In which Mrs Gilbey puts on her chaps and discovers pleasure, and Mr Gilbey sucks on a Chupa-Chup
The warm interior of a car on a cold evening: this is the closest that most of us in our town are ever going to get, or would want to get, to regression therapy.* With temperatures low and the winds high, the fan heater on, the knob turned all the way round to red and the stereo playing classic rock – if it all comes together just right, if it’s cold enough outside and the roads are clear enough, this is worth about a month of twice-weekly counselling sessions to us here in town. This is true demisting. If Sigmund Freud had owned a nice little hot-hatch or a supermini with heated seats and he had friends he needed to get to see on the other side of town, you can’t help thinking that the world would have been saved a whole lot of time and trouble. A warm car on a cold night can of course cause problems – and you see some of them walking around town every day. But it can solve a lot of problems too.
Frank was waiting in the car. It was the Jaguar. Frank admired American cars the most, of course, in terms of the Styling, but a Jag was more sensible for his purposes, tootling around town, keeping up appearances. The Jag was his run-around. He also owned an M G GT coupé with a V8 engine – a beautiful little thing with a top speed of 125 mph, and only a couple of thousand of them made. It was not a good car for cold weather, though; not a good car for our climate generally. He had a BMW as well, for Mrs Gilbey, and a Range Rover – and of course you get a lovely ride in a Range Rover. But Frank liked the Jag best, partly because an old friend of his had the dealership up in the city – Buchanan’s, Ken Buchanan – and Frank believed in doing business with friends if at all possible, plus Ken organised a nice little owners’ club, run by his lovely daughter, Trisha, which offered a free car wash and valet every Saturday morning, and Frank liked to drive up early on the motorway, drop the car in, chat to Trisha, who was always polite and nicely made-up, and who laughed at Frank’s jokes, and then he would hit the streets. Manhattan it most certainly was not, or Baltimore even, or Manchester, but it wasn’t bad. It was better than nothing. It was a better start to the weekend than waking up beside Mrs Gilbey and having to discuss with her what to have for dinner that night – meat or fish. It made no difference. Going up to the car wash made a change. He’d walk a couple of times round the block – that was his exercise for the week – and then he’d stop for a coffee, a proper coffee, not like the chicory widdle you get in town, and a nice Danish at a little place he knew, run by a guy called Christodoulous. Frank always called him Christy, and actually Christy’s real name was Cormac, but Cormac’d given up explaining the ins and outs to people – Greek father, Irish mother – and Frank wouldn’t have been interested anyway. Every customer had a different name for Cormac – in a city you can be an Everyman to every man, but in a town you’re just little old you – and Frank was a big tipper, so he could have called Cormac anything he liked and Cormac wouldn’t have minded.
In the car Frank was working his way through a word puzzler book and sucking on a lolly. He kept the lollies and the word puzzler books in the glove compartment, and he would not be unique in this habit, in our town. Here, word puzzler books and Chupa-Chup lollies perform the same function that, say, cannabis and cocaine do for wealthy and artistic people seeking enlightenment or social ease in cities like London or New York, or so we’ve heard. Frank found they helped take his mind off things. They helped him relax, but they also helped him think. He’d tried crosswords, but he found them too difficult. Crosswords are a much harder drug, really, like heroin, which doesn’t make any sense to people who aren’t addicted.* The lollies and the word puzzler books are just the job, though: they helped Frank to free his mind.
Frank was sucking on a problem and the problem was the Quality Hotel. What frustrated him was that people didn’t realise that the Quality Hotel was basically his pension. Frank didn’t do what other people did. He did not save money. He invested – and the value of investments can, of course, go down as well as up. At the moment they were a little down – actually, they were more than a little down – and Frank could have done with a cash injection, just to pep things up a bit, and the Quality Hotel, when demolished, was just the sort of thing that would give him the boost he needed. This was going to be a prime piece of real estate; ‘Absolutely primo,’ said Frank, out loud, to himself. He liked to practise his New Jersey mobster talk in the car, trying it out on himself before risking it with others.
‘Look, buddy,’ he was saying to himself, ‘the great thing about the Quality Hotel is that the services are there already: you’ve got your drainage, your electrics, your gas, your access and a huge freaking car park out front.’
Frank already had offers coming in: luxury apartments with a leisure club, needless to say, and some high-street developers who wanted to acquire a presence. And Bob Savory, of course, who wanted his new flagship store, the first Speedy Bap!, to have a central site.
People were beginning to understand that the tide was turning against out-of-town retail parks, against the likes of Bloom’s. Frank had been saying this for years and now people were coming round to his way of thinking. The redevelopment of the town centre was something that everyone would approve of – and if Frank played his cards right he would be responsible for the shift. He imagined a town centre arcade: Gilbey’s, perhaps, they could call it, to match his roundabout on the ring road. Bringing people back into the centre to shop, providing an alternative to the shopping experience at Bloom’s: that was Frank’s aim and intention. And the Quality Hotel was the only thing that stood in the way – why people couldn’t understand that he didn’t know. It was short-sighted of them. Frank could see a bright future for the town centre. He could even imagine pedestrianisation. That was how things were going. Something a bit more Continental. He’d seen it on his city breaks with Mrs Gilbey: Amsterdam, Paris, Brussels. He’d even seen it in America – places that sold themselves as places, as ‘downtown experiences’. This was Frank’s vision for our town and he wanted everyone to share it. He was like a prophet.
You see, Frank could get you to believe that black was white and white was black. Because it was Frank who had been responsible for the destruction of the town centre in the first place. It was Frank who’d cut the ribbon on the ring road. Frank who’d rubber-stamped Bloom’s. Frank who’d taken a slice out of every development and so-called improvement around town over the past twenty years. But Frank had enough charm to make you forget what he wanted you to forget and to remember things that you didn’t even know you knew. This was quite a talent, the kind of talent you only really get with dictators, with artists and with very wealthy businessmen, and Frank was the closest thing we were ever going to get in our town to a Picasso, or a General Franco.*
People had underestimated Frank Gilbey all his life. His father had underestimated him, but then his father had underestimated himself as well and had ended up drinking his life away. Frank’s father was one of life’s losers and Frank hadn’t spared a thought for him in thirty years. He still worshipped at the shrine of his mother, though, of course, every day, who’d taught him everything he knew. Frank was an only child. His was the typical CV of the overachiever.
He had not excelled at school. He wasn’t interested in school learning. He didn’t want to get a job as a postman, like his father, who was known around town as the ‘Drunken Postman’ (even today some of our more senior citizens still refer to Frank as ‘the Son of the Drunken Postman’, not a nickname that Frank relishes). He didn’t want to become a civil servant either, which was just about the height of what his family could imagine for him, a job in the council offices, filing. Frank had his eyes set on bigger prizes. He’d started up his first business when he was seven years old. He’d discovered by accident that if you removed ball-bearings from a pair of roller skates you could make a very satisfying rattling noise. He loved that rattling noise and he figured that other people might love it too. So he offered to fix their skates for them. Noisy skates were suddenly what everyone wanted. Once he’d fixed everyone’s skates in school and around town, he then mentioned to a couple of people that in fact the really cool thing was silent skates. And so, eventually, everyone paid him to put the ball-bearings back in their skates. He made enough money from that one job to buy himself a bike, a Raleigh, second-hand, and a transistor radio, new, a Decca, for his mother. That was sweet, for a boy from the Georgetown Road: having money in your pocket, being able to spend it. That was a good feeling.
The roller skates were Frank’s first experience of a very important business lesson, and one which he had never forgotten: you create demand. You may not think you do. You may think you only control supply. You may think that demand simply exists. But it doesn’t. You create it. You tell people they want something – a ring road, say, or a shopping mall, or luxury apartments – and they might never have thought they wanted it before, they might never have conceived in a million years that this thing might be a good thing to have, but suddenly they’ll all want it and they’ll pay you good money to get it.
According to this principle you could sell people any old rubbish.
And he had.*
By the time he was forty he had the big house, the cars, the companies, the properties, the lovely wife and the darling child, and his monthly cash flow from investments alone exceeded his monthly expenses. That was another good feeling. That was better than sex, actually, the realisation that if necessary he never need work again. Although, of course, he did work again. Seven days a week, in fact. Frank worked like a dog and organised his life like a Mafia don. If you treated people right, Frank believed, they treated you right. If you saw them right, they’d see you right. Councillors, for example, who enjoyed their golf were always glad of a gift of golf balls, or clubs, from a friend. Councillors who enjoyed their food and drink were glad of a Fortnum & Mason hamper at Christmas, with a nice pot of gentleman’s relish, or an invitation to one of Frank’s legendary parties, or a barbecue, where whole pigs were spit-roasted and a jazz band was bussed in from the city, to add a touch of class. Councillors are of course supposed to declare any interests, but everyone in our town has interests in everything and in everybody – our town is one big happy family, according to Frank, and he couldn’t help whom he knew, or the fact that he was a generous man. There are lots of ways to get things done among friends in a town like ours and Frank had done them all.
He had run into trouble, though, with the Quality Hotel and the trouble he had run into had been with the kind of mealy-mouthed, pen-pushing, do-gooding gainsayers who didn’t enjoy jumbo grilled steaks and trad jazz and golf, the finer things in life. These people were Guardian readers, Frank suspected, and fans of Classic FM. Vegetarians too, probably, and homosexual. First they had denied Frank planning permission, but fortunately he knew the Development Control Officer and the Divisional Planning Officer, so that was sorted. Then he was refused building regulations approval, but he knew the Building Regulations Control Officer, so that was sorted too. But then there’d been this ridiculous final thing that had come up: the conservation area consent. That’s what had held him up. That’s what had given him all the trouble.
That was Mrs Donelly’s doing, who was not a Guardian reader, actually. She only ever read the Daily Mail, or the Impartial Recorder, and she ate chops, and she slept with her husband, that was all the window on the world she needed, but she’d got the council to agree to make the town centre a conservation area, our town centre, where there is almost nothing worth preserving, because we destroyed it years ago. She must have been crazy, shutting the gate after the horse had bolted, or maybe there was method in her madness, Frank couldn’t decide. He wondered, looking back, if she’d been working up to it for years and he just hadn’t seen it coming. It was Mrs Donelly, after all, who’d been responsible for the Shopfront Improvements Scheme, when she was first elected to the council, which had prevented the big stores, or at least the many competing card, giftware and charity shops, from putting up bigger signs. That wa sher first move. And then there’d been the Town Centre Improvements Scheme, she’d got that going too, had co-opted all the remaining small businesses on to the committee. The scheme was run by Enda Tierney and Ivan Cuddy, two of the more useless members of the council in Frank’s opinion, who’d used all the power they’d had vested in them to plant a couple of birch trees down at the bottom of High Street, an initiative that had taken exactly eighteen months to see through, and in the meantime the carcass of the town had remained prey to marauding teenagers and unscrupulous developers, people like Frank, who just kept on knocking the old stuff down and putting new stuff up, ignoring Enda and Ivan completely, and the people who were caught in the middle were the small businesses, the people the scheme was supposed to help, who kept on paying rates in order to sustain Main Street and High Street for long enough for the bigger firms to come in and put them out of business. Frank couldn’t believe how stupid all these people were. He didn’t get it at all, what they thought they were doing, and what they were actually doing. They seemed to have no idea. They had no vision. They were certainly no match for Big Frank Gilbey. In his day, when he was mayor, Frank had widened roads and pulled down historic buildings – whole areas – in the time it took Enda and Ivan to agree on where to put a few dog litter bins.
But now these same useless individuals were giving him terrible trouble over the Quality Hotel, the thing he most wanted, the thing he most needed. Him, Frank Gilbey, who more than anyone had helped shape the town over the past couple of decades. Frank had been responsible for drawing up the town’s first local plan, years ago, before anyone else had even thought of it – detailing policies, mapping out proposals, determining which sites should be developed. That was Frank, that was his doing. It was Frank who had helped draft the plan and who had made sure it was open to interpretation, so that it favoured his own interests, naturally. It was Frank who’d got people to start thinking of the town not as a corporation but as a business. It was Frank who’d got the council to start referring to citizens as ‘customers’ buying the council’s ‘products’ and he had, of course, made sure that many of those products were his own, his own properties, and his own property management companies, and his own property maintenance companies. You can’t possibly do that, people had said at the time. Yes you can, Frank had said. You can’t delegate civic responsibility to private companies and individuals, they’d said. Yes we can, Frank had said. And they did. And it had worked. And Frank had become very rich.
And this was all the thanks he got.
Frank had not done anything wrong. He had bought a lot of land around town, years ago, but that was simply because he’d had the foresight to do so. And as for his relationships with the council’s planning officers, well, they really were his friends. He wasn’t pretending. And his own involvement as a councillor, well, if he didn’t get involved, who would? Shouldn’t we be encouraging participation in local democracy? Of course we should.
And as for Bloom’s, well, yes, he had known there were plans afoot. After the ring road, it was logical. But anyone could have worked it out. Anyone with their eyes open and looking to the future. Frank had been to America enough times to be able to see the future: malls, vast car parks. Convenience, that’s what people wanted. And it rains here approximately 270 days a year, for God’s sake, so you’d have had to have been stupid not to see that malls were the way to go. And Frank wasn’t stupid, so he had gone about systematically buying up the land outlying the ring road, even before the plans were announced. Most of the deals had been straightforward, but there had been one or two problems. Miss McCormack’s father, the Scotsman, Dougal, had some land, for example, where he kept his piebald. Frank needed the land, but the land had been in the family a long time and Dougal didn’t want to move his horse. Frank knew everyone had a price, but the price wasn’t always money. So Frank got to know Dougal. He found out what his weaknesses were. Dougal’s only weakness was the horse. If there was no horse, there’d be no problem. So the piebald ate lavender one day and died. Simple. The horse’s dying broke Dougal’s heart and he sold the land within a month, he just wanted shot of it. And he moved further up-country, away from our town and from us, the townspeople, and our ambassador, Frank Gilbey. That’s the way the world worked. That’s the way Frank Gilbey did business.
Frank was lovely and cosy in the car, sucking his lolly, thinking his profound thoughts, and he didn’t notice his wife getting in – she was not someone he had ever really needed to attend to. He had enough other things to worry about without worrying about her. She looked after herself pretty much, under his supervision. That was the great thing about Mrs Gilbey – she was easy. She was straightforward. They had never argued, the pair of them, not really. They never had. He’d married her partly because he was aware there was no chance of her arguing with him. She wouldn’t have said boo to a goose.
She coughed.
‘Right, ’ he said, starting up the car and setting off for home. ‘Well?’
‘Well what?’ she said.
She was not going to tell him. She never did. She was determined. She was not going to give him the satisfaction. He’d only laugh at it. She was not interested in his opinion anyway, or anyone else’s. If you’ve never tried it, don’t knock it. That was Mrs Gilbey’s new mantra. If you’ve never tried it, don’t knock it. That’s what she said to herself these days when she saw the look on the faces of her friends and the wives of some of Frank’s business colleagues when she told them about the line dancing. Like Frank, they all thought line dancing was common.
‘Oh, really, have you ever tried it?’ she’d ask them, as they held their little retroussé noses up in the air. Plastic surgery was the big thing these days with a lot of them, and what was that if not common, thought Mrs Gilbey. Trimming your nose and your neck fat, like you were the Sunday roast going to waste? Having someone siphon fat from your belly, or pump it into your thin little lips? Going out to lunch with her friends was starting to get like going to Madame Tussaud’s: they were all beginning to look like models of themselves, like they’d been freshly poured out of moulds and dressed up in lookalike clothing.
Mrs Gilbey was not into remodelling. It was not her style. With Mrs Gilbey you got what you saw. Which was a lot. Mrs Gilbey knew exactly who she was and how much of her there was, thank you very much, and she did not intend messing around with her essentials, or reducing the size of the portions. She was the same now as she’d ever been, although every Thursday night at seven she did go to the ‘Dance Ranch’, which is actually the badminton courts at the Leisure Centre, which during the day and at night hosts the full range of what a good local council leisure services facility should be able to offer, including Step Aerobics, Boxercise, Pilâtes, Spinning, several martial arts, and Seventies Disco Turns and Bums. And badminton, of course. And every Thursday night the badminton court announced itself as ‘The Place for Foot Tappin’, Heel Stompin’, Clean Livin’ Honky Tonk Fun’, a claim that is entirely correct, as far as Mrs Gilbey is concerned, even though the place may still look like the badminton courts to you and me. In our town it helps if you can use a little imagination.
Frank had tried, of course, during his time as a councillor and his tenure as mayor, to get all the council’s leisure services contracted out: he’d have happily seen the Leisure Centre taken over by a private company. He had tried, in fact, to get the council to make overtures to the Works, the private gym up on the ring road, to see if they might be interested in taking the place over, but he’d failed. People here in town seem to like fat, unattractive women behind the till, and graffiti on the walls, and wet floors in the changing rooms. Frank suspected that anyone who used the Leisure Centre was a socialist, and frankly they deserved verrucas and athlete’s foot.
Mrs Gilbey was not a socialist, as far as she knew, but she had always liked country and western music, which was also suspect in Frank’s opinion: it was but a short step from country-and-western to folk music, Frank believed, and folk music opened the floodgates to all sorts of silliness. You get one man strumming on a guitar, and before you know it you’ve got a whole load of people growing beards and burning their bras and going down to Yasgur’s farm to demand equal pay for the disabled and single mothers. Mrs Gilbey was not keen on folk, but she had always liked Patsy Cline, ever since she was little, when her father had been a train driver, taking trains up to the city and back, and he used to do this country and western yodelling thing when he was driving the trains, and Mrs Gilbey used to travel up and down with him sometimes, at weekends, and she would sit and listen to him, and to the sound of the trains, and they’d eat hot pies and apples. And that’s about as close to a communist childhood as we come in this town. At home her father liked to listen to Hank Williams and he also played the ukulele, an instrument which seems to have fallen out of favour, here and elsewhere, but which at one time was the instrument of choice for the working man and woman in town.
A ukulele is cheap, it’s portable and you can learn to pick out a tune in an afternoon. It’s a bright, happy instrument, an instrument of innocent pleasures and of limited range. Bill Bell and his French wife Antonietta – whom he picked up and brought back after the Second World War, quite a souvenir, everyone agreed – used to duet on Sunday afternoons in the Palm Court at the Quality Hotel, Bill on tenor ukulele and Antonietta on soprano. They even made a record, The Two Little Fleas, and it was a pretty good record, one of the only records ever to have come out of our town.* Mrs Gilbey’s father had learned a lot from that record. Mrs Gilbey’s own all-time favourite performers were probably Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson – they were classics, obviously, and they reminded her of her dad, but she also liked some of these younger women who’d come up over the past few years. Mary Chapin Carpenter she liked, and Shelby Lynne. Frank called them Chafin’ Carper and Slippery Finn. Frank thought it was all very funny. Frank thought country music was a joke.
This was because Frank was not interested in emotions. And he did not like sentimentality. He did not agree with it. Emotions and sentimentality were pretty much one and the same thing to Frank; he could not distinguish between the two, like it’s sometimes difficult to tell, just by looking at the light, whether it’s dawn or it’s dusk. Mrs Gilbey remembered once, a couple of years ago, she’d wanted to talk to him about Lorraine, when things were going wrong with the bad Scotsman – a necessary, difficult conversation – and he’d just said, ‘Let’s try not to have an emotional talk about this, shall we?’ And that had shut her up. She’d never spoken to him about it since.
It was difficult to explain what she liked about the line dancing exactly; it wasn’t just the emotions. You could have emotions at home. What she liked was going out and getting dressed up for it. Sometimes it can be good to have emotions outside the home, although it’s not a habit many of us here in town have acquired, street preachers, drunks and small children excepted. Mrs Gilbey liked the clothes, wearing her pre-faded jeans and her cherry-coloured waistcoat, and the stetson, and the lace-up boots. She liked tucking her thumbs into the top of her jeans. She liked doing the slides and the splits, the slappin’ leather. There was a period, a couple of years back, when everyone was mad on Toby Keith’s ‘A Little Less Talk and a Lot More Action’ – she loved that song – and they’d do the ski bumpus and there was something about that leaning to the right, and leaning to the left. It was very ... freeing is what it was. When she tried to explain it to Frank he just laughed. But – and she never said this to Frank, it was pointless talking to Frank about it – if you’ve never tried you’ll never know.
Actually, what Mrs Gilbey really enjoyed about the line dancing was that you didn’t need a partner. You weren’t stuck with someone like Frank. When you were line dancing you could forget you wore a wedding ring.
When they were young and she and Frank were courting they used to go to the dances, to the Quality Hotel and Morelli’s, and they used to dance rock‘n’roll, but Mrs Gilbey had never been keen on it. She couldn’t have identified what she didn’t like about it then, but now, now that she was older and wiser and she knew herself a bit better, she thought she knew what it was. It was partly that before she’d started stepping out with Frank he’d been courting this other woman – her old friend Mary, Mrs Donelly – and they were great dancers, Frank and Mary, the pair of them, and Mrs Gilbey just hadn’t been able to compete. She’d always been a little bit large around the hips, truth be told, and a bit heavy up top, so she was a bit self-conscious when she was dancing, and particularly with that style of dancing, the rock‘n’roll-style dancing, where the man stood still, pretty much, and the woman was supposed to jiggle all around him. She didn’t like that, the man giving the lead. Mrs Gilbey was not a feminist, but she always thought rock ‘n’roll dancing was just a formalised version of what went on in the home – the woman doing all the work, the man thinking he was in charge. Which was fine, but it wasn’t that … freeing for the woman. It was boy’s music, basically, rock‘n’roll. It certainly wasn’t ukulele music.
But now with line dancing everybody was equal, and you didn’t have to answer to your partner, or for your partner. It just made more sense to Mrs Gilbey: it was fun. Frank and Mrs Gilbey didn’t dance together these days. The most they’d ever do together now would be a last waltz at a golf club dinner.
The line dancing was her lifeline, really; it was her breath of fresh air; it revived her at the end of a week; when she was tired it gave her strength. It had even helped with her diverticulitis, although she couldn’t say how. She was addicted now: she’d started to watch Country Music Television on satellite, and she would practise, in the bedroom, with the curtains drawn, doing the Electric Slide, or the Tush Push. She also watched Friends in the afternoons sometimes, on cable. That was the other thing she liked. Frank liked everything about America, but he couldn’t stand Friends: he said it was unrealistic and unbelievable, and yet then he watched all these films with Sylvester Stallone or whoever it was in them, films with lots of explosions and shooting and fights. At least Friends was funny – shooting people isn’t funny, Mrs Gilbey didn’t think. And Mrs Gilbey believed it could be quite revealing, Friends, actually: you could tell something about people if they preferred, say, Rachel to Monica, or Chandler to Joey. She liked Phoebe the best. Phoebe was her favourite. Frank would probably have liked Joey. If only, she thought, there were somewhere like Central Perk here in town. There was Scarpetti’s, of course, which hardly counted. So the next best thing was the Dance Ranch. You could get a cup of coffee from the machines after the session, and sit in the soft-seating area and talk to some of the others, if it wasn’t too busy with the fellas from the ju-jitsu drinking Lucozade.
She’d had to give up drinking tea and coffee, though, Mrs Gilbey. There was something about tea and coffee. If she had a cup of tea or coffee, she had to have a cigarette. Or vice versa; she wasn’t sure which came first. She’d tried drinking more water every day, like they said in all the magazines, but she’d started to wonder if this was leaving her bloated. When she looked in the mirror these days she was amazed to see how puffy she was looking. It was horrible, looking at it. She wore turtlenecks, to hide her chicken-wattle neck. She wasn’t ashamed of it – she most definitely was not going for plastic surgery – but she didn’t want to flaunt it either.
Frank had been encouraging her to have plastic surgery, just to lift the skin around her neck and her tired eyes a little, but she didn’t want to change the way she looked and she didn’t want Frank to want to change the way she looked. She wanted to change who she was, not what she looked like, although she knew that her face had become long-suffering. She could see it herself. It broke her heart to see herself in the mirror sometimes, the state of her. Her blonde hair and her blue eyes had always been her salvation – they’d got her a long way. Now her hair was dyed and her eyes were dull, like a dying animal’s. She remembered she’d left school without a certificate to her name and her teacher had said to her, ‘You are not suitable for anything but polishing your nails, ’ and she’d gone to work for Sloan’s, the old coal merchants (‘Group 1, Group 2, Group 3, Slack, Phurnacite, Wonderco, Coalite, and Glovoids’) on Commercial Street, in the office, and the coal dust had got under her nails – it got everywhere – and she thought that was it, she thought that was going to be her life. But that was where she met Frank. People used to come in to pay, which is how she’d met him, coming in to pay his mother’s bill. And she’d scrubbed up, scraped the coal dust from under her nails, and they’d started going to the dances together. She was a couple of years younger than the other girls he’d been going with.
Good for nothing, the teacher had said. Well, Mrs Gilbey had been good for something: she’d got her man. And look at her now. She had everything: central heating, wall-to-wall carpets, a self-cleaning oven, beautiful nails. The house was perfect and spotless, although she did have a cleaner, of course, to help. Her own mother had had to do it all for herself, had had it all mapped out for her: Monday was washing; Tuesday ironing; Wednesday cleaning; Thursday was her night at the spiritualist church on Old Victoria Street; Friday was baking for the weekend. And she’d had a job at Carragher’s Drapery Warehouse up on Moira Avenue as well. And Mrs Gilbey had never heard her mother complain, not even once.
Mrs Gilbey, on the other hand, had hardly any routine and she complained all the time. Shopping was her only routine. She hadn’t worked for years. She could do whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted. She and Frank had so much money they didn’t know what to do with it. Literally didn’t know what to do with it. It was just like people said. They never had to worry about spending money. For years, she’d bought the very best of food and clothes, but even that wasn’t enough. Frank had encouraged her to take up hobbies. She tried French classes for a while, but she was embarrassed by the accent: it was a young person’s game, the learning of the languages, she thought. She’d encouraged Lorraine to take it up, but she hadn’t stuck with it either. Then she did tapestry for a while, but everything she made went wrong somehow, and the stuff piled up in the corner of one of the spare bedrooms where no one ever stayed and it looked messy. She’d tried upholstery – she’d quite enjoyed upholstery, that wasn’t as tricky as the tapestry. She’d upholstered everything in the house, from top to bottom, and then there was nothing left to upholster. So she’d started doing the neighbours’, but there are only so many footstools you can re-cover, even in our town. Then she’d got into the collecting: pot-pourri vases, sauce and cream boats, scent bottles, cameos, treen, carriage clocks. Small stuff, stuff you could take home with you on the day, that you didn’t need to have delivered. She used to go up to the auction houses in the city. She’d enjoyed that. The excitement. It felt as though she were somebody. But as soon as she acquired a piece the excitement left her and she wasn’t interested any more. She stored the things away.
Frank didn’t understand. He suggested to her that she start buying bigger stuff – furniture, or paintings. But she didn’t really want to collect the tangible. She didn’t want more things. She wanted to collect something else: experience was what she really wanted to collect, but even when she thought that to herself it sounded silly. Experience! This was her experience. This was it. Here and now, in our town, with Frank, and it was running out on her all the time, like in an egg timer, or rising up against her, like a flood. She felt like Kate Winslet in the film Titanic. Mrs Gilbey was working against the clock now. She still worked hard on her looks, had her hair done once a week, up at Noreen Fry’s new place, Fry’s, on Abbey Street, but keeping fit had been a problem until she discovered the line dancing. The line dancing had been her salvation. The line dancing was helping her hold back time. It was a kind of sandbagging.
Frank had dominated and controlled her life for years. She cooked the food that Frank enjoyed. She wore the clothes that Frank liked. He expected her to look good all the time, a certain way. He was always saying these days that she shouldn’t wear skirts because of her legs. That’s why she liked the line-dancing clothes – she decided about the line-dancing clothes. In all other areas, her own likes and dislikes had ceased to matter, if they ever did. Her own likes and dislikes had gradually come to resemble Frank’s, so eventually she found it difficult to judge what she really liked and what she didn’t, what she saw as a duty and a chore, and what was a pleasure. It was Frank’s likes and dislikes that counted, that existed. Even her values: her values had become Frank’s values. She loved money, although she never really spoke about money. She called money ‘plastic’. She talked to her friends about ‘burning plastic’. That’s what she was doing, burning plastic. And it was killing her. She assumed that everyone felt the same, that everyone was choking from the stench of money, like the smell of burning fat, and not a smoke alarm in the house.
The car was too hot. Frank liked it hot.
She was looking forward to getting home and making herself some nice Philadelphia cheese-on-toast. And maybe a glass or two of Chardonnay. She’d left Frank his dinner out earlier – some pastrami, some wheaten bread and a salad. He’d have binned the salad.
They didn’t eat out much, her and Frank. Frank liked his food quite plain. A lot of her mornings were spent deciding what she was going to cook for him in the evening and then, once she’d decided, she’d go out and buy what she needed. Unlike virtually everyone else in our town Mrs Gilbey still does her shopping every day. She hated Bloom’s. She hated the mall: it was so tacky. There was nothing there she wanted to buy. She’d exhausted the mall. What she wanted was not available in Bloom’s. Actually, what she wanted was not available in our town. Mrs Gilbey wanted glamour. She wanted sophistication. And she usually bought lamb loin chops and floury potatoes – that’s as close as she could get.
She didn’t really enjoy eating out anyway; it’s not as if that would have made much difference. She didn’t really like eating in front of other people. She didn’t know why. She was over sixty now, and she’d never liked it, and she was hardly going to start liking it now, when every mouthful made her fat and her whole face wobbled with every bite. She thought it was disgusting, actually, the sight of old people eating. Watching Frank eating – it was horrible. She preferred eating at home, in private. At mealtimes Frank always liked to offer his insights and opinions about the state of the world and his business philosophy, and at least if they were at home she could put the TV on, and she wouldn’t have to listen to him. A load of old nonsense he came out with and she’d heard it all before. ‘You don’t work for money, ’ he’d say, ‘you make money work for you.’ And, ‘The rich acquire assets, the middle classes acquire liabilities.’ ‘The bigger the elephant, the bigger the balls’ – Mrs Gilbey had no idea what that was supposed to mean. He was full of that sort of stuff. ‘You might make a better hamburger, ’ he’d say, eating his steak while Mrs Gilbey watched the news, ‘so why aren’t you McDonald’s?’ She could never decide if he was really talking to her or not, whether he’d have kept on if she weren’t there. A lot of it was just clichés and common sense that he liked to recite to himself, and he did these funny voices sometimes, these American gangster voices; it was awful. ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.’ ‘Money is only an idea.’ ‘The greatest losses are those from missed opportunities.’ ‘It’s a dog-eat-dog world’, that was one of his absolute favourites, which applied to just about everything and she hated it when he said that, which was at least once a week. She probably hated that one the most. Because saying that made him a dog. And her a dog. And everybody else: just dogs eating dogs. She didn’t like that at all. It made her feel quite sick.
She’d thought she might have had grandchildren by now, naturally, to take up her time, to take her mind off things, to spend some money on. But there was no sign in that department from Lorraine, and not much chance either, now that she’d lost the bad Scotsman. It was what all Mrs Gilbey’s friends talked about, these days – their grandchildren and their plastic surgeons. It seemed to have come on so quickly: one minute they were all excited, talking about Elvis Presley and how to get a fella and stuffing tissues up their jumpers, and the next minute they were all tired out and talking about their children, and then their grandchildren, and a little nip here and a little tuck there, and who’d died, and how, and how sad it all was. It was strange: Mrs Gilbey never felt like she herself was getting old. It was more like she was observing someone very like her getting old, not her self as such, but her doppelgänger.
It was the same feeling she had when she was reading a book. When she read a book she always felt like she was hearing a story that sounded like her life, but wasn’t quite, like something that might have happened to her, or which still might. Even with Stephen King she felt that.
That was her other great escape, actually – books and the library. Frank always said he’d buy her the books, rather than her having to go to the library, but she liked going to the library. She liked the displays and the cracked lino and the public notices, and she didn’t really have much use for a book once she’d read it. She liked Margaret, one of the librarians, who’d keep things aside for her if she thought they might interest her. She had always been a very good borrower: she’d never had an overdue book in her life. She loved Catherine Cookson.* Reading those books was her education. She told it like it was, Catherine Cookson. She’d always have a good cry over a Catherine Cookson. Frank was very sniffy about the books, obviously. He wasn’t a great reader.
When she was dancing and everyone was moving together, that was what it was like when she was reading a good book. She couldn’t explain it: things just seemed to make sense. It was like that feeling, sometimes, of driving round the ring road at night, when all the cars seemed to move in formation together. Or sometimes, when she looked outside on Fitzroy Avenue and she saw people going about their business, almost as if it was synchronised. There was a serenity there that was absent the rest of the time.
Not that she really had any complaints about her life, or about Frank, which is what made it hard. What did she have to complain about? He’d been an excellent husband, really. And a good father to Lorraine. They’d wanted for nothing, either of them. He was very kind, very generous to everyone. But there was this other side to him, a side that other people didn’t really see. The way he’d talk about his colleagues, or competitors – she’d never liked that. He’d swear and shout about them – the language that came out of his mouth, you’d be surprised. He used the ‘f word a lot at home, and the ‘c’ word, if he thought he could get away with it. And sometimes he used the two in combination. That upset her.
Frank was just like that, though. That’s what he was like. He could get quite abusive. He didn’t like her going to the line dancing – he got quite abusive about that. He didn’t mind her going to the market, or out to lunch with Ita, or Marjorie, that was fine. But he didn’t even like her going out to the library on late-night opening on a Thursday (until eight o’clock). She was never sure why: whether he was jealous, or possessive, or just afraid that one day she might slip away and never come back. He’d always been funny like that. He was very insecure, Frank Gilbey, when it came down to it. That’s what people didn’t realise. He took quite a bit of mothering, Frank. But Mrs Gilbey was over sixty now, and she was sick of mothering.
There was a month left before line dancing shut up shop for Christmas, and Big Donna had been saying about this big evening up at Maxine’s on Christmas Eve. Maxine’s is a famous pub and club out in the country, ‘The Pub with a Club’. There were going to be line-dancing clubs going from all over. You had to sign up if you wanted to go.
Mrs Gilbey really wanted to go. But she knew Frank wouldn’t approve. On Christmas Eve Frank would expect her to be at home baking and making things special for Christmas, for him and for her, and Lorraine. Their little family. That was what always came first.
She’d waited for everyone else to leave the badminton courts, and while Big Donna was packing up, Mrs Gilbey quickly checked the list of names to see who’d signed up. Quite a few. Someone had taken the biro. She only had an eyebrow pencil in her handbag.
Frank always dropped her off outside at exactly 7.00 and he always picked her up at exactly 9.30. He parked on the double yellows outside: he didn’t care. So she didn’t have much time. She’d had to decide.
They were driving up the gravel drive, and Frank was parking and switching off the engine. ‘Frost tonight, ’ he said.
And she’d taken the eyebrow pencil and written, in her tiny but legible hand, her name: Irene.
* Although it is on offer at the Oasis, actually, a new course, along with ‘Humming to Heal’, ‘Rainbow Dancing’ and a new series of Reiki master-classes. Contact Cherith or Sammy at the Oasis for details.
* And we do have a few people in town who are: Colin Rimmer, for example, can’t begin the day without at least having a go at The Times and he likes to tackle the Guardian at the weekend, although a Guardian can be hard to find here: people have been known to cross the county line for a proper broadsheet at weekends. Only the Sunday Times is guaranteed.
* We have had our artists, though, of one kind and another: the work of ‘Diamond Annie’, Annie Coker, for example, who was a quilt maker back in the 1920s and a demon on the treadle machine, is now much sought after, by people from the city and abroad, the kind of people who like to hang old quilts on their walls rather than put them on their beds, which many of us here find difficult to understand, especially since the colours in Annie’s quilts have rather faded and the stuffing’s falling out, and you can get a perfectly good duvet and nylon cover from N’Hance at Bloom’s for less than £30; and Archie Hillock, of course, who attended the Royal College of Art in the early 1950s and who was briefly renowned as one of the ‘Kitchen Sink’ artists, most famous for his tiny thick-and-crusty painting of a turd in a toilet; and George McGuigan, our own home-grown Impressionist, who lived on Fitzroy Avenue and who was rumoured to have met Manet, and whose own bravura style of portrait painting, featuring much apparently slapdash pink and yellow brushwork, earned him the nickname of the ‘Egg-and-Bacon Artist’.
* In his time Frank has successfully sold people worthless properties, blighted land, timeshares, conservatories and insurance. But undoubtedly his best and biggest offer has been himself, gift-wrapped in Armani and presented to us as mayor and councillor and pillar of the community – an offer which, like the people of Troy, we did not refuse and have come bitterly to regret.
* The Two Little Fleas has long since been deleted, alas, but copies do occasionally crop up on on-line ukulele music and memorabilia auction sites: the last copy to have surfaced, on www.ukesandbanjeleles.com, sold for £800 within forty-eight hours, which is ironic because Bill and Antonietta had had to pay to have the record produced in the first place, and when their son Richard was clearing out the house a few years ago, after they’d died, he threw away about 500 unsold copies which had been kept in the loft, and he has been kicking himself ever since. Now he saves everything that might one day be worth something: hundreds of his children’s drawings and paintings, in case they become artists, thousands of photographs of them in case they become famous, their shoes, their clothes, hours of home-video recordings. His wife Lena is threatening to divorce him unless he stops. ‘Don’t you understand?’ he tells her. ‘This is history in the making.’ ‘Well, it looks to me like a rubbish dump in the making, ’ says Lena, ‘and I can’t get into the cupboards to put away the laundry. So it’s your choice: it’s either me or it’s your memorabilia.’
* Although if there was no Catherine Cookson in the library she’d settle for a Joan Jonker, a Nora Kay, or a Mary Larkin. Philomena, one of the librarians, who is studying part-time for an MA up in the city, and whose tastes run more to the Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson and Orange Prize for Fiction end of the literary spectrum, tried to set up a women’s reading group in the library a couple of years back, to encourage some of the older ladies to experiment a little more in their choice of reading. She started them off with Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, which was a surprising success – there are a lot of older ladies in our town, it seems, who can readily identify with a story of sadomasochistic sex, love and abjection – and there was a brief period when Sylvia Plaths and Kathy Ackers were being requested on inter-library loan almost every week, but people’s enthusiasm soon faded and Catherine Cookson re-emerged triumphant.