Forget the pain of childbirth, or the long, drawn-out death of a loved one; forget being eaten alive by piranha fish, or having a nail slowly hammered into the back of your neck. Hell is a coffee morning with the unemployed lady-mums of idyllic rural Britain. Hell is knowing you’ll be stuck with them for an hour minimum, smiling until your face cracks, before you can politely slip away again. Time hasn’t passed so slowly since my last triple physics class, back in 1983.
Nevertheless, I thought I put on a pretty good show. Said “Mmmm ” about the organic carrot and ginger nibbles, hooted with naughty laughter at the wicked “willy” jokes, and left — a little early, admittedly, but spewing gratitude and enthusiasm. They saw through it. They aren’t quite so gullible as my metropolitan snobbery had led me to assume.
At the school gate I bumped into the Queen Bee lady-mum, the hostess, whose nibbles I’d mmm’d over so complacently — and she pretended not to see me. I sort of hopped this way and that, grinning, trying to catch her eye in any case, I shan’t dwell on it. I mustn’t obsess. She obviously hates me, but that’s okay. I have to move on. It was a bad morning. A failed experiment.
Suffice to say, the quest for a decent social life continues in earnest, and I have decided once and for all that lady-mum coffee mornings are not, and never were, a realistic recruiting ground.
I think I’d do better looking closer to home. At the builder, for example. Actually, we have four builders, a painter and three carpet-layers on the property as I write. I’m talking, of course, about Dean, the tea and biscuit- refusing installer of our new yellow kitchen, who sings Fred Astaire songs while he works and who is among the most handsome men I have ever met.
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While my husband was hard at work in London yesterday, Dean told me, in his lovely West Country burr, that he used to play a lot of tennis. Well, blow my cotton socks off, and so did I! In London, I used to play tennis two or three times a week, but here I have nobody to play with. Everybody I ask looks at me — and I don’t think I’m exaggerating — as if I had suggested a spouse swap. There’s a tennis club up the road and I go there once a week for a group lesson. I’ve asked the entire class for a match, even the really bad players, but nothing. No joy. They already “have their tennis organised”. But they’ll give me a call if the person they’ve been playing every Wednesday at 9am for the past 45 years happens to drop dead. Which, frankly, I’m beginning to hope they do. In any case, it’s with a mixture of desperation, loneliness and, obviously, lust, that I’ve been trying to summon the nerve to ask handsome Dean for a game.
But what if he thinks I’m propositioning him? Christ, what if I am propositioning him? Crickety- crackety? What if he thinks I’m propositioning him, and he says yes? Okay. No. That was silly. Overexcited and silly. We moved down here to be more of a family, not less: to pursue a life of good, clean, decent, honourable, innocent, monogamous fun. And that’s what we’re doing, dammit. For example, we went out in the woods yesterday, me-and-the-kids, and built our own bows and arrows! Out of natural sticks! God, it was fun! Just like Swallows and Amazons! Or it would have been, except the children wanted to watch telly, and it was raining, and all the arrows broke and anyway, it’s all very well. The point is, I’m married.