Old Girls Behaving Badly

Chapter 1

‘So, is that it then, no discussion; you’re selling up and buggering off? What does my dad have to say about it?’

‘Your father was finding himself on a wellness retreat in Santa Fe. He’s back now and staying in a flat in Maidenhead, apparently.’

‘He had a holiday, Mum! Maybe you could have gone too if you’d shown some interest.’

I held the phone a little away from my ear while my daughter vented on the other end of the line. I hadn’t told Alice that two days after her father had dropped a grenade into our marriage and disappeared to the airport, a Dear John letter had arrived. Douglas, it seemed, had left it quite late to have his midlife crisis. He was seventy-three.

‘And you don’t need to sell the house. Let Dad have his moment and then he’ll come back.’

‘He’s not coming back, Alice. He’s made that very clear and I really don’t have any choice; he’s the one pushing the sale,’ I said. ‘I can’t keep this place on my own. Your dad needs his half share and, frankly, I don’t want to rattle around here any more. It’s too big and has been for a while.’

This wasn’t actually true. I didn’t rattle around; the house was quite modest and we’d never pushed ourselves to extend it past a small conservatory.

‘Get a lodger then,’ Alice said. ‘It’s our family home, all our memories, and you’re just going to hand them over to somebody else! Take a breath, Mother. You don’t need to do everything all at once. Dad’s only been gone five minutes and you’ve packed up the house without any conversation or consideration. This is not like you.’

I sighed. I couldn’t help it. Alice just wasn’t listening and contrary to what she said, this was actually the third of such conversations I’d had with my daughter; I didn’t have the energy to do it all again. Alice adored her father; it was so much easier if this was all my fault.

‘I haven’t packed everything up, I’ve just been going through the loft, but I do have your things boxed up carefully. You can come and get them and enjoy your childhood memories in your own home.’

That was when the tears started and I moved the phone away again. Alice was forty, married with two children and behaving like one of them.

‘Look, darling, this thing going on with your father is complicated. He needed to go away and he doesn’t want to be with me any more. I can’t stay here and look after a house of memories on my own. You wouldn’t want that for me, would you?’

‘I think you’re being completely selfish,’ Alice said, sniffed for effect and then hung up.

I took one long calming breath and placed my phone gently on the mantelpiece. The oak had been salvaged from a reclamation yard, then after it had been sanded and oiled I’d let my two children carve their names into the end of the timber. I ran my fingers over the letters: Alice and Christopher. It was just one of the many memories that Alice was talking about. Their handprints were in the concrete base now under the conservatory floor. Their heights had been recorded on the inside of the door frame between the living and dining room. Chris had been just eighteen months old when I had marked his height in ink. The lines of my careful hand tracing the growth of my children, now sun-bleached and faint with the passage of time. To be fair to Alice, these memories could not be boxed up.

I walked over to the French doors that led out onto our garden, small as gardens went, but what we could afford when we first moved to this part of Oxfordshire and it was the one thing I would take with me if I could. I’d devoted years to the garden, to careful planting and experimenting with what worked and what didn’t in our soil. There were not many days in the year that I wouldn’t be out there, pulling weeds, deadheading, trimming. Even in the winter months I’d find little jobs to do. It was my sanctuary.

The treehouse that Douglas had built, all those years ago, was still just about clinging to the boughs of the beech. I imagined that the new owners would pull it down. They’d sand out the names on the mantelpiece, paint over the lines on the door frame and obliterate the very existence of our family in that house. I wasn’t at all sure how I felt about this. It was just a house after all, wasn’t it? Memories were not things cemented into the fabric of a home, they were thoughts you could carry with you, weren’t they? My own thoughts had been preoccupied with how Douglas had just left me. With a few things thrown into a suitcase, a letter absolving him of a conversation and barely a backward glance, he’d simply gone.

I opened the doors and stepped onto the patio to pull a weed out from between the slabs, then sat down in one of the garden chairs, my elbows on my knees, my chin in my hands. I watched as a butterfly flitted from one purple spearhead of buddleia to another, before coming down to land on the ground beside me. I was pretty sure it was a red admiral and I trawled my limited butterfly brain deciding that it was. Then, I noticed that one of its wings was torn at the corner; one little piece missing in an otherwise perfect symmetry.

‘Hello there, are you hurt?’ I said, as it rested in the full glare of the sunshine. I had a sudden urge to pick it up, to look after it, to keep it. I didn’t, of course – I hadn’t completely lost my mind – but as it lifted off the ground and disappeared over next door’s fence it suddenly hit me, like a hefty punch in the gut, that I was very much alone.

I had celebrated my seventy-first birthday a few months previously and my son had given me a huge coffee-table book about the history of art. I knew he’d been watching me closely for my reaction, and I had managed to keep my face steady and receptive, a warm smile placed on my lips while my heart did that flip-flop of sadness that it still did from time to time.

‘You know,’ he’d said tentatively. ‘A reminder of the good old days…’

He’d trailed off, but I was quick to reassure him with how much I loved it. And I did love it; well, I loved the idea of it, but I’d only opened it three times since my birthday. The first couple of times I’d flicked through, just admiring the pictures while it was still on the table, but the last time, I had taken it onto my lap and disappeared inside the pages before Douglas appeared and took it gently from my hands.

‘You don’t really want to be dragging all that up again, do you, Gina,’ he’d said and wedged it onto the bottom of the bookshelf.

At the start of my working life, I had studied art history at Warwick University, focusing on Italian and Renaissance studies and then after a spell at the British Museum, had spent a whole summer with my mother, Ellen, in Venice where we had immersed ourselves in the city’s art and culture. When we returned I had worked in partnership with her at a National Trust property in Richmond where she held a senior role as curator.

But, everything changed after those precious years working with her. There had been a bleak spell where I hadn’t been able to do anything at all. My mother was gone and the landscape of my life had shifted.

I’d sleepwalked through the next few years and woke – as if from a coma – to find myself married to Douglas with baby Alice on my hip, Christopher toddling about and little memory of how I’d actually got there. My friends at the time urged me to go back to work, to be as independent as possible, find a way, but my heart was broken, and after what had happened to my mother I just couldn’t consider it. Instead I clung onto what I regarded as my comfortable bubble of familial bliss with Douglas at the centre – my rock.

I’d never gone back.

As Douglas inched closer to retirement and we both began to slow up, I started to examine my marriage. I’d always called him my rock, and he had been. He’d steered me through the most awful time of my life and I’d become completely dependent on him. I wondered what our retirement years together would look like.

He’d often talked about his wish to travel – although we only had a Mediterranean cruise and a handful of British holiday cottages under our belt – but still, I imagined the two of us sipping cocktails in Italian bars, walking the Cornish cliff paths while we were still able, taking in a castle or two in France and trekking trails of discovery. I had an image of these future years that really didn’t fit with the ones that had come before, as if we’d both sidestep into a new existence.

In reality, Douglas had his leaving party from the pharmaceutical company he’d worked at for all of his career, collected his crystal decanter and taken up golf. He’d spent the last five years on the golf course or in his armchair, or on the stool playing his prized piano and, now it seems, had been silently planning. His plans didn’t involve me, though; they were all about finding himself, he’d told me, and it turned out he couldn’t do that with something as inconvenient as a wife in tow. My marriage of forty-three years was over and Douglas had pulled the rug out from underneath my feet before he left. We’d been merrily playing this game of life, the two of us; I thought I’d been following the rules, but just as the finish line was in sight, Douglas had changed them.

My phone was ringing again inside and I got up and steeled myself for another conversation with Alice, but it wasn’t my daughter on the phone, it was my son.

‘Hi, Mum, do you wanna come over? We can go to the pub and talk about what an absolute prat my dad is?’