a scrap of truth in all this.
‘But you like cats,’ she says reproachfully, and I do, I do.
But cats are like husbands to me.
I just prefer them in other people’s houses.†
A word about my sister, Cass, now.
Cass, full name Cassandra, was named after Lady Cassandra Something or Other who clacked away at her typewriter next to my mother in Cairo. My mother still likes to refer to her in the manner of a bosom buddy.
‘Poor old Cassie. Getting divorced again …’ This like she’d just heard it from a mutual friend as opposed to reading it in the gossip column of her morning paper.
In fact Lady Cassandra dropped all that social levelling crap the minute the war was over. Wedding Number One was in Westminster Abbey, to which my mother and the rest of the girls from the Nissan Hut Nine were not invited, and where Lady C wore a mile-long train carried by a dozen bridesmaids, although not including me despite my long and distinguished service. Number Two, to some zillionaire Nazi gaucho was in some Chilean registry office, and Number Three (to her personal trainer, it lasted a week) in a Las Vegas wedding chapel.
None of this matters, however, since it’s our Cassie who concerns us here, not Lady Cassandra; Cass to me on most occasions, Cassie who I have come to the conclusion I love more than life itself, something I discovered thanks to a dark period in our lives when she got cancer.
The day Cass told me she had cancer, I shook my fist at heaven, cursing the fact that there no system, no Great Cosmological Swap Shop where we were allowed to trade our lives to save another’s. I knew then that I’d give my life cheerfully for Cass, which was no big deal. It’s just the same thing that’s been discovered, and in similar circumstances, by countless other people.
I still feel humbled, inadequate at the memory of the stern courage with which Cass faced her cancer, the extraordinary determination not to be brought down by anything, chemo, hair-loss, contemplation that she might not be here in the future. Still, I think it was Fergie who was the big surprise.
People talk about others in time of trouble as a ‘rock’ but that’s exactly what Fergie was, a slab of absolute determination, refusing to accept under any circumstances that Cass could do anything but live. The day they told her she was clear – I mean really clear, no more check-ups, go away, don’t come back – we drank champagne beneath that sweet soft Somerset night in the back garden and I clinked my glass against his while Cass was in the house.
‘You were fantastic too,’ I said, but he shook his head.
‘Nah. Purely selfish.’
‘Selfish? No. I don’t think so.’
‘Yes. Absolutely self-interested.’ He turned to face me. ‘I knew that I wouldn’t survive without your sister.’
I didn’t give up the spinster thing with Cass. I said, ‘Now here’s a thing I bet you didn’t know. The actual definition of spinster is a single woman beyond the age of marriage.’
‘That’s me.’
‘What?’
‘Beyond the age of marriage.’
‘But you are married.’
Now I know Cass is married, and not just because I was the bridesmaid at the wedding. The real clincher on this occasion was that only moments earlier I had been in the kitchen with the man I know to be her husband discussing plans for his retirement party.
‘Of course. But what I’m saying is, I’ve done the marriage thing now. And I don’t know what it’s supposed to be but, by and large, I reckon with the kids and Fergie and everything, I’ve had just about as good as it gets.’
‘So?’
‘So if anything happened to him, God forbid, I wouldn’t bother doing the thing again, that’s all. I’d make a new life for myself. Do something different.’
And then she said it.
‘I’d be perfectly happy on my own.’
Because it turns out that C is also for compromise, this according to Cass who says, ‘It’s wrong to separate out the married and the single. You do it all the time.’
‘What exactly?’
‘Make the mistake of thinking that people who marry and people who stay single want different things from life.’
‘Don’t they?’
‘No. Everyone wants the same thing at the beginning.’
‘Which is?’
‘A mixture. Companionship with solitude. Intimacy, but with distance.’
The way Cass describes it, there’s this long line, and we’re all standing on it, and through that line goes another one bisecting it like a cross. And one side of that central line is labelled Companionship and the other side Solitude.
‘And everyone – at least every sane person – wants a bit of both.’
‘Only you can’t have it.’
‘Well, you can but never in equal measure.’
And that’s the bastard of the thing, isn’t it? In the end that’s what shocks you. That life has such a damned limited amount of options. That in the end you have to fall one side of that bisecting line or the other.
Of course, you can pretend, if you like. You can tell the world you’ve found some grand, adventurous new way of living, get yourself interviewed for one of those life-style features and boast about how you and your Significant Other have cracked the whole companionship and solitude/ intimacy and distance thing, how you have this perfect relationship, which allows you both space and comfort, sanctuary and safety. And you can even imagine, if you like, that anyone out there is believing you when all they’re really asking is how significant is that Significant Other anyway, when what you really want is to go off and fuck other people.
I said, ‘I guess what everyone wants is the best of both worlds. To have their cake and eat it.’
‘And why the hell shouldn’t we?’ Her words were combative, deserving of an answer. She said, ‘Life’s a compromise however you look at it. Single or married, it’s all the same. Doesn’t mean we didn’t start off wanting the same thing. Doesn’t mean we still don’t, one way or another.’
Meanwhile, truth to tell, I wasn’t that thrilled at the prospect of celebrating Fergie’s retirement. Not that I had anything against him retiring. Quite the reverse. I was delighted for him. I figured he deserved it, teaching science for close on thirty years.
‘Selfless years, dedicated years.’ I clinked my glass against his in the Apple Tree.
‘Cherishing young minds … nourishing them.’
‘Ripping off all their duty-free allowances so you could bring
