Wishful Thinking

by Jemma Harvey

  The thought just flickered through the back of Lin’s mind: What happens when I am not so young or so innocent? Aloud she said, in an aggrieved tone: ‘Of course I’m not innocent. Nowadays, nobody is.’

  ‘You’re so right,’ Sean said warmly. ‘The word has fallen into disuse because girls are just girls now, and there are few angels among them. You’re the first I’ve ever met. You seem to glow like a rose in the moonlight.’ There was no Blarney Stone in Deptford, but Sean claimed to have kissed it nonetheless. He had developed what he thought of as a poetic flair to complement his Irish image, borrowing freely from the scripts of his various shows. ‘I want to pluck you and wear you against my heart forever.’

  Lin was charmed, for all her Scottish common sense. Common sense, after all, is not strong in a teenager, and she was susceptible, and secretly romantic, and he had charm enough to impress the viewing millions, never mind her. And blarney was a rare commodity in Edinburgh, where the young men tended to be dour and earnest, or dour and yobbish, or just dour. She gazed deep into his eyes and sank into them as into an Irish bog.

  Later that night, back at his hotel, after large quantities of champagne and assurances of love and prudence, he relieved her of her innocence. The condom split during the proceedings, but he assured her everything would be all right. ‘Me sperm are very lazy: they won’t go swimming off into the dark.’ He was staying in the north for two weeks, and during that period she found herself borne off to nightclubs and restaurants, shrinking from the flash-bulbs of the paparazzi, to other hotel rooms, even to a lochside castle where a friend took him grouse-shooting and Lin struggled to quell her compunction for the hapless birds, telling herself it was only Nature. Her studies and her job were brushed aside: Sean bore her along in his swath like a favoured pet. He didn’t talk about the future but, naïve to a fault, she assumed that was because it was taken for granted they’d be together. She deplored her own sneaking doubts, and did her best to ignore them.

  And then came the day when he told her he was returning, not to the relative proximity of Liverpool and Mandela Street, but to London. To the deep south with its pollution and corruption, its hot climate, its posh accents and overpriced cuisine. She knew he had been written out of the soap at his own request, to graduate on to Higher Things, and now he told her that he would be making a new series, to be filmed in the capital, in which he would be the principal star.

  ‘Wish me luck, acushla,’ he said.

  ‘Of course, but . . . what about me?’

  ‘You’ll be doing fine. We’ll meet again, one of these days; I can read it in the stars. When I’ve a Bafta or two to my name and you’re a meedja sophisticate, we’ll turn up at the same charity event and our eyes will meet and – POW! That’ll be a moment to live for, won’t it? Until then, you can always tell the Press how much fun we had. They’ll be glad to run your picture under my name, though you don’t photograph as good as you look.’

  ‘I don’t want my picture in the Press,’ Lin said, feeling as if the bottom had dropped out of her world. ‘I just want to be with you.’

  ‘Ah, now, me darling, you’ve a deal of growing up to do, and you need to do it without me. Don’t be crying now; it doesn’t suit you. We’ll be seeing each other, I promise you.’

  And that was that.

  What about my innocence? Lin might have asked, but she knew it had been used up and thrown away. Now, she was supposed to become a meedja sophisticate, just like all the rest. She returned to her studies, tried to concentrate, noticed belatedly that she had missed a period or two. She attempted two home pregnancy tests and got two different answers. Finally, she nerved herself to go to the doctor.

  Once she knew the worst, she was flooded with a torrent of conflicting emotions. Shame at her easy acquiescence in her own seduction, remorse for both the pain and the problems she was going to cause her parents, panic at the premature onset of adulthood and responsibility – and a desperate, overwhelming love for that tiny seed that was growing unwanted inside her. She rejected abortion immediately, out of hand. When she told her Presbyterian father and conventional mother they did their best to suppress their disillusionment with their daughter and offered both moral and financial support, though Mr Macleod’s meagre income would be strained to feed another mouth. Perhaps it was because of this that Lin decided she had to talk to Sean. Reeling from his effortless act of desertion, she still retained an unacknowledged optimism about the male sex, somewhere underneath her emotional numbness. Surely, if he knew the truth, he would help. She wanted to write to him, but had no address. So she packed a single holdall, and braved the long train journey south.

  Sean had occasionally mentioned hanging out at a club called the Groucho and on reaching London, after lengthy inquiries, she found her way there. ‘I’m a friend of Sean Corrigan’s,’ she explained. ‘I know it’s silly, but I lost his address.’ She hated the lie, feeling it contaminated her, but circumstances had taught her a little worldly wisdom – if only a little. Staff inevitably wondered if she was an obsessive fan, but decided she looked relatively harmless and could not help being moved by her crystalline beauty. She waited the whole afternoon and evening, finding herself a B & B to stay in and returning the next day, and the next. Reception were impressed by her quiet manner, and the way she resolutely refused to enter the bar when male club members tried to pick her up. They fed her tea, soup, sandwiches. By the third day, they were beginning to have an inkling of the truth. ‘Contact his agent,’ they suggested; but she shook her head. She could hardly tell her story to an agent, and if she didn’t give her reasons Sean might simply fail to contact her. (Or if she did.)

  But that evening, he came. He might have been disconcerted at the sight of her, but only for a second or two, then the charm kicked in and he took her into the bar and appropriated a vacant sofa where they could talk. He hoped she would be impressed by the scattering of celebs, but she was too keyed up even to notice. He ordered champagne; she asked for mineral water. He said he was sorry, he couldn’t stay with her long, he was meeting friends; she said it wouldn’t take long. Then she told him.

  She thought he would be horrified, but he seemed almost amused. ‘Is that all? Have it out, me darling, have it out. We’re not in the old country now.’ He had never been in the old country. ‘I’ll pay, no problem. You don’t want to be saddled with a baby at your age. You’ve got your life ahead of you.’

  ‘I can’t,’ she said.

  ‘It’s not a big op, honest. Nothing to worry about. I’ve got two girlfriends up the spout before: they said it was a doddle. I must be fucking fertile.’ So much for his lazy sperm.

  ‘I can’t.’

  She tried to explain her feelings, but he wasn’t listening. In the end, he gave her a pat on the shoulder, told her: ‘You’ll see it differently in the morning,’ and went off to dine with his friends, leaving her to return to her lonely B & B, defeated and desolate. On the way out she paused in Reception to thank the staff for their kindness (she was always polite). A fellow Scot in the process of retrieving his coat heard her accent and glanced round. Touched by her appearance – everyone was, except Sean – he asked her where she was from, and if she was all right. ‘I don’t mean to be nosy – actually, I suppose I do – but you look upset and a bit lost. Maybe you’re new to London. It’s a tough city if you don’t know your way about. Can I help? We’re fellow countrymen, after all.’

  ‘I’m okay, really I am,’ Lin mumbled.

  ‘No you’re not, anyone can see that. Look, my name’s Andy, Andy Pearmain. The girls here’ll give me a reference. I’m not trying to make a pass or anything: I’m much too old for you and anyway, my last girlfriend was such a disaster I’m going to convert to homosexuality. It should be easy: in Scotland, it’s always been the men who wear the skirts. You’re obviously in some kind of trouble. If you don’t want me for a friend, at least let me be a stand-in.’

  The receptionists, genuinely concerned about Lin, assured her Andy
was to be trusted, and eventually, too devastated to resist, she let him take her out for a meal. He was thirty-two, which seemed incredibly old to her, and bearded, increasing his air of venerability – the aforesaid beard concealing a jaw which might or might not have resembled a lantern. His hair was unruly, his other features – well – ruly. He admitted to a family background in banking and to being involved in ‘investment opportunities’ in film and television, which were, he said, too boring to elucidate. He used words like ‘elucidate’ in normal conversation, with the air of someone who was accustomed to using four-syllable words. He had chosen an unremarkable Chinese restaurant because he guessed, quite correctly, that a more glamorous location would have daunted her, but his manner displayed the unobtrusive confidence that goes with wealth. He was gentle, thoughtful, neither coaxing nor pushing, and gradually, stammering at first, then in a rush, Lin poured out the whole story.

  This was the point, of course, when she should have subsided gratefully into his arms and lived happily ever after. It’s like that moment in Sense and Sensibility where Willoughby dumps Marianne to marry money and she is rescued by Colonel Brandon. But real life doesn’t work that way. Andy was elderly and bearded, Lin was still hopelessly in love with Sean, he offered her the sofa in his Covent Garden flat in friendship only, then put her in the bed and slept on the sofa himself. He was kind and chivalrous, Sean was an arsehole. He didn’t stand a chance – even if he had wanted a chance to stand, and there is little evidence that he did. An unhappy relationship with a sophisticated brunette three years his senior had left recent scars, and though he was touched by Lin’s beauty and her plight, that was all. He was a responsible adult helping a desperate child: nothing more.

  So much for romantic cliché.

  Two days later Sean called Lin at Andy’s flat after wheedling the number out of a mutual acquaintance. Evidently, he had had a change of heart. He insisted he had never meant to hurt her, she shouldn’t take everything so seriously, she was so sweet and earnest, it was just that she had dropped a bit of a bombshell and he’d needed time to get used to the idea. He was coming along to fetch her right now.

  A week later, in the full glare of the paparazzi, they got married.

  To call Sean an arsehole isn’t, I suppose, entirely fair. He’s an actor. In some ways, that’s worse. An arsehole is at least consistent: you know where you are with him. You can rely on the fact that under any set of circumstances he is going to lie, cheat, and let you down. But an actor, immersing himself in his current role, tends to take his colour from that, blending into the part like a chameleon. In Mandela Street, Sean had been the charming Irish ne’er-do-well who impregnated other men’s wives and shed girlfriends in alternate episodes. In the new series (I forget what it was called) he played a tough cop torn between the pressures of the job and the pregnant young wife he adored. Inevitably, it went to his head. He adored Lin in a succession of minor interviews, in a piece in the Radio Times to promote the series – by then, the twins had arrived and could be included in his adoration – in a lengthy feature in Hello! After a brief, unremarkable appearance at Stratford-on-Avon he stated his aspirations in serious theatre, and, as a sideline, insisted on calling the babies Lysander and Demetrius. Lin, blinded by reciprocal adoration, acquiesced, despite a private preference for Fingal and Fergus. Lysander Fergus and Demetrius Fingal were non-identical, respectively reddish-fair and dark, silent Scot and sensitive Irish (or Deptford) in temperament. They looked amazingly endearing in all early photographs. By the time they had grown into tiresome toddlers vandalising their Notting Hill house, Dad’s character had lost his wife to a terrorist bomb and was back playing the field, albeit with suitable undertones of brooding and tragedy. Since Lin had failed to meet a premature death, in real life Sean was forced to revert to a less gloomy promiscuity. While Lin was tied to house and family he would go out, returning late or not at all, always indignant if she ventured to object. ‘These people are useful, acushla. I was meeting a producer/director/casting director’ or ‘You know I’m not the stay-at-home type. That isn’t why you fell in love with me. You love me for my wicked, wicked ways.’ But charm fades with proximity and the lies wore thin with overuse. Even before Sean’s girlfriends and other misdeeds started to appear in the tabloids Lin had begun to see through him.

  ‘You’re supposed to be the angel, mavourneen,’ he would tell her, in the course of what was less a row than the monotonous drip-drip of seeping domestic discord. ‘I never pretended to match up, now did I? Don’t turn into a nag: it makes you ugly. And you don’t want to go believing everything you read in the papers – any fool knows that.’

  ‘I don’t need to read the papers,’ Lin said. ‘I’ve seen your address book.’

  ‘What the fuck were you doing looking in my address book? That’s private – my private property. HOW DARE YOU SNOOP IN MY THINGS?’

  And so on.

  But the marriage lasted, or at least malingered. Moving out would have been expensive for Sean, and he still enjoyed the occasional indulgence in domestic bliss, usually on a Sunday when there were no nightclubs or parties to go to. Once in a while, he even took Lin to parties with him, if they were the kind of social events where appearing with a wife might do him credit. It was at one such party that she met Garry Grimes.

  The second series of Dickheads was just finishing, and Garry was the big name in post-eighties alternative comedy. He had a squashed up nose, a brown monkey face, and a smile that stretched out like an elastic band, twanging back into mock sorrow at the expiry of a punch line. His racial origins were reputed to include Afro-Caribbean, Chinese and Italian, though all of them via Soho. ‘He made me laugh,’ Lin always says, failing to add that she hadn’t had much to laugh at for some time. She still remembers what she was wearing that night, a dress she had bought in an obscure backstreet boutique which ran to tie-dye patterns and embroidery and ragged hemlines; but that kind of thing suits her. She didn’t have any mascara on since she had been crying before she came out. Afterwards, she wondered if Garry had guessed. He fetched her a cocktail, fed her canapés, noted with appreciation that she didn’t recognise several of the celebrities. On the way home, Sean treated his attentions as something of a joke. Garry might be a rising star – rather more of a star than Sean Corrigan – but his monkey-faced appeal could not possibly compete with Gaelic good looks and Deptford blarney.

  He was still treating the situation as a joke three months later, when Lin packed the children, her bags, and the new nanny, and moved them all into Garry’s house in Kensington.

  Not long afterwards she had dinner with Andy Pearmain to tell him all about it. Therapeutic dinner with Andy – for Lin, the equivalent of the psychiatrist’s couch – had become a regular feature in her life, substituting for the family she had left behind in Edinburgh. This was probably just as well, since letters and phone calls from her parents and two sisters who remained obstinately married to the same husbands all conveyed reactions shading from disapproval to mere bewilderment. Andy was a far more sympathetic auditor. His beard had shortened and he had acquired an earnest Japanese girlfriend who deplored his personal wealth while expecting him to use it to put the world to rights. Lin, who had grown up enough to listen to his problems in exchange for airing her own, agreed that Mitsouko’s position was very inconsistent. ‘But people are like that, aren’t they?’ she said with a new element of maturity. ‘Full of contradictions. Everyone thinks Garry is so funny all the time, but in private he gets these black fits of depression. You know – if a script isn’t working out, or something. He writes most of his own stuff. And then he drinks, and gets even more depressed. But he’s so kind, and so good with the boys. I’m afraid they don’t miss Sean very much.’

  ‘Do you?’ Andy asked bluntly, noting, unsurprised, that they had reverted to her affairs.

  ‘No,’ she responded. ‘I thought I loved him so much – he hurt me so badly I thought it had to be love – but when I came to go I found it had a
ll evaporated. Like the smell of cigarettes when you plug in one of those air-freshening things. I don’t know if it was Garry – I don’t think so – Garry just made me see the truth. All the time Sean was playing around, staying out all night, seeing other women, lying or brazening it out or whatever, the love just sort of leaked away. It shouldn’t do that, should it? Not if it’s real.’

  ‘You were infatuated,’ Andy said. ‘Hardly surprising. Sean’s incredibly good-looking and oozes Irish charm, even if it is fake. And you were very young and totally inexperienced when he came your way.’

  ‘I’m not so young any more,’ Lin declared, at the ripe old age of twenty-two. ‘I’ve learned about life now. I shan’t make the same mistakes.’

  ‘You’ll make different ones,’ Andy said cheerfully. ‘We all do.’

  ‘Garry isn’t a mistake,’ Lin assured him. ‘He’s difficult, but he’s worth it. He really does love me.’

  ‘Yes,’ Andy said. ‘I think he does.’

  A few months later Lin had a daughter, christened Meredith Grimes, a name agreed on by both parties and without theatrical or folkloric pretensions. But although Lin had divorced Sean, she and Garry did not get married. He had a phobia about marriage, one of his many phobias: he was that kind of comic genius, Angst-ridden and manic depressive, the sad clown who alternately adored and abused his nearest and dearest. Nonetheless, Lin managed him well and was often happy if always slightly anxious. Garry could be cruel when the black mood was on him, not physically but verbally, though never with the children. Lin told herself that this was a penalty of living with the artistic temperament, and felt rather proud of her adult acceptance of the problem. She informed Andy that she was no longer a silly romantic girl, expecting love to be a bed of roses all the time; she was a grownup prepared to roll on the occasional thorns.

  ‘Roses have thorns,’ said Andy. ‘You’re still thinking in roses, even when the going gets prickly. I suspect you always will.’