Ursula

Ursula

My father was a romantic. He used to believe everything he read in novels or saw in the movies, as if he was reading about or watching real people, and all their joy or suffering or love was real joy, real suffering, real love. Sometimes that could be charming, the most wonderful thing about him; but more often than not it wasn’t. I think that’s why mother had been planning to leave him, because she couldn’t stand living in his world anymore, a world he thought was Fairy Tale.

That’s where he got my name: books and film. D.H.Lawrence and James Bond. Well, not Bond exactly but rather from the actress who played the ‘Bond girl’ in Dr. No, the first Bond film they ever made. He loved the Bond movies. When they came out on DVD he bought them right away, paying over the odds. From then on they always seemed to be playing on the small tv in the little room he liked to call ‘The Snug’. Given the room was too small for dining (its supposed purpose), christening it ‘The Snug’ was romantic too I suppose. I swear you could have turned the sound right down and he would have been able to provide you with the entire dialogue. I think he gave me my name because he wanted me to turn out glamorous and beautiful like that actress, or artistic and spirited like that woman from Lawrence. I think he thought names could do that to people, shape who they became. I suspect, had he lived to see what I’ve actually become, I’d be something of a disappointment to him. For a start I don’t have Ursula Andress’ looks. My body is devoid of the curves of which she could boast, and my hair isn’t long and golden - though whether the colour of her hair was natural or just a component of her public persona I’ve no idea. And I don’t have her come-to-bed eyes nor a mouth that looks as if it could suck you to death. Need I go on? Where Honey Ryder was bends and undulations, this Ursula is much more up-and-down with the odd lump in the road here and there. Not that I mind. Not really. My not living up to some goddess-template hasn’t stood in the way of love or affection - though I might have had to work a little harder at getting it.

And artistic and spirited? I guess it depends how you want to measure that. For example, I can fly off the handle with the best of them, especially during my periods. Does that make me spirited? I once told an old boss what he could do with his job after he refused a holiday request and insisted I work ten straight days because the company had a big order it needed to get out. Him calling me a ‘raving Commie’ as a result felt like something of a triumph; I’d made my mark, stood out from the crowd. But was that brave or stupid? I didn’t work for a little while after that…

To be honest I prefer a quiet, unobtrusive life. Some people might regard that as - I don’t know - unambitious or passive; perhaps that’s what stops me from considering myself spirited or artistic, because it isn’t all about talent. At school I found I could draw pretty well; my teachers persuaded me to take A-level Art because they thought they’d unearthed a seam of some kind, a little precious metal that would make my fortune. As it turned out I was fine all the time they were telling me what to do, but when it came to working on my own, using my imagination… Well, I discovered I didn’t really have very much - nor the inclination to work hard to cultivate it. Still, I had enough talent to find employment later as a freelance illustrator - and being freelance, I can choose to take jobs where I’m always told what to do.

Artistic? Like I said, depends how you’d want to measure it.

For the thirteen years he knew me he always called me ‘Princess’ - which is either ironic, given how much thought he put into choosing my name, or proof of how much of a romantic he was. During the first half of my time with him I remember everything being pink, as if - like ‘Princess’ - colour was another part of a template against which I was being moulded. When I realised I didn’t actually like pink and told him so, well, he was devastated. “What colours do you like then?” Shell-shocked, the only way I could have made it worse for him was to say blue or red, boy’s colours. So although I had no real favourites, I told him green and orange; they seemed ‘safe’ and relatively non-committal. As it happened, I actually liked red and was never really a fan of orange, yet over the years it is my love of green which has grown. Is there any other colour in the universe where you can simply walk outside and be struck dumb by the infinite variety of the shades on offer? Red or blue? Come on! And pink - really?

When he died none of that seemed to matter any more, though on my fourteenth birthday I bought myself a pink jumper as a kind of tribute to him. It was the last item of pink clothing I ever purchased. I still have it and wear it occasionally when I need to cheer myself up - not that it’s the colour that works the oracle but rather the memories of him it invokes. And if I’m really low then I’ll sit on the sofa enveloped in my jumper’s pinkness and put Dr No or From Russia With Love on the DVD player and imagine that I’m seven again and leaning against him on his little settee in ‘The Snug’.

Okay, so maybe a little of his romanticism has rubbed off on me - but don’t tell anyone. Not that there’s anyone to tell just at the moment. Thirty-four and my on-off love life is currently ‘off’, a status that is beginning to slide uncomfortably towards being the norm - though not for the want of trying. Of course there’s no-one to blame for that other than me. I seem to have developed this pathological habit of sailing through the early stages of relationships right up until the point where they ‘get serious’, and then I flee. I don’t think it’s anything to do with love, but rather my twin afflictions of not having the imagination to see where things could go next, nor a romantic enough nature to believe in Happy Ever After. The first of those - I would argue - you can do little about. A bit like my Art A-level, you’ve either got the imagination for it or you haven’t. As for the second… Sadly, I think my dad weaned me off romance before he went. I’d been so saturated in it - smothered by his Princess pink - that knowingly or otherwise I’ve rebelled against anything too saccharine even since. Let’s face it, nothing’s forever, so why embark on a commitment predicated on a lie? Isn’t that dishonest? Love’s all well and good, but isn’t honesty better? Though having said that, I doubt my dad would agree. Not that he was dishonest; far from it. But we all have a pecking order for those ‘big things’, don’t we? Like Love, Honesty, Sincerity, Kindness, Authenticity - though don’t ask me what that last one actually means! They’re the major parts of ourselves we choose to endow with capital letters because we sense, instinctively, that they’re important. I just happen to have Honesty in front of Love, that’s all. Where some of the others go in the sequence I’m still trying to work out! My dad wanted to be all those things simultaneously; given they were all important, why did a person have to be more one thing than another? I guess that was one of the things being a Romantic - capital ‘R’! - meant to him.

If you are biased towards one trait rather than another, it follows that one of those ‘big things’ must come last, that there’s a personal attribute - defining who you are and how you behave - at which you suck, relatively speaking, even if you try not to. Perhaps it’s all about investment. In my case - imagination aside (and I don’t think it even warrants a capital letter, by the way) - I suspect some of the people I’ve been involved with would challenge my assertion that I’m honest, and might also argue that I’m far from authentic. Obviously that’s not how I see it. They probably get so hung-up on how in love they are and their vision of the future, that when I put Honesty before Love, they can only see it as a kind of betrayal, as if I’ve been leading them on. I was once called a “deceitful, lying cow” as a result. Not my finest hour. But that just goes to show you, no matter how you see yourself, you’re not in control of others’ perceptions of you, the ones they overlay and choose to label you with. Princess? I don’t think I was ever a Princess.

Occasionally what others think of you can be insightful. I’ve had more than one person tell me what I need to do is to take a break; not a holiday on a beach or a weekend in Paris, but a proper break. ‘A vacation from yourself’ one of them called it. The overall theory they seem to be espousing - as if I’d asked them for advice in the first place! - is that I’m stuck in a rut which is not stimulating. And more than that, I’m stuck there alone. They think I’m too glued to the past and not focussed enough on the future - yet, as I’ve already said, I struggle to imagine what might be around the corner. So when they say ‘a break’ what they mean is three months in America or Australia or somewhere like that, either working or travelling; probably a combination of both. A chance to see a different side of life and to get some ‘perspective’. It’s the kind of notion that would have appealed to my dad, not that he’d have accepted the challenge himself. A romantic notion such an adventure may have been, but he had his boundaries and those were very much geographic ones. When people have suggested I do something wild like that, I can get enthusiastic for a short time, but then reality pokes its head round the door and starts asking questions: what about work? what about the flat? what about money? Could I really go off somewhere on my own - even if I took my pink jumper with me? You get the idea.

Once, Grace, an old friend, made me sit down with her in front of her laptop and had me qualify continents ‘in’ or ‘out’; then do the same with countries. She said she wanted me to focus, to try and see what the world might have to offer. We talked about climate and such like, and then she had me making binary decisions about coast or not-coast, winter or summer, English-speaking or not. In the end she triumphantly presented me with a shortlist as if her work was done and everything was settled: Seattle, the West Coast of Australia, South Island in New Zealand, Hawaii. I still struggle to see all of the connections between those places, and wonder how she managed to filter the world down to just four options. If you’d forced my dad to choose between them he would have settled on New Zealand, no question. Why? Because it’s the most like England. And if you forced me, right now?

I don’t know. Maybe the same. Or Seattle. Does it matter?

I suspect the Ursula he’d had in mind - the one he’d hoped I would grow up to be - wouldn’t have hesitated. She would have been straight down to Thomas Cook’s and splashed the cash on some extravagant flight to Australasia via all sorts of places en route. Dubai? India? Vietnam? Singapore? Maybe even Japan or China. And then she would have dusted off that old suitcase - battered from the various trips she’d already taken (whale watching off the coast of Alaska had been her favourite thus far) - and started packing, hurriedly making a list of all the essentials she didn’t have but which she needed for a four-month sojourn down under. Maybe that Ursula would still be there, the four months sliding into five then six; and along the way she’d have made new friends, started a relationship with a penniless artist or a wealthy sheep farmer, committed the rest of her life to trying to resist an Antipodean accent. Or she would have crashed from one adventure to the next, arriving home three weeks early, all her money gone, and having fallen in and out of love at least five times along the way. I wonder which of these versions of me would have made my dad the most proud?

I’d like to think it’s the Ursula who did none of those things; the Ursula who stayed at home and lived her quiet, unexciting life; the one whose values were slightly different to his - and yes, the one who puts Honesty above Love, and doesn’t believe in fairy tales.