Straight on Till Morning

by Lynne Barrett-Lee

  ‘Did I say that?’ she asked, yanking a fiver from her bulging Bagpuss purse and thrusting it at the cashier. ‘Well, I lied, Sal. I have a true and sincere and utterly unshakeable faith.’

  The woman at the till sniffed. I carried my lunch to the nearest table and sat down carefully. My bottom was still hurting. A whole week on and my bottom was still hurting. My bottom was still hurting and worse than that, my head was in an even worse mess.

  ‘Since when?’ I asked.

  Ruth twisted her wrist to look at her watch. Her bosom, ever privy to conversations these days, was a threatening, quivering mass. Like popcorn extruding from a fairground popcorn machine. She put down her tray and pulled out the chair opposite. She was breathless and beaming. ‘Since five minutes ago. I know I’m still a novice and covered in sins and all that but I can see a life of spirituality and good deeds and early nights and sensible footwear beckoning even as I speak. I might even take up church. Yes. I might just do that.’ She bit into her baguette and chomped on it hungrily, the rapturous smile never leaving her face. ‘Well,’ I said. ‘I just hope church knows what it’s letting itself in for. But why, exactly?’

  Ruth put the baguette down and slapped a few bread shards from her cleavage.

  ‘Why’d’ya think, you dozy mare? He’s just been in. Didn’t you see him? For some meeting or other. And guess what? He has asked me out. He has asked me out! Oh, joy! Oh happiness! Oh unbridled lust!’

  Ah. Him. No I didn’t. Something unexpected and small and spiky punched my stomach. Hard. ‘Who has?’ I said anyway.

  ‘Oh, Sally. You big klutz! Nick Brown! Who else? Just now. Just then. Just –’ she stuck her wrist out at me, ‘God, Sal. Pinch me. Pinch me hard. I might have dreamt it, mightn’t I? Hard. Now.’

  I pinched her. ‘Don’t be so daft,’ I said, hoping she had. ‘So. Right. When? Where?’

  ‘Friday. For lunch. He said – oh, happy day, Sal! – he just came up to me in the office and said “ Ah, Ruth. I’ve been looking for you.” He was all sheepish. Well, not sheepish exactly. But, you know, a bit shy? A bit…oh, you know that look, don’t you?’ I did. ‘And he said. “Look, I just wondered if you had any plans for Friday lunchtime” to which I said – God, No. What do you think? No I didn’t say that. Don’t worry. I said, I’m not sure, let me see. I don’t think so. No. I’m free. Why? And he said “Are you free for lunch then , maybe?” you know, in that lovely way he has. “mebbe?” you know?’ I knew. ‘And before you say it – and you were going to say it, weren’t you? – it’s not work. It’s not a meeting or anything.’

  I put my face in my coffee and tried to rationalise away the huge lump of anguish that had settled inside me as being a perfectly reasonable and understandable response given the circumstances, even if those circumstances were completely unreasonable given that I was married and he was more-or-less married and I didn’t believe in infidelity anyway and so it was really no business of mine to be fantasising about him and mooning about him and perfectly reasonable for Ruth to do any amount of those kinds of things given that she fancied the pants off him and was a free woman who hadn’t – thank the Lord – the faintest idea how I felt about him, and every right to want to go out with whoever she damn well pleased. Oh, this was becoming such an unpalatable and unpleasant and horrible thing. Why couldn’t I stop it? Why?

  ‘Because I asked him,’ she went on, in the manner of someone anticipating a ten point analysis of possible alternative reasons and daring her interrogator to just try it. ‘I said “oh, is there a meeting or something?” and he said no. He said “no, not a meeting. Nothing like that. Just lunch. Just the two of us. If that’s OK?” in a completely obvious way.

  ‘Anyway, so I said yes, of course, and he said “great. That’s great. And then he said he wasn’t going to be around on Friday morning so would it be OK if he stopped by to pick me up from here at around twelve-thirty. To pick me up, Sal! Wow! And take me out! And I said, “ooooh yes!”. Well, not quite “ooooh yes!” – I kept my cool, of course – and that’s it! Lunch! Friday! Happiness!’

  And shagging? This was it, then. This was the day. This was the day that, to the visual accompaniment of a brace of jostling bosoms, I was forced to accept that the small but insistent young ripple I’d been fearing had finally broached the millpond of my marital life. For I believe my main thought at that particular moment was something along the lines of ‘you can’t shag him! He’s mine’.

  Which was preposterous, plainly. I needed, I thought, to get a grip. A big one. But how could you get a grip on something so slithery, so insubstantial, so ephemeral, so intangible? So wrong? I left the rest of my lunch – the sort of omelette that people in canteens rustle up from the scrapings of all the left over breakfasts (and for which, ordinarily, I had a fondness) – and listened patiently to Ruth’s lengthy monologue about clothing crises and whether she should blow a ridiculous stash of cash on something new to wear. (She had already exhausted her wardrobe of seductresses stretch T-shirts to the general appreciation of a good chunk of myopic local male-hood, if not, up to now, of the local male in question. By the time we had returned to the relative mayhem of the optic area (we had a mid-season sale on, to boot) I rather anticipated a Friday morning of frightening sartorial excess.

  I had not seen him. I had not seen or spoken to Nick Brown since waving off the ambulance the previous Monday night. And then, of course, I did. Only ten minutes later, in the corridor on the way to the stock room. But I was so stressed about the whole thing by this time that I couldn’t even bring myself to call out to him and ask him how his rib was. Instead I shot off into the ladies before he could see me, grateful that he was headed in the other direction, even if it did mean I only got to look at his retreating back.. Then I went grumpily off to test a Mr Pleasance, who was not only fairly offensive in manner and but who smelled offensive as well, which was just the sort of day it had been. When I got out of the by now toe-curling environs of my consulting room, it was to be greeted by the news that my mother had phoned and it was imperative I call her back urgently, as she had important news to impart. So I did.

  She was breathless too, so I asked her if everything was all right.

  ‘All right?’ she panted. ‘Everything’s fine. Why?’

  ‘Because,’ I said, ‘you sound like you’ve just been landing a barracuda.’

  ‘Oh, no, dear. Just been practising my Dragon, that’s all.’

  ‘Your what?’

  ‘It’s a stance,’ she puffed.

  ‘But I thought t’ai chi was supposed to be gentle and undemanding and spiritual and so on.’

  ‘Not at my time of life and if you’re watching Esther Rantzen, dear. Perhaps I should go back to the yoga. Anyway –’

  ‘Yes. Anyway.’ I was feeling testy by now. ‘What exactly is the panic? I’m at work.’

  ‘Oh, no panic, dear. Just some rather exciting news.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Which is that I can go and deliver my petition to the Prime Minister. I’ve been speaking to a very nice man at the Labour Party, and he said it would be no problem at all.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really. I have to sort it out with the police and everything first, of course, but –’

  ‘The police?’

  ‘Yes, at Charing Cross. He’s given me their number and it’s all very straightforward apparently – the main point is that we need more signatures! Which means as many pairs of hands as we can get. So I was wondering if you were working this Saturday. Are you?’

  ‘Well, no, as it happens, but –’

  ‘Brilliant! You don’t mind popping down do you? You only need do a couple of hours or so. Bring Kate! Bring Merlin! Yes. Definitely bring Merlin. He’ll be good, because people will want to come up and stroke him. And if people think it’s for the RSPCA they’ll sign anything. Oh, isn’t this all so exciting!’

  That night I did dream about my mother. I dreamed she was
travelling the Great Wall of China in a leotard and footless tights, dispensing home grown African violets and dog biscuits and asking Tibetan Monks to sign her save-the-refuge petition. And then I woke up.

  I wake up most nights, of course, but in a generally uncomplicated manner. If not through a dream, in which case I am catapulted awake, then it’s a gradual, unfussy clamber back to consciousness. One minute I’m asleep and the next I’m not. Eyes open, brain sluggish, feet cold.

  This was neither. I opened my eyes and scanned the dark room for clues. Something had woken me up.

  I lay silently for a minute or two, waiting for whatever sound it had been to trot back along to my short term memory and explain itself to me. But there was nothing. Just the tinny click of my watch on the dressing table and a low hum of distant motorway traffic outside.

  But something. It had been something. I slid my legs from underneath what little duvet was covering me and swivelled to sit up on the bed. It was a sticky night. A blue-black sky, lit by a moon I couldn’t see, and all the treetops still as statues. Jonathan’s bulk shifted beside me as I stood up to look out of the window.

  Something. But what? I wasn’t afraid. So familiar was I with the night time noises of our home that the night house was no more threatening than the day house. I padded down the stairs and went into the kitchen. Merlin, on twenty four hour alert in case of passing grouse, thumped his tail twice but remained in his basket, his doggy smell stirred by the movement of the air. I leaned to stroke his head and murmur a hello.

  Something. Not the phone. Not a rafter. Not a floorboard. The immersion heater, maybe. No. A different kind of noise.

  I opened the fridge and pulled out a carton of cranberry juice, the lemon light illuminating the cling-filmed remains of the chicken I’d left out for Jonathan after tennis. When was the last time we’d actually sat down to eat a meal together? Weeks, at least. There was an upturned glass on the draining board so I picked it up and poured some juice into it. Then I spotted my mobile on the work surface, plugged into the charger that sat next to my cookery books. The light spilling in from the kitchen window was falling on it and as soon as I looked at it, something went click in my head. I picked it up. Of course. The envelope icon was there. 1 message it said. Of course. The phone. That little five note jingle it played. A message. I replayed the notes in my head then glanced up at the wall clock. Ten past four. And a text message for me. At this time? Who on earth from?

  Wondering absently about a nocturnal visitation on my mother by the ghost of petitions past or something, I pressed the little buttons to see. Menu, it prompted. View message.

  And there it was. Beneath a phone number that meant nothing to me.

  Mars. To the South. WOW. Worth a look, if you’re up.

  Then N. N for Nick. So it was from him. The little thump started up in my stomach again. Without really thinking anything further (this was night, I was fuggy), I obediently picked up my keys and padded through the utility room and into the garden, the phone still clutched in my hand. The sky was thick with stars, the grass dewy and compliant underneath my bare feet. And there it was. Shining clear and strong above me as if just arrived specifically for my inspection and approval.

  The thing about looking at stars and planets is not the light as such – light is light, after all, whatever the source – but the mere fact of them. Their very existence. The scale. The sheer awesome reality of the universe. What must it have been like to look at the stars a thousand years ago? What would it be like to be a star, even, shining down on a world that’s so changed?

  I stared up at the sky until my neck could hold my head back no longer, then sat down on the bench beneath the kitchen window and weighed the phone in my hand. And now I did think. Should I send a message back, I wondered? Should I? The cursor, which had been winking steadily ever since I finished scrolling the message, seemed expectant now. Impatient. Compelling.

  Thks, I wrote. Jst seen it. Wow, indeed. S.

  I looked up into the sky again, the back of my head cooling against the house wall. I found Vega. The Plough. Pegasus. The cursor was still blinking at me, after the S. I pressed the key again. Send? It asked. Should I? Dare I?

  God! I didn’t know! It suddenly seemed that of all the little things I had done in my life that were foolhardy, reckless, dangerous, and downright stupid, then this one, this single press of a little silver button, would eclipse every last one of them. Or was I being silly? Where was the harm, after all? Where was the harm in sending a text message back to him? Where was the harm in a shared interest in Astronomy? A simple communication? An innocent exchange between two like-minded souls?

  I thought of him, sleepless and maybe still looking at the stars himself. Staring up, as I was right now, from his window – his garden? – in Oxted, at the very same patch of sky that was spread so beguilingly over me now. I thought of us having a little typed conversation, connected in our solitude while all around us slept. And then I thought of Ruth. I thought Lunch. I thought Friday. I thought how I had felt when I’d heard about Friday. It told me the answer. I scrolled downwards. Erase.

  Chapter 12

  But, strangely, I didn’t think of Jonathan. Not then. Not in the way I really should have thought of Jonathan, i.e. the right way .i.e. very, very guiltily indeed.

  I didn’t think of Jonathan in any meaningful sense until two days later, at just after four on the Thursday afternoon, when I got an angry call from him just as I was about to go in to do a test, because he couldn’t find his dinner suit anywhere.

  That’s not strictly true, actually. I did think of Jonathan at the time, but only in a completely self-righteous, dismissive, rather petulant, serve-him-right way, which hardly covered me in glory. Worse, I even resented that he’d made me feel like that. How had our marriage come to this? And worse, how was it that I had let it come to this without realising that it was heading towards coming to anything I should be worrying about in the first place? And what exactly was the ‘this’ in question anyway? Why did I need the rather halting and tremulous half-attentions of a man with an absent wife and God knew what baggage to tell me I was not the happily married little bunny I thought I was? Didn’t proper grown up people know these things already? Had I been living life with the colour turned down?

  I’d had crushes on men before, of course. Who hadn’t? Little oases of fanciful longing were the splashes of colour in long-married life. But never before with this persistent side order of impending catastrophe and fall-out attached. Never before with this constant analysis. This ceaseless angsty dialogue I kept having with myself. They never, in short, involved Jonathan. Ever. But perhaps, just perhaps, that was only because all the men I had idly fancied had no plans for straying, or the ones after me had not pushed the right buttons. Was it pure luck, this unexpected conjunction? Serendipity, even, between Nick and I? Had my marriage endured simply through logistics? Simply not having been at the right place at the right time?

  God. Too much thinking. The remainder of that night I slept not a jot and sat in the spare room using my now world-beating insomnia as a stick to bash myself up with. What I should have done was go into Jonathan, shake him awake and demand to know how precisely his wife had come so dangerously close to sending a text message to a man who drove women off roads (rails???) in the middle of the night and in the middle of the night, no less. In short, I should have dealt with it. But I didn’t. For one thing, I couldn’t even imagine how such a conversation would get going in the first place, given that it was by now five in the morning and the principle reason I knew how many stencilled daisies ran around the spare room dado rail in the first place (87) was that Jonathan would quite possibly spontaneously combust if I so much as cleared my throat at that hour. For another, what would I say? Would I say ‘Jonathan, I’m feeling a bit anxious because I’ve suddenly started hyperventilating over a man who is not yourself and while I appreciate that there is nothing inherently wrong with happily married women
having the odd palpitation over George Clooney or Brad Pitt, say, I’m also conscious that this has more the flavour of something about which we should both be concerned so how’s about you and me popping down to Relate on the way home from work tomorrow to thrash things out?’. No. I would not. Because Jonathan would say ‘whhaaaaat? before I’d even got past the word ‘I’m’.

  I could, I supposed, have tackled him over breakfast. I could have handed him his toast and broached the subject of our relationship over the Flora tub. But I couldn’t, because he’d have said ‘For God’s sake, you know the sort of day I’ve got, Sally. Can’t we talk about this tonight?’ And if I’d attempted to broach the subject when he came home from work he would have said ‘For God’s sake, you know the sort of day I’ve had, Sally. Can’t we talk about this some other time?’ Or I could have been assertive. Ah. Yes. That one. I could have said ‘I have just realised I am not completely happy and I am having dangerous feelings and I don’t know what to do about it’, and he would have become instantly cross and hurt and defensive and said ‘Oh, great. You’re not happy and you choose now to tell me about it. For God’s sake, you know the sort of ….and so on and so forth.

  Which is why, I suppose, people in ailing marriages don’t communicate their difficulties to one another and instead go off and start giving their attentions to other, more communicative relationships instead. QED. They’ve simply lost the knack.

  Some forms of communication, however, seem to improve with longevity.

  ‘Oh God. It’s still at the dry cleaners,’ I told him now.

  ‘What?’

  ‘God, I’m sorry. I completely forgot to pick it up.’

  ‘Forgot? How could you forget? I reminded you yesterday!’ Which was true. ‘Great,’ he said. ‘Now what am I supposed to do?’

  ‘Um,’ I said. ‘I don’t know. Um, can’t you wear another suit?’