Our laughter lightened things, but by the time Sonny picked up the burger between thumb and forefinger and minced over to the bin with his other hand holding his nose, we were attracting dark looks from the staff, and I knew it was time to leave.
But there are worse things than McDonald’s. Had I known what was to come I would have stayed. I would have eaten there every day. I would have turned away from the dusty afternoon light in my eyes as we pushed through the door onto the highway, as sluggishly crowded as it got at what passed for peak hour in these parts, and marched straight back to the counter and ordered dozens of Big Macs, litres of Coke. And ten kilos of cardboard chips.
Dear Delia
I’ve consulted numerous cookbooks but despite many attempts I still can’t manage to boil a soft egg. Can you help? I wonder if I should Google it?
A Bachelor.
Dear A Bachelor
You are asking me to impart one of my best secrets. Go Google all you like. I worked it out, I’m sure you can too.
I’d started another list. I should have been concentrating on the real work, but I felt an irrational urgency about this. I would finish it then put it in one of the boxes I was preparing for the girls.
Guests (needs separate list: obviously can’t be done now)
Invitations: suggest professional printers
Cake: refer to recipe (but maybe Jean?)
Dress: David Jones’s best?
Photographer: god knows. Maybe digital cameras will be obsolete by now?
Catering: Benny’s the obvious choice. But Cater Queen if not poss.
Venue: depends on time of year. Back garden perfect if summer/spring.
Musicians: string trio (students from college?)
Ideally this list wouldn’t be needed for another twenty years. Ideally, if it were entirely up to me, it would never be needed, since I was beginning to sense the redundancy of marriage. But as I didn’t feel it was right to impose my views on anyone else, even my own daughters – especially my own daughters – then it would be better than no list.
Along with everything else it offers (a chance for relatives to catch up, a good excuse for a booze-up), a wedding is a means for a certain level of bonding between mother and daughter. Fraught bonding at times (I remembered it well), but a rite of passage that should not be denied at any cost, no matter the jaded views of the older generation. No matter that the mother would not be there.
That my daughters would not need this list for many years was irrelevant. All that mattered was that they’d know I’d made the effort. And if by then they happened to be capable of organising a wedding without my assistance, then even better. In fact, I’d regard it as a significant sign that the mothering I’d managed to squeeze into the years available was successful.
Archie had recently called me a control freak. I think it was the day after I’d written that late-night list to help him get the girls to school. As I sat at my desk with the preliminary list for the wedding of my youngest daughter, who was just eight, a wedding that might never occur, and which I certainly wouldn’t be attending, I confronted this accusation. If all this wasn’t the work of a control freak, then what was? I tapped my lips with the pen and gazed out the window at the wisteria. I decided that Estelle was probably in no need of any such list, being supremely organised herself. Also of firm opinions, already, regarding matrimony. It was Daisy I was planning for, though with built-in flexibility if Estelle should turn out to surprise us all.
Them all.
I wondered if these lists said more about me or Archie. I’d spent too many mornings, more than I cared to remember, explaining to him what needed to be done: instructing, directing, losing my temper, becoming impatient, before finally doing it all myself. As if I’d been at the control centre of a military exercise, a full-scale war, instead of a partner in a marriage that included two young children. Occasionally, the children had been dressed and fed (if you counted crisps as food) and otherwise organised out of the house and off to childcare, lately school, without my help. But the fallout had never been worth it:
Daisy: I didn’t get a merit star today because I forgot my home reader.
Estelle: Miss Blake says if I don’t take my permission note back I won’t get to see the
Dreamtime storyteller.
D: I was cold, why didn’t you pack my jumper?
E: You know I hate blueberry muffins!
And so on. I tried every method available to the reasonable woman. Pointing out the lapses in a kind way (‘Darling, don’t you think Daisy should have her shoelaces tied?’). Barking out orders like a sergeant-major (‘If you don’t take them NOW they’ll be marked late!’). Saying nothing. Saying everything. Standing by pretending to be preoccupied with another task but internally writhing as Archie tried to brush hair that was still plaited or failed to understand that children needed reminding to wear sweaters even in the middle of winter. Writing lists. Not writing lists. Doing none of the tasks. Doing half the tasks, like lining up the contents of a lunchbox so that he only had to place them inside, close the lid and grab the juice bottle from the fridge. Daddy packed my lunch today.
Nothing worked. Now I was playing my very last card. It was a mean trick, I knew. I felt its meanness myself. How cruel, how unfair, how totally unsporting, how unlike the stout mothers of public life, the mothers of fiction. You could never imagine Mrs Gandhi or Mrs Micawber or Mrs Thatcher or Mrs Weasley dying before their time and leaving their children unmothered. The prime minister’s wife – any prime minister’s wife – Nicole Kidman’s mother, Mrs Jellyby, Angelina Jolie, the Queen, Lady Jane Franklin, Mrs George Bush senior and junior…they would never have died young and left motherless children. They might have been doubtful, dominating or dysfunctional – all Dickens’ mothers were – but they stayed around. Even Lady Dedlock hung in there. Jane Austen’s Mrs Bennet would never have left five young daughters weeping over a coffin. The mother dying was a disgraceful breaking of every single rule and if I were Archie, I would have been outraged too. But that wasn’t going to change, and it certainly wasn’t my idea.
I wondered if my absence would make any real difference to the running of the household. As with the commander of an army, or the leader of any enterprise, so it is with the mistress of a house. Like Mrs Isabella Beeton I had applied a strategic approach to the household, its contents, its routines, and its warm and breathing occupants. And how had I forgotten that Isabella Beeton, that wise, visionary, wellread, innovative woman, that young woman, had died far too early? Isabella Beeton had left her two children – one just a baby – motherless. She ought always to remember that she is the first and the last, the Alpha and the Omega in the government of her establishment.
But what once infuriated me about Archie I now admired. It hadn’t been his tendency to dally in flirtatious territory at dinners or parties featuring women with more impressive cleavage than I – and of course, more recently, with cleavage at all. Nor had it been his need to bond with members of the same gender and subspecies (semi-professional, rugby-loving) at the pub once a week. Nor his regular forgetting of birthdays and anniversaries. If this marriage were to have unravelled it would have been over something as trivial and tangible as a misplaced sock, or a forgotten school lunchbox. That indifference to the knitted fabric of the household. It might have been misshapen over time and ill-fitting but still, thanks to the one thread that was me, it all held together: the shopping, the bill-paying, the girls’ activities, their dental appointments, their swimming lessons, their need to dawdle in the park doing nothing at all.
However,