Grandmother or even Granny smacks of the middle class, and the young these days are desperate to be seen to belong to the workers.
But I daresay next time she sees me she will hold Kitty out to me and say, ‘Smile at Great-Nan,’ and the infant will bare its toothless gums at me, and I will smile back and be delighted. I am totally dedicated to my family, and to Hattie, and to Kitty, and even to Martyn though he is not always a bundle of laughs, but then neither is Hattie, certainly not since they had the baby.
Martyn is tall, over six foot, solidly built, sandy-haired, and hollow-cheeked but otherwise attractive enough. Girls like him. He has a First in politics and economics from Keele University, and is a member of Mensa. He tried to get Hattie to join but she declined, finding something distasteful about setting herself above others, intellectually. This may be because her mother also once belonged to Mensa, having joined in the days when you could send the qualifying questionnaire by post, so you could get your friends to supply the answers. Martyn has worn glasses since he was five. His shoulders are slightly rounded, from bending over so many computers, so many textbooks, so many reports and evaluations.
His mother Gloria, forty-three years old when Martyn was born, the youngest of five, had the same big-boned build, making twice of Martyn’s father Jack. The latter was slightly built, although like his son sandy-haired and hollow-cheeked. But Martyn looks healthy. Jack never did, certainly not by contemporary standards. Chip butties, fried fish, mushy peas and sixty cigarettes a day made sure that his arteries were clogged and his lungs black-lined. It was surprising he lasted as long as did. Gloria is still alive and in a nursing home in Tyneside. Martyn and Hattie visit her twice a year, but neither looks forward to the visits. She finds Hattie too fancy and strange-looking. The other siblings live closer to their mother, and visit more often.
Martyn is the only one who went to university. The others could have, but chose not to. They were like that: so sharp they cut themselves. Their father, Jack, joined the Communist Party as a boy in 1946, leaving when Russia invaded Hungary in 1968 to become a less extreme labour activist, but fighting as ever for the rights of the working class. He died of a heart attack when on the picket line during a strike. Waste of a good death, his friends said, better had it been from police brutality. Jack’s hair thinned and went in his thirties.
Martyn fears that the same thing will happen to him: he hates to see hairs in his comb when he gets to the mirror in the morning. The bathroom is small, and usually hung with wet, environmentally-friendly, slow-drying garments.
My own demotic credentials are rather good, these days. My husband Sebastian is in a Dutch prison serving a threeyear sentence for drug running. His name works against him. It is too posh. It attracts attention. I have suggested he calls himself Frank or Bill, but people are oddly loyal to the names that their parents gave them, as Hattie has observed to Martyn in relation to Agnieszka. Sebastian was, I believe but do not know, trying to supply the Glastonbury Festival with Ecstasy in yet another doomed attempt to solve our financial problems. These of course have become much worse as a result, but there are consolations. I have my new computer and a novel I can write in peace. I can sleep in all the bed, not a third of it; I can listen to the radio all I want, and now the panic fear, the anxiety as to how Sebastian is faring, and my own sense of social disgrace have faded, I can almost call myself happy. In other words, one can get used to anything.
And it’s surprising, even at my age, how suitors cluster round as soon as the man of the house is away. The newly divorced woman, the grass widow and the prison widow are as honey to the wasps of the passing male, in particular the best friends’ husbands. If there is no man to begin with, the attraction is not so great. Men want what other men have, not what they can have for the asking. So the lonely stay lonely, and the popular stay popular; the leap from one to the other is hard but not impossible. True widows do all right if they have come in to a great deal of life insurance. But otherwise their lot is hard: a grave too new for a headstone is disconcerting, and once it’s up it’s worse. Lose one husband, lose another. But the grass widow is in a good position, the promise of a short-term exercise in love and desire with a finite end is tempting. Age has little to do with it, in these days when a man of sixty seems old and a woman of sixty seems young. So I have suitors who do not interest me – they include a retired Professor of Philology from Nottingham, an art student who mistakenly thinks I have money and ‘likes older women’, and a television dramatist of the old school, largely unemployed, who thinks a connection with Serena would be a good idea. But like Penelope I encourage the suitors so far, and no further. I have no real intention of betraying Sebastian. I love him, in the old-fashioned, critical, but steadfast manner of my generation, we who loved first and thought afterwards. ‘Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love,’ said Shakespeare, and that is true for women too today, if not for the women of my generation. We lot died for love, all right.
‘How am I really?’ I respond to Hattie’s question. ‘How I am really is angry with Sebastian.’
‘Oh, don’t be,’ she says, ‘I am sure he is suffering enough.’ ‘I am suffering too,’ I say, ‘I have suitors. But I must say I am faltering in my Penelope role. Three years is a long time.’ ‘Oh, don’t!’ she implores. ‘Just give up and behave like a grandmother and wait.’
‘He should have looked behind him,’ I say. ‘A police car followed them for forty miles and they didn’t even bother to look behind. In a car packed with illegal drugs!’
‘Perhaps he didn’t know they were in there. And he wasn’t driving.’
‘Oh, come off it,’ I say. ‘Don’t you start excusing him too.
Last time I saw him he said, “I did it for you.” That made me really cross. He committed the crime, not me.’
Hattie laughs and says it’s true, men have a knack of making their womenfolk responsible for everything that goes wrong. Martyn will open the front door and turn to her and say ‘but it’s raining’ as if it were her fault.
Sebastian is my third husband, fourth if I include Curran, so I like to think I have some knowledge of the ways of men, in the house and out of it. I regale her with tales of husbands who pat their pot bellies and smile and tell you it’s your fault because your cooking is so good, blame you for their adulteries (your fault I slept with her: you were too cold, snored too loudly, not there enough – anything). Your fault I lost my job, you did not iron my shirts. Your fault I am in prison, I did it for you. Serena’s previous husband George gave up painting pictures and in future years was of course to blame Serena for failing to dissuade him from doing so. You should never try to make a man do anything, Serena says, that he doesn’t want to. It always bounces back to you.
I love you, I love you, is the mating cry of the arriving male. All your fault, as he departs.
I met and married Sebastian when I was thirty-eight: he was forty. We had no children together: he had two by an earlier marriage: I had accumulated two along the way. I can only hope that imprisonment will not have the same effect on Sebastian as the heart attack had on George: that he will not, like George, encounter some therapist who will encourage him in the belief that it’s all the wife’s fault and the only way to survive is to leave her. To break the ties that bind. It is a fairly absurd worry. Fortunately counsellors are in short supply in Dutch prisons.
