Thin Ice – Another from the Archives…

There will always be dysfunctional people. Just as there will always be those who skate elegantly across the pond of life, so there will be those for whom life is a gauntlet of thin ice. I remember once, in discussion with a colleague about a stroke of misfortune that had visited a then-girlfriend, George remarking that ‘bad luck seemed to follow her around’.
This is a truth newly awakened in me each time (and there are many times) I find myself witnessing a disintegration in progress, and the absolute helplessness I feel before the relentless juggernaut of human nature. I can only watch as, in apparent slow motion, two irresistible forces match up to each other. I can do nothing to stop the explosion of destructive energy which follows.
From the shallows of old age, there is a morbid attraction for the tumult that forms about the thinner and cracking ice. To watch the inevitable and not to turn and walk away up the riverbank is dangerously close to schadenfreude, and I neither like myself nor respect my own history when I yield to that temptation. After all, these are scenes from my own past: I genuinely want to step between the protagonists and keep them apart. But I have no wisdom in this arena; and even if I had, wisdom has no part to play.

White Goods counselling

This was a few years ago. Tony was a generous man of nearly my own age, not in the bloom of health perhaps, but still walking in the sun when he found a partner younger than he, slim and apparently self-confident with a willing smile; a paragon of something not quite within the powers of description but mother to two adolescent children, a girl and a boy.
Within three months they found a house – a modest semi-detached with a garden – and moved in together; a course of action which might have seemed sudden, but the days grow short as you reach November, and it would be hard to criticize them for reaching out to grasp at happiness. To all appearances, this was the sort of consolation prize relationship many dream about but few attain, and all seemed well with Tony and Marian, his new-found friend.
Barely six months had passed before the first cracks showed. According to Tony, Marian’s expensive tastes did not match his modest income: she kept two horses, insisted upon her own car, and had a penchant for retail therapy. Two months later, again according to Tony, Marian drank heavily; Marian was bi-polar, Marian was ‘troubled by her nerves’. Marian suffered those slings and arrows stoically and made no accusations in return, but the outcome was inevitable.
Friends gathered around the two camps; battle lines were drawn. It was noticeable that of the two armies, Tony’s was much the smaller. They entered into skirmishes on his behalf with less enthusiasm and were conspicuously absent at key points in the fight. Like Custer at Little Bighorn, Tony stood tall; like Custer, Tony was too stubborn to realize he was hopelessly outnumbered.
No-one mentioned counselling.
Then, one Saturday morning as she hung out washing on their garden line, Marian announced calmly that she and Tony were not ‘getting on together very well’ and she was moving out. She had procured a new house locally, she told me, and would be gone ‘within the week’.
True to her word, as day seven dawned she and her children were to be seen loading boxes of possessions into her little car. They drove off and peace descended over the little house. A disconsolate Tony watched the remnants of his defeated army disappearing over the horizon. He stood alone.
For one day.
On the Monday morning at nine o’clock Tony went off to work. At nine-thirty Marian’s car drew up outside his house, where she stayed for the rest of the morning because her new accommodation had no washing machine and no garden. By midday she could be seen pegging out her washing on what now had to be regarded as Tony’s washing line. It was a temporary arrangement, she explained. It would be rectified as soon as she could procure the necessary equipment.
By Tony’s return in the evening Marian and her washing had vanished and the matter should have rested there – would have done, if Marian had fulfilled her intention to purchase her own washing machine and drier. Perhaps the temptation was too great, the answer too simple; or maybe with all her other commitments now she was single again new white goods were beyond her financial reach: whatever the reason, Marian kept coming back. Three times a week, her washing adorned Tony’s washing line, even to a point on one occasion when Tony’s own washing had to be deposed to make room.
Now Tony’s ear for bush telegraph was less than acute, but eventually this state of affairs had to come to light. You do not need to catch a rabbit red-handed to know it has trespassed in your cabbage patch. The evidence is provided by the cabbages. My choice of metaphor, by the way, is not accidental.
Marian had retained possession of a key. Her daughter knew its whereabouts. It was so available that one afternoon, in the grip of coital fever and desperately in need of privacy, she and her boyfriend let themselves into Tony’s house and thence into Tony’s spare bedroom. They were still there, deep in satisfied sleep, when Tony returned that evening.
I am unsure exactly what agreements the ensuing row produced, though a whiff of blackmail hangs in the air to this day. Suffice to say both Marian’s children spent the following weekend grudgingly treating Tony’s garden to a rather inexpert but well-intended makeover, and Marian’s washing forays no longer retained their clandestine nature. In fact, she often arrived with the basket before Tony had left, and on increasingly frequent occasions did not leave on the same day, or the next.
These events took place, as I have said, a few years ago. Tony is older now by double those years, and poorer by several more: but Marian, though she has still a house of her own, spends little time in it, and a lot of time in Tony’s, if only because of the volume of her washing. As far as I know, she never bought her own machine, and if she did, she never uses it.
The moral of this story? If there is one, it might point out there are many versions of ‘happily ever after’ which even within one partnership may not coincide. And a further point: as a bachelor in need of a life partner, your first consideration should probably be the purchase of a good washing machine.