A Perfect Husband

by Hilary Boyd

  ‘Hey,’ he heard Shirley’s voice, soft in the darkness.

  Rolling onto his back, he felt the silk of her nightdress against his arm.

  ‘Thought you needed a bit of cheering up,’ he heard her whisper.

  ‘Umm . . . Listen, Shirley . . .’ He stopped, gently pushing her arm away. ‘Not sure this is a good idea.’

  Silent and clearly undeterred, Shirley drew closer, her hand sliding deliberately across him till it found what it was searching for. He heard her sharp intake of breath and then her body was pressed to his, the silk gliding seductively across his skin. With shame he felt himself harden quickly as her fingers began to move rhythmically – and expertly. It had been a long time.

  Without a word, her breathing now fast and jagged, she pushed back the duvet and brought her mouth down on his erection, her lips soft, tongue flicking against the tip. Freddy no longer thought, no longer cared. He just gave in to the pleasure. After a few minutes he took her silk-clad body and raised her up till she was astride him, her thighs surprisingly strong as she held him between her legs. He lifted her gently until he was inside her and she cried out, dropping to his chest, her nipples hard through the silk. He could smell the faint scent of coconut on her hair, taste himself on her mouth. It lasted only a few minutes before both of them came, letting out loud, animal groans.

  *

  When Freddy woke next it was morning and he had his bed to himself. There was the pungent scent of coffee on the air as he poked his head out of his room and slipped into the bathroom to brush his teeth. His head was still banging and he saw in the bathroom mirror his chin stubbly dark, great bags beneath his eyes. He was sure Chase’s razor was somewhere in the cupboard under the cream-painted basin unit, but that might be a step too far, given the goings-on of the previous night. Although he wasn’t sure at this juncture if Shirley’s visit had even been real. He sincerely hoped it had not, prayed it was just a fevered dream brought on by anxiety and too much brandy.

  He washed his face vigorously with cold water, picked up the pink brush that lay on the shelf and attempted to tame his tangled hair. Frowning as he regarded his reflection for the last time, he took a deep breath and prepared to face his hostess. Thoughts of Lily he pushed far to the back of his mind.

  Shirley was sitting on the balcony, a cup of coffee on the small bamboo table, reading the Times of Malta. She was dressed in a pair of navy linen shorts and a sleeveless coral T-shirt, her hair sleek, her makeup tastefully minimal to suit the time of day.

  She jumped when Freddy materialized beside her, but that was the only sign that she might be embarrassed by the events of the previous night. Folding the paper, she swung her feet off the lounger and stood up, a perky smile playing around her mouth. ‘Freddy! Did you sleep okay?’

  Sleep? he thought. Cheeky cow, but he said, ‘Like a log. Your bed is way more comfortable than the one at the flat.’

  He had not explained to Shirley the true extent of dilapidation in his grandmother’s home, and certainly not invited her there, although she had hinted a number of times that she would like to visit.

  Shirley laughed and flung her arms wide, her head thrown back, indicating the vista beyond the balcony. ‘Isn’t it just marvellous this morning? All glittery from the rain and so clean and fresh. We should have a storm more often.’

  She was right: the air sparkled, the Mediterranean light crystal clear as it bounced off the aquamarine sea. Freddy breathed in, wishing himself a million miles away. Should I say something? Wait for her?

  ‘I could murder a cup of coffee,’ he said.

  Chapter 34

  ‘Heavens, you’re soaked!’ Seth said as he opened the glass doors to Lily. She had ridden over, braving her sister’s bicycle for the first time and discovering that it was, indeed, ‘as easy as riding a bike’. But what had seemed a dry, if cloudy, day when she set out had suddenly turned wet, the rain instantly heavy. Now her thighs were sodden, her jeans clinging to her legs.

  Seth ushered her inside. ‘Lucky I lit the stove.’ He frowned, eyes on her sopping jeans. ‘I’ve got some tracksuit bottoms in the back. You’d better take those off and we’ll hang them by the fire. You’ll catch your death if you sit in them.’

  The last thing Lily wanted to do was change into the doctor’s tracksuit, but she had little choice and didn’t bother to protest. Seth left her alone to change into the grey cotton trousers, but she was aware of him only feet away on the other side of the open partition and cringed with embarrassment.

  Later they sat with cups of his favourite jasmine green tea in front of the fire, Lily’s jeans draped on a fold-up chair near the heat.

  ‘What should I have done?’ Lily asked, desperate to talk to someone about Kit. ‘He’s my nephew – I’ve known him since he was a baby.’

  ‘Did you give him a lot?’

  ‘Forty.’ She had thought it was mean at the time, but now it sounded like a vast amount, Helen having told her the current price of a heroin wrap could be as little as ten pounds.

  Seth didn’t seem to condemn her. ‘It’s hard when it’s someone you’re close to.’

  ‘I thought it was better coming from me.’ She sighed. ‘And David takes him food every week. He even gave him a key to the house, so Kit can let himself in.’

  ‘Sounds like you’re all supporting his habit in some way.’

  ‘Not Helen. She was livid.’

  ‘She’s right, I’m afraid, although it seems cruel. You and David are just making it easier for Kit to survive as an addict.’

  ‘I’m not sure I could have refused. He was a bit threatening . . . I don’t think he’d have attacked me or anything, but his desperation was almost palpable.’

  They were both silent for a moment.

  ‘Addicts can be very convincing. And most of us tend to believe people rather than not.’

  Lily pushed the thought of Freddy to the back of her mind. ‘So you think David should stop taking food round?’

  ‘Yes. Your nephew will most likely be trading it rather than eating it anyway.’

  ‘He certainly didn’t look as if he’d had a square meal in decades.’ She felt suddenly so sad. ‘He used to be such a beautiful, funny boy. And clever. He was at Magdalen, got a first in biochemistry by the time he was twenty.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  She shrugged. ‘No one seems to know. I mean, my sister can be tricky, especially with me, but she’s been a brilliant mother, and David a wonderful father. Kit had a very stable upbringing.’

  ‘Something must have triggered it. Something he couldn’t cope with.’

  ‘He’s never said. I can’t bear to see him like this, though. Or see what it’s doing to Helen and David.’

  ‘People do turn their lives around sometimes, Lily. To me the ones who do are heroes. The willpower needed to resist an addictive substance is huge. Especially when they know they need to harness that willpower for the rest of their lives.’

  Lily asked, ‘But what makes them do it – turn their lives around?’ Freddy’s face swam before her eyes.

  ‘If I knew that, I’d be rich.’ Seth frowned. ‘They have to want to, that’s key, obviously. Often it’s getting to rock bottom. One day they wake up to the realization that it’s change or die. Then it depends on the help they can access.’

  Lily said, ‘A gambling addict, for instance . . . I mean, gambling’s not like drugs.’ She had thought she’d asked the question casually, without any special emphasis, but she saw Seth’s dark eyes fix intently on her face.

  ‘It is like drugs, Lily,’ he replied quietly, ‘in that the need to gamble is just as intense, apparently, as any heroin hit.’

  Lily bowed her head. ‘But it’s easier to give up, surely? It’s not like your body is being physically affected by an actual substance.’

  Another look from Seth, this one curious.
‘I know it should be easier to give up a habit rather than a substance. But, oddly, it’s not. Perhaps because the gambler can go undetected, sometimes for a long time, until their debts reach tipping point. But it can make them physically ill, too. Stress, depression, suicide even . . . The effects are potentially just as devastating as a heroin habit.’

  Lily’s throat contracted and she looked away. It still seemed impossible that the man she loved was unable to stop himself destroying everything that meant anything to him, was open to mental health issues and self-harm.

  ‘I’m sure you know most addicts are trying to escape from emotional pain of some sort. Blocking out past trauma. Low self-esteem issues . . . a whole variety of complex reasons. There’s often a hereditary component.’

  None of these seemed to apply to Kit or Freddy. Freddy certainly didn’t have low self-esteem, and he’d always told her he’d had an uneventful childhood, his parents both kind and supportive. Although his mother had died when he was fourteen from cancer.

  ‘Like losing a parent when you’re young, maybe?’ she asked, desperate to work out what had pushed her husband to the edge.

  Seth shrugged. ‘As I said, it’s very complex, Lily.’

  Lily realized she must stop. He was still looking at her intently. She wanted so much to tell him about Freddy, but he was her employer: it might cause all sorts of awkwardness in the future if she did. She got up quickly and went to see if her jeans were dry. They weren’t, of course, merely warm and damp rather than cold and damp. But she wanted to leave before she said more than was appropriate.

  ‘You can wear my tracksuit pants home if you can deal with the embarrassment,’ Seth said, laughing.

  ‘I think I’d better,’ Lily said. ‘I don’t want to interrupt your work any longer.’

  ‘I welcome any diversion, I’m afraid.’ He got up. ‘I’ll go and get some more tapes.’

  Freddy’s presence hung in the air between them, even though Seth knew nothing about her husband, beyond that he and Lily were separated. Yet he seemed to know everything. Those dark eyes of his were like a laser beam, probing into the depths of her soul.

  He handed her another bag. ‘I was wondering, could you put all the clients on a spreadsheet? With a date, file name, length of therapy and whether they were one of my patients or someone else’s? Those details should all be on the tape boxes, if you can read my scribble.’ He grinned. ‘Just makes it easier when I come to writing it up, and then I can add other stuff as we go along.’

  ‘Of course,’ Lily said, after a moment of hesitation brought on by having never, as far as she was aware, even seen a spreadsheet, let alone created one. Helen will know what to do, she thought, as she gave the doctor what she hoped was a confident smile.

  *

  On the ride home she wobbled wildly when she had to signal a turn or when a car passed too close, randomly clicking the gear-shift up and down, not knowing what she was doing, the chain clunking in protest. So when the tears of despair began to wet her cheeks, she had no hands free to wipe them away. She felt, since her conversation with Seth Kramer, as if her life before Oxford had been a complete lie. Every single memory of her love affair with her husband was now tainted with what she saw clearly as his addiction.

  Until this moment, she had managed to view what had happened as a glitch, a temporary circumstance that would soon right itself. A financial problem – however serious – not a traumatic emotional one. It was almost as if the meltdown had had nothing to do with Freddy, was just a very unfortunate series of events visited upon them all. Putting the disaster at a safe distance was the only way she’d been able to cope.

  But Seth’s words had brought home the scale of the problem. It was as if someone had dumped a burning hot weight in her lap. She could no longer ignore it. People do turn their lives around, Seth had said, but he’d said it in a way that implied it was not often and not easy, the exception rather than the rule. Was Freddy brave enough? Was he strong enough? Did he want to change? She had no idea and, what was more, she didn’t have a clue what lay behind his destructive behaviour. Absence, rather than making her heart grow fonder, was making Lily doubt that she had ever really known Freddy March at all.

  Chapter 35

  Neither of them had mentioned the sex. The morning after that first time, Freddy had waited for her to bring up the subject. It seemed the polite thing to do, and his obvious compliance meant he could hardly pretend he was offended. He wasn’t offended anyway, it was just something that had happened, a one-off. He was too lonely – too dependent on her generosity – to stop seeing the American on the strength of that one night.

  But it turned out not to be just one night. He and Shirley began to settle into a pattern. By anybody’s standards it was an indulgent one: expensive lunches, too much wine, evening cocktails, occasional gambling. And then, a couple of times a week, Shirley would suggest it was too late for Freddy to go home.

  He should have cared. He should have been ashamed of himself for his betrayal of Lily, not to mention the systematic dismantling of his self-esteem. I am a gigolo, I am a gigolo, I am a gigolo. He would repeat this over and over, trying to cudgel his fallen morals into life. But he couldn’t find it in himself to be guilty. He remembered his film mates back home quoting the thirty-five-mile rule, ‘What happens on location stays on location,’ or some such self-serving bullshit for infidelity, and had berated them for it. But his previous life felt as if it were a million miles away. He couldn’t relate the sex he had with Shirley to anything remotely real, let alone Lily.

  And Shirley let him gamble. The weeks before meeting her, he had had to brace himself, struggling every single day not to give in to his desperate yearning to slip into one of the many casinos around the bay area and feel those smooth chips between his fingers again. But now he had it on a plate: whenever he wanted to gamble she was willingly by his side. It was no longer his painful secret, just a way of passing the time. And she insisted he keep his winnings, so he was stockpiling money, gambling with hers. Sex was a small price to pay. Freddy thought it was her clever way of stopping him having to find work. Or, worse, go back to London. They never talked about the future, unless it involved a discussion about trying a new restaurant for lunch or taking the ferry ride to Sicily.

  Is she in love with me? he asked himself more than once. But Shirley was hard to read. She was sociable, easy company, interested in the world beyond the sunny balcony, but she rarely spoke about anything personal except her beloved Chase, keeping Freddy and everyone else at arm’s length. He always slept in the spare room, Shirley making sure he was comfortable – a favoured guest – before wishing him a chaste goodnight. She never kissed him, held his hand or made any physical move during the hours of daylight. She barely even flirted with him. Then she’d be there, in the middle of the night, pressing against his nakedness, clad in a series of silky smooth negligees, offering her body for him to use as he pleased. And in the morning there would be hot coffee and toast, a fried egg on hand, plus cheerful smiles and titbits of local news to enjoy in the sunshine.

  Freddy found it baffling, and a bit scary. It was as if he were being drawn into a soothing, irresistibly luxurious spider’s web, from which it would be harder and harder to extricate himself if he didn’t make a move right now.

  ‘My friends are in town,’ Shirley announced one June morning, after another night of snatched intimacy. The sex, Freddy noted, always made her look particularly polished and perky. Her hair, this morning, was shiny-gold, her blue eyes very bright, her lips boldly glossed.

  ‘Marty and Jill. Old, old friends from back home. Marty used to sail with dear Chase.’

  She handed him a basket lined with a white napkin and filled with knotted white rolls. They were sitting inside, the sun already too hot for comfort. Shirley had laid the table with her usual care: pots of marmalade and honey, a plate of sliced ham, a slab of butter on a blue sau
cer, a small ceramic jug filled with warm milk.

  ‘I’m dying for them to meet you.’

  Freddy nodded, his heart sinking.

  ‘I thought we could all do lunch today, at Pescarino. I know they just adore Italian.’

  How has she described me to her friends? he wondered. Friend? Boyfriend? Walker? Lover?

  ‘I’d better go home and find a clean shirt then,’ he said with a smile.

  She laughed, and for the first time Freddy saw a faint blush beneath her tan.

  As soon as he was free of the building and on his way back to his grandmother’s flat, he found himself like a child set free from the classroom at break. He wanted to sing at the top of his voice. But the thought of Shirley’s friends brought him up short. Can I really go on like this?

  Although he was no nearer to paying back creditors such as Lau Heng, maybe he could talk to them, make some long-term deal, now time had passed and his parlous financial state was a matter of public record. They would only be angry if they thought he was hiding money from them, ignoring their debt while living high on the hog. Certainly Barney, although obviously not thrilled by the amount he was owed, might be reasonable in the light of the studio’s demise and Freddy’s personal bankruptcy. And Lau Heng was not, Freddy thought, a vindictive man. If he believed Freddy was respecting his debt, doing what he could to repay him, he might settle for future earnings. There was no mileage in going after a man who didn’t have a pot to piss in.

  I should go home, he thought, as he neared the flat. If I stay here much longer, I’ll destroy both myself and Shirley. Because it was clear that she was getting more attached by the day, even involving her friends now, pinning him down to some sort of public relationship. Deceiving her like this is unfair, he told himself firmly. She deserves better.