I intend to call the story ‘The Road More Travelled’, because I feel the majority of women will identify with Abigail the chicken lady. My sorrowful contention, in fact, is that butter it how you will, we are most of us chicken ladies – rationalizing inaction, inventing pathetic reasons not to do things. Why didn’t the chicken lady cross the road? Because she’d just done her toenails, of course. For every Thelma and Louise accelerating a big green Thunderbird into thin air above the Grand Canyon there are at least a million of us pressing our noses to wet wintry windscreens, deciding we can’t possibly take a five-minute detour on the way back from Ikea. ‘Got to get home!’ Why? ‘It’s bins night.’
The trouble with escape, I suppose, is that it must be dramatic and once-and-for-all; anything else is just holidays. For my own part, I have nothing particularly onerous at home to escape from – only newspaper deadlines, a neglected novel, an EastEnders addiction, and a punishing schedule of cats’ tea-times – yet I seem to battle constantly against powerful flight fantasies. I don’t mean drooling over economy fares to Delhi, either. I mean that regularly I drive in circles at Brighton’s orbital roundabouts, defying the lure of the home exit, and torturing myself with such exotic alternatives as ‘Worthing’ and ‘Shoreham’.
Yes, yes, make the break! Turn those wheels, baby! But then I glance at the clock on the dashboard and change my mind. Drat, half-past two, it will be dark in a couple of hours. If you’re going to run away from home, it’s better to hit the road first thing in the morning with a little bag of Marmite sandwiches and a banana. So I take the Brighton turn-off with a familiar mixture of self-loathing and relief, and head back by the usual route. (Today’s unconvincing reason for not escaping: no banana.)
I hope I’m not talking to myself here, by the way. Perhaps some readers never entertain the ‘Ordinary Woman Completely Disappears’ fantasy; never dream of wearing dark glasses at night and crashing through road-blocks on the A27 at Chichester. But surely every woman turns down small adventures in favour of urgent ironing; says ‘Can’t’ when she really means something else. Perhaps we draw the line so quickly on outlandish opportunities because we fear otherwise it may not get drawn at all. Thelma and Louise discover what they’re capable of once they’re free, and it’s pretty alarming.
But back at my short story, I don’t know how it ends. I don’t know what happens to Abigail the chicken lady. In the movie, when Thelma and Louise drive at night through Monument Valley, you get that spooky old Marianne Faithfull song ‘The Eyes of Lucy Jordan’ about the woman who went bonkers because she always stayed home. ‘At the age of 37 / She realized she’d never / Drive through Paris in a sports car / With the warm wind in her hair.’ I have an idea that Abigail has no such regrets. She just continues to defrost the chicken, cooks it, suffers salmonella poisoning and dies – expiring just at the point when Thelma and Louise fly into their ravine. It’s a bit harsh, perhaps. But as Thelma and Louise showed, sometimes you have to be fairly dramatic to make a point.
In the new Penguin Book of British Comic Writing there is a short autobiographical essay by Elizabeth Bowen called ‘On Not Rising to the Occasion’. I recommend it highly, especially if your memory of childhood etiquette disasters is still so vivid it makes you feel like running to the hall and burying your face in an auntie’s funny-smelling coat. Elizabeth Bowen’s childhood was an Edwardian one, so she had proper guidance in suitable behaviour (she probably did not innocently repeat the word ‘git’ in company, as I did), but she still misjudged it sometimes in a very particular way: she ‘overshot the mark’. ‘Thank you, Mrs Robinson, so very, very much for the absolutely wonderful LOVELY party!’ she would say. ‘Well, dear,’ her hostess would reply with a frigid smile, ‘I’m afraid it was hardly so wonderful as all that.’
My own experience of childhood parties was a little different, since I felt awkward in the society of children and generally slipped out during pass-the-parcel to ask Mrs Robinson whether I could help with the washing up – which surprised her, especially if we hadn’t eaten yet. ‘No, you go and have a good time,’ she said, mystified, pushing me out of the kitchen with her leg. Thus, when it came to going-home time, I did not embarrass her with my effusions; I merely cried with relief. ‘Lynne tried to help with the washing up,’ she would inform my older sister, tapping her forehead significantly. ‘Funny,’ said my sister. ‘She doesn’t do that at home.’
But I still managed to overshoot the mark in other ways. At the age of ten, for example, I went to a party where a game of forfeits was played – you know, where you are given a task, and the penalty for failure is to kiss a boy. When my turn came (and I had been led back to the games room by a kind but firm Mrs Robinson, who declined my wild-eyed offer of silver-polishing) I was informed that my task was to recite a poem. A limerick would have easily sufficed. But I was nervous, and desperate not to kiss a boy, so I launched into ‘The Highwayman’, a long, galloping poem which unfortunately galloped off with me clinging on to its back, bouncing and helpless. In fact, I had got as far as ‘Tlot-tlot in the frosty silence!’ before the exasperated kids finally flung themselves bodily in front of my runaway poem, waving their arms, to make me stop.
Overshooting the mark in Elizabeth Bowen’s sense is actually quite difficult these days, now that we have followed America into a more kissy-huggy way of life. Saying merely ‘Thank you for the absolutely wonderful LOVELY party!’ sounds tame, actually; it raises suspicions that you didn’t enjoy it. In 1978, when Woody Allen’s film Interiors came out, I remember that it seemed genuinely peculiar to see women greet each other with ‘Hey! You look great! Your green is perfect!’ while planting smackeroos on one another’s ear-rings. Nobody I knew behaved like that. But now I don’t know anybody who doesn’t. In fact nowadays, if someone neglects to applaud my green, I actually worry about it afterwards.
But what Elizabeth Bowen’s essay brought to my mind most horribly was not the thank-you-for-having-me thing; or even the social smackeroo. What it made me think of most was Selfridges. Because one day, when I was in the basement there, I quite unwittingly overshot the mark, and I still feel embarrassed about it. It happened quite by chance; I had only popped in for some diamanté cat collars. But then I noticed this poor old bloke on a carpet-tiled plinth demonstrating a cordless travel iron, and I’m afraid it was ‘The Highwayman’ all over again.
The trouble was, his little crowd was so unresponsive. ‘Now, you see this?’ he said, without much enthusiasm, producing a bone-dry knotted lump of cotton velvet. Nobody moved, or indeed acknowledged his presence, so I piped up, I couldn’t help it. ‘Gosh,’ I chuckled encouragingly, ‘I wouldn’t want to iron that!’ He gave me a look, then gravely un-knotted the velvet and flourished his little iron over it – to amazing effect. Suddenly the cloth was smooth and lovely! Again, nobody clapped, or even murmured. So I said quite loudly, ‘Well, I think that’s quite remarkable. I’ve never seen anything like it. What an extraordinary device. I only came in for these cat collars and a whole new world has been revealed.’
And I got increasingly voluble, I don’t know why. ‘That’s amazing,’ I said flatly, as his crowd started to wander off. ‘Do that again. Wow, I can’t believe how those creases are coming out.’ I felt I was doing him a useful turn, although I couldn’t help noticing that by the time the demonstration ended I was the only person left. ‘Thank you,’ I said warmly, ‘that was marvellous,’ and went off to pay for the cat collars. And when I looked back, I noticed he was pointing me out to a sales assistant, who was patting him gently on the shoulder.
Only when I got home did I realize I had overshot the mark so badly I had sounded like a ‘plant’, by which time it was too late to apologize. I often wonder how close I got, actually, to being clocked over the bonce with a miracle travel iron. It would have been such a pointless way to go. Whatever the merits of this extraordinary velvet-smoother, it was hardly so wonderful as all that.