The Foster Husband

by Pippa Wright

  It’s harder to feel that sense of triumph this time; harder to disguise the running away. I’m not the triumphant winner, returning to show off the spoils of my exciting London life. It feels like everyone can see that I’m no better than they thought I was; that it was bound to all go wrong in the end. That the girl who had the great job and the husband and the big house was just play-acting; it was an illusion she couldn’t maintain. And who is surprised that it’s all come crashing down around her ears?

  I hear barking in the undergrowth where Minnie is chasing rabbits; she whines with excitement, though she has never even come close to catching one. The Undercliff is a strange place – Prue won’t walk here alone; she thinks it’s too isolated, but I love it. I have done ever since I used to lead the Baileys’ French Lieutenant’s Woman tourist walk when I was in the sixth form, from the Cobb, up the hill into the Undercliff and back through the town to the museum where John Fowles’s shabby old office chair, foam coming out of a rip in the seat, is preserved like a holy relic. The book was an A-level set text back then, so the groups of walkers swelled with students every summer, but it never felt like school work to me.

  Inside the woodland, between the trees, time seems to slip away; with no visible buildings or roads or cars it could be centuries ago. Only the dim shadow of a tanker out at sea, interrupting the horizon, anchors me to the present. I read once that walking amongst trees was meant to calm you; psychiatrists recommend it to the depressed. Back in London I took Minnie for relentlessly long walks on the Heath, as if I was dosing myself up with medicine, downing the healing landscape one tree at a time. Maybe they were the wrong sorts of trees up there; either way it didn’t seem to make much difference.

  But here, in the quiet solitude, I feel as if I might believe it, as if the trees of the Undercliff are a benevolent presence, their mossy arms ready to embrace me, their unchanging stillness reminding me that everything passes in the end. These trees stood here before I was born, they were here when I was growing up, and they’ll be here when I’m gone. I can allow myself to think about Tim and Matt without that feeling of dread and horror that threatens to overwhelm me most of the time. The mistakes that feel so enormous to me become somehow smaller here.

  Though this stability is an illusion, too, of course. In reality the Undercliff is one of the least stable parts of the Dorset coastline. It owes its rugged wildness to the fact that nothing can be built on it for fear of landslips. Only a few years ago a huge chunk of the Black Ven, further down the coast, collapsed onto the beach below. The last landslip at this spot was back in Victorian times – an enormous piece of the cliff slid out to sea, the seemingly solid land buckling and sliding away. Farmland was destroyed, fields fell into the sea, and yet parts of the cliff stayed just as they were. Beyond the chasm, crops continued to ripen on fragments of land that were now isolated out in the water, like living fossils. Everything that seemed permanent disappeared without warning.

  I suppose, though, that however it seemed, the landslip didn’t happen in a moment. As shocking as it must have been, underneath the surface things must have been changing for some time. Little cracks and fissures opening wider, hidden tensions in the bedrock. After the landslip people knew what to look out for – the odd way a patch of grass seemed to have sunk, a bubbling spring where there hadn’t been one before, the fence posts that had fallen for no reason. There were warning signs if only you knew what to look for. And now I do.

  Minnie bounds back to me, her tongue lolling out of her mouth, eyes wild as if she hopes I’ll share in her excitement, but I can see she’s starting to tire. It’s time we went back.

  As my footsteps turn back towards home, I start to think again about Ben, and the mess I will have to face at the bungalow. It makes me shudder to think of it, but I know I am doing the right thing by refusing to clean up. And not just for me. As I follow the path back to Lyme I realize that, unbeknownst to him, I am doing Ben a huge favour here. There may be a few difficult months while I break him in, but it needs to be done for the sake of his relationship with Prue. He will thank me later, I am sure of it. It is as if he is a foster child that I’ve adopted in order to teach him, by example, a few important lessons about the co-habiting dynamic. No, a foster husband, that’s better.

  Wouldn’t that be the perfect wedding gift to my sister and her future husband? A husband who is already housetrained, his annoying edges knocked off. Who needs a full set of champagne glasses, or teak-handled barbecue tongs engraved with Mr and Mrs, when they could have something truly useful? Something that will actually make a real difference to married life? I cannot wrap this gift, but surely it is far more valuable than anything I could buy?

  If you know the warning signs in advance, you can do something about it. Fill in the cracks, move the livestock to safer ground. Not build your house on the fault line. Matt and I are like the crops still growing out at sea, too far away to be harvested, all that effort wasted. There’s still time for Prue and Ben; I am going to save them both, even if they don’t know it yet.

  16

  London

  Matt truly believed that eight years of living in Bethnal Green had somehow made him more authentically urban than me, simply because my flat was within ten minutes’ walk of Hampstead Heath. Even though he was the one who’d owned an entire house, while my flat was a minuscule one bedroom on the third floor of a purpose-built block. It was as if the very presence of grass, trees and open vistas on my doorstep, instead of abandoned mattresses and fried chicken shops on his, stripped me of my status as a true blue Londoner. As if the pair of us, white, university educated and working in television, weren’t already stuffed into every middle-class pigeonhole imaginable, no matter what postcodes we inhabited.

  It hadn’t exactly been my intention to make Matt move to Belsize Park. In truth, I had been against us moving in together at all, but to say so directly sounded unnecessarily harsh, and I’d just delayed and hesitated and hedged my bets until he asked me outright if I just hated the idea of moving to East London. It was easier to agree that this was my worry than to admit to the churning sense of anxiety that filled me up every time I thought about where this was going. And when he offered to move in with me instead, my excuses ran out.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t love him. Of course I did, though he was the one who said it every five minutes. Of course, that was why it was terrifying. It meant so much, you see. So much that I couldn’t stand the idea of what would happen if it didn’t work out.

  But when he’d moved in to my flat, ruthlessly casting out the girly cushions in my living room, and cluttering up the hall with a ton of sports equipment that he never seemed to use, I wondered why I’d ever worried about it. Everything felt so easy. Even boring things, like trips to Ikea or the supermarket, felt fresh and new because we were doing them together. As if by choosing a curtain rail together we were investing in some sort of shared future. Though obviously I never said so to him; no need to tell him he was right, I’d never hear the end of it. But I was surprised by how this shared life, which I had thought would be all compromise and difficulty, turned out to give me far more than I had to give up. Matt always said I was an all-or-nothing girl; either entirely against something or entirely for it, with no in between. And slowly, slowly, I was coming round to being entirely for a future that had Matt in it.

  However. The ointment always has a fly in it, and ours was Matt’s continued belief that he was somehow too ‘street’ for Belsize Park. Even though he was now a signed-up member of the Hampstead Heath massive, with a council tax bill and a parking permit, he couldn’t resist reaffirming his bogus urban authenticity every time we went to the Heath.

  It was one of those late September Sundays when the sun puts on one spectacular last show, as if trying to remind you that it will soon be gone. Even with the best efforts of the sunshine, there was an autumnal chill in the air that practically pulled the covers off you and begged you to get outside before winter came. Well, okay,
the chill didn’t do that, I did. But Matt, for all his urban warrior act, could always be persuaded out of bed by the promise of lunch at the Holly Bush.

  On our walk across the Heath he insisted on playing the game that he called Hummus Bingo and that I, refusing to join in, called Class War. He racked up the points according to rules that seemed to be devised purely to afford him a maximum score.

  ‘Regular, shop-bought hummus in a plastic tub – one point. Too easy,’ he said, striding dismissively past the picnic of a young couple whose entire lunch appeared to consist of hummus, Doritos and White Lightning Cider. Ah, sweet youth, and sweet youthful metabolic rate that permits such appalling dietary habits.

  Matt granted himself two points for spotting any variation on classic hummus – roasted red pepper, lemon and coriander, that sort of thing – three if purchased from a deli rather than a supermarket. But the true bonus points were earned by those picnickers who had expended a little more effort on their Middle Eastern dips.

  ‘Now wait, wait.’ Holding my hand, Matt led me on a determined detour towards a family seemingly dressed straight out of the Boden catalogue. ‘Signs are good, very good. Yup, yup, here we go. Proper wicker picnic hamper, tick. Assortment of tartan rugs, tick. Kilner jars and proper cutlery – I feel some serious points coming on.’

  We slowed our pace once we neared them, the better to spy on their lunchtime spread. Matt pretended to be looking for something on the ground, and I helped him. Half crouched in the grass, we crept closer, like ineffective and highly visible reconnaissance spies on Operation Hors d’Oeuvre.

  ‘Linus, hummus!’ called the mother, holding out a pitta bread to a small boy who was far more interested in shovelling handfuls of crisps into his mouth.

  ‘Not hummus,’ he sulked, pushing her hand away.

  ‘Come on, darling,’ she said, her face falling. She waved the pitta bread as if that would make it more tempting. ‘Mummy made it especially.’

  ‘Bingo!’ hissed Matt, clutching at my hand for emphasis. ‘Double points for homemade.’

  ‘Not like it,’ insisted the little boy, his lower lip stuck out rebelliously.

  ‘Just try it, darling. Just a taste.’ She tried to catch him with her free hand.

  Linus had other ideas and wriggled away from her, grabbing another handful of crisps as he went.

  His mother sighed and turned to her husband, her shoulders slumping in defeat. She looked tired. ‘I don’t even know why I bother. You shouldn’t’ve let him at the crisps so early.’

  Her husband grunted, not looking at her, his attention held by the sports pages of his newspaper.

  ‘Charles, are you listening? I made this from the Ottolenghi book especially. I suppose you wouldn’t have cared if I’d just gone to Nando’s, would you?’

  Charles didn’t stir, not even when his wife began passive aggressively rearranging the picnic spread, as if weighing up each component as a weapon. If I were him, I’d have been worried, a thrown Kilner jar could do some serious damage, even to his thick head.

  Matt and I grinned at one another, trying not to laugh out loud. Other people’s domestics always seem completely risible, don’t they? While your own are incredibly serious and complex.

  ‘Nightmare,’ I mouthed, rolling my eyes.

  We stumbled to our feet and brushed the grass off our clothes. Charles and his wife were still not speaking, a frosty silence lengthening between them as we walked away from their waterproofed picnic rug.

  ‘God, yeah, she was awful,’ he agreed. His voice went high and mocking. ‘Linus! Hummus!’

  ‘What? No, he’s awful,’ I said, pulling on Matt’s hand to make him stop and look at me. ‘Just ignoring her like that when she’d made all that effort.’

  ‘Is it any wonder, with her nagging at him?’

  ‘She wasn’t nagging!’ I felt stung into defence of this stranger. Something about the droop of her neck told me Charles didn’t pay her much attention.

  ‘Basher, if you had nothing better to talk to me about than hummus recipes, I’d ignore you too,’ said Matt, tapping me playfully on the nose.

  I ducked my head out of the way, but it wasn’t worth arguing over. Other people’s problems didn’t affect us. We’d never let ourselves get like that.

  ‘Right. To the pub,’ said Matt, setting a brisk new pace up the hill. I followed after him, trying to match his long stride.

  ‘Wait, have you finished your Class War game, then?’

  Matt turned around. ‘Game over,’ he said. ‘Obviously.’

  ‘Obviously?’

  He shrugged. ‘Sudden death. She said the magic word.’

  I looked at him blankly.

  ‘Ottolenghi. Patron saint of weird hummus. You lose.’

  ‘But I wasn’t even playing, you arse!’

  ‘Them’s the rules, Basher Bailey. If one of us wins, stands to reason the other one loses, right? I can’t help it if that’s you.’

  At the time I thought very little of this game. It all just seemed like nothing, a silly diversion that kept us occupied on the walk towards our Sunday lunch. But afterwards I remembered it for two things: the opposing sides we had taken in an argument that had nothing to do with us. And the fact that only one of us could win.

  17

  The postcard is in a bin on the seafront. And I ripped it up into little pieces just in case the compulsion should come upon me to run back and try to retrieve it. Matt mentioned the emails I haven’t answered. It’s time to face these, too. And if that means going into the Baileys’ office, one cramped room containing my entire family and my inescapable housemate cum foster husband, then so be it.

  When Mum and Dad established the company, they rented the upstairs floor of a house just off Broad Street. I am sure the intention was to move to bigger premises as the business grew, but somehow they never got around to it. Nor had they ever thought about redecoration – it’s not the sort of office where meetings are held, since holiday-makers either go directly to their rental cottages or meet in town or on the Cobb for one of the guided walks. No one visited, and nothing ever got thrown out. Like the striated cliffs of Lyme, new material was simply added on top of the old. Which meant that stepping back into the office was like revisiting my childhood. There was the supremely Eighties poster for the ‘Do You Think He Ichthyosaurus?’ fossil tour – all bubble writing and batwing jumpers (the latter on the tourists, I hasten to add, not the dinosaurs). There was the framed Austen Festival newsletter, featuring a furious six-year-old Prue, dressed up in an olde-worlde outfit very much against her will. At seventeen I had hated the picture of me leading the French Lieutenant’s Walk; the photographer had caught me with my mouth hanging open in a weird way, and the wind had blown my hair into knotty tangles. Now I am just astonished at how young I look.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ says Prue, looking up from her computer. There’s a pile of wedding magazines next to the monitor, each one bristling with multi coloured Post-its marking relevant pages.

  ‘Hello, darling,’ says Mum. She takes her glasses off and stands up, pushing them into the twisted knot of hair that is piled on top of her head. ‘Come on in. I hoped you’d come and visit us.’

  Dad waves hello but is busy scowling at a screen and obviously doesn’t want to be disturbed. There is no sign of Ben, but then I hear a toilet flush and he appears behind me, wiping his wet hands on his trousers. Even here, it seems, there is no escape from his bathroom habits.

  ‘Kate!’ he exclaims. ‘Just talking about you, weren’t we?’

  Mum quickly shakes her head at him, and Prue glares him into silence. Dad harrumphs behind the computer monitor. I suppose that means they weren’t saying anything good. I should be used to people talking behind my back by now, but it always makes me feel sick to realize they have.

  ‘Ben, I think we need some more milk,’ says Prue, giving him a pointed look.

  ‘Ah, not sure we do actually,’ says Ben. He heads towards the office fridg
e to prove his point. ‘Loads left.’

  ‘No there isn’t,’ she answers, stepping in front of the fridge and blocking his way. ‘I, er, I drank it.’

  ‘All of it? A pint?’ Ben rubs his blond curls, bemused.

  ‘Yes. I just really fancied a big glass of milk. While you were in the loo just now. Lovely. But now there’s none left for tea. So can you run out and get some? Just take some money from petty cash.’

  Ben shuffles his feet, kicking at the corner of a desk as he looks at each member of the Bailey family in turn, sensing he is being banished. At last he grabs a handful of change from the red tin by the office door and stomps off down the staircase, his heavy footsteps reverberating through the building.

  The sounds of his departure have barely faded before Prue crosses the room to point at me accusingly, her pale blue eyes so like mine that it’s like being accosted by my younger self.

  ‘Don’t you think I don’t know what you’re doing.’

  ‘Prue,’ says Mum. ‘This is not the way to—’

  Prue interrupts. ‘Ben’s told us, you know.’

  ‘Told you what?’ I ask, wondering what Ben could possibly have to complain about since he’s moved into Granny Gilbert’s bungalow. That I don’t allow him to use my dog as a waste disposal unit? That I haven’t bought the most recent copy of Grazia to accompany his morning poo?

  ‘Darling,’ says Mum, coming over to stand between me and my sister. She takes hold of my hand and squeezes it gently. ‘What Prue is trying to say is that we are very worried about you. Ben has mentioned that the house has become rather dirty since he moved in. He says you never clean anything up, which is ever so unlike you.’