Straight on Till Morning

by Lynne Barrett-Lee

  ‘And that’s all there is to tell. I said I wouldn’t tell you. He said he would. I thought he had. He always said there was nothing serious about it, Mum. Just that he was very attracted to her, and that the feeling was mutual and that it just sort of, well, happened.’

  I thought briefly of myself and Nick and that moment by the lift. These things didn’t ‘just happen’ at all. Not if you were happy. ‘So why isn’t it still happening?’ I asked. ‘Assuming it isn’t, of course.’ How would I know? How would I bloody know?

  ‘No, no! It’s long over, Mum. Honestly.’

  ‘How come?’ I asked again.

  She looked anguished. How had the twenty year old Morgan dealt with all this? No wonder she was so tuned into my every movement. ‘I think they got to one of those her or me situations, you know?’ She looked at her plate. ‘And so that was that.’

  Now I did drain my wine glass, and my water glass too. ‘Lucky me, eh?’ I said. Lucky me. How very magnanimous of Jonathan.

  Morgan reached across the table and put her hand on my arm. ‘Mum, you can’t leave him. You can’t. He loves you. He needs you. It would kill him if you left him. Mum, there really wasn’t any choice to make, you know. Ever. It was just one of those crazy things – ‘

  ‘Did he tell you that?’

  ‘He couldn’t help it, I don’t think.’

  ‘Did he tell you that too?’

  She shook her head. ‘It was just –’

  ‘Just what, Morgan?’

  She lowered her eyes. ‘Just that you know what really struck me about her? That she looked so like… well, like my Mother.’

  We made the exhibition, because there seemed little else to do. And jolly good I’m sure it was too. A retrospective – that’s what they’re called, aren’t they? – of some dead abstract painter who’d come back into fashion (as opposed to dead-abstract painter, which school would doubtless be in fashion the following week), and whose oversized gloomy daubings provided the perfect backdrop to the one act drama I had now found myself in. But the reality was that Morgan’s had perhaps been the worst shock of the day. She had been so sure I’d known, and so convinced everything she’d observed in our relationship since was a consequence, and now the fact of my ignorance had hit her in the face she was terrified she’d just sealed the envelope on my divorce petition. It took a great deal of firm reassurance to persuade her that, no, it wasn’t so. That it didn’t make any difference. That it was all in the past, and no longer relevant. That I certainly wasn’t about to invoke it as reason for some undignified tit for tat emotional revenge. That I certainly wasn’t about to leave Jonathan. And Nick? Well, things like this happened, didn’t they? Just like it had with her father. It had been my own ‘fling’, as it were. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

  So I’d lied yet again.

  Oh, and I bought Kate a poster.

  When I got home I trawled through the Sunday papers for the TV listings. There it was. Four days a week Parker’s Yard was on apparently. And, yes. Today was one of them. I looked at the kitchen clock. Not long to go then. The inside of my head felt like it had been stamped on by a diplodocus. Water. More water. That was what I needed. I ran the tap and filled up a pint glass of the stuff, but two swallows in and I couldn’t face drinking it. Drink was what I needed. Drunk was what I needed. Yes. I’d get drunker. That would be the best thing. I poured myself a large Pimms, hacked up a lemon, plopped it in the glass, swirled it with my finger, knocked back an inch, prised off my shoes, called Merlin to attention, went into the living room, sat down on the sofa Nick and I – no, don’t go there – tucked my feet under my bottom, knocked back another inch, and we settled down, woman and dog. To wait.

  Chapter 28

  She could have been called lots of things. Susan. Joyce. Tabitha. Dolores. But, no. She was called Constance. Which struck me as rather spooky and apposite. Not only because I was on my second Pimms. Not even because she was about as constant as a yesterday’s paper in a typhoon, certainly not because she was a second rate actress (she was) playing a second rate hairdresser in leather trousers, but because Constance, of course, was the name of Lady Chatterley. Who was famous for having had a lover. Though his name was – what was his name? I couldn’t seem to recall it. Only that he wasn’t in the least bit like Jonathan, being a son of the soil and having a hut in the woods and a flat cap and string round his trousers. Or perhaps that was Worzel Gummidge. Whatever. He certainly didn’t go off to work in a suit. Constance Chatterley on the one hand. Rebecca de Winter on the other. And me ( I thought). The second Mrs de Winter. She, of course, being equally famous. For not having a first name at all.

  I’m not given to sneering as a pastime. Not for me the ‘ooh! I can’t stand her’ pronouncements about people that fetch up on the television, but that I have never even met. I don’t do that stuff. Yet I believe that had you glanced in at my living room that evening you would have found yourself peering at the face of a woman for whom the superior sneer is the expression of choice. It was with this novel set to my features that I watched the second half of Parker’s Yard. There had been a commercial break in the middle, during which I was encouraged to take heed of the fact that my dog could be glossier, funkier, lustier and doggier if I were to switch to Binga- bonga Compleat (or something). I thought perhaps I should write up the list of ingredients and send them to Androulla, pretending they were a new diet, for a laugh. That being the sort of laugh I thought funny right then. And then I sat and I watched and I thought.

  I thought mainly that there was something unexpected going on here. Something interesting. Noteworthy. Curious. The fact that while I watched Constance Perkins and her plank-like pronouncements in the matter of a misguided root-perm, my instinctive, gut-based, organic response was to want to punch her in the face, hit her around the breasts with a frying pan and tell Heat Magazine that I’d heard on the grapevine that she was riddled with genital warts. Which was grotesque of me, surely. How could I hate her? How could I bring forth such bile for Ms Constance Perkins when I was a chess piece carved from the very same wood? What right had I to feelings of anger against her, when I was practising the very same strokes myself? Unable to fathom a reason – unable to reason, full stop – I scratched Merlin’s ears and saw Parker’s Yard through to its (decidedly) bitter end. Then I wondered, in an almost dead-abstract fashion, whether Jonathan would be expecting dinner when he got home from his Tennis club AGM. I had already abandoned dinner myself. If I was lunching with Morgan (so my reasoning had gone) then I certainly wouldn’t want dinner. This was still so. I had dined on my lemon. And as Kate was out – where was she? Oh, yes. Staying at Amanda’s – there seemed little point in preparing some brownie point meal just so Merlin could snaffle it down at half past eleven. Jonathan, I thought loftily, could make his own dinner. Have some cake, maybe. And eat it, too.

  It was just gone eight thirty, and having satisfied myself that Ms Constance Perkins was old and wrinkly and had a neck like a fallen down football sock, I decided I would do something else instead.

  I went and riffled in the box at the top of Jonathan’s wardrobe. And yes, she did look like Tricia.

  One of the commonest causes of insomnia, it’s noted, is excessive alcohol intake. It’s caused by the body’s internal regulatory system becoming aware of the chemical changes that occur when the alcohol level in the bloodstream has dropped. Any change in the body’s chemical balance can be sufficient to coax it from sleep. I don’t know if this is true or not (I drink, I wake up, I don’t drink, I wake up) but suffice to say it was really no surprise to find myself staring at the ceiling at half past two.

  Another of the commonest causes of insomnia is having something pretty damned important to keep you awake. And the pondering of two and a half years of completely undetected infidelity would surely challenge the somnia (if that is the expression, which I concede is unlikely) of even the most dog-tired grizzly bear. Thus excessive alcohol intake was, in a way, a blessi
ng. Though I would most certainly wake up at some small hour and grieve, I would sleep like a corpse until then.

  .Jonathan had come in at nine thirty, by which time I had cleared the dog hairs from the sofa, the Pimm’s bottle from the worktop, and my head of any ridiculous ideas that I would confront him about what Morgan had told me. Which were small in number in any case. Not only because I had promised Morgan, but also because what purpose would such bloodletting serve? And there would be bloodletting. Of that I was sure. The thought had been almost sobering. Indeed by the time I had dispatched the last of the contents of my glass I had become so anxious about the bloody and terrible aftermath I was certain would follow such a revelation – from both regiments – that I elected to go to bed ultra-early, in the hopes that I’d be fast asleep by the time he got home.

  I hadn’t been, not quite, but I’d obviously absorbed a little of the Perkins technique, for when he put his head round the door and said ‘hello’ I was breathing in wisps and sprawled across the bed, limbs arranged as if I’d been jettisoned recently from a passing high-altitude jet.

  And then I had slept. And now I was awake. And Jonathan was in bed snoring beside me. I lifted the duvet gingerly from over me and padded across the room in my T-shirt. The moon was a half crescent of creamy luminescence, backlighting a haze of high, feathery cloud. I glanced back to the bed, to this stranger I lived with, and felt cold stirrings of sobriety and misery begin to tug at my up-to-now maniac brain. Nothing had changed and yet everything had. It was true. I’d been right. Jonathan didn’t love me. And despite the other promise I’d made to Morgan not twelve hours ago, my instinctive, three a.m., almost hysterical reaction was that I wished beyond every wish I’d ever, ever wished that I could be with the man who did.

  But I couldn’t I wouldn’t I shouldn’t. There. If I repeated those words to myself often enough, perhaps they would stop my fingers from creeping ever closer to my phone. I went downstairs and now I did drink some water. Three glasses full, standing at the kitchen sink, staring out into the night and looking for starlight. He didn’t love me. Had never loved me. Not in the way he had loved his first wife. I was simply the woman who rescued him from his misery. A wife to take care of him and a mother for his child. Morgan’s words swirled in my head. It meant nothing. Really. It was just an infatuation. It would kill him if you left him. There was never a choice to be made. Well, she was right about that. How could there have been? There was only one woman he would leave me for, and she was six feet under not three miles from here. No. That was wrong. He couldn’t leave me for Tricia. Because he’d never left Tricia in the first place. I drank some more water and swallowed this truth along with it.

  I went back to bed, then, and lay sleepless till sun up. The loneliest woman in the world.

  But loneliness in the face of having done the right thing was a feeling I thought I could cope with. And had the benefit of being like a bobbly old blanket. A whole lot more comfortable to live with than guilt.

  Thus went my thoughts when I woke the next morning. I had faced up to the acid test and I had not been found wanting. I had looked into the deep well of my conscience and, despite the siren call of my newly absolved feelings for Nick, I had taken that vital step back from the precipice. I had remained true to the promise I’d made Morgan. I was not going to unravel my marriage and family. Like Jonathan had done (for I was certain-sure love for me didn’t figure), I was going to stay with my spouse and get over Nick Brown. I had ended my fling. I would do the right thing. Happiness of the kind I had glimpsed so beguilingly was simply not a God-given right.

  But being all things to all men, and a rock and a stalwart and a person who does the right thing in the face of difficult moral decisions and so on, clearly takes its physical toll. As does round-the-clock crying.

  ‘Christ, you look like shit,’ observed Russell gaily, as we half-collided in my consulting room doorway a little after eleven . I paused long enough for him to register that I was not going to grace this comment with a sharp and profane riposte, and he leaned forward to inspect me more carefully.

  ‘Russell,’ I said eventually. ‘Do you think it will be appropriate to be passing such comments once I am Manager of Amberley Park?’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ he said, plunging a hand into the breast pocket of his suit. ‘But you don’t need to worry. Got my interview date this morning.’ He’d been invited to apply for the post of senior optom in Redhill, and it looked like the job was as good as his. He mimed a little plane taking off with the letter. ‘And then I’m outta here.’ He nudged me playfully. ‘Go on. Admit it. You’re gonna miss me, aren’t you?’

  Yes, I thought. Yes. I am. Very much.

  ‘Russell, don’t kid yourself,’ I told him gravely. ‘Believe me, I’m counting the days.’

  ‘Well, I shan’t miss him in the slightest,’ puffed Ruth as we sat and went through the special offers together. ‘Not in the least,’ she went on. ‘Be nice to be able to come into work without someone looking down my cleavage and passing judgement on my clothes sense, and taking the piss out of me all the time.’

  I sighed. I couldn’t seem to stop sighing all of a sudden. Was this the future for me now? A life of regretful exhalations? Would they erect a little monument to me? ‘The mysterious woman who sighed’? ‘But I couldn’t seem to help it. I think it was the pressure of having so much regret inside me. So much to think about. So many reasons for feeling sorry for myself. So many decisions I could be making but the knowledge that the only one that mattered any more was the one I had already made. Damn Jonathan. Damn him. How dare he let Morgan find out about Constance bloody Perkins. How dare he put in place a chain of events that meant I knew about Constance bloody Perkins. How dare he marry me at all.

  How foolish of me to marry him. I sighed again. ‘I find all this very unsettling,’ I said, pretending to myself that there was something inside me other than rocks and finding I could just about manage. ‘Everything changing. Everyone moving on. I know it’s progress and promotion and inevitable and everything, but it’s still a bit sad.’ I was talking on auto-pilot. Merely trotting out words. I felt, very keenly, that my world had collapsed. Morgan gone, Kate not so very far behind her, Merlin growing older, Ruth changing her job, Russell leaving altogether, my mother busy with her protests. And then just Jonathan. Just Jonathan and I. ‘Nothing’ll be –’

  Russell poked his head around the door.

  ‘Phone for you, Sally. It’s Morgan.’

  I had expected Morgan to call, of course, so I was word perfect and prepared.

  ‘I’m sorry to ring while you’re at work, Mum,’ she said. ‘But I just wanted to – you know. Is everything all right?’

  ‘Everything is fine,’ I said smoothly. ‘The subject is closed, and I don’t want to hear any more about it. What about you? Do you have a head like a prune in a bucket? You deserve to.’

  ‘I’m OK,’ she said.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Mum – ‘

  ‘Morgan, I really have to go. I’ve got patients waiting.’

  ‘I know,’ I’m sorry. I just –’

  ‘Well don’t, OK? As far as I’m concerned you never even told me, OK?’

  Ruth was still on her knees in the contact lens cupboard when I got off the phone. Work. That was the thing. I had patients to test and referral letters to write and I also had to sort out a thing called a game-plan to present at my induction morning the following week. Lots and lots to do. That was the thing. Carry on. One day at a time. Being sad successfully was all about not thinking long-term. About splitting your day into manageable chunks. Just get through this. Just get through that. Just get through the other, ad nauseam.

  ‘Hmm,’ she said, glancing up. ‘There’s a thing.’

  ‘Thing?’

  She said hmm again. ‘You heard of a band called Kite?. Russell’s got a spare ticket for them tonight that he wants to offload. Some crowd of his from five a side football ar
e going and one’s dropped out. The question is, can I be bothered?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘D’you like Kite?’

  ‘Vaguely. In a hum along but don’t buy the CDs sort of way. Much more to the point, do I want to spend and evening with Russell and half a dozen of his tanked up, testosterone fuelled pin headed cronies?’

  ‘Well, put like that, er…yes?’

  ‘Hmm,’ she said, twiddling a pack of disposable lenses. ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Hmm, indeed,’ said Dennis, who had arrived with Colin, the Store manager, clutching some posters. We’d been sent a big package of publicity material, for the official Drug u Like launch on August the tenth.. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever really come to terms with this colour scheme. Rather you than me, Sally. He unrolled one of the posters and squinted at it. ‘These Americans might have streamlined the business but they have an alarming tendency to overstatement. By the way, have you had the dates for the course they’re sending you on yet? I was speaking to Adam over at Crawley earlier. He said it was farcical. Lots of jumping up and down and shouting yes!yes!yes!, apparently. Don’t quite see how that’s going to help him run anything.’

  I nodded. ‘I still have to sort that out with –’ I swallowed the next sigh because I knew it would be a big one. ‘Nick Brown. Is he due in any time this week?’