Young Wives' Tales

by Adele Parks

  When we are seated, with full glasses and a bowl of peanuts, he cuts to the chase and asks the same question all the others have asked.

  ‘So which course piques your interest?’If he’s feeling frustrated, he manages to hide the fact. But then he lives with Connie’s whimsical nature and appears to delight in it. ‘I gather you’ve narrowed down the field a little. Let’s see what we have here,’he says, spreading out the application forms on the floor, like tarot cards. ‘Flower arranging, pastry making, first aid, calligraphy, a study of etymology. I might as well confess I have a note here from Connie to steer you away from flower arranging and pastry making.’

  ‘Why?’I ask. I know the answer but I’m testing Luke’s honesty.

  ‘Well, her notes say I ought to point out that you already have those skills and you wouldn’t be stretching yourself.’

  ‘But in reality she doesn’t think I’ll meet any men on those courses, at least not straight ones, and therefore thinks they’ll be a waste of time.’

  ‘That might have crossed her mind.’He grins. ‘How about learning an instrument?’I shrug. ‘Something must appeal?’

  The truth is they all terrify me. Not the actual learning. Historically, I was a girly swot and something like that never leaves you. I have no fear of practising a skill at home or having to write essays and hand them in on time. I have every confidence that I will be able to understand and retain all that is taught. My fears are more basic.

  I’m dreading finding the place of higher education. Driving or catching a tube to somewhere unfamiliar seems a ghastly idea. I’ll have to set off hours in advance because I can’t bear being late, but I’m not great with maps. Even if I find the institution I’ll then have to find the actual classroom, and these places are notorious for having warren-like corridors. And, assuming that by some miracle I do get there on time, then, horror of horrors, I’ll have to walk in on my own. It will be dreadful.

  Everyone will look at me and they’ll size me up. Judge my clothes, my manner, my size. They’ll categorize me (it’s simple, I look like an archetypal daft, bored housewife) and then they’ll dismiss me. The other students will be younger than me, or brighter, or fitter, or at least more confident. That much is guaranteed. I will then be required to do one of those dreadful introductions. Who I am and why I’m here? Good questions, dumb answers only required. I remember those hideous intros from training days when I worked in a corporate environment. Worse yet, if the tutor is ‘wacky’and wants to ‘shake things up’, we’ll be asked to reveal something no one else knows about us in order to break the ice. Why would I want to share something with a room full of complete strangers that I’ve kept from my nearest and dearest? I’m not even sure I have any secrets. Certainly not interesting ones. How lame is that? Would anyone care that my secret recipe for a moist Christmas cake is adding a cold cup of tea?

  I might be asked to answer other questions. In the classroom, this is bearable. As I say, I’m reasonably academic; I can usually think of something not entirely stupid to contribute. But answering questions in the coffee break, which will almost certainly be required, is a terrifying prospect. Someone, a bubbly blonde no doubt, will pounce on me as I slosh milk into my cup of instant coffee, and she’ll insist on asking about my family. I see it now. Her cheery disposition will be tested as I reveal that I’m a divorcee. She’ll try to think of something to say; something kind, conciliatory or witty depending on how nice she is. She’ll pity me but dismiss me. I’ll never make a dinner party guest; I’ll screw up the seating plan.

  I tell Luke all of this.

  ‘I see,’he says, in a way which suggests he does. This is to his credit because of course he can’t possibly see. He has no idea what it’s like to be a single, prematurely middle-aged, under-confident woman.

  ‘I think you should do a course in mechanics,’he says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s useful. You struggle to find anything on your car beyond the ignition and the headlights. Connie and Daisy will get off your back because they’ll think by going to a course on mechanics you’ll meet men. But in reality the only people you’ll meet on a mechanics course are teenage boys, who are often astoundingly shy, perhaps even more so than yourself, and at least unthreatening. No offence, Rose, but they’ll think of you as a mother figure.’

  ‘None taken. At least I have practice at being a mother. If someone hit on me, I’d be at sea.’

  Luke smiles, kindly. ‘Teenage boys will be great. And then there will be other women in the same position as you.’

  ‘Women in the same position as me.’I echo the sentence because the sentiment has never crossed my mind before.

  ‘Yes. Independent women. Let’s face it, as sexist as it is to admit, the truth is there aren’t many women in this world who are prepared to change a tyre or check water and oil in their car if they think someone else will do it for them. If there are women on this course the chances are that they will be in a similar position to you. They won’t pity you, Rose. They’ll admire you. They’ll understand you.’

  I’ve never considered the possibility that there are other single mums out there. I’ve never attended those support groups, full of angry dungaree-wearing women sipping black coffee. It seemed somehow indulgent. Besides, I had enough anger of my own to deal with; the last thing I needed was to shoulder other people’s. At Holland House everyone is respectably married; even a second, third or fourth marriage seems respectable in comparison to being on one’s own. Maybe Luke is on to something. Maybe I’ve been looking in the wrong places.

  ‘OK,’I say quietly.

  ‘OK, you’ll do it?’asks Luke, unable to hide his surprise and excitement. He was obviously expecting a longer battle.

  ‘Yes, I think it’s a good idea. What day is the course on?’

  ‘Wednesdays from 7.30 p.m. till 9. Starts this week.’

  ‘Tell Connie she’s booked for babysitting and that I’ll do her VAT returns if she brings over her files of receipts and invoices.’

  ‘You mean the shoebox she keeps under the bed?’asks Luke. ‘You know how disorganized she can be.’

  We smile and I pour us both another glass of wine.

  ‘I think I need this,’I observe.

  ‘I think you deserve it,’says Luke with a fat grin. And he clinks my glass.

  13

  Tuesday 19 September

  John

  There’s a woman at work that I would do if I didn’t have to work with her for the next three months. In truth, there are dozens of women at work that I would do if I didn’t have to see them again, but the one I’m on about is especially hot. Mandy’s her name. I like that. Like the fact that she hasn’t upgraded her name to Amanda but stuck with the childish derivative that her mam and dad probably use. She’s smart and beautiful and in her late twenties. She likes me too, it’s obvious. She’s always hanging around my desk. There’s no doubt about it, I would do her if we didn’t work together. But no way. The stakes are too high and there’s always totty. I’ve only ever broken that rule once with, as you’d expect, disastrous results.

  Greenie. Connie. What was it about her that made me break my own rules? And of course the old adage is true, you should never, ever crap on your own doorstep. If she taught me anything, it was that. Funny, I haven’t given Greenie a thought in years but since I bumped into her on Friday she keeps popping into my head pretty much constantly.

  Last time I gave her any mind-share must have been about two years ago when I came across her work at a tiny photographic exhibition. Artsy-fartsy galleries aren’t normally my thing. But my then Mrs was quite into that sort of stuff and we’d been rowing (situation normal) and I thought I’d try and do something nice with her. For her. So I got a copy of the Guide from the Guardian. Working from a position of ignorance I had no reason to select one exhibit over another and there were dozens to choose from. I saw this advert for a photographic exhibition of new up-and-coming talent, and it was near to a tube
station on our line, so I plumped for that one.

  There were six photographers exhibiting. All pretty good, I suppose, but it was only the third set of photos that I found genuinely arresting.

  The pictures were showing under a headline ‘The Bedroom’, which was an attention-grabbing title to a man like me. The pics were of women in various states of dress and undress, lying in bed. The women were always alone but you got the sense from the photos that they had all either just been entertaining or were waiting to be enjoyed. The girls were dozing, or snuggling pillows, or wide awake and expectantly preening, and in one photo the woman was having a fag; it was unquestionably post-coital. The ladies were not models. One was breathtakingly beautiful but the others were just normal women like you see in the high street every day, and yet the photographer captured them in a way that made them all look sexy and stunning, or at least peaceful and content. I scanned the leaflet I’d picked up at the door, interested enough to want to remember the photographer’s name. I had money on the photographer being a man, but it wasn’t. Constance Baker. She’d chosen to use her married name.

  It gave me a jolt. I considered the possibility that it was just a coincidence that the photographer had the same name as my old mistress, but then hadn’t I heard she’d left Peterson Windlooper to retrain as a photographer? There was no pic of the artist in the leaflet but there were a couple of lines of biog that confirmed that the photographer and my Greenie were one and the same. Good for her, I thought. She’d gone and done it. She’d always said she wanted to be a photographer and, bloody hell, she’d gone and done it. Weirdly and irrationally I felt a huge surge of pride in what she’d achieved. Her work was good. I was glad for her. Even if she was a fucking nutter.

  Arty types often are though, aren’t they?

  I re-examined all the photos. There were about nine in total. Each one of them was moving, intimate and deeply, deeply sensual. One of them stood out as it was the filthiest. Not that this was the kind of exhibition where full frontals and open-leg shots were likely to be displayed, but on one of the photos there was a suggestion that the model was masturbating. Gently, not manically, but circling her vag under the sheet. You couldn’t see her face or the upper part of her body. Just the outline of her legs and one foot was tangled in the sheet. Exhibit number 9 was entitled ‘Self-portrait’. Fuck. The intimacy sent shivers through my body. That was Connie. There, lying exposed for everyone to see. For me to enjoy, privately. Because irrational as it sounds, I believe I had something to do with those photos, in fact I think I can take quite a lot of the credit for Greenie finally becoming a photographer.

  We used to talk about it, you see, her ambition to be a photographer, and I told her, way back then, that she could do it if she wanted. I believed in her, see. It ended messy and everything. But all endings are messy, aren’t they? It started magnificently. I looked at the self-portrait for about ten minutes, until my Mrs called me a perve and dragged me away for lunch at the local pub.

  From time to time someone from Peterson Wind-looper mentions Greenie. They’ve seen her work used in an advert or read a review of some exhibition or other. But I don’t dwell. I’m not the type to dwell. Besides, I’ve had quite a bit going on in my life over the last half a dozen years. Married, divorced, promoted, new car, new home, travelled a bit, more notches on the bedpost. Life flies on.

  Funny that she’s a mother, though. To someone big enough to go to school. Not a tiny cute baby that you can wear in a sling as a fashion accessory but the real deal, a person. Greenie’s all woman. The girl I knew has disappeared.

  Girls keep doing that. It’s a boring habit.

  I call Tom to ask if he wants to meet for a drink. He says he can’t. He and Jenny are going to brief their wedding photographer tonight. It’s not just the girls that are disappearing. I sigh and have a dig.

  ‘Mate, isn’t that woman’s work? You didn’t catch me doing all that wedding planning stuff.’

  ‘No mate, but you’re hardly a role model when it comes to the happily ever after, are you?’

  ‘S’pose not. But buddy, will you ever be allowed out for a drink again? A man can die of thirst, you know.’

  There’s silence on the line for a moment or two. Tom knows he has a real laugh coming out with me on the lash. We don’t chase skirt together, we haven’t for some time. Tom is the faithful type, bless him, so since he got together with Jenny he’s simply been an innocent bystander to my antics, but Jenny doesn’t believe that. She pronounces him guilty by association and is sure that when we are together we do nothing but pull totty. The truth is we often just play darts, have a chat and a laugh. True, more often than not I go home with some lovely or other, but Tom limits his womanizing to the odd flirty wink. It’s harmless fun.

  Tom is clearly weighing up the laugh he’d have with me versus the earache that he’d no doubt have to endure because he’s been out with me.

  ‘Craig could come along too. We’ll tell you what we’re planning for the stag,’I tempt him.

  ‘Well …’

  ‘Craig’s on the pull. He needs a date for your wedding. It’s our duty to help him out.’

  ‘OK. I’ll ask Jen if we can get together for a bevvy on Saturday,’he says finally.

  ‘Mate, don’t ask her, tell her.’

  Where’s his self-respect?

  14

  Thursday 21 September

  Lucy

  Things are not great between Peter and me. It’s boring that so much of my time is taken up with this sort of nonsense. Surely if I have to bear the burden of wrinkles at least I ought not to have to worry about the status of my love life. I’m too old for it.

  Peter and I never discussed my hasty exit from the restaurant or any aspect of the evening. On the one hand, I am disappointed that the incident was so thoroughly brushed under the carpet; after all, we both said some monumental things and I believe things said in anger, jest or when drunk are often the things that are true. Most of the conversation we make when we are our rational selves is self-preserving bullshit. On the other hand, I look back at the evening with an overwhelming sense of shame and think it’s best that we forget the whole messy business.

  Bloody Rose.

  Peter arrived home about forty minutes after I did. I feigned sleep. He feigned a belief in my pretence. The next morning we cautiously edged around one another. We showered, dressed and ate breakfast as though we were opposing sides in the early part of a game of chess. We skirted, danced and carefully avoided any genuine interaction. I politely offered him coffee. He courteously accepted it, and civilly offered me the financial pages of his newspaper. I graciously declined, knowing that he doesn’t really like to split the paper. He went to the tube station by foot. I made an excuse to set off a little later, rather than walk with him. I said I needed to polish Auriol’s shoes, a transparent excuse, of course, as this is not the sort of thing I normally concern myself with. It’s Eva who sees to it that our daughter is well turned out for school. Peter civilly accepted my excuse. ‘That’s sweet,’he said as he kissed me on the forehead and scurried off with ill-disguised relief, keen to leave the omnipresent doom that filled the house.

  And so on and so forth, for a week now. We are two polite strangers living together. We are using the same bathrooms, washing our dirty clothes in the same machine, sleeping in the same bed, eating from the same crockery, but the intimacy is fading, it’s all but disappeared.

  Still, there is nothing better than lots of work, culminating in a Club Class flight to New York, to allow domestic issues to slip to the back of one’s mind. Mick and I have found ourselves working together on a pitch for some new business. A multinational, based in New York, looking to spread the risk with their employee pension fund. We’re talking big bucks but it’s a straightforward proposal. Frankly, I think we’re an over-qualified team. Either one of us could have handled this with the aid of a decent new boy. Indeed, it was Mick’s business pitch initially and then Ralph discovered tha
t the client had specified that they preferred ‘an ethical approach to business’.

  ‘Who doesn’t?’I quipped.

  But I knew that this piece of information was only being brought to my attention because, roughly translated, ‘an ethical approach to business’means they want to see diversity within the European Team managers; this sort of thing often makes companies feel better about exploiting minorities in places which are further afield. Gordon Webster Handle does not have a disabled black lesbian on their staff (the preferred choice for an ethical approach), so the most diversity they could rustle up in the white male C. of E. environment was me. At least I have to sit down to pee.

  ‘We wouldn’t ask you, but that chink guy in Ed’s team is already working on something really big,’said Mick.

  ‘You mean Ral, he’s Malaysian,’I replied. I know the City isn’t a politically correct place; I’m shocked to discover it isn’t geographically correct either. ‘I’m busy,’I objected.

  ‘If you have to get something done, give it to a busy person. Isn’t that what they say? What can I do to persuade you to surrender four working days to this pitch, plus find the time for a trip to NY?’Mick beams at me, suggesting that he doesn’t think it will take much to persuade me. This disturbs me. Why would he assume I want to spend time with him? Can it be simple arrogance? ‘Come on, Princess. You never know, you might have some fun.’

  I agreed to help out. Long hours in the office or long silences at home. It’s not such a tough choice. Besides, Mick was right, it pains me to admit it, but it has been fun working on the pitch with him. The way I tell it is that Mick schmoozes the client and I crunch the numbers. As expected, the pitch gives me a valid excuse to avoid Auriol’s bathtime and Peter’s sulky silence (it’s extraordinary how many times one can run through the same set of numbers), and it is while I’m working late at night that I discover Mick is very amusing (which I knew) and reasonably thoughtful (a surprise). He always remembers to order me a veggie pizza because the local delivery place only offers three types of pizza and two of them have salami as the staple. I hate salami with a passion. And he is clever. He may not lead but he keeps up; many men I’ve met failed to do this much. Besides, he has the occasional flash of brilliance which is exciting. When we ran through the deck with Ralph, he beamed and commented, ‘You two make a good team, possibly the best team in Gordon Webster Handle. Therefore the client would be crazy not to give us the business.’