The Foster Husband

by Pippa Wright

  This is Lyme. The only changes here happen at geological speed; imperceptible to the human eye. Everything is just as it always was, and that, for me, is very much the problem.

  3

  Minnie pulls on her lead towards the beach, in the opposite direction to the bungalow. I don’t blame her for not wanting to go back indoors, but we can’t hang around the town all day, purposeless. To be perfectly honest, we have been entirely without purpose since we arrived here a week ago, but the important thing is that we should be purposeless out of sight of people who will report back to my family, so I drag Minnie back towards the path along the river.

  I already have a severe case of the guilts about my life of highly visible leisure. It wasn’t so bad in London where no one was around to comment on what I got up to on my own all day. Sometimes the Turkish shopkeeper would pointedly ask, ‘Busy day?’ as I perused the newspaper headlines without buying anything, but it wasn’t hard to ignore him. Anyway, he was nicer to me once I got Minnie – I could flick through the magazines as long as I liked while she sat on his lap and let him feed her bits of pitta bread. But yesterday Mum gently mentioned that her friend – Cathy, I now realize – had seen me in the Town Mill Bakery most mornings, which is about as close as my mother gets to openly criticizing my behaviour.

  I know in Mum’s eyes eating breakfast in a cafe is not only a wasteful extravagance tantamount to eating a five pound note that has been spread with butter and jam, but also a symbol of the demise of the family unit, in which everyone should eat their meals together in happy harmony. But since there’s no room for me and Minnie at their house, I don’t see that it makes any difference to the social fabric of Lyme Regis whether I eat breakfast alone in my granny’s bungalow or alone in a cafe. Although it can’t be denied that my savings are being eaten up one costly croissant at a time.

  Despite my gloomy mood, I have to admit it’s a gorgeously mellow morning, there is a soft light on the turning leaves that hang over the water. A family of ducks huddles on a stony island in the middle of the flow, quacking and waggling their tails, jostling for position in the small space. I should have kept a bit of croissant to throw to them; I’ll remember tomorrow. Lyme is beautiful on a morning like this. It’s cool enough to be snuggled into my parka, but warm enough that I’m happy to linger, peering into the gardens that back onto the leat towards the Mill. There are apples lying in the grass, windfalls ready to be collected, heavy rosehips dragging down the trailing thorny shoots. It all makes me feel a bit D.H. Lawrence-ish, admiring of fecundity and sumptuous fruity ripeness.

  I should appreciate this. I could be stuck in an office, or in a meeting. This is freedom. I should be happy to be here, instead of feeling that I’m in exile, cast out from the life I’ve left behind. Perhaps I am doomed to wander the streets alone forever, while gossiping locals refer darkly to my past. I could become a tourist attraction all by myself; ‘The Head of Marketing’s Woman’ or something. Catchy, no? Although of course I am not Matt’s woman any more. The Head of Marketing’s Estranged Wife-Soon-To-Be Divorcée doesn’t sound like she’d offer the French Lieutenant’s Woman much competition. Although I have always imagined it would be rather cool to swish around in a cloak.

  We’ve reached the end of the riverside path. It stops at a bridge, which offers us two choices; one direction will take us back towards the town, the other leads up the hill towards Granny Gilbert’s bungalow. Minnie looks up at me, unsure which direction to take. You and me both, I think. But we take the path most travelled; the one that goes back to the bungalow. The one that’s not going to make any difference.

  There’s a reason why tourists don’t bother visiting Hill View Close, where Granny Gilbert’s 1960s bungalow faces its identically unattractive neighbours across bleakly paved low-maintenance, wheelchair-accessible front gardens. No one poses for family photographs outside the boxy glass porches; no one stops to admire the sickly fern turning yellow in Granny Gilbert’s living-room window next to the Neighbourhood Watch sticker. No one wanders these Lyme Regis streets and dreams of escaping the rat race for a new life in this cul-de-sac. Which would be why Granny Gilbert’s house has been on sale for over a year without a single offer. The estate agent’s board gives the house an even more forlorn look, like a poster advertising a show that has long since left town.

  This is the kind of home you move into not out of optimism and excitement and choice, but out of compromise. You move here when your garden has become too much for you, because your family’s concerned that you are unsteady on the stairs these days, because you no longer need all that space just for yourself. Because you’ve split up with your husband and have nowhere else to go. I should be grateful for this. I am. It’s a place to live, for nothing. But it’s hard to see this move as the fresh start I thought I was running to. I feel quite far removed from the Liz Taylor-style glamorous divorcée I’d hoped to be, and a bit more like Liz Taylor in the declining wheelchair-bound friend-of-Michael-Jackson years.

  The front door opens with a pop of insulation foam; Granny Gilbert liked her home to be hermetically sealed from every possibility of draught. I’d claim she was an early environmentalist if it weren’t for the evidence in her undersink cupboard of the world’s largest store of aerosol cans, promising to buff every possible surface to a reflective shine. Although I’ve kept the doors and windows open every day since I arrived, the house still reeks of chemicals – Misters Sheen and Muscle are my new housemates – and both Minnie and I sneeze every time we step into the hall.

  I head straight for the back door to fling it wide open.

  Granny Gilbert’s garden is nothing special, just a square of patio surrounded by some scrubby rose bushes that Mum has hacked down to stumps, but I feel astonished every time I see the view. It’s like walking through the wardrobe into Narnia. Fooled by the drab interior of the bungalow, you don’t expect to be presented with a scene straight from a watercolour painting. The hill drops down towards the town, the streets as clearly laid out below us as if they were marked on a map, and beyond them the flat, grey sea stretches to the horizon, flashing and glittering when the sun breaks through the clouds. To the right, houses further up the hill block the view towards the Undercliff, but to the left the eye follows the rise of the cliffs up past Black Ven and Stonebarrow to the Golden Cap, its sandy peak yellow and bright against the dark sky.

  I can feel my heart lift; it’s strange how a view can do that to you. Maybe it’s something that happens when you get older. I don’t remember being awed by the scenery when I visited Granny Gilbert as a child – the biscuit cupboard was my main focus then – but every time I step into the garden now I understand all over again why someone would move to one of these plain, ugly bungalows. Once you’re inside, you don’t have to look at it, and from the garden you can feel like you’re flying over the town.

  ‘Sandy, dear? Is that you?’

  Minnie starts as a voice calls out from behind the rose bushes. She runs back to hide behind my legs.

  ‘Hello?’ I say to the shrubbery. ‘It’s not Sandy, it’s her daughter, Kate.’ I haven’t yet met a single neighbour but, to be honest, I have kept my head down every time I’ve left the house, unwilling to meet anyone’s eyes in case I’m drawn into a conversation. I’d rather not have to explain my circumstances to everyone in Lyme.

  I hear the harsh scraping sound of something metallic being dragged across paving stones, and then a muffled grunt. Two gnarled brown hands, a flaming red nail on each finger, grasp the top of Granny Gilbert’s garden fence with purpose. Rising up behind them, like the sun over the horizon, is a lavishly rubber-petalled orange swimming hat. And finally, a face, wrinkled and tanned to the consistency of biltong, in which two dark eyes twinkle brightly.

  ‘Now, you must be Kate! How lovely. Don’t you look like your mother? I’d know you anywhere.’

  ‘Hello,’ I say, and I’m about to ask her name when there’s a clattering sound and the swimming hat disappears from vi
ew. For a moment her fingers still cling to the top of the fence, knuckles blanching with the effort, and then they disappear too. I hear a worrying thudding noise, of something soft landing on something hard.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I call over the fence, but there’s no answer. ‘Shit,’ I whisper under my breath. ‘You stay there, Minnie,’ I say. I sprint back through the house and out into the deserted close. Not even a net curtain twitches. There’s no one to ask for help.

  A high wooden gate blocks off the entrance to next-door’s garden, and it’s locked. I try to peer through the slats, but they’re too narrow to see anything; all I get is a faceful of creosote fumes. From Granny Gilbert’s garden I can hear Minnie’s high-pitched anxious bark.

  I rattle the metal latch and call out again, ‘Hello? Hello, are you all right?’

  I can hear a faint groan from behind the gate – what if the old lady is lying there with her head split open on the paving? God knows what Neighbourhood Watch will think, but I can’t just leave her. I step backwards and take a running jump to leap over the gate, which has clearly been designed with the specific aim of preventing someone from doing exactly that. Instead of clearing it, I hang by my fingertips from the top, my feet scrabbling for purchase against the bottom, achieving absolutely nothing. At this rate there will be two of us lying unconscious outside this bungalow.

  Wait, though, is that a recycling box at the end of the drive? They’re sturdy things, aren’t they? I drag it to the base of the gate and make sure the lid is secured before I stand on it; it gives me just enough lift to allow me to launch myself over the top, swinging one leg over so I’m sitting on top of the gate. From this new vantage point, steadying myself by clamping my legs on either side of the gate, I can see into next-door’s garden; a toppled stepladder lies on its side on the paving stones, but there is no sign of the old lady. She must be hidden from view by the house; she might be really badly hurt if the ladder’s thrown her that far.

  I’m about to swing my other leg over and jump into the garden when the gate rattles alarmingly, as if it’s about to give way. Before I can launch myself onto the other side, a hand grabs my leg and a male voice demands, ‘Care to explain what you’re doing breaking into my grandmother’s house?’

  I’m so intent on not falling off the gate that I can’t look down properly to see who has hold of my leg. ‘I’m not – I didn’t – I think she’s fallen over in the garden. The ladder – the ladder.’ I’m babbling incoherently.

  ‘What is going on?’ asks a querulous voice.

  The swimming hat is gone, revealing a damp, wispy head of hair, like the down of a freshly hatched chick. And now I can see it wasn’t just her face that was tanned. The old lady is burnished to a rich shade of mahogany, the kind of Seventies colour you rarely see in these days of SPFs and skin cancer warnings. I wonder if it can be real, but she looks far too no-nonsense to be messing around with fake tan or sunbeds.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I ask. ‘It sounded like . . . I thought you’d fallen, I was trying to check . . .’

  The old lady looks annoyed, her eyes flash at me. ‘In the garden just now?’ she says. ‘I simply slipped. Nothing to worry about, I assure you.’

  ‘Oh, it’s just that you went so suddenly,’ I say, clutching onto the gate with my knees. ‘While we were talking. It made me worried when I saw your swimming hat disappear like that.’

  ‘Swimming hat?’ says the man, frowning.

  ‘I wasn’t wearing a swimming hat,’ the old lady retorts. She glares at me pointedly.

  ‘Have you been swimming this morning?’ asks the man. He puts his hands on his hips and looks at her accusingly. ‘I thought we’d agreed you’d only go when I can take you.’

  ‘Honestly, I’m not some helpless little old lady,’ says the little old lady, waving a dismissive hand in a way that is meant to include both of us. ‘All of this fuss about nothing.’

  Now the man’s let go of my leg, I see my chance to get down at last; my thighs are beginning to protest at having to support me in this position. There is no elegant way to lower yourself backwards off a six-foot-high gate, let me tell you. I can only be grateful that I’m in jeans and not a skirt, though I can’t help wishing they weren’t tight ones; I realize my bum must look huge as I hang over the top of the gate, my feet scrabbling in mid-air for the recycling box below.

  Suddenly the voices behind me stop. I feel hands around my waist and I’m lowered onto the ground.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say primly, trying to regain my dignity. My hair has been flying all over the place thanks to my exertions, and I pull it back off my face in an effort to look respectable, and not like a pensioner-robbing housebreaker.

  ‘No way,’ says the man, a slow smile spreading across his face. He is standing far too close to me.

  ‘What?’ I say crossly. I don’t like the way he’s staring.

  ‘Kate Bailey, I don’t believe it.’ I haven’t been called Kate Bailey for two years. I’m about to correct him – I’m Kate Martell now – but I stop myself when I realize that I don’t really know what to call myself at the moment. Maybe I will go back to my maiden name. It’s too early to tell.

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t remember—’ I begin.

  ‘Oh, of course you don’t.’ He laughs, stepping back to link his arm through his grandmother’s. She pats the drying wisps of her hair, trying to style it. ‘The famous Kate Bailey’s forgotten all about Lyme, hasn’t she?’

  I look at him more closely. I’m sure I would remember if I knew this man, he doesn’t look like someone who’s easy to forget. He towers above his grandmother, his dark hair is closely cropped to his head and he has the kind of strong nose that would be a disaster on a woman, but which lends his face a certain character. It’s the commanding sort of profile you would expect to see on an ancient coin.

  His eyes begin to crinkle under my scrutiny, as if he’s about to burst out laughing. ‘Got it yet?’ he asks cockily, but I can see his apparent confidence waver momentarily. He looks much younger for that second, and suddenly I know exactly who he is.

  ‘Eddy Curtis? Dready Eddy?’

  Suddenly I can see him just as he was all those years ago – his dark hair twisted into giant, matted patchouli-stinking dreadlocks, the sides of his head shaved.

  ‘I knew you’d get there in the end.’ He grins, ducking his head shyly.

  ‘But, Eddy, give me a break.’ I laugh. ‘You look totally different. God. You used to have all that hair for a start.’

  ‘Ugh that hair,’ shudders his grandmother, grimacing at the memory. ‘Quite disgusting.’

  He rubs the top of his head ruefully. ‘Not so much any more.’ I realize that his crop is designed to disguise the beginnings of a receding hairline. But who knew that underneath those revolting dreads, Eddy had been such a looker? In my memory he was little more than a lanky spliff-rolling hairball who held a massive party one summer night just before I left Lyme for good.

  ‘Short hair suits you,’ I say. He rubs the top of his head again, embarrassed, and I feel myself begin to blush in sympathy, as if I’ve just propositioned him on his grandmother’s driveway, instead of idly commenting on his haircut.

  Next to Eddy, the old lady speaks, ‘Kate, dear?’

  Eddy and I both turn to look at her.

  ‘I do hope you don’t think I’m rude not to have called round before. Only I’ve had a bit of a chest, you know.’ She coughs once, primly, as if to demonstrate.

  ‘It’s all that swimming, Grandma,’ says Eddy. ‘I told you it might be time to pack it in.’ She pulls away from him crossly.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Nothing of the sort. Gets the blood pumping.’

  ‘Till you’re carted off in an ambulance.’

  ‘That was only once,’ huffs Mrs Curtis, thrusting her hands into the pockets of her cardigan. ‘I’m not dead yet, you know.’

  Eddy’s expression softens, and he reaches out towards her.

  ‘Hmm.’ Mrs Curtis all
ows him to take her arm again.

  Eddy raises his eyes to the sky in a way that only I can see. The whole exchange has an almost scripted feel, as if they have had this exact conversation many times and now it is almost a pleasantry, drained of any actual meaning or expectation that the behaviour of either will change.

  Mrs Curtis fixes her beady eyes on me, her fluffy head cocked birdishly to one side. ‘Now I’m better you’ll come round for tea, won’t you? Or we could even go out for a cup?’

  ‘Grandma,’ Eddy says warningly. I wonder what objection he can possibly have to us sharing some tea.

  ‘What?’ she asks.

  Oh God, am I going to get co-opted into the neighbourhood as a replacement for my grandmother? Forced into bridge groups and RNLI coffee mornings? The thought makes me shudder. In London I barely knew my neighbours, except to exchange curt nods and twice-yearly comments about the weather or the shortcomings of the local bin men. But Eddy’s granny looks so pleased with her invitation that I can hardly refuse. I only have to go once, I tell myself.

  ‘I’d love to,’ I lie. She beams at me happily.

  ‘Kate Bailey,’ says Eddy, shaking his head, and I’m not sure if he’s speaking to me or her. ‘Kate Bailey is back in town.’

  ‘Eddy, dear, did you bring my pills?’ his grandmother interrupts.

  Eddy confirms that he has brought everything she asked for, and begins to steer her back towards the front door. ‘Come on, Grandma,’ he says. ‘Didn’t you say something about a cup of tea?’

  ‘Oh yes, dear, a cup of tea. What a lovely idea. Aren’t you a thoughtful boy?’

  ‘Bye, Eddy,’ I say. I start to wave, but it feels stupidly childish somehow, so I shove my hands into my jeans pockets again. ‘It’s good to see you again.’