Not Married, Not Bothered - Carol Clewlow

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all the odds, Martin is a morris dancer, although perhaps not, bearing in mind that for him morris dancing represents the raffish and unpredictable side to his nature. Like so many of his kind (i.e., the bank manager, two solicitors, surveyor and accountant who constitute the rest of the troop) he thinks it’s evidence of the fact that he’s not boring, an allegation apparently that Fleur not only made to me, but more cruelly flung at him at the time of their parting.

      ‘Boring. Can you believe it? That’s what she called me.’

      There’s a sorrowful confusion on his face that would have touched my heart if I hadn’t remembered just in time that he was an estate agent.

      Even Martin’s ankle bells had a mournful tinkle to them that day. His mood could be detected in the half-hearted way he flapped his handkerchief.

      ‘It’s just a phase she’s going through,’ he said, using it to mop his brow as we sat on the town hall steps. ‘She just needs a break, that’s all – a bit of space. That’s why I agreed to get her the flat.’ The misery was beginning to subside by now and his eyes were becoming matter-of-fact and hopeful. ‘What do you think, Riley?’

      I couldn’t answer, not for the lump in my throat – there wasn’t one (like I say, in the last analysis Martin is still an estate agent) – merely for the memory of all those beautiful baggy-shorted young men and Fleur’s lustfully glowing enthusiasm.

      ‘I should have thought this would be the sort of thing you’d fancy, Riley,’ she said that day, pushing the page towards me from which a particularly appealing tousle-haired young Icarus stared out at me, dark glasses exploding into stars of sunlight.

      ‘Not me,’ I said, flipping the brochure closed and pushing it back across the table. ‘Me, I get all the adrenalin rush I need just opening the post in the morning.’

      Listen, do you ever get the feeling that Life’s a card game, and that you’re the only one at the table busking it because you don’t know the rules? Well, that’s pretty much the way I’ve always felt watching other people get married. I’d poke in and around my own heart, trying to find something, a yearning, an inclination, finding only a gap, an absence where both were supposed to be. At the same time I’d know it had to be me, that there had to be a good reason why people got married, since most of them did it. And now I’ve discovered it. The explanation. The reason it’s so popular. The hitherto unspoken, undisclosed Official Secret that everybody else knew but forgot to mention to me. The biggest cliché in the book. So bloody obvious it was staring me in the face.

      Two can live as cheaply as one, right? And while it’s not Isaac Newton and the apple, or Archimedes and the bath, still it explains why any sensible human being should want to get married.

      You wouldn’t think it would take so long to dawn on me, would you? This simple truth. Or that it would appear in the manner of that Great White Light on the Road to Damascus. But that’s exactly what happened as I complained to Cass about Fleur’s cavalier use of the word ‘single’.

      ‘Look, I’ve earnt the title. I’ve paid all my own bills all my life.’

      Which is the precise moment when it exploded over my head like some sort of revelation, the simple fact that all those marrieds and cohabitees, being à deux, only have to find the cash for half of the bills that drop down on their doormat every month while I, being one alone and single, have to fork out for the whole damn lot of them.

      Question: if two people can live as cheaply as one, then how much is one alone paying as compared with one living as part of a twosome? Write on both sides of the page, preferably using graphs and pie charts.

      ‘When you think about it, it really costs to stay single,’ I moaned one day to Sophie.

      ‘So what?’ she said. ‘Everything in life costs one way or another.’ And I see that. But still …

      The main reason why married couple’s finances are supposed to be better in general than those of single people – and this according to the same survey – is that coupledom forces those involved to do more financial planning, this because most will be wanting children, and therefore know that up ahead somewhere, sometime they’ll be faced by major financial considerations like university fees and, in the case of daughter or daughters (unless they can be persuaded to elope), large and expensive white weddings.

      Being part of a couple, it’s alleged, acts as a brake on spending, because individuals in the relationship have to account for their purchases to a partner and are thus unlikely to indulge in splurges in the manner of single people. ‘Absolute rubbish,’ according to Cass, citing somewhat tersely as evidence her discovery only minutes earlier of Fergie reading the paper, in his dirty overalls on the new white sofa she’d bought in her lunch time and had delivered. His excuse, shouted in an injured tone from halfway up the stairs where he’d been sent to change, ‘Well, no one mentioned a new sofa to me,’ appears to further bear out her argument.

      Tie the knot at thirty, according to the survey, and merely by doing so you’ll increase your personal financial potential by some fourteen per cent. Come seventy-five, and the Marks and Spencer’s slippered pantaloon, oh, married sister, you’ll be worth a full thirty per cent more than the spinster.

      There’s a catch to all this, though, and I’ll warrant some of you have already spotted it and quite possibly from bitter experience. To stay in the money, you have to stay married.

      For spinsters, as it turns out, are not at the bottom of the pile financially. That honour goes to the newly single, those people currently in the middle of a separation.

      Clearly there are exceptions to this rule. I’m sure we can all name one from within these pages. In general, however, the income of a woman, especially one with a young child or children, nose-dives on the break-up of a marriage.

      Widows may also suffer the same fate. On the other hand, they may just emerge from their husband’s death doing the Merry Widow waltz. Which you might say is what happened to our mother.

      George Gordon died one wet Wednesday afternoon returning from a car auction in his well-loved, much-mended old Humber Snipe, a tank of a car, which when it left the road on the bend, managed to crash through a hedge and fence before hitting a tree, and all this with only a small dent to its bumper.

      George’s death was his finest hour, as far as Babs was concerned, thanks to the discovery of the insurance policies in the bottom drawer of his desk. This, plus the sale of the much-depised garage, left her what she always wanted to be, comfortably off and still respectably married in the eyes of the world, but without the day-to-day irritation of a husband.

      Words cannot describe the speed and dexterity with which our mother metamorphosed from carping, miserably mis-married wife to tragic heartbroken widow. Oh … George … achieved with his death what he could never have achieved in his lifetime. He became ‘Poor George’, and ‘Dear George’, and finally, ‘My George’, this a last self-satisfied little sideswipe at all those damned spinsters.

      Cass and Fergie had been married only six weeks when our father died. Still, it was lucky in its way, this because at least it meant that Fergie was now a member of the family and was thus able to officially identify the body. It was his first experience of mortality being still a young man. He came back shaken and with Archie who’d come down to help.

      ‘Why are you here?’ I said to Archie, unreasonably angrily.

      ‘Why do you think?’

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