A Perfect Husband

by Hilary Boyd

  Freddy thought about this. A thousand – ‘bag’ being short for ‘bag of sand’ in money slang – seemed a fair punt. Cosmo was famous for his reckless dislike of anything but a straight bet, liking to win big or not at all.

  The footballers were back and the table noisy, the croupier distracted.

  ‘Done.’ Freddy nodded his agreement and was rewarded by a slap on the back from Cosmo’s meaty fist.

  ‘Splendid.’

  ‘If neither of us wins it’s a wash, agreed?’

  Cosmo nodded. ‘No outside bets, that’s too easy. Has to be a straight, split or street. No corners, no six-liners.’

  In the event, both men lost. Freddy, egged on by Cosmo’s presence, was down fifteen hundred on the night. He’d seen it as only risking five hundred; the rest he’d wrongly assumed he would get back from the side bet with his friend.

  ‘Go again?’ Cosmo wasn’t really asking as he slid the chips onto 21 and 19 red again. ‘This time make it two bags, eh?’

  The croupier slung the ball round the rim of the wheel. Freddy pushed a conservative five hundred onto the table, a split on 17 and 20 black, then held his breath. He felt discombobulated, out of control. Cosmo was ruining everything with his careless rivalry. Freddy knew he should leave, wait in the bar till the man had gone home and start again. But time was running out. He had to have the money by morning; he couldn’t afford to wait.

  When the ivory ball finally settled in 17, Freddy felt his heart somersault. He’d won! Nine grand and two from Cosmo. Plus what I already had. That’s seventeen five. Nearly there, he whispered to himself.

  ‘Lucky bugger,’ Cosmo said cheerfully, counting out two thousand in chips and pushing them across to Freddy. The piles were mounting in front of him in a very satisfactory way. Just a few more punts to get the cushion he needed and he was out of there. He saw the floor manager – a small, neat Algerian called Abdullah – out of the corner of his eye and knew he was watching Freddy, as he would anyone making a substantial win. Freddy waved and grinned and received a small raise of the eyebrows in return.

  ‘Right, now you’re so bloody rich, let’s make it three bags.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Freddy said, pushing back his chair and standing up. ‘Need a break.’

  But Cosmo grabbed his arm. ‘Hey, you can’t quit before I’ve had a chance to get my money back, my friend. That’d be a very poor show.’

  Freddy watched the previous bonhomie evaporate from Cosmo’s bloodshot gaze. He was looking at Freddy imperiously now, a man used to getting his own way. Freddy twitched his arm free. ‘I need to pee,’ he said.

  Cosmo eyed him suspiciously, pulling his mouth down at the corners. ‘No arguing with that,’ he said finally, turning back to the table at the croupier’s request for bets, as if responding to a siren call.

  Freddy, relieved, made his way slowly across the thick carpet to the Gents, where he shut himself into a stall in the empty room and sat on the closed lid of the toilet, his face sunk in his hands, suddenly overwhelmed by tiredness. He could go home now, safe in the knowledge that Lily’s son could get married in four weeks’ time, his responsibilities met. He would have five hundred in cash, enough for a few days, by which time something would have turned up.

  Freddy nodded off for a few minutes, waking disoriented and in a panic, his mouth dry. Go home, a voice was telling him. Go home now. Go home, go home. It felt as if his life depended on it. As if some terrible, unnamed thing would destroy him if he didn’t. It did have a name, of course, and the name was Freddy March, but Freddy couldn’t see that.

  Jerking up from the seat, he went over to the basins and rinsed his face in cold water, washed his hands with the Molton Brown liquid soap, dried them on the small white towel taken from the neatly folded pile in the corner and reviewed his reflection in the mirror. What he saw shocked him. A man with tension lines and dark circles about his tired, hunted eyes, hair dishevelled, skin sallow, lips dry. I look ill, he thought, attempting to brush some order into his hair with his fingers. He heard the warning echo in his head again: Go home.

  *

  ‘Three bags?’ Cosmo asked, round about two thirty in the morning.

  Freddy shook his head. ‘Can’t.’

  ‘You chicken?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Cosmo shook his head in disbelief. ‘Freddy March refusing a bet? Never been heard in the history of the world.’

  ‘First time for everything,’ Freddy said tiredly.

  ‘Come on, man. One more and I’ll let you go home. Marina will be white-facing at the window by now, so I should be getting off myself in a mo.’

  Freddy thought this was highly unlikely. Cosmo’s wife was a hard case. She had few illusions and even less interest in her husband’s many foibles. In fact, she’d probably be quite glad if Cosmo didn’t come home ever again. Freddy had met her only once, years ago, at a weekend party at an acquaintance’s stately home in Yorkshire, and she’d terrified the life out of him with her cold eyes and disparaging comments about everyone in the room.

  ‘Okay . . . one more. But only one, Cosmo. I mean it.’

  ‘Aah,’ Cosmo’s sigh of satisfaction had a knowing tinge, which irritated Freddy. Was he so predictable?

  But he couldn’t think about that now. He was still up on the night over all, but down on his previous high by nearly six grand. He didn’t even bother to ask himself why he hadn’t gone home when he was up, because he rarely ever did, despite that bloody voice in his head. Being up gave you confidence: you knew you were on a winning streak so it was hard to resist another punt. And being down meant you were desperate to be up again, so you needed to punt then too. There were really only two reasons why Freddy left the tables: exhaustion and an absence of stake money.

  ‘Two, not three,’ he told Cosmo, who shrugged his agreement.

  But the ball decided neither would win and their chips were briskly swept up by the croupier’s shiny rake. Shit, shit, shit. Freddy cursed himself for allowing Cosmo to bully him. The man was bad luck.

  Cosmo yawned and stretched his chubby body. ‘Good fun, old chap. Glad I bumped into you. Went to a God-awful charity bash earlier and got saddled with a shoot at Balfour’s place in the autumn. His birds are so small I never manage to hit the buggers. Stingy bastard. Can’t stand the fellow.’

  ‘You won it?’

  ‘Won it? No such luck. Marina made me bid for it, said she’d promised her pal Julia I would. Cost twice as much as it should have.’ He shook his head in mock-despair. ‘Life’s a bitch and then you marry one, eh?’

  Freddy could hardly keep his eyes open. The group of Chinese businessmen who had joined the table half an hour before were noisily egging each other on, their shouts grating on his already tender nerves. Okay, he thought. I’ll give it till four, and limit myself to a thousand. When that’s gone, I’ll go home.

  Chapter 11

  ‘I’m furious with him,’ Lily heard her sister, Helen, say on the other end of the phone. ‘He’s known the wedding date for over a year and he should have finished the chair months ago. But no. Always the same with my dear husband. Mañana, mañana, always mañana. God knows when they’ll get their present now.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s fine, Helen. They’ll just be thrilled to get it whenever. I know how busy he is.’ Lily spoke quickly. She didn’t want a long phone call, even though she and her sister rarely spoke. She was at Evelina Children’s Hospital, part of St Thomas’s on the South Bank, where she had been a children’s play volunteer two mornings a week since she’d stopped working for Prem. A sleeveless volunteer’s jerkin over her jeans and T-shirt, she had been drawing a cartoon story for a four-year-old girl called Marley, whose eczema had made her whole body red, cracked and flaky, bleeding in places.

  It looked agony, but the child had been laughing at Lily’s drawings and was now happily absorbed in painting over Lily’s
figures with some dirty red poster paint while her mother went for a coffee. The huge play area in the out­patients’ department, with a towering shiny blue and pink slide in the centre, wasn’t yet busy, so Yolanda, another volunteer, had taken her place with Marley while she talked to her sister over by the plate glass windows.

  But Helen wasn’t to be easily placated. ‘David’s always busy because he’s so bloody slow. If he just got a move on, there wouldn’t be a backlog of impatient clients waiting for their stuff to arrive.’

  ‘He’s painstaking rather than slow, I’d say. I mean, his work is so beautiful, he can’t cut corners.’

  ‘Yes, well, I wouldn’t expect you to understand, Lily. You have no idea how frustrating it is living with David because you’ve been married to two men who know how to earn a living. You don’t have to worry about mundane things like mortgages and money. Rich people always admire artisans. The ones who visit David’s workshop love poking around, oohing and aahing at all his half-finished rubbish. They think it’s so “real”—’

  ‘I wasn’t saying that,’ Lily interrupted, the ‘rich people’ grudge boringly familiar. ‘But David wouldn’t be so sought after as a furniture maker if he was slapdash and just thought of the money.’

  There was a sigh at the other end of the phone. ‘I’m not asking him to be “slapdash”, as you put it, just to get a move on, not take six months to make one small cabinet.’ Another sigh. ‘Anyway, how are the preparations going?’

  Lily knew Helen didn’t really want to hear the details. Her sister was always so busy, so determined not to have a moment to indulge in frivolous chit-chat, so she said, ‘Fine. I’m keeping out of the way unless I’m asked.’

  ‘I’m not wearing anything grand, by the way,’ Helen went on. ‘I can’t afford the time or money to buy something new so it’ll have to be the navy dress I bought for Dad’s funeral.’

  Lily almost laughed, but managed to control herself. Only Helen could come to her nephew’s wedding in a funeral dress. Their father had died nearly seven years ago, from a huge stroke while he was sleeping. He had just never woken up. Lily had been impressed that anyone had managed to slip away so neatly, so painlessly. ‘Fit as a butcher’s dog’, Roy Yeats had liked to describe himself. Gone in a second. But his death had fitted in with his no-nonsense life. Had Helen really had no cause to buy a new dress for seven years?

  She hadn’t come to Lily and Freddy’s wedding in the South of France, of course. ‘I can’t possibly take the time off,’ was her excuse, but Helen was an academic – teaching business management at Oxford Brookes University – and the term had finished by the beginning of July. Lily knew the real reason was that she did not feel comfortable with Freddy’s friends. She understood – her own reservations, when she’d first met her husband, had not been dissimilar – so she hadn’t pressed her to come. In fact, Lily was relieved she hadn’t, knowing she would have sat on the sidelines looking on disapprovingly at the fancy dresses, designer sunglasses and clear display of wealth on the exclusive sunbaked terrace. She would have made it her mission to feel out of place, on principle. But, God, she was so tired of the competition.

  It’s not Helen’s fault, Lily told herself – not for the first time. It had started the moment Lily was born, six weeks premature. Helen had been three and was, according to her mother’s stories later in life, virtually ignored. They sent her away to stay in Norwich with Grandma Irene, whom she had barely met, for the two months Lily had spent in a hospital incubator.

  It had been touch and go as to whether she would survive. The severe respiratory problems she suffered from, her lungs being so immature, were life-threatening on a daily basis, especially back in the sixties, when neonatal medicine was not very advanced. And it didn’t stop there. The damage to her lungs as a newborn had made her a victim of the crippling asthma she had suffered during her childhood, which on occasion required urgent hospital treatment. So the attention had been relentlessly on Lily from day one. Helen knew she had to be good and quiet, and always take second place.

  To Lily, her parents had not appeared to love her more because she was sickly. In fact Marion, her timid mother, with her powdery skin and fluffy, almost see-through hair, seemed almost scared of her much of the time, as if she were constantly terrified she might have another asthma attack. She fussed endlessly, drove Lily crazy. And her father gave the impression of controlled irritation on their many trips to Barnet General, as if Lily might avoid the attacks if she chose. He had, she thought, favoured Helen, for her diligence and robust approach to life. His elder daughter was the nearest thing to a rugby-playing son he was likely to get. But Helen could never see it like that.

  ‘That’ll be great. It doesn’t matter what you wear,’ Lily said, unable to remember much about the dress other than that it was as dreary and plain as all her sister’s clothes.

  ‘I can’t compete with your glamorous friends, anyway. No point in trying.’ Lily gritted her teeth and didn’t reply as Helen went on, ‘But I’ve never been bothered about what I look like – it’s not a priority in my world. I just want to see dear Dillon married.’

  ‘And you’ll stay with us? You don’t want to be driving back to Oxford in the small hours.’ Lily kept her tone as light as she was able.

  ‘Oh, goodness, no. I don’t drink, so it’s not a problem.’

  ‘Will Kit be coming with you?’

  There was a tense silence at the other end of the phone. ‘I don’t expect so.’

  Lily wished she hadn’t asked, her heart breaking for her sister on the subject of her only child. Kit was a drug addict. In and out of rehab, at thirty-one he was unemployed and unemployable. A brilliant, charming boy, he’d been offered a place at Magdalen College to study biochemistry at the age of seventeen, then, at only twenty, had gone on to do a doctorate. But something had happened to him during that time and he had gone off the rails. Now he could be found in a miserable flat in one of the concrete sixties high rises on the infamous Blackbird Leys estate. Helen refused to see him; David drove over every week to check on his son. The last time Lily had talked to Helen, Kit had just done a stint in rehab.

  Lily thought guiltily of Dillon and Sara, their comparatively happy lives, then about her own good fortune with Freddy. The gulf between her and Helen couldn’t be breached. How painful it must be to come to your nephew’s wedding and remember the times Kit and Dillon had played together as boys in their Oxford garden, racing round the lawn, making camps under the magnolia, coming into tea, faces flushed and happy. Kit was always in charge, Dillon, four years younger, his willing and adoring foot soldier.

  ‘How is he?’ she asked tentatively, not wanting to ignore the situation, but glancing over at her co-worker as another two children joined the play area with their mothers.

  ‘Oh, nothing changes. He checked himself out of the clinic after barely a week. He was completely out of it last time David visited, didn’t even acknowledge his father. The flat was a tip as usual, stinking, David said, full of rubbish, needles, empty cans, fag butts, some girl – presumably another addict – passed out on the sofa. I . . . I don’t know how much longer he can go on like this . . .’

  Lily heard the break in her sister’s normally brusque voice. ‘It must be such hell for you.’

  ‘And Kit too,’ Helen said, after a moment.

  ‘Isn’t there anything—’

  ‘Don’t go there, Lily.’ Her voice was hardly above a tired whisper. ‘David does his best every time he sees him, but . . .’

  ‘No, I’m sure. I didn’t mean—’

  ‘There isn’t a night goes by,’ Helen interrupted her again, ‘when I don’t lie there expecting the police to phone and tell me he’s dead.’

  Lily swallowed. The image was so terrible.

  ‘There’s not a damn thing any of us can do about it, unless Kit comes to his senses.’

  ‘Please stay wit
h us after the wedding, Helen. Make a night of it. We could debrief, sleep in, go somewhere for a slap-up brunch in the morning. It’d be fun.’

  Lily knew her suggestion would be met with refusal, but she had nothing else to offer her sister.

  ‘No . . . thanks, but no. I don’t like being away from home . . . in case something happens.’

  ‘Okay, well, you don’t need to decide now. Listen, I have to go – I’m at the hospital.’

  Chapter 12

  Freddy hadn’t slept, just come straight to the Berwick Street studio from the club, deliberately arriving very early, before the others. He didn’t want to face his employees if he could help it, but facing Lily seemed the worse option.

  His office was on the first floor. Studio 1, for dubbing, took up the ground floor, while Studio 2, the music-recording area, was in the basement. An editing company rented the attic space. It wasn’t grand, but his clients seemed to enjoy the more intimate surroundings.

  Wired from the long and stressful night, Freddy badly needed diversion from his problems. He decided to test the recently installed multi-track mixing and recording software, get his head around it. He was no longer actively involved in the recording and dubbing process – hadn’t been for nearly a decade now, his job being to bring in clients and run the business side of the company – but he wanted to know he could still do it. And check that he’d got his money’s worth from the shysters who’d installed the equipment.

  Glyn, Freddy’s senior sound engineer, had taken time to adjust to the swish new panel, preferring the old-fashioned desk where he controlled every knob and slider himself to create the mix. ‘The whole thing’s too bloody automated. I don’t feel like I’m in charge,’ he had complained.

  Freddy had silently thought the same. But he refused to be the cliché of the older person with his head stubbornly stuck in yesterday’s sand. The computerized desk could create way more tracks than the old system; the sound was supposedly pinpoint clear; the feed coming from the microphones was potentially more precise. Finally, it didn’t matter whether it was better or not – there were probably very few people who could tell the difference. It was the future and every artist booking the studio would expect a state-of-the-art system for their dollar.