*
The previous owners were an older couple, just the kind I imagined we would become. Moderately successful in their teaching careers (they’d bought the place when you didn’t need corporate careers like ours or, later, banking ones like the Vaughans’, to afford a decent family home) and confident of the job they’d done raising their kids, they’d wanted to release equity, release themselves. They planned to travel and I imagined them as born-again nomads making a desert crossing under the stars.
‘It must be very hard to say goodbye to a house like that,’ I said to Bram as we drove back to our flat after a visit to measure up for curtains that had ended with a bottle or two of wine. He would have been breaking the speed limit, possibly the drink-driving one too, but it didn’t bother me then, before the boys, when there were only our own lives at risk. ‘I thought there was something a bit melancholy about them,’ I added.
‘Melancholy? They’re crying all the way to the bank,’ Bram said.
Bram, Word document
So how did I get to this point? The point of terminal despair? Believe me, it would have been better for all concerned if I’d reached it a lot sooner. Even the short version is a long story (okay, so this is a bit more than a ‘note’ – it’s a full-scale confession).
Before I start, let me ask this: Was it actually the house itself that was doomed? Did she simply take down all who sailed in her?
The old couple we bought it from were splitting up, you see. The estate agent let that slip when he and I nipped into the Two Brewers for a drink on the way back from a visit with our builder. (‘Fancy trying out your new local?’ he asked, and I don’t suppose I needed any second invitation.)
‘Not the sort of information you share with prospective buyers,’ he admitted. ‘No one likes to think they’re moving into a house that’s witnessed marital breakdown.’
‘Hmm.’ I gripped the glass, raised it to my lips, as I would at that bar thousands of times to come. The pale ale was more than acceptable and the place had an old-school feel to it, hadn’t yet gone the gastro route of most of the boozers in the area.
‘You’d be surprised how common divorce is with these empty nesters,’ he went on. ‘Pack the youngest off to university and then suddenly you and the wife have time to notice you hate each other and have done for years.’
‘Really?’ I was surprised. ‘I thought it was only our parents’ generation who stuck it out for the sake of the children.’
‘Not the case. Not in areas like this, people like this. It’s more traditional than you’d think.’
‘Well, it’s only divorce, I suppose. Could be worse. Could be body parts found in the drains.’
‘I definitely wouldn’t have told you that,’ he said, laughing.
I didn’t say anything about it to Fi. She had some romantic notion of this past-it pair collecting their final-salary pensions and riding camels across the desert like Lawrence of Arabia. Flying hot air balloons over Vesuvius, that kind of crap. Like they hadn’t already had forty years of teachers’ holidays to travel the world.
We’d seen at least a couple of dozen houses by then and the last thing I needed was her changing her mind about the first one to pass muster on the grounds that ‘melancholy’ was some kind of airborne disease. Like smallpox or TB.
‘Fi’s Story’ > 00:07:40
Was I aware of the house’s escalating value? Of course I was. We were all on Rightmove constantly. But I never would have sold it. The opposite: I had hopes of keeping it in the Lawson family, of finding some tax-efficient way for the boys to raise their kids there, my grandchildren’s heads resting on the same pillows, under the same windows, as my sons’ did then.
‘How will that work?’ my friend Merle asked. She lives a couple of doors down from my place (my old place, it’s still hard to say it). ‘I mean, what’re the chances their wives will want to share a house with each other?’
It went without saying that the women of the future would be making the decisions. Trinity Avenue, Alder Rise, was a matriarchy.
‘I haven’t thought about the official negotiations,’ I said. ‘Can’t you just allow me my little castle in the air?’
‘That’s all it is, I’m afraid, Fi.’ Merle pulled that small secret smile of hers that made you feel so chosen, as if she bestowed it only on the very special. Of the women in my circle she was the least concerned with her appearance – petite and nimble-bodied, dark-eyed, occasionally dishevelled – and that made her, inevitably, one of the most attractive. ‘You know as well as I do that we’ll all have to sell up sooner or later to fund our nursing homes. Our dementia care.’
Half the women on the street thought they had dementia, but they were really just overloaded or, at most, suffering generalized anxiety. That was what had caused Merle, Alison, Kirsty and me to gravitate towards one another: we didn’t ‘do’ neurosis. We kept calm and carried on (we hated that phrase).
When I hear myself now, it’s laughable: didn’t ‘do’ neurosis? What about the kind caused by marital breakdown, betrayal, fraud? Who did I think I was?
You’ve probably already decided that. I know everyone will be judging me – believe me, I’m judging myself. But what’s the point of me doing this if I’m not going to present myself honestly, warts and all?
#VictimFi
@PeteYIngram Hmm. IMO losing your posh house isn’t on a par with being the victim of violent crime.
@IsabelRickey101 @PeteYIngram Wtf? She’s homeless!
@PeteYIngram @IsabelRickey101 She’s not on the street, though, is she? She’s still got a job.
*
What do I do for a living? I work four days a week as an account manager for a large homewares retailer – recently I’ve been involved in our new line of ethically sourced rugs, as well as some beautiful pieces by Italian glassmakers inspired by spirals.
It’s a great company, with a really holistic and forward-thinking ethos: can you believe they suggested my reduced hours to fit better with my parenting? And this is retail? They’d signed up for an EU initiative to support working mothers and I was in the right place at the right time. Well, you know what they say when that happens: never leave.
It’s true, I could probably earn more working for one of the big cut-throat conglomerates, but I’ve always valued work–life balance over salary. Some of us don’t want our throats cut, do we? It’s a cliché, I know, but I love working with the kind of handmade products that really make a house a home.
Yes, even now I no longer have one of my own.
Bram, Word document
I worked for the best part of ten years for a Croydon-based orthopaedic supplies manufacturer as one of their regional sales managers for the South East. I was on the road a lot, especially in the early years. I sold all kinds of braces – for knees, elbows, you name it – and neck pillows and abdominal binders, but really they could have been anything. Paperclips, dogfood, solar panels, tyres.
It was meaningless then and it’s meaningless now.
4
‘Fi’s Story’ > 00:10:42
Yes, Bram and I have been separated since last summer. Will I tell you why? I’ll tell you precisely why, precisely when: 14 July 2016, at 8.30 p.m. That was when I discovered him fucking another woman in the kids’ playhouse at the bottom of our garden.
I know, what a place to choose! A beautiful, secluded, sun-dappled oasis filled with hydrangeas and fuchsias and roses; home to a wonky rectangle of fraying lawn, with a blue-and-white football goal, scene of many a penalty shoot-out. A children’s den.