You may not remember this but some years ago our former Prime Minister had a dream of Old Albion which had all to do with warm beer, the sound of leather on willow from the village green, but most important and heart-warming of all, the sight of a spinster, all tweed and lisle stockings, pedalling through the early morning mist to Holy Communion on her sit-up-and-beg bicycle.
Tweeds and lisle? Sit-up-and-beg bicycle? Excuse me?*
Yeah, C is for cliché alright, also for Caricature, that picture of her as ‘bloodless and boneless, thinned to the spirit,’ this being anti-spinster speak for ‘celibate’ under which she’s listed in Roget’s Thesaurus, also for Cardboard Cut-out, the picture of her in tweeds and lisle stockings peddling through the early morning mist, also for Calumny – another cliché, this, a favourite of film and play and novel, the lonely spinster with nowhere to go on Sunday afternoons but the homes of relatives, married with children.
Ha!
Behind every successful single woman there are other successful single women. Show me a spinster and I’ll show you the proud and grateful possessor of a fine circle of female friends – in my case Mad Magda, for instance, who you’ve already met, Sophie and Connie who have yet to appear, others too who you won’t meet but only because they have no particular part to play in this drama. I think of them as a sort of Greek chorus, standing at the back of the stage and carrying the narrative of life forward with visits to the cinema, the theatre, Ikea, dinners out, dinners in. Because the fact is that far from being lonely and with a duff social life, the spinster can generally be counted on to have a wider circle of friends than those who spend their lives as part of a couple, this for the obvious reason that she has more time and energy to expend on her friendships than those with partners and/or children. More likely than not, her friendships will be long and deep, this because she knows the truth of the thing – that friendships, the ones that count, are relationships too, and go through the same traumas and tensions, and require the same amount of time and energy, faith, hope and charity to keep them going.*
In all this, these canards, these cock-and-bull stories, C stands for contempt, for a curl of the lip. On the other hand, C also stands for Cat, biggest of all spinster clichés.
Which is why I won’t have one, despite all Cassie’s urging.
‘Cats are not just for Christmas, Cass,’ I say when she starts in on me as fat old Hughie, her favourite, leaps up and starts purring contentedly on my lap. ‘It’s all that responsibility. Bringing them up. Finding the right schools. Putting their paws on the right path in life. I just don’t feel I’m up to it.’ And there’s more than a scrap of truth in all this.
‘But you like cats,’ she says reproachfully, and I do, I do.
But cats are like husbands to me.
I just prefer them in other people’s houses.†
A word about my sister, Cass, now.
Cass, full name Cassandra, was named after Lady Cassandra Something or Other who clacked away at her typewriter next to my mother in Cairo. My mother still likes to refer to her in the manner of a bosom buddy.
‘Poor old Cassie. Getting divorced again …’ This like she’d just heard it from a mutual friend as opposed to reading it in the gossip column of her morning paper.
In fact Lady Cassandra dropped all that social levelling crap the minute the war was over. Wedding Number One was in Westminster Abbey, to which my mother and the rest of the girls from the Nissan Hut Nine were not invited, and where Lady C wore a mile-long train carried by a dozen bridesmaids, although not including me despite my long and distinguished service. Number Two, to some zillionaire Nazi gaucho was in some Chilean registry office, and Number Three (to her personal trainer, it lasted a week) in a Las Vegas wedding chapel.
None of this matters, however, since it’s our Cassie who concerns us here, not Lady Cassandra; Cass to me on most occasions, Cassie who I have come to the conclusion I love more than life itself, something I discovered thanks to a dark period in our lives when she got cancer.
The day Cass told me she had cancer, I shook my fist at heaven, cursing the fact that there no system, no Great Cosmological Swap Shop where we were allowed to trade our lives to save another’s. I knew then that I’d give my life cheerfully for Cass, which was no big deal. It’s just the same thing that’s been discovered, and in similar circumstances, by countless other people.
I still feel humbled, inadequate at the memory of the stern courage with which Cass faced her cancer, the extraordinary determination not to be brought down by anything, chemo, hair-loss, contemplation that she might not be here in the future. Still, I think it was Fergie who was the big surprise.
People talk about others in time of trouble as a ‘rock’ but that’s exactly what Fergie was, a slab of absolute determination, refusing to accept under any circumstances that Cass could do anything but live. The day they told her she was clear – I mean really clear, no more check-ups, go away, don’t come back – we drank champagne beneath that sweet soft Somerset night in the back garden and I clinked my glass against his while Cass was in the house.
‘You were fantastic too,’ I said, but he shook his head.
‘Nah. Purely selfish.’
‘Selfish? No. I don’t think so.’
‘Yes. Absolutely self-interested.’ He turned to face me. ‘I knew that I wouldn’t survive without your sister.’
I didn’t give up the spinster thing with Cass. I said, ‘Now here’s a thing I bet you didn’t know. The actual definition of spinster is a single woman beyond the age of marriage.’
‘That’s me.’
‘What?’
‘Beyond the age of marriage.’
‘But you are married.’
Now I know Cass is married, and not just because I was the bridesmaid at the wedding. The real clincher on this occasion was that only moments earlier I had been in the kitchen with the man I know to be her husband discussing plans for his retirement party.
‘Of course. But what I’m saying is, I’ve done the marriage thing now. And I don’t know what it’s supposed to be but, by and large, I reckon with the kids and Fergie and everything, I’ve had just about as good as it gets.’
‘So?’
‘So if anything happened to him, God forbid, I wouldn’t bother doing the thing again, that’s all. I’d make a new life for myself. Do something different.’
And then she said it.
‘I’d be perfectly happy on my own.’
Because it turns out that C is also for compromise, this according to Cass who says, ‘It’s wrong to separate out the married and the single. You do it all the time.’
‘What exactly?’
‘Make the mistake of thinking that people who marry and people who stay single want different things from life.’
‘Don’t they?’
‘No. Everyone wants the same thing at the beginning.’
‘Which is?’
‘A mixture. Companionship with solitude. Intimacy, but with distance.’
The way Cass describes it, there’s this long line, and we’re all standing on it, and through that line goes another one bisecting it like a cross. And one side of that central line is labelled Companionship and the other side Solitude.
‘And everyone – at least every sane person –