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Lesson 8

Marriage: to resign one’s self totally and contentedly into the hands of another; to have no longer any need of asserting one’s rights or one’s personality

You were born in mountain country, north of Sydney, a place assaulted by light. High hill country with ground leached pale by the sun and tap water the colour of tea and you always looked down when walking through tall grass, because of snakes, and at dusk the hills glowed pink with the force of the sun, trapping the heat under your skin, in the very marrow of your spine; that could not be gouged out. Whispering you back. Home. To a tall sun, a light-filled life.

When you were eighteen you climbed down from your high mountain place. Went to university and became a lawyer, in Sydney, the Big Smoke. Winged your way to London in your mid twenties: restless, fuelled by curiosity, eager to gulp life. After several years of hard work there was the expat’s dilemma of wanting to return to Australia but unable to decide when; of meeting Hugh – the man who did not excite you but sheltered you; of one thing leading to another and now you are in this rain-soaked island for life, staring at a mountain of washing by your bed and dreaming of the roaring light. After the second bouncy boy the decision was mutual: a move to the west country, the Cotswolds, for space and fresh air, a better life. Your dream of a partnership in the law firm fell away under the demands of motherhood; after the first maternity leave you never went back, lost your professional confidence and now your children cram every corner of your life. You are driven by perfection and ambition as a mother, just as you were driven as a lawyer. Everything you do you dive into completely, attacking with a ferocious will to succeed and hating it when you fall short. Which you do now, often, to your distress.

Hugh has said it’s good you’re Australian in this place; your accent can’t be placed, you can slip effortlessly from lower class to upper, can’t be pinned down. You know it’s good Hugh is not Australian for he can’t nail the broad flatness of tone that any Aussie East Coaster would recognise as originally from the sticks. The bush has never been completely erased from your voice; wilfully some remnant clings to it. Your vowels have been softened by Sydney, yes, but they still carry, faintly, the red-neck boondocks in their cadence. England hasn’t left a trace.

You will always be an outsider here. You revel in not-belonging, enjoy the high vantage point. Marvel, still, at the strict sense of place, of class they cannot breach – the fishing and shooting, the villas in France, the stone walls that collect the cold and the damp, the wellies even in July, the jumpers in August, the hanging sky like the water-bowed ceiling of an old house. How can it hold so much rain, cry so much? Days and days and days of it and at times you just want to raise your arms and push up the clouds, run. Hugh will never move to Australia, he has a blinkered idea of it as the end of the earth and deeply uninteresting, really – that the only culture you’ll find there is in a yoghurt pot.

You can see your whole future stretching ahead of you now until your body is slipped into this damp black earth, the years and years of sameness ahead. Once, long ago, you never wanted to be able to do that, curiosity was your fuel, the unknown. You carry your despair in you like an infection that cannot be shaken.

But now. A dangerous will inside you to crash catastrophe into your life, somehow, God knows how – or with whom. It’s been brewing for years; it’s something about reaching your forties and seeing all that stretches ahead. You’ve never been fully unlocked with Hugh and bear responsibility for that, entirely.

For always wearing a mask. For not being entirely honest. For never showing him your real self.

Lesson 9

Unhappiness of soul – a state of being often as unaccountable as it is irrational

‘How are you?’ the lovely, cheeky Bengali man in your newsagency asked before school pick up today.

You replied, distracted, ‘I have no idea.’

The ultimate flaky mum, you know he thought.

But it was the truth. You have no idea. Have lost the woman you once were. Cannot simplify your life. Had so much energy for so much, once; now your days are taken up with so many bitsy, consuming, domestic things. You catch yourself talking aloud as you walk away down the High Street. Is it madness or preoccupation or mere motherhood. In a window reflection you gasp at yourself scowling, jaw set. There’s the niggle that now you’re married you are somehow less. Just the little wife. Hugh doesn’t mean to convey that but he does. There’s a subtle and discernible loss of confidence, so insidious, as you lean on another for so much and you never did that, once. As you have somehow allowed over the years your petrol tank to be filled and restaurant dinners to be decided for you, sweets secreted to your kids, Nintendo Wiis gleefully bought behind your back, theatre tickets purchased for plays you don’t like.

You cannot explain how circumstances have closed over you, how you became a woman who lost her voice.

But you know there’s only one person who can haul you out.

It is five o’clock.

The potatoes have to be peeled and the toilet unblocked; it’s probably a plastic toy, it’s becoming a habit with Pip, your youngest.

You have to change this life, somehow, or something in you will implode like a depth charge way beneath the surface.

Lesson 10

There are very few families whose internal mismanagement and domestic unhappiness are not mainly the fault of the mistress

Nine p.m. Just the dishwasher to unpack now and then you’ll draw your bath and unclench, at last, in the warmest room in the house, the main bathroom.

The phone. Susan. A mum from the boys’ school and you don’t know how it came to this: a Susan so entwined in your life. Rexi is friends with her eldest, Basti. You met when the boys were in the same nursery and then they moved to primary school together, have known each other for years. It is assumed. But you became friends before you realised how unsettling she is. A mother with an overdeveloped sense of her own rightness, with everything, and there’s something so undermining about that.

Every conversation, to Susan, is a form of competition; there must always be the moment of triumph. When she’s first seen every morning, at the school gate, she forces you to say how lovely her little girl looks, to compliment.

‘Look at Honor, she dressed herself today, doesn’t she look gorgeous?’

‘Where’s Honor, is she hiding on my shoulders?’

‘Isn’t she beautiful?’

Yes of course, and you are a woman who does not have a daughter but it would never cross Susan’s mind that the keenness for a girl once sliced through you like a ragged bit of tin; you can’t deny there was a moment of disappointment at each subsequent son who appeared from your womb – just a moment, wiped as soon as you held them to your breast. And now, every day at the school gate, there is the ritual noticing of what you do not have, every day this conversation you have somehow allowed in your life.

Susan is obsessed by her children. Like no other woman you know. Always talking about how good her Basti is – at maths, swimming, art, he’s just swum four laps, helped plant her herb garden, is never sick, always good – not one of those naughty ones.

You always cringe at this – your boys are boys, you adore them but they are not always the best; often your heart is in your mouth when your family is with other people, about what may be said, knocked over, who may be shouted at. Susan is critical of your Rexi whenever he’s had a play date. Always, on the doorstep when you pick him up, you have to submit to her little ritual of complaint. The only time you can ever remember her complimenting your eldest was when she said, in wonder, ‘He’s good looking … now.’ Now. Your beautiful, sunny, ravishing boy, from day one.

‘Rex didn’t eat his food … wouldn’t play with Honor … was very loud …’

You have allowed it, for so long – Susan’s reward for taking one son off your hands, for giving you a blessed break; it means one less child for a few hours and you both know how needed that is in your life, a tiny sliver of extra space.

Lesson 11

A state of sublime content and superabundant gaiety – because she always had something or other to do.

If not for herself, then her neighbour.

It is nine-fifteen and Susan is still on the phone and inwardly, at her voice, there is a tightening in your stomach, a knot – what has her Basti excelled at today, what triumph has to be endured? And your head is full of the ‘Shout Book’ you have just discovered under your middle child’s bed. Jack has recorded, meticulously, every time he is yelled at. By you. In writing neater than it’s ever been at school.

Saturday: 14th January. 2 times.

Sunday: 15th January. AMAZING. Nothing.

Monday: 16th January. 3 times.

Devastation. Today it was all to do with him wearing a good shirt to his grandmother’s tomorrow, for her birthday tea.

‘I hate that button shirt so much it makes me walk backwards,’ he had shouted.

You laughed at the time and later jotted it down; for what, God knows. You had to laugh, they give you so much and don’t even know it. These bouncy, shiny little scamps fill every corner of your life, plump it out; you love them so consumingly but you’re not sure they believe it, Jack most of all, your middle child you worry will one day slip through the cracks.

‘Please, God, stop Mummy shouting,’ was his prayer tonight.

‘Don’t!’ came his muffled protest from under the duvet when you tried to tickle him into giggles, to kiss away all your guilt, but he recoiled as if your touch would scald him which only made you want to caress him, cuddle him, envelop him all the more.

Susan is prattling on, she wants you to do the coffee before the class assembly on Monday and didn’t catch you today. She is president of the P.T.A., you are a class rep, this is the new world you have thrown yourself into with the zeal you once reserved for law. You’re deeply embedded in this intense little microcosm, yet feel sick every day now as you approach the gates for pick up. Wear a mask of joy – you have perfected it but if only they knew of your relief when for some reason, too rarely, you don’t have to be there. It’s your twice daily torture and you feel ill, sometimes, as you near the school gates. You wait in the car so you’re not standing there early, having to talk. Filling up afternoons with play dates for the boys so they’re not missing out and filling up your own evenings with drinks and dinners with your mummy friends for the same reason and you need the solace and release of using your brain, somehow. You’ve been with some of these women for over five years now. And their flaws are getting worse as they age – as are yours; it feels like you are all hardening into your weaknesses and you’ve got years of this school run ahead of you. The competitiveness, petty power games, boasting, one-upmanship; sometimes you feel like you’re ten again, back in the school yard. It’s stealing who you really are, who you became, once.

Lesson 12

Beware the outside friend who only rubs against one’s angles

Your shout book.

What Mothers Do (or, The Tyranny of the School Gate)

Ignore requests for play dates, just don’t return emails, or constantly say their child can’t do it. Or get their P.A. to decline on their behalf.

Invite every child in the class to their son’s party but yours.

Talk and talk about their own child and never ask a single question about your own.

At every mention of a problem your child has – e.g. crooked front teeth/can’t do the maths/is having difficulties with friends – comes back with, ‘Johnnie’s teeth are beautifully straight, thank God, Johnnie’s always been good at maths, he gets on with everyone,’ etc. Whether you believe it or not.

Drop their child off to your son’s birthday party without a present, pick up their child with no mention of a present, happily take a party bag, say an extravagant thank you but never give a birthday present in return or mention the situation again, as if challenging you. Of course you say nothing.

Never reciprocate with lifts to or from school, as if it just hasn’t crossed their mind to do so.

Like a butterfly buzz from school gate flower to flower, alighting on the freshest and most beautiful – the newest mum, the next best friend – before flitting off to someone else. Dropping you, just like that, into a cold, cold place. Phone calls are suddenly unanswered, coffee requests met with, ‘So busy, another time’. Felling you with silence. Because someone else is filling up their lives now, whereas once you were the loveliest and most intriguing mum in the school; fresh from London, foreign, marked by difference. Long ago. The technique is stunning: how to bring a strong woman down, torment them with bewilderment, force them to ask the question, again and again, ‘What’s wrong with me?’

Sometimes you just want to scream at these women, at the height of all the pettiness (usually towards the end of term when everyone’s frazzled). Can’t we all just value each other? Please? It’s hard, for every one of us, you’re sure of that.

And then, specifically, there’s Queen Susan:

Using the royal ‘we’ when talking about the school because as P.T.A. president she has a sense of entitlement and ownership over the institution – and access to the headmaster – that no other parent has.

Likes to slip in to conversations, often, her privileged position. For example, parking is difficult around the school and everyone wings it, including you, with illegal, jittery, hovery pulling up at pick up and drop off. Except Susan. ‘I’m president, I just can’t,’ she likes to remind everyone, often, with a rueful smile. ‘I’m president, my boy has to do his homework … I’m president, I can’t be late for pick up.’ If the job came with a badge she’d wear it.

Always includes a link to her own website at the bottom of her weekly school newsletter, as if to rub it in that she has a life beyond all this, she has managed to be one of those ones who does it all, effortlessly (she runs a website selling bespoke wooden kitchenware along with her school duties).

If you were content, none of this would infect you; it would just roll away like water off a duck’s back. But one woman, this woman, has become a focus for all your frustration and you know it’s unfair and paranoid and ridiculous, she’s a good person, you’re just jealous of her position and the way she’s worked out her life and it’s eating you up, can’t escape it. But you’d be happy to never see her again. Would never have befriended a Susan in your former existence, are not uplifted by her in any way; your heart doesn’t skip with happiness to see her and you need heart-lifters around you now, more than ever – it feels like you’re becoming more thin-skinned and vulnerable as you age. How can that be? That the great, raw wounds inflicted by others in the distant past are sharpening now, in middle age. You can’t gouge them out and you have no idea why; have lost your voice, your strength.

Lesson 13

Friendship – a bond, not of nature but of choice, it should be maintained, calm, free, and clear, having neither rights nor jealousies, at once the firmest and most independent of all human ties

Your hand is straying into your pants, thinking of other things entirely, school dads, their spark. How one in particular, Ari, would spring you alive, back to the woman you once were. Ari, yes, he’d have the knowledge, the instinct; but you’d never do it. God no, the mess of it. Susan is still in your ear, telling you that Basti is just about to pass his first flute exam, can pick up any piece of music and just play it, he amazes her. (Rexi, God love him, is on page six of his guitar book and unlikely to progress.) And the coffee morning, ‘Can you run it, babes?’ Of course, yes. Susan will bake some muffins for you: ‘I know you’re not good at that bit.’

She is constantly baking, her house a show place, her children spotless – yours are the ones who sometimes wear grubby t-shirts you’ve flipped inside out, have cereal for dinner and Coca-Cola as a treat. In Susan’s kitchen is a huge notice board in an ornate frame crammed with certificates of achievement and baby photos and colourful kids’ drawings. The occasional certificates your own children get are lost in piles, somewhere, along with school reports and photos and Santa lists and they will all be sorted, sometime. Long ago, you were in control of your career, your friends, your life; you never feel in control within motherhood. The guilt at so much.

The time you folded up the push chair and placed it in the boot, only to hear a squeak – baby Pip still in it.

The time Jack rolled off the bed as you were changing his nappy and ended up with a dint in his skull.

The birthday cakes from Tesco, year after year.

The computer games that keep them all riveted, baby included.

The occasional McDonald’s, three quarters of an hour’s drive away on a Sunday night.

Basti, of course, has never had it in his life. He tells you this when he comes to your house. He has inherited his mother’s heightened sense of censorious rightness, about everything in his life, and you fear for what’s ahead of him, how the wider world will chip away at that. Meanwhile Susan bustles about in her flurry of energy, a tiny, dark sparrow of efficiency with an enormous, puffed chest, making you feel deficient in response, that you’re always running and never quite catching up. Have had no role model in life for this. The best mothers are those who had bad mothers, you think, because they know what not to do – but what if you never had a mother? If she died before she was lodged in memory.

Susan’s voice veers you back.

‘Wasn’t that homework hard today? Basti got it, eventually.’

‘Rexi took a while. I had to snap off the TV just to get him to the table …’

‘We don’t miss ours. The kids never ask for it.’

A pause. ‘Lucky you.’

Television, of course, is babysitting for you, your guilty secret. And you didn’t notice exactly what Rexi was doing in his maths book.

‘Just checking you’re still on for Basti this Thursday?’

You’re always scrupulously generous with play dates; it’s why the routine works.

‘Of course … can’t wait.’

‘Did you get the notice about nits? I know you never check their schoolbags, just reminding you. Basti’s never had them. I don’t know who it is …’

You shut your eyes, your knuckles little snow-capped mountains around the phone. Because of bath time, several hours earlier – all the boys, even Pip – and dragging out the lice with all their tiny, frantic legs. And Jack has a pathological aversion to nits, almost vomits with the horror of them, yells like you’re scalping him. Then the pleas, the threats, to finish the homework due tomorrow, to stop the Wii, get to bed. Rexi storming off in frustration, his arms over his head. You feel, sometimes, he’s a great open wound that you’re pouring your love and puzzlement into. What’s going on in there? Does it ever even out? He’s only nine. His teacher says it’s something to do with boys about this age, from seven onwards, their teeth coming through; there’s a huge psychological change in them, hormones swirling. Does he mellow with age, does he strengthen? Is he too much like you, too emotional? You are fascinated and fearful at the depth of his feelings.

You are not responsible for your child’s happiness, Rexi’s teacher in her fifties told you gently the other day.

‘All you’re responsible for is what is said and done to them, as a parent. That’s all. Nothing else.’ You must remember that.