My Ex-Husband's Landlady

Today's post is a short story I wrote recently which nobody else has read yet but which I'm making available to all paying subscribers. If you'd like to become one of those, you can do so here, for a price of your choice, beginning at as little as £1 per month/£10 per year, which will give you access to everything I post. To me, this seems fairer than the old Substack system, which shut too many people out. Also, if you go for the cheapest option, that's £59 less than it costs for a year's subscription to the Daily Telegraph newspaper, and, let's face it, this newsletter is shitloads better than what you get in there.

P.S. My new book comes out on Thursday. But I'm sure you know that already by now.

My ex-husband’s landlady is 77 years old, five feet nine and a quarter inches tall, with broad shoulders, size seven feet and hair as wild as the kind of unidentifiable weed that you might one day find growing at the top of some steps. She lives at the crest of an important-looking hill in a tall thin house, which I personally believe is far too big for her, even though she, herself, is bigger than most women of her age. Directly below the important-looking hill is a much smaller hill. Balanced precariously on top of that is a squat, undistinguished building which also belongs to my ex-husband's landlady and which, for the last couple of years, my ex-husband has called home. I think I am correct in saying that, at some point in the mists of time, prior to my ex-husband’s landlady converting it, the building was used to protect goats from the rain. It could, however, have been sheep. You would have to verify this with my ex-husband or his landlady. Both of them have spent time with numerous animals and are good with information.

The day my ex-husband moved into his landlady’s house was one characterised primarily by sunlessness and the kind of cloud that has nowhere to fall because it is already all around you, sagging against the ground: not the kind of day that seems to herald any bright new beginning in a person’s life. My ex-husband was not yet a whole season past his nervous breakdown by then and I helped him move his things, although, to be honest, this was not an arduous or lengthy job, due to what he called his “new minimalist approach” to life. “Have it all,” he had told me, during the final death rattle of our marriage. “I am past caring at this point.” A more mercenary person than me might have taken him at his word but, knowing that my ex-husband has a habit of making spur-of-the-moment decisions he later regrets, I was careful, while dividing our possessions, to separate some for him: a cake tin, an outdoor dining set once belonging to his late parents and a couple of my least favourite armchairs, amongst others. As my ex-husband and I moved all this paraphernalia through the clammy air from his small rental van to his new home I was struck by how diminished and stringy he seemed, in his moist clothes, as if now he was no longer propped up by my larger personality and income, all that was really left was a scarecrow in a pair of spectacles. I had just noted what an impractical my-ex-husbandish position he’d placed his new dining table in and was starting to move the table when, at the kitchen’s threshold, I saw the unusual amalgamation of hair, eyes and herbal tea smells which I soon understood to be the building’s owner.

“What is it that they say?” said my ex-husband’s landlady. “'Parting is such sweet sorrow'.”

“Keep your nose out of it, bitch,” I thought. But what I said was “Hi, I’m Donna. Good to meet you”, after which the three of us exchanged some awkward pleasantries and observations - not all of them accurate - about the weather. Then my ex-husband’s ex-landlady explained that some rampant ivy on the back wall was at present perilously close to entering the building’s heating system but she had someone coming out to see about it in a couple of days.

Since all of my ex-husband’s and my ex-husband’s landylady’s parents are now dead, and their other relatives live hundreds - and in some cases thousands - of miles away, my ex-husband and his landlady chose to stay at home alone during my ex-husband’s first Christmas in his new house. At the last moment, worried that his landlady might be lonely, my ex-husband invited her over and cooked soup for her from a recipe I had given to him: a lemony, chickpea-based concoction which I always felt he blighted by choosing to add only one tin of chickpeas, as opposed to the two I had recommended. My ex-husband and his landlady talked about their lives, including their past love affairs, the various problems with money my ex-husband had experienced and the significantly more various problems with money his landlady had not experienced. His landlady reminisced fondly about the one fortnight in all of history that she had spent working for a living, back in 1967, prior to meeting the wealthy man who became her husband. My ex-husband made appropriately grave and sympathetic noises as she then told him about her husband’s death, in 1998, in a helicopter crash near the Congolese city of Lubumbashi, and more positive, upbeat noises as she told him about the guilt she felt about the sense of happiness and liberation she had found subsequent to that, here, alone, on top of a big hill. At the end of the afternoon, both were rosy-cheeked from the brandy they had consumed and the well-stocked log fire they had sat marginally too close to, and my ex-husband offered to walk his landlady up the path through the dark to her front door, but his landlady declined the offer, pointing out that there were only 42 yards to traverse and, though the path was steep and bumpy, she had, in her two decades living here, committed every undulation of it to memory.

During these months, as my ex-husband settled into his new house, I was going through something of a purple patch in my professional life. Having received two promotions in the space of less than a year at the high end kitchenware firm where I work, there was a sense that a lot of what I had waited for in my adult life was finally coming together, that the patience I'd adhered to in playing my determined long game was paying off. Despite the expense of a divorce and having to buy my ex-husband out of our mortgage, I had no shortage of disposable income and plenty of spacious, unplanned weekends to randomly squander it on. Because of this I felt bad for my ex-husband, out there, far from the edge of town, on a small hill, with only a crazy old shrub-haired widow for company. Men, when they reach my ex-husband’s age, have a habit of slipping back in their efforts to keep in touch with friends in a way that women of the same age are less liable to, and I had been reading worrying reports in the newspapers about a wider epidemic of male loneliness that was on the rise. Additionally, from what I could see my ex-husband was making little effort to hunt for more of the freelance graphic design work he made his living from: a worry not just in terms of his financial stability but because of the valuable social lifeline that work had given him. I noted, for example, the following spring, as I took advantage of an overdue week of paid leave by walking the paths near my ex-husband’s new house, that my ex-husband had chosen to fritter away a Tuesday by stretching out on a hammock, reading a book, with his landlady’s cat sprawled contentedly on his stomach. To give my ex-husband the benefit of the doubt, I realise that there is an element of research to his career, which involves devoting time to reading, but from what I could see, through the overhanging branches on the perimeter of his garden, the book in question did not appear to be connected to the graphic design business in any obvious way, having more of the look of a 1940s pulp detective novel.

I wisely did not rush back onto the dating scene after my ex-husband and I parted ways but, after ten months, deciding enough time had elapsed for me to be clear-headed and ready, I began to see an assortment of men for dinner dates and afternoon walks in the gardens of heritage buildings: mostly people loosely and not so loosely connected to my work, to whom I’d been introduced by colleagues, but also a couple of encounters manufactured via the murkier digital universe. I was frequently startled by the directness of these suitors - many of whose suggestions were what my mother would describe as “a bit previous” - and this had the effect of making me worry about my ex-husband, who had never been bold when it came to making his romantic intentions towards the opposite sex clear. How would he fair in this new, cut-throat marketplace when he, too, decided to make his first foray into it? And how would that first foray even evolve at all out of his current predicament? My ex-husband continued to stubbornly avoid the smartphones that most people, even in middle age, now used to light the touch fire of their sex lives, remaining loyal to the pay-as-you-go Nokia clamshell device I had watched him purchase from a secondhand electronics shop in Trowbridge in 2011. It was also doubtful that there would be much potential for love in the nearest population hub to his new abode: an upland hamlet with a population of little over 100 people.

My ex-husband remained an attractive man, in a spindly oddsocked way, who could still fetch an admiring glance or two from strangers on a city street, but I had heard that his trips to the city had become infrequent and that, for most of them, he was now accompanied by his landlady, as a way to minimise the pair’s carbon footprint. In the event that an available single woman spotted my ex-husband on one of these trips and, admiring the hint of sunset red in his still-lush brunette hair and the suggestion of calm intellectualism in his aquiline nose, built up the courage to start a conversation with him, would the sight of his formidable elderly companion, with her absurd pointy red shoes and Arcadian medusa hair, make her more or less likely to hold fast to that courage? My suspicion is the latter. Not, of course, that my ex-husband’s potential admirer - who I see, incidentally, as a slim, kind-eyed woman, who has recently had her first children’s book published, to quiet accclaim - could possibly assume my ex-husband’s landlady to be his wife or civil partner, just that the bulky confusingness of her aromatic presence might well, in such a scenario, be an impediment to destiny taking its rightful course.

You might think I am being unkind when I say “crazy shrub-haired widow” in reference to my ex-husband’s landlady, but I assure you I am not. It is a stone fact that all of us become crazy, in our own way, at some point, and the shrub-haired way is merely the way my ex-husband’s landlady has chosen. I am sure, too, that my ex-husband will become crazy, in time. But, being as intimately acquainted with him as I am, I am just not sure he is quite ready yet, nor that the possible path of craziness he is currently on - the one that involves living on a small hill, a long way away from all but one other building, and being brought anywhere up to ten cups of herbal tea a day by a woman almost four decades his senior - is the right one for him.

I know that many might say to me, “Donna, you are far too caring. Can you not just accept that you and your ex-husband did well for a while, then you grew apart, and now it’s time to focus solely on yourself?” I am aware plenty of people find it easy to walk away from a person they’ve shared their life with and never speak to them again. But that’s them. It’s not me. I am who I am and am past the point where an alteration of that would be a feasible project to undertake. I also know that - my ex-husband included - there is no person in the entire universe who understands my ex-husband better than me. And that means that when he calls me to say “You really didn’t have to come over with that cake the other day. I have loads to eat, especially with the casseroles MJ has been making me” I know that what he is trying to tell me is just “Thank you so much: I am more glad than you will ever realise that you are still around.” If you knew him like I knew him, you would understand. You would also find the herbal tea a troubling detail in view of the fact that it is something he has always disliked, even going as far on several occasions as stating that he did not believe it was a real drink.

“MJ” is what my ex-husband calls his landlady, although her real name is Margaret Jacobs. I find the nickname cringeworthy and wholly unbecoming of a woman of her age. It sounds, to me, like something you would call a small male child who was precociously good at racket sports, not a fully signed up member of the National Trust with six grandchildren and the threatening ashen hair of a 17th Century medicine hag. I worry about the future pickle my ex-husband might find himself in as a result of lapsing into this kind of intimacy. I have rented houses on several previous occasions and experience has told me that it is better to keep things as formal as possible as far as one’s tenancy is concerned. A friendship with the person taking your monthly rent can muddy the waters when the tenancy ends, leaving you in a more vulnerable position. As a naturally vulnerable person from birth, my ex-husband will probably find this applies twofold. 

People have often told me I’m something called a “natural empath”: that most of my problems in life come from putting my own needs to one side and worrying more about the people close to me. But if kindness and compassion is a hangable offence in this new triple-refrigerated society we live in, go ahead and string me up from the nearest strong tree. What I am about to admit to you is something I am not proud of but it’s important that you understand where it came from: a position of tenderness and selflessness. 

One day, during the second summer of my ex-husband’s tenancy with his landlady, I parked my car in a secluded spot, a quarter of a mile down from her house, then set out to tail her, from a safe distance, over the course of a weekend morning.

Do not think for a moment that I felt comfortable about embarking on this undercover mission. As I watched my ex-husband’s landlady’s 57-year-old Volkswagen Beetle round the bend at the top of the hill and pulled out from my hiding spot, my thumping heart swam up into my ear canal, drowning out the sound of my car’s engine, and I felt like I had stepped momentarily into the life of somebody who was fundamentally opposite to everything I know myself to be. But I reminded myself why I was doing this - that I was merely giving myself peace of mind that the woman my ex-husband was now spending most of his time with was a person worthy of his trust - and this allowed me to stay resolute. 

My ex-husband’s landlady’s first stop of the morning was at a farm shop three villages away, where she purchased a dozen local free range eggs, some gooseberries, three heads of little gem lettuce and a handful of other provisions I was unable to identify. Having paid, she stopped to photograph an insect on a lavender bush at the far side of the car park - a bufftailed bumble bee, I suspect - before engaging in a brief conversation with a lady half a generation younger than herself who she referred to as “Penny”. Next she drove to the outskirts of Exeter where, from a national chain store specialising in bulk alcohol, she purchased ten discounted bottles of wine. The outfit I had chosen for the day - a bucket hat and waxy overcoat, with the collars turned up - allowed me to lurk, unseen, in the corner of the shop and eavesdrop on her conversation with the warehouse’s main cashier (an obvious previous acquaintance of hers), which involved a joke about an alcoholic couple they both knew who my ex-husband’s landlady described as “a marriage made in Oddbins”. Distracted by the alluring sight of a bottle of obscure nettle-infused sauvignon blanc I had thought long obsolete, I at this point very nearly lost my ex-husband’s landlady though picked her up again on the dual carriageway, heading out of town over Haldon Hill. At the hill’s brow, she made a left turn to Exeter Racecourse, where, after paying a £2 entrance fee, she efficiently negotiated that day’s giant car boot sale, purchasing a woolen throw, some hard-wearing leather boots and three deep stainless steel pans. It was after this that my ex-husband’s landlady made her most mysterious move, pulling over onto a forest track in Haldon Hill Woods, then hiking deep into the undergrowth. Remembering the reputation the woods have as a popular dogging spot, I exercised caution, following my ex-husband’s landlady from a safe distance, only to discover she had merely stopped to find a place to inconspicuously urinate. Upon discovering the nature of her business, I came dangerously close to being seen and identified by my ex-husband’s landlady and was required to swiftly physically portray myself as a person who had an important calling to attend to farther into the woods. As a result, by the time this charade was over and I had returned to my car, neither my ex-husband’s landlady nor her car were anywhere in sight.

I had nothing planned for the rest of the day and had already cleaned the house, so I decided to return to the start point of my mission, in a secluded gate gap on the narrow country lane leading to my ex-husband’s landlady’s house. Upon exiting the car, I heard a distant hammering and, peering through the trees, was flabbergasted to see my ex-husband on the flagstones outside his landlady’s living room, confidently repairing a large wooden table, with a pencil tucked behind his ear. I say "flabbergasted" because I had known my ex-husband to be the least handy of men ever since the time, early in our marriage, he miserably failed to repair the broken gate at the rear of our garden. Admittedly I never permitted him to do any more DIY after that, but it would have been blindingly obvious to anyone who met him that it was not his forte.

There was something about being out in the woods, with the sun using the patterns in the canopy to cast its spells on the day, that put me in mind of the secret afternoons of my childhood, running through the forest glades near my grandparents’ home, shinning up tree trunks and enjoying a rook’s view of the landscape. It had been two decades since I had climbed a tree but I was still limber and, finding a willing larch, discovered that the process still came easy to me and up in its highest branches, it was as if I was once again my nine year-old self with her special secret life. Back then, although I never told anyone, I would often hear animals talk to me in human voices, and now, as I tucked myself into a position which would give the best view of my ex-husband’s landlady’s garden, I noticed a grey squirrel bounding towards me, across an adjoining branch. “Hello, my name is Grace Mitchell, and I am the Human Resources Manager at Serviceplan Group,” said the squirrel. “Currently, we are offering a flexible part-time position that you can complete during your spare time. Salary 150K. To opt out press ‘1’.” But I ignored the squirrel and decided not to let it spoil my afternoon. 

After I’d been in the tree for almost an hour I noticed my ex-husband’s landlady’s Beetle pulling back into the drive. I observed her walk, in her sashaying diaphonous way, towards my ex-husband, holding numerous shopping bags, and say something which, though I was too far away make out the exact words, appeared to be a complimentary acknowledgement of his work on the table, which the two of them proceeded to turn upright and fill with a selection of drinks, cheese, fruit, salad and snacks. My ex-husband’s landlady returned to the house and changed into a floral kaftan and then she and my ex-husband brought more tables and chairs out onto the flagstones. Onto one of the tables she placed the stainless steel pans she had purchased at the car boot sale. Around half an hour later, more cars arrived in the drive, and the garden filled with people, mostly women, all - aside from my ex-husband - aged between 50 and 80. After consuming the food my ex-husband and his landlady had laid out, many of them moved over to the pans, into which my ex-husband’s landlady dipped several pieces of fabric. Others took up positions on the far side of the garden, closer to the building where my ex-husband lived, removed pads from their shoulder bags and began to sketch, using what seemed to be unusually long pencils. I found all this highly intriguing but the day had been long and tiring and at some point I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew it was dark, and the woods, and my ex-husband’s landlady’s garden, were silent, save for the flitting of bats and the occasional soliciting call of a sexually inflamed owl. 

As I scrambled down from the tree, there was only one source of light pollution in the forest: the dim glow of a reading lamp coming from a small window in my ex-husband’s home. I found myself wondering what kind of mental state he was in. Did he ever get lonely out here? Did he miss my perfume and the shape of my body beside him? But then I reminded myself that none of that was any longer my concern. Despite my worries, I would retain my discipline and keep just as removed from my ex-husband and his landlady’s life as I had been since he had moved into his new home. I steered the car gently up the lane, the headlights briefly illuminating a handwritten sign outside my ex-husband’s landlady’s house which read ‘MJ And John’s Natural Dyes and Charcoal Drawing Open Day’. I tuned into a radio station which I mostly disliked but which I knew played the kind of music that would help keep me awake on the 75 mile drive home to the clean, substantial house that I now owned, in my sole name, and was fully responsible for. Remembering that cleanness, and my foresight in providing it for my future self, I was momentarily overcome by a pure, rare form of happiness and had the urge, just for a fraction of a second, to cry.