by Sara Downing
‘Don't be silly, of course I don't want to see your messages. If you tell me there's nothing going on, then I believe you. What exactly are your feelings for him though?’
‘Feelings?’ I say, sounding a little baffled. ‘He's a good friend, nothing more.’ A little bit of a white lie? Not many of my friends are male, for one thing, and none of them have Tom's hot body and gorgeous blue eyes. Who am I deceiving here, myself or Mark? Yes, I do fancy Tom. There, I have admitted it, if only to myself. Well, I can't go and tell Mark that, can I? ‘By the way, Mark, that gorgeous head teacher of mine is an absolute God. I'd like to rip his clothes off and do unspeakable things on my desk with him.’ I feel myself blush as this latest thought enters my head and hope Mark can't read my mind. I imagine I have ‘LUST’ written in large letters across my forehead for the world to see. I decide the best option right now, before I give myself away, is to nip this conversation in the bud and get some sleep.
‘Come on Mark, stop being so silly and paranoid,’ I say. ‘Let's get to sleep, we're both shattered. Can we please have a day together tomorrow?’ I plead.
‘OK, why don’t you come out with me tomorrow morning?’ I might have known it would be on his terms, but this time I decide to go along with it. Otherwise we will end up spending the whole week apart. We have a relationship to fix here; one of us has to give in, and it looks like it’s going to be me. Again.
By ten thirty the following morning Mark and I are bumping down the hill into the town, at quite a laborious pace, on the hotel's little shuttle bus, which despite the opulence of the hotel, is not much more sophisticated than a cattle truck.
‘This place is amazing,’ I drool, open-mouthed. I’m not so much admiring the picturesque bougainvillea-covered dwellings which seemed to tumble down the cliffs as though they will drop into the sea at any minute. No, true to my usual form wherever I roam, I have spotted the shops. And these aren't just your average tourist shops packed with tacky souvenirs, useless ornaments or cheap jewellery which will turn your skin green on the first wear. No these are QUALITY retail establishments, all virgin and new and waiting to be discovered. By me, retail queen of the Midlands. Already we have chugged past the most fabulous shoe shop, with a sign outside proclaiming that they can make you a pair of soft leather sandals while you wait. I can smell the leather from the minibus, and close my eyes to inhale its intoxicating aroma.
Then there are jewellery shops, all of the highest quality, the windows crammed with unusual rings, necklaces and bracelets set with beautiful highly-coloured stones. They are as bright and colourful as the town, and it seems almost as though the gems have been hewn from the surroundings themselves. There are clothes shops too, floral dresses, shirts and scarves oozing from the little shop fronts, inviting passers by to come and look, touch, try and buy. I feel like flinging myself off that bus there and then and diving head first into this paradise of merchandise. It would be an experience for all the senses, not just the wallet. The textures, smells, sounds of a foreign town, with the promise of unearthing a real gem; an unusual piece of jewellery, a beautiful hand-crafted bag or a meltingly soft silk dress. I can't wait to get stuck in.
‘Why didn't you tell me about the shops?’ I turn to Mark, realising now what I have been missing over the past couple of days.
‘Well, you seemed so determined to stay behind and ‘relax’, he says pointedly. ‘Besides which, I haven't been shopping, I've been sightseeing, doing all the cultural stuff that you appear to be not so keen on.’ He can't seem to speak to me without that edge in his voice. Actually I love the cultural stuff too, and I begin to wonder if maybe I have been a little over-stubborn in my refusal to join Mark on his daily excursions. But then again he has shown no willingness to stay behind with me either. We are both as bad as each other, neither wanting to acquiesce.
Suddenly there is a screeching of brakes, and horns sounding in all directions. I had forgotten what it’s like to be in the middle of an Italian traffic jam, if it could even be classified as anything as civilised as a traffic jam. There appears to be a bit of a blockage a few cars up front, and in true Italian style, no one is prepared to wait. Just to our right a middle aged man, his face tanned to leather from the sun, is leaning out of the window of his tiny, beaten-up Fiat, both hands gesticulating madly in the air, wildly insulting the parentage of the driver in front. I can just about understand enough to grasp the colourful nature of his outburst. Not a happy chap. We seem to be surrounded by cars now; no one believes in queuing for anything here, and they don't do it in their cars either. Traffic jams become a mêlée of vehicles converging from all directions. Mark and I decide it might be prudent to disembark here, and leave our driver to find a way through the congestion. Besides which, we are outside all those gorgeous shops and wasting precious shopping time.
I begin to wonder how I am going to fit all my purchases in my suitcase when it comes to packing at the end of the week. I lay everything out on the bed to admire it and gloat over it all. It had been a fabulous day's shopping and I am on a retail high like no other. Mark hadn't been bitten by the same bug, and was out on our private terrace, on a lounger, reading a copy of the Times that he'd managed to pick up in town. I am busily getting things out of bags and boxes, stroking silken clothes, smelling the new leather on shoes and a bag I’ve bought, trying on jewellery and parading in front of the mirror, happy as a little girl with a new string of beads. None of it had cost a fortune, either. It’s all quality, but not designer, and all original and different to anything you can buy at home. I am thrilled to bits. I select a softly draping cream silk dress which I will wear tonight, and some coordinating jewellery, and set about packing the rest back into bags and boxes, carefully folding clothes and trying as best I can to wrap them in their original tissue paper. I will probably have to ditch all the packaging in the name of fitting it into my suitcase, but for now I am happy to see all my purchases lined up in their smart paper bags, in a rainbow of colours and shapes, a trophy to my day's success.
Mark comes strolling through into the room. ‘I've been thinking, Grace, and I reckon it would be best if you hand in your notice next Monday,’ he utters, totally out of the blue. My head is still in the shopping zone and I look at him aghast.
Thirteen
I set foot back on home soil with a cracking tan and a suitcase full of new clothes, but without the feel-good factor that normally follows me home after a great holiday. Probably because it hadn’t been a great holiday. Things hadn’t really got any easier between Mark and me; in fact they were probably worse. We’d had a couple of day-trips out together, which were fine as long as there were some shops for me and some sights for Mark, but it felt at times like we were on different holidays, just sharing the same room.
I am gutted really. I’d had such high hopes that Positano and its sun and atmosphere would fix our relationship. Silly, but there you are. If we can’t fix it at home, then what is the likelihood of it being repairable anywhere? I’m not really sure where we go from here. Although things are bad, neither of us has dared broach what happens next. Do we stay together, keep plugging away at it, hoping some spark will rekindle itself somehow, or do we call it a day and agree to go our own separate ways? Scary and unpleasant whichever way you look at it.
Mark’s comment about me giving up work had been the icing on the cake. I know he’d vaguely mentioned it when he first threw the idea of starting a family at me, and I’d tried to pretend I hadn’t heard it. But he was deadly serious. For God’s sake, I didn’t want to have a baby with him at this point in time or even let him near enough to me to be able to father one, let alone give up the lifeline which is my career. I would have to be mad even to consider it.
Despite the way things are between us, bizarrely Mark does still talk about us having a child together. Come on, if a holiday can’t fix our relationship, then all the stresses and strains of parenthood aren’t going to make one iota of difference to the way we are with each other, are they?
Isn’t early parenthood supposed to be really stressful and hard work, neither parent having time for the other whilst caught up in the demands of the newborn? Plus if things really are on the rocks, I have no ambition to be a single mother, left on my own to face nappies and broken nights whilst Mark goes off and builds a new life with someone else, as undoubtedly he would. A child deserves parents who are happy and together, not ones who are using it as a means to test whether their own relationship will succeed or fail. That’s far too much to put on narrow shoulders.
I had really exploded when Mark brought up the giving up work idea again. I was still away with the shopping fairies on my fluffy retail cloud, and being a house-bound expectant mother was the furthest thing from my mind. And why would he see my being stuck at home as a fix to our a) bad relationship and b) failure to fall pregnant as yet. (Wouldn’t he need to be home too for that to happen?!) I don’t have much recollection of what I actually said to him in reply, but I do remember a lot of arm waving and gesticulating – must have been the Italian influence on me, I was going native. We had left things completely up in the air, neither of us with a solution to the way forward, both expressing our opinions, which it would seem, were poles apart.
I can’t wait to get back to school today. I need to escape the house and Mark, and get back to some sort of normality, whatever that might be. I get the feeling Mark is chomping at the bit to get back to work too. He spent most of yesterday in his study, reviewing client files, as though he had been away for six weeks, not one, and had forgotten what was going on. That suited me fine; I was able to prepare myself emotionally and practically for today. I would be seeing Tom again, for one thing, plus I had a lot of unfinished prep that I’d left until after the holiday, as I hadn’t really been in a state of mind to concentrate on it before. I am probably no more in that state of mind now, yet I somehow feel more focussed; now that I know I am wasting my time trying to improve things with Mark at the moment, I can concentrate on work as it is something I know I can get right and do well, and it gives my life the direction that it’s lacking in other areas.
So it is with great relief that I finally leave the house on Monday morning for the short drive into school. Just getting into my own car, on my own, with just me and my own pleasant company, feels like a release. No one to worry about upsetting or saying the wrong thing to. No catty comments or undercurrents. Just me. For ten minutes, at least, and then I will be at school. Where Tom will be too.
And how do I feel about that? Excited, actually, I have to admit. Not in that heart-racing, lust-inducing way of a few weeks ago, but in a much more warm and comforting way, as though he is my refuge in stormy seas. I can’t wait just to see him, have a good chat, catch up on news, hear what he’s been up to, all that sort of thing. We continued to text throughout the holiday – it was all fairly innocuous stuff, but it had been nice to know he was thinking of me. I hope we manage to find some time on our busy first day back. And what I really crave is a hug. Tom and I haven’t ever hugged – in some friendships you do, and in others you just don’t, and we are of the ‘don’t’ variety at the moment. I suppose I am missing closeness generally, as there is no physicality on any level between myself and Mark right now.
‘Hi, Grace, good to see you,’ he says, sounding genuinely pleased to see me, as our paths cross for the first time in the corridor. He squeezes my arm and plants a kiss on my cheek. ‘How are you, how was the hols?’ As the questions tumble out he bends down slightly so that he is more at my level and his eyes are desperately meeting mine, searching for the truth in them beyond what the words will say.
‘I’m good thanks,’ I say, but he probably sees it differently. ‘Nice to get some sunshine, but great to be back,’ I grin, trying not to let him see that there is anything wrong. It’s eight thirty in the morning; we don’t have time to get into the intricacies of my holiday at this point in the day. Maybe later. I hope.
‘How ‘bout you? Do anything nice?’ I ask, and I find myself wanting to know what he did day by day, hour by hour, whilst he was away from this place. And from me. He reels off a couple of things, but then I find I’m not paying attention. Because what I really want to do is climb inside those big strong arms and have a huge hug, lay my head against his chest and smell him, wrap my arms around his back, touch the smooth expanse of him, feel warm, and safe, and protected. I have to pull myself together quickly, and I shudder with the effort of it.
‘I’ll see you later, we’ll catch up then,’ he says, sensing my distraction, probably assuming I am preoccupied with the day to come, and bringing things to an end so that we can both get on with it. He squeezes my arm again and gives it a little rub, then he pauses, his fingers come up to my cheek and he strokes it a couple of times with the back of his hand. It’s such a small gesture, but so intimate and gentle, and I want to grab hold of those fingers with both hands and pull them to me. I can’t, so I make do with a quick smile and another glance at him, before I head off to my classroom.
Well that had been an unnerving start to my day. I hadn’t been sure how I would react when I first saw Tom; we’d had no contact for over a week other than the texts we’d exchanged, and I hadn’t known what to expect. What does he want from me, and more to the point, what am I expecting from him? I am worried about using him as an emotional crutch – it always seems fine to lean on your girlfriends in times of trouble, but is it the right thing to do to turn to another man with all my problems? Oh God, so much turmoil in my head, I’m not used to all this.
There are two men in my life, and I am not entirely sure how I feel about either of them. Tom is a good friend, but I have to be so careful here to make sure I concentrate on getting things back on track with Mark; he has to be my priority, that’s only right. But I find myself thinking about Tom more and more. Maybe it is because he is the one who comes without all the emotional trauma attached – it’s less complicated to think nice thoughts about him than burdening my brain with all the Mark issues.
Tom and I don’t see much of each other throughout the course of the day – probably a blessing, as I need all my concentration to get me through it. It’s a bit of a shock being back at work after a week of not doing very much. We are having another rehearsal for Joseph after school, so it’s going to be a long day.
Tom grabs me whilst I’m in the playground at the end of school, seeing off those not staying behind for the practise.
‘I’ll probably still be here later – pop by and see me, won’t you?’ he asks.
‘Course,’ I say, trying to sound non-committal, but knowing that I will be there like a shot as soon as the rehearsal is over.
The kids have me in stitches for the next hour and a half with their singing and dancing antics, and that’s a great diversion. Somehow we seem to have managed to put our own comedy spin on Joseph, by virtue of the kids we’ve cast in the leading roles, who seem to be largely made up of the class clowns. I think the parents will love it – I know they will. I’m not going to change a thing, let it roll as they want to play it and just polish up the parts so that they are singing to perfection, and there are no slips other than the inevitable ones that always happen on the night when you are staging a production that’s fully staffed with kids. No school show would be the same without those endearing little faux pas.
Tom is still in his office when I arrive back from the village hall after the practice. Nothing new there, he is always in with the lark and hardly ever leaves before six. So not like he was waiting for me specially or anything…. I dump my stuff back in my classroom and tidy up a bit, clean the whiteboard and stick up the next day’s lesson plan; I don’t want to look too keen. Even if I am desperate to see him and have been waiting all day for this.
‘Hi,’ I breeze into his office, without knocking, feeling a bit breathless and full of anticipation – but of what I’m not really sure. Gone are all the formalities of the day, he has taken off his tie and unbuttoned his shirt, and his hair looks even more unkempt a
nd wild than usual, as though he has been running his hands through it. Oh no, more glimpses of that smooth chest, how will I cope? He looks good enough to eat, and it’s as much as I can do not to go straight over to him, perch on his lap and throw myself into his arms. Instead I throw myself into one of the squishy chairs in front of his desk. Some furniture between us is probably a good thing right now.
‘I’ve missed you, Grace,’ he says. He stands up and walks round to my side of the desk. I’m not safe here after all, but I’m not sure I want to be safe. Give me danger any day, if it feels like this. My heart is pounding, and I can hardly breathe. Tom pulls me up in one swift movement, and I am in his arms. Finally. It feels so good here, it feels right. His huge body dwarfs mine and I feel so safe, so comforted. I don’t want it to stop. He nuzzles into my neck, and I am happy to stay like that, melting against his huge chest. I can feel his heart pounding beneath the firm muscle and bone.
He turns his head and his hair brushes against my face as his mouth seeks mine. It’s just the briefest of kisses, gentle and fleeting. A kiss full of promise of more to come, but not so intense as to scare me off at the first embrace. He moves his head back so that he can look at my face, his arms still around me.