Not Married, Not Bothered. Carol Clewlow

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СКАЧАТЬ Old Testament book, apparently, especially if you’re in two minds about how to sacrifice your bullock) he merely gave Danny a severe dressing-down for the way he’d broken the news to his mother.

      ‘Totally thoughtless.’

      Which as a matter of fact, growing more penitent, not to say sober, by the minute, Danny agreed with.

      Ten years later, Danny’s brother-in-law now being a high-flying academic and his sister all over the place (they’re currently en famille in America), Danny, the gay son (as is so often the case) is the mainstay of the family. Truth to tell, he plays the spinster daughter, visiting his parents once a week (they live in Bath) and accompanying them on their annual cultural trips to Europe (Italian painters, Echoes of Byzantium, etc., etc.). More often than not it’ll be some single attractive woman he makes friends with, and I can’t help imagining the disappointment they must feel with this handsome forty-two-year old, with his serious air and his cropped head and his rimless glasses. Because apart from the odd eye-rolling moment, he hates the whole campy thing and is undemonstrative in the main. A gay man would spot him, of course. Eye contact would do that. But for a straight woman … how sad.

      ‘Don’t worry,’ Danny says, patting my hand. ‘They soon get the picture when they realise we’re after the same waiter.’

      Meanwhile there are fears from Arachnophobia to Zemmiphobia on Peter’s list. Zemmiphobia? Fear of the Great Rat?

      ‘Fear of the Great Rat?’ Danny shook his head, reading out from the list. ‘What the hell’s that about?’

      ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But I guess if I’d had it, I’d have been ready for Lennie.’

      ‘Deipnophobia? A fear of after-dinner conversations. Wooh, that’s weird too.’

      ‘Not at all. It’s the reason I don’t do personal ads and on-line dating.’

      That was when I felt a tap on my arm and found Fleur standing beside me.

      The phobia clinic opening was the last place I was expecting to see her. Turned out she’d given up the art course idea, and writing a children’s book (for this, much thanks). Instead she was thinking of signing up for a course in aromatherapy.

      ‘I have to think of ways of making a living,’ she said. ‘I’m on my own now.’

      ‘Well, not exactly,’ as I said later to Cass, ‘bearing in mind Martin’s renting the flat for her, and that Fraser family money.’

      But Fleur was enjoying herself, I could see that. There was a definite air of nobility about her.

      ‘I married so young,’ she said, a hand on her chest now and faintly tragically.

      ‘What?’ as I said to Cass. ‘Like she’d been given in marriage at thirteen to some European crown head.’

      ‘Of course, I realise it’s going to be hard at first,’ Fleur said, ‘paying my own way and everything, strange too after all our years together.’ She gave me one of those flat-faced challenging looks, the sort you get from government ministers in unsound regimes when they’re shamelessly rewriting history for the cameras. ‘I’m just so looking forward to having time to myself,’ she said, ‘to being on my own.’

      ‘Un-bloody-believable,’ I said, reporting it. ‘This from the woman who used to shiver at the mere thought of it.’

      ‘I can’t tell you,’ Fleur said, ‘how much I’m looking forward to being single.’

      ‘How dare she?’ I said. ‘Calling herself single.’

      ‘Well, I suppose she is.’

      ‘Not at all. She’s just claiming the title.’

      But the final outrage, as far as I was concerned, was still to come. I was crossing the road from the Avalon Centre, glad to be getting away from her, when suddenly there she was again, beside me.

      ‘I feel wonderful,’ she said, thrusting her arm chummily through mine, making me feel like I’d been caught by a stalker. She flung her head back, face to the sun in a grand flamboyant gesture. ‘Ah … freedom,’ she said, and there it was, the final insult, the ultimate profanity.

      Freedom.

      My lodestar. My guiding light. Appropriated by Fleur as part of her new-found persona.

      There’s a name for fear of freedom. I found it on Peter’s list. It’s eleutherophobia. A fancy word for the fear of it, but no mention – mark you – of a term for the terror of losing it.

      ‘I just want to feel free,’ I said to Nathan one night, not long before the end.

      He said, ‘It’s just a word, Riley.’

      I said, ‘I just want to do what I want to do, that’s all … go where I want to go… live the life I want to live.’

      In the silence the air conditioner clattered while somewhere in the distance, a mah-jong piece was slapped down heavily on a table.

      He said, ‘I’m not trying to tie you down. That’s not what love’s about, Riley.’

      I don’t know why I went travelling. All in all, I could have just stayed at home. Waited for all that bead-and-bangle hippy shit to come walking up the High Street.

      Still the facts of the case are that in 1972 I did what it seemed at the time like half the country was doing, at least those of my age and inclinations. I bought a large orangey-red rucksack with a steel frame that bit into my back and rose up over my head like the beak of some giant bird, packed it full of toilet rolls and soap and shampoo and salt tablets, although not all the other weird stuff – mosquito netting and the malaria pills – which Tommy, with his war service in India, insisted I’d be needing.

      Some said we did this thing because of a war, others because of a lack of one. Whatever. I did the same as everyone else anyway, went on the Hippy Trail, joined that crazy, grand, absurd, pretend peace and love diaspora.

      It was the day before I left Nepal for Bangkok when it came to me, that thing about freedom. I’d hired a bike, cycled out of Kathmandu. I was lying down on the grass verge with the scent of the pines in my nostrils, the wheels of the bike still whirring and clicking beside me.

      As I stared up into the crystal-blue canopy above me, I thought about everyone back home and, in particular, I thought about them working and I felt a deep, satisfied sense of pleasure that I was here doing nothing.

      I thought, this is what freedom feels like. And the revelation seemed so real and so true I could have reached out and touched it.

      It seemed to come right out of the heart of all that blueness.

* Still, if you’ve done the West Country tour, which I’ll warrant more than a few of you have, you won’t have too much trouble identifying it.

* Even though those who know say all this is just early spin-doctoring on the part of the abbey.

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