The Invasion of the Little People
The theme set for my writing group’s story this month, was ‘Invasion.’ However, rather than discuss wars, or rumours of wars, I decided to tell a more domestic tale. James is enjoying retirement, his wife keeps busy with committees and entertaining – but sometimes her husband will interfere with her plans …
‘No! You can’t have. The mess! It’s … it’s an invasion, that’s what it is! What about the shopping? And the extra cleaning? You never thought of that, did you? I’ll have to cancel my bowls match … And you’ve just said it’s all right! I’ll give you all right –’ My wife stopped mid-rant. I knew this explosion would happen sooner or later. This was sooner, but then, the date was significant.
Sure enough, it was the kitchen calendar she took a long hard look at.
‘Didn’t you check? Dinner with Colonel and Mrs Lloyd?’
‘Yes,’ I replied – admittedly sotto voce, but I did say the affirmative word. I was ignored.
‘Do you know how long I’ve been waiting for this to happen?’ A rigid forefinger pointed at the red-letter day. The careful printing for clarification in case I missed it. The frequent reminders not to arrange any golf: the whole day must be kept clear at all costs. Under no circumstances can the event of the century be allowed to fail. While she was about it, what state was my dinner jacket in?
If she wanted to send my dinner suit (not just the jacket) off to the cleaners, then fine; though I was not altogether happy about being turned this way and that to check I could still, just about, fit into it. Personally, I had been enjoying my retirement. A life without evening-tie events still appealed. A life without having to please people with whom I had, outside the job, no common interests whatsoever. Instead of paying for a gardener, it was lovely doing the work myself. Apart from being bowls captain, my wife still chairs the WI, the local NSPCC committee, and heads up the church flower rota, so she finds it a bit harder. She complains it’s quite annoying to find her husband, except for his golf, at home all the time.
Now I’d found time to disrupt her planned dinner party, change it for fish and chips with her grandchildren. Yes, I knew it would upset her but, until she calmed down, I couldn’t explain why our grandchildren were coming for the weekend, nor why the Colonel and his wife were happy about it. It all started when my son called me to help deal with his wife, our first female GP. Our local surgery had held out until the twenty-first century, but even the die-hards had to concede rejecting a qualified doctor, just because ‘she’ was a ‘she,’ was going too far by that stage. Some insisted they ‘wouldn’t be seen dead crossing her threshold,’ but it’s amazing what a bit of lumbago or a dodgy hip can do to a man’s resolutions.
It is this male stupidity that was the source of my argument with my son. We were sat there, drinks in hand, with my son thinking we were doing a bit of ‘male bonding’ over ‘these women.’ However, I had a question for him:
‘How long have you known about this conference?’
‘Oh, it’s been on the calendar since last year.’ An airy wave of a hand. It was, apparently, a conference he had to go to.
‘Which calendar?’
‘What do you mean, Dad?’
‘The calendar at work, or the one at home?’
‘Well, at work. It’s a work conference.’
‘In Copenhagen. For a week.’ I love my son dearly, but there are times …
‘Yes.’ Was all he said. I let the silence build. He sipped his drink. I left mine on the side table. He was taking a second sip before the cogs of his brain went into motion.
‘You think I should have told Amy?’
‘As soon as it was a possibility. And,’ I held up my hand to stop the interruption, ‘before you say anything, ask yourself this: how do you think your mother would have reacted to getting less than three days’ notice of such a conference, told – told! – she was to attend, and her husband not lift a finger to help with the preparations?’
‘Well, we both know mum’s a bit of she-wolf, Dad. You were always too soft.’ Whatever else, my son was going to say was lost as I got up and bellowed: ‘That’s enough! You don’t say that about your mother.’
‘Why not? “A man has to be master in his home.” Your line, Dad.’ My ‘line’ had been a standing joke, often said when I was doing some DIY Sophie had asked me to do. Her response was always, ‘Anything you say, my lord.’ Sometimes, she’d even bob a curtsey. Trying not only to work out how George could have got it so wrong, but also trying to contain my anger, I spoke again:
‘Master – possibly. Despotic dictator – no! And you, young man’ – the “young man” was well into his thirties, but I wasn’t in the mood for niceties – ‘clearly have no idea how to be a “master” if you think so little of your mother’s example! How dare you! How dare you so disregard your wife’s achievements to have no concern – none whatsoever! – for her career, her wellbeing, and that of your own children …’ I drew breath, but I wasn’t about to let George open his mouth. ‘Interesting you get to go to your conference while Amy is not allowed – not allowed – to go to her reunion.’ The sarcasm dripped from my voice, ‘Go to your conference, but you’d better come back with a changed attitude or I, for one, won’t stand in the way if your wife demands a divorce. I’ll stand in the divorce court on her side, not yours! Get out of my sight!’
My last phrase was ridiculous, given I was my son’s guest in his home. And I have no idea how divorce courts work, so whether I’d have ever had to attend on anybody’s side is one of life’s unknowns. But I was furious. His wife, having worked all day at her surgery, had been upstairs packing. She had, as I’d understood, refused the ‘invitation’ to attend. This was the reason why I was round here in the first place – my son hadn’t wanted his mum ‘in case the women gang up on me.’ It was that phraseology which alerted me to the choppy waters facing the family. I blame the new job: he was trying to make a splash in ‘The City,’ when he should have been happy with his previous role as a software engineer in a local firm.
Maybe I had been too absent when George was small. I had thought, when he married Amy, he accepted, and would support, her medical career. A career she had worked so hard to get. We knew there was a lot of child-care juggling now both children were at school; and we often walked the grandchildren home and supervised their tea. However, I now realised I should have been asking more questions about how they were – how their mother was – coping. My only defence is that one doesn’t like to interfere.
My interference now bore immediate fruit, as Amy appeared in the open doorway. I could see from the expression on her face she had overheard everything.
‘There’s a train from town in forty-five minutes.’ Her voice was too calm, too measured: ‘You have a reservation at the airport hotel, so you can be on the early flight you told me to be ready for.’ A case was unceremoniously dumped at my son’s feet. He was still not getting it, as he was opening his mouth to expostulate something, but stopped as Amy said: ‘The taxi’s due in five minutes.’
Five minutes gave him just enough time to wash and change. I stayed in the lounge, but I had a good line of sight of the front door, so I saw there wasn’t a kiss good-bye. She didn’t wait for him even to get to the waiting taxi before the front door was shut.
Amy joined me in the lounge, picked up George’s whisky, downed it in one, grimaced and said: ‘Filthy stuff. Prefer gin myself.’
‘With tonic?’ I said, ‘Ice and slice? I think I know where everything is. No,’ I said as she showed signs of playing hostess, ‘you need to sit and we need to chat.’
I think Amy might have been physically tired the next day at work, but hopefully less stressed. By the time I got home, I understood my daughter-in-law much better, and she knew where I stood. I was on her side. If my son was stupid enough to get himself into a firm which expected wives to be mere fancy adornments, and then even more stupid to expect his wife to mould herself into that role rather than tell the firm where to go, then he had another think coming if he expected his father to agree with him. My wife never had a career as such, but mere adornment? I think not. I may affect to joke about her charity work, but charity dinners versus a works do? Work would have to accept my apologies. Also, I didn’t make it my practice not to warn my wife (or work if and when the boot was on the other foot) about upcoming events. Which made both sides more prepared to help – or at least not hinder – when a crisis occurred and I had to be somewhere else at short notice. I could mention that time George got concussion on the games field; or the food poisoning crisis which meant I had to replace the then chief executive in New York on two days’ notice …
I was in trouble for coming home ‘so late,’ but my wife knew where I’d been. I gave her a brief resumé. The full story was going to have to wait.
The next day, once I received the expected and hoped for phone call, the plans went into motion. First, I had to make a call of my own. Then I ‘confessed’ to Sophie we were looking after the grandchildren from end of school to Monday morning. Unfair? Especially when she had got the Colonel and his (second) wife coming round for one of her cordon bleu dinners? Yes, but this was a crisis and, as Sophie now knew, I had spoken to the Colonel.
‘It’s not the Colonel I’m worried about.’ Muttered my wife, still looking daggers in my direction.
‘You needn’t be,’ I said, but I wasn’t letting her in on the whole plan yet.
As anticipated, once I had got her to sit down and made her a coffee, Sophie went into ‘spoil the darlings’ mode. A whole weekend without Mummy and Daddy? What were we all to do? The inevitable chocolate-cake baking started.
Only once the oven was up to temperature and the baking happening, and Sophie’s hands were in the sink (I put myself on drying-up duty), did I start explaining.
‘Did you know George banned Amy from attending her university college reunion?’
‘I knew she wasn’t going.’
‘Not the answer to the question, dear.’
She stopped what she was doing, sighed, and leaned on the front of the sink: ‘To be honest, I didn’t like to ask. Don’t they sort this kind of thing out among themselves?’
‘In our era, possibly, love. But their generation, it tends to go to divorce.’
‘Those poor kids.’
Part one of the plan had been successfully completed. I drew in my breath, but was forestalled.
‘You’re up to something, aren’t you, James? Come on, I’m already dealing with one invasion. What else is going on?’
Rumbled, but not really surprised or disappointed, I deflected Sophie by filling her in on Amy’s situation – and why I had waited until I got her phone call. Amy had been able to take advantage of someone dropping out at the last moment, so she could go to the dinner and overnight stay at her old college. I had insisted she stay away for the weekend. She needed, in my opinion, to talk things through with someone – a friend from her course? A favourite tutor? Who it was didn’t matter, but I thought it had to be someone less involved than me or Sophie. I said Amy should book into a hotel if she needed to, but she needed a break. She had our phone number; she could always call her two at bedtime … Did she, does she, want to stay in her marriage, and, if so, what has to change? ‘And that, my dear,’ I said to Sophie, ‘is a question we can’t answer for her.’
‘And I suppose unless they both want it to work, it won’t. Oh dear.’
The other part of Amy’s phone call was to inform me that she was indeed going to the reunion with Claire Margetts – the Colonel’s daughter – so I was able to get the information I needed. Just as I had started my industrial journey on the shop floor, I now knew the Colonel had enlisted as a private straight from school. I also asked a question or two about his ‘new’ other half. They’d been married over a decade, but so many people knew the first Mrs Lloyd that Sarah would always be ‘the new wife.’ Which was rather a handicap for the poor woman.
Colonel and Mrs Lloyd were also looking after grandchildren (which, of course, I knew). They had temporary charge of Claire’s offspring. Hence my phone call to ‘call me Gerry.’ I suppose it was very much a grandad sort of suggestion, but a fish-and-chip supper anyone? Gerry and Sarah were paying; we were providing the venue. There would be four kids at the picnic table in the conservatory, and the grown-ups could keep an eye on them from the dining room.
Ok, so maybe I hadn’t thought through all the practicalities and logistics – too many years of being able to order that sort of thing to happen and others dealing with it – but we did manage to get to Amy’s house to collect the bags she’d packed for her children, and get to school to collect said children, and get back home to set everything up just in time before the Lloyd/Margetts crowd joined the invasion force.
There had been one last thing to sort out. We were outside the school just before the children’s finishing time, and Sophie had spotted the Colonel and his ‘new’ wife also waiting. My wife was gearing up to go over to apologise about the cancellation of the fancy dinner party. ‘She’s shy – that’s all.’ I said.
Sophie hesitated. I shrugged: ‘I got this from Claire – the Colonel’s daughter – via Amy … My phone call with Amy this morning,’ I explained as Sophie looked puzzled: ‘Anyway. Everyone treats Sarah as if she’s Dresden china or something. She ran a hotel before she married Gerry – but he’s brought her here, and dumped her in amongst all these people she doesn’t know, and all she gets is … is socially superior dinners and the sort of chit-chat that bores her to tears!’ Dangerous ground, seeing that was exactly what Sophie had originally planned for her dinner party, but it had to be said.
‘Really?’
‘Really.’ I said, ‘I think her step-daughter would know, don’t you?’
‘I’ll get Sarah to help me in the kitchen, chat to her there.’ The eruption of grandchildren from school prevented any further discussion.
It could have been less messy, but kids released from both school and parental control tend to go a bit wild. The weekend was exhausting. We were also contending with frantic phone calls from abroad from a son who was unable to contact his wife: ‘She not answering her mobile. She’s never at home, Dad. Where is she?’ Apart from suggesting it was up to his wife if she wanted to speak to him or not; as per my agreement with Amy, I refused to divulge. It seemed the conference, from George’s point of view, was not going well; but I am afraid (heartless beast that I am) I let him stew.
Sophie and I have two new friends. Also, Gerry put my name forward for a couple of directorships, which (after the appropriate interviews and so on) got me out of the house and keeps Sophie happy. The two women are getting involved with the new soup kitchen in town, where Sarah’s organisational skills are a great asset.
And the younger generation? Amy came home from her weekend refreshed (it was a tutor she talked with). George came home contrite. We see a lot more of our grandchildren as George and Amy are going with an American concept of a ‘date night’ once a week – something their marriage guidance counsellor suggested. And … George has given up the city job and starting his own micro-engineering company. Apparently, these computer companies need loads of software for their ‘apps.’ It’s a new world, but we have decided the weekly invasion of the grandchildren is survivable.