Girl on the Landing

by Paul Torday

  As soon as we could, without being too obviously in a hurry, we stood up to go. Michael patted Jimmy briefly on the shoulder and murmured his thanks. I bent down and kissed him on the cheek, not ideal when the person you are kissing is still eating a chocolate profiterole.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ I said.

  ‘It was my pleasure,’ said Jimmy, beaming. As we left the marquee, and all its dreary litter of unwashed glasses, overturned chairs and empty bottles, we heard a noise behind us. It was our host standing up.

  ‘I think it goes to show how important it is for us English to stick together,’ he shouted. ‘I mean us British, Michael. A night like last night ... the flower of English society ... the membership of Grouchers ...’

  His voice trailed away as Michael and I left the tent.

  10

  He Shot out into the Street and Disappeared

  Monday was supposed to be a busy day. I was meant to be organising a photo shoot of the interior of a new block of flats in Belgravia: five million pounds for a two-bedroom flat. In between phone calls I kept thinking about last weekend. Michael - Mikey - had talked to me more openly in the brief conversation we had held on Sunday morning than he had in the whole of our marriage. Yet, open as he had been, I did not feel he was telling me everything. For every question he answered, more questions were raised. For example, what did he mean by ‘behavioural problems’? And if the drug he had been taking had got rid of them, or suppressed them, what would happen now that he was not taking it any longer?

  On the evidence so far, Mikey without Serendipozan was infinitely more fun, more loving and more interesting to be with than Michael with Serendipozan had been for the entirety of our marriage. The changes in him had been almost abrupt, taking place over days rather than weeks, as far as I could tell, and suddenly our life together was different. The sex was different, as well; very different. In the past, when we went away together, the main activity behind the bedroom door had been Michael complaining that there was no trouser press, or shoe trees, or that there was the wrong sort of coat hanger in the wardrobe. On Saturday night - perhaps the effect of being in a strange bedroom, although a very comfortable one - I had felt very randy, and had drawn Michael towards me as soon as he climbed into bed. He too seemed to want to make up for years of relatively celibate existence, and as he entered me I saw on his face a smile that was part love, part triumph. The memory warmed me now, and with it came another thought.

  For years I had been on the pill, both before and after our marriage. It had been a deliberate choice, although not one Michael and I had ever discussed. Then, for a whole lot of reasons, I had stopped taking it. There didn’t seem to be any point: Michael and I made love together in recent years with an infrequency that was approaching extinction. Now all that had changed, and the idea struck me: what if I became pregnant? For some reason, the possibility no longer filled me with dread.

  I realised I had to talk to someone. There was too much that was new in my life, too many new ideas and experiences going round and round. I gave up on the photo-shoot planning for a bit, and on an impulse I rang Mary Robinson and asked whether she could have lunch with me. I knew Mary wouldn’t be busy, although she made a production out of looking in her diary and muttering about book club lunches and bridge classes. In the end I bullied her a little, and we agreed to meet at one o’clock in a small restaurant off Walton Street.

  Mary was puzzled as to why I had made her cancel something in order to see me. After all, it was only two weeks since we had all been together in Scotland. When we had looked longingly at the menu and then both ordered salad and mineral water instead of the white wine and the veal escalope, or Thai grilled chicken, that we really wanted to order, I said, ‘Mary, how did you think Michael was when we were all up at Caorrun?’

  Mary looked startled for a moment and then said, ‘I don’t know: about the same. No, perhaps there was something: he seemed a bit more animated than usual.’

  ‘That sounds awful.’

  Mary blushed. She was a shy, straightforward sort of girl I had been at school with, and had met again a few years later, when she unexpectedly asked me to her wedding. Since then we had been firm friends.

  ‘Well, you know what I mean. Michael’s always been a quiet sort. He did get quite excited that evening when David Martin was teasing him. Or was David teasing Peter? I don’t remember, but Michael practically jumped down his throat at one point. Anyway, he put David in his place, which has to be a good thing.’

  ‘Mmm,’ I said. There was a silence while Mary tried to decide whether she had just called my husband a crashing bore, and if so, what she ought to do about it.

  ‘Mary,’ I said. ‘You must have told me, but how did you meet Michael? Was he your friend first, or Peter’s?’

  ‘Oh, Peter met him before we became engaged,’ said Mary. ‘Aren’t we going to have a glass of wine with our lunch? Do let’s.’

  This was an obvious device to change the subject. I waited until the wine had been ordered and poured, and then returned to the attack.

  ‘I mean, were they at school or university together? I’d always imagined it was something like that but for some reason, I’ve never asked Michael about it.’

  Mary fiddled with her fork.

  ‘No, they weren’t at school together.’

  ‘So where did they meet?’

  Mary looked up at me unhappily. I could see she didn’t want to answer.

  ‘Where?’ I asked again. ‘I mean, they weren’t doing time together, were they? Your husband’s the most respectable man in London. What’s the big secret?’

  ‘It isn’t something Peter likes to talk about,’ said Mary, after a moment. ‘So of course, I don’t. But you don’t know either, which means Michael has never told you ...’

  I just looked at her. I knew I could make Mary talk, and I did.

  ‘Peter used to suffer from some sort of depression. Bipolar disorder was what the specialist called it. Peter used to have to attend a clinic, and before that he was briefly in hospital. He met Michael when they were both outpatients.’

  Mary stopped speaking and looked at me. A huge blush suffused my face. I bit my lip to stop it trembling. My oldest friend had just told me that my husband and his oldest friend had met in a mental hospital, and I hadn’t even known. Michael had spoken about taking pills for some sort of ‘behavioural problems’; not about being in an institution. Mary, for whom kindness was as instinctive as breathing, put her hand out and covered mine as it lay on the table.

  ‘You really didn’t know, did you?’

  ‘I feel so ashamed. I should have known,’ I said.

  ‘There’s nothing to be ashamed of,’ Mary replied. ‘I told you, Peter doesn’t like talking about it, either. Men are like that. They think mental illness can be cured with cold baths and long runs. They’re ashamed when they shouldn’t be. They think it’s a black mark - that people will stop sending them briefs, or avoid them at the club, if they aren’t “normal”.’

  She paused and then added, ‘Stephen used to say that there is no such thing as normal, anyway. Not when it comes to the brain.’

  ‘Who’s Stephen?’

  ‘Stephen Gunnerton. He’s a psychiatrist, the consultant that Peter’s doctor referred him to. He really helped Peter.’

  That name again: I had heard Michael mention it last weekend, and had seen it written, again and again, on a sheet of paper in our sitting room.

  Our salads arrived and the conversation stopped for a moment. Then I asked, ‘Did this psychiatrist cure Peter?’

  ‘Oh, absolutely,’ she said. ‘He’s on some medication, but there are virtually no side effects, and he’s miles better. He’s been fine for years. Stephen must have helped Michael too, because Peter says Michael was very strange when he first met him. Now he’s steady as a rock.’

  We finished our lunch talking of other things, and then I went back to the office.

  All that afternoon, and on the way
home, I wondered what to do with the information Mary had given me. My first instinct was to ask Mikey to tell me more about it, but somehow my nerve failed me - darling, how come you never mentioned you used to be in a mental hospital? What sort of ‘behavioural problems’ did they put you in there for? I couldn’t see myself saying that, or anything like it. My second instinct was to find out more. How could I not? If I just forgot about it I would know that there was always going to be a part of my husband that was secret from me, part of the story that had not yet been told. For ten years I had bottled up my own emotions and concentrated on having what I had once called a ‘workable’ marriage. What vast cynicism had welled up within me, when I had used those words, what inexcusable ignorance of life? I might as well put a line under those last ten years of marriage, because now, after the last few days, everything had changed. We either had to go forward, or we had to go back. We couldn’t just stay as we were.

  Michael wasn’t in when I got home, which was unusual. I went into our bedroom and changed, then into the bathroom. Something prompted me to look in the medicine cupboard as I stood in front of the mirror, brushing my hair.

  I found the packet almost immediately, tucked under a box of Nurofen. I remembered how it had fallen out of the cupboard when I was rummaging in it, just before I went up to Caorrun not quite three weeks before. Bathroom cupboards are full of mysterious bottles and packets: medicines picked up on holidays; pills prescribed for past ailments, imagined or real, unfinished and never thrown out; endless vitamin supplements and fish oils containing the secrets of eternal youth. At the time, I had been in a rush, but now I wanted another look. The label was faded, but I could make out the words ‘Bridge of Gala Health Centre’. So our nice local GP at Caorrun, Alex Grant, had actually been prescribing the Serendipozan for Michael. I wondered how long it would be before he noticed Michael had not renewed his prescription. Perhaps he just sent them to Michael once a month without being asked.

  I caught a movement in the mirror and jumped. Mikey was standing behind me.

  ‘You gave me a shock,’ I said. ‘I didn’t hear you come in. Where have you been?’

  He looked at me - holding the packet of Serendipozan - and raised an eyebrow. I said nothing for a moment, and then, ‘I was thinking of having a chuck-out. There’s so much rubbish in these cupboards. Are you sure you don’t want these any more?’

  ‘I’m quite sure,’ he said, taking the packet from my hand. He threw it in the waste bin beneath the basin. ‘I’ve been out walking Rupert,’ he added. ‘Poor old boy looked rather bored. He’ll sleep well tonight. We’ve been all the way to Hyde Park and back.’

  ‘It must have taken you ages.’

  ‘It did.’

  Michael looked as if he, too, had benefited from the exercise. His cheeks had more colour than was usual and his hair was windswept, although it had been quite calm and windless when I came home. He put his arms around me in an embrace, then released me.

  ‘I thought we might go to Rome this weekend. Can you get off work early on Friday; and Monday morning too? I hope so - I’ve looked on the internet and found a special offer at a very good hotel.’

  I felt breathless.

  ‘Rome? On Friday? This is very sudden. What about Rupert?’

  ‘I’ve already arranged for Norma to come in and look after him.’

  Norma was a neighbour, short of cash, who did flat-sitting and dog-walking for us from time to time.

  ‘But Rome?’ I knew I could get the time off: it would just be a matter of a few late evenings to make it up. That was the one good thing about my increasingly ghastly job.

  ‘What made you decide to go to Rome?’

  Michael looked at me and said, ‘Don’t you like surprises? I do.’

  I remember our honeymoon. The official one, ten years ago, had consisted of a few damp days in a hotel in Ireland. It was by a links course and our days were punctuated by golf, which I could barely play, bad food, and sitting around in communal sitting rooms in a cheerless hotel, surrounded by perfect strangers and reading back issues of Hello! Magazine.

  What I remembered most about our honeymoon night was the way Michael carefully unpacked his pyjamas and laid them out on his pillow. Then he unpacked a pair of slippers and put them on the carpet at precise right angles to the bed. Pyjamas, slippers? Where was the wild passion in pyjamas and slippers? The answer was: nowhere. We had been sleeping together for a couple of months, so there was no novelty to look forward to, except that now we were legal, as people used to say. Even so, I suppose I had been expecting at least some pretence of romance. I lay expectantly in bed while Michael brushed his teeth in the bathroom. Then I felt a sticky feeling against my legs and realised I had got into bed with the complimentary chocolate mint, which had slipped off the pillow without my noticing it and was now dissolving into a happy molten mass. Anyone but Michael would have roared with laughter at this. What Michael did was to ring Housekeeping and force them to come upstairs and remake the bed while we stood gazing blankly at each other wrapped in the hotel’s towelling dressing gowns. Believe me, melted chocolate mints are a very effective passion-killer.

  Those brief days in Rome were everything that first honeymoon should have been, and wasn’t. We took the train out to Stansted at a very early hour, but it didn’t matter, because we were going on holiday together: not golfing, not fishing, not stifling yawns trying to make conversation with some ghastly Grouchers wife.

  The plane was on time, the luggage was not lost, there were no queues for taxis and the taxi driver was cheerful, the sky was blue and clear. As we drove into Rome from Ciampino airport, I thought, this could be what the rest of my life is going to be like: doing things together, having fun with Mikey. I leaned against him and pressed his arm.

  We stayed in the Hassler, at the top of the Spanish Steps. Mikey had booked a suite, not just a room, and it contained a sitting room with a balcony, and a bathroom with a marble floor and gold tap fittings. Some special offer. We unpacked, then went down and sat on the terrace and stared out across the city, drinking a glass of wine. Next we wandered down the Spanish Steps, and along some side streets until we found a restaurant that suited our mood. After lunch, we walked and walked for miles, arriving back at the hotel footsore and happy. I lay and dozed on the bed until it was time to shower and get changed for dinner.

  And that was how we spent our time in Rome, brief though it was. It seemed an endless daze of wine, and food, and happiness. We did all the sights, or as many as we could manage: the Colosseum, the Pantheon, St Peter’s. We shopped in the Via Condotti, the Via Corso, the Via This and the Via That. Mikey bought me an eternity ring in a little jeweller’s shop: a thick gold band studded with white diamonds and aquamarines. Every few minutes, it seemed, we stopped in a caf’: to take espresso, wine, or ice cream, regardless of the time of day, regardless of whether we had just lunched or dined. And how we lunched and dined: we ate our heads off, and then felt hungry immediately afterwards. When we weren’t walking, we were in our room at the hotel, and Mikey made love to me: before breakfast, and in the golden hour before the first drink of the evening.

  My mother, after her third or fourth glass of wine, had confided in me a few years earlier: ‘Never allow a man to make love to you in the morning: their breath is disgusting, and you get a rash from their bristles. It’s even worse at night: they roll off you and start to snore before you have a chance to say a word. The time to make love, darling, is what the French call de cinq à sept, a decent interval after lunch and with time to spare before going out for the evening. Then you can make it all as pretty and romantic as you like, and there’s still time for a long bath and a stiff drink before dinner.’

  I remember blushing to the roots of my hair; I was not married then, hardly even launched into the world of men, and this information, the only guidance my mother ever gave me about my sex life, seemed quite a lot to cope with at the time.

  With Mikey, this advice now seemed redund
ant. Any time of day seemed like a good time for him to take me to bed, and I agreed. Our closeness wasn’t just physical: we talked together as we had never talked before.

  ‘What were you like as a child, really?’ I asked, as we sat on the roof terrace on our last evening, watching the sky turn violet. ‘Mrs McLeish obviously adored you but she’s far too loyal to say a word out of place.’

  Mikey said, ‘I was a strange little boy, I suppose. I was left on my own a lot. My parents often went racing in the spring and summer, and then they would go abroad for the winter. They never took me abroad. We used to go to North Berwick, sometimes, but that was when I was very little.’