She pressed.
‘Ralph?’ Susie had clearly been crying.
Emily was silent.
‘Ralph, are you there? Please say something,’ said Susie again, ending on a distinct sob.
‘It’s me,’ said Emily at last.
‘Emily!’
There’s a turn-up, thought Emily with a detached interest. No longer ‘Mrs P’, in fact she couldn’t remember another occasion that Susie had ever called her by her first name.
‘You know,’ Susie continued. It was a statement, not a question. ‘I – I’m sorry,’ she added like a child forced to apologise for a misdemeanour they didn’t regret in the least.
‘Thank you.’
‘I love him.’
‘So do I,’ replied Emily, calmly.
‘No you don’t,’ said Susie crying audibly now. ‘You aren’t there for him. You don’t understand his ambitions, his talents. Ralph is a great man and all you want for him is to be a rural MP and that would kill him. What he needs is me – not you.’
Emily reeled. ‘I think not,’ she said icily, and pressed the ‘end’ button.
Still shaking, she made her legs take her upstairs to the bedroom, where she could hear Ralph now moving around.
‘Do you love her?’ asked Emily, as Ralph rubbed his hair, his back to her. He stopped dead.
‘Not like I love you and the children,’ he said at last.
‘She seems to love you.’
Ralph’s eyes were misty. ‘She’s an amazing woman,’ he replied. ‘She doesn’t deserve all this grief. I should go to her. Make sure she’s all right.’
Emily could hardly believe her ears and yet, relief at postponing the moment when they had to address their problems flooded through her.
‘Go,’ she said flatly. ‘Run off to your little mistress then. After all, she says she loves you … and I’m not at all sure that I do.’
Chapter Ten
‘What an idiot,’ exclaimed Nessa with comforting outrage, when Emily carted the children around to her house the following morning. Ralph had not returned. After a sleepless night, she was dreading the weekend with no school to give her a break from caring for the children on her own.
‘Here,’ said Nessa, ‘Let’s get shot of the rug rats, and I’ll pour you some of this,’ she waved her glass of wine. ‘There’s soup and stuff for lunch later.’
‘You are kind. What are we going to do with them?’
‘Watch,’ said Nessa with a wink. She plonked down her glass and grabbed a Waitrose carrier bag. Standing in the open kitchen doorway, she flung handfuls of its contents – little individually wrapped chocolate eggs – into all the corners of the garden.
‘Children!’ she hollered. ‘Easter egg hunt. What you find, you eat.’
‘Wow!’ said Alfie and Tash together, scampering to the door. ‘Can we eat them straight away?’ asked Tash, slyly.
‘Yes,’ said Nessa.
‘No,’ said Emily, simultaneously. ‘Oh, all right, yes then,’ she added with a smile.
‘Even before lunch?’ replied Tash, incredulously.
‘Yes,’ said Emily again, ruffling her daughter’s hair. ‘And make sure Alfie finds lots, won’t you darling?’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ complained Tash, but she took Alfie’s hand, ‘Come on monkey face,’ she said. ‘Let’s go.’
‘And so,’ said Nessa, when Emily had told her everything, ‘the man has behaved appallingly, and – as usual – the long-suffering wife has to take it on the chin.’
‘I do?’
‘Probably, yes. Or at least,’ she added briskly, ‘if you intend to leave him twisting in the wind, as it were, you need to know precisely the implications of your actions.’
‘In other words?’
‘In other words, you hold the future of your marriage in your hands,’ she said, ‘but you need to understand you hold the future of the country in your hands as well.’
Emily giggled hysterically. ‘Well that’s just great,’ she exclaimed, ‘far from being allowed to cut off the legs of my husband’s trousers or give away the contents of his wine cellar, I actually have to ask, not what my country might do for me but what I might do for my country.’
Nessa held Emily’s gaze. ‘Oh my goodness,’ Emily whispered. ‘You are really not joking.’
‘Remember the household management book? Not much has changed. Mind you,’ she said, ‘on a brighter note, if this Matt chap is to be believed, the whole thing is rather pointless if the story isn’t going to come out in any case.’
‘What!’ shrieked Emily, sitting bolt upright, not even noticing that she had sloshed half a glass of wine into her lap. ‘Not you too? You sound like them, the bloody focus groups and Gerald and – and – Ralph. They honestly believe that the way things look is more real than the way things actually are. It matters to me that Ralph and Susie cheated on our marriage. Everyone thinks it doesn’t count if people don’t know, but I know. I know he was unfaithful. Isn’t that what matters?’
‘In any other circumstance,’ acknowledged Nessa. She fell silent, thinking. ‘You know,’ she went on, ‘this isn’t the life for everyone. It’s bloody hard, you sacrifice your own life, your children’s lives get turned upside down, you get the shitty end of the stick on every occasion, the husband gets all the glory and before you know it, they bugger off and die on you,’ she paused, ‘at which point you might just conceivably wonder what it’s all been about.’
This was interesting. In all her friend’s pep talks about sacrifice, tolerance, patience and diplomacy she had never, but never, raised the bail out option before. It was frightening to have someone else voice her darkest most lawless thoughts.
‘Are you saying …’ asked Emily slowly. ‘Actually, what are you saying?’
‘Well, to play devil’s advocate – you could leave him.’
Emily poured the remaining wine in her glass down her throat in one gulp. Immediately, Nessa replenished it.
‘What I am saying is,’ she continued, waving the bottle, ‘if you are unable to tolerate the situation with Ralph as it stands, then I suppose you will have to make your move. Now.’
‘With ten days until polling day?’
Nessa’s volte face on the usual ‘buck yourself up, stiff upper lip’ pep talk made her think of those Doctor Who episodes she always found most disturbing as a child where characters suddenly took their faces off and revealed their true diabolical identity.
‘Better ten days before than ten days after.’
‘Really?’ said Emily. ‘Are you sure?’
‘What do you think?’
‘I think,’ she said, slowly, ‘that the issue of whether Ralph would be a good PM is, to be fair, entirely separate from whether he is capable of being a good husband and father.’
‘Not what the majority of the electorate think,’ noted Nessa. ‘Wrongly, I’ll grant you, but there it is. You’re a package.’
‘I don’t want to be. I don’t know what to do. I haven’t even had a chance to have it out with him. Everything’s about the election. Why can’t it just be about us?’
‘OK, suppose it was,’ said Nessa. ‘Just about you and Ralph, I mean. What would you do?’
‘Kick him out.’
Nessa nodded. ‘And then?’
‘And then I’d wait. And then – eventually – we’d talk. We’d talk. A lot. And shout at each other, and have time to think … Then, he could beg to come back,’ she continued. ‘He could woo me, make promises …’
And he probably would, she thought, because Ralph, for all his carefully studied vigour and manly drive, was fairly rubbish at being on his own. Never without a girlfriend from the time he went to university to the day she met him, she was acutely aware he had segued smoothly from mother to wife, via stepping stones of a few – but not too many – attentive girlfriends who had all willingly volunteered to manage the practical, emotional and domestic side of his life.
‘Mm. A visible breakup and then a
fun reconciliation with flowers and forgiveness. Nice idea. Not really an option,’ commented Nessa.
‘I know,’ snapped Emily. ‘Heaven knows, at least I have the chance to keep the media from crawling all over it … it’s like people queuing up to jump on a broken leg,’ she said.
Nessa winced. ‘You only have a chance to keep the media out of your face if you don’t do anything different to what you’re doing now.’
‘So kicking him out and making him beg for forgiveness as a way of deciding what to do is a luxury I can’t afford.’
‘’Fraid not.’
And she was right. Emily was powerless and paralysed by the weight of everybody’s expectations. Ralph had it good.
‘And now,’ Nessa announced as she topped up both of their glasses, ‘I want to talk about me.’
‘Let’s do that!’ exclaimed Emily guiltily. ‘Which aspect exactly …?’
‘My love life. Or to be accurate, “the absence thereof”. I’ve decided to launch myself into the brave new world of internet dating.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’m lonely,’ said Nessa, lifting her chin a little. ‘I miss having a man in my life. I miss having someone to look after, to cook for, to talk to. I miss sex, for goodness sake!’
‘Go, Nessa!’ said Emily. ‘In that case, I think it’s a brilliant idea.’
‘Good, because I need your help,’ she replied, grabbing her laptop and plonking herself down next to Emily on the sofa.
For the next hour and a bit they were absorbed in creating an online profile. Nessa was keen to put in the bit about wanting sex but Emily managed to dissuade her.
‘You’ll attract all the sleazeballs and lowlifes,’ she explained. ‘All the married men who just want a bit on the side,’ she added, momentarily diverted by a wave of hatred for Ralph, but pulling herself back to the task in hand.
‘I have to be honest,’ protested Nessa.
‘Sure. Be yourself, but don’t reveal too much. And don’t end up suggesting something you don’t want to suggest … For example, see this bloke? He says he goes to the gym several times a week? Narcissist. Definitely.’
‘I bet he’s got a nice bod though …’ said Nessa wistfully.
‘And some of these aren’t real people you know,’ continued Emily as they dismissed another handsome grey-haired model with a toothpaste smile who was looking, so he said, for a theatre and food-loving woman in her sixties for companionship and long term commitment. ‘They just put them up there to hook you in to paying the fees. And then there’s the other whole thing of meeting strangers. You need to be careful you know. Always meet them in a crowded place and never give out your personal details …’
‘I know, I know,’ Nessa reassured her. ‘I’m not Tash darling. I’m big enough and ugly enough to look after myself. I’ll be fine, you’ll see.’
Chapter Eleven
Easter is a jolly occasion but even a public holiday such as this is no excuse for profligate expenditure. Charming decorations can be fashioned from the humblest of scraps, with vegetable dyed hen’s eggs making delightfully gay additions to the Easter breakfast table.
FELICITY WAINWRIGHT, 1953
Emily prodded the eggs in the saucepan despondently. Despite using practically all of the food colouring she could find in the cupboard, and boiling them to the consistency of rubber bullets, the egg shells remained resolutely white.
Vowing to chuck them in the bin, she had already got Tash and Alfie using the food colouring neat, painting wobbly stripes onto the remaining eggs and onto everything else they touched besides. Alfie’s fingers were dyed crimson right up to his palms, making him look like Lady Macbeth after a murder spree. Tash was more fastidious but, even so, Emily noticed a splodge of bright green on her new and expensive pink rugby shirt.
The book had recommended blowing the contents of the raw eggs out through two tiny holes before decorating them so the shells would be light enough to hang on sprays of winter jasmine and pussy willow. Feeling permanently queasy from the stress and from eating so little, she had been unable to face the prospect of putting her mouth anywhere near raw egg. Instead, she gingerly took the whole, decorated eggs, trying to arrange them artistically in a twiggy basket lined with florists’ moss.
Standing back and looking at her table centrepiece through narrowed eyes, she personally thought the layer of moss, made the eggs look like they had sprouted elephantiasis growths of green mould.
Tash eyed her mother keenly. ‘All right, Mummy?’ she said.
‘Yes darling, of course.’ She smiled at her daughter and gave her a hug. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Just … stuff,’ said Tash, as inarticulate suddenly as the teenager she would become all too soon.
‘What darling? Are you all right? Is it this whole silly election thing?’ she hazarded, hoping desperately it was, and not the other whole elephant in the room issue – the marriage.
Tash considered, looking old beyond her years. ‘Yeah,’ she said at last. ‘That’s it.’ She gave her mother another hug and pottered off to watch television, apparently oblivious to the mess on the table where she had been working.
Like father like daughter, Emily thought as, wearily, she began to clear everything away.
The table cleaned, she realised the rest of the day was hers and hers alone. Excused cooking the whole exhausting Easter lunch responsibility by Ralph who had – again – decided to spend the day with his campaign team, going over the polls and tweaking the strategies, she had little to occupy her, other than the children.
She collected the papers from the porch. There was a huge stack. Ralph liked all the papers to be delivered to his home every day so he could see coverage before his team faxed his cuttings. She dumped them on the kitchen table. Selecting The Times she pretended to herself she was carrying out research as she flicked quickly through to the lifestyle magazine. Here she saw Matt had contributed several pieces, his usual comment on the week, the TV reviews because the regular contributor was away and a six page article on the politics of abortion.
She made herself stop and brew coffee and then, sitting with a large steaming mug of it beside her, she settled down to read.
Despite the emotive subject, and her reaction to it – always even worse, Emily found, now that she had Alfie and Tash – she could not deny the incisive and dispassionate way that Matt had laid out the various arguments. He had started by framing the debate with the facts, quickly and coherently relaying the statistics, the history, and then exploring the various ethical positions with a detached clarity that she had to admire. Not that he had taken the emotion entirely out of the debate she noted. A case study detailing the experiences of a young woman who had terminated a pregnancy then regretted it had an immediacy and directness that caused tears of empathy to spring to her eyes.
She sat back and sipped. Subject matter apart, she had to admit, he was a superb journalist. Not that she had ever doubted he would be of course. When they were together he was already doing well professionally.
He was four years older than her, which had seemed a lot in their twenties. Of course Ralph was a full ten years older but, in many ways, Matt was the more grown up of the two men. He had been her mentor, champion and number one fan – until that last commission when he had returned from Serbia. Then he had been like a possessed soul, she remembered, angry and distant, refusing to communicate with her … She had agonised endlessly afterwards about what she might have done differently. She could have talked more, made him get help rather than misinterpreting his psychological distress – in her youthful egocentricity – as being something about her. She was hurt that his attitude to her was less loving. She wished now that she had refused to let him go to Kazakhstan after yet another furious row sparked by his failing to say and do the right things when she told him she was pregnant. As a result her unplanned pregnancy and subsequent miscarriage had been faced alone while Matt fought his demons chasing yet more war stories overseas. She ha
d resented him then most of all, for leaving her alone to cope with her grief while he empathised instead with the grief of strangers. But all that was too late now. The point of turning back had been passed many years before. The relationship irretrievably destroyed by her self-obsession – and his.
And then, Ralph had appeared, with his glamour, optimism and downright certainty about everything. Interviewing him on the day they met, when she was still reeling from the loss of her baby and the simultaneous implosion of her relationship with Matt, Ralph’s confidence was appealing. The die was cast and things moved forward with breakneck speed as Ralph, quickly certain about his choice, drove the agenda. After her agonies with Matt, she was relieved to be no longer in charge, content to leave even the major decision making to Ralph and his team. She was sure the miscarriage and her rapid stress-related weight loss had made it impossible to conceive so she was astonished to fall pregnant with Tash the first time they slept together. They were married in months.
When Emily drifted back to the present, her coffee had grown cold. Feeling guilty about neglect, she called to the children who were both slumped in front of cartoons.
‘Come on,’ she chivvied. ‘It’s a beautiful day outside. In the garden with you both please,’ she added, turning off the television at the wall.
They whinged, but they went.
She sighed, brushing away a sudden and unexpected tear. She couldn’t ring Nessa to whinge again – it would be too much for the poor woman. She realised that there was, in fact, no-one else. No friends who she felt she could confide in. There were other mothers from the school of course, women she would meet for a glass of wine and a harmless gossip about things that didn’t matter, but she wore her distance from them like a suit of armour. It was unthinkable that any of them should know what was happening to her, revealing an unfaithful husband who she should never have married. The stripping back of the whole edifice of her supposedly glamorous life, successful by proxy, for them to see in all its chaos was too horrible a thought to bear. No, they were not her friends.
Never Marry a Politician Page 9