Chapter 3
Expectations – Discoveries – Satisfactions
People are disappointing and expectations of them (unlike Pip’s)
should not be great. Indeed, the way to afford oneself some nice
surprises is if one begins with no expectations at all. Without being
unduly pessimistic, just realistic, I came to expect nothing from
anyone one or anything. If something rewarding happened, that was
a bonus. For instance, I met a man at a publishing party given by my
sister for her new book launch. He was very tall, elegant, and
articulate. I discussed books with him, elaborating on my dislike of
the contemporary novel.
“Anita
Brookner is wonderful” he said. “I’ll send you her latest
three novels and guarantee that you will enjoy them”. Well, he did,
and I did. But it was an exception. People promise to introduce me to
a wonderful single man they know. Or they promise to telephone, or
return a borrowed book, or send a postcard from faraway places, or
just to lend their calculator to ease the pain of sorting out tax
returns. But they seldom, if ever, do. They say they will come to
lunch or to dinner, but rarely come on time and, frequently, do not
turn up at all. Once I accepted that this is quite normal behaviour,
that people’s word was not their bond, as it were, and I stopped
expecting it to be, life became much simpler. It is a frailty of human
nature that man’s actions often fall far short of his intentions, and to
accept that fact helps to keep one’s calm.
The conditioning of women when I was young was that they
should be subservient and submissive. They should have no identity
of their own and voice no opinions. Such a condition is of little help
to those who wish to survive a single life. My inability to say ‘no’
resulted in a dotty amount of hard work. In the early months people I
barely knew wanting a bed in Oxford, stayed in my house – friends
of friends who I had not the courage to discourage. I looked after
other people’s children, had dogs to stay, and even joined both the
Labour Party and Conservative Party as a consequence of this
inability to say no. I am basically wet. Rather than argue or have
confrontations I acquiesce to achieve peace. But the irony is that
wetness creates more problems, not less. The Bible says “the meek
shall inherit the earth” which might be true long-term, but in the
short-term it is not so. The strong, determined, positive and decisive
win every time. I had to learn to be more assertive, to get tougher.
An essential early survival lesson is to say what you mean straight
away, and stick to it. If you don’t want to walk the neighbour’s dog,
look after her children while she goes to see an afternoon
performance of Val Doonican, or fetch someone’s brother from
London Airport at 3am, say you won’t and don’t.
A new, important, and interesting discovery was how desirable I
had become as a woman. Felicity a friend, who had been single
between marriages, had given me some advice. “You can’t have a
man to tea”, she said, “when you are single”. How ridiculous, what
an exaggeration, I thought. But she was right. My first encounter
with this peculiar hazard was when I was looking for someone to
help me with the garden. He was to remove bedsteads and beer
cans, and generally prepare the ground for planting. I checked the
postcards in the local post office and saw a likely candidate by the
name of Phil. Do anything, it said on the postcard. And anything was
what he meant, as it turned out. To arrange times and terms I told
him to meet me at the house at 2 o’clock one afternoon. He turned
up at 3 o’clock after a few fortifying beers at the Eagle and Child. He
had a white emaciated face, long straggly unwashed black hair, was
aged about 30 but looked older. He wore a large leather belt with
several chains around the waist, cowboy boots, tight jeans, and a
denim jacket. Not much like Mr McGregor, I thought. We sat at the
kitchen table.
“Do you know much about gardens?” I asked him. There was a
silence. “No” he said, “I know nothing about gardens. I am a student
of the philosophy of life.” He then asked me what my husband did
and I told him I was separated and living alone. Immediately an
anticipatory light shone in his eyes. He looked at me with a new
interest. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I don’t feel like working this
afternoon. Why don’t you and I go somewhere more comfortable?”
The thought of being anywhere comfortable with Phil made me
laugh. When I had dissuaded him from the idea he laughed too, and
said it was always worth a try, you never knew. And then he left to
further philosophize on life. The garden stayed as it was.
Some summer mornings I talked to a male neighbour over our
adjoining fence. A bachelor of 38, who worked at the Oxford
University Press. He liked skiing holidays and growing tomatoes, he
said. One evening I answered a knock on the door, and there he was.
Ever polite (in those days) I asked him in because he said there was
some matter he wished to discuss with me. Something to do with
finding him a cleaning lady. He thought I might know of one. I made
cups of coffee. After ten minutes he looked at his watch.
“Time for bed, do you think” he said. “What do you mean, time
for bed?” I said, incredulous. “Well, it’s obvious” he said, “you are on
your own, I am on my own, sex can be a good way to pass the
evening…”.
The next close encounter was a fellow magistrate. I had been a
magistrate for twelve years, during which time I had come to the
conclusion that male magistrates were some of the most sexually
frustrated men I had ever met, anywhere. So, I should have known
better. After sitting in Court one cold snowy December afternoon, I
boarded a bus for home in the company of this fellow on the Bench,
a small man from the Welsh valleys. We chatted as far as my
destination and when I got out, he got out.
“Do you live far from here?” he said, “I could do with a cup of tea.”
I should have remembered Felicity’s warning. The magistrate settled
himself in the sitting-room while I made the tea in the kitchen – thus
revealing he was a male chauvinist pig as well as a sex maniac. I took
the tea through on a tray and sat down opposite him. Suddenly, with
loud yell and a mighty leap, as demonstrated by Robert Redford and
Paul Newman hurtling into the cavern during the chase in Butch
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, he was on top of me, - pinning me into
the chair, shouting filthy suggestions. I disentangled myself and told
him in two assertive words what to do. “Ah well” he said, “if that is
how it is, and there is no sex to be had, I might as well go home.” The
tea was left as untouched as my garden.
From these unromantic scenes I learn a vital lesson: my
desirability was simply due to my availability. There was no point in
flattering myself. The fact is that almost any woman, regardless of
shape, size, or comeliness, is curiously attractive to any visiting
heterosexual man. (Window cleaner and milkman jokes are not
without foundation.) There is always the off-chance she will
succumb. It seems from the man’s point of view it is always worth
trying. However, I make no judgements. Since the male of the
species has been a hunter since evolution, perhaps there should be
no blame attached to their attempts. I simply made a rule never to
be alone in the house with a man – unless he was a trusted personal
friend.
As a single woman I soon found myself thrust into another new
category. Not only was I available, I was also, apparently,
threatening. A threat, at least, to wives. Dinner invitations, as a
separated over forty-year-old, came as frequently as Christmas
during the year. I discovered why at the only one I went to. It was a
pretty country house in an affluent conservative commuter village
near Winchester. I had been asked for 7.45pm but arrived a little late
having lost the way. The effect on me as I walked into the drawing-
room was that I had mistakenly come upon an amateur dramatic
group rehearsing one of Noel Coward’s drawing-room farces. There
was a large log fire ablaze, two Labradors asleep in front of it.
Fruitwood and oak tables were dotted about, weighed down with
family photographs in heavy silver frames. The sofas and chairs were
covered in birds of paradise chintz. In the corner the grand piano
staggered under copies of Harpers and Queen, Tatlers and expensive
unread coffee-table books.
The men were wearing dinner jackets, the women long dresses. I
was introduced to them; four married couples and a polo-playing
lord without his wife. She was at a health farm, he said, but later in
the evening he revealed they were not ‘getting on’. (Perhaps, I
thought, she was ‘somewhere more comfortable’ with her butler,
gardener, gamekeeper, or some lesser mortal with more vitality and
sex appeal than her fat dull husband.) Whisky, vodka, and gin and
tonics were being liberally splashed about to help lubricate the
incredibly boring conversation.
If I had to describe the sort of man, I really detest it would be the
loud, arrogant, self-opinionated, insensitive churl who brays like
Bottom and whose education invariably took place at a ‘top Public
School’. At dinner, one such man, an Old Etonian in commerce, floor
polishing to be precise, was on my right. As a woman and therefore
expected to feed the lines, I asked him what he did. He told me at
great length. He bored on about the types of brushes needed for
different floor surfaces, about his profit margins, his charges, which
kind of parquet floor needed which kind of polish and so on. In fact
lots of jolly interesting tips, had I been contemplating floor polishing
as a career. However, even he had exhausted the topic by the time
we were halfway through the main course.
“So, what does your husband do?” he then said. (This type of man
doesn’t imagine that women do anything worth talking about). I told
him I was separated. Thereupon he shook and bellowed, winked,
nudged, in a most peculiar manner. When his agitation had subsided
he asked me where I lived, and I told him. Puce in the face, his eyes
rolling, he shouted: “Then I’ll come up to Oxford one day and do you
a favour with some of my best brushes.” Ho ho…. His wife, from the
other end of the table, had been watching me with a malicious look
in her eye. She must have heard the last sentence, indeed none of
the guests could have missed it. In a shrill voice, she enquired why I
was “luring her husband to Oxford” and not to worry, she tittered,
she knew all about single women. Frustrated, of course, trapping
unsuspecting innocent husbands….
The man on the other side of me was of Russian aristocratic
descent, he said. He was also a Turgenev fan. (What a surprise that
someone had actually read a book at this gathering.) We discussed
some of Turgenev’s books and he mentioned one I didn’t know.
“I heard you say that you live in Oxford. I’ll be up there next week
and could bring it round” he said. Untruthfully I told him I would be
away for a month of two.
I am constantly amazed by the continuation of the curious habit by
some British upper-class males who stay in the dining room after
dinner to drink port and swap fishing/hunting/shooting tales, or tell
each other hilarious crude jokes. They can still laugh uproariously at
the mere mention of tits, bums, knickers, or the Karma Sutra. Sex for
them is still a furtive pleasure. They still believe that ‘nice’ girls have
sex for procreation (the close-your-eyes-and-think-of-England
variety) but that incredible orgies can only be with ‘tarts’. Their
complete inability to give their wives any sort of pleasure from their
loutish lovemaking is probably why the gamekeeper et al have such a
success with the upper-class ladies.
The ladies, meanwhile, go upstairs to ‘powder their noses’. Then
ready for the fray, they gather in the drawing room again to wait for
the ‘boys’ to appear. There was a heavy frost pervading the air when
I returned to the drawing room that evening. Four of the women
were sitting side by side on the sofa as though lined up to one of
Kitchener’s stands. The men returned, now crimson from the port,
smoking large Havana cigars. The wives stood up, took aim, and
fired. Time to go home they said as one, and clutching onto their
marital rights, as it were, muttering to the hostess about their early
starts, they hastened away. Motoring home, I though how strange
that those men, being so hateful, could bring about such jealously
and anxiety in their spouses’ breasts. The wives worked, I suppose,
on the premise that any man is better than no man, and if that was
all they had then they were all for keeping it.
But despite the many occasions I experienced the unpopularity of
being single, the altered tempo of life exposed me to new
satisfactions. Feminists would be appalled, I am sure, at the very idea
that housework could be either interesting, fulfilling, therapeutic or
something to look forward to. I found it all these things and more.
The pleasures of ironing, for instance are immense. The smoothing
iron should I think be known as the ‘soothing iron’. Ironing restores
more tranquillity to the soul in half an hour than any tranquilizers.
Listening to a play on Radio 4, whilst watching piles of fresh laundry
grow on the kitchen table is, to me, a perfect way to spend the
afternoon. Then there is furniture polishing, hoovering, dusting,
sewing and hanging up the washing all to enjoy. I feel like Mrs
Tiggywinkle (and much the same shape) proudly bustling around my
house.
Finally, satisfaction of the garden. I had always thought garden
enthusiasts even more tedious than Royal Family enthusiasts, squash
or golf enthusiasts, car enthusiasts or people belonging to the
Ecology Party. But I was wrong. The small patch outside my kitchen
that is the garden had become an imaginable delight. Although
gardens are something of a mystery for beginners, and all the things
to learn are not a little daunting, the results are worth the struggle. I
get easily confused about compost heaps, fertilizers, annuals,
evergreens, bulbs, seeds, cutting back and pruning, but gardens are
forgiving and anxious to please. Perhaps the aura of mystery and
necessary esoteric knowledge is perpetuated by proud garden
owners showing off their ability to know and remember the plants
and shrubs by their Latin names, and then telling frightening tales of
6 o’clock risings to put in the three- or four-hours necessary work
each day to keep the garden pristine. I simply bought various seeds
in Tesco that looked pleasing and scattered them about. The pansies
did not appear, but everything else came up. Which proves that
arbitrary scattering with little or no skill involved will produce
flowers. And, as my attempts at teaching myself to propagate new
life advanced a little each week, so did the growth of my own
renaissance.
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