The Loveliest Month

It strikes me as a bit cheap on the part of the weather gods that we are only allowed one May in a calendar year. I love it so; the crisp new leaves bursting out of their buds, long, pink-tinged evenings, soft, mild light at dawn and dusk with vibrant blue skies in the bright stretch of the day. Just the right amount of heat. Yesterday was the first day that Mr Litlove and I could enjoy sitting outside in the garden. And so we did our yearly inventory, reclining on garden chairs with cups of tea, making our way around the borders plant by plant as if they were schoolchildren in class, deciding how each was coming along, whether they needed help and in what form.

the gorgeous Manteau d’Hermine

My main worry was a philadelphus, a gorgeous version called Manteau d’Hermine, which had been squeezed on either side by some rather boisterous ferns (and this is the only definition of ‘leaning in’ that I will countenance). So I had my eye on that, and on Mr Litlove generally, who sheds his gentle, mild-mannered nature to turn rogue with a pair of clippers in his hand. Anything that looks as if it might commit the crime of ‘getting beyond itself’ risks a severe scalping despite all my pleading. And for the first time in my life, I thought to myself, my goodness how incredibly middle-aged we have become. Normally, on the inside, I feel about 17, but there I was, regarding plants I had seen grow from seedlings into this mature garden, and it seemed so long since it had been just a vision in our minds.

When we first moved into the house the garden was a long, thin, isosceles triangle whose only beauty was a large cherry tree, all too near to the back windows. One dank and chilly autumn day, Mr Litlove hired a rotavator and dug all the scrubby, weedy grass up, shoulders straining against the handles, wellies sinking in the mud. Early in the afternoon there was a power cut, and when he went into the kitchen, now shrouded in darkness, the kitchen clock still read half past two. Mr Litlove then congratulated himself on having finished the job with so much of the afternoon still ahead of him, and I felt quite confirmed in my belief that he was an undiagnosed dyslexic. It’s funny to think we hadn’t been married that long then, three or four years at that point. We bought a climbing rose, the luscious Mme Alfred Carrière with clotted cream blooms that blushed charmingly pink as they burst their buds. And in the supermarket, my son – then an angel-faced toddler with white-blonde hair and dark blue eyes – picked out a red rose he liked the look of. I didn’t hold out much hope for it, but both plants grew and flourished on the sunny south-facing wall.

Mme Alfred Carriere in all her glory

Then we decided to have an extension on the house, and a garage and workshop at the far end of the plot. The garden shrank to a lop-sided square and the plants suffered. The cement mixer took up residence in the middle of a flowerbed, and bushes started to die mysteriously, until I put two and two together and stopped providing the builders with so much tea. We had to move the red rose and feared it had died, but the white fought gallantly against the chaos and flowered vigorously, scattering velvet petals over the garish headlines of The Sun that the workmen read in their breaks. Mr Litlove had his first stretch of unemployment, the difficult one, where we assured each other we would manage fine, while mentally totting up columns of figures in the restless small hours of the morning. We weren’t particularly fine at all, for I was beyond tired and working hard, both of us too aware that mine was the only incoming salary. And we didn’t like each other much, having swallowed all sorts of things we should have said in those anxious, frantic years of early parenting and new careers. Things were coming to a head, though we didn’t know it then. Instead, Mr Litlove used his time to lay a patio, and to pave the area outside the kitchen, and to construct a beautiful winding path in a herringbone pattern of grey brick.

Several years later, when Mr Litlove was made redundant for the second time, our lives had completely turned around. The crisis had passed and now I was off work too, the first of three years I would take out with chronic fatigue. I can remember the feel of the grey brick path beneath my bare feet as I ventured outside after months laid up indoors, still weak and unwell but silently comforted by the beauty of the flowers, the orange blossoms of the philadelphus, the dancing buds of the fuchsia, the bough of the white rose, heavy with unfurling flowers, that was big enough now to reach out to me from its spot on the back wall. And the red rose we feared lost was starting to grow again, its tentative feelers offering hope. This time around Mr Litlove painted the house. To the extent that I believe in past lives, I feel convinced he must once have been a Lord of the Manor. It would be such a perfect job for him, to have a whole estate to tend to, one that he would survey from the saddle of a fine black stallion, issuing grand orders about the guttering on his tenants’ cottages. He would have married a version of me, one whose nature would have led her, not to teach, but to strap on a bonnet and go visiting the sick and the poor. From whom I daresay Regency-me would have caught diptheria and died. So there is much to be said for the 21^st century and having reached the era of self-indulgent middle age.

Imagine him weatherbeaten and mossy, with a bird on his head, and you’ll have our version

The last change in our garden was the arrival of Hermes – or Mercury, I never know which to call him. He stands on one leg as if he had just bowled a googly, though one arm is raised above his head with a beckoning finger (happily, the first), while his other hand holds a strange implement the size of a very large spatula, which I believe may be the Greco-Roman prophecy of a television ariel. He came from the grand and lovely garden of Mr Litlove’s grandparents, and I vividly recall his arrival in the back of a moving truck. Two men arrived with him, papers in hand. ‘One small garden statue – Mercury,’ one of them read. ‘I’m not sure ‘e made it intact, luv. Ever since Bury we’ve ‘eard somefink rolling around in the back.’ His mate tipped me a wink. ‘Makes you wonder what dropped orf.’ I confess I held my breath as they went to unload him, fearful of the ribaldry he might unleash in the delivery men, and so I was most relieved when the loose item in question turned out to be the television ariel, which has never quite sat right in his hand ever since.

And now here we were, all these years later, with our son grown, and the university behind me, but still together and (for me) in better health than I had been in pretty much all that time. ‘I can remember planning this garden,’ Mr Litlove told me, ‘imagining what it would look like as I sat here, or stood in the kitchen at the sink. And it looks very much as I hoped it would.’ And I thought of our entwined lives that had suffered their own versions of frost and drought, disease and blight, but were still growing strongly together. I would never have imagined the road we would take to get here, but yes, our life looked pretty much like I’d hoped it would. How beautiful, how precious, how terrifying that felt.

In Which I Am Annoyed With Mr Litlove

When loved ones suffer unexpected delays, I have to admit I am the kind of person who imagines they are dead in a ditch, rather than simply late. Of course, the degree of anxiety depends on the information available. If they are travelling from a long way away, then of course I would be much slower to react. If they only have a ten-minute journey, then worry sets in sooner. I may be anxious, but it’s generally proportional to facts.

Well, yesterday evening, at about a quarter to seven, I realised I did not know where my husband was. For many years now, Mr Litlove has had a job that allows him a pretty regular homecoming between 6 and 6.30pm. Occasionally he has to work late until 7, but if he’s going to be any later than this, he calls or sends a text. This is a system that believe it or not, we’ve worked out, as when we were first married, Mr Litlove found it difficult to organise his timetable. Some of his early jobs involved more travelling, and it was quite often the case that I would ask him where he was going, and he would tell me he’d find out when he arrived at the airport. Not that this information was unavailable to him, just that he didn’t feel the need to think about it in advance. However, I took exception, as when people asked me where my husband was, and I could only reply that I didn’t know, but out of the country somewhere, I felt it gave the wrong impression. Mr Litlove, like many a male before him, had a little issue sharing the details of his day with me, and I, as I said before, am of a nervous disposition. Over the years, we’ve figured out ways around it.

So, yesterday, and I shouldn’t even have been in myself. We bookshop girls had had a plan to meet up for more paper sculpture last night, but I’d reluctantly decided I couldn’t go. The past week has been very up and down for me, chronic fatigue-wise, but often an erratic pattern means the end of a period of ill health. I wasn’t feeling great yesterday, but I felt pretty sure that if I took good care of myself, kept calm and well rested, the end was in sight. I was very sorry to miss my friends, but in a positive and optimistic frame of mind. In fact I was planning a blog post for today in which I would tell you how optimistic I was feeling. Ah my friends, if you are to learn one thing from my errors, let it be this: never tempt fate.

At a quarter to seven, I texted him, asking where he was, but got no reply. He’d left early that morning for a meeting in London. We’d spoken about it the night before, as he had to give an hour and a half presentation and hadn’t prepared for it. But he was just introducing new recruits to the company, so we agreed it wasn’t so dreadful. Usually an early meeting means he’ll be back in the office by the afternoon. When seven o’clock came and went, I tried ringing his mobile, but it rang with no reply until it eventually switched to voice mail. I wasn’t so worried at this point. I just thought he must be held up somewhere. So I looked up his company online and rang the number for the Cambridge office. No reply. I rang the number for the London office (which I knew to be a small affair). No reply. If everyone had gone home for the day, then where was he?

I kept ringing his mobile. Same result – ringing and ringing and eventually voicemail. So maybe he’d lost his phone somewhere, or was in a place where the noise was too loud for him to hear it. Or, of course, he could be stuck on the train. I rang the station and checked: no delays today on the London-Cambridge service. If he didn’t have his phone with him, the other place he could be was on the river. Had he perhaps a practice session that I had forgotten about? I rang his rowing buddy, Roy, who was incredibly sweet and concerned, but no, there was no rowing fixed for that evening. It was now past 7.30 with no word, and Roy was worried too; he’d always found my husband very reliable in letting him know of any changes of plan.

Well, I was trying not to panic and wondering who I could ring next. Part of me couldn’t believe that anything serious had happened because my husband leads such a charmed life. On occasions, I’d heard of hold-ups and crashes in the transport system that should have affected him, only to have him saunter in at the usual time, unaware that anything had happened. On the other hand, I couldn’t think where he could be. He would surely realise he was late, and know I would be worrying. We had our agreement and we’ve kept to it for years. I was tempted to ring the hospital, but I felt sure that news of that sort would travel fast to me. Wouldn’t it? I couldn’t call any of his work colleagues as he keeps their numbers on his mobile which was with him, wherever he was. By a quarter to eight I was really concerned.

Finally, shortly before eight o’clock, he rang. He was in London still. He’d just not thought about telling me he’d be late, and he said he’d had his phone switched off because his battery had been low. Neither of us understands why his phone was ringing then, rather than moving directly to voicemail. He doesn’t know why the phone wasn’t answered at the London office. Honestly, this is the first time in our marriage that I’ve thought another woman might be involved, only in the cold light of day I feel sure a mistress would pose a logistical nightmare of such proportions that my husband could not rise to the challenge. If he can’t manage to tell me where he’s going to be, how could be possibly deal with two of us?

I have many questions which wither and die before the mysteries of the male brain. Why didn’t he tell me last night, when we were discussing the meeting, that it might go on late? How come it’s not possible to find the time to send a text saying ‘late home’ over the course of a whole day and in the light of possible mobile battery failure? How could he forget me entirely?

The thing is, I was thinking about the situation from the perspective that he would know he was late and realise I’d be worrying, and that any kind of extreme anxiety would have unfortunate consequences for my chronic fatigue.

Whereas Mister Litlove was in a meeting in London and not thinking at all.

This, my friends, is why marriage is not always a bed of roses. His friend, Roy, rang me again about 10 pm (when he was not yet back) to ask if I’d tracked him down. ‘He’s fine,’ I reassured him, thanking him for his consideration. Then I thought about it. ‘But he might have a broken leg the next time you see him.’ Roy laughed and asked very politely if I could postpone any retribution until after the weekend; they have a regatta to race, apparently. Poor Mr Litlove is still somewhat in the dog house today; he’ll be very glad to have an excuse to be out of the house on the weekend, and I will know better than to worry about what time he’ll make it back.

In Good Company

‘There is always a moment in the life of young people,’ Colette wrote, ‘when dying is just as normal and seductive to them as living, and I hesitated.’ She was 28 at the time to which this quotation refers, and had sunk into a complex and unexplained illness. Later biographers have wondered whether her philandering husband had given her some unpleasant disease, but although she doesn’t expressly say so, Colette knew she was suffering just as much from the philandering. She had tried to cover it up and present a brave and invincible front, but it was by no means the truth of the matter.

In the middle of sitting for her portrait with the painter Jacques-Emile Blanche, she heard carriage wheels at her door and spotted Willy bidding a loving farewell to the woman who dropped him off. ‘She had real convulsions,’ the painter wrote, ‘hysterical crying fits, one had to lay her on a sofa and bathe her temples with cologne because she believed herself abandoned forever.’ In later life Colette would talk about her propensity for jealousy, ‘the only suffering we endure without ever becoming used to it.’ She had married very young, and been taken from a doting and possessive mother to become the neglected wife of a manically social older man who had no intention of changing his ways. If such a thing as emotional culture shock exists, Colette had it.

To add insult to injury her husband, Willy, ran a publishing factory, signing his name to a host of books and articles produced by other writers. At his suggestion, Colette had produced a 600-page manuscript of lightly fictionalised adolescent adventures. Willy had been disappointed in it and left it to languish in a drawer. In years to come it would turn out to be the first bestseller that France had ever known, but for now he rejected it out of hand. This double betrayal left Colette horribly miserable, and she succumbed to an illness it would take her the better part of a year to shake off.

Not long after she turned 29, Simone de Beauvoir was admitted to hospital with severe pneumonia and a collapsed lung. The other lung was also damaged, and if it failed to hold out, she would die. She was suffering from emotional and creative exhaustion, having worked hard and played hard ever since she had met Sartre, a little less than a decade earlier. She was teaching, writing a book of novellas (that would never get published) and maintaining a taxing social life. She and Sartre had fallen in love but Sartre’s philosophical commitment to freedom meant he did not believe in marriage. Beauvoir, deeply romantic but entranced by the idea of freedom after her restricted and conventional upbringing, had taken the very brave step of embracing his beliefs. For a woman in this era, whose value would have been determined by her marriage, we cannot underestimate how courageous and subversive this act was.

But in practice, the commitment to emotional and sexual freedom was extremely difficult to maintain. Shortly after they had embarked on their relationship, Beauvoir became close friends with a young woman she taught, Olga Kosakiewicz. Olga was dazzled by the brilliance of Beauvoir and Sartre and hypnotised by the glamour of their unorthodox liaison. Sartre fell in love with her in a more physical way, and although Olga would always resist him, they moved her in with them and lived a ménage à trois that caused them all great suffering. Sartre told Beauvoir everything, thinking this to be some sort of purification of his soul and a validation of their exceptional love. He told her that with Olga, he ‘experienced alarm, frenzy and ecstasy’ and recounted every detail of what went on between them. Beauvoir wrote that ‘The agony which this produced in me went far beyond mere jealousy’. She wanted to deal with whatever Sartre threw at her, to be worthy of his love. But the comfort she derived from hoping that Olga would be a passing phase made her question the solidity of Sartre’s love for herself, Simone. ‘At times I asked myself whether the whole of my happiness did not rest upon a gigantic lie.’ Her illness grew out of the turmoil these tangled relationships created in her.

I was 28 years old, almost 29, when I fell ill with the viral pneumonia that would become chronic fatigue. Of course, this means nothing at all, it’s simply a coincidence. But I couldn’t help being struck by it, as I was reading the biography of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. Colette I already knew about. Thankfully Mr Litlove was not a philanderer, but I was exhausted by work, and by the new ménage à trois we had with our baby son. When I realised Beauvoir had fallen ill at the same age, I could not help but marvel at the way books continue to offer such unexpected solidarity. For the first time, I realised that that unfortunate episode in my life put me in exceptionally good company. I found I minded it a whole lot less, viewed from that perspective!

Being Woodstock

 

I feel like Woodstock in this cartoon lately. Whilst I’m pretty much fine about my redundancy now and am looking forward to all the new and exciting things I could do in the future, my body has other ideas.  Every few days it seems I hit another little dip in my health, and I get over it just in time for the next one to come along.  The shock of hearing the news about my job so unexpectedly has really messed with my sympathetic nervous system and now it’s taking forever for it to get back in balance.

My reiki practitioner thinks that this is a period of readjustment, and that I’m clearing out all sorts of old habits and responses and modes of thought that I don’t need any more, ready to move into a new phase of my life. This has the advantage of being a very positive perspective! So I like it and I’ll keep it; I just wish it didn’t mean in practice that I had to feel so rubbish.

Many apologies to friends who are waiting on an email from me, and to bloggers whose posts I regularly comment on. I’ll be back! And as soon as I actually finish another book, I’ll write about it here.