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Like Cleopatra, my mother believes with passion and spirit that age cannot wither her, an opinion most often expressed when she stands before her hall mirror patting her washboard stomach and uttering the now familiar words: ‘Haven’t put on a pound since I was sixteen,’ this always followed by a critical stare in the direction of whichever daughter has the misfortune to be caught in the mirror next to her, and the rider, ‘Darling … do I dream it … or are you a size 14?’ (Or 16 in Cassie’s case.)
I have learnt over the years that all my mother’s snips and snides are prefaced by the word ‘darling’. As in:
‘Darling … do you have to buy such clumpy shoes?’
‘Darling … is that a motorbike jacket you’re wearing?’
And now, of course: ‘Darling, all I’m saying is, do you really think your hair suits you that short?’ (The italics in all cases, I promise you, are my mother’s.)
As regards my hair, I’ve always worn it long. I’ve had every style known to man or beast (perms, pleats, plaits, highlights, low-lights, etc., etc.) but still it’s never risen much above my shoulders. Thus the day I came in with it ice white and shorn, my mother fell back against the sink like she was having a heart attack.
‘Oh, what have you done… what have you done?’ she moaned, clutching her chest.
‘I’ve had an arm amputated. I’ve shot the Prime Minister. Oh no. I’ve just remembered. I’ve only had my hair cut, Mother.’
She continued keening for a while. ‘Oh, your hair … your beautiful hair.’ But in the way of these things, grief soon turned to anger.
‘It was your saving grace, Adeline, you know that, don’t you?’
‘Oh, and I thought it was my crowning glory.’
Please note here my mother’s use of the name Adeline to address me, she being the only person on the planet to do so, and this on account of it being the one she gave me – a fancy French name, according to my dictionary of first names, although not in this instance, since I was named after an Adeline from Bromsgrove whose bridesmaid I later became and who had the bed next to my mother’s in the barracks in Cairo.* (#ulink_138894a8-9af7-522a-b460-2939fcd6976b)
The name was and is entirely unsuitable, one I would have had to wear like a bolt through my neck was it not for my father, God bless him. In a move that my mother would forever regret, she deputed him to register my birth, something that allowed him to pull one of only two known flankers over her in the history of their time together (the other was when he died to get away from her).
Afterwards he would claim that the middle name he gave me was that of a close friend killed in the war. He’d even take the trouble to look suitably mournful when he said it. Once, though, bending beneath a bonnet in his ramshackle old tin-roofed garage on one of our long evenings together, me standing beside him handing him his spanners, he told me he’d named me after his favourite car, a Riley Sprite he’d owned in the halcyon days of his youth, which translated means those days before he met my mother.
‘Lovely thing, she was. Four cylinder push-rod-operated overhead-valve engine.’
I assume he was talking about the Riley.
Thus I am Adeline Riley Gordon, but to all and sundry ever since (except, natch, my mother), Riley, not least because my father, keen to compound his crime and irritate my mother whenever possible – the revenge, raisond’être and principal calling of his married life – referred to me as that from Day One, firmly instructing my sister Cassie, three at the time, to follow his example.
In all this I count myself lucky. Not just because Riley suits me infinitely better than Adeline ever could (or, the horror … the horror … the appalling ‘Addy’), but because if I’d had the misfortune to be born a generation later, God knows, I might have had to put Golf or Mondeo or Fiesta at the top of my O level paper.
Anyway, I like Riley. It suits me. It has a jaunty, freedom-loving air that I like to think entirely encapsulates what I am. I think, I hope that, like Beatrice, a star danced when I was born.
‘Not from where I was looking it didn’t.’
Yes, thank you, Mother.
Anyway, I’m more than happy, just like Beatrice, to pay for my state by leading apes in hell when I die, this being the mythological punishment for spinsters, but one that holds no fears for me, coming of age as I did at a time and in a place where men were still getting used to the upright position. Confronted by the word ‘clitoris’, there’s still a few would guess at one of the lesser known Greek islands.
All in all I’d say the only downside, if downside there be to my name, is the jokes it provokes. Or rather, The Joke. Because there is only one. I’ve heard it a thousand times but, trust me, that’s not something that ever spoils the enjoyment of the joker.
‘Ri-l-ey …’ he’ll say, and I’ll watch as that geeky smile dawns and behind the skin of his face those old wheels and cogs start turning. ‘I suppose you live the life of Riley, then?’
And if you want know what all this Spinster’s Alphabet stuff is about I’d say it’s just that.
Because as a matter of fact, I think I do.* (#ulink_4812913c-fd46-5552-801c-cc17bdab7208)
* (#ulink_f5995c56-0877-56b0-b2d2-5797655c2948) Answers in reverse order: Yes, No and How could we know?
* (#ulink_683f3f5a-c7f3-5a77-9519-bc32b283d646) Author’s note: Cass was 29 and I was 26 by the time our father passed peacefully and gratefully away from our mother.
* (#ulink_a6cfa88c-0153-54ce-a3e2-df32a0ea56d9) Among many others. See B for Bridesmaids.
* (#ulink_286622c2-cd68-5049-ad71-29e63736dba3)As will be clear by now, the aim of this book is ever to inform. Thus you may be interested to know whence comes the term Life of Riley. It first appeared in a popular song performed by one Pat Rooney in 1880s America, ‘Are You the O’Reilly’, which describes all the things said O’Reilly would do if he was rich. Another song, ‘The Best in the House is None Too Good For Reilly’, shortened the name to the one we know and introduced the notion of R (e) iley as a carefree soul. The actual words the ‘Life of Riley’ appear in a third and later song, ‘My Name is Kelly’.
Faith and my name is Kelly Michael Kelly,
But I’m living the life of Reilly just the same.
With ‘My Name is Kelly’ the metamorphosis was complete. Reilly had become the idle, ne’er do well of popular fiction, and in particular of my mother’s morning newspaper for whom the phrase is indispensable, especially when applied to that vast amorphous body of people whose sole unifying feature is that they’re all somehow not just getting something for nothing but something due, by rights, to readers of said paper. This body includes but is by no means confined to:
single mothers
students
gays
lesbians
blacks
any teacher, vicar, lawyer, film or theatre director deemed by her morning newspaper to be ‘trendy’
anyone with a good word to say for the sixties
criminals (unless they’re actually members of the Tory Party)
and last, but definitely not least, anyone receiving Unemployment Benefit.
‘Scroungers,’ is my mother’s rallying cry as she waves her paper in the air. ‘On the dole. Lying in bed all day. Leading the Life of Riley.’
B is for … Bridesmaid (as in 3 times a …) (#u08faed99-50ee-5820-94ad-fe41b83cdf95)
According to The Guinness Book of Records, the world’s most prolific bridesmaid is believed to be one Euphrenia LaFayette of Big Flat, Arkansas. A combination of a large family and lack of good bridesmaid material in her mountain home is said to have led to Ms LaFayette being called on no less than sixty-three times. Interviewed by the Arkansas Sentinel upon her retirement at the age of forty-four, Miss LaFayette said, ‘Ah been up that damn aisle in every kinda dress, n’ carried every damn kinda posy. I’ve had every damn kinda contraption on ma head too, and dang me, if a gal caaaint get tired o’ that sorta thang.’
Ms LaFayette has never married.
I lied.
There is no Most Prolific Bridesmaid category in TheGuinness Book of Records. Which is a pity.
I could have been a contender.
When I told Cass about Mad Magda deciding to marry herself and asking me to be one of her bridesmaids, she said, ‘Well, it’s not like you don’t have the experience.’
It’s a weird thing when you think about it that once upon a time the best way to bless the bridal pair, to wish them good luck in their marriage, was to have them met upon the church steps by a raggedy, smutty-faced boy chimney sweep complete with pneumoconiosis and brushes. You can still find the scene depicted on wedding cards, although it’s harder to lay your hands on the real thing these days, boy chimney sweeps having gone the way of so many of our great traditions – children down the mines, nimble-fingered seamstresses working by candlelight, blind and starving match-girls on every street corner. However, whereas we now balk at sticking young boys up chimneys, we show no such compunction at grabbing some innocent young female, thrusting her into a bad dress and bonnet, and pushing her, posy in hand, up the aisle behind the bridal party.
I know. I was that bridesmaid.
Look, the way I see it is this. Some people are born bridesmaids (particularly if they’re cursed with blonde ringlets); some people achieve bridesmaidhood; others, thanks to what can only be termed sheer dereliction of duty on the part of their sisters, have the bridesmaid thing thrust upon them. (Cassie, are you listening?)
Because if that whole ‘Three times a bridesmaid, never a bride’ thing* (#ulink_3f3c2f3b-1f05-56bb-8cf4-be0caad7b292) really is the ancient curse that Archie alleged all those years ago at Cass and Fergie’s wedding, then all I can say is my fate as a spinster was sealed early on. Six times – and this before the age of ten – I was forced into taffeta and tulle, to my mind a human rights abuse of the first order. In part this was due to Cassie cleverly throwing up on her frock within sight of the altar on her first booking (you’re pretty much finished on the bridesmaid circuit after that). But mainly it was due to all those Buffies and Madges and Snowies.
There’s a picture on the mantelpiece in my mother’s front room. More than a picture, an icon. Because the fact is that she looks wonderful in that photograph. They should have used it for a recruitment poster.
‘They did. How many times must I tell you?’
There’s not a ruck or a tuck or wrinkle in that uniform. The cap sits squarely on her head as she gazes straight-backed and grave into the camera. She sheds a tear over that picture sometimes and, trust me, my mother sheds a tear over very little.
‘All this will go when I go,’ she says, dabbing at her eyes pitifully with one of her customised floral Kleenex. ‘You two’ll just throw it away.’
‘Never, Mother, never.’
‘We’ll hang it on the wall.’
‘Light a candle beneath it.’
‘We’ll have one of those dippy little finger bowl things underneath so we can flick holy water on our foreheads as we pass.’
‘Oh, you.’ But there’s real pain in her voice.
It’s one of the few occasions when I feel genuinely sorry for my mother. For herein lies the source of my mother’s madness, the reason for all that lunacy. My mother, you see, never got over the war.
One night, helping her to the car from some wartime reunion night at the Conservative Club, Tommy on one side, me on the other, she clutched at his arm as he lowered her into the front seat.
‘They don’t understand, do they?’ she said. Her eyes were full of tears but, more than that, a terrible yearning sorrow. ‘I was twenty years old, Tommy. I was in Cairo …’
‘It’s alright, Babs, it’s alright,’ he said very gently, and in that moment I did understand, not just all that madness, but also her relationship with Tommy, and what this too might be about, this secret that belonged only to themselves and others of their ilk: what it had been like to be plucked from a small country town, not even full grown, and dropped down into a foreign, utterly exotic place – in my mother’s case Egypt; for Tommy, India. All this with that added ingredient of war. That what? Frisson? No, no, so much more that that. Something we’ve never known, please God will never know. Something that, for all the books and the films, we still can’t really imagine.
Ask my mother about the war, and you won’t hear anything about those bit part players like Hitler and Churchill. Instead you’ll get, ‘Did I ever tell you about the night Madge and I got caught by the curfew and had to climb in through the window after we’d been out all night at the Deck Club?’ Or, ‘Did I tell you how Buffy and I hired a truck and went out dressed as sheikhs to the Pyramids?’ Or, ‘Did I tell you about the night Snowy got drunk on arak and almost threw up over Larry Adler?’
Oh, yes. Many times. So many times, Mother.
As a child, I measured out my life with those visits from the Madges and Buffies and Snowies.
Upstairs in her bedroom, revelling in her round National Health glasses and her straight coarse blunt-cut hair from which slides and flowers and Alice bands would slip as if deliberately, Cassie would sit bent over her book, point-blank refusing to come down and join the party. Thus it would always be just me standing outside the lounge door waiting to be paraded on the rug in preparation for yet another outing as bridesmaid. Through the crack I’d hear the plop of the sherry cork, the sound of all that merciless, melancholy Chalet School laughter.
‘There we are, look … in that funny little place we found that day near the Continental Hotel. There’s you, Buffy, and you, Madge. And is that Snowy?’ A blood-red fingernail would stab the page of the photograph album in something I recognised even then as resentment.
They look so damned happy in those pictures, those young women, that’s the thing. All that leaning in, all that loving and laughter. They make war look such fun. Which is not their fault. The best of times in the worst of times among those elegant potted plants and wicker chairs in the pictures. Blame the table tops full of glasses if you must blame something, or the rakish nature of uniform. Blame Carpe Diem written in the wreathes of cigarette smoke over every table.
Our father is in those photographs. George Gordon, leaning forward, laughing. Battledress most rakishly unbuttoned of all. The man who betrayed our mother, double-crossed her with the oil-stained overalls that became his uniform after the war, that would replace the dashing airforce blue in which he had wooed her.
‘How many times must I tell you not to wear those bloody things around the house?’ she would rage at him. ‘You only do it to annoy me,’ which probably was the truth of it.
I asked my father once, in a blaze of teenage bravery, ‘Why did you marry her?’
He didn’t raise his head from beneath the bonnet. He said, ‘I was mad about her.’
As always he tried to make a joke of it. ‘Must have had a touch of the sun,’ he said, ‘desert fever,’ only then he turned serious. He raised his eyes, gave me a hard look across the engine. ‘It doesn’t do to be too romantic, Riley,’ he said.
According to my mother – this told with relish when he was alive – my father pursued her against her will, even after the war was over and they returned home from Cairo.
‘What could I do?’ she liked to simper. ‘Eventually I relented.’* (#ulink_7318c532-4a11-573a-89a0-655441b0e5f3)
To say that our father disappointed our mother is to indulge again in that appalling habit of understatement. All their married life she made it clear that she despised him. Even the way she looked at him said she’d been fooled, deluded, cheated.
‘Oh … George,’ she’d say, this so often that as a child I thought this was his name. Oh … George. Always accompanied by a disgusted click of the tongue and a contemptuously raised eyebrow. Or sometimes a derisive snort and the stab of a bitter red fingernail on the photo album for those Buffies and Madges and Snowies.
They used to say in our home town that George Gordon could mend an engine with a piece of string and a six-inch nail. Old-timers I bump into in the street still sometimes repeat it, a fine thing, I always thought, to have chiselled on your tombstone. Not so my mother. She hated our father’s business. Each month on bill day the air would be full of her fury. It swirled around, mingling with the blue of her cigarette smoke as she sat there poring over the invoice books on the kitchen table. Over at the sink my father would be Swarfegaing his hands calmly, running them under the tap like some grease monkey Pilate.
‘How much?’ my mother would ask, her pen poised on the bill head.
‘Oh, I don’t know … charge her a tenner,’ whereupon a howl of wrath would rise up to the ceiling.
‘No … no … no. How much …? How much …? How much did it cost you to do the bloody job for her?’ And it was so often a her because there’s no question that my father could be a soft touch when it came to elderly single women, convincing my mother that it was the spinsters of our town who were ruining my father’s business.
‘Bloody old maids, they pull the wool over your eyes,’ she’d yell at him. ‘Well, they’re not doing the same to me, I can tell you.’
As far as she was concerned, the entire Spinster World was engaged in some sort of conspiracy.* (#ulink_bc7ec0e8-6bc6-56cc-bee1-f71a1369341a)
‘See … see …?’ she would scream, thrusting the local paper at him, folded at the wills page where the horrible truth was revealed – that yet another of my father’s ‘impoverished’ customers whose car he had mended for next to nothing had bequeathed her small fortune to a cat’s home or some charity rescuing pit ponies. Worse still, though, was when Olive Jepson died and left the lot to the Communist Party.
It’s a tribute to Olive Jepson that the mere mention of the word ‘spinster’ will bring her instantly to mind. She remains for me the Ur, my über-spinster, which I guess is what she also was for my father.
He liked to take me to see Olive Jepson. I figure now there were a number of reasons for this, not all of which I want to go into. Once, in the summer, as I sat on her lawn drinking lemonade, I saw my father clash closed the bonnet of the Austin-Healey, and walk up beside her where she sat sipping gin and tonic in her deck chair. As he got to her, he reached his hand down and she reached up hers, and for a moment their two hands were clasped in the air in the sort of strong, firm comradely grasp that I knew, even then, was unimaginable between him and my mother.
Olive was the town’s librarian. She drove a large green growling Austin-Healey, and in the summer did her gardening in a checked bikini no bigger than a brace of pocket handkerchiefs.
‘Honest to God … sixty if she’s a day …’ my mother would say with a sniff, and ‘mutton dressed as lamb,’ this last said too loudly once as Olive pulled weeds up in her front garden. Unabashed, Olive raised herself and gave a long mocking baaaaaaa over the hedge, something for which my mother never forgave her.
Olive was secretary of the local Communist Party, a small outfit, probably with scarcely more than a dozen members. She’d been in Spain with the International Brigade, where, rumour had it, her fiancé had been killed.
‘Actually he ran off with another comrade.’
I was fifteen when she told me this. It was the last time I saw her. She died from cancer very suddenly a few months later. It was winter, with a hoar frost on her lawn and I was sitting in her lounge. Outside the window, my father was blowing on his fingers beneath the Healey bonnet. She picked the picture up from the top of her grand piano: her and her fiancé sitting on some hard-baked earth, in fatigues and with packs on their backs, smiling. She smiled back as she looked at it.
She said, ‘Sometimes it’s really useful to have a dead fiancé, Riley.’ She put the picture back on the piano top, turned to look at me. She said, ‘This is a small town, Riley. I don’t know why but some people just seem happier if you can give them a good reason why you’re single.’
That day I heard my mother call Olive a ‘skinny sex-starved old woman’. I saw my father’s hands clench and unclench at his side. There was a set look on his face and, spying from the top of the stairs, I thought he was going to hit her. But then he went to the sink, turned on the tap, began lathering his hands under it. When he spoke his words were very clear and very cold and deliberate.
He said, ‘Well, you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you, Barbara?’
That was how it was at home when we were kids. A terrible ongoing argument that raged along like a swollen stream, all the time underground but sometimes bursting out above the surface.
