The Secrets of Married Women

by Mason, Carol

  ‘Here he is!’ she illuminates as the black Range Rover rolls up. Neil gets out, hair the colour of white light, striking on such a young face. He saunters around the front of the car in his charcoal suit with the top button of his white shirt undone, the knot of his grey tie yanked down mid-chest. Immaculately dishevelled. Like you could put him ‘as is’ in a magazine ad for just about any luxury item and he’d sell it off the shelves. That, plus his degree of forgivable cockiness, and the fact that he puts the bad guys away for a living, makes him a real ‘knicker-creamer’ to use Leigh’s vulgar expression about him.

  ‘My chauffeur arrives!’ Wendy latches onto his arm. His perfectly handsome young-Paul-Newman face cracks a smile at me. It strikes me that if Lawrence had been half an hour late, then just breezed out of the car and hadn’t instantly apologised, Leigh would have made him bleed, as I’d have done to Rob.

  Neil’s mouth meets Wendy’s plump, coral top lip. Then his blue gaze, cool as a breath mint, looks over the top of her head, right at me. ‘Alright Jill? What’s new?’ I feel his hand lightly in the small of my back. He doesn’t wait for my answer. ‘So how’s the job then?’ he asks his wife. Odd timing for a question like that, I think.

  Her gaze hangs on his face and she moves into him so he has to put his arm around her. Wendy first met Neil when he was a twenty-five-year-old police sergeant who stopped her car on Christmas Eve and offered her a free ice-scraper, and like a fool she put her mouth on it and blew because she thought she was being breathalysed. ‘It was good. Very good,’ she sparkles. I suppose she’ll fill him in when they get home.

  ‘So this Clifford hasn’t got her running the company yet,’ he says to me, extracting himself from her and putting her at a bit of a distance. ‘She can still find time for yoga.’ Wendy playfully slaps him and sends me a look that says isn’t he hilarious! Then she bends to pick up her sports bag. And Neil gazes at my friend’s generous backside in its lycra yoga pants with a certain appreciation that makes a quiet part of me pine. Does Rob ever look at me like that? If he does, I’ve never really caught him doing it. ‘Our Paul wants picking up at the arena too. I’m not sure where Ben is,’ he says, covertly looking at his watch. Then he runs his hands through his hair in an impatient gesture.

  ‘Movie,’ she says, mimicking Ben’s grunt. ‘Ben speaks to me with one word or a shrug of the shoulders. The men in this family don’t like to give too much away,’ she looks at Neil then fans her face. ‘Phew. Is it me or is it warm?’ Her eyes run over her husband and I feel like you often feel around these two: as though you’re gate-crashing a raunchy, private party. Leigh and I think Wendy and Neil have a rollicking sex life. And she never has to say to him ‘Don’t you have a headache?’ as Leigh will say, and chuckle. And he never has to slap her to see if she still has a pulse.

  It’s probably all an act, Rob will say, when I report this to him.

  ‘Come on then driver,’ Wendy pushes him ahead and her lovely big bum in its tight pants seems to fold in smiling, self-satisfied creases. Neil puts his hands in his pants pockets and saunters to the driver’s side. And then my friend throws me a look over her shoulder that’s not meant to ignite good-hearted envy in me, but somehow it does.

  I drive home via the grocery store, then Pause for Paws where I leave the dog when Rob can’t take him with him to work. As I drive down our street, Kiefer hangs out of the window barking at the world, giving me a headache. In my kitchen I dig in my shopping bags for the ingredients to make my quick Thai Chicken Curry. I’m starving. With being late into work this morning, I missed lunch in my efforts to suck up to He Who Stares At Me Scornfully. I can’t instantly find the scissors so I try to open my bag of rice with a sharp knife. It goes through the tough plastic—and my finger—just as Rob walks in. ‘Hiya treasure,’ he shouts from the hall, then he sings, ‘Why do you have to be a teenager in love...’

  ‘Very funny.’ I remember the silly little conversation we had earlier about my being a juvenile.

  Upon sight of his lord and master Kiefer’s tail thrashes a tune on the parquet floor. ‘All right there my angel?’ Rob strokes him and Kiefer gets the hysterics. He stands on his hind legs and the pair of them start dancing around the room. There are three of us in this marriage, so it’s a bit overcrowded. After they’ve smooched, Rob’s gaze plants on mine. He slides my specs down my nose, lays a tender little kiss first in my eye socket and then on my lips. ‘Hiya you. My little Lolita. Are you feeling better now? Did your yoga class make you, you know, all chilled?’ Rob loves mocking these sorts of things.

  ‘It did. Ish.’ I hold my finger up and wiggle it.

  ‘Good God Jill! What’ve you done?’ He marches me to the sink, thrusts my hand under cold water. ‘You’ve got to stop doing things in such a hurry! Hang on, I’ll get a bandage.’

  ‘Oh Rob, it’s just a little cut.’ A sea of blood swirls down the plughole. I watch my hubby of nearly ten years, in his white T-shirt that strains appealingly over his broad chest, open the junk cupboard above our fridge. And then there is an avalanche of odd shoes, empty gin bottles, Hoover bags, cookery books, panty liners, Christmas cards, you name it, to which he says fuck. He tries to stuff it all back in there and says fuck again because everything keeps spilling out. Personally I avoid this cupboard at all costs for this very reason.

  ‘Where do we keep the bandages Jill?’

  ‘I don’t think we do keep bandages Rob.’

  ‘Well why not? We seem to keep everything else.’ He picks up a panty-liner in his fingertips and says, ‘Jesus.’

  He’s sexy when he’s vexed.

  ‘And how many times do I have to tell you that you need to leave this by the oven in case there’s a fire?’ He brandishes the miniature fire extinguisher he bought for me last Christmas, which I keep trying to throughout with the rubbish, because I get tired of humouring his paranoia. But he always drags it back out again and plonks it by the oven, which just gets in my way, so now I stuff it up there in the unmentionable cupboard. ‘Stay there. Don’t move.’ He disappears down our narrow parquet passage that flanks our main living area that’s essentially three rooms knocked into one. Something builders liked to do in ‘70’s semis to give the illusion of space. I hear him climb the stairs, his work-boots imprinting manly thuds above me. He reappears with a roll of loo paper.

  ‘Oh Rob! My arm’s not hanging off.’

  His warm hand holds up my wrist, and his other carefully winds loo roll around my wound, stopping only to pop a kiss in the centre of my forehead, a slow and loving process of mummification. ‘You could have sliced your finger end off.’ His voice is soft and treasuring.

  ‘Pity, it’s my middle one too. I use it so much.’ I demonstrate. He pretends to bite the rude gesture. I watch my husband as he works away on me. His serious, fine-featured face, eyes of the darkest grey-blue, the knit of his brows under his tumble of chestnut hair, and his tight-drawn concentrating mouth. I feel intensely loved, and fill with this urge to kiss that concentration off his face. He must catch something in my expression, because he does a double-take, gives me that Are-you-thinking-what-I’m-thinking? look. So I give him the oh-you-bet-I-am-baby one back. Our gazes hang there. My heart does a wild ticking. I don’t know when it was that we last had sex. Then his hand that was bandaging me up, slows. His thumb that was pinned to my wrist, strokes it. My eyes savour his even-tempered mouth with its up-curled edges. And I forget all about my headache, my finger, the curry and my hunger. I close my eyes and drift in to him. My face is poised upwards waiting for his kiss; his breath makes little draughts on me. Seconds pass… Nothing happens.

  I open first one eye, then the other. And somewhere far inside me, a cringe slowly unfurls. Rob is studying me, just peaceably taking the measure of my face. His eyes have apology written all over them: the kind that would choke you if you tried to voice it. For a second he tenderly joins his forehead to mine, and we just stay like that in recognition of something that is between us. Then he drops my l
imp hand and shifts his attention back to my finger, his expression void like a doctor’s. ‘There,’ he pops a chaste kiss on the big fat white poultice, doing a very good job of ignoring my bewildered scrutiny. ‘All better now.’ The room seems to lose oxygen. I don’t move immediately, giving him a chance to redeem the moment. But he turns his back to me and starts making a big surrogate fuss of the dog. I turn back to my vegetables. Aubergine. Mushrooms. I immerse myself in slicing them as a feeling dies inside of me. He roughhouses Kiefer on the kitchen floor. I clash a can of coconut milk on the marble counter, thrust the opener in it, recognising the impatience that has ignited in me. The onions are making me cry. I mop my eyes with the back of my wrist, push cubes of chicken off my chopping board into the pan. ‘You’ve not seen the green curry paste have you?’ I ask him as I peer into the fridge. ‘I swear I just bought a new one.’ My voice sounds fallen, as though what is lost between us will never come back.

  ‘Eh? Curry paste? No.’ Rob is leaning over the kitchen table now, thumbing through the Evening Chronicle. ‘Oh, you mean that green stuff in the jar? Yeah. I think I ate it.’

  I close the fridge door with my elbow, nail a hand on my hip. ‘What?’

  ‘Yeah, I think I had it on toast the other night when you were out.’

  ‘You ate it? On toast? Green curry paste?’

  He scowls over his shoulder. ‘Yeah. Why? It’s great.’

  I throw my hands up. ‘Well how am I going to make curry now then?’

  He sends me a guilty smile.

  After we eat our bland dinner in silence, I drag myself upstairs. A pile of clean laundry that I made him bring upstairs yesterday is dumped in the middle of the floor. Well, to give him credit he did put it on the bed first, but moved it to the floor later so he could get into the bed. Rob will happily leave it there, just wearing things from it, chucking them off again, until the pile replaces itself like an exhibit for the clothing cycle of life. You’d never think Rob was a slob when you see him in his spanking white T-shirts, with his thing for Italian leather shoes. Nor when you see the fastidious pride he applies to his job (self-employed carpenter who can build anything from a chair to the house it’s going in.) I’m not particularly tidy myself—kitchen junk cupboards will attest. But picking up my own mess after a long day is one thing; picking up his can make me resentful. Sometimes I’ll chase him around the house thrashing his backside with a towel shouting I’m not your sodding mother! Mostly though, I just tend to do everything myself, because it’s less tiring than arguing about it.

  I pick his dirty dog-walking shoe off the newly-changed, white Ikea duvet cover—scream!—and get some small urge to bash his brains out with it. Then I catch myself. I’m not really angry about this. In fact, I don’t want to be angry at all. I think of how sweet he just was over my finger—of all his good qualities. How he constantly offers to have my parents come live with us. The list is endless. Rob is massively supportive in the ways that count. I’ve just had a tiring day and the rejection tripped my switch. Get over yourself, Jill. It’s hardly the end of the world that he didn’t ravish you on the chopping board or playfully threaten to slam you with a large aubergine. Who goes on like that when they’ve been married all this time? Nobody.

  Downstairs, Rob is staring through the window watching Keifer having a pee. ‘I hate how he squats to do it like that, Rob observes. ‘I think somebody’s going to have to show him how to do it like a man.’ He beams a smile at me. ‘How’s your finger?’

  ‘It fell off.’

  He reaches for my hand, brings it to his mouth, kisses it. ‘A four-digit wife. I’ve always wanted one.’

  Chapter Three

  Rhododendrons are abloom in gardens as I drive my mam and dad to the beach. Rob didn’t feel like coming. ‘You don’t mind if I don’t?’ he asked me as I was flossing my teeth, and he balanced a loo roll on my head.

  I grinned. ‘So long as you don’t mind if I do.’

  Long ago my dad and I decided it’s important to keep my mam looking the way she would have kept herself: elegant, immaculate, even if she was just hanging the washing on the line. So today he’s got her in her pink and green sundress and cardigan. He’s put too much blush on her cheeks though, and her lipstick is bleeding over her lip-line, making her look like a cross between Tootsie and one of those strange old birds you see in the films who rip their wigs off and are really serial-killers underneath. ‘How is David?’ she asks. This has to be the tenth time she’s said this in as many minutes.

  ‘Rob, mam. You mean Rob. He’s my husband. David is a lad I used to date fifteen years ago. The lad I dumped because he was a pound short of his taxi fare so he asked the driver if he could back up until he could afford to pay.’ Memories.

  My dad titters.

  ‘David,’ my mam says, with an infatuated sigh. ‘David is a delicious boy.’

  We park opposite a stretch of white Georgian town homes and the pink Seaburn Hotel where my dad used to bring us for Dover sole and claret for birthdays. My mam is carrying bags—the lunch she said she’d packed us. I was very impressed until I saw they were really bags full of toilet rolls. Ooh! We’ll enjoy these, won’t we! I cooed at her. We truck over to a spot in front of the white pavilion that houses the toilets, and set up camp. I feel a bit guilty about not having brought the puppy now, but I was worried he’d hatch a stinker in the car. My dad troupes off to buy us ice-cream from the van but comes back empty-handed saying the driver was picking his nose. ‘Disgusting bugger. He was in it up to his elbow,’ he says. Details I don’t need.

  We sit maybe half an hour and mam gets fidgety. She delves into the carrier and finds toilet rolls and asks me, with the haughtiest disdain, why on earth have I brought toilet rolls, and where, pray, are the sandwiches? Morrison’s supermarket is across the way so I decide to go and buy us something, rather than chance taking my mother into a restaurant.

  They’ve done wonders to the seafront since I was little. New pubs, Italian restaurants and designer fountains front onto cinder toffee sand, and swelling green-blue waves like bolts of velvet in an upholstery store. I pass the amusement arcades and the fairground rides with the music blaring and the kids’ high-pitched squeals. In Morrison’s, I zip around filling a basket of things I know my mother likes, and in the check-out line I think of my conversation with Rob yesterday about how Arnold Swinburn had stood over my desk waiting to sign a letter I was typing, and was pointedly fingering through the Hello! mag on top of my in tray. ‘He was doing it to imply that I read magazines instead of doing my work,’ I grouched to Rob.

  ‘He probably fancies you, so he’s awkward around you and he hides it by being a bit of an arsehole. Men are like that. Especially married ones, because they feel guilty. So they want to make on it’s your fault for being too much of a temptation.’

  ‘Speaking from experience are you?’

  ‘What else would I be speaking from?’ He gave me his sly smile. Then he said I shouldn’t have magazines on my desk though, so I had it coming. So then we got into a fight. He said if I was that sensitive about it maybe it was because I knew he was right. I did a big ‘uuuurrrrrh’ and got the urge to clap a pan over his head.

  Rob will sometimes wind me up just because he knows he can. But then again, if he’d just said, ‘You’re right dear,’ life would be boring wouldn’t it? Even if it would have been the right answer. I pay then I go briskly out of there.

  I vaguely register that there’s a lifeguard sitting on one of those white lookout posts by the shore. I get back to the beach where our chairs are and… oh no. The towels are there. The chairs are there. ‘Have you seen an older couple?’ I ask some kids who have lilywhite bodies and legs caked with dark, wet sand. ‘They were sat right here.’

  ‘No, missus,’ the young lad says. I dump my shopping in the chair and hotfoot it across the sand to the toilets. What if she gets on a bus and we never see her again? Or worse, walks under one? I remember the lifeguard. I hasten down the sand in pursuit
of his yellow outfit. ‘Mr. Lifeguard,’ I pant to the back of his head, as he gazes off to some kids playing on a crop of rocks. Then he turns and his eyes meet mine over the top of his sporty-framed sunglasses.

  ‘I’ve, I’ve…er. I’ve lost my mother,’ I say.

  He’s handsome. Nothing like I’m expecting. Older. At least forty. With a yachtsman’s weathered complexion, velvety black hair that looks wet and raked back off his face, and intelligent, inquisitive eyes the colour of new pennies. ‘What?’ I say, because he’s studying me with a look that—weirdly—you could only call faint surprise.

  Then he smiles a demolishing testosterone smile.

  For a moment I can’t speak. Then I remember myself. ‘You have to help me. I’ve lost my mam and dad. They were here, now they aren’t and I’m panicked and I don’t know what to do.’

  He peels off his sunglasses. ‘Well,’ he says, climbing down from his chair, and I can’t help but notice the bracing of his forearm muscles, and the small everyday detail of his having a body like a God. ‘Lots of girls lose their mam and daddy. Though they are usually smaller than you. Is nothing to panic over. I will help you to find.’

  The accent throws me. The unusual rise and fall of his sentences. I think of what he just said, failing to see the funny side. ‘Look, this may sound like a big laugh to you, but my mother suffers from dementia. If she disappears and something happens to her, I just might have to kill myself.’

  ‘Well, we wouldn’t want that,’ he says, smiling at me with his eyes. Then he accompanies me back down the sand, asking concerned questions about my parents. But he keeps staring at me in an odd way. I decide that he’s awful for some reason. Can’t do his job for thinking lewd things about a woman. Aren’t you a bit old to be doing this for a living? I feel like saying, but don’t.