An old friend of mine, who five years ago migrated to the country with her husband to propagate children and rear a garden, recently sent me a card which I didn’t know quite how to take. ‘Wishing you all good luck’, she wrote, ‘on your chosen path.’ I sat looking at it with my fingers in my mouth. What did she mean, exactly, by this notion of the ‘chosen path’? I assumed she meant it kindly, but it made me feel suddenly exposed and distant. Hey, where did everybody go? Supposing that she imagined herself on a path radically divergent from mine, I instantly pictured myself labouring alone up a narrow, steep, dusty, brambly trail with a determined look on my face, as though illustrating a modern-day parable about the grim sacrifices of feminism.
So vivid was this picture, in fact, that I could feel the stinging nettles brushing against my legs. It was awful. I felt thirsty; my head swam; the sun scorched my shoulders. Looking down, I observed my friend ambling happily in the sunshine on a broad level path with a pram and husband, while small apple-cheeked children ran off to right and left, frolicking with lambs. I would have watched for longer, but a bloke called Bunyan came along and told me to hop it.
But I was definitely confused by the notion of the chosen path, and dwelt on it for days. Did I choose this, then? And if so, why couldn’t I remember doing it? Hadn’t I always thought, rather naïvely, that there was still time to make these decisions about wife-and-motherhood in the future – that the crossroads were just over the horizon? But it turns out that the last exit was miles back, and I am a person whose chosen path speaks for itself. The hardest part was realizing I can never be a teenage tennis phenomenon. How on earth did I let things drift so badly?
For some reason I thought of the careers mistress at school – perhaps because she represents the single point in my life when I recognized a T-junction and made a definite choice. She wanted us all to be nurses, you see; and I refused. Brainy sixth-formers would queue at the careers office with fancy ideas about Oxford and Cambridge and archaeology, and come out again 15 seconds later, waving nursing application forms and looking baffled. ‘You have to have A-levels to be a nurse now, you know, Miss Hoity-Toity!’ she would bark after them, twitching.
At my age, women are supposed to hear the loud ticking of a biological clock, but I think I must have bought the wrong battery for mine. The only time I experienced the classic symptoms was when I desperately wanted a car. It was weird. If I spotted another woman driving a Peugeot 205, I would burst into tears. In the end, friends tactfully stopped mentioning their cars in my presence (‘My Volvo did such a funny thing the other day – oh Lynne, how awful. I didn’t see you’). And there was that one shameful occasion when I lurked outside a supermarket half-considering snatching a Metro. ‘What a lovely bonnet you’ve got,’ I whispered, fingering it lightly. But then a woman shouted ‘Oi!’, so I picked up my string bag and scarpered.
Now I realize that what I want is a book. So much do I want to give birth to a book that I experience ‘false alarms’ – when I think I am ‘with book’, but am not really. Once a month I phone up my agent and say, ‘It’s happening!’ And she says, ‘How marvellous!’ And then I have to ring again a week later and say, ‘Bad news,’ and she says, ‘Never mind, conception is a mysterious thing.’ I suddenly realize that a book would be a comfort in my old age, and I try to ignore the argument that there are already too many books in the world competing for the available shelf-space. Mine, of course, will be a poor fatherless mite, but I shall love it all the more for that.
Perhaps the image of the paths and crossroads is just the wrong one. Perhaps I did always know where I wanted to go, but just walked backwards with my eyes closed, pretending there was no act of will involved. Because I do recall from early youth that while other children pleaded with their mums for miniature bridal outfits and little dolls that went wee-wees, I was campaigning for a brick-built Wendy House in the garden where I could lock the door and sit at an enormous typewriter. My only imaginary friends were phantom insurance collectors, a person from Porlock and the printer’s boy.
My idea of a Wendy House was a rather grandiose one, I suppose. It involved guttering and utilities and a mantelpiece where I could put the rent money, not to mention trouble with the drains. I remember when a little friend told me she had acquired a Wendy House, and I was wild with envy. But when I went to see it, it was just a canvas job with painted-on windows. Fancy telling a gullible kid that this was a Wendy House. Sometimes I wonder what happened when she eventually uncovered the deception. Probably she married somebody with a big house and had lots of kids in double-quick time, to establish a sense of security. In which case, I wish her all good luck on her chosen path.
The prevailing notion of the lone woman traveller seems to have been fixed about a century ago, and entails such heart-stopping intrepidity and pluck that there is not much in our banal modern lives to touch it. I mean, compared with the achievement of striding across the Andes armed only with a pocket bible and a big stick, the modern-day purchase of an air ticket to Los Angeles is going to look rather paltry, isn’t it? And compared with Amelia Earhart flying solo across the Atlantic in a rattling crate with nothing but a soup Thermos and a star-map, the modern woman’s stout-hearted endurance of an eleven-hour scheduled flight (complete with movies and drinks) is emphatically nothing to write home about.
Intrepidity is relative, however. To me, the acme of being brave is catching a bus in central London after 9pm, or enduring a whole instalment of Just a Minute on Radio 4. So it was only natural that when I booked my single ticket to LA before Christmas I was so transported by my own pluckiness that for a moment I thought I smelled quinine and hartshorn in the air. Sod Amelia Earhart’s soup, I thought; this feels great. How brave and adventurous I am, to travel alone! I nearly phoned up Maria Aitken to suggest she make a documentary.
This was the first thing I learnt about solitary travel, by the way: that the habit of tiresome (and bogus) self-congratulation starts at the ticket desk and never wears off. ‘Hey, I made it!’ you say proudly, as you step off the plane, having done nothing more heroic during the flight than stumble to the loo a couple of times. ‘Wow, I collected my luggage from the carousel! I found my hotel! I had some M&Ms from the minibar! I turned on the TV and it worked!’ This exclamatory tone is a bit relentless, I’m afraid. ‘I hired a car! I looked someone up in the telephone directory! I ate a bagel in Santa Barbara!’ And so on.
Travelling à deux does not encompass this splendid sense of perpetual infantile achievement; I don’t know why. Travelling à deux, in fact, is generally a much more sober and grownup affair, with precision map-reading not only its greatest measure of success but also (alas) its highest goal.
‘Nicely map-read, dear,’ says the driver, calmly applying the handbrake.
‘Well, thanks very much. It got a bit tricky around Nuneaton, but I think I kept my head.’
‘We didn’t get lost at all, did we?’
‘No, we didn’t.’
The advantages to travelling alone are many, as I discovered. For one thing, you can listen to old Beach Boys hits on the car radio without your passenger huffily twiddling with FM to find something else. Secondly, you can take art galleries at your own pace (at a brisk roller-skating speed, if preferred) without feeling guilty. Thirdly, you can browse in shops without first devising an hour’s alternative entertainment for your companion (who will otherwise stand next to the door looking helpless, like a tethered puppy). And fourthly, you can choose a route for your journey without your companion suddenly spotting a scenic wiggly detour just a few miles short of your destination.
The main disadvantage – as I also discovered – is that when travelling on fast roads at night it is impossible to drive and navigate at the same time. Something to do with the number of hands, I think. Consequently, on a simple trip across town to Pasadena, you can get so deeply lost on the freeway system that you think the night will swallow you up (just like poor old Amelia Earhart) and that your cats at home will die of broken hearts waiting for your return. Such terrors are feeble, no doubt, compared with those of the stout Victorian lady wandering lost in the deserts of Arabia, describing huge ragged circles in the shifting sands. But I can assure you that the cry ‘I don’t want to go to Glendale!’ represents the nearest I have ever got to a nervous breakdown.
Perhaps map-reading really is what holidays are about – strenuously mastering streetplans, so that one can always find the route back to the bus station. I admit that maps obsess me; as a founder member of Cartomaniacs Anonymous, I resent and refute the theory that women are genetically incapable of reading maps (although I rather like the notion of dangling a copy of the London A–Z over a pregnant woman, to determine the gender of the unborn child. If the foetus shrugs and turns its back, murmuring ‘Ach, I’m sure you’ll find it,’ it is probably a boy.)
So no wonder my night of terror in Los Angeles made such an impression on me: every time I braked abruptly at the sight of yet another freeway approach, all my maps slid off the passenger seat on to the floor. Moreover, when I reached inside the glove compartment for hartshorn, there was never any there. Alone and Disoriented Without a Smelling Bottle in Glendale. Perhaps I should make the call to Maria Aitken, after all.
An old chum, newly spliced, recently invited me to dinner in his new marital home. Ordinarily I would have said yes automatically, but this time I heard myself imposing conditions.
‘Is it a nice house?’ I asked.
‘Yes, very nice.’
‘And you and your new wife are really happy there?’
‘Yes, we are.’
‘With a nice well-organized kitchen, and a big fireplace, and a patio for barbecues, and a little room suitable for Baby?’
‘Yeah, sort of.’
‘Well, in that case the answer’s no.’
There was an awkward pause.
‘Did you say no?’
‘That’s right,’ I said briskly. ‘Not in a million years. Let’s meet at Leicester Square for a pizza or something instead. Then we can eat and talk just the same, but afterwards I can come home feeling quite all right and not mysteriously depressed because your home life is so lovely. All right?’
If he was surprised by this outburst, so was I. I had no idea I felt so strongly. All I knew was that sometimes, after a delightful evening spent with perfect hosts in a full, groaning family house, a single person spends the next few days dumb with misery, hating everybody, and bursting into unexpected tears during heart-warming re-runs of Flipper. I confessed my ‘Not in a million years’ speech to a friend, who said she understood, and who mentioned that at least I had been assertive without being aggressive. Which made me bloody annoyed. ‘What’s the point of that?’ I yelled. Damn. Next time, I shall shout ‘Sod your fancy house with its bloody patio and its baby room, you make me sick, you people.’ Because there are times when a sub-text simply won’t do.
The alternative strategies to an outright No Thanks – though possibly better etiquette in the strict sense – are too wearisome to contemplate. For example, you can accept the invitation, and then half an hour before arrival phone up with a fabricated story about a last-minute mercy-dash (‘I’m so sorry, but if I don’t deliver this jar of rollmop herrings to the Foreign Office in the next hour, we could find ourselves at war with Finland!’). But is this less rude than explaining your true feelings? I think not. Worst of all, surely, is to agree to come, turn up punctually, make perfect-guest ‘Ooh lovely’ noises at the wallpaper, and then sever your wrist quietly in their nice big kitchen while pretending to help with the puddings.
Don’t get me wrong. Things get better for single people every day. Oh yes. How cheerful to reflect, for example, that Sainsburys now sells ‘Single Bananas’ in a special bag. But we are not the norm, despite our bananas. We are seen as something akin to the rogue animals in wildlife films, the ones that are tolerated by the herd but don’t fit in, and are photographed sulking hundreds of yards off, snuffling in long white grass. When lone dolphins turn up in British harbours (clearly enjoying a walloping good time eating fresh salmon and frolicking with the boats), the British public invariably feels sorry for them, and worries about finding them a suitable mate. It is the same benevolent but mistaken instinct that makes married people invite you to their new house.
What nobody appreciates, of course, is that the poor old dolphin fields invitations all day, through his ultrasonic mind-waves. ‘Come to dinner, we haven’t seen you in ages,’ he hears from a happy nuclear dolphin family five miles out to sea. ‘Bugger,’ thinks the dolphin, wishing he had remembered to switch on his answering machine. How can he say he moved five miles (and risked having to swim with New Age poets in wet-suits) just to escape all this? Treading water for a minute, he programs his super-brain to run through the available strategies, and instantly feels doubly depressed. Pizzas in Leicester Square is not a viable option for a dolphin; and the rollmop herrings routine cuts no ice whatever in a marine context.
He is caught all ways actually, because he can’t be assertive or aggressive, since neither is in his nature. And he always finds Flipper depressing. What a bind. So in the end, he agrees to visit, swims miles, has a marvellous time, adores the kids, applauds the bold choice of murky green throughout, gets home late, and flops out exhausted with a smile on his face. And then, for about a week later, he mopes miserably in the water, and everyone says it must be because he misses the company of other dolphins.
Perhaps it is a phase you go through, this ugly envy stuff. I hope so, certainly. I know one woman who is perfectly all right most of the time, but who bursts into tears every time she gets a wedding invitation, so that we have to rush out and have a pizza at Leicester Square, where we talk bravely about single bananas. Edna Ferber said that single life, like drowning, is a delightful sensation once you cease to struggle – but is this comforting, or isn’t it? The analogy isn’t bad, certainly: your whole life unfolds before your eyes, and you entertain strange dreamy consoling thoughts such as ‘I shall never have to wash my hair again, anyway.’ Meanwhile, however, you can’t help wishing that those nice married people on the bank would stop chucking you lifebelts, so that you can just get on with it.
I went to see Batman Returns last week. A man-friend had dropped the offhand remark that the Michelle Pfeiffer character had reminded him of me, so naturally I couldn’t wait to find out what he meant. After all, Michelle Pfeiffer and I are seldom mentioned in the same breath; and on the evidence of the publicity shots of Catwoman – the sexy patent leather catsuit, the high heels, whip, and hood with little black ears – I have to admit I was chuffed and flattered.
As I stood in the ticket queue at Leicester Square I preened myself by licking the back of my hand and rubbing my forehead with it. I flexed my painted claws. Meeeeow, I thought. How perceptive of this male acquaintance to realize that while I portray myself in this column as a frowzy, spinsterish stay-at-home, in reality I am a lithe, crazy, dangerous feline-type animal who prowls the moonlit rooftops after dark, purring to the sounds of the night-time city.
But alas, no sooner was I embarked on my second vat of popcorn than I noticed that the Michelle Pfeiffer character in Batman Returns is a frowzy, spinsterish stay-at-home, instantly recognizable as Single Life material at its most abject and pitiable. Damn. Her name is Selina. Each evening she bursts into her apartment with a ritualistic shout of ‘Honey, I’m home!’ followed by ‘Oh I forgot, I’m not married.’ She kicks off her shoes, listens to the answering machine, pours milk for the cat, talks aimlessly to herself. Evidently it was Selina, not Catwoman, that my friend had been talking about. I put my head in my popcorn tub for a moment, and screamed with the minimum disruption.
No wonder Selina escapes this paltry existence by assuming the identity of Catwoman (‘I am Catwoman, hear me roar’). It is a sensible decision. The only problem is that, before it can happen, she must suffer a brutal death from defenestration – which gives pause to all the would-be Catwomen in the audience who are fed up with shouting ‘Honey, I’m home’ to an empty flat. I mean, is it worth chucking yourself off the Shell building on the remote chance it might turn you into Catwoman? Well, it’s tricky. I am still weighing it up.
But if it boils down to clothes, I am sunk. You see, in order to become Catwoman it is important that you can rummage in your wardrobe for an old patent leather coat; you then rip its seams and magically re-fashion it into the appropriate figure-hugging costume. Imagine your disappointment, then, if having flung yourself from a high roof (and become a glassy-eyed un-dead) you opened your closet, snapping your expectant pinking shears, to find only a brown calf-length fun-fur, with no patent leather in sight. You would have to become Teddywoman instead, and it would not be the same.
‘I am Teddywoman, hear me not make any aggressive noise,’ you would say lamely, as you sat with your arms out in front of you, unable to bend your elbows. It would be dreadful. While chaos overtook your city, you would just sit there looking stiff and fluffy and hoping that your eyeballs didn’t fall out. There would be no opportunity for Batman to fall in love with you during exciting bouts of single combat, either. At best, he might pick you up by the ear and trail you on the ground behind him. And admit it, this would make you feel quite stupid.
I don’t suppose Batman’s creators needed to think very hard about the animal identity of his female counterpart. Dogwoman would not draw much male interest. Spiderwoman has been done before. Elephantwoman would look like a rip-off. And Ferretwoman is too suggestive. So Catwoman was the obvious answer. However, lots of potential kitty-joke plot-devices were disappointingly left untapped by Batman Returns. For example, just as Batman is summoned across Gotham City by a special Bat-design searchlight shone on to solid cloud, couldn’t Catwoman have been summoned from miles distant by the shaking of a little box of Miaow-mix?
I liked Batman Returns. The one thing that really worried me, though, was the role of the Gotham City populace, who are required repeatedly to turn up in grey hats and coats for Yuletide speeches outside the City Hall. Each time they do this, a dastardly attack is launched against them, entailing multiple explosions, car chases, punch-ups and deaths. At one point, this passive crowd is sprayed with machine-gun fire from a trick umbrella. So why on earth do they keep turning out, these people? Imagine, if you lived in Gotham City, and somebody said ‘Are you coming to hear the new mayor address us this evening?’, wouldn’t you pause momentarily before limping off to another apocalyptic pasting? A twinge of pain from your latest shrapnel wounds would surely nudge your decision one way or the other.
I suppose one should not be surprised. Only a city of fools relies on a man in a bat-costume to protect it from evil. But perhaps the Gothamites deliberately expose themselves to extreme danger in the hope that they will be transformed, like Michelle Pfeiffer, into a new superhuman chimera. In which case, you have to admire their pluck. The only trouble is, you can’t imagine a movie called Lemmingman, can you?
The bit that always stops me dead is where it says ‘Photo appreciated’. Up to then I am fine, almost excited. I can even entertain the pathetic notion that I am being singled out personally.
‘Intellectual Andre Agassi look alike with steady job’ (it says) ‘seeks lonely cat-fixated Teddywoman for evenings of mutual squeaks. Extensive knowledge of EastEnders an advantage. My dream lady has clean TV licence, an interest in the fashion potential of household fluff, and a Jeff Bridges video collection. Please write to Box 213. Oh, and I nearly forgot. Photo appreciated.’
‘Damn,’ I yell, and head-butt the bath-taps. Bleeding from the brow, I stab wildly at the Lonely Hearts column, speechless with frustration. There he is! Mister Dreamboat himself! But he wants a photo! And now we can never meet because I don’t have any pictures. What a personal disaster. ‘Perhaps you could send your Single Life picture?’ ventures a passing cat, sort-of telepathically. ‘Hah!’ I shout. ‘How can I send a newspaper clipping, you fur-faced poltroon! Besides, this picture gives most people the impression I am 93!’
I clamber from the bath, press a towel to my head, and go through the usual frantic motions of searching the flat for a suitable picture. But while I rifle my home with all the gusto of the professional burglar, I know there is no chance whatever of success. In the end, in desperation, I grab my passport and some pinking shears and tussle with the temptation to cut out the picture forthwith. But luckily I remember in the nick of time that a) it was taken seven years ago; and b) some of the proffered squeaking might take place abroad.
Sinking on the debris, I sob quietly. If I say I always look lousy in photographs, there is one large, obvious inference which I would naturally rather not contemplate. But there is another reason, honestly, for my despondence. It is that I find it really hard to pose. In front of a camera I just smile in a ‘this is it, there’s no more’ kind of way, and trust that ‘being myself’ will do the job. This is utterly wrong-headed, of course, because for a successful photo you must seize the moment, choose your statement, and go for it. Whereas I invariably look as though the statement I have chosen is ‘I am simple-minded. Please don’t mind me. Children are safe.’
For this reason, book jackets depress me. I am amazed by the intensely serious faces adopted by authors on the backs of books. It is as though they have been subjected to some weird voodoo practice, where all the personality and humour has been pulled out in strings through their nostrils. Look at the pictures of the Booker shortlist people (the men, anyway) and you will see they seem to have memorized a list of permitted authorial qualities – a list that is unfortunately rather short. It goes: Brainy, Moody, Mad, Sincere, Sensitive, Anxious, Supercilious, Dangerous, Grumpy. On this list, you will observe, Harmless is notable by its absence.
Evidently authors may choose three (not more) of these qualities and put them together in subtle combinations. Thus, taking a random selection from the bookshelves, one finds that the Ian McEwan of Black Dogs, say, has opted for brainy, anxious and mad; that Martin Amis, formerly brainy, supercilious and dangerous (London Fields), has now daringly regrouped as brainy, sincere and anxious (Time’s Arrow). And Nigel Williams (They Came from sw19) has achieved an amazing triple – of brainily sensitive, sincerely sensitive and sensitively grumpy.
For women the range is smaller and doesn’t include Brainy. That’s just the way it is. Traditionally women could choose from Clever, Nice, Shiny, Well Made-up and Pet-owning, but usually said to hell with it and took the lot. To this list a few new elements have been added recently. For example, Jeanette Winterson (famously self-effacing author of Written on the Body) has added Challenging, Bloody-Minded and Eyes that Follow You Around the Room. Pictures of women authors sometimes have a verge-of-tears quality, reminiscent of Julia Margaret Cameron’s famous picture Despair, which was achieved by locking the juvenile sitter in a cupboard for a couple of hours beforehand. Jeanette Winterson does not look like someone recently emerged from a cupboard. She does, however, resemble a person who has just locked someone else in a cupboard, and put the key down the lav.
Meanwhile, what do I do about the Andre Agassi man? If I don’t send a picture, he will smell a rat. Perhaps I should get a heap of coins and take residence in a Photo-Me booth for the afternoon, trying out statements. Think moody. Think mad. Think grumpy. But what I don’t understand is this. Given that the mad, brainy, sincere look is only a pretence, why not go for something a bit more dramatic? Such as Livid, Amnesiac, Paranoid, or Escaping from Wolves? Unfortunately I shall have to settle for Concussed by Bathroom Appliance. Which probably means that my photo won’t be appreciated very much, after all.
A man friend who lives in California recently phoned me at great expense from a Santa Barbara call-box and asked me what clothes I had on. Not having read any fashionable American novels about sex-by-phone, I found this rather unsettling. It came out of the blue. I mean, we observed the usual preliminary greetings, such as ‘What time is it where you are?’ and ‘Have you seen The Player yet, isn’t it great?’ But we had barely touched on the elections and the earthquake forecasts before he posed this extraordinary question about my attire, leaving me all perplexed and wrong-footed.
Was this a dirty phone-call, I thought, or was he simply concerned to conjure up an innocent mental picture of his faraway pal? Should I give him the benefit of the doubt? Playing for time (and angling for clues) I asked what he was wearing, but his answer didn’t help. Evidently his outfit consisted of a T-shirt and trousers, some trainers and a beany hat. ‘Sounds very nice,’ I said non-committally, wondering whether the beany hat was a code for something. Either way, I was still completely in the dark about whether to confess to the old grey army socks and the jumbo dungarees.
Fran Lebowitz once said that the telephone is a good way to talk to people without having to offer them a drink. Personally, I see it as a good way of talking to people without having to dress up in a high-cut Kim Basinger costume, or apologize for your paltry wardrobe of seductive gear. In the end, I decided to ignore the overtones, and acted dumb. I said that actually my clothes were so thickly matted with cat-hair and household fluff that I could no longer identify them with any confidence. A smart evasion, which seemed to do the trick, because the subject turned to the Richter scale forthwith.
I was more disturbed by this conversation than it really merited, perhaps. But I hold the telephone in reverence as an instrument of pure verbal communication, and I don’t like to see it messed about. Surely this is the only form of talk in which you can convince yourself that the other person is really engaged in a flow of words entirely undistracted by the extraneous. Which is precisely why it always comes as a shock to discover that for the past ten minutes the other person has been keeping an eye on Northern Exposure, or marking exams, fitting a new flea-collar on a resistant pet, or reading a funny bit from Tristram Shandy.
Saying ‘Have I caught you at a bad time?’ does not eliminate this problem, I find.
YOU: Have I caught you at a bad time?
THEM: No, not at all. How are things? (Tap, tap, tap.)
YOU: Are you sure you’re not busy?
YOU: Listen, I’ll phone another time.
THEM: No, really. This is lovely. (Tap, tap, tap.)
YOU: Look, are you typing, or something?
THEM: Just the radio play. (Tap, tap, tap.) The one about existential despair. (Tap, tap, tap.) I’m doing this big speech about the black void of silence and the sensation (tap, tap, tap) that nobody is listening, anywhere in the universe (tap, tap, tap) to anyone else. I don’t mind if you want to talk, though. (Tap, tap, tap.) It doesn’t bother me.
YOU: I’m surprised you can write and talk at the same time.
THEM: Perhaps you’re right. I’ll stop for a while. (Clank, clatter, tinkle.)
YOU: What’s that?
THEM: Nothing much. I thought I’d start dinner.
The worst thing is when they don’t mention they have guests. You chatter away for twenty minutes or so, and then hear them whisper, ‘Go ahead without me. I think she just needed someone to talk to. Sorry.’ That’s the other illusion of the telephone, of course: that the other person is on their own, just as you are. There is a woman I know who answers the phone in your presence and signals at you to wait; and then she talks animatedly for thirty minutes without giving a single indication to the person on the other end that there is any reason not to. Meanwhile she pulls faces at you, mimes ‘nearly finished’ repeatedly, and makes exaggerated comic pleading gestures when you make embarrassed efforts to leave. Imagine how awkward one feels phoning her up, after witnessing all that.
Perhaps I worried too much about my American friend’s innocent question. He only asked what I was wearing, after all. He didn’t ask if I was entertaining a coach party from the Midlands, or examining A-levels, or making a casserole; whereas in fact I was doing all three, as well as finishing my script for the epic Night of the Living Teddywomen and practising bird-calls.
Funny he didn’t remark on the array of sound effects, really – Shsh, tick, chop, tap, cuckoo – (something like a jaunty clock repair shop in a Disney cartoon). But then perhaps he was simply transported by the unbearably erotic notion of a woman, six thousand miles away, dressed up to resemble the inside of a Hoover bag.
When you are a single person, the world is full of happy couples. That’s the idea, anyway; the tragic little myth we have all picked up from somewhere. In this version of events, life is a couples-only ceilidh in which the single person is the perpetual wallflower; she leans over the bridge in St James’s Park in her lonely anorak, crooning the plaintive country song from Starlight Express (‘I’ve been U-n-c-o-u-p-l-e-d’), while happy newlyweds chuck beach-balls about, and giggle together at the ducks.
This is all rubbish, of course. It rubs no salt in my wound to see people happily paired off; they could waltz around the concourse at Waterloo in their dozens, and I wouldn’t care. No, what single life means to me (strangely enough) is that I can’t stand to hear couples bickering about where to park the car; or stalking off in a huff at the supermarket. It seems terrible. The other day I saw a man in the street trying repeatedly to take his wife’s hand, and she kept snatching it away again. It made my blood run cold, like watching somebody kick a dog.
I wonder whether people parade their marital misery because they are proud of it. At traffic lights, you can always see couples in cars staring out in different directions with their mouths set rectangular like letter-boxes, and with a small thundercloud visible above their heads. You will have noticed also how those cheerful ‘Bob and Sandy’ windscreen stickers have largely disappeared, which is something I take personal credit for. I kept knocking on the glass and saying, ‘Hey, cheer up, Bob, you’ve got Sandy,’ and ‘Cheer up, Sandy, you’ve got Bob,’ until they took the stupid things down and cut them in half.
So if I tend to avoid dinner parties, it is not because I am afraid the couples will canoodle in front of me, but because the couplesome strangers Derek and Jo need only exchange a private hostile glance over the sage derby and I start to panic on their behalf. It is not happy, this Derek-and-Jo; it will split up; its Derek-and-Jo kiddies will suffer. I turn into a kind of Cassandra, prophesying the sooner-or-later catastrophe of Derek-and-Jo with a forlorn certainty, usually even before they have reached the front gate and started arguing.
It is a heavy burden: to see the inevitable with such clarity. ‘See the cracks!’ I moan inwardly (after some ritual ‘who’s driving?’ fracas after pudding). ‘Oh, woe! Hear the marital fabric split and rend, stitch by stitch verily from top to bottom! Weep, ye marrieds! Weep!’ It is an odd way to behave in a Crouch End dining room, but of course nobody listens anyway. Or if they do, they probably put it down to personal disappointment.
This fatalism seems to be the worst aspect of being single; it gives you a cranky view of the world. You have heard of ex-hippies who advocate trepanning as the answer to everything (drill a hole in your skull to let off steam)? Well, I am quite similar, only I think everyone must tear up the marriage lines or sell the double bed, or for heaven’s sake quit moaning. As you can imagine, this makes me pretty useless as an adviser when relationships hit stormy seas, since my suggestions are always equally radical and precisely the same.
‘I think he’s seeing another woman, but I can’t believe it’s true,’ sobs a friend, desperate for support. ‘Split up,’ I advise, promptly, ‘and make sure you get the tumble drier.’ ‘I am in such turmoil,’ says another. ‘My wife wants to have a baby and the idea makes me dream about being eaten alive by a big hairy mouth with teeth in it.’ ‘Mmm,’ I say thoughtfully. ‘Have you considered going your separate ways?’ On Radio 4’s comedy news programme On the Hour the other day, I heard: ‘A palace spokesman has today confirmed that Prince Harry is to split up,’ and I automatically thought ‘Good idea; best thing’ before seeing the joke.
The thing is, coupledom is a bit like childbirth; a week after it’s finished, you can’t imagine what it was like, or how you got into it. This is the gulf between single people and couples, and between the different bits of one’s own life. One minute you are Derek-and-Jo; the next you are Derek or Jo. And in each state you can’t imagine the other. I have spent about 80 per cent of my adult life in proper committed long-term relationships, yet at the moment all I can clearly remember is that I once startled my boyfriend by asking, out of the blue: ‘Why aren’t you a pony?’
This ‘Why don’t they split up?’ syndrome is not sour grapes, I promise. It is not even cynicism. It is just an unanswerable point of view, similar to a religious conviction. The only trouble with this particular panacea (like trepanning) is that once you have done it, you can’t do it again. Consequently its evangelists cannot follow their own advice. What do trepanners do when they are depressed? If they kept drilling holes in their heads, they would risk being mistaken for patio strawberry-planters.
Similarly, once you have split up you can’t keep doing it, unless of course you are a simple organism like an amoeba. So it is quite ironic, really. Here I am, advocating the new revolutionary pluck-it-out, cut-and-run approach to personal happiness, while at home I am gradually learning how to patch things up.
One of the more difficult things to accept about being newly single is that there is no one to strike chore-bargains with. You know the sort of thing: ‘If you do the breakfast, I’ll take the bin out’; ‘I’ll get the milk, you get the papers.’ Make such fair’s-fair suggestions to a cat, I find, and it will just look preoccupied, and suddenly remember an urgent appointment outside.
The beauty of efficient teamwork is that it cuts through the grease and grime of household activity with a brisk one-two, reminiscent of the old telly adverts for Flash. Wisshh, woossshh, all done. ‘You make a cup of tea, while I lie full-out on this sofa, preventing it from bucking up and killing somebody.’
Jobs that can’t be tackled simultaneously stretch out instead in long miserable single file, like prisoners on a chain-gang, and are dealt with on the weary principle of one-damn-thing-after-another. The plodding linear quality is depressing. Sometimes you forget, of course, and glance optimistically at the bin, fleetingly wondering whether someone else has taken out the rubbish. But they usually have not. The cheerful midnight pixie with bucket and mop is a sweet and potent myth, but it is cruelly misleading.
Looking on the bright side, however, there is great consolation in the knowledge that the Mr Nobody who takes out the bin is also the Mr Nobody who moves things around so that you can’t find them. Take the TV remote control, for example. In my old cohabiting days, how many times did I search frantically among sofa cushions for it, knowing in my heavy heart that it was probably travelling anti-clockwise on the M25 by now, snug in a coat pocket on the back seat of the boyfriend’s car? Living alone, then, it is no wonder you rejoice that things remain precisely where you left them. You feel a great warmth inside on the day you realize that if you haven’t finished the marmalade, there is still some marmalade left. The only interference I have experienced since living alone was when I emerged from the bath one day to discover the word ‘trhjwqxz’ on my otherwise blank word-processor screen. I gulped, and stood stock still for a minute, feeling the pulse race in my neck. And then I realized that a cat had made a dash across the keyboard.
I mention all this because last week I left a friend alone in my flat for a couple of hours, and when I came back I realized I could retrace virtually every moment of his stay, just by observing all the things he had moved from their usual places. The loo seat was up. A plate with toast crumbs awaited me on the draining-board, along with a knife tinged with Marmite. A couple of inches of wine had gone from an opened bottle, and a glass with dregs in it was rolling on the living-room floor. A book had been replaced in the wrong position on a shelf, a window opened (and not closed again), the backdoor key hidden so successfully it took me two hours to find it. I moved stealthily around the flat, feeling a bit like Sherlock Holmes on the trail of exotic cigar-ash. ‘He’s been here, too!’ I whispered excitedly. ‘See, he has moved these cassettes!’ Thank goodness I didn’t have a magnifying-glass, or I would have been down on the carpet, observing the pile for footprints.
I felt proud and irritated in equal measure: proud that I can now (like Holmes himself) detect the tiniest variation in the depth of dust on a pile of Radio Times; irritated for obvious reasons (mainly to do with washing up). But there was something rather macabre about this Do Your Own Forensics activity, and eventually I stopped thinking about it. The idea of living alone is somehow quite closely associated with the idea of dying alone, too; and I didn’t want to think about the giveaway clues packed into my own day-to-day life. ‘We found a half-eaten jar of pickled onions next to the bath. She had fed the cats but not washed the spoon. A little Post-It note was attached to the bin, with the mysterious words ‘‘I suppose it’s my turn again?’’ written on it in big wobbly capital letters, underlined.’
If this sounds self-pitying and morbid, it is nevertheless something that single people very often joke about; the collective single mind contains a whole sub-section labelled: ‘What if I died?’ ‘Thanks for the present,’ they say, ‘but what if I died, and somebody found the room stacked to shoulder height with twenty-five years’ worth of Pet Fish Monthly?’ I remember a woman once proudly describing to me how she had rescued herself from acute self-consciousness by assembling a library of pop psychology books, with titles such as 101 Ways Not To Care What Other People Think. The effect of these books had been miraculous she said; she had been transformed into someone who did not give a damn. I was impressed, and asked her to check the publishing details. ‘Oh, but I threw them all out, in the end,’ she said in a lowered voice. ‘I mean, what if I died and people came in and found a load of books with titles like those?’
The day that I became single again – some time last August – I felt it was important to perform some symbolic acts. After all, I reasoned, you never know when a social anthropologist might be watching. I tried to picture what a newly single woman would be expected to do, to mark the reclaiming of the living environment after years of cohabitation. Washing the walls and beating the carpets sounded the right kind of thing – but on the other hand it also sounded a bit strenuous, and I didn’t want to alarm the cats.
So perhaps, instead, the newly single woman might do a little light tidying? Form the old newspapers into distinct new piles? Pick up the dusty used tissue that she always stared at, mindlessly, through hour-long telephone conversations? This all seemed manageable, given the emotional circumstances. Oh yes, and she might ceremoniously replace the lavatory seat to its ‘down’ position, with an exaggerated flourish and a round of applause. This was ample Coming of Age in Samoa stuff for a single afternoon.
But I remember that the first evening I was also moved to root through a heap of books until I found Anthony Storr’s Solitude. This was a book I had wanted to read for a very long time; and I felt I should seize the moment. I read it avidly until 9.30pm, after which I left it unopened on the coffee table for the next three months, hoping that some of its inspiring message would miraculously buoy my spirit. I don’t know why I stopped reading. People must have thought I was a real stoic, savouring a book called Solitude over such a long period. Either that, of course, or that I couldn’t read without moving my lips.
Storr thinks that solitude has much to recommend it. He says it promotes creativity – making people write novels, and so forth. Look at Anita Brookner, Edward Gibbon and, er, many, many others. Interestingly, a large proportion of our philosophers turn out to have been lonely miserable gits who walked about wearing buckets on their heads.
There was something wrong with the appeal of this argument, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Months later, however, I do still hold out hope that the novel-writing and world-class philosophy stage will bounce along nicely when the time is right. I have bought a few note-pads, just in case. And a cardigan. The only trouble is that at the moment I can’t seem to pass a rather more mundane stage in the experience of solitude. I can’t seem to overcome my excitement at being able (at long last) to listen to The Archers without having to do it in the shed.
I never accepted the idea that ‘love means never having to say you’re sorry’. In my own case, love invariably means never being allowed to listen to The Archers – and in fact saying ‘Oops, sorry, I’ll turn it off then, shall I?’ when discovered in the guilty act. I kept faith with The Archers during three solid years of strict prohibition, just waiting for the day when I could again turn the theme tune up to maximum volume, as a statement: ‘Yes, I love The Archers, and I’m proud.’
My fanaticism may have been forced underground, but it remained resilient, like the French Resistance. I take this as living proof that inside every cohabiting person there is a single person humming ‘Dum de dum de dum de dum’ waiting to get out.
The more I think about it, the more I impress myself – the clever ways I found to mask my addiction. I remember those Sunday mornings when I would grab the car-keys at around 10.13am, saying, ‘Just popping down to Croydon for the Sunday papers, dear. I shouldn’t be more than, oooh, let’s say an hour.’ And I would dash off and sit in the car with dark glasses on, agog to the omnibus edition on the car radio. I don’t suppose the boyfriend ever suspected anything – although he did say: ‘Why are you taking a flask of cocoa?’ and ‘What’s wrong with buying them from the man on the corner?’
I expect the Archers euphoria stage was something Wittgenstein went through, too – and Edward Gibbon, I shouldn’t wonder. The other novelties certainly wore off, in time. The tidying of newspapers, for example, started to look like a mug’s game, so I ditched it. I expect I can call in a specialist with a fork-lift truck when I can’t kick a path to the window any more.
For a while, too, I made a point of playing records with significant words – ‘I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair’; also ‘I’m Still Standing’ by Elton John – and lectured friends on the potency of cheap music.
But now the flat is sometimes eerily quiet, and I rattle around in it, like a lone Malteser in a shoebox. It is an odd thing, this single life. And Gloria Steinem’s famous feminist axiom – that a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle – has been of strangely little comfort. I agree with the sentiment, but I wish she had chosen a different image. Unfortunately I find it very easy to imagine a sardine on a mountain-bike joyfully bowling along country lanes; or a tuna in a yellow jersey winning the Tour de France on the happiest day of its life.
One of the consolations of getting older is that one day you look in your address book and find you have acquired a list of specialists (hairdresser, mechanic, hypnotherapist, carpet-layer) whom you can mention in conversation and pass on to your friends. ‘Try my Ear, Nose and Throat man,’ you say, offhandedly. Or, ‘My acupuncturist knows an aromatherapist who recommends a plumber who could really help you with that!’ Gosh, it makes you feel sophisticated. And at the same time, of course, it helps you fill the rather big address book (with pussy-cats on) that somebody gave you for Christmas.
I now have a builder, a carpenter, a gas man, and a painter and decorator. Most exciting of all, however, is the handsome ‘24-hour emergency gardener’, whose services I unfortunately rarely need. I sometimes think of him in the small hours, though, and picture him trouble-shooting in a dark garden somewhere, lashing daffs to splints in a high wind, looking Lawrentian. Should I call up with a bogus middle-of-the-night problem? ‘Thank God you’re there!’ I might say, feigning a verge-of-tears voice. ‘It’s – er, a 24-hour emergency! And here I am, clothed only in these – er, diaphanous jim-jams, unequal to the struggle with the elements!’
The only glaring hole in my list of blokes is under ‘window cleaner’, because the local chap simply refuses to clean my windows, on the grounds (I think) that I didn’t register with him in 1948. ‘Excuse me,’ I say periodically, pretending that the idea is quite a new one, and that we have never had the conversation before. ‘You wouldn’t do my windows, would you?’ He looks down at me from his position on the ladder, and just says ‘No’, but he packs the word with an impressive degree of hostility and affront. My question seems to offend him; I don’t know why. I mean, he is a window cleaner.
I mention all this because it is a great advantage of the single life to be able to say ‘There is something wrong with the heating; I think I’ll get a man in,’ without having to negotiate with the boyfriend first. Boyfriends, I find, tend to reply ‘No, let me take a look, I’m sure it’s straightforward,’ and end up emptying the S-bend on to their shoes at three in the morning. However competent the boyfriend, the sight of him with his head in the gas cupboard and the sound of bang!-clink!-Oops! is enough to make my blood run cold. ‘What do you mean, Oops?’ I say, dancing about in panic. ‘Nothing.’ ‘You said Oops!’ ‘No I didn’t.’ ‘You did.’
The trouble is that you start to identify with the boyfriend’s tussle with his ego, which is getting out of hand. And strangely, no amount of hand-wringing or helpful why-don’t-you-call-it-a-day noises make his tussle any easier. ‘It’s just this last hole,’ he says grimly, after a day of constant drilling, and you peek aghast into a room filled with brick dust and a wall that has been drilled so many times it resembles pegboard. The helpful suggestion, ‘Hey, let’s forget those silly old shelves, and give the books to the Russians!’ fails to lift the gloom.
Which is why I prefer the professional option. This is a simple business arrangement. If the bloke has problems with the job, his ego is his own affair. Recently, a rather lugubrious gas engineer came to remove the old pump from my central heating, and when he said ‘Oh dear, oh dear, it won’t budge an inch,’ and ‘Do you know, when you can get one side to come loose, the other side always sticks,’ I just said ‘Really?’ and carried on watching daytime TV. Afterwards, when he discovered his car had been towed away from outside my house, I did not identify with his wounded pride. I drove him to the car pound and told him the fine was usually about eighty quid.
Left to my own resources, I admit I do sometimes ‘get a man in’ when it is not strictly necessary. I once called a heating engineer when the only problem was that I had turned the thermostat the wrong way; similarly I recently called out a bemused Zanussi man merely to clean the filter on my washing machine. A live-in partner might have stopped me, perhaps; but on the other hand, I might equally have come home to find bits of washing machine all over the floor, and a scribbled note ‘Don’t use water. Have gone to Zanussi spare parts centre in Cornwall,’ while the culprit filter sat unnoticed, cocooned in soggy fluff.
On acquiring a boyfriend, then, it is important to know that a chap who says enthusiastically ‘Why don’t we knock the two rooms into one?’ is not necessarily an expert with a sledgehammer. He has just always fancied the idea of knocking down a wall. A friend of mine was married to a chap possessed of this spirit of enquiry, who carried a Swiss Army penknife at all times, and would offer to make new holes in watch-straps (sometimes when you didn’t want one). At dinner parties he was noted for telling stories of fast-thinking chaps with Swiss Army penknives who had saved lives by performing emergency tracheotomies. Understandably, everybody kept quite quiet after this, and chewed very carefully. The slightest choke, and you knew he was likely to leap from his seat and cut your throat. To him, it was the ultimate Do It Yourself.
You want to meet Vic,’ said Jonathan a few months ago, when I was having a therapeutic snivel one evening after a movie.
‘Because he’s a great bloke,’ he said, heartily. ‘Don’t be so suspicious all the time, Lynne. Loosen up. Vic is a real free spirit, with marvellous ideas, and funnily enough his last girlfriend just threw him out so he’s available. Some sort of bust-up over money, I think. Anyway, I’ll introduce you.’
‘What does he do?’ I sniffed.
‘He’s very young at heart. Ha ha good old Vic.’
‘What does he do, though?’
‘Well, he’s very artistic, and he’s promised himself that if he doesn’t get into something by the time he’s forty-eight, he’ll get a proper job.’
I thought about it. The distinct odour of rat whiffled past my nostrils, unignorably.
‘Does he like cats?’ I asked at last.
‘No, he’s allergic, I think.’
‘Thank goodness for that, then,’ I sighed with relief. ‘I had an awful feeling for a moment that he was exactly my type.’
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Vic is a phenomenon of our times. I used to think I was unlucky, but then I found out I was just single and averagely tolerant of failure, which made me a pushover for layabouts. It is possible that married readers are unfamiliar with the world of Vic, but each single woman discovers him for herself in a very short while. The telltale clue is when you find yourself paying for both dinners, but pretending not to notice. ‘Did I? Never mind, it’s only money. Tell me again about this project for knitting old cassette tape into lightweight blankets for the homeless, and charging them ten quid each. It sounds fascinating.’
Feminists, of course, are not supposed to admit that there is a man shortage. We have this horrible feeling that it will give ammunition to the backlash, who will jump up and down saying ‘Tee hee! Told you! Only yourselves to blame!’ But if there were a man shortage, hypothetically speaking, and it stretched out arid and flat to the far horizon, then you see that little shimmering dot in the distance? The one coming steadily towards you, like Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia, getting slowly bigger and bigger and more sinister, as the only sign of available life? It’s Vic.
‘Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, Vic,’ goes the prune-counting of the wised-up single woman each morning. ‘Rich man, poor man, Vic, beggar man, thief, Vic.’ Vic ought to be more substantially represented in this litany, really; but you get the gist. The really interesting thing, however, is not that single women are eating too many prunes. It is that Vic, like the devil, is everywhere, yet always comes as a surprise. When he’s somebody else’s Vic, you can identify him at once. Whereas when he is your own, and he is blatantly using your mains electricity to recharge his car battery again, you can’t.
‘Ooh, so when will I get to meet him?’ you say to a friend who recently went out with Vic on a first date.
‘Soon, I expect. He’s moved in.’
There is a short pause, while you tell yourself it’s none of your business.
‘Really?’ you say, non-committally.
‘It’s working out quite well, actually. I mean, being home all day he can take in the milk.’
‘Great.’
‘And he cooks meals and things, and above all he trusts me with his problems.’
‘What does he do, then, exactly?’
‘He’s such a free spirit. Ha ha good old Vic.’
‘No, but what does he do?’
‘He used to be a disc jockey. And he’s got so many schemes he doesn’t know where to start. He reckons he needs a mobile phone and some headed notepaper before he can really get going. But unfortunately he hasn’t got either at the moment.’
‘He sounds – er, laid back.’
‘Yes! Sometimes we laugh about it. I say he’s so laid back he’ll fall off and hurt himself.’
‘Ho ho,’ you say, politely.
They are not all called Vic, incidentally. It would make things too easy if they were. But I do feel it is worthwhile to list a few of the obvious warning signs, so that more women can be spared the misery of asking Vic, on some fateful day, ‘Did you only love me for my free battery-charging facilities?’ and then waiting for five agonizing minutes while he seriously weighs up the pros and cons. The term ‘free spirit’ ought to set alarm bells clanging; also Vic’s habit of abruptly crossing the road to avoid walking past his bank. Watch out, too, for his suggestion (curious for a free spirit, after all) that you take out wills in one another’s favour after only a brief acquaintance.
The really clever thing about Vic is that he feels most comfortable with women who are independent, for reasons beyond the obvious. To an independent woman, you see, the notion of sponging is so unthinkable that she can’t bring herself to accuse anybody else of doing it. But the sad fact is, there are people in the world who consider themselves perfectly eligible for relationships yet whose personal motto is the same as New Hampshire’s: ‘Live Free or Die’. And unfortunately they don’t all wear it on a T-shirt.
They will sack me when they read this. But how can I keep pretending to be single when I have recently entered a rather serious relationship? Ho hum, another nice job down the drain. Of course, I didn’t mean to get into anything so heavy. In fact, I struggled quite hard against it.
‘Don’t you understand?’ I moaned, sinking dramatically to my knees, and hammering my fist on the Axminster. ‘I just can’t afford to get into this. I mean, literally. I can’t afford to get into this.’
It all started in June, when I took a few days’ holiday at a hotel on the north Norfolk coast, all by myself. I had envisioned a carefree time, joining boat-trip excursions to blustery sand-spit nesting grounds, pedalling my nice bike down poppy-lined B roads, and enjoying solitary meals in the hotel dining room with just a book for company. For of course (ha ha) I thought of it as ‘just a book’, then.
‘I’m taking Possession, by A.S. Byatt,’ I breezily informed the cats while I packed (hoping they would be impressed). ‘You know Possession, kitties: big one, really literary, Booker Prizewinner, everybody’s read it already, bit of a mouthful so they say.’ And I slung it in with the socks. None of us guessed what the future would hold – that after six warm days and nights of intimate contact with Possession, we would be locked in a tight stranglehold of book-and-woman relationship that would probably last for the rest of my literate life.
It is peculiar. I feel as though I have been married for forty years to the same book. Possession and I are not on the same wavelength, yet somehow I can’t break free, and there is no literary equivalent to Relate.
Last week, when somebody asked me to a dinner party, I said automatically: ‘Do you mind if I bring my book?’ And they said, er, no, of course not.
But they didn’t anticipate the change in me. We turned up at 7.30 (Possession and I) and sat quietly in a corner; and then we left together at about 10. ‘Are you sure everything is all right?’ whispered my host in the hall, as he showed us out. And I shrugged and raised my eyes to the ceiling, as if to say: ‘What I have to put up with.’
I got in the car and put Possession on the passenger seat, and thought back to our early days at the hotel, where my fellow diners often drew attention to my book at meal times.
I had thought it was funny, then, the way their friendly comments would have sounded frankly presumptuous had I been seated with a bloke instead. How would a chap react, I wondered, if strangers kept leaning over him to say to me, ‘Gosh, that’s a big one,’ and ‘But I can’t say I fancy it myself’?
Oh, what a Jezebel I used to be, when it came to books. ‘Use ’em up and cast ’em aside’ was my motto, as I notched up conquests on the bedpost, and blew smoke rings at the ceiling. I made bibliophile a dirty word. ‘Use it gently, won’t you?’ people said when they lent me books, and I laughed, callously, with a succession of’ Heh!’ noises. Living dangerously, I defied P.J. O’Rourke’s prudent advice that you should always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it. Let death surprise me in flagrante with the Jeeves Omnibus, I cared not.
And now here I am, stuck in terminal monogamy with Possession, a book I shall certainly die in the middle of, because I shall never finish it.
I keep reading the same bits over and over again, you see, because the story glances off my imagination without sticking. ‘Try skim-reading,’ my friends advise me, but I am not that kind of girl. I weep, I rage, I do the kneeling and hammering thing on the carpet. But the book remains calm and implacable on the coffee table, its nice blue ribbon marking my place. I complain about Possession to my mum on the phone (‘We just don’t get on, mum’), and she says loyally: ‘Why don’t you bust up, like you did with old whatsisname, Henry James, that time?’
Sometimes, when you are unhappy in a relationship, it is good to talk about it. But it breaks your heart to think how casually it was undertaken in the first place. I mean, I only thought, ‘Better not take a funny book’ (since it sometimes disturbs people’s dinners when you suddenly bark explosively, sending bits of half-digested bread roll across the room); and ‘I won’t take any Anita Brookner, especially not the ones about lonely old maids reading in restaurants.’
Of such chance decisions are our manacles forged.
It is no good regretting it now. It is no good thinking of Dorothy Parker’s famous line, ‘This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly, it should be thrown with great force.’ I sit glumly in my living room, humming the tune to ‘A Fine Romance’ in a minor key, and guiltily running my eyes over the books pages of newspapers while pretending not to.
Possession does not satisfy me: it is as simple as that. And all I can do is pace outside Waterstone’s on wet afternoons, feverishly wondering whether I dare run in, grab a copy of Madame Bovary and take it on an illicit ride in a cab.