmonise, slightly hampered by Granny, who had already loudly announced that she didn’t want any fuss made about birthdays at her time of life, ignoring us and turning the TV up loudly, so that a repeat of Top of the Pops drowned us out.
Mother keeps trying to persuade everyone that Granny is losing her marbles, but I think anyone who can learn to preset a video recorder deserves Mensa membership, because I’ve never managed it.
‘You can’t possibly want to watch that, Maud!’ Mother broke off to exclaim crossly.
Granny briefly unglued her boot-button eyes from the screen. ‘Why not?’ she demanded belligerently. ‘All them funny clothes and lewd dancing. Best entertainment on the box.’
She returned her avid gaze to the gyrating row of young men clad in enormously baggy trousers and no tops. ‘Eh! There’s more hair on the back of my hands than there is on them poor boys’ chests. And call that a beard? Bum fluff!’
Mother sighed long-sufferingly and cast her baby-blue eyes heavenwards. ‘So vulgar,’ she whispered. ‘Dear James, she’s such a trial to me – and getting more senile by the day.’
I wouldn’t agree with that, though she certainly seems to be reverting to her Yorkshire roots at a gallop!
James squeezed Mother’s hand. ‘At least she has you to look after her, Valerie,’ he said, which I thought was pretty rich considering he knows Mother is the giddy, spendthrift widow of the two. But Mother is the tiny, fluffy fragile sort who seems to appeal to a certain type of man. (She’s tough as old boots really.) She spends large amounts of money she doesn’t have on beauty treatments, make-up and clothes, which is mainly why Granny decided to move in and take over.
I’m sure she thought she could sort Mother out and then leave things running smoothly while she moved to the retirement bungalow she’d set her mind on. Only, as she soon discovered, you can’t organise fluff, it just drifts away with every passing breath of wind.
She’s had to bail Mother out of major financial difficulties at least twice, and even the house itself now belongs to her, so it’s fortunate that Grandpa was a jeweller and had lots of what Granny calls ‘brass’. He was a warm man, she always says, though she won’t say precisely what his thermostat was set to.
Mother has entirely failed to see that she is Granny’s pensioner, not vice versa, and tells everyone she’s trying to make her declining years a joy to her.
Granny hasn’t shown much sign of declining yet, and not much joy either.
So Mother now squeezed James’s hand with sincere gratitude and batted long mascara-lagged eyelashes at him: ‘Dear James – so understanding. So very wise.’
Granny’s deafness has an astonishingly intermittent quality about it unrelated to whether her hearing aid is switched on or off (or even which ear she happens to have plugged it into).
She now remarked without turning her head, ‘Dearest James knows which side his bread is buttered on, and so do you. He—’
She broke off so suddenly that I swivelled round in my chair in alarm, only to find her attention riveted by the appearance on the screen of a dark, extremely angular face: a familiar, very masculine face, framed in long, jet-black hair and with eyes as green as shamrocks.
‘Well, I never did, Tish!’ she gasped. ‘It’s that Fergus who used to live next door – the one you were sweet on. Now that’s what I call a man!’
‘Fergal,’ I corrected automatically. And he’d been what I called a man, too, until fame and fortune had beckoned and he’d gone off without a backward look. It’s not what I call him now.
Still, it gave me a peculiar feeling to see him on screen moodily singing, bright eyes remote and hooded. And even more of a funny feeling in the stomach when the guitars crashed in and he started throwing his lithe body about the stage.
Age does not appear to have withered him or staled his infinite variety.
Top of the Pops
