The Trouble with Single Women Read online

  Fee had recently been promoted to Projects Director. If, for instance, a chain of stores with a staid image decided that it needed to attract a younger age group to survive, F.P. & D. would carry out market research. It would also draw on its own resource centre, which tracked current tastes and possible future changes via two dozen categories of consumers.

  Fee, for instance, was a MUSIC – mature unattached single; intelligent with a conscience. You didn’t have to be very old to be mature – thirty was the threshold. And you didn’t have to do very much to be classed as having a conscience – paying your parking fines would do.

  F.P. & D. would then construct for the chain an entirely new image, an advertising campaign and a five-year sales plan. Fee would be in overall charge. Will was responsible for turning the research into something visual.

  He had recently helped Fee to retarget a line of soups whose customers had been in two categories – dead or dying. On that occasion, F.P. & D. had labelled every tin ‘earth-friendly’ and sold it via a hi-tech television commercial that advocated that everybody should ‘get canned’.

  Soup drinking amongst fifteen to twenty-five olds had risen by 21 per cent. The only hiccup was a tendency by graffiti artists to change the ‘a’ in the slogan on hoardings to ‘o’. Increasingly, Fee had found herself in sympathy with this sentiment.

  Now, Fee watched Will as he meticulously buttered the toast, cutting the bread tidily into two triangles. She was more inclined to stick a dollop of butter in the centre of the slice, fold the bread in half and leave the dry bits uneaten. Will had patience, she didn’t. According to Will, they had other differences too, fundamental differences.

  ‘You want love,’ he’d tease her. ‘All single women past thirty seek love. Me? I want sex. And no babies. It’s the male genes. I can’t help myself. I’m a hunter. You’re a nurturer.’

  ‘But I don’t want babies,’ Fee would protest.

  ‘Oh yes, you do,’ Will would correct her firmly. ‘You just won’t allow yourself to say it.’

  Will’s view was that he’d been faithful to his wife for nine years – now it was time to play the field, run free from commitment. Fee had also been faithful to her former partner, Bill Summers, for the shorter time of five years. According to Will, what she now required was more of the same: another long-term relationship to replicate what had gone before.

  ‘But why?’ she would ask, puzzled.

  ‘Because you’re a woman – and that’s what women are like. Except they won’t admit it.’ Will would duck even as he spoke to avoid whatever missile had come to Fee’s hand.

  ‘If I was to ask you what you looked for in a woman, what would you say?’ she asked Will now, accepting a plate of neatly arranged toast.

  ‘Easy,’ he replied. ‘I’d say, “Size 10. Age twenty-two. No emotional baggage.” ’

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ Fee protested mildly, abandoning her attempt to chew on the toast. The effort made her head ache even more.

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ Will replied. ‘What’s wrong with being straight about your needs? I want beauty, no demands, no hang-ups. And definitely no assumptions that a relationship has a future.’

  ‘Did the woman who took it out on my car assume a future?’ Fee asked.

  ‘I’m really sorry about your car,’ Will replied. ‘She thought it was mine. Mind you, the fact that she thought I’d choose anything as naff as a Fiat confirms my worst fears about her,’ he smiled.

  ‘Well,’ Fee asked again, ‘did she assume a future?’

  ‘I know what she didn’t want,’ Will offered evasively. ‘She didn’t want the truth. Not many of you women do when—’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘Look,’ said Will. ‘I want to be honest. I want to say to someone “You’re really wonderful but I don’t think there’s much point in us meeting any more.” I want to say that, but have you any idea what happens if I do?’

  He rolled his eyes up to the ceiling. ‘I’ll tell you what happens, I’m called an emotional coward, immature, I’m told I don’t know what I want, on and on and on. And all because I do know what I want, and it isn’t her. Not sounding too brutal, am I?’ he asked lightly.

  ‘Yes,’ Fee replied. She was never quite sure when Will was being truthful and when he was simply trying to provoke her. It was a tactic she recognized since she was fond of using it herself – particularly on her mother.

  Will continued, ‘Emotional mayhem is avoided if I lie. All I have to say is, “I’ll give you a call,” and everything is hunky-dory. Her pride is saved, I’m off the hook, no post-mortems. Truth is all that suffers.’

  Fee picked up the cups and put them in the sink. ‘You’re a rat, Will,’ she said. ‘Just you wait until you’re on the receiving end of that kind of treatment, then see how you like it—’

  He handed Fee his empty plate. ‘So I take it, you’d never resort to such tactics?’ he challenged. ‘You’re always absolutely honest, above board, never any deception?’

  ‘Of course I am. Well, at least, I try hard to be. It’s only fair.’

  ‘Lesson number one, Fee,’ Will said patronizingly. ‘Fairness doesn’t come into relationships. Not, that is, if you intend to remain magnificently on top no matter how difficult the situation.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ Fee answered flatly.

  ‘Lesson number two is even more painful,’ Will continued, ignoring her reply. ‘Lesson number two is that ten years from now, when I’m ready to settle down, I’ll still be able to select a younger mate and have a couple of kids – but you?’

  Will smiled and stepped sharply to one side as Fee grabbed a teacloth and threw it at his head.

  ‘What I’m telling you is for your own good,’ he admonished, wagging his finger. ‘When it comes to the mating game, men have all the advantages. Bar none. And you, who keep banging on about the importance of female choice, when you find yourself at what, forty-five? fifty? – you’ll discover that choice is a young woman’s illusion.

  ‘In short, my darling,’ Will was enjoying himself, ‘you’ll be just another middle-aged casualty. On the shelf. An independent, modern woman – who just can’t get a man. But all is not lost.’ He paused dramatically, then dropped onto his knee at Fee’s chair.

  ‘Call it a day now, Fee,’ he pleaded, theatrically. ‘We were made for each other. I’ll give up my life of shallow deceit and throw away the pleasures of young flesh, just to be with you—’

  Fee dismissed him cheerily. ‘You’re a vain, arrogant, selfish bastard, Will Evans,’ she said.

  He affected disappointment. ‘But I thought that was exactly the kind of man you fell for?’ he protested.

  ‘Real bastards, yes,’ Fee answered. ‘Your kind, no.’

  An hour later, Will Evans, back in his own flat, ruefully examined the scars of the night in the bathroom mirror. It was the first time in his life that anyone had exacted physical revenge upon him. Will knew that the experience ought to have made him contrite, ashamed, regretful . . .

  He traced the path of a scratch with one finger. As there was only him and his reflection discussing the issue, he could afford to be honest. The scratches made him feel good; a veteran. He was no longer an ex-husband with little previous experience. He was now a man who had Lived.

  He smiled and, as if on cue, the telephone rang. It was just after 7 a.m. Only his ex-wife rang him at that hour. He picked up the receiver gingerly.

  ‘Hi, Will, Hilly here. Hilly Byrne. Remember?’

  He grimaced and then sucked in his breath at the pain from the scratches. He and Hilly Byrne had met via the Internet. Within days, they had arranged to have an early-evening drink. Within hours, they had discovered that while they had little else in common, they could have an alarmingly good time in bed.

  Briefly, Will had even seriously considered that this standard of sex, unknown to him before, might be the perfect foundation for a second marriage. But the bits before and after copulation increasingly became a strain,
so, after a few months, they agreed that it was time to say goodbye. Or rather, Will suggested it and Hilly Byrne had no choice but to agree.

  Will had been grateful to the Internet for widening his sexual repertoire but now, many weeks later, he did not relish a post-modern relationship.

  Hilly revealed, however, that she was making a purely professional call, in her capacity as a television director. Will listened and then chuckled.

  ‘I’ve yet to meet one,’ he remarked. ‘But I’ll pass her on if I do.’

  ‘Fancy a drink, sometime?’ he added; a little test, just to see if Hilly was still interested.

  ‘No, thanks,’ she replied brusquely. ‘Right now, I’m into a career thing. You know how it is.’

  For the next several hours, Will’s thoughts kept returning to Hilly Byrne’s breasts. He found it extremely annoying.

  ‘Now that is a real bastard.’

  Fee was on the phone to her mother.

  Helen Travers looked expectantly at the telephone receiver as if it might signal whether Fiona was playing straight or not. She could never be quite sure with her youngest daughter.

  Fee had just been told that Charlie Jackson, her brother-in-law, a builder, had refused to obey his wife’s instruction to remove the spiral staircase he’d installed in the centre of his living room only a few weeks before.

  ‘Can you imagine how your sister must be feeling?’ Helen demanded of her daughter.

  ‘Gutted. Absolutely gutted—’ Fee replied, deadpan.

  Helen frequently regaled her with stories of the married lives of her two older sisters, Veronica and Elizabeth; the generosity of their respective husbands; the magnificent décor of their family homes; the cost of their latest holiday; the beauty of their now grown-up children.

  It was intended to whet Fee’s own appetite for marriage. Helen found it very disturbing, to have a still unattached daughter in the family: one in her late thirties.

  Now, coming up to her daughter’s thirty-eighth birthday, Helen had decided that something serious had to be done.

  For Fee’s own good, of course.

  Fiona Travers should have been born on April Fool’s Day. It was only Helen’s categoric refusal to push for an almost inhuman amount of time that ensured that Fee was born at seventeen minutes past midnight on 2 April. Helen had spent a great deal of her time since then continuing to try to hold her daughter back from almost anything other than matrimony.

  She had agreed to Fee going to university – the first from either side of the family to do so – only because the daughter of the woman next door had met and married her husband in the final year of her degree course.

  ‘Don’t study so hard that you forget to look,’ were Helen’s parting words of advice to Fee.

  For as long as her daughters could remember, Helen Travers had conversed in clichés and homilies, some of them homemade.

  ‘You make your bed, you lie on it,’ Helen would instruct her three daughters. And, when advocating if not tolerance then no surprise at male infidelity, ‘Marriage wasn’t made for monks.’ Another favourite was, ‘Don’t dig deep, unless you can fix what you find.’

  When her girls were young, they took these then incomprehensible remarks as evidence of the mysterious wisdom of adults. As each moved into their teens, they recognized them as echoes of Helen’s own fearfulness.

  Born just after the First World War, Helen had never ceased to find life dangerous. She was caught in an eternal dilemma.

  Men were treacherous, but since a woman ‘on the loose’ was an even more unpredictable commodity, a sensible female acquired a husband as speedily as possible.

  ‘Women go bad without the protection of a man,’ Helen frequently said. All her experience told her that women who refused to fit into the mould paid a price. The fact that her own conformity had probably cost her even more dearly she could never afford to acknowledge. Instead, a permanent air of disappointment hung around her.

  Others, Helen would say, ‘without naming names’, had let her down badly.

  Veronica and Elizabeth had been born when Helen and her husband, Jim, a welder in the local railway works, were in their twenties. Fee was a late accident. Helen had been thirty-seven and deeply upset to discover she was pregnant for a third time.

  Veronica and Elizabeth took after her side of the family. They adopted their mother’s ambitions early.

  Veronica, a bank clerk, had walked up the aisle at twenty-one. She then had two children. Elizabeth, a florist, was two years older when she became the bride of Charlie and she, too, became the mother of two.

  They were delighted to find themselves, at a very young age, living happily ever after. Admittedly, Veronica was now going through a bit of an upset, as Helen preferred to phrase it, but then nothing in life is absolutely perfect.

  Not even happy endings.

  In Helen’s opinion, Fee took after her father. And she couldn’t get much more damning than that.

  Jim Travers had coped with married life by retreating to a garden shed for much of his spare time.

  There, in an armchair with an electric fire in winter, he read westerns and manuals on how to raise the perfect budgerigar. Helen wouldn’t let him breed birds. Helen wouldn’t let Jim do much of anything – except take the blame for all the disappointments she had had in life.

  Jim disappointed her even in death. He had a heart attack at fifty-seven, reducing his pension considerably. Fee was eighteen when her father died. After he had gone, whenever she was home from university, she would spend a lot of her time in his shed, reading his westerns, escaping from Helen’s constraining expectations.

  In so far as you can love a man who had withdrawn so much into himself, Fee had loved her father. Not least because he had introduced her to The Lone Ranger.

  As she grew older, Jim Travers became only the first of a number of elusive men for whom Fee would fall.

  A final reason why Helen viewed Fee with uncertainty was because of that terrible business with Great Granny Vera.

  Helen had known that Veronica and Elizabeth could never do a Vera; but Fee . . . well, who could tell?

  So, from almost the minute she was born, Fee was criticized, chastised, and threatened with dire punishment, not so much because of what she had already done, but as a deterrent against what she might do.

  ‘Good girls don’t make trouble,’ Helen used to say again and again. ‘They accept that others know best. You’re a good girl, aren’t you, Fiona?’

  Infuriatingly, even at three years of age, Fiona chose to remain silent.

  Now, while part of Helen wanted to see Fee safe, secure, settled, part of her deep down also wanted to see her daughter go desperately, badly, wrong. Perhaps because, as much as Helen repressed the idea, she knew Fee was increasingly becoming the person she might have been.

  And Helen wasn’t at all sure how she felt about that.

  ‘So you’ll definitely be there on Saturday?’ she asked Fee for what must have been the tenth time. ‘You know your Emily hasn’t asked everybody to be a godmother, she’s asked you—’

  At 3 p.m. the following Saturday, a christening would be held at the church of the Holy Trinity, South Welsden. Emily was Elizabeth’s daughter, Fee’s niece. The christening would be followed by champagne, rich fruitcake and smoked salmon on bruschetta brushed with black olive paste at the house of Emily’s aunt and uncle, Veronica and Les Haslem, since they had by far the largest garden in the family.

  ‘How’s that nice man Adam?’ Helen suddenly asked Fee, hoping to catch her offguard.

  ‘He’s away,’ she lied, to deter further questions.

  ‘Away where?’ Helen asked suspiciously.

  ‘Away for a bit. Working, you know, the usual—’

  ‘So he’ll be back for your birthday?’ Helen probed further.

  ‘It’s none of my business, I know,’ she began again. ‘But Adam has a lot going for him. I told Mrs Jackson next door, he’s absolutely besotted with you. And
don’t forget, none of us is getting any younger—’

  Fee knew how to derail her mother.

  ‘Well age didn’t stop Vera, did it?’ she asked casually. ‘I mean she wasn’t getting any younger when she changed her life, was she?’

  ‘What?’ Helen squeaked down the line.

  ‘I was just saying that age didn’t stop Vera getting into her stride,’ Fee continued conversationally. ‘I mean, she must have been well past her forties.’

  ‘And what made you mention Vera out of the blue like that?’ Helen asked tartly.

  ‘Oh, nothing really. I was just thinking,’ Fee replied casually, trying to keep the smile out of her voice.

  ‘Well, don’t,’ Helen commanded tartly. ‘Not if you know what’s healthy.’

  Later, as Helen Travers plumped the cushions on her settee as she did several times every day – she did so like visitors to see them nice – she told herself that everything would have been so much easier if Fee had been, well, dimmer. Like her sisters.

  She was fully aware that friends, relatives, people who mattered, believed that it was she, Helen, who was somehow to blame for Fee’s lack of a spouse.

  This condemnation was a bitter disappointment, since, really, what mother could have done more? Helen herself had no doubts about who was the real cause. Jim and his ridiculous cowboys. And, of course, Vera.

  Vera had done her bit too.

  If young Travers family members were present, Vera was always discussed by the adults in a semaphore of sign language and raised eyebrows.

  Fee was fourteen before she was finally given a complete description of her great grandmother’s alleged sins. An aunt drank one too many rum and blackcurrants at a wedding and out it all came.

  It was Fee’s first realization that bad girls become legends – which, of course, good girls never do.

  Great Granny Vera, from Jim’s side of the family, so the saga went, had married at twenty. Her husband, Arthur, was eleven years older, and a fishmonger. They had seven children and everyone said what a lovely family they made.

  Then, when the youngest child was nineteen, and Vera was fifty-four, she suddenly disappeared. A fortnight later, she got back in touch with the family to give them the news.