A Perfect Husband

by Hilary Boyd

  ‘You think that proves it?’ Lily asked, her stomach turning on the red wine she had being gulping down too fast.

  ‘It probably indicates he’s under some sort of stress. But maybe it’s just business. Maybe the studio isn’t doing so well, or a client has kicked off about something. It could be a host of things to do with work or money that he doesn’t want to worry you about.’

  Nothing Prem had said comforted Lily. Freddy was a great businessman. He’d had his recording studio for years now and it was highly respected in the industry. It had made him rich. If there were problems he’d share them with her as he always did, giving her the lowdown on which artist was in and what they were recording and whether he thought the work was any good. He had his hand in everything.

  When Lily didn’t reply, Prem went on, ‘I absolutely refuse to believe Freddy is having an affair. I just can’t see it.’ She eyed her friend for a long moment. ‘Go home and ask him. Don’t let him wriggle off the hook this time, Lil. Keep on at him till you have a proper answer. Otherwise you’ll drive yourself mad, probably over something quite trivial that’s nothing at all to do with you.’

  Lily sighed, trying her best to accept what Prem had said. She was so grounded, so practical, and mostly right. She was an amazing friend. Lily thought back ten years. News of her first husband Garret’s death – so sudden, so shocking, so completely unbelievable – making Lily’s head spin so hard she could hardly breathe. Prem hadn’t made a fuss, just scooped up Lily’s then teenaged twins, Dillon and Sara, and taken them back to her house. Sara was friends with Prem’s only daughter, Aisha, at the Fulham secondary school they both attended. She’d fed them, comforted them, brought wine and groceries round to Lily’s house, while Anthony temporarily palmed off his divorce clients to deal with the bureaucratic nightmare involved in bringing Garret’s body back from Switzerland. She’d been more of a sister to Lily than her actual sister, Helen.

  ‘You trust Freddy, don’t you?’ Lily asked, her heart beating uncomfortably fast when Prem didn’t reply at once.

  ‘I don’t know him that well but, yes . . . yes, I trust him.’

  ‘Like you trusted Garret?’

  Prem hesitated again, frowning. ‘I knew Garret from when he trained with Raj at Guy’s – twenty years at least. And he was . . . he was one of those people you’d trust with your life, literally.’ She laughed. ‘That’s the point of a brain surgeon, I suppose.’ Raj was Prem’s older brother. He and his partner, Hal, lived in Minnesota, where Raj worked at the Mayo Clinic, doing research on genetic sequencing.

  Lily gave a rueful smile. ‘And you don’t feel like that about Freddy?’ She shrugged. ‘No reason why you should.’

  ‘As I said,’ Prem replied, ‘I’ve only known him for such a short time. And we don’t see him much – he’s always working.’

  *

  Lily got home late – the two women had sat for hours over the wine and then some fresh mint tea. She was fired up by Prem’s insistence she get the truth from her husband. He wouldn’t be asleep – Freddy seldom went to bed before midnight, often considerably later. She realized she was nervous, almost frightened, as she let herself into their sixth-floor penthouse in the smart block set back from Bayswater Road, minutes from Lancaster Gate. Did she really want to know what was making him so edgy, so distant? Shouldn’t she just do as he’d suggested and stop worrying, let it pass, whatever it was?

  She pictured him lounging on the sofa in the soft light of their large, luxurious sitting room, probably in his habitual jeans and untucked shirt, bare feet propped on the low oak coffee table, his handsome face, framed by thick, dark wavy hair, looking up at her with its perfect light-olive complexion and those large brown eyes, which could switch from being charmingly social, to tender and so loving, to something much darker and unfathomable, all within seconds. ‘Mercurial’: that was the word someone had once used to describe Freddy March.

  But the flat was dark and silent. Lily slipped her heels off – they were stupidly high and her feet had been aching almost since she’d put them on – and left them in the hall, padding over the polished floorboards in her stockinged feet to the bedroom at the end of the corridor. Maybe he was asleep after all. The door was open, though, just as she had left it hours before, the smooth, expensive white bed linen untouched, except for a sea-green cardigan she had failed to put away earlier. She glanced at the bedside clock: 1:05 a.m. Where is he? She reached for her phone to check if he had called, and rang his mobile when it was clear that he hadn’t. It went straight to voicemail: ‘Freddy March’s phone. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you.’ His voice was warm and strong, confident. She loved him so much.

  Where are you? she texted him. I’m not asleep. Pls call when you get this. xxx

  Then she wandered back to the sitting room and went to stand by the glass doors onto the balcony, staring across the roofs at the city, the lights still dotted randomly over the floors in the hotel nearby, the dark patch of Hyde Park behind. She heard a police siren in the distance, over the constant background growl of traffic which never stopped and which she barely noticed after so many years in London. Her head was thick with the tension she knew she’d been hanging onto for weeks now, and also, no doubt, from too much red wine. There was no point in waiting up, she decided. If Freddy were involved in an all-night session at the studio, he’d have his phone turned off anyway. Better to talk to him in the morning. If she confronted him when she was so tired, she’d probably accuse him of all sorts of ridiculous stuff and they’d have a row.

  Chapter 3

  When she jerked awake around five it was to an empty bed. She sat up, heart racing. It was chilly in the room, the heating not yet triggered. Quickly, she wrapped her naked body in the pale blue soft-wool dressing-gown Freddy had given her for her recent birthday and walked through to the sitting room, hoping her husband had crashed on the sofa, not wanting to wake her. But it was dark and empty, the dawn barely breaking outside the uncurtained glass. The previous night’s rain had blown over, and it looked clear on the horizon as Lily glanced out of the window, shivering.

  Where the hell are you? she wondered, turning to curl up on the sofa, her cold feet tucked under her. She checked her phone, which she’d left charging on the glass side table by the door to the hall. No message. The flutter of anxiety grew in her gut, making her feel sick and even colder. He’s at the studio, she thought, trying to be firm with herself. Where else could he be till this time? But he always told her if he might have to do an all-nighter. And it usually meant till about four thirty, latest – even the keenest musicians ran out of fuel. So the answer seemed obvious: in someone else’s bed. She tried to picture it. Maybe they’d had sex and he’d fallen asleep by mistake. Or maybe she – whoever ‘she’ was – had insisted he stay, insisted he make a decision, forcing his hand so that he would have to confess the affair to Lily.

  Her thoughts were almost detached, as if it were someone else’s husband she was picturing in flagrante. Because it was impossible for her to believe her Freddy might, right at this moment, be kissing another woman, stroking his finger down her nose as he did Lily’s, muttering his love for her, despite the tensions of the past month.

  Lily reached for her sketchbook, her love of drawing a lifelong comfort and distraction since childhood when severe, life-threatening asthma had restricted her physical freedom, pinning her to her bed or, swathed in blankets – like a precious artwork – propped up on the sofa. Her wispy, anxious mother would hover over her, while her sister and friends were out in the fresh air, riding bikes, swimming, playing sport, free. She could not imagine surviving those early years without pencil and paper.

  As she waited, she found herself unthinkingly sketching Garret’s face on the thick cream paper in front of her. It was strange how her hand remembered things her brain did not. She still had photos of her first husband, of course, but since her marriage to Freddy they ha
d been shut away in albums at the top of one of the wardrobes in the bedroom. Lily had not thought it fair to Freddy to have daily reminders of a man she had once loved. A man who had acquired the inconvenient halo of those who die young. These days, she recalled Garret’s essence more than his actual features, remembered the feel of him more than his physical form. But her hand still knew every line.

  Like Prem, she had trusted her first husband implicitly. Although he was just as much of a workaholic as Freddy, his job as a leading neurosurgeon in a busy London hospital taking up all hours, Lily had never for a single minute worried he wasn’t where he said he’d be. Garret was like Freddy in that he was charismatic, unconsciously seductive, someone who could command the room, his charming smile effortlessly drawing people into his circle of admirers. A big, broad-shouldered Irishman, he was warm and very physical, someone who had made her feel safe.

  But Lily had often felt she was part of ‘Garret Tierney Inc’. There was no exclusivity with him, no special place where she felt she alone occupied his affections. He loved her, she thought, enormously, but only as much as he loved his children, his friends, his work, his colleagues and the beleaguered victims of the Iraqi war, one of whom he’d operated on with remarkable success – a seven-year-old child with terrible brain injuries who’d been flown to Britain by a charity.

  Her second husband, although similarly warm and physical, and equally able to charm the birds from the trees, seemed to have eyes only for Lily. He made her feel as if she were the entire centre of his world, despite his moods being sometimes difficult to predict, his sudden need to be alone disconcerting. She had thought her new marriage would mirror the uncomplicated friendship she’d shared with Garret. But Freddy’s love for her was a far more exclusive, more intense, more unpredictable thing. Lily felt he understood her on a deep soul level in a way no one else in her life ever had.

  But as she waited in the early spring morning for him to return, she wondered how well she really knew him. Their first meeting, four years ago in Prem’s shop, had been what her friend later termed a coup de foudre. The instant, irrefutable connection was like fitting the final, long-lost piece into a jigsaw puzzle.

  Prem had bamboozled Lily into working for her after the twins had left home to go to college: Dillon to Bristol, Sara to medical school in Nottingham. Lily, two and a half years widowed at the time, had sunk into a dull despair at the lonely, empty days stretching ahead of her. Days she couldn’t find the energy to fill. She had, by absolute choice, been a full-time mother since the twins were born.

  She was not ambitious, had never had a burning desire for a career. In fact, she had never wanted to do anything but be left alone to draw the small, detailed, brightly coloured pen-and-ink portraits at which she was so good. Although no one could ever convince her of this because her going to art school had broken her father Roy’s heart. ‘That’s a bloody stupid waste of a life,’ he’d told her, tugging on his bushy auburn beard as he always did when upset, his fit, wiry body rigid with outrage. ‘You have to be brilliant to make it as an artist, and you’re not brilliant, Lillian, not by a long chalk.’

  He was not being intentionally unkind, Lily had thought later. He just assumed that everything in the world was black and white, categorized by a straightforward rule, like a try or a penalty. Rugby was Roy Yeats’s passion, his obsession, his raison d’être; the family came a poor second. His day job was as a tough – and, by all accounts, inspirational – games teacher at a secondary school near Potter’s Bar, where Lily had grown up. He also refereed club rugby matches all over the country, and there wasn’t a detail of any game ever played that he couldn’t instantly recall.

  Lily remembered his voice, always so confident and loud, ricocheting round the house after she’d told him about her offered place at Byam Shaw in north London, broadcasting his dissent in no uncertain terms to his cowering family. But Lily had quietly gone ahead anyway, side-stepping her mother’s spurious worries – or manipulations – that college would bring back the asthma and make her ill. She was sick to the back teeth of being thought weak, an invalid, and she told no one at college about her childhood condition.

  But after Garret died, her drawing hand had become paralysed. Every image she saw around her echoed with the past, every room in the house a scene set for those times when her family had been whole, when her world had seemed perfect. It had panicked her that she couldn’t draw. Her pencil hovered above the blank page, but her hand was unable to commit to the lines and shapes that were normally hard-wired to her brain, as if her hand had been disconnected.

  So, although she had no need to work – her husband had left her well provided for – over time Lily came to enjoy her job and the interaction with Prem’s clients in the shop. It was better than sitting at home, moping. And buying a desk chair seemed to open up in the clients a wealth of personal disclosures. She listened while they told her about back problems, injuries, operations, fitness challenges, worries about their business and their family. They had filled her loneliness to a degree, enough to make her feel, as the years passed, that there were still pleasures to be had. She had never imagined falling in love again, despite Prem’s dismal parade of potential suitors.

  Then one Monday morning – nearly six years after Lily had been widowed – a tall, confident figure, well-dressed in expensive jeans, white shirt and a tailored black corduroy jacket, with indigo trim to the turned-up collar, had pushed open the shop door and strode straight to where Lily was standing. Smiling at her, he had thrust out his hand and introduced himself as if he had been expecting to meet her his whole life.

  Lily, surprised by his forthrightness, had looked into his face as he said ‘Freddy March’ and felt a small shock of recognition, not based on any known previous acquaintance. Freddy had continued to stand close to her, engaging her with a vivid tale of a homeless man he’d met on the walk from his Soho studio, who had told him his life was about to change – she’d never asked him if the story was an invention, a handy chat-up line. Prem told her later that she’d been certain they were old friends as she watched them from across the shop floor.

  Their courtship had been swift and unchallenged. He wasn’t married, just a couple of long-term relationships he said hadn’t worked out, and had no family, except a father suffering from dementia in a Nottinghamshire care home – whom she’d yet to meet. Freddy had said he’d rather visit him alone, his dad at the stage where he got upset at new faces. Lily was a widow and the twins had left home. No one, except her older sister, Helen, seemed anything but pleased at the union: two single people, turning fifty, finding love . . . What was not to like?

  Within three months they were living together in Freddy’s glamorous Sussex Square penthouse. Another three and Lily had sold the family home in Fulham, given money to her children and kept a fair chunk of security, which she’d invested with one of Freddy’s banker friends. Within another three they had announced their wedding, which took place the July after they’d met, a swish affair in a famous restaurant in the South of France, with fifty friends and family.

  ‘Fairytale’, ‘whirlwind’, ‘magic’: her friends had applied all the clichés and Lily understood why. But to her Freddy was bones-and-flesh real, not some fantasy Disney prince. She loved him from deep in her soul. More passionately than she’d ever loved Garret Tierney. Freddy had awakened things in Lily she still didn’t understand: a restiveness, a need, an almost painful yearning. She felt slightly obsessed at times. And with that obsession came the nightmare ache of jealousy.

  Lily came out of her daydream to the sound of a key in the lock. Freddy entered the room slowly, not seeing her at first as she lay curled up on the sofa, clutching her sketchbook, and she had time to scrutinize his face in the seconds before he did. A person used to studying faces carefully, what she saw shocked her. He looked devastated, exhausted, blank, as she imagined people look when someone they love has died. Then he noticed her and
adjusted his expression to a slow, tired smile.

  She jumped up, not going to him, as she normally would, to throw herself into his embrace, but standing behind the coffee-table on the grey-and-cream-patterned rug in front of the gas-log fireplace, arms folded tight across her chest.

  Freddy attempted another grin, this one slightly more successful than the first, and came round the end of the sofa, rubbing his dark, stubbly chin. But she backed away. ‘Where have you been?’ she asked, all the pent-up tension of the previous few hours – it was now nearly seven o’clock – making her words sting as they whipped across the room.

  They rarely argued. It was only at the start of their relationship, when Freddy thought Lily was pulling back from social events he was sure she would enjoy, that they’d sometimes wrangled. He saying it would be fun, she saying she wasn’t in the mood, not admitting she was shy and felt intimidated by his myriad high-profile friends, many of whom were in the public eye. Lily had never been much of a socializer.

  She still had not got used to the fact that they might start the evening having a drink at an opening, launch or private view, move on to someone’s house for dinner, leave late and go to a club, leave even later and grab an espresso at Bar Italia in Frith Street, Soho, finally making it home in the small hours. Freddy would have his arm round her most of the night, or be pulling her along by her hand, his pleasure and pride in her company obvious to all. She did enjoy herself when she began to know his friends better, but she would have been just as happy with one of those events in an evening, not all. Or not even one: supper alone with her new husband was Lily’s idea of heaven. Freddy, however, was insatiable. ‘It’s part of my business, Lily,’ he told her. But she knew it was more than that.