Worn Out Wife Seeks New Life

by Carmen Reid

  There was a pause.

  Tess held her breath and felt the prickling intensify across her face as she wondered if she’d just made the most ridiculous suggestion of all time. Her CEO had offered her a promotion, a chance to step up to a bigger job in London, and she’d just pitched him a sabbatical idea and more than hinted that she was losing her enthusiasm for work.

  The pause went on and Tess curled her toes.

  ‘Well, well…’ John Lloyd said finally. ‘Now that is left-of-field and not at all what I’d expected, but good for you.’

  Tess felt as if she could breathe again.

  ‘I say yes. I say take your break, take three months off, have a proper sabbatical… and paid,’ he added, to her relief, ‘visit horizons new and come back to us with a raft of fresh ideas.’ She heard the encouragement in his voice, ‘I’m a midlifer myself, so I’ll want to learn from your project. And congratulations, Tess, thank you for making us all look so good at our jobs.’

  As she put the phone down, a grin split Tess’s face. A happy, relieved, yes, even triumphant grin – and it was a long time since she’d grinned like this. Three. Whole. Months. Off. Paid.

  This was incredible. And absolutely long enough for the lavish, adventurous, thrilling travelling holiday she had in mind – temples of Vietnam, beaches of Cambodia – followed by six weeks of in-depth research for the ‘midlife project’ she’d come up with. Both truly inspired ideas that had somehow bubbled up from the depths of her upset and despair.

  The only cloud on the horizon was that she hadn’t actually mentioned this idea to Dave yet. And Dave, who hated to fly, who loved holidays either in his own back garden, or involving vast quantities of cheese in France, was going to think she had completely lost the plot.

  4

  In her long experience of trying to get through to producers, River had found that it was usually the third call that was the charm. When you called an office for the third time in a morning, the perky executive assistant was generally done with putting you off with bullshit excuses and would actually ask her boss, in this case Phillip Renfield, whether or not he wanted to speak to you.

  ‘Hi River, thanks for calling.’ When she heard Phillip’s voice coming out of her mobile speaker, she could actually have given a little jump for joy. ‘I’ve got a meeting in ten, but why don’t you hit me with some outlines, I’ll tell you what I like and then you can send me the full storylines. Does that sound okay?’

  He sounded very busy, of course, professional, but definitely open to hearing from her.

  ‘Phillip, I’m not going to pitch you anything…’

  Now she was sure she had his attention.

  ‘Instead, I want you to give the “High School Musical meets Merchant of Venice” gig to me. I literally cannot stop thinking about it. In the right hands, I think it could be amazing. The play is about racism and exclusion and injustice… in a school setting, with musical sing-alongs, it could be incredibly powerful. Plus, I know Shakespeare. Someone cultured should be working on this, someone who can translate everything that was genius about that play and make it totally relevant for today’s audience.’

  With barely a pause for breath, she went on: ‘And high school kids… they can’t make it to the end of a TikTok video, so this has got to grab them, entertain them and make them think, without preaching any kind of lesson at them. I’m thinking I take the script you have to England. I actually go to Shakespeare country. I immerse myself in it all. Go to the theatre, visit Shakespeare’s birthplace, get the feel.

  ‘Maybe I could script up a little documentary aimed at kids that releases at the same time as the movie? Plus, you know me, Phillip, you know I’ll be way less of a pain to work with than a bunch of kids out of film school. I mean, let’s have an ideation session with the film school kids, I bet they could come up with things we’d never have thought of, but then you need a grown-up to create an excellent script.’

  She paused. Screwed up her eyes… and waited for his reply.

  You could never tell with a pitch. She’d been rehearsing it all morning. She thought she’d delivered well, with the right level of expertise and enthusiasm. She thought her ideas were great. But you could never tell with a pitch.

  The pause went on. Long enough for River to wonder if she’d made a complete fool of herself. Or worse, that she’d sounded desperate for work…

  Then finally, Phillip said, ‘I love it.’

  And River felt almost faint with relief.

  ‘I love your ideas, I love your energy, and best of all, I love the way you’re solving one major headache for me.’

  Wow! River couldn’t help thinking, her emotions switching direction in a split second, and that’s the way I reel ’em in.

  ‘But this is a big project. I don’t expect a final draft of the script until August/September. Can we make the figures work, River? I don’t have a generous budget for this. I might not be able to afford you.’

  He then hit her with a suggested fee that made her jaw drop. This was his definition of a not-generous budget? She needed to work with him a lot more often. She could definitely go to England, write a script, write a documentary and have months of spare money literally sloshing around in her bank account for that.

  But careful, careful, wasn’t the rule to always negotiate? River didn’t have an agent. She’d fallen out in too spectacular a fashion with too many agents in the past, so now she did her agenting herself.

  ‘Well…’ she said.

  And now it was her turn to pause.

  Sometimes, people offered you more money without you even needing to say a word, she’d discovered. Sometimes you just… had to… pause…

  She let that pause go on almost uncomfortably. She waited for him to say something.

  ‘Okay, I can probably go up a little,’ he said finally, ‘Let me see what I can do. I’ll come back to you today.’

  ‘Thank you, Phillip. This is going to be amazing. I’m really very excited.’

  ‘Yeah, me too, right!’

  ‘I want to get to the source. I mean, the Shakespeare guy’s material has lasted over four hundred years. We’re still quoting it, still performing it, so he must be doing something right. I think the inspiration for making this script awesome is going to be in England.’

  ‘Actually, I’ll be in London for a few weeks in the summer,’ Phillip volunteered.

  ‘I bet all kinds of really great people will be there too,’ River said, feeling an idea coming together. ‘If I’m going to be renting a place – I should have a garden party. Mix it up. Invite some cool LA people, some theatre people and anyone else interesting I can find along the way.’

  ‘You know how to hold a good party, I remember,’ Phillip said.

  ‘Yes I do, thank you! Hey, I should let you go, Phillip, you have a meeting. We’ll talk very soon and I’m so thrilled to be working with you again!’

  When the call was over, River looked up from her desk, well, actually it was a café table but in one of the quietest, calmest cafés she knew, all shades of greenish blues. And when she was working here, she ordered two espressos an hour, plus tips, to keep everyone happy, so it was practically a desk.

  Okay, this project was not signed yet, so she couldn’t celebrate. But it looked really good. It looked like a done deal and she was so happy, she could shout. Or maybe sing… since she was now going to be writing a musical… a ‘High School Musical meets Merchant of Venice’… what the actual hell? How was this going to work? She had no idea. But she was a smart, very creative person, so surely she could figure it out.

  And a party… an English garden party. She needed to think about that too. How to find other guests, she wondered… she’d look up the actors, writers and theatre producers involved in the Shakespeare plays she would go and see. She’d put feelers out with her friends. The main thing was not to have too many writers at her party. Writers, goddammit: wonderful people… terrible people… they’d swig down all the booze, they’d
tell hilarious stories and then move on to the deepest, darkest opinions that would depress the hell out of everyone, and then they’d corner all the producers and steal the commissions from under her nose. Writers!

  And where the heck was Shakespeare country anyway? Where did he live? Where did they put on all those plays every summer? Wasn’t it in London somewhere?

  She tapped the questions into her phone and was soon looking at a map of Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire. Warwickshire? Where was that? It didn’t look anywhere near London at all. It looked miles and miles and miles from anywhere except Birmingham. She didn’t know much about England, but she did know that no one was going to travel to a garden party near Birmingham.

  5

  ‘An elephant care centre? Do you think that’s something you’d like to visit?’ Tess turned to ask her husband, ‘I mean… I’m not really so keen, but Natalie might really like that. It might even be something she could put on her CV.’

  Natalie was studying Biology at uni, because it was her best subject at school, but she had only the vaguest idea of what she wanted to do when she graduated.

  ‘Elephant care?’ Dave perched his reading glasses on his head and looked up from the book he was reading beside her in bed, ‘I don’t think any of us is qualified to give elephants any kind of care.’

  ‘No, I know that, but this tour I’m looking at of northern Thailand takes in Bangkok, Chiang Rai, Chiang Mai – and includes visits to hilltop temples, a local hill-tribe village, plus an elephant care centre.’

  Dave continued to look at her and now she suspected that the debate they’d been having for the last three weeks was about to break out again.

  ‘Look, Tess, is this really a good idea?’ He was using his most kind and sympathetic tone, as if she was one of his pupils who had made a mistake, but that was okay, because he was here to help her now, ‘I mean… Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia… these places are so far away…’

  ‘That’s the idea, Dave.’

  ‘We’ll be on seventeen-hour flights with stopovers. We’ll have jetlag and maybe deep vein thrombosis… and then when we get there, people always get food poisoning, amoebic dysentery, tape worms, mugged and all kinds of disasters when they travel to countries like this. I mean, it just doesn’t sound relaxing at all. Don’t you want to unwind? To really relax?’

  ‘I want to travel,’ she countered, ‘I’ve never had the chance to go travelling and I’m planning to book all kinds of relaxing things in between the travel and the sightseeing. Look at the website for this eco spa…’

  Tess turned her laptop screen to face him, so he could see the luscious blue and bright green images from this particular corner of paradise as she read aloud from the spa’s website: ‘Swim in the freshwater pools, heated to different therapeutic temperatures; unwind in our scented flower gardens as you enjoy our range of creative and relaxing treatments.’

  ‘Oh God,’ Dave eye-rolled, ‘but that’s probably the kind of spa where they only serve you a slice of watermelon every other day, so that you can lose the two stone required to make you think it was worth the money.’

  ‘Dave? Would I take you somewhere that only served watermelon?’ she asked. ‘We all know you’d be absolutely miserable!’

  But really, she thought as she turned back to her screen and gave a furtive eye roll of her own, a week of watermelon-based meals would probably be a great idea for Dave. His middle-age spread was spreading so rapidly that even his pyjama trousers were starting to look stretched.

  ‘And what about the cost?’ he protested, ‘I mean, I know you’re getting paid for the break and I know you’re expecting a good bonus, but we have Natalie at university; we want to give Alex some money to get a place of his own, and we’d also like to retire in the not-too-distant future, so maybe we shouldn’t be blowing thousands and thousands of pounds on a six-week holiday. Six weeks! My whole summer… I just don’t know if that’s how I want to spend it. You know I always want to do some…’

  ‘Painting,’ she snapped, ‘Yes, I know, Dave.’ He had now opened a long and festering wound and she was going to have to point out a few home truths: ‘In the run up to every single summer holidays, you buy paint, you buy canvasses, you buy new brushes and then somehow, every year, the entire holiday goes past and you don’t even paint one single sodding thing.’

  It was a low blow. She knew it would upset him, but he was upsetting her.

  Yes, of course it was expensive. But wasn’t she allowed to spend her money on what she wanted? And she wanted a six-week adventure, a wonderful family holiday… the holiday of a lifetime. She wanted to see Hoh Chi Min City, in all its frantic glory, then cruise the Mekong Delta, and marvel at its floating markets. She wanted to go to Phnom Penh in Cambodia. Siem Reap and Angkor Wat – the largest temple in the world – were on her list of glorious destinations. She wanted to stand in front of Angkor Wat, and drink in the sight of ancient tree roots draped over even more ancient buildings.

  And she wanted to do all of this with her family standing by her side. She was paying, so why shouldn’t she make this happen? Why couldn’t they all get excited about it? She hadn’t felt so excited about anything for a long time.

  Was it really too much to ask her husband of twenty-three years to show some enthusiasm? To be all for it, instead of doing his best to convince her not to do it?

  ‘You have no idea how much the children always got in the way in the summer…’ was Dave’s excuse on the painting front.

  ‘The children? In your way? Natalie is nineteen. She spent most of last summer in the US,’ Tess couldn’t help pointing out.

  ‘Yes, but you don’t know about the creative process…’ he protested, ‘you’ve got to have headspace… you’ve got to…’

  ‘If you’d really wanted to paint in the summer holidays, you would have found the time,’ she contradicted him. And she knew he would find this hurtful, but really, what she was saying was true. He couldn’t keep pretending he was some sort of stifled genius who would flourish just as soon as he had the right amount of time… whatever that was. He was an art teacher at a great school who liked to spend the summer holidays lolling around in the garden then cooking a nice dinner. He was definitely not the creative cool kid she’d married all those years ago, when he had plans to… oh, what did all that matter? They were here now in their lovely house in the English countryside, a teacher and an accountant with two really great kids. What did it matter about youthful plans and dreams? That was all another lifetime ago.

  ‘I think Natalie and Alex will love the idea of this holiday,’ she said, to get the conversation back on track.

  ‘What I want to suggest is three weeks without them, three weeks when it’s just us on this holiday,’ she glanced at her husband, ‘and then they come out and join us for three weeks. I thought three weeks of just the two of us… might be quite good for us,’ she added.

  But Dave wasn’t going to be drawn into a boggy discussion about ‘the state of us’ just before bedtime. He gave her a curt smile and then turned back to his book… historical crime fiction would be her guess, one of his favourite genres: ‘Foxy Miss Scarlett in the stately home library with the antique silver-plated candlestick’.

  ‘What about the house?’ he asked, ‘Six weeks is a long time to leave the house empty.’

  And that was true… maybe their cleaner could come in once a week to check on it… maybe a neighbour, too. Tess hadn’t solved this problem yet.

  ‘Let’s talk about this tomorrow,’ Dave said.

  ‘Fine.’

  On a break at work earlier in the day, she’d followed a link and wasted three minutes and forty-five seconds of her life watching an earnest anthropology professor rubbing a wooden stick into a notch on a wooden board in order to finally, after long and painful effort, create a tiny spark that smouldered in the dried grass and bark chips he’d prepared. It had made her think of the state of her marriage. A great deal of effort for very little spark or flame.


  She and Dave were very fond of one another; they got along; they generally agreed on things; they ran their home and their family and their lives well together. But she was beginning to seriously wonder if that was enough. They’d been together for twenty-three years, and the last five, maybe even six years had been very testing. The teenage years – the rows with the teenagers, the rows about the teenagers – and the sudden death of Dave’s mother just two years after his father’s death. It had all been very turbulent.

  They’d had too many arguments, far too little couple time, and now they were in this holding pattern of generally getting along well – okay, when they weren’t annoying the heck out of each other – in their groove, quite comfortable, with the odd prickly argument, but Tess found herself wondering: where did the passion go? The fun? What were she and Dave really looking forward to now?

  These thoughts bothered her a lot. But infuriatingly, they didn’t seem to bother Dave at all. Now that the children had left home, it was as if he couldn’t wait to be retired and snoozing on the sofa in his slippers. Retirement, for God’s sake? She wasn’t even fifty yet!

  Several times a day, Tess quoted to herself the opening line of the Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem read out at their wedding, but she replaced ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways’, with ‘How do you annoy me? Let me count the ways.’

  Like a room last decorated over twenty years ago, or an untended garden, their relationship desperately needed concerted attention. But neither of them wanted to make the time or the effort to do it.