Carol Clewlow - Not Married, Not Bothered

Frasers has been part of our town for close on two hundred years. It became part of our family one day in 1946 when my Aunt Fran met my Uncle Hugh in Millington’s Café at the bottom of the High Street (now the Avalon Alternative Health and Therapy Centre). She was introduced by her sister, Babs, a lesson to us all. i.e., when pursuing the man of your dreams take care not to be accompanied by your younger, better-looking sister.

Required to explain what happened that day in Millington’s, I suspect the words ‘We wuz robbed’ would best suit my mother. At family gatherings, after her fifth gin and tonic, she likes to murmur in a noble and meaningful voice, ‘Of course, I got to know Hugh first.’ This closely followed by, ‘We met when we were serving .’

To this day my mother regards herself as having been cheated over Hugh Fraser. She’d like to bring Life to account for it, accuse it of having lost the plot, and I have some sympathy with her over this. Because not only did she meet Hugh before Fran, but they met in circumstances that it was fair to expect would have led to the most romantic of conclusions, i.e., a junior officer and a typist from the same small country town cast up in the middle of a war a couple of thousand miles from home in North Africa.

And all this while Sister Fran was back in Blighty and doing no more for King and Country than rolling bandages.

At Fraser family gatherings my mother gets very drunk, drags at Hugh’s arm, dredging up memories of Cairo.

‘Remember, Hugh, oh, remember …’ this clapping her hands girlishly. ‘Those mad nights at Groppi’s, Hugh. Martinis at Shepheards. Oh, and those wonderful Sunday night concerts…’

In all this she likes to imply to anyone willing to listen, and to those who aren’t, that something more passed between Hugh Fraser and Babs Gordon née Garland in Cairo than the mere exchange of pleasantries when the junior officer caught the West Country burr of his typist.

‘Of course, I’d met George by then,’ she’ll say with a brave smile and a demure droop of her eyes, this designed to imply a love story tragically foreshortened.

And indeed she had met our father – met him and almost certainly ruled him out of the picture. But when fate took a hand via Hugh and Aunt Fran she needed to save face and quickly. So it was that when George came to visit next time she snared him like a spider, this so that when her sister walked up the aisle she was able to watch from her pew with the satisfied feeling of her fingers tucked into husband’s elbow.

Hugh, meanwhile, always acts the perfect gentleman when she puts on her pantomime at family parties. For Hugh is a nice man. A good man. A decent man. He lets our mother reminisce for a while, before patting her hand and then gently disengaging it. But while Hugh is kind to old Babs Gordon, his only daughter, my Cousin Fleur, has never felt any similar compunction.

At the firm’s parties, where my mother likes to play the family card, act like Lady Bountiful with the workers, Fleur’s chilly little favourite is: ‘I see your mother’s enjoying herself,’ the phrase normally accompanied by a thin smile and a nod in the direction of Babs growing steadily more raucous in the corner.

(Oh God, if only our mother would get tired and emotional.)

‘I’m only surprised your mother hasn’t heard,’ Fleur said, that day she dragged me in for tea, a bitchy remark but one entirely well-founded, my mother being the human equivalent of a sniffer dog when it comes to searching out family scandal and misdemeanour.

‘HA!’ my mother said with a smile the size of a watermelon when I passed on the startling news about Fleur leaving Martin.

‘Old-Poker-Up-The-Arse’ this being the nom de guerre Babs Gordon coined for her niece close on thirty years ago when Fleur, still only fifteen, strayed fatally beyond her years to ask at one of those family parties, ‘Don’t you think you’ve had enough, Auntie Barbara?’ Suffice it to say that my mother did not approach the question in any sense as rhetorical, and that everyone standing within a radius of fifty feet took the answer to be in the negative.

To put all this into context, i.e., to appreciate the significance of Fleur leaving Martin, you need to be aware of the way in which Fleur has played the little wifey during the twenty-three years of their marriage. On the night they got engaged, for instance, she informed me in all seriousness that she considered the occupation of wife and mother ‘a woman’s highest calling’ (she used those words precisely).

‘Gosh,’ I said. ‘You and Joseph Goebbels.’

Fleur was nineteen when she got engaged to Martin. They were married two years later.

‘I’ve been the perfect wife,’ she said that day at her kitchen table, looking over the top of her mug at me, and I couldn’t argue. Apart from anything else, she’s even looked the perfect wife – her long straight fair hair sitting impeccably behind a velvet Alice band, her lobes graced with no more than small pearl earrings. She brought up her children too with this same degree of perfection, three of them – Mark and Hannah and James – all of whom have that same perfect straight fair hair and perfect teeth, and who have so far failed absolutely to do the slightest thing to disgrace their parents (Hannah at some fancy cooking school, Mark and James both at good universities).

I suppose it was always inevitable that Fleur would play the part of older wiser women with me, and this despite being seven years younger.

‘Relationships are something you have to work at, Riley,’ she told me severely on another occasion, hearing that another one of mine had bitten the dust.

‘I’ve got a job,’ I said. ‘Who needs another one?’

Over the years, Fleur’s conversation has been entirely dominated by Martin and I , and our house … our car … our holiday… our children. Her tongue would slick along those pale pink lips in self-satisfaction as she said the words. To all outward appearances she and Martin were joined at the hip. A few years ago, for instance, she offered me a free weekend in Paris she’d won in some upmarket shopping competition.

‘I can’t go,’ she said. ‘Martin’s working.’

‘Go with a friend,’ I said. ‘All else fails, I’ll go with you.’

She looked at me like I was suggesting group sex or experimenting with hallucinogenics. ‘I couldn’t ,’ she said. ‘I simply couldn’t. Martin and I do everything together.’

Only not any more, apparently.

‘He’s become so boring .’

Now this was a shameful lie. A total untruth. Martin had not become boring at all. Martin was always boring. Martin is a country estate agent. He drives a Volvo. He’s a member of Rotary. He’s supposed to be boring.

In her new kitchen that day, as the small army of women washed up and put stuff away around her (apparently all in the wrong places), Fleur clattered our mugs together and got up from the table with the air of someone setting out on a journey.

‘I told Martin now the children are away I want time for ME … time to find myself, time to get my head together.’ (Time to find a new scriptwriter. R. Gordon.)

She said, ‘I need space…’ a particularly nice touch, this, I thought, since she was leaving behind an executive home with half a dozen bedrooms, a games room in the basement, an ensuite with sauna, a swimming pool and a lounge the size of Wembley Stadium.

Listening to Fleur that day I felt as though I’d slipped into some alternative reality, like someone had wound the clock back. I was hearing phrases that day I thought never to hear again, that I’d thought safely dead and buried by the end of the seventies. And if I was hoping that somewhere along the line Fleur would see the irony of all this, bearing in mind all that kinder, kirche, küche , stuff she’d put the rest of us through over the years, I was about to be disappointed. Clearly Fleur didn’t do Nazi allusions.