English newspapers are always tittering about pre-nuptial contract stringency between Hollywood superstars, but there are plenty of ghastly bronzed Adonis-type creatures demanding – and getting – large sums from rich old women under the heading of “Palimony”.Not that Roland qualifies. He’s older and fatter, and is still pretending to be an intellectual, ie drinking Vermouth and discussing Somerset Maugham long-distance with his friends on our telephone bill.And while I think of it, faint pencil-marks at drink level on a bottle of Noilly Prat is the height of meanness – and just encourages one to top it up with water.ROLANDStupid woman. I was just sitting there, making a quiet telephone call and trying to pick off the Blu-tacky mess she’d made on the wall when Arabella flounced in draped in a tent-sized bath towel and suddenly started screaming at me. A random sample from last week: fluff removed from inside drawer and placed in careful pyramidal heap on bedside cupboard, football boot partially cleaned with laundered table napkin, grease mark patterns from nose-tip on clean window.Over the last few months, I’ve been keeping a written list of causes of argument, in case Roland agrees to see a cohabitage counsellor. The list might be useful on another count: I am expecting my Great Aunt to leave me what used to be called “a tidy sum”, ie about pounds 20,000. As Roland and I have lived in the same house for about six years, it would be very annoying if he were legally entitled to half the money.This is not paranoia, but a pre-emptive stand against the horrendous backlash of sexual equality in this country.
But in the 10 minutes or so while I was having a bath to use up the time, Roland made a couple of calls and “accidentally” doodled on the paper, turning Racine’s number into a drawing of a harassed mother and a line of 11 children. Completely illegible, and, of course, she hasn’t rang back.I made a most unnatural fuss, diagnosed as female hormone imbalance – eat more fish – and nothing to do with the recent barrage of male behavioural disorder. I haven’t seen her since an Easter Solstice barbecue at Pant Perthog, and she’s not one of those people with a permanent address.I carefully wrote down her current number on a piece of paper which I Blu-tacked to the front of the telephone, promising to ring her back after 6pm when it was cheaper. Raju is just 12 years old and probably carrying twice his own bodyweight.
He won’t come any higher than Base Camp, but even so, a cynic might wonder which one of us is really climbing Everest.Tomorrow: snow in Namche Bazaar. ARABELLA
Roland and I are moving towards a relationship crisis point as I find it more and more difficult to tolerate the irritating things he does. Were women conceived solely to clear up the mess that men make? And are men maddening by instinct to keep women in their lowly biological places, being eaten up with suppressed rage, unable to do anything other than hoover and grind their teeth? How does the rest of the world co-habit without killing each other?
Most of the women I know are on Prozac. I’m not, which is why I’ve become such an ill-tempered “unreasonable” 28-year-old hag.Yesterday evening, for instance, one of my oldest and blondest girlfriends – we went to Pony Club together – rang from Patagonia. The weight is taken by a plaited rope across the forehead and looks brutally uncomfortable.
