Middle Lane
Image credit: Marcelo Uva
Joelle glanced up as she neared the shallow end for the 49th time. It was 12.20pm on the ancient analogue, just one more length before she would bring her lunchtime swim session to an end. The lanes in the middle of the day were reserved for adults only. Every weekday, Joelle would make her way to the second lane, marked medium fast.
A few years earlier she would have taken up her rightful place in the fast lane, the preserve of club swimmers or the ultra-fit. The next lane down from the middle lane was medium slow, a fate Joelle was not prepared to contemplate yet even if she was more frequently than not lapped by someone half her age as she alternated between crawl and breast-stroke.
No, this was still her middle lane, just as she accepted she was now firmly middle-aged. On the cusp of 50, there were still physical traces of her younger self, her clavicles jutted out from her size 10 black Speedo costume, her jawline chiselled, resolute. But the harsh realities of the changing room mirror told a different story. Lines had creased and uncreased themselves before finding their final resting places around her eyes, forehead and the contours of her mouth, those years of smoking and a lifetime addiction to the sun had finally caught up with her.
Still, Joelle liked to remind herself, as she roughly towel dried her silver streaked bob, at least she was still trying to take care of herself and not sitting slumped at her desk over a Tupperware lunch of limp salad or the previous supper’s leftovers. These 30-minute swims had been Joelle’s life-saver, their attendant weightlessness releasing her from what she had seen then as the penal servitude of 9-5 and that feeling of failure, an unwanted appendage that she had carried round with her during that time too.
Nearing her mid-century, Joelle had now realised that for good or bad, middle age was nothing more than a letting go, a gradual cutting of the cord between her old and young self. She knew now that the urgency in which she had lived the years after university, constantly propelling herself forward, driven by an inner compulsion for endless self-improvement, would only ever amount to this. This was not a value judgement, simply a matter of fact.
Joelle wrapped up her sodden costume in her towel and tossed it into her swim bag. Soon she would make the same journey back to her office and her desk, still sandwiched between the ancient tea urn and the photocopier. She never had moved on from that job and those thoughts of career ladders seemed almost laughable now. She was humbler too, recoiling at how dismissive she had once been of her fellow workers. Shirkers, she had thought then. Middle streamers with no desire ever to enter the fast lane. Now she gladly swam with them too. Just as her body had begun to show signs of sagging, her jagged edges had softened over time. Gradually she had allowed herself to be drawn into their domestic lives, and was surprised at the warmth and affection she now felt for them. Where once a cool brittleness had set her apart, Joelle was now one of the team, welcoming newcomers to the ways of the office, their highs and lows shared with shop-bought cake and chipped mugs of instant coffee.
It was that job that had been both her doing and undoing. Joelle could almost pinpoint to the day four years earlier when her once perfectly pedestrian domestic life would begin to unravel. How was Joelle to have known that it had been her constant desire for change that would set in train a series of events that had to run their natural course before her life could be righted again. Or that this relentless desire for self-improvement was underpinned by a complacency that everything she and her husband, Quintin, had valued and built up over time could be transported and re-built, only bigger and better.
Joelle had been a down table sub editor on a national newspaper until their third child was born. She had no regrets when she traded her daily commute to Kensington to stay at home with her young family. Like all women of her generation, Joelle knew that there was no such thing as having it all, but what her feminist ancestors had never prepared her for was the sheer joy and creativity being at home with her young family could bring. With no deadlines to work to, Joelle was free to spend her days revelling in her children’s make believe, creating dens out of washing lines, igloos out of bamboo canes. And when Quintin returned home, the garden would soon ring out with squeals of laughter as he pushed their youngest that little bit too high on the rope swing before he returned indoors to her, his eyes smiling as she regaled the minutiae of another perfectly ordinary day.
Yet Joelle was restless and wanted even more. A new patio, new furniture, a bigger house to entertain in. After all they were relatively young and successful, didn’t they owe it to themselves to aim even higher? How naïve she had been then, believing that they would keep growing exponentially, displaying this upward mobility by moving from their lovingly finished semi to a huge detached house and garden.
A return to work was the only answer. Getting the job had been the easy part. She had stumbled on the advert, applied without researching the role and had given it scant thought when she accepted the job offer just hours after being interviewed. She had even laughed with her London friends about how impossibly easy it had been to walk into the job, all on her terms with an office just 15 minutes from their home.
On day one in the new job, Joelle had made it clear she was only passing through and was above office politics, gossip or anything else that didn’t relate strictly to the job or would impact on her leaving on time for the school run. She would be moving on quickly once other local employers knew she was back in the workplace. Gradually week by week, the once strongly demarcated lines between office and home life began to blur. There were expectations, targets, goals to meet that refused to be contained within school hours. Soon emails would start to take precedence over supervising homework or organising playdates. Evening meal times would slip back later and later, until Joelle would decide that it was easier for her family to eat a hastily prepared microwave supper without her, preferring to eat alone long after the dishes and daily detritus had been cleared away. Her relationship too would become relegated to the last in a line of jobs to be ticked off at the end of each day.
The missed sports days, parents’ evenings, or just time spent with her family were short-term sacrifices for long term gain. Soon, she reckoned to herself, as she craned to catch a glimpse of sunlight from her office’s grimy windows, she would be moving on from here to something more akin to her previous glamorous career. And her salary would help pay for that bigger family home.
Joelle’s working day was now punctuated by the pings of Rightmove email alerts diverting her attention to glass and steel creations in affordable commuter land Oaklands or town houses in Hertford, before she stumbled on a shabby Arts and Crafts House in Other Town crying out for love and a family. Never mind that it had huge surface level cracks running up from the floor to the ceiling or that the bathrooms, kitchens and extended gardens needed complete makeovers. It was perfect. Joelle immediately arranged a viewing, visualising the rose arches and marquees on the lawn for future birthdays, even wedding receptions. A forever home.
No sooner had Joelle set foot on its vast polished wooden floors, than the deal was set in motion. Joelle had almost willed meeting some resistance, something to stop the house purchase from actually going ahead. She hadn’t really meant to go along with it, and yet here they all stood. A sold sign was duly erected, the rope swing and their children’s bedroom curtains still hung as the contents of nearly 16 years of family life were boxed up high in the back of the bright yellow removal van.
Other Town, how they began to loathe that name, as the novelty of their new surroundings soon wore off. No swing to race out to in the garden on homecoming from school, the scooters sat forlorn at the back of the garage, along with the discarded tennis rackets and cricket bats now there was no longer anyone to invite around to play. The children’s artworks that had once adorned their old home sat in crates in the attic, never seeing the light of the day.
Every day Joelle and her youngest child Charlie would make the long, lonely cycle ride to and from his new school, hoping that somewhere along the way they would fall in step with someone else making the same journey and slip casually into an easy friendship, finding new playmates to fill the silence of their huge garden. They both hoped in vain.
Sometimes, if Joelle returned home early from work, she would find her husband, who had been made redundant just weeks after they moved, staring forlornly out on the tumbleweed, unsure where to start, rooted in the past but with no means to navigate his way back there or accept their new solitary surroundings. Joelle wanted to rush over to him and put her arms round him, as of old, but she hesitated and simply stared at him from the window. What could she possibly say that would put everything right again?
A chasm formed. Joelle had naively thought all would be well when Quintin finally secured a new job, but instead he blamed her for the long commutes and she began to dread his key in the lock at 7.30pm, too late now to run out in the garden for twilight football. And if week nights were bad, weekends were even worse. Camp-outs, sleepovers, popcorn making, all were memories of childhoods past. It had been too soon to pack away their childish things. Joelle, restless at night, sometimes tapped Quintin to see if he too shared her guilt. But his longer commutes meant he deeply resented those cries for help that would rob him of even more sleep. Joelle would creep into the bathroom and sit there until her nightly fears subsided at the rising of another new day.
True, Joelle had her pick of rooms to write that long promised novel and she could peruse Farrow and Ball paint swatches deliberating between Incardine, Radicchio or Picture Gallery Red for their friendless dining room. But her heart was no longer in her new project. Joelle could never bring herself to tell her friends or relations just how bad things had become, instead she bowed out of social invitations, her growing sense of isolation giving way to further bitterness and endless recriminations.
The summer after their move they returned to a little stretch of the Costa Brava they claimed their own. After walking the familiar pine-scented coastal path from their apartment at El Golfet to Palafrugell, they stopped at Port Bo to gaze out at its flotsam of bathers, boats and bars. Joelle and Quintin had met as TEFL teachers in pre-Olympics Barcelona in their first year after graduating and had spent long, languorous weekends exploring Catalonia’s rugged coastline.
Now more than 25 years later, they sat side by side in silence on a concrete plinth as their children wended their way up to their favourite ice cream stall. Without turning to each other, they both finally came clean, admitting how much they missed their old life, how back here among previous summers they could find voice to those silent resentments they had shored up during their 10-month self-imposed exile. How they had felt marooned in that huge, crumbling house that creaked with their nightly fears and anxieties. Relief washed over them in waves. They would tell the children that evening they had a made a bad move, that it was time to sell up; this time, Joelle vowed, not move up, but move back home to their friends and community. Later as they celebrated their eldest daughter’s 16th birthday in a little seafood bar, its rafters slung low with vines exposing a moonlit sky, they told of their decision, once more united by a common purpose.
That was just over a year ago. They had kept that promise made on Spanish sands and had found a house just streets away from their old beloved semi. Tonight, like every weekday evening, Quintin would put his keys in the lock, right on cue at 6.30pm, his relief almost instant as he stood on the threshold of home life, at once distancing himself from the stresses of work and his M25 commute. And Joelle, also on cue, would look up from preparing tea, the parting of her thinning hair revealing its silvery tinged roots, quickly drying her hands marbled by thick veins. So much had passed between them and yet their smiling eyes would seek out each other, fleetingly, knowingly. The day Joelle had sold the family home now relegated to local dinner party folklore. They could joke about it now as their teenage children’s voices rang out once more. Joelle’s impulses to push onwards, upwards were now forgiven, if not forgotten; in their middle years they had navigated their way back home to each other.
Like sand, Joelle realised that the move, their return, her job, had just been moments, passing through her fingers. She had attached so much weight to these things, when really what had been important and true had been there all the time. As Joelle stared at her older self in the changing room mirror, she could spot new faint lines of a woman who had learnt to live and laugh at her mistakes. Who knows she might even dip her toe into the slow lane in the future.
Middle Lane is the first in a collection of short stories called Six Silos Standing, loosely based on women’s lives in Welwyn Garden City.
