It was in that very same doctor's waiting room, with the eyes of the sympathetic, be-Prozacked receptionist upon her, that she had flicked through one of the superior women's magazines, only to find that its editor, reeling from the statistical news that
40
per cent of women of child-bearing age considered themselves celibate, asked in a headline, 'And where does all that sexual energy go?' Like a hypochondriac, Angela Fytton read this and felt a terrible clutch at her heart. 'Failed again' echoed through her shrinking brain, and she immediately switched to
Country Life,
the magazine that seeks not the depth of one's psyche.
Too late. Despite the fact that she was attending the surgery only for her tetanus booster, she imagined all that sexual energy whizzing through her system, imploding her energies, drying out her knee joints, draining off her hair pigment, creeping round her retina to suck away the sight. A gammer, a harpy, a crone - a.k.a. Mrs Angela Fytton of Francis Street in the town of
L—,
in the year of
19—,
in the process of decomposing.
Did all human beings need to shag on a regular basis in order not to go crazy? Like the old-fashioned idea that if men didn't get It on a regular basis they went off pop. Or became serial rapists and paedophiles. Now - hello, equality - were women getting the same treatment? Post-feminism, it was imperative to have sex. No sex for some time meant imminent disaster. This way to the loony bin, via infanticide, kleptomania, peculiar eating habits, hemlock for hubby and all those other well-known things the average potty, sex-starved female is heiress to. Never mind that some of the most dangerously peculiar women she knew were having lots of sex all the time and imploding all over the place. To be seen to be unshagged was definitely outer darkness.
'All
that sexual energy' indeed. She vowed never to pick up that particular magazine again.
Country Life
was much better. And much more useful. For wasn't she here, on this beautiful spring morning, because of it?
She changed into fifth gear, glad to be nearing the end of the motorway now, and overtook a silver Saab. Cars for boys, she thought grandly, and nipped on, allowing her brain to expand once more to its true and mighty size. You see, it got to you if you weren't careful. At least, once upon a time, women had the right to say no. Now they seemed to have the right only to say yes and make sure the world knew about it. She suspected it was the same for men too. Otherwise why would rock bands, as she had read, have to put shuttlecocks down their trousers when performing? Her stunned mind went walkabout for a moment. A shuttlecock? Why a
shuttlecock?
She glared at a distant lone donkey in a field. Sex was not, she told it, the problem. Sex was always out there if you wanted it. Even if you had two heads and a third eye, there was always someone, somewhere, advertising for just that combination. Of course they were. You just had to believe in yourself. If George Eliot could get a man of thirty-nine when she was sixty, after being told by at least two suitors that they rejected her on the grounds that she was too ugly (one hoped she head-butted them out of the room with that remarkable nose of hers), then anyone could do it. Celibacy as failure? Not at all
...
No one, male or female, needed to be without sex if that was what they wanted. But it was not sex that people sought, not really; it was love. She had loved every minute of loving her husband and being made love to by him. There was never a time when it was not a delight to welcome and be welcomed into his arms. And frankly, when you had known
that
the prospect of a quick shag with someone as a way of dealing with 'all that sexual energy' was wholly unedifying.
On she primly drove.
No, the country with its promise of peace beckoned and was best. No need to worry about where the sexual energy was leaking out once she had established herself in the pastoral. She would be too busy with her half an acre and a cow, or whatever it was. She'd buy a book. She'd hire a man. She nearly swerved into the outside lane
...
No, no, she would
not
hire a man. She would do it all herself. And she was bloody well going to enjoy it. Of London, truly, Mrs Fytton, aged forty and a half, had had quite enough.
She would grow old there gracefully. Learn to live without benefit, or oppression, or cosmetics or hairdressers. Unless there was a way to do it in the self-sufficiency method. Berries or crushed newts or something. Women have always known how to get what they want in the looks department. In Newgate did not Moll Flanders keep her teeth pearly by rubbing them on her hem every day with a little soot?
Her spirits rose as the car sped further and further away from the horrible place, London. London, which contained more lunatics of the male rampant variety to the square mile than anywhere else on earth. This was a fact. Rosa, living in Buenos Aires, might say that she'd got them all down there, but she was wrong. Clancy might say that, according to the local mavourneens, they were all over in Dublin, thank you very much. But she also was wrong. Even Elizabeth, an escapee from west Londinium like herself, but for quite different reasons, now up on some Outer Hebridean isle, could sometimes be a bit short about the male aspects of the community, but since this largely comprised her husband and a few goats, and since her views on the subject directly corollated to the state of their marriage, this was somewhat suspect.
Puzzled, they reminded themselves that it was still largely the women who brought up the next generation. 'So why
’
they wondered, 'is the next generation of husbands and lovers not appearing to get any easier?'
Angela, pondering her own experiences back on the market, shrugged and said, 'How can you redirect the next generation when you are still defending the barricades against the first?'
'It is not a battleground,' said Rosa gently.
‘I
know,' replied Angela, just as gently. 'And Stalingrad was just a little dust-up between mates
The Lunatic Swains were definitely,
definitely,
clutched up in her small bit of west London. Solipsistic this might be, but Angela was sure of it. If the nastiness of the neighbourhood pygmy witch-women was silver-medal standard, the lunacy of the male rampant was gold cup for the championship
...
This was the bit that the counsellor left out when exhorting her to get on with her life. What she should have added was: and preferably in a nunnery.
'Perhaps you are setting your standards too high?' said Elizabeth, who was obviously back on her husband at the time.
'Ah, yes
’
said Angela, 'you are probably right. I will instantly become a visitor at the Scrubs. Sure to find someone that way
...'
'Angela!'
'Elizabeth!'
'Angela, that's not what I meant.' 'Oh, very well then. Hollo way.'
Mrs Fytton's Swains. How Ian curled his lip as each one went down like a nine-pin. 'I cannot bear to see you getting so hurt,' he said. Trundling back to his bint.
Bear to see? Bear to see? She watched him go, too stricken to object.
Strange, she thought, how the vocabulary changes emphasis according to situation. Ian's 'cannot bear' was on a direct par with son Andrew's statement, during his summer holidays, that he was 'desperate to get a job'. 'Desperate' was used interestingly here. 'Desperate to get a job' comprised lying in bed until about
11.30
and then stumbling about for a bit before embarking on a fruitless amble around the immediate locale with several of his mates, calling in to shops on the off-chance and no doubt frightening the proprietors rigid with their gangling six-foot clumsiness, their menacing inar-ticulacy and their shuffling gait of the young homeless. 'Give us ten pounds, Mum. There are no jobs to be had anywhere.' 'Anywhere' in this situation was also an interesting variation on received meaning. Anywhere, apparently, could also mean 'this small bit of London in which we live'.
Just to be fair, and not to imply that the sorority was hanging back in the matter of the changing shape of the English language, daughter Claire's linguistics were also interesting. To pick one at random, 'it's doing my head in' could be said of anything from the introduction to the household of cheaper shampoos to the imposition of a five-minute rule for the telephone - both of which were quite likely, in daughter Claire's head-done-in state, to contrive the failure of all three of her A-levels and a permanent pla
ce under a blanket outside Wool
worths.
Now she knew that it was an inherited trait. Husband Ian's 'cannot bear' was in the same class. Meaningless. Though she wanted to believe it, how she wanted to. But subtext. What he actually meant by 'cannot bear' was that it made his life difficult having an upset dumped wife. Apart from making him feel guilty, which detracted from the quality of life within the bosom of the new bint, Ian's heart was not entirely free of her. He was not entirely averse to jealousy when she was happy with another man. She had seen that. She knew him well enough to read him. She did not need to lean across the table and say that the new man in her life had the genital equivalent of a Polaris Tomahawk stationed in his underpants, she had merely to lean back and let her eyes go secretive and misty. Something old and primal, she supposed. He would come and call and sniff it out, like a confused dog.
But unfortunately her experiences with the new swains were so unerringly awful that to pretend was useless. No one could say that, after Ian, she had not tried. But if Dorothy Parker was right about 'Scratch a lover and find a foe' she should come on down to west London. Never mind
scratch.
In west London it was 'put the slightest, softest finger pad of pressure on the
skin
of a lover and you will find yourself availed of the entire Napoleonic retreat, Gallipoli, and assorted extracts from the Somme and Dunkirk . . . with artillery. Something to do with loss of empire and the lack of big-game hunting probably. No other outlets but the snare of the signal of a wiggling piece of skirt (gloriously into battle) and the fury of being captivated by it (retreat with guns).
As a married woman she was so protected from it all. It made her shiver every time she thought now about the
Houses of Parliament and the male majority who ruled within thinking about sex every six minutes. Could that be true? If it was, then the only compulsion she could liken it to as an experience was the number of times you thought about peeing when in the last stages of pregnancy. And then you had the excuse of the baby's head or bottom or tender little foot on your bladder. Male politicians had no such excuse with regard to their wobbly bits, unless they had called into Cindy the Whip for a quick trussing
en route
for the House. Which, she was not surprised to read in Cindy the Whip's autobiography, was not unknown. But rare.
Which meant, God help the planet, that most of the assembled parliamentary representatives did it
spontaneously.
One minute the Chancellor of the Exchequer was holding up his Treasury case and spouting about family allowances, and the next he was in the mental grip of a lurid coupling that might or might not include goldfish. That, she thought, must be the point at which he reaches for a glass of water. She imagined sex peppering every single debate in Parliament, like perforations in a colander: whale hunting with harpoons - congress in wet suits; pregnant prisoners wearing shackles - Vaseline, leather and whips; the European Union butter mountain -
Last Tango in Paris
and what Marlon did with half a pound of unsalted
...
Recalling that particular piece of filmic legend, her heart contracted with grief. It was after borrowing the video of
Last Tango,
on the pretence of its being a cinematic milestone (her) and the perfectly honest desire to see a woman buggered (him), that Ian turned to her, or - to be fair - peered round her heaving buttocks, and suggested it would be nice to have another baby.
What?
The children were teenagers. Freedom was in sight. She was thirty-six and crisp on the matter. 'You want one, you go and have one,' she said.
He looked surprised (apart from a little daft), peeking between her legs like an anxious gynaecologist. Well, he
was
surprised, unsurprisingly surprised, because until that moment she had denied him nothing. She knew how to get and keep a man and it was not by saying no to things.
He scowled.
I have spoiled him, she thought, as she watched little willy die. Another baby? My plans, my hopes, my dreams, she thought, amid a lathering of Lurpak.
'Come on, baby,' he wheedled. He could wheedle her like nobody else. But this time - for the first time - she denied him.
'Ian, I have had my tubes tied.'