of years ago and we were introduced. ‘H-E-L-L-O, M-U-M-M-Y!’ she said to me, V-E-R-Y S-L-O-W-L-Y. And that was it. Amazing.)
Where was I? Darrell and me. Darrell et moi…We talked about our travels in Florida. Darrell went to Orlando the year before last, but didn’t manage to make it to Miami. He said he thought Orlando was mind-boggling. I said I thought so too, though truth be told I’m not convinced I’ve ever been there. I went to Jacksonville once, I think. In any case it didn’t matter at all…Florida has a lovely climate and a hell of a lot of alligators. We agreed on that. What else did we talk about?
I don’t know. The kitchen, obviously. But I didn’t want to focus on that. It would have put too much of an emphasis on—lots of things I didn’t particularly want to emphasise at that particular moment. Anyway, I drank slightly more than half a bottle of wine in the time it took him to finish his two cans of lager—which, I think, is a slight improvement on the last time. I certainly wasn’t reeling by the time he left, but I had taken up smoking again. Darrell smokes roll-ups. He offered to roll one for me. I know perfectly well how to roll my own, of course, but I decided not to mention it. I let him do the rolling and then I said oooh, because they did come out very neat. Oh dear. Oh dear.
Oh dear oh dear oh dear.
I can’t help it. He’s got such a fucking sexy laugh.
Going to Clare Gower’s coffee morning this morning.
Oddly enough I’ve never been to a ‘coffee morning’ before. Well, it’s not that odd. Up until now I’ve made a fairly conscientious effort to avoid them. I have a nasty feeling this one may be quite a formal affair. Otherwise why would I have been invited to it almost a fortnight in advance?
She had to postpone the last one because she was having the outside of the house repainted, and she thought scaffolding might somehow ‘confuse matters’. Not certain which matters, and I didn’t like to ask. In any case the scaffolders have apparently packed up now, and taken with them all danger of confusion. The house is nicely repainted, Clare says, and the coffee morning is Back On. I have high hopes for it. Clare says she’s expecting about ten guests—all women, of course. There must be one among them who might possibly be a friend?
I’m going upstairs now to put on some mascara in her honour.
Sunday Times
There haven’t been many times in my life when things have seemed so wretched that I really, truly wanted to press my own ejector seat and power into eternal space. But since leaving London for the West Country and a new existence of Healthy Family Fun, I find my fingers more often groping for the button.
Forget the pain of childbirth; the long, drawn-out death of a loved one; forget being eaten alive by piranha fish, or having a nail slowly hammered into the back of your neck. Hell is a coffee morning with the unemployed lady-mothers of idyllic rural Britain. Hell is knowing you stick out like a sore thumb and that you’ll be stuck there, sticking out, for an hour minimum, smiling until your face cracks, before you can politely slip away again. Time hasn’t passed so painfully since my last triple physics class, back in 1985. What a culture shock.
Nevertheless, I definitely tried to fit in. Said mmmm about the organic carrot and ginger nibbles, which were truly delicious; hooted with naughty laughter at the wicked ‘willy’ jokes, which were abysmal; managed (most impressively of all) to bite my tongue when they talked about their husbands’ domestic predilections as if they were not only interesting but paramount, and left—a little early, admittedly, but full of gratitude and enthusiasm.
They saw through me. Maybe they could sense I didn’t truly believe. At the school gate I bumped into the Hostess Lady-Mum, Queen Bee Lady-Mum, whose very delicious nibbles I’d mmm’d over so wholeheartedly, and I think she pretended not to see me. I sort of hopped this way and that, grinning, trying to catch her eye. She turned away. Somehow or other, I must have blown it.
In any case I shan’t dwell on it. I mustn’t obsess. They obviously all hate me, but I have to move on. It was a bad morning. A failed experiment. Suffice to say, the quest for a decent social life continues in earnest and I have decided once and for all that the ladies’ coffee mornings are not, and never were, a realistic recruiting ground. Unless of course they happen to invite me again.
In the meantime I think I’d do better looking closer to home. At the builder, for example. Actually we have two builders, a painter, a landscape gardener and five carpet layers on the property as I write. I’m talking, of course, about the good looking one, the tea and biscuit-refusing installer of our new and exorbitantly tasteful, pale green kitchen, who sings Fred Astaire songs while he works, and who is, by the way, among the most handsome men I have ever met.
While the husband was hard at work in Bucharest yesterday, the builder told me, in his lovely West Country burr, that he used to play a lot of tennis.
Well, blow my cotton socks off, and so did I!
In fact there’s a run-down, faintly depressing old tennis club in the local town and I go there once a week in search of a match. So far I’ve not had any joy. It appears that everybody in the club already has ‘their tennis organised’.
So it’s with a mixture of desperation, loneliness and, obviously, lust that I’ve been trying to summon the nerve to ask him for a match. Trouble is—what if he thinks I’m propositioning him? Or—Christ, what if I am propositioning him? Crickety-crackety, what if he thinks I’m propositioning him and he says Yes?
OK. Obviously, that was silly. Over-excited and very, very silly. He’s much too young for me. Apart from which, of course, we moved down here to be more of a family, not less: to pursue a life of good, clean, decent, honourable, innocent, monogamous fun. And that’s what we’re doing, dammit. For example, we went out in the woods yesterday, the children and I, and we built our very own bows and arrows. Out of natural sticks. God, it was fun! Or it would have been, except it was raining and the children wanted to watch telly and I was terrified about the slugs, and the arrows didn’t really work and—
Anyway the main point is, I’m married.
Well, here’s a peculiar fact. Clare Gower, maker of immaculate ginger nibbles and agonisingly feeble willy jokes, has decided to overlook my spoddish performance at her coffee morning the other day. I was convinced she hated me, but it turns out she doesn’t hate me at all. In fact she seems quite keen to become my friend.
Not because she likes me. She couldn’t. We have nothing in common, beyond the whole life-cycle thing. I catch her looking at me sometimes with an expression of dull, vaguely pitying confusion. Nevertheless, in spite of that, in spite of my obviously being a misfit, something about me has obviously tickled her fancy. Or possibly she feels sorry for me. In any case she has invited Fin and me to a drinks party in three weeks’ time and to a dinner party—not this Saturday, not the Saturday after that, nor the one after
