considerations like university fees and, in the case of daughter or daughters (unless they can be persuaded to elope), large and expensive white weddings.
Being part of a couple, it’s alleged, acts as a brake on spending, because individuals in the relationship have to account for their purchases to a partner and are thus unlikely to indulge in splurges in the manner of single people. ‘Absolute rubbish,’ according to Cass, citing somewhat tersely as evidence her discovery only minutes earlier of Fergie reading the paper, in his dirty overalls on the new white sofa she’d bought in her lunch time and had delivered. His excuse, shouted in an injured tone from halfway up the stairs where he’d been sent to change, ‘Well, no one mentioned a new sofa to me,’ appears to further bear out her argument.
Tie the knot at thirty, according to the survey, and merely by doing so you’ll increase your personal financial potential by some fourteen per cent. Come seventy-five, and the Marks and Spencer’s slippered pantaloon, oh, married sister, you’ll be worth a full thirty per cent more than the spinster.
There’s a catch to all this, though, and I’ll warrant some of you have already spotted it and quite possibly from bitter experience. To stay in the money, you have to stay married.
For spinsters, as it turns out, are not at the bottom of the pile financially. That honour goes to the newly single, those people currently in the middle of a separation.
Clearly there are exceptions to this rule. I’m sure we can all name one from within these pages. In general, however, the income of a woman, especially one with a young child or children, nose-dives on the break-up of a marriage.
Widows may also suffer the same fate. On the other hand, they may just emerge from their husband’s death doing the Merry Widow waltz. Which you might say is what happened to our mother.
George Gordon died one wet Wednesday afternoon returning from a car auction in his well-loved, much-mended old Humber Snipe, a tank of a car, which when it left the road on the bend, managed to crash through a hedge and fence before hitting a tree, and all this with only a small dent to its bumper.
George’s death was his finest hour, as far as Babs was concerned, thanks to the discovery of the insurance policies in the bottom drawer of his desk. This, plus the sale of the much-depised garage, left her what she always wanted to be, comfortably off and still respectably married in the eyes of the world, but without the day-to-day irritation of a husband.
Words cannot describe the speed and dexterity with which our mother metamorphosed from carping, miserably mis-married wife to tragic heartbroken widow. Oh … George … achieved with his death what he could never have achieved in his lifetime. He became ‘Poor George’, and ‘Dear George’, and finally, ‘My George’, this a last self-satisfied little sideswipe at all those damned spinsters.
Cass and Fergie had been married only six weeks when our father died. Still, it was lucky in its way, this because at least it meant that Fergie was now a member of the family and was thus able to officially identify the body. It was his first experience of mortality being still a young man. He came back shaken and with Archie who’d come down to help.
‘Why are you here?’ I said to Archie, unreasonably angrily.
‘Why do you think?’ he said, which I thought didn’t answer the question.
In fact he did prove to be helpful, not least to me. He provided me with a butt for my anger. I was hurting inside and out over my father’s death. I wanted to vent all that hurt on someone and Archie seemed eminently suitable.
‘What is the matter with you?’ Cass said, angry herself after I’d shouted at him to leave me alone when he’d tried to comfort me.
‘He shouldn’t be here,’ I said. ‘It’s family.’
‘Don’t be so bloody unreasonable,’ she said. ‘Can’t you see how useful he is, particularly for Fergie?’
At our father’s funeral, our mother carried her wreath before her like the Queen at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday. Afterwards she stood at the lich-gate in her new little black suit and her six-inch heels and her Jackie O pillbox, dabbing at her eyes through the veiling.
The line of mourners stretched down the church path. Most were customers, people whose cars he’d repaired for next to nothing with that string and those six-inch nails, among them a small flotilla of spinsters.
‘Paying their respects,’ our mother snarled in an aside, dropping the tragic widow act for one blissful moment. ‘Why not? They paid for bugger all else in his lifetime.’
I wanted to shout at her then, I remember. I wanted to shout, ‘So what? What does it matter?’ I wanted to tell her right there, under the lich-gate, what an awful human being I thought she was. How much better I believed he was than she. How angry I was that by sheer bad luck the only decent part of my parentage was now dead with the stupid, rotten vain part left behind. I stormed away, up the path, beside the line of mourners to get away from her, to be alone. I found a quiet spot hidden from view in the furthest corner of the graveyard where I sat on an ancient gravestone that had fallen flat, and was resting under a tree, which is where Archie found me.
‘I’m sorry …’ he said, the words hesitant. ‘Cass sent me. They’ve left for the house. I’ve to give you a lift.’
‘I don’t want a lift with you,’ I said, astonished because I hadn’t been crying before but now I was. Suddenly tears that had not been there a moment before were running down my face. ‘I don’t want to go with you. You of all people. I never wanted to see you again, you know that.’
He took a step towards me. He said, ‘Look, Riley … please … I just want to say something.’ But my shouted words stopped him in his tracks.
‘I don’t want you to say something. Don’t you understand? I just want you to go away.’ I laid a hand on my heart, feeling suddenly faint. Violently sick. ‘Go away …’ I said. ‘Go away. How many times do I have to ask you? Just leave me alone, will you?’ and I dropped down on the stone.
I heard his steps receding behind my back as I threw up in the long grass beside it.
I didn’t join my mother in that large overwrought wreath. Instead I bought a dozen red roses. When I’d finished being sick, I went back to the grave where the gravediggers were just picking up their shovels.
I threw one of the roses in and it landed on the coffin with a soft empty swish and an air of finality.
I stood there beside the open grave that day listening to the unforgiving sound of the spades and the whump of the earth as it landed on the coffin. I felt as if something had been cut away from me.
To be frank, it’s a feeling that’s never left me.
* Carried out for BestInvestment.com and reported in my mother’s paper.
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