The Delusionist

by Rachel Mathias

  He was bigger than I had imagined. More smartly dressed, more smiley faced, more portly, more comforting, less sexy, which is always a relief. According to my mother, attractive men have the biggest capacity for infidelity. “Never…” she decreed, all Winston Churchill-like one day after a large G&T and a divorce to match, “never go for a good-looking man.” Apparently all it takes is one coy smile from the waitress, or your best friend, and they are in love, again.

  The parking space, as it turned out, had a twenty-minute limit, so we barely had time to walk around the block. I think that was all he was expecting, but I spotted a cute coffee shop in an alleyway and ushered him in. He protested that he didn’t have any money on him, had left his bag at the office because he thought we were just going for a walk. I just thought how sweet that he assumed he would be buying the coffee, and brushed aside his objections, reaching into my purse for some coins. The main thing was that we had finally met. We had chatted for nearly five weeks, and not just online, but WhatsApp, long phone calls into the early hours of the morning. He had given me a Facetime tour of his home in Surrey, had even woken me at 2am to tell me he loved me, but I put that down to men – you know what they’re like.

  I still don’t know what they’re like. I do know that they fall in love easily. A good friend of mine once said “When men say they’re “in love” with you, they mean they are in love with the idea of you” and she was probably right. But that’s the whole thing about being in love, and it’s the reason we strive to cultivate that perfect exterior – because in the end it’s all about connecting with what is projected rather than the weathered sludge below.

  When he said it to me, I should have had the sweetest dreams, but I couldn’t sleep all night.

  At a table in the window of the café, we sized each other up while talking about I have no idea what, the way you do when you are concentrating on someone to the exclusion of everything else. Even women can’t multitask when it comes to love. I couldn’t look at him as well as listen to him. I probably talked nonsense while imagining what he’d be like in bed. He got in my car afterwards and I dropped him somewhere near the station. He said he had a meeting with a wealth management company – there was an insinuation of tax avoidance, not evasion, just avoidance, which I took in my stride. He had money, so much money he needed to manage it. I could handle that, especially in the light of Tinder Craig who had introduced me to the kind of poverty which precluded even going on an actual date.

  I had told Harry about the poverty, and about the jealous drunken rages, and he had assured me there would be none of that Craig bullshit; and now he had doubly reassured me on the money side. He kissed me goodbye on the cheek. Later he would say that I was going to kiss him on the lips but he turned away.

  “So, do you want to see me again?” He had one hand on the dashboard. With the other, he pushed his Ray Bans up so I could see his eyes. They seemed slightly bloodshot, or perhaps it was just the sudden impact of the sun on his face.

  I didn’t need to reply, because he had already said “Course you do.” Shutting the car door behind him, he stood in the street to stop the traffic so I could swing out onto the main road. People must have thought he was some kind of eccentric who had forgotten to take his medication. I thought he was my knight in shining armour.

  I drove all the way to Dorset in a state of high excitement. By the side of the A303 the giant rocks of Stonehenge were bathed in a new light. The sky behind the stones was dark and menacing, giving them a supernatural glow I had never seen. I pulled off the road to take a photo on my phone and spent a minute absorbing the view, while traffic hummed past on the road behind me. Everything was more alive, full of the clichéd promise of new beginnings, a new way of seeing the world.

  I climbed back into the car and switched on the stereo. No Radio 4 for me today, it was all feel-good chart-toppers from the eighties, which shouted out that love was, finally, in the air.

  Sally listened to the story with the indefinable but unmistakeable expression of someone who is keeping their thoughts at bay, for the moment.

  “Well,” she began. But then I realised there were even more heaven-sent signs she needed to know before responding.

  “And, he went to the same school as me.”

  I left out the fact that he had been expelled at fifteen for dealing drugs and never gone back. I had my own narrative around that, mainly that he lost all connection with education after his parents split up. Left by an abusive violent father in the care of his new stepmother, who was equally at a loss, he muddled his way through his teens in the best way he could. He wasn’t likely to be an A grade student with that start in life. Hardly surprising he ended up on the wrong side of the law.

  “Incredible, Rach. It must be fate.”

  She was right to mock me. Next thing I’d be telling her what a great match Taurus and Pisces were, or what a coincidence it was that we both liked going out in the rain.

  “Well, as long as you’re careful. I know what you’re like. You go rushing into things, but you don’t need to invest so much, so soon. I mean I get why you do it. We all do it. It’s like a need to erase your mistakes, to find someone new to justify why it never worked out with anyone else.”

  “You saying I’m living in a fairy tale? I mean you’re probably right…”

  “I suppose I’m just thinking we need to accept the stuff that happened in the past with the other people in our lives, not just bury it by plonking a new person in their place and starting a dreamy romance with them. It’s like slapping new wallpaper on top of the old stuff. You gotta spend a bit of time with the scraper, and then fill the holes, sandpaper…”

  “Is that a metaphor for therapy?”

  “Maybe, or yoga, or just time out, alone. I don’t think you can hurry the healing and learning process.”

  “Sal, what have you been reading?”

  “Oh all sorts. Well you know my situation. I take all the help I can get.”

  “But you don’t do the online dating thing?”

  “What bothers me is how do you know anything about them when you have no connection to them? Can’t you meet people some other way?”

  “Do we know anything about anyone?” I countered. “And we change. I thought I knew Adam, and either I didn’t, or he changed, because he’s nothing like the person I thought I was marrying.”

  “Or you changed? Of course that’s bound to happen over time, but it seems worse knowing absolutely nothing. It’s like you’re deliberately putting yourself at a disadvantage from the outset. I’d just rather it was through an activity where you meet by chance."

  “What, like an evening class? I haven’t got time to hang around adult education venues learning things I’m not interested in, just to meet a man.”

  “You could do car maintenance. That might even be useful.”

  “Well first of all I don’t think car maintenance even exists anymore because cars are pretty much run by computers. And even if it does, it’s probably full of women with the same idea, all disappointed when the men don’t turn up, which they don’t, because they already know everything about cars, or even if they don’t know everything, then they’re not going to admit they need lessons, and especially not lessons with girls.” I paused for breath and pushed my glass aside. That was far too long a sentence and I blamed the alcohol.

  “Ok, fair enough, Tinder wins.”

  Sally moved round to maximise the impact of the sun’s lingering rays and turned the conversation to the reason for our meeting, which was that her little sister was about to become officially old, just as we all had done when turning thirty, and probably twenty. Having passed the fourth decade landmark some time ago, Sally and I were struggling to understand its significance. My thirties had passed in a flash of relay-parenting and work-life juggling, and the first years of my forties were looking like a kink in the hosepipe of my life; it was the decade of the break-up of my marriage, my husband’s mental breakdown and the subsequent
loss of my job, it was the decade of selling the family home and downsizing to the neighbouring postcode, giving up foreign holidays, swapping Waitrose for Lidl, River Café for Wetherspoons. So far it had been a catalogue of sickness and decline, sadness, and upheaval, and I couldn’t wait for it to be behind me.

  We debated the demise of past relationships, the patterns in behaviour which led to unhappy outcomes, “You invest too much too soon” and “You deserve better” and finally reached the ultimate question, which was whether to take our long-sleeved tops off to reveal the flimsy camisoles and flabby arms underneath. After much agonising, we decided to risk it but only until the rest of the guests arrived. Then, our conversation finally turned to Sally’s latest boyfriend, her twenty-eight-year-old tenant, whose estranged wife and children didn’t know that she was providing Daddy with a good deal more than board and lodging during the trial separation. I was on safe ground now in terms of tit for tat finger-wagging. And my concern for her followed hot on the heels of hers for me.

  “He’s got to tell his ex, hasn’t he?” I brought my glass down onto the table with a little more force than required. “I mean where does this go otherwise? He can’t go away with you, you can’t have a holiday, even a whole weekend together, if she thinks you’re just the landlady”. I had said it all before, and I knew the answer.

  “But he’s afraid she’ll kill herself if he tells her.”

  “She won’t. She has children. Who would do that?”

  “She’s tried before.”

  This wasn’t the first time that a friend had stepped in to point out the masochism behind her situation, and Sally had her responses ready, which she would fire back in a series of killer return volleys that sent her opponent scuttling around the base line. She was trained for this. I tried what I thought might be a new angle, the judge’s summary at the end of a trial. Girls do this for each other’s good, because when you’re in it, you can’t always see it. We stand on the edge of the swamp because we have a better view of the crocodiles from there. I was happy to point them all out.

  “Okay, so basically you are voluntarily putting your whole life on hold, with someone who hasn’t introduced you to any friend or family member in the year you’ve been together, who disappears up the road every night, to “talk to the kids,” who won’t leave his phone on the table even to go to the bathroom, and all that just so you can have sex?”

  “Haven’t you done that before? Fallen for someone who belongs to someone else?”

  There was a pause, the first one in an hour of fervent chatter. It was a fair comment. Out of context, but perhaps the context was irrelevant.

  “That was ages ago, and different. He didn’t belong to her anymore…”

  “Maybe. But every relationship is different. Graham and I have a connection. We laugh together. So much.” I had met him twice, briefly, and struggled to imagine him cracking a smile, let alone a giggle, but gave her the benefit of the doubt.

  “So, it’s for sex and laughter then. Actually, that’s not such a bad result… I like the fact you say it’s that you laugh together, rather than he makes you laugh. So many women seem to expect some sort of court jester, where the real fun is when you both find each other funny.”

  She nodded in agreement. But my detective alter-ego was still working in the background on solving the mystery of the late-night phone calls. “If he is literally walking down your road on the phone, maybe you should get a neighbour to listen to his secret conversations.”

  “What do you mean?” Her smile disappeared.

  “I mean, when he goes off to talk to the kids, if the woman up the road had her window open, she could listen and see if that’s what he’s really doing.”

  “Spy on him you mean?”

  “Oh Sal, I don’t know.” I frowned. “I just worry about his ‘situation’ with the ex, and what exactly she thinks is going on. I mean, when someone says they have left their wife, what proof do we have that that’s true?”

  “The fact he lives with me? Sleeps with me?”

  “In my experience that is no proof at all.”

  There was a pause. Sally looked into the distance for a minute, chewing over the imaginary scenario I had put before her.

  “I see why you’re worried Rach. You’ve been through all this before, you think men can’t be trusted. And I think the same about your new guy. Wait till you know him better before you put all your eggs in one basket. Divorce is not a label of shame. Enjoy the freedom.”

  “I’ve had enough of the freedom, enough of the poverty stricken, guitar-strumming Lotharios pining after some long-lost ex.” I had somehow managed to cram all my romantic adventures into one sentence.

  “Fair enough. I haven’t had the pleasure. But show me a divorced man with cash and I’ll show you an ex-wife who hasn’t done her job properly. I honestly believe Graham is a good guy. He used to be in the navy, on submarines. He’s disciplined, resilient.

  “And used to spending months away from the people he loves. He might have just told her he’s working away for a while.”

  “Well, when you put it like that….”

  “Sorry, it’s only because I care about you.” I tried to wrap her in a hug but she wriggled free.

  “Okay, so to take this page-turner to its bunny-boiling conclusion, I need to go and knock on Sylvia’s door at the top of the cul-de-sac, ask her to leave her window open and eavesdrop on Graham while he talks to his kids on the phone. Do I ask her to leave a mic outside and Bluetooth it straight down to my place? Or do I sit in the back of a van down the road with a team of hit men ready to leap out and arrest him for telling the wrong bedtime story?”

  “Count me in for the van.” I said.

  “Seriously, you think there is more to this? I don’t think he’s got the nous to be deceitful. I mean, why bother?” She drained her glass and looked up at me, needing something I couldn’t give. My answer was simple.

  “I don’t care why, I just care if he is being deceitful. His end-game is of no interest to me. But if he is leading a double life, or hiding anything from you, you might as well know now. And if someone asked me to do that favour for them, I would. It’s summer, windows are open, it could just be accidental over-hearing.”

  “And it may never happen, because I might not ask, and she might not be in, and Graham might choose that day to make the call somewhere else, and the weather might turn cold…”

  I nodded. This was all true, and I concluded, as she probably had, that this was nothing but the pie in the sky dream of someone who’d watched too many mini-series thrillers.

  Then out of nowhere there was the sudden roar of a car engine, probably not sudden, but when you stop laughing loudly, any other noise sounds like it’s just started. We scrambled for our clothes lest anyone should spot our bingo wings and run for the hills. It’s madness but we all do it, because it wouldn’t do to be judged, unless of course you were judged the winner in which case please go ahead, judge away.

  Over the next hour, a procession of cars spilt out freshly manicured couples clutching suitcases, presents, boxes of wine. The air was filled with whoops of delight at the Aga as newly agile weekenders scurried to locate the best room, under the guise of simply marvelling at the delightfulness of everything; London mice escaping their miniature dwellings to discover what kind of square footage they could trade it in for, one day, when the kids left home...

  Maya arrived with Maddie in tow. Simon had pulled out, or perhaps had never been in, but this was normal for them. Maddie was a more than adequate replacement, with her unique abundance of energy there was no danger of things getting boring. She was already busy hanging up the birthday bunting and handing out balloons to anyone who would take them.

  "Come on everyone. Let's get this place looking fabulous."

  Maya was still making excuses for her absent husband. “It’s so rude of him. Although to be honest, soooo much nicer for me not to have him here.” She was untangling a piece of ribbon to s
tring the balloons up with , and just getting it more and more tangled in the process. It was a micro-representation of her and Simon's relationship.

  “He never comes to anything anymore,” said Maddie in between puffs. “It’s a shame really. He will really be missing out this weekend.”

  “He hates people. Or maybe it’s just me he hates. He probably has a whale of a time when I’ve gone out.”

  “I’m not sure about that." I was trying to picture Simon turning the music up, cracking open some beers and dancing round the kitchen. "I can't imagine it."

  “Okay maybe not what I’d call a whale of a time. Depends how you’d describe watching back-to-back replays on Dave Ja vu.”

  Maddie cackled and then whooped as the front door creaked open once again.

  “Jess!” She threw her arms round the next arrival, then her partner Jason, taking their bags off them, then leaping up the stairs in front of them to show them their room. Everyone knows they can always go off duty when Maddie’s around.

  “Don’t worry Jason, there’s a gym in the barn so you can work on those big guns of yours…”.

  Jason frowned over his shoulder at us. “Do I have to? I thought I was on holiday.”

  “Johnny!” Caro’s brother got the same treatment and pushed his glasses back up his nose, smiling at everyone.