The Trouble with Single Women

by Yvonne Roberts

  Fee smiled. ‘Not a lot,’ she answered, ‘but then I had too many other things to think about with . . . with what was going on around Claire—’

  Will leapt up, spilling champagne, and deposited himself playfully in her lap. ‘Ahaa!’ he shouted. ‘So you did miss me. I knew it. Absence makes the heart and all that—’

  Just as suddenly as he’d landed on her lap, he slid off and ended in a crumpled heap, sandwiched between her chair and the coffee table.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he asked. ‘What’s that pong?’

  Briefly, Fee was alarmed. Then she began to laugh. ‘You old romantic,’ she teased. ‘Don’t tell me, you can’t tell the smell of flowers when it’s under your nose?’

  ‘It’s that bloody Alan Munsen, isn’t it?’ Will moaned melodramatically. ‘He spends far too much time here for his own good.’

  ‘Veronica says exactly the same of you,’ Fee responded over her shoulder as she went to make coffee.

  ‘Aah, but your sister is incapable of knowing the difference. Alan Munsen sees you as his prey. To put it bluntly, any fool can tell, except Veronica, that he is desperate to get his leg over. But I, I am your protector! I will not permit this to happen!’

  When Fee returned with the coffee a few minutes later, her protector was snoring loudly, his mug on one side, spilling champagne into the carpet.

  I need to get away. I’ve got a week off and I need to clear my head,’ Will said. His face was as puffy as a duckdown duvet.

  He sat at Fee’s kitchen table, desperately shovelling fried eggs, bacon, bread and mushrooms into his mouth, in the hope that an excess of grease might conquer the worst aspects of his hangover.

  ‘Let’s go away together. You’ve got time on your hands, and so have I. What about it?’ he suggested.

  She sat nursing a slice of toast. She’d forgotten how being lovelorn affected the appetite. If time is a healer, Fee’s one wish was to spin her life forward a couple of years.

  ‘Fee, are you listening?’ Will asked. She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry I can’t go away with you. I’ve already arranged to visit a friend in Wales—’

  ‘Not to worry, it’ll probably do me good to go on holiday on my own for once. I’ll commune with nature alone in Mykonos—’

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ Fee retorted with absolute confidence.

  Half an hour later, she surrendered. She hadn’t realized quite how desperately keen Will was to avoid his own company.

  ‘OK, OK, you can come. I’ll have to ask Anna first. Perhaps we can spend a couple of days walking?’

  ‘Perfect, Welsh rain, lots of bitter, long walks . . .’

  Fee decided she should tell him now rather than later.

  ‘And Alan Munsen.’

  ‘Come again?’ Will slowly put down his mug of coffee.

  ‘I’m telling you that Alan’s coming too . . . You’ll like him once you get to know him better, you really will,’ she offered encouragingly. ‘But if you want to pull out, that’s OK too.’

  ‘What? And miss my chance of telling everyone I had a threesome on holiday?’ Will smiled. ‘I’ll look on the bright side. I’ll bank on Mr Munsen suddenly having to stay at home.

  The day before the planned drive to Wales, Claire returned to London. Fee had been in her flat and stocked the fridge and changed the bed linen. She had put flowers in the sitting room and fruit in the kitchen. Some of which she would have done anyway, some of which was motivated by guilt.

  Claire’s firm, accustomed to dealing with employees suffering from burn-out and breakdowns and various stress-related ailments, insisted on sending a chauffeur-driven car to collect Claire and Clem from the airport.

  Fee was relieved. She would have had to invent a reason why she couldn’t have been there herself. She left a note on Claire’s bedside table, explaining that she had been urgently called away to Wales for a few days but she would phone before she left.

  On Thursday afternoon, she took a break from helping Veronica, who had been receiving a steady stream of calls from male applicants, and phoned Claire. She found her tired from the flight but otherwise her recovery was proceeding well.

  ‘I’ll be back to work in a week, you watch,’ Claire promised. ‘Clem can’t do enough for me.’

  If Fee had been travelling alone to Wales, she would have left that night. She desperately wished to put a physical distance between herself and Clem Thomas. To be in the same city was too close.

  Instead, aware that Alan was not due to pick her and Will up until nine in the morning, she made an excuse to Shona, put on her coat, and left the flat. She walked and returned home when she was so physically exhausted she could think only of sleep.

  Clem Thomas was sitting on her front doorstep.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  ‘I’VE GOT something to say,’ Clem began. Fee had suggested they walk in the park. She saw the park as neutral territory.

  He rushed the next few words, as if he’d been rehearsing them. ‘I haven’t a clue how you feel, I’m not even sure this should be said, but it’s driven me mad for days, and I’ve decided that I’ve got nothing to lose by being honest.’

  He stopped and turned to Fee. ‘I’ve fallen in love with you.’

  In the few romances Fee had read, in every film she’d seen, it was at this point that the heroine flings her arms around her one true love, joy overflows, a union is made, happy ever after beckons. But Fee couldn’t throw her arms around this man. No matter how much she wished to, she couldn’t because the image of Claire stood between her and him.

  He ran his hand through his hair agitatedly, misreading her reaction.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry, I knew this would be a huge mistake. I’ve embarrassed you. And I know that you’re happy on your own and everything . . . so it’s probably entirely pointless . . . And, oh God, this is a mess . . . but I just wanted you to know—’

  ‘No, it’s not, I don’t . . . I mean, I do—’ Fee struggled to find the words.

  Clem Thomas looked away from her. ‘It’s hopeless. In Dublin, almost from the beginning, I realized that I was engineering time to be with you . . . I felt guilty because I didn’t want to include Claire in our conversations . . . Then I tried to wean myself off you by avoiding you as much as I could.

  ‘I told myself that if this continued to its logical conclusion, I’d lose you both . . . But’, he smiled ruefully, ‘love isn’t a rational enterprise. So here I am.’

  Fee took a step away from him, but he saw that her face had softened.

  ‘And here I am too,’ Fee replied. ‘Why don’t we go home?’

  On the short walk back to the flat, they were silent, each trying to make sense of the words that had been said. Fee’s mood swung from depression to ridiculous heights of elation. Clem had placed his hand on her arm, when it came to crossing a road, and she had leapt as if he’d administered an electric shock. Since then, he had carefully kept his distance.

  In Fee’s flat, Clem stood awkwardly like a schoolboy trying to remember his manners until she suggested that he sit on the sofa.

  ‘Would you like coffee or tea or whisky or wine?’ she asked, nerves making her sound like a beverages hostess.

  ‘Would I like wine? Would I ever,’ Clem Thomas smiled disarmingly. The situation was almost surreal, Fee told herself. ‘He has just told me he loves me, it was the one piece of information I longed to hear most – and now we’re behaving like strangers.’

  In the kitchen, she desperately tried to organize her thoughts.

  Clem seemed different from the men who she normally fell for – but she hardly knew him well enough to tell. And what about trust between friends? Loyalty to Claire? The rule that you never help yourself to another woman’s man?

  Can it be right that you take what you want, no matter how great the pain or cost to others . . .?

  In Fee’s hands, the cork suddenly came out of the bottle with a sound like the crack of a bullet.

  ‘The Lone Ranger had it easy,�
�� she told herself wryly. ‘What would he do if he discovered that the good guy and the bad guy shared the same heart?’

  Pouring wine, Fee was fumbling and shy. And nervous, as if she was on her very first date.

  ‘In the park,’ Clem asked, ‘what did you mean when you said, “And here I am”?’

  Fee looked at him. He was staring intently, as if trying to pick up on any sign she might give.

  ‘I mean that I feel the same way too,’ she said finally. ‘But it isn’t as easy as that.’

  Clem scooped her up in his arms. But caution – or was it fear or guilt – unconsciously made her tense. Instantly, he let his arms fall.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked gently. ‘If you feel the same way, then we have a right to take this chance of happiness. Everyone has that right—’

  ‘Claire,’ Fee said.

  Clem put his finger to her lips. ‘No matter what you decide, once Claire is on her feet and well again, I’m going to be honest with her . . . Not about us because there may be nothing to tell, but about me—’

  ‘What do you mean? About you? She’s certain you’re in love with her—’ Fee felt disloyal even discussing Claire in this way.

  ‘I’m sorry if that’s what she assumed,’ Clem said. ‘But I’ve never mentioned the word love, not once. What I have said, again and again, is that I care for her; she has qualities that I honestly believed I could learn to love. I—’

  He looked helpless. ‘Christ, the more I talk, the bigger shit I sound . . . What I’m saying is that I thought I had no judgement worth relying on when it came to love . . . But I did want a family, a future with another human being who was committed to make the relationship work . . . I think, deep down, Claire felt the same way too.

  ‘I thought, for once in my life, I was acting like a grown-up by choosing the right person. It was my head not my heart that was involved . . . and now—’ He ran out of words.

  ‘And what makes you think your judgement will be any sounder when it comes to me?’ Fee asked.

  ‘You’re the nicest woman I’ve met in a very long time,’ he replied simply. ‘That’s why.’

  Much later that night, Fee went to bed – alone. After talking for hours, she had told Clem that she needed time. She couldn’t rush into a decision, not with so much at stake for herself, and for Claire.

  ‘I’m going away for a few days,’ Fee had explained. ‘When I get back, I promise I’ll have a better idea of what to do.’

  ‘Why wait?’ Clem had demanded. ‘Why not trust your instincts?’

  ‘Because my instincts have betrayed me too often in the past,’ she had replied.

  An hour into the journey to Wales, not far from London, something happened under the bonnet of Alan Munsen’s car. Fee never imagined that she’d be grateful for a car breaking down, but she was now.

  The first thirty-eight miles had passed painfully. Alan had attempted to make conversation; Will Evans had sat in the back and replied in monosyllables. Like a spoilt child sulking.

  Fee was almost at the point of throttling him when the engine of Alan’s secondhand Sierra suddenly cut out. The car glided to a halt on the hard shoulder.

  ‘Terrific,’ Will muttered.

  ‘I’ll walk to the next phone box and call the AA,’ Alan offered. ‘It’s done this before a couple of times. I know it’s fixable but I don’t have a clue about these things—’

  ‘Allow me,’ Will offered.

  ‘Are you sure you know what you’re doing?’ Fee asked. ‘I mean, you didn’t even think to put petrol in your car—’

  Will gave her a dirty look. ‘That’, he said, ‘was an entirely different situation.’

  Fifteen minutes later, the engine reluctantly revved back into life. ‘Good on you, mate,’ Alan slapped Will enthusiastically on the back.

  ‘Not bad,’ Fee conceded. Will grinned. It was then Fee remembered that Alan had told her how he used to service cars in Guatemala that were almost as old as his mother. But she said nothing; this was Alan’s ploy. For the remainder of the journey, Will was a far happier man. His superiority to Alan Munsen in at least one area of life had been firmly established.

  By the time they stopped for a drink and a sandwich at a pub that Alan knew on the Welsh border, Will felt generous enough to compliment him on his taste. It was only a matter of time before the two men discovered they liked the same sort of jokes, both enjoyed walking and both had had childhoods lived on and around boats.

  Fee who, inevitably but misguidedly, had felt responsible for the initial tension, retreated into silence while the men talked. She ran through the previous night’s conversation with Clem again and again. What he’d said, how he’d said it, and how he’d looked when he’d said it.

  Was this, as Fee wanted to believe, a proper, grown-up sort of love?

  ‘Excuse me, is anybody there?’ Will was talking into Fee’s ear, his chin resting on the back of her car seat.

  ‘Sorry, what did you say?’ Fee replied with a start.

  ‘We’ve been asking you for the last few minutes to tell us something about this woman we’re all dumping ourselves on. Is she fanciable? Would she go for fine, upstanding, mature men like Alan and me – preferably one at a time? Have I packed six new pairs of boxer shorts in vain?’

  Fee laughed. If all else in her life failed, she told herself, at least she was fortunate in the company she kept.

  ‘We should be there in half an hour or so,’ Alan said. ‘Speak woman, the floor is yours—’

  ‘Once upon a time,’ Fee began, in a soft, mock-Felicity-Kendall-style voice, ‘there was a beautiful young single woman of twenty-two, called Fiona Travers, and a married woman of twenty-nine, who was naturally not quite so attractive as Fiona—’ She was interrupted by the simultaneous groans of pain from the two men.

  Fee persisted. ‘Now this not-so-attractive twenty-nine-year-old—’

  Anna Clarke had been employed by a local newspaper, the Huxley Chronicle & Echo. She was married and had just returned to work after having her second son when she came to cover a story at Lillieshall Primary School where Fee was teaching.

  Anna was exceptionally tall and far too thin. She smoked too much, so that her voice had a rasp. Some people assumed, that because she was skinny and she chain-smoked, she must suffer from her nerves. The truth was that she ate like a horse, drank copiously and smoked because she loved it.

  Fee enjoyed Anna’s subversive sense of humour. They also shared in common a monumental capacity to drift. And as both had recently drifted into Huxley, they became friends.

  Anna and Fee moved to London within months of each other. Anna became a freelance writer and had a third son. Her husband, Neil, established a business making china for themed restaurants. Anna’s career progressed too, but, for her, every step up the ladder seemed to produce still more conflicts of responsibility between work and home – conflicts from which Neil had made himself immune since he had long made it clear that his sole priority was his job.

  Eventually, Anna and her family moved to Stoke on Trent, closer to Neil’s two factories. Fee visited a couple of times. Then, Anna moved again – and Fee lost contact. Until the telephone call after The Perfumed Pound.

  ‘What she told me then’, Fee said, bringing the story up to date, was that she divorced Neil five years ago. She must be . . . forty-seven or forty-eight now. She runs her own bookshop and she writes horror stories. She told me that two of the boys, Daniel and Charlie, are living with her and the eldest, Dylan, is at university.’

  ‘Great,’ Will commented acerbically. ‘So we’re about to spend a long weekend with a depressed divorcee with sado-masochistic tendencies.’

  ‘Conway & Rigsby, Booksellers of Repute – New and Secondhand Books, first-edition science fiction and horror a speciality—’

  ‘Look!’ Fee shouted as they drove along the B-road that led into Newyddfach, the village to which Anna Clarke had come after her divorce.

  ‘Conway & Rigsby, that’s
Anna’s shop—’

  The posters had been stuck haphazardly on a brick wall surrounding a recreation ground. What caught the eye was the psychedelic background, a different one on each poster.

  ‘I bet that’s Dan’s work, he was always the artistic one,’ Fee said.

  Alan Munsen feigned mild alarm. ‘You don’t think this weekend is going to be a sixties sort of experience, do you? Only it was a decade that passed me by—’

  Conway & Rigsby was at the top of the high street, just around the corner from the village green. It had a thatched roof, and it literally overflowed with books. Even window-boxes had been conscripted into use to hold books, while trestle tables set up outside were stacked with secondhand paperbacks. In the rare space between books, homemade jam and marmalade were on sale.

  The door of the bookshop had been painted sunflower yellow and it was open. To one side of the door, a large shabby emerald-green velvet Victorian armchair on casters was balanced precariously on the uneven flagstones of the pavement. Sitting in it was a woman who was too preoccupied with the book in her hand to notice a car had stopped. Fee opened her door, unsure at first, until Anna Clarke glanced up.

  ‘Well, if it isn’t my old mate, Fiona Travers,’ she roared, jumping out of the chair with such vigour that it rocked and rolled.

  She had put on weight, which suited her well. Her black hair was cut short and streaked with silver. She wore cream trousers and a matching loose top. Around her neck she had a scarf in cream and turquoise and lime green and tangerine. She was barefoot and she had a cigarette in her hand.

  ‘Cut back a bit,’ she laughed at Fee, waving the cigarette. ‘Only forty a day, and only if I sit outside for a smoke. The boys won’t allow it in the house.’

  Introductions were made. ‘And which one—’ Anna had asked, her eyebrows raised in semaphore, when Fee had linked arms with Alan and Will.

  Fee had laughed. ‘Neither,’ she’d replied. ‘They’re both much too fussy to fancy me.’

  She sensed that the two men found Anna a little overwhelming. She was large, loud and loquacious.

  ‘Daniel!’ she shouted to the open window on the first floor of the cottage. ‘Look who’s here.’