by Jane Davis
She goes out with another fellow to make Brendan jealous. Let's call him Rob. Outwardly, she lavishes Rob with affection. He adores her but knows there is nothing behind her kisses. He wonders if he is supposed to buy her love. This time she trades little pieces of herself for an engagement ring. She parades it in front of her friends. Rob comes to realize that she cares more for the diamond than she does for him. One night after drowning his sorrows, he finds himself entangled in the arms of an uncomplicated girl who cares nothing for jewellery. He feels something close to happiness. Michelle feels completely justified when she tells everyone that men are all the same.
She interrupted her flow to ask me, 'Are you getting all this?'
It was only then that I realized I had stopped taking notes and was sitting back in my chair staring at her. I may even have had my mouth open.
'Oh, yes,' I replied, 'I'm definitely getting the picture. Do go on.'
Michelle decides to take revenge on the cheating men of this world by playing them at their own game. She finds a man in a bar with a wedding ring on his finger and asks him to buy her a drink. Several drinks later and she agrees to go 'home' with him and he finds a hotel. She wakes in the morning to find a twenty-pound note on the bedside table. She decides not to share this little story with her friends.
She has had enough. Never again will she be taken advantage of. The next time, she assures herself, she won't give any more of herself away until she walks down the aisle. Unfortunately Michelle is too willing to swap a bit of respectability for love. Once the wedding and the honeymoon are over, she finds that she is expected to give little pieces of herself away every night. And not only in the bedroom, but when she has to play the role of a dutiful wife with her in-laws and his work colleagues. In those moments, she feels lonelier than she ever has before. But she can't admit it, so she retreats to a small place inside herself. Occasionally she looks in the mirror and she can't even recognize the face in front of her. She needs to escape so that she can remember who it is that she used to be.
Unfortunately, her chosen escape route did not take her far enough away from the prying eyes of a well-meaning neighbour. Now her husband is divorcing her. The bastard. She's going to take him to the cleaner's.
For a while, I had been sitting and nodding, waiting for Michelle to give me something – anything – to work with.
'For a man, you're a very good listener,' she told me and I take it from this that she has run out of steam.
'It's my job,' I said, smiling, meaning that I listen by the hour and that her story has cost her the best part of £250. A counsellor might have been cheaper.
'I mean business.' She uncrossed her legs and leaned forward slowly. 'I want him to pay.'
'Just so I'm completely clear, what do you want him to pay for?' I asked, thinking of her insecurities and the other men in her life.
'I want the house, all of the furniture and the car,' she said without hesitating.
'Well, at least we have our starting point. Now, we need to focus on your husband a little more. What sort of a man is he?'
Family law is a depressing line of business. I meet the Michelles of this world more than you might imagine, ceaselessly looking for the next escape route.
But is it any easier if you have loved just the one person? Where can I go looking now that I need to remember who I am? I start by visiting my old haunts. A young family is living in my parents' house. I can't see them, but the front door is ajar. Somewhere inside a mother is swearing at a child, and the child is shouting back. No one has explained the house rules to them: self-control, self-discipline, self-preservation. Never show your emotions, never answer back. Is it better to grow up in a house where people say exactly what they think? Once things have been aired there is no taking them back, no matter how much you try to forget.
I walk past the double glazing and the paved-over front gardens to the place where I expected to find St Winifred's. In its place is a large block of newly built flats with little personality. An advertising board describes them as 'luxurious accommodation sitting within the footprint of a prestigious school'. A second block sits where I used to play marbles in the playground and a third and fourth where the football pitch and playing fields were. I feel as if something else has been stolen from me. Is it possible to mourn the loss of a building as you would a person? Or is it simply that St Winifred's was the shell that I stored so many of my memories in? How is it that my old school was torn apart and I didn't feel a physical wrench?
Taking Betty's advice, I decide to go looking for my Uncle Jonathan again and drive to the beach where I once thought I saw him: the relative I feel closest to and yet never actually met. Sitting on a low wall, I take off my shoes and socks, tuck the socks inside the shoes, tie the laces together and hang them around my neck. I breathe in the air, smelling salt and seaweed and wet dog. It is a bright day with a good breeze taking the edge off the warmth of the sun, and clouds of the large, white, solid-looking type, fit to take the weight of any god of the Old Testament variety. A day to cheer the spirits. The dog-walkers and bucket-and-spade brigade are out in force, if not the sun-seekers. Mucky kids in sun hats and undies run shrieking from the shock of the icy water. Everyone seems to be with someone, doing something, smiling. Excluded from the world of happy families, I bypass them, walking for what seems like miles, until I have left the roads and crowds with their litter and pandemonium behind.
Walking purposefully but without any particular destination, I watch as the sun sets and the waters turn from blue to grey to golden to obsidian black, and then I walk some more. At a place where the sands meet the cliffs, I toy with an abandoned Diet Coke bottle. With no one to see me, I whisper, 'I miss you,' into it, screw the lid on tightly, and set it afloat on the water. Then I cry the sea-salty tears of someone who is not certain what they have to go back to. An overweight, balding, middle-aged man, weeping over the loss of a love that was never his, the loss of a friend he was willing to betray, the loss of a favourite uncle he never actually met, the loss of a father he never told how he felt, the loss of a name he might have grown to live up to, and the loss of a son who might one day have looked up to him. You couldn't do it by daylight.
Chapter Eighteen
There were any number of times when I could have asked Laura out or told her that I loved her before Tom Fellows arrived on the scene, but there always seemed to be something stopping me. We were too young. I was shy. I didn't think that I was good-looking enough. I valued our friendship too much. There would be plenty of time. It wasn't fair on her when I was going to be leaving for university. Besides, she must have known how I felt, surely?
I didn't feel particularly threatened by her other boyfriends once I realized that they would come and go with surprising regularity. A week, two weeks, three at the most. I made an effort to appear to get to know those that lasted slightly longer. I tried my hardest not to appear to be too jealous of them and I secretly enjoyed their jealousy about my relationship with Laura.
'This is Peter Churcher,' she would explain perfectly naturally, and I would offer my hand. This ritual of Laura's became the test of who was going to make the grade as a boyfriend. Some would look cautiously from one of our faces to the other, waiting for her to expand on the introduction. I listed the possibilities in my head.
'Who has loved me for as long as he has known me.'
'Whom I will compare you to.'
'My best friend.'
'Who will accompany us on some of our dates and will make you feel like a lemon.'
'Whom I tell all of my secrets to.'
'Whose shoulder I will cry on when we break up.'
She never provided an explanation. That was part of her test. The handshake was my own test. I have always read handshakes in the way that some people analyse handwriting.
'Call me Pete,' I would say, looking them in the eye.
I almost felt sorry for one or two of the poor confused souls who fell at the first hurdle and a
ctually asked her to explain. To them, she said very graciously, 'I'm sorry. I don't think this is going to work out.'
The first time she did it, I said, 'That wasn't very fair on him.'
'Oh, Pete,' she replied, 'if he's like that now, what would he have been like a week from now when he asks me out and I have to say no because we're already going to the pictures? Anyway, if I said you were a friend, do you think he'd have been happy with that?'
I should have said it then. 'Laura, what if we were more than friends?' Or, 'Seeing as you're short of a date, how about it?'
If they could prove that they didn't look like the jealous type, she would sometimes reward them with, 'You're going to get to know each other quite well.'
Later, when we were alone, she would dig me in the ribs, her head on one side, and ask, 'Well?'
'Well what?' I pretended that I didn't know what she was talking about.
'What do you think of him?'
'Reasonably firm grip. Good eye contact. He's housetrained. Worth a second chance.'
'That's what I thought.' She hugged herself.
'Not sure if he'll pass the Mrs Albury test.' I couldn't resist leaving her with some doubt. Sunday lunch at the Alburys was the ultimate test. Mrs Albury could tell a lot from the way that a man held his knife and fork and what he did with his elbows while he was at the table.
'You don't think so?'
I shrugged. It was always best not to say too much. Not when Mrs Albury wouldn't be able to resist giving her daughter the benefit of her years of experience.
Of course, I was happiest when there was no one else on the scene. People often assumed that Laura and I were together and it must have put many a prospective admirer off. What is the difference between a male friend and a boyfriend anyway? When Laura complained about a boyfriend, it was always me that she compared them to.
'We never find the need to argue, do we? So why do they feel they have to?' she would say, or 'When you buy me an ice cream, you're not thinking about what you're going to get in return.'
Laura liked to look good for herself and lapped up any attention, but she didn't enjoy the feeling of being on display or of being ogled. She liked to be tactile, but she didn't like to be groped or feel that someone had an arm around her as a sign of possession. She liked to receive gifts, but only when there was no expectation of what would be given in return. She liked to be walked home, but only when she was not going to feel pressurized.
'When do you and I talk about words like "compromise"?' She would occasionally get angry. 'When is it necessary for us to sit down and "talk about it"? When do we ever discuss who's going to pay for what?'
Why didn't I ever say, 'We're obviously the perfect couple. Why don't we just go out with each other?'
The thing was we did go out with each other. All of the time. I didn't understand how to move things on to the next level, short of jumping on her or declaring undying love. For every time that I told myself I had nothing to lose, there was a part of me that knew that I had everything to lose. I didn't want to turn into one of those boys she complained about. And she must have known how I felt about her. Surely, the whole point was that we never discussed it?
Ironically, Laura would tell everyone how I broke her heart the day I told her I was going away to university.
'I'll be home every few weeks to see you.'
'It won't be the same. Why can't you just go to college here?'
In a way, I was delighted that my announcement had had such an effect on her. Who doesn't want to hear that they will be missed?
Why didn't I tell her then? I love you. I've always loved you. I'm always going to love you. This is four short years and then I can earn enough money to make us both happy.
'I'll be able to get a better job if I go to one of the top five universities. It's a really good opportunity for me.'
In fact, I have only ever worked for the one practice and they wouldn't have given a hoot which tin-pot college my degree came from. The senior partner knew my uncle Jonathan during the war and that was the only reference I ever needed.
Chapter Nineteen
I recognized Tom Fellows as the threat that he was the second I introduced him to Laura Albury. By that time, our friendship had survived a four-year separation, working together and the odd admission uttered under the influence of alcohol, which she had graciously chosen to ignore. The change in her was so immediate that I felt I had no choice but to walk away. I even thought about leaving town and putting down roots elsewhere. I had not counted on being charmed by Tom Fellows or the fact that, in time, his friendship would become as important to me as Laura's.
In my early twenties I was the embodiment of everything that was sensible and respectable. I had turned into the professional suit-wearer that my parents had hoped I would become.
'Get a few years under your belt, son,' my father advised me, man to man. 'Thirty is the right age for a man to marry. Plenty of time to shop around.'
I was still young enough for thirty to sound old. I enjoyed work to a degree, I even enjoyed playing the part, but was this really all there was to life: university, job, marriage, children?
You have no idea how attractive Tom's lifestyle was to me. There was no rigid timescale to anything he did. Against the background of our nine-to-five working lives, his pressures were relatively few. He was the front man and driving force behind the Spearheads, a rock band who had achieved local success and were aiming for the big time.
'Enjoy the ride, boys,' he would say. 'It's only a matter of time.'
His belief that they were going to break through was so strong that he had us all convinced. He made only a small amount of money from gigging. Whatever else Tom needed, he made by what he casually referred to as 'making himself useful'. There is no doubt that Tom had an almost extraordinary talent for understanding how things work. Cars came second only to music in his life. He invested the little money that he managed to save in clapped-out shells that looked fit for the scrap heap, but he stripped them down, lovingly welded them back together, sprayed and polished them, and sold them on. I watched him perform these miracles in the double garage at the bottom of his mother's garden. He breathed life into them in the same way that he breathed life into a song. Even as a mechanic, he was an artist. Although he paid his way at home with the vehicle-restoration work, he could never really charge enough to represent the hours that he put in, so he also took on extra work. He gained himself a reputation as someone who could be trusted to do a good job, whether it was car repairs, gardening or small building jobs. When you weren't sure whom to call, you called Tom. If he had been aware of his own worth or if he had become qualified in any of the areas that he already excelled in, he could have made a grand living. As it was, he felt he had to be the cheap option for people who couldn't afford – or couldn't afford to be ripped off by – the so-called professionals. Unemployment was at an all time high in the 1970s.
'Settle up with me when you can afford it,' he would say, not wanting to cause offence.
The businessman in me was appalled. 'You've just done a day's work for nothing!'
'I went to school with his Jimmy.' He scrubbed at his hands until he felt they were clean enough to handle a guitar. 'They didn't have much then, and that was when he was in work, but he would always make sure that he took me to the game if we were playing at home. My dad didn't bother sticking around long enough to do that.'
'What about the materials?'
He shrugged and pointed to a wooden tea chest. 'Spares. When someone can afford a new part, I recondition the old ones. You never know when they might come in handy.'
'How do you make ends meet?'
'My mum has never let me starve. Pete, you give a little, you take a little.' He put one hand on my shoulder and looked at me as if I was the one who didn't understand how the world worked. 'You know that shipment of tyres I've got stacked out the front?'
'Yes?'
'Do you think I did that all myself? W
ho do you think helped me unload them?'
'I did wonder.'
'And no one's complained. Do you see anyone else getting away with that?'
In other words, despite the bad-boy image, he was as hard-working and genuine a soul as you could hope to meet. There wouldn't be a single complaint from neighbours if he made a racket on a Saturday morning revving up a car in the road. He was far more likely to receive offers of help. The only person he failed to charm instantly was Laura's mother, but she was a hard nut to crack.
I would never have been able to hate Tom Fellows, or to convince myself that he wasn't good enough for Laura. The story of how he came to be stifled by an office job is a tragedy. It is also the story that I need to find a way to tell Andrea, because it is really her story.
Tom passed the good-boyfriend test with flying colours. For once, there was no need for Laura to introduce me or to explain who I was. He not only recognized the importance of our history, he knew that it was vital to the success of his relationship with Laura. The need to rehearse with the Spearheads in the evenings and his irregular hours meant that dates were going to be few and far between. We were always welcome to watch the practice sessions or gigs, but for every really exciting rehearsal where you felt that you were watching the creation of something important, there were ten when someone couldn't get a chord sequence quite right and they had to go over it again and again. Tom was a hard taskmaster. He demanded commitment and something close to perfection. If Laura had thought that going out with someone in a band was going to be glamorous, she was sorely mistaken.
'I'm bored!' Laura shouted to me, trying to make herself heard above the din.