Copycat

by Gillian White

  ‘But how wrong you’d be if you believed that,’ I told her firmly.

  ‘Especially when it’s cold out here. But that’s what other people’s lives looked like to me then. When I saw couples holding hands, some with babies in prams… and in the shops when I watched busy women filling their trolleys and rushing off to somewhere special, while I shopped for just Stella and me – liver, cabbage, tinned rice pudding – and I knew my trolley was missing something, something I wanted so much for myself.’

  ‘I know what you mean. We’ve all felt like that…’

  ‘No, Martha! You haven’t! Not like me!’

  There was no point in interrupting, even to help her along. Jennie was determined to hold centre stage and from there she stumbled and blundered on, although her words were so strained, her heart was so pained for her own sake that I wished she would stop, whatever the truth.

  ‘I was twenty-one,’ she said, ‘and had never had a boyfriend. When I’d finished work, I’d get something for tea and go straight home to cook it. Then when Stella was watching her soaps I’d say I was going out for a walk, just to get out of that flat for a while and spend some time on my own. She didn’t like it. But walking the streets alone in the evenings – and I even sat down in pubs made me feel more lonely and cut off from the world. The only people who talked to me were dirty old men or yobs who would shout unkind remarks.’

  I could hardly bear to hear this. That she’d been lonely I could easily believe. ‘What about the cinema, with someone from work?’

  ‘I didn’t get on with the girls at the bank. It was cliquey. They all had social lives, I knew that, it was all they talked about. They were friendly but we had nothing in common.’

  ‘Like that Back To Work course at the tech?’

  ‘I don’t seem to get on well with women.’

  ‘Well, that’s no tragedy…’

  ‘Don’t patronize me!’

  ‘Damn you, I’m not. I’m agreeing.’

  ‘So I picked up my first punter by accident. I didn’t know he was looking for sex. He pulled over, really chatty and nice, not bad looking, though his face was a bit pitted. He bought me a drink and for half an hour I could pretend I had a lover, too. Did I want to go for a ride in his car? God, I was so naive! Incredible, when I look back, but I went for fear of upsetting him – what if he wanted to see me again?’

  ‘The bastard.’

  ‘No, he was kind, he was patient. It was only when he drove me back and gave me a twenty-pound note that I realized what it had been about; I realized that I had a new name. And he wasn’t going to ask me out, not ever.’

  ‘But you, a virgin, and so prissy, you must have been horrified to do that with him after only half an hour. You’re so disgusted by bodily functions…’

  ‘It was vile. I’d never seen a man’s prick before, only children’s on beaches. I couldn’t believe the size of the thing, and the colour, all veins and wrinkles. I was so glad I didn’t have one. I closed my eyes and I thought: if this is what I must do to keep from feeling so lonely, then I’ll do it, I don’t care.’

  This was just too fantastic, but something about how she told it rang true. And yet I couldn’t be certain this wasn’t one of her games, a bid for sympathy or a cry for attention. ‘Poor you. No wonder you’re so anti-sex – having used your body for barter. Poor you, poor Graham.’

  She didn’t even hear me. Jennie’s wounds went deep, much deeper than I’d realized. She was still reliving the whole ghastly mess while I crept round icy roundabouts, turned on the wipers to clear the sleet and wondered if my lights should be on. The people we passed were rubbing their hands and turning their coat collars up. If only we could get home. If only we could have this bizarre conversation in front of a fire with a bottle of wine. I couldn’t give the responses she needed with my mind on so many other things.

  ‘We were like computer parts,’ Jennie said, ‘both products of sterile environments. He’d led much the same sort of life, huddled round Coronation Street with Howard and Ruth, joining in with their social life… garden centres… church fetes… coffee mornings. A full-grown man, and that was his life. Howard couldn’t drive, you see, so Graham bought the Metro. He even drove his father to work rather than let him go by bus.’

  ‘No wonder he’s so shy,’ I said.

  ‘We both were. That was the trouble. We didn’t know how to make friends, we’d never acquired the knack.’

  I gave her a quick look of affection. ‘Oh Jennie, you’re both so much better now!’

  She shrugged her shoulders. She gave a sigh. ‘That’s because we’re together. Finding each other was a miracle, we needed each other so badly. But one thing we agreed on and that was we’d never have sex till we married. I hated it and he was ashamed that his first experiences had been paid for. I didn’t want him to see me as some slag who did it for money.’

  ‘Well, no. Definitely not.’ Sod it, sod it. Why did nothing go smoothly for Jennie like it did for most other people? She was always being cheated or disappointed or misunderstood.

  ‘So keeping sex for Friday nights seemed like a sensible thing to do.’

  ‘It never got any easier?’

  ‘It’s something we don’t talk about. We don’t want to bring that old stuff back.’ She paused for a while, eyes still tightly closed. The sleet was coming down more thickly – thank God, we were almost home. I could have murdered a brandy. Jennie had finally managed to convince me and I knew no-one more cynical than me. ‘If Graham knew I’d told you, he would kill me.’

  ‘You don’t have to worry about that.’

  ‘But you went and told Tina Gallagher about what happened between us that day.’

  This sudden statement was a slap in the face. It wasn’t expected. I was guilty as hell and there was a moment’s embarrassed silence. ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I don’t know for certain. I guessed it.’

  What did it matter how Jennie knew, it was my betrayal that I had to put right. ‘Tina caught me at a terrible time,’ I told her, at my most coaxing. ‘And I’m sorry I told her, I regret it now. I don’t normally go around shooting my mouth off over tricky situations, but that was an extreme. You can trust me as far as Graham goes and I’m glad you’re able to talk about it with me. But I think you should have told Mr Singh.’

  She was angry, as if I’d thrown back a precious gift, or suggested she give it to somebody else. ‘Why would I tell Singh? What good would that do?’

  ‘It could be that these awful experiences triggered off your fixation on me.’

  ‘So if I’d confided in Singh I’d be able to leave this obsession behind?’

  ‘It’s possible, I suppose. Your childhood and all those repercussions, well, they’re not things you can look back and laugh at, are they?’

  At last we drove up to the house. I slumped over the steering wheel, gasping with relief. My neck muscles had seized up like crane chains.

  ‘You hate me now, don’t you?’ cried Jennie.

  Oh no, not that old chestnut. She had returned to her manipulative ways. I sat back in the driving seat, physically and mentally crippled. ‘I’m not even going to answer that.’

  ‘You’re disgusted. Tell me. For Christ’s sake, be honest.’

  ‘Jennie!’ I shouted. ‘If you give me so little credence, it’s hard to know what you see in me. I’m not an insensitive cretin, dammit.’

  ‘I’m sorry, so sorry,’ she said quickly. ‘I’m just so afraid you’ll find me disgusting.’

  I fixed my eye on her fiercely. ‘If we don’t get inside this sodding house, get the bags in and get these boots off in one minute from now, I will never speak to you ever again,’ I yelled. ‘So let’s go. Let’s do it. And, Jennie, I really couldn’t give a toss about what anyone’s been or is likely to be. I see you as you are now, my friend, and I need you. So leave it there, will you, just stop.’

  It was so cold that winter the fire couldn’t warm me.

  TWENTY-
SEVEN

  Jennie

  IT WAS SO COLD that winter the fire couldn’t warm me.

  ‘It never used to be like this,’ said Graham.

  We sat in the hotel dining room overlooking a cheerless grey sea, the colour of the morning porridge that Poppy refused to eat.

  ‘Jennie, it can’t have been like this then, or I’d never have…’

  ‘It must have been something like this,’ I snapped crossly, trying to attract the attention of a sour-faced waitress. ‘They can’t have rebuilt the whole place since the Seventies.’

  ‘It looks the same, it smells the same, but in those days it wasn’t crammed full of crusties.’

  The dining room bristled with walking sticks, electric wheelchairs and tweed, lace-up shoes, and moustaches both male and female. An Agatha Christie haunt of brown Windsor soup, polish and sprouts.

  I tried to be forgiving; Graham meant well, he usually did. Perhaps Sea World would be open today. ‘It must be the time of year, normal people don’t come to Llandudno in March.’

  But this March felt more like January. Arctic winds cut the tops off the waves and hurled them up through the streets of the town and on to the Welsh hillsides which were hidden in sheets of rain. Prepared for some blustery walking, I’d packed the fleeces, boots and anoraks, but nothing kept this weather at bay. It was Graham who had suggested this holiday alone, our first without the Frazers. He had happy memories of this place. ‘Even with Howard and Ruth you could keep well ahead and pretend to be separate, make out you weren’t with them.’

  The Frazers were in the Austrian Tirol for ten days. They’d gone with Emma and Mark as usual, but this time the Harcourts went with them as well. Sadie of the arias, and Crispin, her antique-shop husband, along with their two serious teenage daughters. Sam and Crispin played squash together and they were both expert skiers. This was the first time that Graham and I had not been invited.

  It’d all been explained to me kindly.

  ‘Now I want to talk to you about this, Jennie, because I know how you’re going to feel, and I do understand, whatever you say. But we can’t always have holidays together just because it’s become a ritual…’

  ‘I know that,’ I sobbed, feeling raw and despairing.

  ‘You and Graham don’t ski, but Sam learned when he was little and I used to go every winter from college. Fulpmes has some nursery slopes, but we’re after the more difficult runs. Mark and Emma have been there before and they say it’s perfect for what we want. We reckon we’re all pretty much the same standard and it’s time Scarlett and Lawrence had a go.’

  How could Martha do this to me? It was so plain they didn’t want us. Her mind was made up, probably by Sam, and there was nothing I could do to change it. They had booked the trip before she told me. ‘I always wanted my children to ski,’ I told her bleakly.

  More excuses came tumbling out one after the other. ‘Scarlett and Lawrence will stay with the ski school; the Harcourt girls will be in charge. Now you just listen to me, Jennie: Poppy and Josh would hate that, being left all day with strangers, and you know that as well as I do.’

  ‘So you’re saying that mine couldn’t cope.’

  ‘Damn you, no, that’s not what I mean. You’re so determined to make this an issue. Your kids aren’t like mine, that’s all. Not worse, not better, but different. And that’s nice… that’s nothing to moan about. But I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t enjoy skiing.’

  ‘You might have let us decide about that.’

  ‘And you and Graham would loathe it too, it’s a very sociable night life.’

  ‘How can you say that when we’ve never been?’

  But Martha was determined. Nothing I said could move her. ‘I can say that because I’ve been so often and because I know you both so bloody well. You would not enjoy the skiing and you would hate the way most things are done in groups. Not just groups, Jennie, but lively groups, loud, drunken groups. Imagine the après-ski and the sitting around one huge table. Communal eating, too. Come on, admit it, that’s your worst nightmare.’

  And she even had the nerve to laugh.

  ‘We could book separately and come anyway.’

  ‘Certainly you could. But it would be a complete waste of money and I would not be prepared to give up my holiday to pander to you.’

  ‘This was Sam’s idea,’ I said, ‘wasn’t it?’

  ‘Now you’re being paranoid. Why would Sam take that attitude?’

  I knew the answer to that. ‘Because he can’t stand me, that’s why.’

  ‘Oh, nonsense,’ said Martha crossly.

  At least Sam had had the decency not to invite the Gallaghers. And I wondered how Tina felt, forced to endure ten days without him. I couldn’t give up. I nagged on, I had to. ‘I can stand the idea of Emma and Mark, but why did you ask the Harcourts? You know what Sadie thinks about me, surely you know how that makes me feel?’

  ‘That wasn’t my doing,’ said Martha. ‘Crispin was having a drink with Sam when they caught sight of the brochures. The Harcourts go skiing every year and it seemed a good idea to team up. And I have to admit that Jasmine and Clara will make the holiday easier for me. Built-in babysitters, and Scarlett adores them.’

  ‘But Sadie?’ I couldn’t get over that.

  ‘She’s OK,’ said Martha coolly.

  ‘She’s bitter, she’s precious and she’s a snob,’ I retorted.

  ‘That’s Crispin’s problem, not ours.’

  ‘And she hates me,’ I added. ‘She lies.’

  ‘Now you’re being childish.’

  ‘But I’ll miss you so much.’

  This cut no ice. ‘What’s stopping you and Graham going away? Maybe that’s what you need – time together. I’ve been thinking a lot about what you told me.’

  ‘I wish I hadn’t said anything now.’

  But Martha ignored my sulks and suggested, ‘You’ve never been away on your own as a family, so why not give it a whirl? Who knows, it could help.’

  So we decided we’d go to Wales the day before the Frazers left.

  I wished I hadn’t confided in Martha. I had betrayed Graham in a way that was totally unacceptable, when I knew that even under torture he would never have done that to me.

  At night I tossed and turned, anguishing over my stupidity, hoping to God she’d keep her promise and keep our secret to herself. But what if Martha told Sam? She’d blabbed before, she’d confided in Tina over what had happened between her and me in bed. I could never be totally certain she wouldn’t give away Graham’s and my closest secret.

  What sick urge had made me tell her?

  It was like I wanted to give myself to Martha.

  If only I could take back what I’d said.

  Graham would be destroyed if anyone found out what I had been saying about him. I owed him a damn sight more than this mean little betrayal. And I also owed him a holiday together, without the Frazers, in a place of his choosing.

  Guilt made me agree to Llandudno because of his happy memories of it.

  I was not the only one who suffered because of the Frazers’ unkindness. When we told Poppy about Llandudno, she wore her closed-up, mulish expression. ‘I don’t want to go, it sounds horrid. If I can’t go with Scarlett, I’m not going anywhere,’ she said. And I saw how hurt Graham was by that. Josh was the same. ‘We won’t have fun, we never do.’

  Furiously, I shut them up. ‘Don’t talk like that. If you only knew how spoilt you sound. Of course we have fun as a family…’

  ‘When?’ asked Poppy defiantly. ‘Go on – tell me when?’

  ‘I’m not getting into this, Poppy. If we can’t enjoy ourselves on our own, it’s a pretty poor situation to be in, don’t you think?’

  ‘It’s true,’ she said sulkily, ‘and you know it.’

  What Poppy said was proving to be right. We weren’t having fun, it was purgatory. Ten years married and we’d never been away on our own before. It seemed extraordinary then and I hadn’t realized what it wo
uld mean. We had no formula to follow. We had nobody to provide the ideas, or the laughs. When we were away we followed the others, and the children were happy to go off and play, leaving us adults to do our own thing. This time they hung around our feet all day, moaning and asking impossible questions like ‘When’s it going to stop raining?’ and ‘What do people usually do here?’ and ‘Why is everyone so smelly and old?’

  Perhaps we’d chosen the wrong hotel.

  I hoped that Scarlett and Lawrence, in Austria, were giving Sam and Martha the same kind of hassle but I doubted it – it seemed unlikely. It wasn’t a fair comparison because they’d be busy on the nursery slopes, not bored like my kids. But, reluctantly, I had to admit that if Martha’s children found themselves here in this drab and lifeless place, they would manage to entertain themselves: they’d have made friends somehow, they’d be racing down the pier on skateboards, because that’s just how they were.

  The hotel meals were endless, catering for the toothless who had nothing better to do than eat and were happy to spend two hours at it. I cursed the fact that we’d paid full board.

  Night after night we ended up, silent and staring, in the windowless TV room and the sense of failure was overwhelming. I knew, by the way he looked at me, that Graham felt it, too.

  We were often in bed by nine.

  We tried going to see a film.

  We walked along the gale-torn front.

  In our desperation we even booked for an old-time music hall. ‘Stop moaning, Poppy, it’s a new experience.’ The blue-rinsed performers were all senior citizens, the singing was in northern club style, the costumes tatty, the MC crude, and the one act we might have enjoyed, the ventriloquist, was corny and raving drunk.

  What a flop.

  ‘I wonder what Lawrence is doing now,’ said Josh. And I conjured up a picture of an ecstatically happy child dressed in red with a blue bobble hat, flying over sunny snow on skis.

  We spent a fortune on games and toys so that Poppy and Josh could play in their rooms while Graham and I, next door, lay for hours on our beds and read. I must be honest, I tried to read, but jealousy ate me up over Martha.