A Family Man

by Amanda Brookfield

  ‘Look, do feel free to call me about absolutely anything, won’t you?’ she urged, feeling after twenty minutes of polite, if rather strained, chitchat that it was time for her to go. ‘I’ve got loads of time this week. It would be a pleasure to help out, it really would.’

  ‘That’s kind, but I’m sure there’ll be no need.’

  ‘And any problems with …’ Louise lowered her voice, gesturing with her thumb at the doorway through to the kitchen, where Josie was working up a lather of froth and bubbles at the sink, jigging her skinny hips in time to whatever was pulsing through her headset.

  ‘Josie? Unlikely to be any trouble there. The girl’s a treasure.’ ‘Is she? Oh, good,’ murmured Louise, marvelling at such blanket loyalty for so spiky a teenager and privately attributing it to the fact that desperate situations called for desperate remedies.

  Matt, in his present circumstances, had to make do with what he could get, she reminded herself.

  ‘There’s my number anyway,’ she added sweetly, tearing off a piece of paper from the handy pad she kept in her bag, ‘just in case.’

  It wasn’t until trying to buy a choc-ice at the cinema that Louise realised that her purse was not in her handbag. Since the tickets were prepaid and she had her credit cards, it was not a major crisis. Anthony, as usual, had wads of cash in his wallet, which he used not only for confectionery but for dinner and paying the NCP carpark afterwards. It was bound to be at home, he assured her, even after she had gone into some detail about her visit to the Websters, focusing particularly on the mess the place had been in and the sly unpleasantness of the girl.

  ‘But it wouldn’t make any sense for her to steal it, now, would it?

  She’d lose her job.’

  ‘Only if she was found out.’

  ‘Really, darling, it seems very unlikely all the same. I bet you it’s on the kitchen table, or in your other bag, the brown one you used last night.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Louise closed her mouth round the word, disappointed that Anthony did not share her suspicions, that he should choose to side with a surly teenager whom he had never met, rather than with his own wife.

  21

  It was well past three o’clock in the morning when they finally tumbled out into the street, the heat from their breath and skin steaming at the touch of the cold air. It was snowing. Not the wet, uncertain flakes which Matt associated with England, but huge, tufty, substantial things that held their shape as they fell, and packed together after they had landed, converting the drab dirt of the pavement to a soft carpet that squeaked underfoot. Looking up, Matt saw that the patch of yellowy sky which had left him feeling so buried that afternoon had been converted into a star-prinked tableau, an opening rather than a closing, a telescope to the universe. With the snow swirling about them, even the dullest of the skyscrapers had taken on a fairytale prettiness, contributing, as much as alcohol already had, to Matt’s sense of wellbeing and bonhomie. With Graham accompanying him to the theatre, it had felt like old times, only better for being so exceptional, so needed. Afterwards, Graham had insisted not only on a three-course dinner, but a visit to a cramped, seedy nightclub, where they drank quantities of bottled beer, served by semi-naked women on rollerblades. Matt hadn’t been anywhere like it since his stag night, when Graham and a couple of other friends of the time had rounded off celebrations by bundling him into a Soho bar where women in stilettos and thongs simulated sex with metal poles. Kath, out the same night with some girlfriends for a markedly unriotous meal in a Thai restaurant, had sulked for days afterwards, muttering about sexual stereotypes and the inability of men to develop controlled relationships either with pints of beer or their penises. Sincere protestations from Matt that what little he could recall of the evening had involved no erotic pleasure at all fell on deaf ears.

  On this occasion Matt enjoyed himself enormously, not because of the waitresses, whom he found over-made-up and generally unalluring, but because of being able to lose himself in the deafening anonymity of it all. The mesmeric pulse of the music, so powerful that it made the tables shake, and the intermittent sweep of the disjointing strobe lights, facilitated the sense – growing ever since his arrival – that he was being taken out of himself, that the burdens of everyday life were no longer his. As the evening wore on he gave up the effort of trying to say anything intelligible to anybody and instead enjoyed the spectacle of Graham horsing around on the dance-floor, partnering chairs and imaginary companions, oblivious to any irritation or amusement he was causing in the process.

  Apart from a low spot during the latter stages of their meal, all traces of jet-lag had magically disappeared. Striding along the pavement now, with Graham playing some sort of hopscotch game beside him, and the taste of the snow on his tongue, Matt felt widely, vividly awake, as if he could never be tired again.

  ‘Taxi!’ Graham hopped to the edge of the pavement, waving both hands. The driver slowed before getting a better look at his prospective clients and accelerating away again. ‘Arsehole —’

  ‘But it’s nice to walk – let’s walk.’

  ‘I’m hopping.’

  ‘Okay, you hop, then.’

  ‘Ministry of silly walks, remember?’ Graham flapped his arms and bounced on up the pavement, echoing choreographic feats which had caused a near-riot on the dance-floor.

  ‘You drove that girl away,’ remarked Matt, prompted by a sudden vivid snapshot of a woman with freckled skin and big breasts who had sat at their table for a while, taking long, suggestive swigs from Graham’s bottle of beer. ‘She liked you,’ he added, hurrying to catch Graham up, the smooth soles of his shoes slipping hopelessly on the snowy ground.

  ‘She liked you, only you were too dumb to notice it, as per bloody usual.’

  ‘Crap.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’ Graham had abandoned his hopping and was now walking backwards in front of Matt, taking huge strides and sticking his arms out for balance. ‘Has there been anyone, then – since Kath?’ Seeing the flicker of hesitation in Matt’s expression, he punched the air with his fist. ‘Yes – I knew it.’

  ‘You don’t know anything,’ exclaimed Matt, annoyed, even through the fug of inebriation, at his friend’s exuberance. ‘It’s not that simple … I mean, I don’t know what – or if —’

  ‘How many times?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Bed. The new woman. How many times?’

  ‘Just once.’ Even though it was cold and they were drunk, Matt could feel himself flushing. Years of banter and camaraderie had not often led down such acutely personal avenues, not even during the days before Kath, when drunken girlfriend talk had been more frequent and less restrained.

  Graham stopped walking backwards and waited until Matt drew level. ‘The question is, was it good?’ he whispered, slurring the words and clumsily swinging one arm across Matt’s shoulder. Aware that without the buffer of alcohol he might have felt inclined to tell Graham to fuck off and mind his own business, Matt instead found himself trying to answer the question honestly. ‘Yes. But weird too … like I wasn’t given much choice in the matter.’

  Graham giggled, tightening his grip on Matt’s shoulder. ‘All the better. Go for it, that’s what I say. You are single, pal – might as well get used to it. Women these days hold the reins more – know what they want and so on.’

  They had at last reached the door of his block, and Graham was involved in a fumbling hunt for his keys, rocking between the balls of his feet and his heels from the strain of concentration. Matt, in contrast, felt greatly sobered and suddenly very cold. It was still snowing hard. His feet were wet, he realised, curling his toes inside his socks, and staring morosely at the worn leather of his shoes, caked white on every side.

  ‘What about your love life?’ he countered, feeling that in terms of intimate revelations a certain redressing of the balance was called for. ‘Who am I depriving tonight?’

  Having successfully extracted his keys from a tangle with his handkerchief, Grah
am stared at them, looking suddenly rather solemn. ‘No one. The fact is, I’ve changed, old boy … bit of a new leaf.’

  On getting through the door, he staggered so badly that Matt hooked an arm round his elbow to steady him for the walk across the polished floor of the main hall. In the unforgiving light of the lift he saw that his friend was in a worse state than he had realised: his handsome honey-coloured face had a definite tinge of grey, dew-drops of sweat had burst out along his forehead and upper lip, and his eyelids were so heavy that only half the brilliant blue of his pupils was visible. Outside the door to the flat, Matt had to prop him against the wall in order to prise the keys from his fingers and negotiate the door lock. Since there was no question of tackling the spiral stairs, he made for the sofa instead, staggering and swaying from the effort of preventing Graham sinking to the floor.

  ‘Shoes … there we go.’ Matt slipped off the smart leather loafers, unable to resist a grimace at the decorative tassel, and wedged a cushion under Graham’s neck. Nudged by some dim and distant segment of his sober self, Graham murmured profuse thanks before turning on his side and collapsing into sleep. By the time Matt laid his jacket over him he was the picture of peaceful innocence, smiling to himself in his dreams, his hair golden and unkempt, his knees curled protectively to his chest.

  Knowing from the thickness between his temples and the raw feeling at the back of his throat that the countdown to his own hangover had already begun, Matt fetched a can of Coke from the vast and surprisingly well-stocked fridge before going back for a final check on the sofa. Joshua would already be waking up, he mused with some disbelief, squinting at his watch as he sank back into one of the wide chairs, still feeling not sleepy so much as heavy-limbed. He imagined his father going through the ritually resisted trials of the morning – tracking down clothes, teeth-cleaning, hair- brushing, shoelace-tying. While a part of him missed it terribly, another part felt a flood of fresh gratitude at being so distant. Not just because it was a break, but because it was helping him to see things clearly, to make out some order among the muddle. Three more weeks would see both the arrival of Erica and the departure of his father. His new life as a non- commuting parent could then start in earnest – Josie as his part-time home help, Beth as his girlfriend … There was a future after all, a way through.

  Waves of fatigue engulfed him at last, so fiercely and thoroughly that it took all his remaining strength to get up from the chair and cross the floor to the staircase. Sinking to his hands and knees, he climbed the entire way like an amateur on a rock face, not looking down for fear of the drop on either side.

  22

  The next morning Graham was astonishingly – infuriatingly – bright-eyed and energised. Streaming with chat and plans for the day, he woke Matt with a cup of tea and a glass of pink grapefruit juice. Graham had never suffered from bad hangovers, Matt recalled gloomily, eyeing his friend through narrowed eyes as he hauled himself upright among the pillows, his own head feeling as if someone had spent the night tying all the cranial blood vessels in knots.

  ‘Slept well?’ ‘You clearly did.’

  ‘My sofa’s a very comfortable piece of furniture,’ replied Graham

  smugly. ‘There’s half a box of fresh bagels left if you fancy breakfast, and some coffee in the pot – it’s a thermal job so should keep hot for an hour or so. I’ve got to go into the office for a while – then I thought we could meet at my gym this afternoon, work up a bit of a sweat before tackling this evening’s entertainment. Good fun last night, by the way. Rather you than me having to write about that play, though. It was crap, wasn’t it? Or have I remembered wrong?’

  ‘Refined crap, and I don’t want to go to a gym.’

  ‘Yes you do. You’ll love it. Lots of Lycra and bulging flesh – more entertainment than in a multiplex cinema.’ He pulled on a long grey cashmere coat and flexed his hands into black leather gloves. ‘Help yourself to anything you want, won’t you. The computer doesn’t need a password if you want to use it. See you around three. If you leave the phone for six rings the machine will take it.’

  The walls shuddered from the force with which he slammed the door. In the unforgiving light of morning the flat felt more of a big empty space than a structural marvel. Taking a bagel, some coffee and his laptop, Matt returned to the spacious comfort of his bed and launched into a concentrated effort to compose his review. The play had been based on a bestselling book released the year before, a simple tale of betrayal which had taken the reading population of the world by storm and left publishers marvelling and scratching their heads. The paucity of plot, camouflaged in the original by patches of fine writing, had been ruthlessly exposed on stage, leaving the actors to ham up the dialogue for nuance and hidden meanings. Matt worked slowly, his progress hampered not only by his headache but by a vivid image of Kath reading the book on which the play was based. Eighteen months and a lifetime before, during an early September break to a whitewashed fisherman’s cottage across a road from a pebbled beach in Brittany. After the pressure and general disruption of the Edinburgh Festival Matt had been longing to get away, to be able to enjoy rather than curse the heat wave which had gripped Europe for the previous five weeks. As things turned out, the weather broke almost the moment they rolled off the ferry, bringing not only dense cloud cover but northerly winds which whipped the sea into a frenzy.

  Aged just three and suffering from a bad head cold, Joshua had not responded favourably either to the journey or to the sudden change in his environment. His sleeping patterns deteriorated to such a degree that Kath pulled him into bed between them every night. The beach, to which they tramped determinedly each day in spite of the inclemency of the weather, offered little consolation. Unnerved by the unseasonal wildness of the water, their son had screamed at every suggestion of venturing near it, eventually forcing them to decamp with their belongings back up to the ugly high tideline of dried seaweed and bleached items of rubbish. The book had constituted his wife’s chief line of defence against such trials, Matt remembered, leaving him the task of entertaining Joshua, a challenge managed largely through a steady supply of ice creams and expensive plastic toys from the beach shop. The image of Kath, huddled under beach towels, her expression inscrutable behind the sunglasses which she insisted on wearing in spite of – or maybe to spite – the bubbled grey sky, burned in his mind. Had she loved him then, he wondered? He remained motionless for a few moments, his fingers poised over the keyboard of his laptop, which was half submerged among the padded folds of the duvet. At the time he had been aware only of the obvious obstacles to their happiness – the weather, Josh’s cold, broken nights – never imagining, not wanting to imagine, bigger issues seething underneath. Matt pressed his knuckles into his eyes, wearied by the hold such memories still had over him, wishing he could airbrush them from his mind with the same ease with which Kath had walked out of his life.

  By ten o’clock icy pockets of air seeping across the rafters and up the staircase alerted Matt to the fact that Graham had forgotten to reprogramme the flat’s heating system for daytime occupancy. Pulling on the clothes strewn on the floor next to his bed, his fingers stiff with cold, he set off in search of a dial or control panel by which to remedy the situation. The feature wasn’t due to go to press until the weekend but, because of the time difference, he had only two hours in which to prepare the review. After a failed, cursory search for something resembling an airing cupboard or an under-stair cubby-hole, he gave up and dialled Graham’s office.

  ‘You have reached the voice mail of Graham Hyde. Please leave your message after the tone.’

  ‘It’s me and this place is like the North Pole,’ Matt hissed, pulling his hands deeper into the sleeves of his jumper and staring morosely at the wedges of snow framing the string of windows running along the wall above his head. Too high for a view of anything but the upper levels of other buildings, they looked like a series of framed black-and-white photographs of urban living; no people, only concrete and
blanched sky. ‘If you can spare the time I’d be grateful for some directions as to the whereabouts of the bloody thermostat responsible for heating this place.’

  A few minutes later, while dropping a soggy tea bag into the swing- bin next to the fridge, Matt’s eye was caught by a rectangular inset in the wall, clearly the outline of a small door of perhaps five foot in height. There was no handle and the tiny hinges had been painted the same egg yolk yellow as the walls, but its outline and keyhole were unmistakable. After trying to prise it open with his fingertips, Matt, spurred both by the mounting cold and the approach of his deadline, embarked on a methodical search for the key, finding it at last on top of the fridge, slid between a juice extractor and an espresso machine. A few moments later he was stepping into an enclosed dark space that smelt faintly of gas and paint. A light switch to his left revealed a concrete room of no more than seven feet square, its walls lined with pipes and thick wires. In the near corner were propped a pair of skis, poles and boots. Opposite them, next to a cylindrical water tank, sat what was obviously a boiler. After a few minutes’ study of his options, Matt pressed a red switch to its on position and was immediately rewarded by a promising whir of ignition. He was already stepping back towards the doorway when his eye was caught by a silvery shimmer in the shadow along the far wall. Closer inspection revealed a portable rail of clothing, covered by a dark blanket. The shimmer of silver turned out to belong to a silky cocktail dress, with a sequinned neckline and shoulder straps. Alongside it hung several other expensive-looking items of female evening wear and a selection of skirts and dresses. Slung across the lower section of the rail were three or four pairs of evening shoes, dangling rather forlornly by their heels, their shiny straps glinting in the dim light.