The Foster Husband

by Pippa Wright

  So I leave Ben’s dirty dishes where they are, as I have done for five days now.

  I would like nothing better than to snap on a pair of rubber gloves and tackle the disgusting mess the kitchen has become. But I know I must resist if I am not to carry on cleaning up after him as long as we are forced to share this living space. I just hadn’t realized that Ben’s tolerance for filth would be so much greater than my own. There are fat flies circling the lampshade, and squeezed-out teabags rest in teaspoons on the work surface, which is liberally sprinkled with sugar crystals. The offending bag of sugar sits next to the kettle, the handle of a soup spoon poking out. For some reason this annoys me more than anything – who uses a soup spoon to put sugar in their tea?

  I am not proud to admit that I have hidden a couple of clean mugs in my bedroom just to ensure that I don’t have to resort to fishing through the mouldering pile in the sink whenever I want a cup of tea, furtively washing them up in the empty bathroom sink so as to remain undetected by Ben.

  I know what you’re thinking: that I am taking out on Ben my frustrations with my husband. But that’s not it at all. The two men couldn’t be more different. Although, come to think of it, if someone had taught Matt a few lessons before we moved in together things might have been very different. And if I were starting again with Matt, I’d be very different too.

  There is a clanking sound from the hallway and Minnie’s ears spring up. She barrels out of the kitchen, barking furiously, and I can hear the skittering of her claws on the parquet floor as she races to the front door. When I go into the hall to see what has caught her attention, it’s just some post. A leaflet from the Co-op and something from the Royal Mail about delivery services. I’m about to put it straight into the recycling bin when a square of card falls onto the floor.

  Minnie lunges for it, but I get there before her. It’s a postcard from London. It’s a postcard from Matt.

  You won’t answer my emails. You won’t call me back. If I wrote a letter I don’t think you’d open it. Will you read a postcard? Kate, please. You can’t just cut me off like this.

  I hate him for fooling me. For realizing I wouldn’t be able to stop myself reading, even when I’ve made it so clear that I don’t want to hear from him. I hate even more that there is a terrible part of me that leapt in gladness to see his handwriting – before I remembered. What does he think is left to say? Does he really think we can talk our way out of this? Sit in some marriage guidance counsellor’s office and talk about our feelings? As if that would make a difference.

  I stare at the postcard for so long, not moving, that when Ben comes out of the bathroom he asks if something terrible has happened. I say of course not, don’t be silly, and tuck the postcard in with the leaflets to hide it.

  I don’t say that the terrible thing happened already, and nothing written on a postcard can undo it.

  14

  I have put the postcard in the recycling and taken it out three times. I know I am doomed to do this forever – well, until the recycling truck carries it away – unless I get a grip on myself, and so I put the postcard in my pocket and resolve to throw it away somewhere far from the house. Somewhere public, where I won’t be tempted to fish it out again for fear of witnesses.

  But here I am in the Town Mill Bakery, having walked past bin after bin, and the postcard is still in my hands. Like the note on the kitchen table, I can’t stop myself from reading it again and again. Throwing it away is going to be an entirely academic exercise now that I can remember every word.

  ‘Kate, hi, what are you up to?’

  Eddy Curtis is holding a cup of takeaway coffee between both hands. He must have come in here and got served without my even noticing, so absorbed was I in Matt’s card. Eddy pulls at the soft grey scarf wrapped twice around his neck. Although he’s in jeans he looks businesslike, as if he has to be somewhere important shortly and getting coffee is just the first step in a busy day rather than one of the highlights, as it is for me.

  ‘Oh, hi, Eddy,’ I say, tucking the postcard back into my coat pocket, out of sight. ‘Nothing much, you know. Just, um, things. What are you up to? Not at work?’

  I say this as if I have any idea what Eddy Curtis does for work these days. When I last knew him the only work he did was revision for his Geography A level.

  ‘Heading there now,’ he says, stooping to pat Minnie, who has greeted him like an old friend. ‘But since the office is just my spare room I always like to get out of the house before I start work. Have to remind myself there’s more than just the four walls pressing in on me.’ He laughs.

  I laugh, too, but I recognize the barely masked slight desperation of the person who spends too much time at home alone. I have felt it myself ever since I left Hitz; the feeling that the world is carrying on without you while you sit still in a room, slowly petrifying. The need to see people – even total strangers – just to remind yourself that you do exist.

  ‘Tell me about it,’ I say in sympathy. ‘Why do you think I have breakfast here every day?’

  ‘Every day?’ he asks, and instantly I feel like I’m flaunting my flashy London ways again. The latte-swilling media bore, showing off in front of her home-town friend.

  ‘Do you want to sit down?’ I say, gesturing to the space in front of me. It’s still early enough, and mid-week enough, to be quiet in the bakery.

  Eddy looks at his watch, hesitant. Behind him the chefs are dragging trays of granola out of the industrial ovens, and peeling vegetables for this lunchtime’s soup. Cathy is busy writing down a list of specials on a blackboard. I realize that I have adopted the reassuring rhythm of their workday as if it were my own, trying to fool myself that I am some kind of colleague, rather than a customer.

  ‘Just for a minute, go on,’ I press him. I am longing for a conversation with someone – anyone – who isn’t Minnie or Ben or my mother.

  ‘Okay,’ he says, and slides onto the bench opposite me. ‘Why not? What’s the point in working for yourself if you can’t start late sometimes?’

  ‘So what do you get up to in your spare room then, Eddy Curtis?’ I ask, and instantly feel myself begin to blush. ‘Er, I didn’t mean – that sounds . . .’

  He splutters into his coffee and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Ha, well,’ he says, reaching for a paper napkin from the stack on the table. ‘Get your mind out of the gutter, Kate Bailey. I set up my own company a few years ago, helping local businesses use more renewable energy.’

  ‘Wow,’ I say. ‘That sounds impressive.’

  Eddy shrugs and looks embarrassed, rubbing the top of his head with his knuckles. ‘It was more impressive when there were loads of grants for that kind of thing, but it’s getting harder to bring the work in lately.’ He continues, with a sigh, ‘Most businesses round here are just hoping to make it through another year, people don’t have a lot of money to invest in expensive new technology right now.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘That must be hard after you’ve spent all that time building it up.’

  Eddy smiles and shrugs again, as if it’s no big deal. ‘It’s fine, I make enough to live on, and for the girls. Luckily I’ve never been someone who wanted a fancy big-shot career. Not like you.’

  I snort with laughter. ‘Hardly,’ I say. Working in television is one of those jobs that impresses other people only because they know very little about it. Telling people you’ve just come back from running the African Music Awards suggests something exotic and glamorous, far removed from the Portaloo and fish-head curry reality.

  ‘Come on, Kate,’ says Eddy, his eyes crinkling as he grins. ‘You were the one that got away, the golden girl, the TV superstar.’

  ‘Eddy,’ I say, sternly. ‘Two months presenting late-night music videos at the tail-end of the Nineties does not make anyone a TV superstar.’

  Eddy raises an eyebrow. ‘It does compared to everyone else in Lyme,’ he says.

  I raise my coffee cup to my lips. ‘I suppose; if you
put it like that. But that was a very long time ago. I haven’t been on telly for years. I haven’t worked for a bit, actually.’

  Eddy looks surprised. ‘Really? I thought your mum said you were some sort of TV producer these days.’

  ‘Um, not for a while,’ I say, absently brushing away a scattering of crumbs from the surface of the table. I wonder if Eddy has spoken to Mum recently – has she been pretending that I still have a job? Has she been too embarrassed to tell people the truth?

  ‘Get tired of the high life, did you?’ he teases.

  ‘Something like that,’ I say.

  ‘And now you’re in Lyme again,’ says Eddy. ‘I didn’t think you’d ever come back.’

  He looks at me for a little too long and I feel a chill run through me, as if someone has dropped a cold pebble down my back.

  ‘Neither did I,’ I say quietly, meeting his eyes.

  Silence stretches between us. I can hear the tinny sounds of the bakery kitchen radio, tuned to some music station, and the low voices of the staff as they talk. A couple comes into the bakery, wrapped up in waterproofs, rucksacks on their backs, and Cathy goes over to greet them.

  Eddy speaks first.

  ‘You know Tim moved to Australia,’ he says. ‘And his parents emigrated out there too, a few years ago. None of them are here any more.’

  ‘I know,’ I say. And I do. Mum wrote and told me when it happened, casually dropping it into an email that was full of other snippets of Lyme news.

  ‘Would it be better if I just pretended I’d forgotten about it?’ he asks.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I haven’t.’

  Eddy puts his hand awkwardly over mine, as if I might slap it away. But I don’t, I let it rest there, heavy and warm.

  ‘You left all of that behind a long time ago,’ he says. ‘Look at everything you achieved. You’d never have done any of it if you’d stayed in Lyme. You left and you really made something of yourself. You should be proud.’

  ‘You’re very sweet, Eddy.’ Even though I mean what I’m saying, my voice comes out all flat and strange, as if I’m a robot who has been programmed to say it.

  Eddy frowns. ‘I should go,’ he says. ‘Sorry – I shouldn’t have brought it up. It’s just, I felt it shouldn’t go unsaid. With you back here after all this time.’

  He stands up, tugging again at the scarf around his neck. ‘It’s good to have you back, Kate. Whatever the reason. And if you need to talk, I’m always around.’

  ‘In your spare room.’

  ‘In my spare room. Or any time. I really mean it. You can count on me.’

  I have very good reason to know this is true.

  ‘Thanks, Eddy,’ I say, and I really mean it.

  15

  The conversation with Eddy, so soon after the postcard from Matt, has made my head hurt. I pay my bill at the bakery and, to Minnie’s delight, take her to the Undercliff for an extra walk to clear my mind. Although Ben will be at work by now, I’m not ready to go back to the bungalow. I think everyone in my family thinks I’ve come back to Lyme for something as self-helpishly cheesy as closure, or self-reflection. That’s why they’re tiptoeing around me, not asking what I’m going do to for money or work or what’s going to happen between Matt and me. They’re carefully respecting my space, as if I’m using this time to think through my options, to write lists of pros and cons. To work out what lessons I need to learn from the whole sorry experience of failing at being a wife.

  The truth is, I have no idea why I’m here. I just ran away. Like I ran away from Lyme all those years ago. I hadn’t even thought to connect the two until Eddy brought it all up again.

  When I left Lyme I tried to close off my memories of the life I had here. Coming back, I’m a different person in every way. Not because I went off and got a television career, that’s not it at all. I’ve changed, I must have. And yet Eddy’s insistence that the past has been forgotten only serves to make me see that it hasn’t at all. Not by the two of us, at any rate. And I should have known that Lyme, clinging to its history as it always does, would have preserved it all, everything I’ve tried to bury, ready to expose it at any time.

  Tim Cooper. I don’t know if it’s better that he’s not here in Lyme any more or worse. Perhaps if I saw him again, as he is now, older and grown-up, it would erase the memory of him that I have in my head. But would I have come back if I knew he was here? Probably not. Even the idea of seeing him unexpectedly, impossible as it is, makes my heart beat faster – as if he will emerge from one of the Undercliff thickets, leaping out from behind a tree having tunnelled his way back from Sydney or Brisbane or wherever he lives now. Australia would suit him. The Tim I knew back then, anyway, all brawn and strength and surfing. Any excuse to whip his shirt off and show us his muscled chest. All the girls in Lyme were a bit in love with him, even the convent girls from St Mary’s knew his name and called out to him from the bus stop where we all waited to be picked up for school. But he didn’t wave back at them. Not even when they turned over the waistbands of their tartan skirts to show off their legs, giggling behind their hands. No, Tim waited at the bus stop with his arm around my shoulders.

  Tim Cooper was a sex god. Everyone said so. When he walked down the hallways at school, the crowds parted for him like the sea in front of Moses. He hardly seemed to notice. He had this intriguing way of looking above it all; superior in a manner that didn’t seem condescending, but rather justified, as if he was just claiming his due. Like he was on a higher plane than the rest of us. He had a faraway look, as if his mind was on greater things. As if, while we mere mortals fretted over a spot on our chin, or a party we hadn’t been invited to, he was considering the nature of time, or the infinity of space.

  When he had turned his faraway look on me in the kitchen at Ally Baldwin’s seventeenth birthday party, I had been struck dumb. ‘I know you, blondie,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen you around.’

  All of my usual smart retorts dried in my mouth with the shock of discovering that I had attracted the attention of this demi-god. I could hardly stammer out an answer. Which didn’t matter much since Tim Cooper wasn’t really interested in conversation. To my astonishment, what Tim Cooper was interested in was me.

  It had taken me months to realize that Tim’s faraway look did not hide a great and complex mind, devoted to deep thought. Months of furious snogging at the beach, and in the back of his car, and in whatever spare bedroom we could find at house parties, where we barely spoke to anyone else, just hid ourselves away to grab what little privacy is granted to a pair of hormonal teenagers. Months in which I’d lost my virginity without a backwards glance, glad to be rid of what I considered a shameful burden.

  Being wanted by the most desirable boy in school was like being handed the keys to the kingdom. We were Kate and Tim, teenage celebrities. Your party was nothing until we’d made an appearance, glassy-eyed with lust as we stumbled down from your mum and dad’s bedroom. If you were a girl, you wanted to sleep with my boyfriend. If you were a boy, you wanted to sleep with me – not because I’d suddenly become irresistible, but because going out with Tim had conferred on me the gift of his approval, and there was no higher accolade in the Lyme Bay area.

  I walked taller, I dressed differently, I found that I’d adopted, without even meaning to, Tim’s languid manner of movement. Because why would you ever rush anywhere when everything you wanted was coming to you?

  It’s impossible to know if I would have developed this kind of confidence without Tim, or if he was just the conduit for something that would have happened anyway. Years later I would read the famous Sophia Loren quote that sex appeal is 50 per cent what you’ve got and 50 per cent what other people think you’ve got. And I’d think that for me it was 50 per cent what Tim Cooper gave me.

  And yet I haven’t even spoken his name out loud for nearly fifteen years. Whenever Mum or Dad has tried I’ve changed the subject. I’ve always thought it’s better to just move on, leave things behind, not dwell on th
em. What good does it do to rehash things over and over? It just makes people upset, brings up emotions that are better off buried. Last time it was easier though; I guess things are when you’re younger. School was ending, everyone was moving on, it looked less like running away when I left Lyme for London.

  No one questioned the fact that I left for university early – who wouldn’t want to get to the big city as soon as possible? What eighteen-year-old wouldn’t prefer to be in the middle of London than hanging out in Lyme for yet another tourist-filled summer working with their parents? When I wrote home, which was rarely in those days before everyone had an email address, I was sure to make my holiday job in a Covent Garden sandwich bar sound far more exciting than it was. I sent Prue a postcard especially to tell her about the time I’d made Liam Gallagher a bacon roll, brown sauce no butter, and he’d said it was ‘sound’. I hoped the postman might read it and tell other people about my new big-city life.

  By the time I started my university course in October, no one would have known I wasn’t born within the sound of the Bow Bells. I’d dropped my provincial ways like I’d dropped my Dorset burr. Now I spoke the same chirpy Mockney as everyone else; I knew about cool bars in Brixton and went clubbing at Fabric. I used my Travelcard on night buses and tutted at tourists standing on the wrong side of the escalator. When people asked where I was from, I said Tufnell Park.

  And as for the fact that I liked a party and wasn’t too particular about the boys I took home, well, wasn’t everyone the same in London? That was practically the definition of a student. It wasn’t cause for gossip or disapproval. If anything it just consolidated my reputation at college. Who wanted to be one of those drippy wallflowers in the union bar, shyly sipping a single Bacardi Breezer and holding hands with your boyfriend, when you could be dancing on a table at the Bug Bar with a tequila in your hand? None of those shy girls got spotted by a TV talent scout; none of them got a screen test for Hitz Music Television, or became a VJ, and then turned that into a production career. Being a party girl worked out better for me than I’d ever dreamed. And even though by then I’d forgotten all about Lyme, even though none of it mattered any more, not at all, it felt like a massive two fingers to the lot of them.