Elizabeth Buchan: Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman

He did not like it when I read gardening books into the night, keeping him awake, and he complained bitterly when I ordered a tiny fountain to be constructed in the garden. That had been a Pyrrhic victory, for the fountain was a source of endless trouble, requiring regular maintenance and cleaning.

Yet they were good rows, the kind that people who live together should share. They raised the whirlwind, shook the furniture and vanished, leaving calm. Nathan and I were happy to occupy opposite sides of the garden fence over which we could shout at each other.

The hot milk had grown a second skin so I fetched the strainer then refilled Nathan’s cup. ‘Have you phoned Poppy yet?’

In May she would take her finals at Nottingham University, and neither of us was convinced that she was doing any work. Nathan had resolved to give her a lecture, although I had argued that, at twenty-two, Poppy was free to choose what she did with her life, and Nathan had argued back that, in that case, she choose between my position and his.

‘I haven’t but I will,’ he said irritably. ‘This evening. Don’t go on about it.’

‘I’m not going on about it. I’m just reminding you.’

I poured myself some coffee and Nathan went upstairs to do his teeth. A little later he came clattering downstairs, shouted goodbye and the front door closed.

Another Saturday.

I looked at my coffee. Flat platelets of skin were floating on its surface, leaving a trail of fatty bubbles in a grey liquid. I threw it away.

When I rang Poppy was asleep. ‘I just wanted to see how you are,’ I said.

She was cross. ‘Mum, what time is this?’

‘Sorry. I just wanted to talk to you.’

‘Talk to me at a decent time.’ She sniffed. ‘How’s Dad?’

‘At work. A crisis.’

‘He enjoys those,’ said his daughter. ‘Makes him feel needed.’

‘He’ll be ringing you. I thought I’d get a word in first.’

Poppy’s sigh gusted down the phone. ‘Look, I know what you’re going to say… but there’s no need. I deal with my own life…’

There was a lot more in this fashion. Poppy was warning me politely to stay within the limits and, after a while, I gave up. She promised that she would come home soon, that she was well and happy, and that was that.

I fed Parsley her biscuits for elderly cats, and she drowsed on the shelf above the radiator. Parsley was sixteen, which I tried my best to ignore. She held my heart in her killer tawny paw and, as far as I was concerned, she must live for ever.

I stacked the breakfast things in the dishwasher, as I listened to the radio news. Another serial murderer in America, civil war threatening in Indonesia. A desperate British couple had travelled to South America to adopt a baby, only to find they had been duped.

I made myself listen. By the skin of my teeth, I had got away with it. My life had been filled with children and Nathan and work, which had given me happiness. I had drunk greedily of that happiness, knowing that others were denied it.

‘Is it possible to be happy when somewhere in the world someone is dying because they do not have enough food, or have been born with scrambled genes, or their very breath is a political problem?’ I asked Nathan as we sat at the table in the kitchen, soon after we had moved into Lakey Street. I was twenty-two, pregnant with Sam, dreamy and apprehensive. Before the babies arrived, there was still time for conversations such as this one. ‘Shouldn’t they overshadow us, those with dreadful lives, unconsciously perhaps?’

Nathan poured wine for himself, milk for me. ‘If you’re talking about the Freudian idea of “the Other” for which we unconsciously seek, then no, you’re applying it too loosely. Anyway, it’s just a theory and humans are far more selfish than you suggest.’

The reference to Freud floored me and reminded me that there was much I did not know about Nathan. Yet. ‘I’ve no idea about the Freud, I was just speculating,’ I said. ‘I hope we can be happy’

There was a dreadful silence and I wished I’d kept my mouth shut. ‘Rosie, look at me. Of course we can be happy,’ he said vehemently, troubled at the way the conversation had turned. I got up and kissed him until he forgot.

Luckily that was all in the past, just a ruffle in the surface of an infant marriage.

If there was benefit in the children leaving home, it was my rediscovery of delight in domesticity, which had been pushed to one side. Some women hated it, but I loved the business of cleaning – the ritual of sweetening and cleansing a house was as old as time and I liked the idea that I was one in a long line of women to perform it. Nathan loved my buffing and polishing too, and confessed that sometimes, at work or travelling, he thought of me wielding a feather duster in a polished, gleaming setting. It was an intimacy no one else shared. He added, with a grin, that I was free to use the feather duster on him anytime. I promised I would.

Today the table required its weekly polish. It was made from French walnut and unsuitable for use in the kitchen, but since we ate there, I had wanted a table at which we could celebrate our family life. Anyway, it was beautiful. I had seen that instantly when I came across it, bruised and battered, in a junk shop in Norfolk, and set about saving it.

The cleaning materials were kept in a room that opened off the kitchen. The estate agent who sold us Lakey Street, whose imaginative abilities could not have been faulted, referred to it as ‘the original game larder’ but it was more likely to have been the privy or washhouse. It was a tiny room and I piled into it all the objects I could not bear to discard – an old pushchair (might come in useful), Sam’s discarded Meccano (ditto) and Poppy’s fold-away pink Wendy house (a reminder of Poppy’s fantasy life). On the shelves stood my collection of vases, also liberated from junk shops – overdecorated china flutes, cheap glass that tried to look like crystal, and imitation art deco. I was touched by their makers’ ambition.

The polish spread milky clouds over the table surface, and I buffed away at it until I was satisfied that the satiny wood was protected for another week. Then I stood back and surveyed my work.

Since we had moved in, only a year after we were married, number seven Lakey Street had enshrined most of Nathan’s and my life together. Someone once told me that, if you knew your stuff, old walls could be read like books. The contents of houses were no less intimate and fascinating. If you were interested, it took only a glance at a room to tell who was fussy, who had given up, who despaired.

Lakey Street had been in a bad state of repair when we bought it and, consequently, cheap. We went into battle with the damp, the mice and the structural wobbles. Building it up had been like applying coats of lacquer: slow. Mistakes had been made – the unfortunate terracotta paint in the dining room, which we had never got round to changing, the bathroom put in in just the wrong place, the uncomfortable and ugly sofa in what had been the au pair’s room. When I chose it I had thought it smart. The less said about the ruffled blinds on the landing, the better. (‘Tart’s knickers,’ was Vee’s verdict when she first saw them. ‘Do you have a past, Rose?’) They were so old now that they were fraying.

Nathan and I had promised each other that when the children were off our hands we would do something about the house. We never had. We were too comfortable in it as it was.

I spent that Saturday morning peacefully in the kitchen sorting, tidying and making shopping lists. The radio was playing a Mahler symphony, full of despair and lament for the composer’s unfaithful wife. Every so often, the music forced me to stop and listen. Mahler’s anguish was our gain. The fresh, starchy smell of ironed clothes, mixed with beeswax polish and the faintest reminder of coffee, drifted through the room. Occasionally, Parsley got up and stretched.