‘Havin’ a starin’ competition,’ said Mabel.
‘Who with?’
‘De chair?’ said Mabel, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.
Billy and me started giggling, then suddenly he stopped and looked at me: ‘You’re laughing again, Mummy?’
SMUG MARRIED HELL
Saturday 1 September 2012
135lb, positive thoughts 0, romantic prospects 0.
10 p.m. Giant step backwards. Just back from Magda and Jeremy’s annual joint-birthday drinks. Was late because it had taken me twenty minutes to do up my zip, despite the time I had spent in yoga attempting to interlink my hands behind my shoulder blades and trying not to fart.
On the doorstep the memories surged up again: the years when I would stand there with Mark, with his hand on my back; the year I’d just found out I was pregnant with Billy and we were going to tell them all; the year when we took Mabel all wrapped up in her little car seat. It was so lovely going to things with Mark. I never worried about what I was wearing because he’d watch me try everything on before we left and help me choose, and tell me I didn’t look fat and do all the zips. He always had something kind and funny to say if I did something stupid, was always batting off any jellyfishing remarks (the kind that suddenly zap you as if from nowhere in the middle of a conversational warm sea).
I could hear the music and laughter inside. Fought the urge to run off. But then the door opened and Jeremy was there.
I saw Jeremy feeling what I was feeling: the yawning gap beside me. Where was Mark, his old friend?
‘Ah, there you are! Excellent,’ said Jeremy, blustering over the pain, as he had consistently done since the moment it happened. That’s public school for you. ‘Come in, come in. Great! How are the children? Growing up?’
‘No,’ I said rebelliously. ‘They are stunted by grief and will be midgets for the rest of their lives.’
Jeremy has clearly never read any Zen books and doesn’t know about just being there, and letting the other person be there, just as they are. But for a split second, he stopped the bluster and we just were there as we were, which was: extremely sad about the same thing. Then he coughed and started again as if nothing had happened.
‘Come on! Voddy and tonic? Let’s take your coat. You’re looking very trim!’
He ushered me into the familiar sitting room and Magda waved cheerily from the drinks table. Magda, who I met at Bangor University, is actually my oldest friend. I looked around at all the faces I’d known since my early twenties, once the original Sloane Rangers, older now. All the couples who seemed to get married like a line of falling dominoes when they were thirty-one, still together: Cosmo and Woney, Pony and Hugo, Johnny and Mufti. And there was the same sense I’d had for all that time – of being a duck out of water, unable to join in what they were talking about because I was at a different stage of life, even though I was the same age. It was as though there had been a seismic timeshift and my life was happening years behind theirs, in the wrong way.
‘Oh, Bridget! Jolly good to see you. Goodness, you’ve lost weight. How are you?’
Then there was the sudden flash in the eyes, the remembering of the whole widowhood thing: ‘How ARE the children? How are they doing?’
Not so Cosmo, Woney’s husband, a successful, confident-though-egg-shaped fund manager, who came charging up like a blunderbuss.
‘So! Bridget! Still on your own? You’re looking very chipper. When are we going to get you married off again?’
‘Cosmo!’ said Magda indignantly. ‘Zip it.’
One advantage of widowhood is that – unlike being single in your thirties, which, because it is ostensibly all your own fault, allows Smug Marrieds to say anything they like – it does usually introduce some element of tact. Unless, of course, you’re Cosmo.
‘Well, it’s been long enough now, hasn’t it?’ he crashed on. ‘Can’t carry on wearing widow’s weeds for ever.’
‘Yes, but the trouble is—’
Woney joined in. ‘It’s very hard for middle-aged women who find themselves single.’
‘Please don’t say “middle-aged”,’ I purred, trying to imitate Talitha.
‘. . . I mean, look at Binko Carruthers. He’s no oil painting. But the second Rosemary left him he was inundated with women! Inundated! Throwing themselves at him.’
‘Hurling themselves,’ said Hugo enthusiastically. ‘Dinners, theatre tickets. Life of Riley.’
‘Yes, but they’re all “of a Certain Age”, aren’t they?’ said Johnny.
Grrr. ‘Of a Certain Age’ is even worse than ‘middle-aged’ with its patronizing, only-ever-applied-to-women insinuations.