Not Married, Not Bothered. Carol Clewlow

thrill my mother to her skinny marrow should she overhear it being used to describe her. For were you to venture, machete in hand, through the impenetrable jungle that is my mother’s mind, you would find there a scary image, the one she bears of herself, a Mata Hari figure, a femme fatale, condemned (hand fluttering upon bosom again) to wreak havoc and confusion in the hearts of men. As for Tommy, well, I guess the best thing to call him is her consort, the man she goes bowling with, on chaste single-room coach-tour holidays to the Swiss Alps, the Scottish Highlands and the Dutch Bulb Fields, as well as to all and every event at the Conservative Club, where Tommy is bar steward and chairman of the entertainments committee. And the fact that this entirely sexless relationship unquestionably suits Tommy down to his last buffed-up blazer button is not something my mother feels a need to take on board. And strange as it may seem, neither do I. It is one of only a handful of things for which I feel a need to defend my mother, and this because I am, at heart, a sixties person and therefore a fully paid-up member of the Whatever Is Your Bag/Whatever Turns You On Party. Furthermore, if it is the case that in an age and a world different from the one into which he was born, Tommy might otherwise be more merrily engaged flicking a towel at the firm buttocks of a handsome young pool boy … well … that’s his business. And long may the pair of them, my mother and he, ignore it.

      This is a small town and with a small-town mentality. Despite, or possibly because of, this, as far as their friends and neighbours are concerned, Babs and Tommy are respectably à deux, occupying their own remarkably similar, chintzy, cushiony, squeaky-clean homes, each with matching pine block freshner down the toilet, pink seat cover and frilly Kleenex holder.

      It’s been this way since our father died the best part of thirty years ago when the funeral baked meats, metaphorically at least, began to coldly furnish forth the marriage table.

      ‘Don’t go there,’ has been Cass’s advice from the first, counsel I followed reluctantly at first but, as time passed, increasingly easily.

      To all intents and purposes, Tommy is now part of the family, not least thanks to thirty years of Christmas Days spent together. In essence, he still looks the way he looked at our father’s funeral, like some old-fashioned stiff-upper-lipped colonel with a stick beneath his armpit. His back is still ramrod straight, or at least it would be was it not for the shaking that has begun to afflict him and that may or may not be the onset of Parkinson’s. This shaking gives him the air of a man trying to control his anger but nothing could be further from the truth. In fact he’s an astonishingly peaceable man, miraculously so bearing in mind he spends so much time with my flighty, wildly irritating mother.

      All of this would be fine was it not for the fact that, in clear contradiction of her own eminently comfortable lifestyle, she still feels the need occasionally to harass her spinsterdaughter

      ‘Hey, I’ve not noticed you’re in that much of a hurry to get hitched again, Mother.’

      ‘I’m not talking about getting married, Addy. No one has to get married these days.’ (Babs likes to think of herself as excessively modern.) ‘There just never seems to be anyone in your life, that’s all.’

      ‘Well, thank you for mentioning it. I don’t believe I’d noticed that, Mother.’

      A strict diet of booze and fags plus the odd lettuce leaf pushed in a desultory way around her plate at what passes for meal times ensures that my mother’s size 8 figure never gets any bigger. Despite this unhealthy life-style she gets a clean bill of health every time she goes to the doctor (and while we’re on the subject, why do you go to the doctor, Mother; is it because he’s young and good-looking, you shameless hussy?). Given half a chance, she’d still do that Cleopatra thing of hopping forty paces through a public street. Robbed of the opportunity, she contents herself putting in a full day’s shopping at Marks & Spencer on a pair of heels that would provide training for a stilt walker.

      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.*

      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, raison d’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