Housekeeper's Diary

Hysteria has set in. We start our mornings giggling and we go to bed still laughing and in-between we sing and dance and make merry with various dodgy meals cobbled together from whatever is available in the local garage. A quote from A Tale of Two Cities, “It was the worst of times and the best of times” always just a moment away from our lips, for what could be more apt?

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us…

Last night, just for a moment, while Ben took her outside for a quick bedtime mooch over the cobbles, I stood in the main window and looked out. The Victorian street lights on the unadopted road threw pools of soft yellow light that made everything look deliberate, theatrical, as if someone had arranged the puddles. As if someone had decided that cobbles at night in the rain should speak of something more than the sum of their parts. 

And for once I thought of myself not as the watcher.

Not she who watches Ruth in her turreted house, or she who peeks at the man next door in his shalwarkameez, quietly humming as he sits hunched over on the grass sowing seeds into plastic trays with the particular concentrated tenderness of someone who has decided that growing things is an act of faith. No. I thought of myself as the watched. Always framed here in this window. In my red kimono. Lighting candles, playing with Willow, staring into the middle distance with the specific expression of a woman who has misplaced something but cannot remember what.

I think they must wonder where I came from.

I think they must wonder why it is I barely seem to leave, whether I am being held hostage here, Ben’s prisoner, given to wild dances and a lot of marching on the spot. I think they watch me, this odd, wild woman trapped in a curtainless, candlelit room, and they watch my doings the way you watch a soap opera in which almost nothing happens. The woman in the window. Throwing her head back and laughing out loud at dancing cat videos. Again. Still. Forever.

And then I wonder if they cannot see me at all. Because maybe we have simply ceased to exist beyond the emotional safety of these neglected four walls. Figments of our own imagination. A closed snow globe. Not unhappy in it exactly. Just very, very much in it. The season of Light, the season of Darkness. Both at once. Candles burning on the windowsill while the world outside seems to get meaner by the hour. We have everything before us and nothing before us, which is another way of saying the future currently looks like a corridor lined with boxes and somebody else’s old furniture.

The unadopted road is a bone of much contention. A victim of whatever is the precise reverse of gentrification. Nobody owns it so everybody does, which means in practice that several people own it furiously.

There is the old man of ninety-plus who has decided it is his, who takes a Pritt Stick to the window-screens of cars that dare to park on it and plasters notes with threats so irrational they cross the line into something a little geriatric Guy Ritchie: Move it or I will slash your tyres. The handwriting looped and serious. The conviction absolute. The epoch of belief, if you will.

And there is the new family, who have moved into a large double-fronted house they light up like Blackpool Illuminations, and who have laid claim to the pavement running the full length of their house and are taking no prisoners about it. Mother pops out whenever she sees anyone stop their car. You can clock the moment she spots you from the way her whole body reorganises itself into pure offence. She rants like a fishwife while her sons lay a ramshackle collection of flags and stones along the road, a rubble fort, a declaration of war, a monument to the idea that the world outside your door belongs to you and you alone.

It is bizarre and hostile and mean-spirited and my whole body bristles at it.

The insidious unkindness of 2026. That is what I lie awake thinking about, among other things. That, and the odd little pile of black pepper by the kettle that neither of us will own up to spilling. The age of wisdom, the age of foolishness. Only now wisdom looks a lot like trying not to scream at strangers about paving stones, and foolishness appears to have become civic policy.

Now: Ben comes in, yet again shaking his head at the road drama, carrying a sandwich for me, bin bag in hand to clear out the old oak bureau that passes for a bedroom pantry. He is singing under his breath, scrubbing coffee cups, while I skip about eating a tuna crunch and liberating my bedside table from the gubbins of restless nights.

The inventory of the insomniac: Magnesium tablets. Restless leg spray. Herbal Nytol. CBD edibles. Little piles of tweezers I hold when I am reading or else the words jump about on the page as though they are trying to leave. I can’t explain the tweezers. It is borne of a need I don’t question. It was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, and somewhere between the two sits a woman clutching eyebrow implements in bed so that her nervous system will stop bopping.

I am not sleeping.

I lie awake and it all goes a bit Yellow Wallpaper. Faces blooming in the pale pink plaster. Old friends I did not know I remembered. Regrets I thought I had filed away tickling at my thighs so that I toss and turn and Willow opens one eye to look at me with the expression of a dog who has seen enough of this particular production and would like the whole shebang that is me to go to hell in a handcart.

So I read. I write in the notes on my phone in the dark, sentences that will not make sense in the morning. I talk to Brocante Betty in case she’s got opinions on the direction of my life. I eat a Hovis biscuit. Get up to brush my teeth again. Tap at the swell of sleeplessness under my eyes as if I am checking to see if it is ripe. Send reels to Ben’s phone. Watch the ones he sends back, one after the other, both of us on our phones in the dark not sleeping, laughing silently so as not to disturb the dog. Sip too much water. Get up to go to the loo. Stand at the window.

Dwell.

Oh how I dwell.

On the state of the nation. On Autumn, the Maine Coon, who will not let us touch her without vicious tiger repercussion, so that last week a vet’s appointment had to be cancelled because we could not persuade her into the carrier without risking our faces. She sits in the corner looking at us with magnificent contempt, making her position clear so we have no choice to but to accept

On the sheer audacity of a President who appears to have mistaken himself for Jesus.

On being two days away from being officially menopausal.

On feeling so far removed from who I was that when I try to picture her I get only the outline, no detail. A woman-shaped gap where a woman used to be. No real understanding of how to get back there, and the question now, turning itself over and over in the small hours: do I actually want to?

We had everything before us, we had nothing before us. Dickens meant revolution, or history, or the terrible hinge-points of nations. But I think he also meant this private sort of upheaval. This feeling of standing in the middle of your own life while the furniture shifts and the wallpaper peels and the old story no longer fits, and still being expected to smile nicely and ask whether anybody wants tea.

On Saturday night I found myself sitting in Hanna’s living room with three of her friends. I sat cross-legged in the corner of the huge sofas, astonished by my own shyness. I labelled it that, shyness, and held the word up and looked at it and wasn’t sure it was right. Wasn’t sure it described what has happened to me. Wasn’t sure, actually, whether shyness or its reverse, some new refusal, some quiet disinclination to perform, is what this is.

Because shyness suggests maidenliness somehow. A blush. A lowering of the eyes. A Princess Di flutter at the edge of the room. It suggests a woman who longs to join in but cannot quite cross the threshold of herself. Timidity, social nerves, the old childhood story of being a little withdrawn, a little awkward, a little too easily overwhelmed by louder people with simpler edges. And perhaps once that was true. Perhaps once I was shy in the ordinary sense, all jangling nerves, loud voice, and second-guessing, wanting desperately to be liked, to say the correct thing in the correct tone with the correct face arranged on my head.

But this felt different. Older and stranger and more skeletal than that?

It was not that I did not know how to speak. God knows I know how to speak. I NEVER STOP. I have spent a lifetime speaking beautifully, amusingly, usefully, gently. Filling in gaps. Softening silences. Offering up versions of myself that would travel well. Being a hoot. Charming the room when required. Performing warmth. Performing curiosity and certainty. Performing that most exhausting feminine art, being easy to be around. It was the age of wisdom, perhaps, in the sense that women become wise in the mechanics of their own pleasing. It was the age of foolishness too, because what a ruinous thing to become brilliant at?

And what if the thing faltering now is not confidence but appetite for performance? What if this is not social failure but social honesty? What if I am not becoming smaller in company but less willing to haul out the old painted scenery and stand in front of it pretending not to be tired?

Midlife does this, I think. Or menopause does. Or unmasking does. Perhaps they are all the same beast wearing different hats. The hormones go feral, the nervous system starts telling the truth, and all the selves you built to make other people comfortable begin dropping to the floor around you like beads with broken clasps. Sparkling, useless and faintly mortifying. It is the epoch of belief collapsing into the epoch of incredulity. You stop believing in the performance. You stare at the bright old trinkets of your personality and cannot quite imagine fastening them back on.

I sat there and felt not so much shy as unscripted. That was the feeling. As if everyone else had been handed a page and I had somehow missed mine. As if the old instincts that once rushed in to save me had wandered off for a cigarette and left me there with my real face on. And my real face, it turns out, is quieter than I had imagined. More watchful. Less eager to leap across the room and build a bridge of words. She does not care for small talk unless it accidentally catches fire. She does not wish to explain herself into acceptability. She is not rude, exactly. She is simply no longer volunteering for the role of agreeable woman-shaped atmosphere.

There is grief in this too. Of course there is. Because the mask, however cumbersome, was still a kind of magic. It got things done. It made people laugh. It passed for personality in rooms where the actual self might have looked a bit too intense, a bit too tender, a bit too much like a live wire left sparking in the rain. To unmask in midlife is not only liberation. It is embarrassment. It is standing there half-dressed in your own psyche while everyone else seems to have arrived fully upholstered. It is realising that what used to read as charm may in fact have been strategy. That what looked like ease was often labour. And that what sounded like wit was sometimes just camouflage in a high viz, controlling the narrative and scouting always for danger.

And yet there is relief in it too. A sly one. A foxglove sort of relief. Poisonous to nonsense. Holy to the nervous system. Because perhaps this new shyness is simply the body refusing to subsidise a version of the self it can no longer afford? Perhaps it is not shyness at all but discernment, or the turning of the key in a different lock? A woman standing at the edge of herself asking, very quietly, whether she would rather be liked or be real, and finding, to her own surprise, that she no longer has the stamina to make the first choice automatically.

Which is its own season of Light. Not bright, exactly, certainly no longer dazzling. Nothing as vulgar as that. More like candlelight in a neglected room. More like the sort of soft yellow cast the street lamps throw over puddles on the unadopted road. Enough to see by. Enough to notice what is mine and what is not. Enough to recognise that some silences are not failures but refusals. Enough I think to understand that there are women who have spent whole lives speaking from behind glass and are only now, in the supposed autumn of themselves, beginning to hear their own unvarnished voice.

I am still turning it over. The black pepper. The road. The woman in the window. The face in the plaster I have christened John. And this too. This hush that comes over me in company now. This strange reluctance to step forward with jazz hands and a polished anecdote. It may be shyness. It may be the residue of grief, of hormones, of too little sleep and too much life. Or it may be something rarer and far less apologetic. It may be the first awkward, unbeautiful movements of a woman laying down her disguises and finding, underneath them, not confidence exactly, but something better. Something plainer and truer. A stillness. A voice that does not rush to fill the silence. A self that does not enter the room already curtsying.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

And so here I am, still, in the window. Half apparition, half witness. Laughing too loudly at cat videos. Not sleeping. Nearing menopause. Watching the puddles hold the light. Wondering whether the neighbours can see me. Wondering whether I can. Wondering whether this closed snow globe life is the winter of despair or the spring of hope.

Probably both. Almost certainly both.

Is it any wonder hysteria has set in?