Straight on Till Morning

by Lynne Barrett-Lee

  ‘How can I wear another one, for God’s sake? I don’t have another one.’

  ‘Um, rent one or something?’

  ‘How the hell am I supposed to rent one? I’m supposed to be catching a plane in little over an hour!’

  ‘Well, I don’t know, then! Buy one at Gatwick, perhaps?’

  He made a snorting sound down the phone. ‘Don’t be so stupid, Sally! God! Honestly! How could you just forget? How?’

  I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t answer. ‘Look,’ I said instead. ‘I’m really sorry, OK?’

  He ignored this. ‘Right. You’ll just have to leave work early. If you leave now, you can pick it up and then meet me in Departures.’

  ‘I can’t do that!’

  ‘You have to!’

  ‘I can’t do that!’ I said again. ‘I’m working. God, why can’t you just wear an ordinary suit?’

  ‘Don’t you ever listen? This is a Royal College dinner. I’m giving a speech, for God’s sake. Sally, you have to get my suit for me.’

  ‘But why don’t you just get it yourself? It’ll take me just as long.’

  ‘Because I have to check in, don’t I? And I don’t even know where the dry cleaners is.’

  Now I snorted. ‘That figures.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘It’s not supposed to mean anything. It means that if you did perhaps, then this sort of thing wouldn’t happen, would it? I mean I do have a job, you know. I do have other things to think about aside from everybody else’s domestic arrangements, you know. I can’t remember everything. There’s your suit, and Kate’s tap shoes and the dog’s injections and whether we’ve got any bread and the car insurance and remembering your Mother’s birthday and organising your receptionist’s leaving party and speaking to the man about the leak in the en suite shower and and and…. It’s too much. You should have reminded me this morning.’

  A silence. Then, ‘I reminded you yesterday.’

  ‘Well you should have reminded me again, shouldn’t you? Then I could have dropped it home at lunchtime, couldn’t I? How come it’s always me that has to remember everything for everybody all the time? I’m not a Palm Pilot, you know.’

  ‘Right,’ he said quietly. ‘That’s fine, then.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Fine. I get the message.’

  ‘What message?’

  ‘That it’s obviously all far too much trouble for you. Fine. Not a problem. You’re too busy? Not a problem. Putting upon you? Not a problem. I’ll sort my own suits out in future. But it would have been a great deal more helpful if you’d bothered to let me know before deciding your schedule was too hectic these days to accommodate insignificant trifles like looking after your family, maybe. Then I would have made other arrangements, wouldn’t I? Now are you going to get my suit for me, or what? It’s already ten past four.’

  ‘God! All right! I’ll get your suit!’

  ‘Thank you. I’ll be at the BA domestic departure gate. Be quick.’ And then he was gone.

  Nick Brown wasn’t my boss as such, but as my actual boss was nowhere to be seen and as Nick Brown – who had appeared as if out of the mists of Valhalla, where he’d obviously been holed up since Tuesday afternoon – happened to be standing a few feet away from me by this time, and glancing at me in a thoughtful and speculative fashion, I decided I had better plunge on in.

  ‘Look,’ I said, instantly remembering his sweet nocturnal text message and feeling crosser than ever as a consequence. ‘Family crisis. Can I ask a huge favour?’

  His eyes didn’t mention it. ‘Shoot.’

  ‘It’s just that I have to go and pick something up for my husband. He’s got to catch a flight. I wouldn’t normally dream of taking such a liberty, but would it be OK if I zoomed off for half an hour or so? I mean, it’s only to the airport, and I’ll be as quick as I possibly can. I’ve got two more tests booked in, but –’

  He’d been blinking and nodding a lot while I spewed all this out, but now he raised a hand to halt it.

  ‘Whoah!’ he said. ‘No panic, OK? I’m sure Russell will be able to cover.’

  ‘I won’t be long. It’s only –’

  ‘No panic,’ he said again, soothingly, which made my eyes start pricking. ‘Don’t worry about coming back. Go on. Zoom away. We’ll see you tomorrow, OK?’

  I wanted to say thank you. I wanted to hug him – if carefully. I wanted to tell him that I had got his message. That I had seen Mars and that, yes, it was stunning. But I couldn’t. I felt way too teary to risk it. So I just nodded at him gratefully and shot off up the stairs.

  I couldn’t find the dry cleaning ticket either, of course, so despite the jolly geniality of the dry cleaning lady, it still took ten minutes to rootle Jonathan’s suit out. She had dozens of them. Big do at Glyndebourne, she said. It was that time of year.

  How dare he? How dare he! How dare he speak to me like that! How dare he just assume, just blithely assume, that I would drop everything to pick up a suit that he should have reminded me about in the first place and that he had no right to be dumping on me in the first place given that I had a full time job as well, thank you very much and he not only had a bloody secretary to sort things out for him, but arms, legs, brains, hands and all that same stuff I had. So why couldn’t he just do it himself anyway? Why did he always assume I would do everything for him? And how dare he be so bloody sodding bloody annoying bloody debating society so bloody clever with words to make it seem like I was the one who was being unreasonable and saying that he didn’t have any problem at all about having to go and take his own bloody suits to the cleaners if only I’d let him know I was too busy so he could sort something else out. In short, making me in the wrong. And, all right, so I was in the wrong, and I shouldn’t have forgotten, but did he have to be so bloody hateful about it? I’d said I was sorry, hadn’t I? So why hadn’t he had the good grace to accept my apology and be nice to me? God! He was so bloody superior.

  By the time I had dumped my car in the set down lane, scribbled a note saying ‘Emergency!!!!!!’ and stuck it under the wiper, and then galloped across the terminal, Jonathan’s flight was a scant fifteen minutes from taking off. He was stomping backwards and forwards in front of the business class fast track bit and looking like he might just deck the next person who came up and asked him if they could help him or anything, as the uniformed woman who was scuttling away from him had, evidently, just done. I wanted to hit him. I wanted to shoulder the suit bag and hurl the thing at him. But as soon as he spotted me his expression changed radically. As if he’d been punched in the face by a little ray of sunshine.

  ‘Oh, Sal, what a saint you are,’ he gushed, taking it from me and giving me one of those enthusiastic hugs that fellow footballers do when one’s just scored a hat-trick. ‘God, I’m really sorry,’ he said, patting my back. ‘You’re right. I should have mentioned it this morning. I nearly did mention it this morning. I had every intention of mentioning it this morning, but then what with one thing and another and that early extraction and everything – well,’ he stepped back and glanced at his watch. ‘Better go catch my plane. I’m sorry to be such a bear. I don’t mean to be. I expect way too much of you, don’t I? We all do.’ He chucked me under the chin and smiled ruefully. ‘It’s your fault, you know,’ he said. ‘You’re just too efficient. Too capable. Too perfect. Too lovely. How on earth do you put up with me? Am I forgiven?’

  He leaned forward to pop a little kiss on my cheek, and patted my shoulder again.

  ‘You’re forgiven,’ I said. ‘It was my fault. I’m sorry.’

  And though the last bit of that was essentially true, the first bit, worryingly, was not.

  Which left me at the airport, and all at sea, at the back end of what had already turned out to be a decidedly unprepossessing day. It was almost five. I wondered if I should go back to work after all. But because the reason I wondered if I should go back to
work was more to do with who and not what I’d be likely to find there, I took myself off home instead. Ordinarily on a Thursday I’d do a big grocery shop, but as Jonathan was away now, and there was therefore no pressing need to stock up on KitKats, I was at a bit of a loose end.

  There was nothing interesting in the house to eat so I ferreted in the freezer and dug out a pie. Chicken and sweetcorn. I hated sweetcorn. Who’d brought this detestable pie into our house? I assumed Jonathan must have while I’d been away. Or Kate, perhaps. Which struck me as very tangible evidence of our increasing remoteness as a family unit. We never seemed to coincide for food any more. I dumped it in the oven in the certain knowledge that I wouldn’t get around to eating it. Sitting by myself, fishing out bits of sweetcorn. But then there was always Merlin.

  And apart from the doggy delights of his undemanding and adoring company, I was all alone. Kate was at dance class tonight – they were rehearsing twice weekly now; excitement about the production having reached such a pitch of frenzied excitement that I had even noticed a small poster flapping on the bus shelter down the road. Heady times indeed. But the joy of dance was still some weeks away ,and tonight there was nothing doing. Nothing on TV except that pet hospital hamster-in-crisis programme which I hated, and then Question Time, which I hated even more. I wondered if I shouldn’t perhaps phone my mother for a refuge update, but then I thought she’d most probably be at t’ai chi and then she’d get in and dial one four seven one and phone me back and twitter manically at me at God knew what hour of the night. No. I wouldn’t phone my mother. I would sit and read a book instead.

  Fairly predictably, this being late May and the night being warm, I fetched up in the garden. It’s a pretty house, ours. Seventy years old and well bedded into its surroundings, it stands in a half acre of gently rolling garden that’s adjacent to farmland on two sides. At this time the early clematis was in flower, an explosion of pink petals that smelt strangely of chocolate and which were just now beginning to be snatched away by the breeze to cover the ground with pretty candyfloss snow. Which Jonathan would sweep irritably away soon, no doubt. I looked up at the sky. There wasn’t much visible. Though the day had been clear, there was now a fair sprinkling of high cloud, deepening now as the night drew its veil over what was left of the day.

  And I thought about whether to send a text message to Nick Brown.

  If you’re a sensible, rational person, you can think sensibly and rationally about things. You can fast forward to some indeterminate time in the future and easily foresee a situation where a suit – or some other domestic item – is involved, and about which you might well, most probably will, be engaged in an argument of some sort. The details are irrelevant. It’s the interplay that’s important. Few of us can expect to spend the rest of our lives without rowing, or at least, getting into conflict situations with people about whom we care.

  But then again – I was on my third Pimms, and still very irritable with Jonathan – our projections, like life assurance performance tables, tend to be based on rather optimistic criteria and are thus as accurate a predictive device as a pair of net curtains. Ergo, I was thinking nothing so sensible and prosaic. I was thinking hypothetically. I was thinking no, no, no no, NO! I would not get involved in rows about dry cleaning issues with someone like Nick Brown in my hypothetical prediction, because dry cleaning would not BE an issue between us. Nor would dustbins, Sainsbury’s, ant infestations, or, indeed, the correct way to iron a shirt. Nonny nonny no no. Because in the make-believe world of wish-fulfilment I would be all the things I should have become during the course of my eighteen year marriage. IE assertive and confident and in charge of my own destiny. And the drudge of the house on my terms.

  Thus any realistic projections I could have inserted into my rambling thoughts (i.e that people in romantic relationships did not spend eternity mooning about and calling each other bunnikins and instead, in time, had tiffs about cleaning the toilet) were borne away and dumped without ceremony. And instead it occurred to me that even though there was nothing much doing in the celestial department, I could still text Nick Brown. To thank him.

  I was just thinking this when the sound of a car heralded Kate’s return from rehearsals. She wafted into the kitchen to find me rummaging feverishly in my handbag for my mobile.

  ‘You all right?’ she asked, pulling off her sweatshirt and frowning. She seemed to frown all the time at the moment.

  ‘Fine, darling,’ I quipped, plucking my hand from my bag as if its actions could betray my guilty thoughts. ‘Good rehearsal? Everything progressing OK with the production?’

  She shrugged and went over to the fridge.‘All is as well as can be expected,’ she said gravely. ‘As well as can be expected when half the cast have all the fluidity of movement of stick insects.’

  She sniffed haughtily. Kate did haughty very well.

  She took out a carton of orange juice and upended it to her lips.

  ‘Would you like something to eat?’ I ventured. ‘There’s a pie I could –’

  ‘Ugh. I cannot eat, mother. I have absolutely no appetite at all.’

  She lumbered off up the stairs with the no-appetite option of a Twix and a bag of Hula Hoops, and I was able, at last, to lay hands on my phone. Then I went and sat barefoot on the bench in the garden and I sent Nick Brown his message. I wrote, ‘thnks for earlier. V kind. And thnks fr lettng me know abt Mars. Was brthtkng. Nt mch out tnite. SM. P.S. How yr rib? Then I sent it off. I thought the SM was a rather nice touch. Not too familiar. Not too presumptuous. Not too….

  ‘Bbbbzzzzzwwwbbbzzzwwbbbzzz!’

  My ring tone right now was something like ‘tsetse fly’. Close enough to a proper phone noise so as not to make me sound like a twit, but different enough that I actually took any notice when it rang. A sort of strained, high-pitched, warbling screech. As if a small winged insect had found itself unaccountably marooned in an empty baked bean can and kept sticking to sauce globs while attempting to escape. I put the phone to my ear.

  ‘Sally?’

  It was Nick Brown. ‘Oh!’ I said. ‘Oh!’

  There was a fuzz of noise behind him. ‘Just got your message,’ he said back. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Oh!’ I said again. Because it had never occurred to me that he might actually ring me.

  ‘Couldn’t make much sense of it, mind you. Do you have a downer on vowels or something?’

  ‘Um,’ I said, with the sudden realisation that learning how to do text messaging from a sixteen year old might have left gaps in my phone etiquette knowledge. ‘Er no,’ I said. ‘Just being concise.’

  ‘Ri-ight,’ he said. ‘Anyway. Rib on the mend, thanks for asking. Your crisis sorted OK?’

  ‘Crisis sorted. Thanks for being so accommodating.’

  ‘No problem,’ he said. ‘Good. Anyway. Nice to hear from you.’ A pause. ‘So you didn’t mind then?’

  ‘Mind?’

  He coughed. ‘Me texting you the other night. I wasn’t sure whether it was appropriate or not, but I knew you’d want to see it, so I figured…and then you didn’t say anything about it, so I guess I really should have…’

  Appropriate or not. In what sense ‘appropriate or not’? ‘No, no,’ I sang, to accommodate all realms of appropriateness and convey my affirmative to all. ‘I didn’t mind at all. I was up anyway so I went straight out into the garden and looked. And it was brilliant, wasn’t it? I nearly sent you a message back, but then…’ Then what? ‘…well. Anyway. No. It was very thoughtful of you. Thank you.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’ He coughed again. ‘It was kind of nice to think there might be someone else out there who’d appreciate it. Nice to share it with someone. Anyway…’

  ‘Anyway…’

  ‘I guess I’d better go.’ I could hear voices nearby. I presumed he was in a bar or a restaurant or something. It wasn’t that late. ‘Just thought I’d call and thank you for your message, and, well, say hello. Still cloudy out?’r />
  Or a cave. ‘Still cloudy. But I’m sitting in the garden right now so I’ll let you know if anything cosmic and radical happens.’ Radical? What did I think was going to happen? That the International Space Station was going to slew off its orbit and come careering to earth on my patio set?

  He laughed at this. ‘That would be neat.’

  ‘No problem,’ I began, groping for something else interesting to say before he signed off and went back to whatever it was he was doing. ‘In fact, I’ll make a special point of –’

  ‘Actually, Sally,’ he said suddenly. ‘I’m glad you sent that message. Because I was going to ring you anyway.’

  ‘You were?’

  My heart braced itself. He sounded so serious. Uh-oh. I took a big gulp of my drink.

  ‘Yes,’ he went on. ‘To apologise.’

  ‘Apologise?’ I asked, puzzled. ‘Why? What for?’

  There was a tiny pause. I could hear him breathe in. I couldn’t imagine what he meant.

  He breathed out again. His voice became low. ‘Because I didn’t realise you were married.’

  What? Where did this suddenly spring from? ‘Um, well…’ I said. ‘Well, I am.’

  ‘I mean… I guess I should have. I mean, why would you not be? But I just assumed you were separated, or divorced or something… I mean, you don’t wear a ring or anything…’

  He’d noticed that? He’d checked that out? I moved the mobile to my other ear and looked down at my hand.

  ‘No,’ I started twittering, ‘I don’t. I lost it in the sea. In Worthing, it was. About five years ago, and then Jonathan –’the name felt suddenly uncomfortable on my tongue ‘– er, my husband, well, he bought me an eternity ring to replace it, and it didn’t fit – it was too big. And I didn’t want to lose that one as well, of course. Ha ha. So I – well, I was going to get it made smaller, of course, but you never get around to these things, do you? I wear it on my middle finger instead, and…um. Yes. You’re right. I’m married.’

  Another pause. Should I dunk something else into it? If so, what?