Not Married, Not Bothered. Carol Clewlow

in a different age, like I say. A time, I guess, when people did stay together. Unlike now, when forty per cent of couples in this country divorce, fifty per cent in America. Of those people in this country who do weather the storm, eighty per cent say that they’ve given splitting- up serious consideration. Maybe it’s the thought of all that long division that stops them.

      In the trauma stakes, divorce ranks second only to death and even this is up for debate. A recent survey carried out by Norwich Union found that forty-six per cent of people who’d divorced said it was more stressful than bereavement. A full forty per cent said they were determined not to marry again because of it.

      Death, divorce and moving house. The great triumvirate of trauma:

‘Although as far as I’m concerned, one and two are definitely overstated.’*

      You could have knocked me over with the proverbial feather when Fleur said that, wiping an exasperated hand over her forehead. This was mainly because it was the first time in our lives I’d heard her say anything remotely witty. A precursor of things to come, I couldn’t help thinking, and almost certainly, I realised afterwards, a direct result of the change in her circumstances.

      It was a couple of days after Fergie had heard about his early retirement, and I was returning from the Town Council when I came upon Fleur haranguing the two removal men outside the new block of flats beside the abbey. They were carrying a white sofa up the path, which if I’d looked carefully I would have recognised. I didn’t, though, because I thought she must just be helping some friend move house. But then she caught sight of me and waved me over furiously.

      ‘I told them clearly. Kitchen stuff last.’ She flung a hand distractedly up to her Liberty bandanna. ‘Now the blasted tea bags are in some tea chest at the back of the wagon.’

      ‘There’s a corner shop over there,’ I said, pointing towards it. She put a hand up to her forehead, shading her eyes like some newcomer to the colonies gazing over a clearing in the jungle.

      ‘A corner shop?’ she said as if I’d used a foreign phrase she’d need translating.

      ‘Best let me go,’ I said. ‘I speak the language.’

      Later, sitting at the kitchen table drinking mugs of tea (she’d made the smaller of two removal men wriggle through to the offending chests to find the mugs plus the kettle), she fixed me with a severe eye.

      ‘I thought you’d have heard.’

      ‘No.’ Because I hadn’t.

      ‘Really?’ A satirical, and I must say entirely warranted expression shot her eyebrows up into her hairline.

      ‘Auntie Barbara is slipping.’

      Time now I think for you to meet The Other Side Of The Family.

      Imagine.

      Two households, both alike in dignity …

      Not.

      It’s a simply tale, corny too, but none the less poignant for that.

      Once upon a time there were two sisters.

      One married a humble motor mechanic, the other the son of our town’s only major employer.

      If you’d opened up the glossy magazines in the fifties you’d have seen full-page ads for Frasers Fine Leathers, the gloves looking more like silk than skin, laid out elegantly like the spokes of a wheel. When the sixties arrived, and no one but the Queen wore gloves any more, Frasers was forced to diversify, which it did and highly successfully. The proof of the pudding is still there in the foyer, a glimpse of the past: John Lennon wearing that famous leather cap, and Patti Boyd, all gap-toothed smile in a Fraser leather skirt the width of a pelmet.

      Those were the long-gone glory days of Frasers. Six hundred people worked there then, now it’s down to no more than a hundred, the skirts and bags and gloves that still bear the Fraser name turned out in the sweatshops of Eastern Europe and Asia, a boon for its sales manager, a.k.a. my Cousin Royston, younger brother to Fleur, who before Carlotta took him in hand liked to take full advantage in recreational terms of visiting suppliers.

      I was still at school and Royston had yet to be even a gleam in his parents’ eyes when I had a Saturday job at Frasers. I worked in the shop, which was run by Miss Eames, a serious spinster who wore a net over her hair, which she’d blue-rinsed so many times it had turned a glorious funky purple.

      The shop was just off the foyer then, busy enough to cover two floors and connected by a narrow curving staircase where Cousin Freddy, elder brother to Fleur, caught me one Saturday and tried to stick his tongue down my throat in an effort to widen his sexual experience. I like to remember this thirty years on, watching him tapping his pinky finger against his wine glass, and sticking out his Toad of Toad Hall chest and making one of his pompous head-of-the-firm little speeches at family parties.

      Frasers has been part of our town for close on two hundred years. It became part of our family one day in 1946 when my Aunt Fran met my Uncle Hugh in Millington’s Café at the bottom of the High Street (now the Avalon Alternative Health and Therapy Centre). She was introduced by her sister, Babs, a lesson to us all. i.e., when pursuing the man of your dreams take care not to be accompanied by your younger, better-looking sister.

      Required to explain what happened that day in Millington’s, I suspect the words ‘We wuz robbed’ would best suit my mother. At family gatherings, after her fifth gin and tonic, she likes to murmur in a noble and meaningful voice, ‘Of course, I got to know Hugh first.’ This closely followed by, ‘We met when we were serving.’

      To this day my mother regards herself as having been cheated over Hugh Fraser. She’d like to bring Life to account for it, accuse it of having lost the plot, and I have some sympathy with her over this. Because not only did she meet Hugh before Fran, but they met in circumstances that it was fair to expect would have led to the most romantic of conclusions, i.e., a junior officer and a typist from the same small country town cast up in the middle of a war a couple of thousand miles from home in North Africa.

      And all this while Sister Fran was back in Blighty and doing no more for King and Country than rolling bandages.

      At Fraser family gatherings my mother gets very drunk, drags at Hugh’s arm, dredging up memories of Cairo.

      ‘Remember, Hugh, oh, remember …’ this clapping her hands girlishly. ‘Those mad nights at Groppi’s, Hugh. Martinis at Shepheards. Oh, and those wonderful Sunday night concerts…’

      In all this she likes to imply to anyone willing to listen, and to those who aren’t, that something more passed between Hugh Fraser and Babs Gordon née Garland in Cairo than the mere exchange of pleasantries when the junior officer caught the West Country burr of his typist.

      ‘Of course, I’d met George by then,’ she’ll say with a brave smile and a demure droop of her eyes, this designed to imply a love story tragically foreshortened.

      And indeed she had met our father – met him and almost certainly ruled him out of the picture. But when fate took a hand via Hugh and Aunt Fran she needed to save face and quickly. So it was that when George came to visit next time she snared him like a spider, this so that when her sister walked up the aisle she was able to watch from her pew with the satisfied feeling of her fingers tucked into husband’s elbow.

      Hugh, meanwhile, always acts the perfect gentleman when she puts on her pantomime at family parties. For Hugh is a nice man. A good man. A decent man. He lets our mother reminisce for a while, before patting her hand and then gently disengaging it. But while Hugh is kind to old Babs Gordon, his only daughter, my Cousin Fleur, has never felt any similar compunction.

      At the firm’s parties, where my mother likes to play the family card, act like Lady Bountiful with the workers, Fleur’s chilly little favourite is: ‘I see your mother’s enjoying herself,’ the phrase normally accompanied by a thin smile and a nod in the direction of