The Foster Husband

by Pippa Wright

  I wondered if he thought that complimenting me extravagantly in front of my friends was the way to get back into my good books, or if he was drunk enough to believe his own words. As far as I could see, he mostly just thought I was extraordinarily annoying.

  ‘Don’t go getting any ideas, Jay,’ warned Sarah, sauntering across the kitchen, wagging her finger at him. Somehow the way she did it managed to be teasing and sexy instead of nagging. I could see Matt looking at her admiringly, the glamorous high-heeled professional compared to his stay-at-home wife in her apron. Well, there was no point in taking the apron off now, I’d only get spattered with hot fat when I took the chicken out of the oven.

  Sarah sank down onto Jay’s lap, crossing one elegant ankle over her knee. ‘Kate might have transformed herself into some domestic goddess, but she is a way better person than I am. You can dream on if you think that I’m ever going to be fannying around in the kitchen on your behalf.’

  Jay tickled her ribs, making Sarah shriek and writhe so that her wine sloshed perilously close to the top of her glass. I picked up a cloth from next to the kitchen sink, ready for it to spill.

  ‘Yeah, right, Sarah,’ he said, rubbing his stubbled chin into her neck to make her laugh. ‘The day you make me a meal from scratch, like Kate’s done, is the day I make an honest woman out of you.’

  Sarah snorted with laughter and leaned back over her shoulder to kiss the top of his head. ‘That’s enough of a threat to keep me single for ever, babe. Anyway, I scratched that curry out of the takeaway packet last night, you’ve got nothing to complain about.’

  ‘God, takeaway curry.’ Matt sighed with patent longing, and then he flinched guiltily, catching my eye. I turned back to the kitchen counter and wiped at a spot of water by the sink with the cloth I was holding tightly in my hand.

  ‘Anyone want more wine?’ I heard him ask. I felt his presence as he crossed the kitchen towards me, putting both hands on my hips. It felt like a sort of apology. I leaned my head back, about to rest it on his shoulder, when he moved me bodily out of the way, and I realized he was just trying to get to the cutlery drawer.

  ‘There it is,’ he said, picking up the corkscrew and returning to the table to open another bottle.

  ‘Kate?’ he waved the bottle at me again. ‘Just one won’t hurt, will it?’

  I shook my head. When Matt said it wouldn’t hurt, he meant it wouldn’t hurt him. He didn’t understand that I had committed to this. Everyone said giving up alcohol increased your chances of getting pregnant. If it didn’t happen this month – again – it wasn’t Matt who’d blame himself.

  ‘You’re no fun,’ he said. I could tell that he was trying for the teasing tone Sarah had adopted, but instead he just sounded petulant.

  ‘Maybe it’s not all about being fun,’ I snapped, unable to stop myself.

  Matt barely reacted, but I saw the swift, anxious look that Jay gave Sarah, and the way she squeezed the arm he had wrapped around her. It was typical that it would seem like me who was being unreasonable, when they knew nothing of how he’d behaved before they arrived. I looked like the shrewish, sober wife, while he was Mr Good Times.

  ‘Did I tell you what happened last week with Randy Jones and the sixteen-year-old intern in Talent?’ asked Sarah valiantly.

  We all turned to her gratefully, gladly, trusting her to lead us to safer conversational ground.

  35

  I don’t hear the exact words of Ben’s reaction to my handiwork, but I get the general idea from the shouting and crashing noises that emerge from the bathroom first thing the next morning, shortly followed by the man himself. He stumbles into the kitchen, his face bright red and dripping with water.

  ‘Why the fuck,’ he stammers, pointing to his forehead. ‘Why the fuck does it say Barbados on my forehead in giant letters? Backwards?’

  ‘Well, otherwise you wouldn’t have been able to read it in the mirror, Ben,’ I say sweetly, trying not to laugh. It is one thing to play a practical joke, but quite another to guffaw out loud in the face of your victim. That would be cruel.

  ‘It won’t come off! Been scrubbing at it with a flannel for ten minutes!’

  ‘Oh shit,’ I say. I had assumed it would wash off straight away, once the joke was over. ‘Ben, I had no idea it was permanent.’

  ‘Did you use the permanent fucking marker in the living room, by any chance?’ he asks. ‘Because that might have given you a clue.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I say. ‘It was a joke, I thought you’d see the funny side. Look, why don’t you try some of my exfoliating scrub, that might do it.’

  ‘Already used half a tub of it,’ he barks. ‘Face is totally flayed.’

  He rubs at his forehead with the sleeve of his dressing gown, as if the soft terry towelling will succeed where Dermalogica has failed.

  ‘I’ve got a meeting today,’ he wails. ‘Who is going to take me seriously with the word Barbados on my face? Backwards? Why Barbados? Why?’

  ‘Because of the honeymoon?’ I say cautiously.

  Ben spins round, his eyes narrowed. I never knew his affability could turn to pure rage like this. It almost makes me like him more to know that he’s not as one-dimensional as I’d feared.

  ‘Honeymoon?’ he asks, in much the same way as a fundamentalist Christian might say ‘abortion?’

  ‘You wanted to know where Prue wanted to go on honeymoon,’ I titter nervously. ‘Umm, now you do.’

  Ben growls something under his breath and storms out of the kitchen. When he returns, dressed in a suit, he has engineered a strange, thin fringe over his forehead by straightening his curls with what looks like a great deal of hair product. He scowls out from under the wispy curtain that entirely fails to obscure the faded blue letters.

  ‘Well,’ he says, ‘if you set out to humiliate me, you’ve done a great job. Good for you. Hilarious. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go to work, which is something you clearly know little about, or perhaps you would have thought more carefully about this.’

  He points to his forehead as if I might have missed it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. I really am sorry. I didn’t think it through at all. It seemed funny at the time. Surely the ends justify the means?

  ‘Prue said I should look out for this,’ Ben says. ‘I said, no, Kate’s a good egg, don’t know why you’ve got such a problem with your sister. But Prue said you just use people, only think of yourself. Don’t care how you affect anyone else. Now I see she’s right.’

  I stare at him with my mouth open, winded by his accusations.

  He produces from his coat pocket a knitted hat that he pulls down over his hair. Blond curls escape at the front, but the offending letters are hidden.

  ‘Good day to you,’ he says, bizarrely, as if we are in a Victorian novel. Good day? I suppose he thought it would sound cutting.

  After Ben is gone I hear a noise at the door and I wonder if he’s coming back to shout at me again. But no, while I was steeling myself for another blow to my core, a knife has been slipped between my unsuspecting shoulder blades. On the doormat lies a letter from my husband.

  At the sight of his handwriting my first emotion is pure guilt. I know rationally, of course, that I have no reason at all not to have been kissing another man last night. Some people might say that it’s inappropriate to fool around with Eddy when I’m still married, but even puritanical Prue seemed to grant me an amnesty on that one, so some people would have to have incredibly high and unrealistic standards. But it is impossible to see Matt’s cramped scribble on the envelope – the messy writing of one accustomed to texts and emails rather than penmanship – without feeling a lurch of shame and horror. Perhaps I will always feel like this in some way: guilt at having let our marriage fall apart, at not being stronger and more resilient.

  When couples who have been married for years and years share their secrets, they all seem to say the same thing: that it’s hard work, and that there has to be forgiveness on both sides
. I don’t know if I am good enough at either of those things. I worked hard, of course, I worked harder on my marriage than on anything. When I think of how I used to complain of my long hours at Hitz, I realize how easy I had it. Those hours raced by in a blur of activity and appointments and teamwork. There were tangible results – a show produced, a budget finalized. Far harder was the painful stretch of time alone between nine and six when you were working working working for the happiness of someone who not only wasn’t there, but who seemed to actively resent the things you were doing when he finally returned home.

  And forgiveness. That is the hardest thing of all. I honestly don’t know if I have it in me to forgive everything that happened. To stare it in the face unflinchingly and take the consequences. Because to forgive is to accept, isn’t it? To accept what happened, instead of resisting it and running from it. That is what I’m not sure I can do. Reading Matt’s letter instead of throwing it away would be a start.

  Before I do that I need coffee. I take my time grinding the beans and letting the boiling water steep. I heat up a pan of milk, a refinement I rarely bother with because it will take more time. All the while the unopened envelope sits on the kitchen counter, all the more obvious because I am trying so hard to pretend I am unconcerned by it.

  When my coffee is made, I take my cup and sit down at the kitchen table with the letter. Minnie settles herself by my feet, sighing heavily at this interruption to her morning routine. We should be out on a walk by now; there are seagulls unchased down on the rocky shore, lampposts unsniffed.

  I use a knife to open the envelope; it makes a snickering sound, as if someone was laughing at me.

  I don’t know if I should read anything into the graduation from a postcard to two pages of actual watermarked writing paper. Even through my guilt and confusion, I am oddly touched by the idea of Matt going to the trouble of buying paper on which to write to me. I know we have nothing like this at home – who does, nowadays? I shake my head crossly – why am I wasting time on considering the medium when I haven’t even read the message?

  Of course, forgiveness is what Matt wants. As if it’s as easily given as it is asked for.

  Kate,

  What is it going to take to get you to answer me? I’ve got in the car again and again ready to come down to see you. But I know you need space. I’m trying to give you that.

  There has to be room for mistakes. Neither of us is perfect. But you can’t throw everything away without even talking about it.

  I’ve got to go away for work tomorrow – Dubai, one week. I won’t be at home if you call. But I’m on my mobile, I’m checking email. I’m waiting to hear from you. Please.

  Matt

  Maybe it is because I am a little hungover this morning, so my brain isn’t ready to spin straight into its accustomed fury against Matt. Maybe it’s because last night I was kissing another man. Or maybe it’s knowing that my insistence on having things on my terms has sent my sister’s fiancé to an important meeting with magic marker all over his face. Whatever the reason, I find myself contemplating how it would feel not to be angry with Matt.

  I can’t say I am going as far as thinking about complete forgiveness. But, like someone probing a sore tooth with their tongue, allowing themselves to measure the pain in careful, self-prescribed intervals, I consider reacting differently.

  Running away, blaming, hiding. These have always been my solutions to everything. But where have they got me? When I think about it in the bright, sober morning, it is less of a surprise that I found myself snogging Eddy Curtis last night, leaning against an ice-cream-coloured beach hut on the seafront, like my teenage self. Because I may be running away from adult problems now – from marriage and responsibilities – but my reaction is still that of a frightened adolescent. Afraid of facing up to actual emotion, preferring to bury it in new experience and hope that the bad feelings will just go away.

  Suddenly kissing Eddy feels less the action of a free-spirited woman reasserting herself after the failure of her marriage, and more the regressive step backwards of someone who has failed to deal with her past in any way. To my creeping discomfort, Ben’s words come back to me, again and again, more insistent even than the letter in my hand.

  Prue said you just use people, don’t care how you affect anyone else.

  I let Ben move in here, wasn’t that selfless? It’s not like Prue was about to put herself out, even though he’s her fiancé. And did I sulk and moan about it? No, I dedicated myself to making him a better person – for Prue, not even for myself! He may be annoyed about the magic marker – and I admit it was a step too far – but hasn’t it had the desired result? He wanted to find out Prue’s preferred honeymoon destination and I have delivered it to him – in black and white and scrubbed red skin.

  So why do those words keep coming back? Why won’t they leave me alone?

  Matt said similar things to me, that I manipulated everything so that it was how I wanted. But like Prue, he never understood that it was for his own good. For our own good. But was it? When I think about us lately, I have the strangest feeling: that while I was trying to get Matt to change, he was trying to change me too.

  But those words sting more harshly even than that, because they’re pretty much exactly what Tim Cooper said to me just before I left Lyme for good.

  36

  That summer started early for all of us, in a bright, brilliant May of blue skies and sunshine. Exams were over, and while the rest of the school was shut indoors, staring out of the window at the sea, we were free. There were parties nearly every night, and we’d meet up in the late mornings to dissect the evening before over bacon sandwiches and Cokes on the seafront, playing frisbee down on the beach in the afternoon. I think we knew it was all about to be over – some of us had places at university, some of us were interviewing for jobs – but in that early part of the summer, it was all about possibility; it felt like the sunny days would stretch out in front of us endlessly.

  It is hard for me to remember if I was already desperate to leave Lyme. My memories of that first part of the summer are so golden that I have almost convinced myself I would have stayed there happily for ever if things hadn’t gone wrong. But that can’t be right, since all the universities I applied to were in London. I remember dancing around the living room with Prue the day I heard I’d got into Imperial, her joy, even at ten years old, less for my achievement than out of delight that she would soon have our shared bedroom to herself.

  Some of the boys had cars now, crappy rustbuckets purchased with the proceeds of summer jobs, and the novelty of being driven around by friends rather than parents made us all shut our eyes to the terrifying recklessness with which we hurtled around the country lanes. Nothing bad would happen to us – we were invincible, independent. While living at home with everything paid for by our mums and dads, of course – we didn’t even know that this was something to be grateful for. Instead our parents were a terrible burden and we spent hours discussing how little they understood our lives, and what it was to be young.

  Adding to my giddy sense of freedom that summer was the fact that I’d dumped Tim Cooper. Yes, I, Kate Bailey, had broken up with the undisputed sex god of Lyme Regis.

  He hadn’t seen it coming. Possibly because he’d been too busy looking in the mirror, but it wasn’t his vanity that had finished us off. It wasn’t just one thing; it was everything. The protective way he hovered around me at parties, never joining in a conversation, just waiting for me to get bored or drunk enough to go upstairs with him; it began to annoy me. I hadn’t noticed how little he contributed, as if his beautiful face should be enough of a reward for those of us near him. He was an object to be admired, and when my gaze turned elsewhere, even momentarily, he was at first baffled, then angry.

  And the more I pulled away, the closer he clung. Turning up at my house when I didn’t answer the phone, pinning Kerry Walker’s fifteen-year-old brother up against a wall for talking to me. Once your party wasn�
��t considered a success until Tim and I had christened one of the bedrooms, now an evening was complete only once Tim and I had had a shouting match in your kitchen, or back garden, or wherever I happened to be when Tim lost patience with waiting for me to turn to him, only him and no one else.

  ‘I don’t understand you,’ he bellowed. ‘What do you want?’

  But I didn’t know what I wanted. I was seventeen, for crying out loud.

  Though it was unknown to me then, some examination board somewhere was about to give me an A in English for my ability to debate the motivations of literary creations. I could see the subtext and the foreshadowing in novels, accurately predict the weakness of character that would lead to disaster (it always ended in disaster for women in those nineteenth-century novels), but when it came to myself I entirely lacked the emotional vocabulary to tell Tim what I wanted. I didn’t know how to establish a boundary between him and myself when I wasn’t sure if this new, confident, popular me was really me, or just the temporary gift of Tim, as easily withdrawn as it had been given. And because I didn’t know how to discuss it, I ended it. Abruptly and badly. Tim couldn’t believe it.

  Nor could anyone else. There was a collective breath-holding from everyone around us for days. Tim Cooper had been dumped. One of the immutable laws of the universe had been broken – would others follow? Would the sun start setting in the east? Would the waves stop rolling up onto the shingle?

  He tried to get back together with me by blasting out No Doubt’s ‘Don’t Speak’ from his car stereo outside our house – don’t judge him too harshly, it was 1997 after all. It didn’t work, not least because Dad threatened to turn the hose on him if he didn’t fuck off out of our drive. And also because we were at that age where music really means something, is your entire identity, and I couldn’t help feeling that if Tim had known me at all, he’d have tried to woo me back with a band I actually liked.

  This is not to say I didn’t mourn the end of our relationship. Of course I did, I was a hormonal adolescent, so I seized on any excuse for dramatics. It was the perfect excuse to refuse to eat for days, to sulk around the house and to claim that no one appreciated the depths of my suffering. But underneath, I at least had the self-awareness to realize that my overwhelming emotion was one of relief.