‘We had a terrible row just before you all arrived,’ I was saying in a stage whisper over breakfast on Sunday morning, fortified by an iron skillet of bacon and eggs sizzled on the Aga. We’d reached the toast and second round of coffee stage, and the reason I was whispering was my husband Ivo was still upstairs in bed after a restless night, and I didn’t want him to hear my whinge and rev up the row.
Geoff’s buttery knife remained poised over the jar of marmalade. Like many men, he can’t multitask, to the extent that he can neither speak nor listen to someone else speaking without freezing, like deer when they spot a hunter on the hill.
I summarised the proximate as opposed to underlying causes of the row for Geoff and co. I’d been working in London late on Friday, I’d only arrived therefore on Saturday just a few hours before my guests. Given the timing, I’d taken the precaution of asking our cleaner, Mrs B, to pop in on Friday and do ‘a whizz round’.
Ivo seems determined to meet his maker without ever having wielded the Toilet Duck
I couldn’t delegate this to Ivo for any number of reasons, one of which is that like many Old Etonians of my acquaintance, he seems determined to meet his maker without ever having wielded the Toilet Duck. But I did want and need the house to be shipshape for the townie delegation escaping Notting Hill Carnival. ‘I’ve got journalists and writers from London,’ I’d said to Mrs B, conveying concern that if we fell down on the job, my name would be mud.
‘Anyway,’ I continued as we sat at the long table, crunching away, ‘when I got here, on Saturday lunchtime, in plenty of time to make scones for the cream tea, it was clear that the plan I’d carefully put in place had not been actioned. The kitchen and the bathroom and loos, you see, were very much not clean.’ On my arrival, Ivo was in the barn across the yard, painting. I’d sent a pass-agg text asking whether Mrs B had, in fact, been? He’d ignored my text. I should note he’s becoming so good (at painting) that I have stopped referring to his canvases as ‘eyesores’.
After an early start at Paddington, a journey home to the west country extended by a full hour to fulfil Ivo’s demand that I diverted to Tesco in Tiverton to get bags of ice – in retaliation for me asking him to get flour and sugar for the scones in Dulverton the previous day – the house was… still dirty! So I texted Mrs B. Like a domestic detective I was determined to get to the bottom of it.
‘I came in with my cleaning bag. Ivo said he’d cleaned the kitchen, and bathroom,’ Mrs B replied swiftly. ‘I did say I was happy to carry on but he was very proud that he had done some cleaning.’
We will return to Mrs B’s stunning text in a second. Then I told my guests, as you can imagine agog at this kitchen sink two-hander, that I’d snapped on the Marigolds in fury, and started scrubbing the many affected areas of sanitaryware and scouring surfaces.
When Ivo emerged from the barn he’d found me in rubber gloves and gone straight on the offensive, especially as instead of greeting him I accused him of never having been tough on grime or the causes of grime, ever (once I had asked him to do some hoovering and our then small son burst into tears. ‘Daddy!’ he’d sobbed. ‘Why are you doing Mummy’s work?’ That was 20 years ago, and I’ve never asked again).
As anyone who knows Ivo will attest, I am married to a man blessed with abundant talent, looks and charm. But when it comes to housekeeping, put it this way: he does not leave it all on the pitch. I’d set up the Mrs B arrangement in calm, mature acknowledgement of this… gender difference.
‘Ivo didn’t just lie to me, he’d lied to Mrs B!’ I concluded my tale, draining my second cup of Lavazza. ‘It’s all fine now.’ And it was. By bank holiday Monday, I was at peace. Comprendre, c’est pardonner.
The row, I now see, was a set-up: for me to adapt to a new reality. I’m not married to an equal, but a superior. My husband has turned from journalist into a gentleman painter… an artist. In another era, he’d have never lifted a finger let alone squirt Dettol around a butler’s sink.
‘I had my middle-class period when the children were at school when I had to earn a living,’ I overheard him boast to the chair of the Exmoor Society over dinner, ‘but now I’m behaving as a man of my class did 100 years ago.’
The fix is in. It’s too late for Ivo – who is at his life drawing class in Minehead as I strip beds and pop the leftover scones in the freezer – to agree there is an important difference between ‘clean’ and ‘tidy’. Far too late, and anyway – I could never be married to anyone else, and nor could he.
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