by Jane Fallon
‘But do you? Be honest.’
Well, he did ask. ‘OK. Yes, I do. She seems like an absolute cow. You could do better.’
He laughs and I’m relieved. ‘No, really, tell me what you think.’
By the time I’m in spitting distance of the flat, I realize I’ve forgotten the milk. I turn around and head back towards the main road again.
13
With Myra’s help, I’ve planned a tireless schedule for Robert’s and my staycation. Art galleries, matinees, walks in the park. I’m exhausted just thinking about it and, to be honest, I’d love to just flop around for a couple of weeks doing nothing, but that’s hardly the idea. I attempt to arrange one event for each day in the hope that will stop him being able to nip off for a ‘game of golf’. And I keep my plans vague so that he daren’t plan ahead. I’ve even organized a couple of nights at Robert’s mum and dad’s because I know he always feels as if he doesn’t see them enough. It suits me too. I love Robert’s mum and dad. How they ever produced Robert and Alice is beyond me.
Lloyd and Christine are both actors, of course, although neither of them works much these days. Both had some modicum of success in the seventies. In fact, they met on the set of a sitcom about a school – a twenty-four- and a twenty-three-year-old playing kids of sixteen – that ran for about four years. After that, they both struggled, and, happily for Robert and Alice, set up an antiques business on the side that actually did rather well. Robert likes to say in interviews that this is one of the reasons he feels so comfortable playing Hargreaves, as if picking up a vase and turning it over was a skill that needed to be crafted over many long years. Neither of them threw the towel in, though, and, occasionally they will pop up briefly in random dramas. In fact, Lloyd just did a couple of days on Game of Thrones and came home saying he’d never seen so many nipples gathered in one place in his entire life.
They are ridiculously proud of Robert in that way that only parents can be. And, best of all, they love me, seemingly unconditionally, too. Georgia, their only grandchild, can walk on water, as far as they are concerned.
They live right in the heart of Bath, in a house they bought in 1975 for a steal and which is now probably worth five trillion. It’s the house Robert and Alice grew up in and every time I go there I have to fight off pangs of envy for the childhood they must have had. Not that mine was bad. Not at all. It was just a bit dull. A bit colourless. Two-up, two-down suburbia with a miniature willow in the front garden and church on Sundays. I always imagine that Robert and Alice grew up in a frenzy of art and sophistication. While I was playing Kerplunk with Cathy from next door, they were at the theatre or being allowed a sip from a champagne cocktail at a fabulous party in the garden. I wonder whatever happened to Cathy. She was exceptionally gifted at Kerplunk. She’s probably a surgeon now, with those hands.
Robert’s family home is one of those honey-coloured, four-storey, terraced beauties that Bath is famous for. Set back slightly from the street with black railings surrounding the below-ground courtyard at the front. Unexpectedly large garden at the rear. Wooden floors and original shutters restored to their former glory. There is always much discussion about parking and how hard it is to find a space nearby this close to town, but I can’t imagine I would ever find anything to complain about if I lived here. Well, apart from my husband’s infidelity, that is.
Because of the parking issue we’ve come down on the train and, when we show up in a taxi after the short ride from the station, Christine is looking hopefully out of one of the front windows, waiting to spot us. She’s presumably been there all morning, as I don’t think I told her which train we were catching.
‘Bless her,’ I say as I wave, and her face lights up.
Robert smiles indulgently. I’ll give him this. He genuinely does love his mum and dad.
The reason I’ve organized this visit now isn’t just because I know Robert will enjoy it, or that it’s easier for me to be relaxed around him when Lloyd and Christine are there, because I would never want them to pick up on any bad atmosphere. It’s because I want to guilt-trip him. Overindulgent and prone to blindness in so far as their children’s faults are concerned they might be, but I know that the one thing they would find it hard to forgive their son would be him cheating on me. Lloyd and Christine have stuck together through thick and thin and they’re proud of that fact. All the temptations were there, they always say about their life in the spotlight, but they steadfastly avoided them. They knew what would really matter when the dust settled.
‘Darlings!’ Christine says, throwing open the front door. She’s not one for an understated entrance. She hugs us both in a flurry of scarves and musky perfume that smells as if it was bottled in the seventies. Christine is still a beauty but she’s starting to take on the look of a startled bushbaby just woken from a nap because of the tiny bits of surgery – which she will never admit to – she’s been having here and there. Her eyes are now round in a way they never were when she was younger, all droop eliminated with the nip of a scalpel. She over-plucked her eyebrows when she was young (as was the fashion) and they never really grew back so she now has unnatural dark brown lines permanently arching above her eyes a good half a centimetre above where any hairs used to be. This time, I notice her cheeks are smooth and appley. Plumped up like two fat chicken breasts. I’d love to be able to tell her she should stop, that she’s just gorgeous as she is, but that would mean admitting I’d noticed and it’s an unspoken law that none of us does that.
‘Come in, come in. Lloyd is at the shop but he’ll be home soon. He’s dying to see you.’
We dump our bags in the hallway and follow her down to the huge basement kitchen. Doors open on to the garden at the back and the courtyard at the front. Lloyd and Christine’s house is so big that Robert and I have our own bedroom permanently (as does Alice), even though we only visit a handful of times each year. But we all know the first order of the day on any visit is a pot of tea (pre-watershed) or a gin and tonic (after six).
I actually feel myself relax as I soak up the warmth that Christine gives off, as if she were a mobile radiator turned up to maximum. If I were a cat, I know whose lap I’d sit on.
‘How are you, sweetheart?’ She holds me at arm’s length. ‘You look as lovely as ever.’
‘You too,’ I say, because she does. Whatever she did to her face wouldn’t make me think any differently.
When Lloyd gets home (I’m half crushed by the bear hug) we FaceTime Georgia while she’s lying on a lounger on the beach. Lloyd and Christine can’t quite get the hang of what’s going on and keep saying things like ‘When did she film this?’ (Lloyd) and, at one point, when I explain that this is actually happening in real time, waving and shouting, ‘Coo-ee!’ over and over again (Christine). I’m almost crying with laughter by the time we hang up, having established that’s she’s having a great time and she doesn’t miss us at all. I look over at Robert and see he’s the same way.
Over dinner (cooked by Christine and Lloyd together in a sort of reverse I Love Lucy double act) I can’t believe my luck when Lloyd mentions how sad it is that some old family friends’ son is getting divorced, having discovered his wife has been seeing another man for years. It’s exactly the in I need.
‘That’s just awful. How can someone be so cruel to the person they’re supposed to love?’
I know I’m preaching to the converted here in so far as Lloyd and Christine are concerned. I just have to light the touchpaper and off they go.
‘It’s ghastly,’ Christine says. ‘I mean, he had no idea, can you imagine?’
‘People aren’t prepared to work at anything nowadays.’ Lloyd picks up the baton. ‘One sniff of boredom and they’re off with someone else.’
‘Everything’s instant gratification these days.’ Christine and Lloyd use phrases like ‘these days’ a lot. Rarely in a positive way. Now she leans forward on her elbows, warming to her theme. ‘In our time, you made your bed and you lay in it. Didn’t y
ou, Lloyd?’
‘You did. Mind you, we were lucky.’ He reaches over and puts a hand over hers and I have to bite back a tear. They’re so sweet.
Robert is keeping schtum. Maybe he’s worried that if he says anything he’ll give himself away. Christine’s not having it, though.
‘I think you know him, actually, Robert. Mark Tyler. Wasn’t he in your class at school?’
‘Oh, um, yes, I think so. I wasn’t really friends with him, though.’ He’s looking a bit shifty, clearly wishing we would all change the subject.
‘Isn’t it awful, though? He’s such a lovely boy,’ Christine persists. ‘Can you imagine? They’ve been married for twenty years. Two children.’
‘Mmm …’ he says. ‘Nasty.’
‘We’ve met her several times, haven’t we, Lloyd?’
Lloyd nods his agreement. ‘I’d give her a piece of my mind if I saw her now.’
‘Well,’ Robert says loudly, changing tack. ‘I could do with another glass of wine. Anyone else?’
For two days, Robert’s mum and dad spoil us and indulge us. They’re so thrilled to have the pair of us to look after that, even though my instinct screams out at me to help out with the cooking and cleaning, as I would in anyone else’s home, I hold back and let them get on with it. It’s not hard to see how someone like Alice would take advantage.
When talk turns to her as we sit at the big table in the back garden with our post-dinner brandies, the smell of the honeysuckle almost overpowering, I keep my opinions to myself. Far be it from me to be the one to tell them she has about as much chance of getting her one-woman show off the ground as of being cast as the next James Bond. Not just because no one would be interested, but because she would never actually put in the hard work to make it happen in the first place.
‘I wonder where she’ll do the first run …’ Christine says, and then they’re off, reminiscing about theatres they worked in in the sixties and what they were called then or what they’ve now become. Robert and I just let them ramble on. I imagine this is how they spend their evenings when it’s just the two of them, happily meandering along down memory lane, holding hands.
‘We saw her the other week, didn’t we, Robert?’ I say when they eventually slow to a stop.
‘Mmm …’ Robert says. He’s quiet this evening and I wonder if he’s trying to decide whether it’s safe to sneak off and call Saskia from a phone box. He wouldn’t dare ring her now, though, not in the evening, when Josh might be about. Despite their no-texting rule, he’s clearly nervous that she might, because every now and again he looks at his phone, tilting it up from where it lays face down on the table beside him, in a way that means only he can see what’s on the screen. At one point he nips inside, taking it with him. He thinks I don’t notice, or, if I do, I wouldn’t understand the significance.
‘I know. How lovely. It’s so wonderful that the three of you get along so well,’ Christine says, and I bite my tongue and smile.
I check my own mobile when Robert is in the bathroom as we get ready for bed. There’s a text from ‘Gail’ that just says, ‘This’, along with a screen grab of what seems to be Saskia’s Wikipedia page.
I’m a bit confused about what I’m meant to be looking at at first but then I notice the part where it states that her age now reads ‘Sherbourne claims to be thirty-eight but, in reality, she’s forty-three.’
I snort.
I listen to make sure Robert’s not on his way back. Josh is probably asleep by now but I send him a reply anyway.
‘Did you do this??’
His reply comes almost immediately. ‘Me? As if I would.’ He follows it up with a smiley face. I actually laugh out loud just as Robert comes in from the bathroom.
‘Stupid cat video,’ I say, as if in explanation. I’m banking on him not asking to watch it. Robert isn’t big on animals.
He rolls his eyes, but not in a mean way. ‘Thousands of years of progress have led to this. Videos of cats banging into glass doors.’
I laugh along.
‘Let’s have a look then,’ he says, and I know this is him trying to make an effort to be nice. I, on the other hand, am caught out. I press a random button on my phone to clear away the incriminating messages.
‘Oh, I don’t know where it was now. I just saw it on Twitter.’
‘Oh, well,’ he says, climbing into bed beside me. ‘There’ll be a thousand more tomorrow.’
‘Have you had a nice evening?’ I say as he turns off the light on his side of the bed.
‘Lovely,’ he says. ‘I should come down more often.’
He might not think I pick up on it. He’s probably not even aware he just did it. But there it is, that subtle shift from ‘we’ to ‘I’. It tells me all I need to know about what’s going on in his head.
By the second week I’m going stir-crazy and desperate to go back to work. Even to have a session with Chas, which just goes to show how bad it’s got. I crave my own company in a way I’ve never experienced before. I’m exhausted with being nice, positive, supportive Paula, but I have to say, I’m doing a great job of it. Robert has definitely enjoyed it, despite himself. He’s had all his favourite things (well, apart from one particular yappy blonde) handed to him on a plate like little Lord Fauntleroy – why wouldn’t he have had a good time? We’ve seen plays, gone around the Courtauld and the Royal Academy, walked on the Heath. I have held my own in conversations about Top Gear and spent hours on the internet in the mornings looking for funny stories to drop into the breakfast-table conversation. I even booked us both a golf lesson (at the same time, but with different people, obviously. I didn’t think an hour of someone going ‘So you hold the club like this. No. Like this’ would make him very happy), and even though I wanted to hurl myself off a bridge before the lesson was even halfway over, afterwards I raved to him about how much fun it had been and how I’ve been wrong all these years. He was chuffed, I could tell. Not that he wants me to join him on the green, of course, especially because half his games are actually not really games at all, but he appreciated the sentiment nonetheless.
As fortnights go where you spend all your time with someone you don’t really want to be with, it’s gone about as well as it could have gone.
14
Saskia has gained nine pounds, Josh tells me gleefully when we next speak. I’m on my way to work, practically skipping my way down the road with happiness to have left Robert still in bed. If the last two weeks have shown me anything, it’s that I’m not afraid to be on my own. In fact, I’m looking forward to it.
‘In three weeks? That’s pretty good going.’
‘It’s showing too. She’s devastated.’
‘Does she look awful?’ I know as soon as I say it that this is a step too far for Josh. He’s too nice.
‘No. God, no, that’s not what I’m saying. She still looks great. It’s just that she can’t see it like that. It’s making her lose her confidence.’
‘Story of my life. Well, I’m pretty sure she and Robert will be meeting up today, so let’s hope he notices.’
He tells me that he’s going to call Robert in for a meeting this week to discuss his new story arc. It’s only a week to go till filming recommences and the whole treadmill gets going again for another year. Two actors have been culled (one unpopular with the viewers, Josh tells me, and the other too dull to keep finding stories for) and they’ve already been told that they’ll be written out in the next run of episodes. I feel a bit sorry for them, losing their jobs out of nowhere. It will probably be months, or even years, before either of them gets another paid acting gig.
‘And when do you get to take time off?’
He laughs. ‘God knows.’
Chas has decided it’s time to weigh me again, like a prize cow at a meat market. He’s already poked me with the forceps, although he has yet to complete his calculation. Humiliating as it is, I’m so glad to be back.
When he tells me the news, I think I’ve misheard.
‘Thirteen five.’ He looks down at his notes from last time. ‘That’s great. Nearly a stone and a half down.’
‘Are you sure that doesn’t say fourteen five?’ I peer down, trying to see. Chas has changed the readout to stones and pounds at my insistence.
‘Well done,’ he says, beaming. ‘And your fat percentage is …’ He scribbles on his bit of paper. It’s like waiting for them to announce the winner of The X Factor. The suspense is unbearable. ‘… thirty-eight.’
‘Wow. And that’s good?’
‘It’s great. Thirty-nine per cent counts as obese, so now you’re down to the overweight category.’
That burst my bubble. ‘So I’m not obese any more by one per cent?’
He picks up on my change of mood. ‘That’s right. And that’s an achievement.’
‘But if I eat a couple of bags of crisps and sit on the sofa for a day I’ll probably be back in obese again.’
‘All the more reason not to do those things.’
When we get back to the gym he pushes me harder than ever before because, as he keeps reminding me, he hasn’t seen me for two weeks. I don’t care. Even though I feel sick, I do everything he asks. I don’t even complain.
Something’s happened.
Something big.
To say it was unexpected is a bit of an understatement. It wasn’t on my top hundred list of things that might happen, if I’m being honest. Probably not my top million.
It’s been a lot of years since I kissed someone in a park in broad daylight. And it’s been a lot of years since I kissed someone who wasn’t Robert. For those two things to happen at the same moment must be about the same odds as Donald Trump becoming president. Oh, wait.
It didn’t last long. It was only a moment before I came to my senses and pushed him away. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it while it was happening. Mostly because of the novelty value, I think. Not because of who was doing the kissing. At least, that’s what I’m trying to tell myself.