Carol Clewlow - Not Married, Not Bothered

It was the day before I left Nepal for Bangkok when it came to me, that thing about freedom. I’d hired a bike, cycled out of Kathmandu. I was lying down on the grass verge with the scent of the pines in my nostrils, the wheels of the bike still whirring and clicking beside me.

As I stared up into the crystal-blue canopy above me, I thought about everyone back home and, in particular, I thought about them working and I felt a deep, satisfied sense of pleasure that I was here doing nothing.

I thought, this is what freedom feels like. And the revelation seemed so real and so true I could have reached out and touched it.

It seemed to come right out of the heart of all that blueness.

*Still, if you’ve done the West Country tour, which I’ll warrant more than a few of you have, you won’t have too much trouble identifying it.

*Even though those who know say all this is just early spin-doctoring on the part of the abbey.

†Previously, you may recall, Millington’s Café where Aunt Fran shamelessly stole Uncle Hugh from my mother.

* Nettles for Health, Your Aura and You, Chakra Cleansing for Beginners, Mysteries of the Tarot , etc., etc., all Demeter Press, available from the Avalon Alternative Health and Therapy Centre, Hocus Pocus and by mail order.

I guess I should go back to Bangkok now. Because that’s what writers do, isn’t it? When they want the past and the present to collide in their head. They go back to the scene of the affair. Which is what I should do – hole up in some backstreet hotel, beat out the story on an old upright Smith Corona with the sounds of the city outside the window, and the sun slanting through the dirty dusty Venetian blinds and making patterns on the wall, all of which would remind me conveniently of Nathan’s hotel room and our afternoon lovemaking sessions. Except that I don’t remember us making love in the afternoon, and anyway I can’t go back because I never go anywhere now. For one thing I can’t fly.

‘Can’t?’ Archie’s look was curious over the top of his glass as the hubbub of Fergie’s party rose and fell around us.

‘No.’ I could feel myself growing defensive. ‘Look, it’s no big deal. I just don’t like flying, that’s all.’

He said, ‘No one likes flying, Riley.’

Being an aviophobe (thanks, Peter) or if you prefer it a pteromerhanophobe, isn’t the only thing that keeps my feet on the ground. The other reason I don’t travel is that I can’t afford it. Not a problem that afflicts the former, now reformed Frau Goebbels.

A week on from the phobia clinic opening I met her in the High Street. She was all Nike-ed up on her way to the gym. In training. For her holiday. Seems she’d done another rethink, this on the aromatherapy course. Now she’d signed up for one of those heavy-duty hi-adventure holidays, white-water rafting, hang-gliding round Everest or something. In Hocus Pocus, where she dragged me for a coffee, she thrust a brochure in my face. It was full of bronzed surfer types with very white teeth doing exciting things in lifejackets and baggy shorts and very black sunglasses.

‘Ah, bless,’ as I said to Cass. ‘And Martin, the poor mutt, still thinks she’s coming back to him.’

I know this is what Martin thinks on account of the fact that he told me. I bumped into him by chance a few days later although ‘bumped into’ is scarcely the right term. Alerted by the merry strains of the accordion and seeing the knot of visitors in the Market Place, and thus the lie of the land, I leapt into a shop doorway. But too late. Mid-leap he caught my eye above the crowd and gave his handkerchief an extra loud snap in the air to show that he’d seen me.

Against all the odds, Martin is a morris dancer, although perhaps not, bearing in mind that for him morris dancing represents the raffish and unpredictable side to his nature. Like so many of his kind (i.e., the bank manager, two solicitors, surveyor and accountant who constitute the rest of the troop) he thinks it’s evidence of the fact that he’s not boring, an allegation apparently that Fleur not only made to me, but more cruelly flung at him at the time of their parting.

‘Boring. Can you believe it? That’s what she called me.’

There’s a sorrowful confusion on his face that would have touched my heart if I hadn’t remembered just in time that he was an estate agent.

Even Martin’s ankle bells had a mournful tinkle to them that day. His mood could be detected in the half-hearted way he flapped his handkerchief.

‘It’s just a phase she’s going through,’ he said, using it to mop his brow as we sat on the town hall steps. ‘She just needs a break, that’s all – a bit of space. That’s why I agreed to get her the flat.’ The misery was beginning to subside by now and his eyes were becoming matter-of-fact and hopeful. ‘What do you think, Riley?’

I couldn’t answer, not for the lump in my throat – there wasn’t one (like I say, in the last analysis Martin is still an estate agent) – merely for the memory of all those beautiful baggy-shorted young men and Fleur’s lustfully glowing enthusiasm.

‘I should have thought this would be the sort of thing you’d fancy, Riley,’ she said that day, pushing the page towards me from which a particularly appealing tousle-haired young Icarus stared out at me, dark glasses exploding into stars of sunlight.

‘Not me,’ I said, flipping the brochure closed and pushing it back across the table. ‘Me, I get all the adrenalin rush I need just opening the post in the morning.’

Listen, do you ever get the feeling that Life’s a card game, and that you’re the only one at the table busking it because you don’t know the rules? Well, that’s pretty much the way I’ve always felt watching other people get married. I’d poke in and around my own heart, trying to find something, a yearning, an inclination, finding only a gap, an absence where both were supposed to be. At the same time I’d know it had to be me, that there had to be a good reason why people got married, since most of them did it. And now I’ve discovered it. The explanation. The reason it’s so popular. The hitherto unspoken, undisclosed Official Secret that everybody else knew but forgot to mention to me. The biggest cliché in the book. So bloody obvious it was staring me in the face.

Two can live as cheaply as one, right? And while it’s not Isaac Newton and the apple, or Archimedes and the bath, still it explains why any sensible human being should want to get married.

You wouldn’t think it would take so long to dawn on me, would you? This simple truth. Or that it would appear in the manner of that Great White Light on the Road to Damascus. But that’s exactly what happened as I complained to Cass about Fleur’s cavalier use of the word ‘single’.

‘Look, I’ve earnt the title. I’ve paid all my own bills all my life.’

Which is the precise moment when it exploded over my head like some sort of revelation, the simple fact that all those marrieds and cohabitees, being à deux , only have to find the cash for half of the bills that drop down on their doormat every month while I, being one alone and single, have to fork out for the whole damn lot of them.

Question: if two people can live as cheaply as one, then how much is one alone paying as compared with one living as part of a twosome? Write on both sides of the page, preferably using graphs and pie charts.

‘When you think about it, it really costs to stay single,’ I moaned one day to Sophie.

‘So what?’ she said. ‘Everything in life costs one way or another.’ And I see that. But still …

According to a recent survey *the average married fifty-year-old with a mortgage, pension and all the other joint accumulated financial paraphernalia assembled after the best part of thirty years spent together, is worth about fifty grand. By contrast the average never-married single of the same age is likely to be worth only half of that (in my case, if only, but that’s another story), good grounds for getting married, I can see that (although personally I’d want at least a couple of mill, plus a peerage and the thanks of a grateful nation).