The Secrets of Married Women

by Mason, Carol

  When I get back to the deckchairs my parents are sat there happily eating the sandwiches. ‘Oh!’ I cry, wanting to heap kisses on their heads and murder them at the same time. ‘You’re here! Where on earth have you been?’ I try to be nice, in case the lifeguard thinks I’m an elder abuser and calls the police.

  ‘You know, if you wanted the lifeguard to come talking to you, you could have just ask.’ He grins diabolically.

  Oh God. This is going from bad to terrible. He thinks I made this up! My mam looks at him and a strange beam of recognition comes over her face. ‘Oh David!’ she says.

  ‘Oh Darling!’ the lifeguard gushes back, which makes a laugh pop out of me; I just can’t help myself. And then she gives her wide-eyed seal of approval then bursts into a strange baritone chorus of that song she’s taken to singing, to the chafe-end of your patience. ‘You’ll never miss your mother till she’s GONE!’ I do not know this extrovert person.

  I clap my hands over my face. ‘Where the hell did you go?’ I ask my dad between gritted teeth.

  ‘To the toilet, chucka.’

  ‘You didn’t. I went looking for you.’

  ‘Not them toilets, chucka. The sea toilet. Your mam wanted to go au naturel.’

  ‘Oh.’ Her shoes are sopping wet. This man must think we’re mental as balls in a lottery draw machine. He starts chatting to my dad. But I can tell that my dad can’t understand a word he’s saying. I suddenly reconsider my opinion about him. He actually seems quite nice. A real looker too. That mouth. Lips like cut glass. It’s the kind of handsome you just don’t see every day, and when you do, a part of you has to stop and appreciate it. When he turns and catches me gazing at him like I’m trying to memorize him, I blabber, ‘Well, thank you for your help. But it seems we’re fine now.’

  ‘Is pleasure for me,’ he says still combing me with that gaze that says he is more than a little interested in me. ‘You walk with me back to my chair perhaps? For all my trouble.’

  My mam and dad are having a tussle over a toilet roll. I suddenly feel as though I don’t know what to do. ‘Look, that’s fine, but I want you to know that I’m married.’

  ‘Why?’ he says, catching me by surprise.

  ‘Why am I married?’

  ‘Why do I care about that?’

  I grin and feel faintly idiotic. ‘No reason.’

  He laughs, as though he has won something. When he laughs, his face is even more shockwavingly handsome, if that is possible ‘You’re not from here,’ I start blathering. ‘Are you Italian? Greek, maybe?’

  ‘Greek!’ He scowls like I’ve insulted him. ‘No. I am Ra-shint.’

  He’s rationed?

  ‘Oh! You’re Russian!’

  ‘He sounds like Mario Lanza,’ I hear my mother’s starry little voice. Then my dad growls, ‘Does he hell. My backside sounds more like Mario Lanza.’

  He asks me my name.

  ‘Jill Mallin. That’s Mrs Jiill Mallin of course, not Miss.’

  His eyes flick over me. I have to look away, look into my shoulder, scratch my head, anything to…

  ‘An-drey,’ he says, and holds out his hand for me to shake. Then with his other hand, he peels off his glasses.

  The name is distantly familiar. Then I meet his eyes. Our pupils blot together. ‘Andrey, as in….’

  The note on the car?

  I have lived in this part of the world long enough to bet that there aren’t too many people with that name around these parts. ‘Do I… Do I know you?’

  ‘You could have,’ he grins. ‘But you never called.’

  I clap a hand over my mouth, thinking, no there is something wrong with this picture. Then I get it. ‘Wait a minute, you don’t drive a posh car like that.’ I don’t want to sound inappropriate or that I’m putting his job down, but it’s the logical thing to say.

  He does that business of putting his hand on his chest, pretending his feelings are hurt. ‘What? Because I am work as lifeguard on Seaburn beach? You English girls…You have such ideas about people.’ He wags a finger, tuts at me. Then his mouth comes close to my ear. ‘But as it happen, you are right. I don’t drive brand new Mercedes. I drive car that was parking opposite the Mercedes. I just happened to witness your very bad parking and I saw an opportunity.’ He grins.

  I’m already flailing a sceptical hand. ‘This is too farfetched to be serious. It’s ridiculous actually.’ If he had wanted to hit on me, he could have just got out of his car and come and talked to me. Maybe his car is such a heap of junk that he didn’t want me to see it. His head was probably holding up the roof. I bet he didn’t dare get out or it’d collapse like a metal wigwam.

  ‘And besides, I wanted to see if you’d call. Women can never resist man with nice car.’

  ‘Oh that’s such an old cliché.’ I give him a look that says, And so are you. ‘I’d never judge a man by his car.’ I glance at my mother who’s still gawking at him like he’s Michelangelo’s David.

  ‘Don’t mind us,’ my dad says, and pointedly clears his throat. ‘Carry on chatting up my daughter, lad. I’m too old to give you a thick ear for it. And I’m sure my son-in-law won’t mind.’

  ‘He won’t,’ my mam enthusiastically chimes in, grinning her face off.

  ‘Thank you,’ the Russian, says, clearly not getting my dad’s sarcy business.

  ‘But supposing I had called thinking you were the owner of a Mercedes, you’d have had a lot of explaining to do wouldn’t you?’ When you turned up in your old jalopy.

  His gaze travels over me again. ‘This may be. But by the time I would be finished, I would have won you with my charm.’

  ‘You think? How nice.’ I’m critically aware that I’m flirting. Like I used to be quite good at, back in the days when Gorbachev was a baby. My dad digs out the Daily Express and conspicuously tries to mind his business.

  ‘And what is more strange is—and you are really going to fall over when I tell you this…’ He gestures for me to come closer, which I do, aware of his body and the undeniable chemistry between us, and how easily I could be pulled to it, if I were free and single. ‘I see you there, at car. But it is not first time. No. First time I see you in Afterglow, before Christmas—’

  ‘—likely story,’ my dad clears his throat.

  ‘You were in dress of emerald green. Different eye-glasses though. You were with friends. Women friends.’

  Leigh and Wendy and I went there for our Christmas meal and celebration! He remembered the dress! My 1940’s belted coatdress that I got from the vintage shop in York, which I wore once then felt like Bette Davis in a time warp. And my old glasses! This is beyond unbelievable. My first thought is—is he stalking me? But then again, it’s not like he could be accused of following me here, could he? ‘Well I never thought the North East was so small!’

  ‘Is not. Is just that you are kind of girl a man see once and he remember anywhere.’

  ‘Oh, vomit,’—my father says under his breath.

  Okay, admittedly, from anybody else that would have sounded a big corn. But I just think, he saw me twice in Newcastle, he remembered my dress for heaven’s sakes, and now I’m seeing him here. How completely, unbelievably—

  ‘Fate,’ he says. ‘Don’t you think?’ Then his gaze slides past me to a woman’s bottom in a bikini.

  He’s practiced at this. He’s a good-looking, cocky, rather past-it lifeguard who stares at women’s bottoms in bikinis, and happens to have a good memory for faces. And dresses.

  And I’m married.

  ‘Seriously though,’ he pulls me aside now so he’s out of earshot. ‘That was real reason why I did not come over to talk to you beside car. I had seen wedding ring in bar. So this way, with note, I think if she call perhaps she not so happily married. Perhaps I have chance.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I hear my mother say.

  I am lost for words.

  ‘So what do we do?’ he whispers, and he grins that mayhem-causing grin again.

  ‘What do we do wi
th the drunken sailor? What do we do with the dr–’ my dad sings until I bark at him.

  Then I look at Andrey again. ‘We don’t do anything. You’re forgetting something. I didn’t call.’

  His smile falters, like a man who is not used to having to take a cold shower. ‘Of course. You are married.’ His mouth moves in to my ear again making a warm breeze that sends a tickle around my neck and for some totally mad reason I think he’s going to kiss me. ‘Happily married, right?’ He pulls away, his pupils impressing on mine, starting little flames in me. ‘He’s a lucky guy. Nice meeting you heh?’ he says, and then he turns and he walks away.

  ‘Oh he’s going? Shame.’ My dad doesn’t take his eyes off his paper. ‘Let’s call him back. I was starting to like him.’

  Chapter Four

  Newcastle beat Millwall 2-0. It was a good match, as football matches go. Last of the season. Free tickets are one of the perks of my job. I grab Rob’s arm and dodge Arnold Swinburn and his wife coming out of the private box from where the Manager’s family and the other bigwigs view the game. ‘With an arse on her like that no wonder he’s after you,’ Rob says. We file out with the crowd that’ll soon be stampeding down Northumberland Street like a herd of manic, dyspeptic zebra chanting Howay the Lads!—the local anthem. Then they’ll barge into the Bigg Market pubs where they’ll drink beer until closing time before staggering onto the last Metro home with all the wasted twelve-year-olds in their underwear.

  Rob’s going away tomorrow to suss out a contract job for some show-homes in Penrith so we won’t be late home. Besides, we feel a bit guilty about leaving the puppy. ‘Don’t want him getting depressed,’ as Rob said.

  ‘No,’ I replied, ‘or then he might do something really terrible like phone the Samaritans and hang himself with his rope toy when they can’t make sense of his bark.’

  ‘You’re a hard-hearted woman,’ my husband playfully scolded me. But this is our Saturday date thing: my rule. Nothing gets in the way of that, be it animal, vegetable or mineral. Speaking of animals, we go to that Italian ice-cream place that’s run by a couple of horn-dog Italian brothers, in the gorgeous building that used to be Lloyd’s Bank. The younger one sits by the espresso machine and says ‘Ciao bella!’ to my breasts. Rob deliberately plants himself in front of the Italian, arms crossed manfully over manful chest, (‘penis-measuring’, as Leigh calls it), waiting to be greeted too. But the Italian completely ignores him. I order coffee. Rob swaggers to the freezer to look at ice-cream flavours, sending me sidelong glances as the Italian carefully flirts with me. I can’t look at my husband or I’ll laugh.

  We take my coffee and Rob’s espresso gelato and claim an outdoor table overlooking the majestic Theatre Royal that’s just turning out its crowd of matinee goers. The sun is high and bright, but it’s crisp out, not nearly as warm as it was. ‘Come here,’ Rob picks a hair off my eyelash. ‘Another one of the flies is he?’

  I slump across the table. ‘Could be.’

  ‘You get them don’t you? The real lookers.’

  ‘Ooh! Mee-ow!’ I mimic clawing and watch his lips fasten around the spoon.

  He narrows those sapphire pools for eyes. ‘Wha’? Me jealous of an ice-cream man with a funny accent? That’ll be the day.’

  ‘Yeah but they say Italians are good lovers.’

  ‘What with? Their average height’s only four feet three. You’d probably need an ultrasound to find it.’ He shoves another spoonful in his mouth while I chuckle. ‘He’s generous mind. I have to hand it to him. It’s a big dish this for only a quid. It’s probably going off. Or it’s got Hepatitis A.’

  ‘What? The ice-cream?’

  He smiles.

  Can I have some?’

  ‘Neh, get your own.’ He pretends to move the spoon away, then holds it out to me, spoon-feeds me, catches runny bits down my chin. Next, we play our daft little game where we rate passers-by on their clothes, their hairdos, how fanciable they are. We get through about three victims when Rob says the immortal words: ‘I need the can.’ Rob’s bowel maketh great legend. ‘Told you that ice-cream was off,’ he says as he hurries inside.

  I grow old in his absence. Ten minutes. Twenty. Where the hell is he? The Italian keeps catching my eye and smiling in cheeky acknowledgement of how grim marriage can be, (but it wouldn’t be with him, of course!). Finally, Rob comes back looking relieved. ‘Bloody hell!’ I hiss. ‘Could you not do the short version?’

  He sits down. ‘I told you the bastard’s trying to poison me. I could have manured half of Yorkshire.’

  ‘Ergh!’ I clap my hands over my face.

  ‘Hard lines for that poor lass though.’

  ‘Lass?’

  ‘Yeah, good-lookin bird who followed me in. She was giving me the eye. She’ll not be now though. God bless her.’ Rob peers inside at the Italian. ‘Look at him still staring over here. He needs to get his eyes on somebody else’s wife, the midgety git. I should have taken my ice-cream glass in with me, filled it, and stuck it on his counter with a spoon in.’

  ‘Thanks Rob. You’re romance all the way. You know that?’

  As we leave, the Italian shouts, ‘Ciao bella!’

  ‘Why does the twit think you’re called Bella?’ Rob squeezes me, gives me his sly smile.

  The sun seems to bring people out in droves: little ruffians outside the video arcades, girls and mams on the bargain hunt, downtrodden husbands trying to stop their wives spending money, and the lovely legless football fans lurching into pubs. The odd one unconscious, being hauled hammock-style by his mates up the street. Because Rob hates shopping (unless it’s for him), we spend a fraught five minutes in Gap while I try to quickly find a pair of jeans. ‘What do you think of these?’ I model a pair.

  ‘They’re great.’ Rob leans against the wall, painfully bored.

  ‘Or these?’

  ‘Yeah. Nice too. Are we done yet?’

  The bonny young assistant who is folding jeans gives Rob the look-over and smiles, entertained. ‘Well which ones are better though?’ I ask him.

  He sighs, stifles a yawn. ‘Both of them. I mean, neither.’ He musses the back of his head. ‘Either. Which ever you like. It’s you who has to wear them. Not me.’

  The girl grins broadly. A typical bloke, but she loves him for it.

  Then we’re in Fenwick’s men’s shoes department. Ever since Rob read an article about how rich people only wear Italian shoes, Rob will buy nothing else. ‘Listen,’ he’ll say, ‘there’s no way you could ever appreciate the orgasmic joy of wearing shoes that make you feel you’re walking on clouds, until you too earn a living clobbering around building sites in hard, heavy boots, in all weather, day after day, growing callouses the size of monkeys’ brains.’ I’ve tried saying, ‘but maybe you can get comfy shoes—probably about ten pairs of 'em—without having to spend so much.’ But he tells me it’s his money; he’s earned it. I need to try minding my own business. Apparently I have this tendency to stick my big nose into things that don’t concern me. Apparently I should just worry about what’s on my own feet, not his, then apparently we’d all be a lot happier. Apparently.

  So here we are in Fenwick’s. I grow old as Rob gets the mumsy sales lady to explain the finer points of Italian shoes. ‘You have such a good way of putting it,’ he woos her with his quiet charm. ‘Can you tell me again, how they slice up those specially bred organic cows?’

  Walking down Grey Street, Rob stops to gaze at its subtly-descending curve, and the ancient sepia-coloured buildings on either side that seem to stand on military parade. ‘Come hither,’ I pull him to Waterstone’s’s elaborate window because I need a new pink novel to read. We stand beside a couple of serious, bookish types who are chatting about the latest Salman Rushdie bestseller that’s displayed. Rob nudges me. ‘So tell me when you next meet your parole officer?’ he says, loudly. The bookish types stop talking and glare at me. ‘You sod!’ I yank him down the steep bank, pulling him extra hard because I know it hurts his knees.
We disappear under the footbridge and come out at the Quayside, chatting about everything from the pants I want to go back and buy (which he now says he hated because they gave me ‘plumber’s bum crack!’) to our puppy having eaten the chord from our Venetian blinds.

  I’m just thinking how we haven’t had a fun day like this in ages when we cross the Blinking Eye bridge. A handsome young father barrels toward us with his kid in a pushchair, wheels rumbling across metal, the little lad squealing with the thrill. I happen to look up at Rob. And I see it. The quiet, covetous gaze.

  When we were first married, we didn’t really talk much about having children. In my twenties the thought of being a mother felt like the end of life as I knew it. And for a sensitive man, Rob has a very unsentimental attitude to family. Maybe it’s from growing up without a father. When his mother was four months pregnant his dad went out to get a haircut and never came back. (Rob was raised as the man of the family, which I believe makes him such a good husband.) Rob would usually grimace on sight of a baby. ‘Look at it. It’s got a face like a worm-eaten sprout. Eat, sleep and shit, that’s all they do. They’ve got nothing to contribute to the world have they? You can’t have a sensible conversation with ‘em. They don’t get any of your jokes. How can they not give a damn about who won the football match?’

  But then, the longer we were married and the happier we were, we no longer had a strong enough reason not to do it. So we stopped using birth control, and decided to let nature take its course. Rob still claimed he was doing it mostly for me. Although he’d say things like, ‘I hope we have a girl. A little you…’ And he’d get that quietly pleased expression. Then I caught him making a crib, which was really crazy given that I wasn’t yet pregnant. ‘A bit ahead of things aren’t you?’ I teased. He looked up at me, with his stain brush in hand, looking very handsome. ‘Just in case she gets an earlier boat.’ We tried for over a year. I got tested and was fine. Then Rob got tested and found out he had a problem. ‘Total sperm count: 0,’ he read to me from the piece of paper that came in the mail. We trouped off to see two specialists. I couldn’t get my head around the diagnosis. I thought that if Rob could ejaculate he had to have sperm. Some sperm. Enough to do the job. I kept thinking of that little egg I saw on my ultrasound, how mesmerized I was to see my body preparing to create life. How sad now that my little egg would be like The French Lieutenant’s Woman in that film, wandering the shores of my Fallopian tubes, waiting for her lover who wasn’t coming. It saddened me to think I’d never have the sights, smells and tastes of being pregnant, like other women. I didn’t go potty and stalk maternity wards or steal babies at bus stands, but I’d take strange dislikes to food, my breasts would be tender and a strange brewing feeling took up tenancy in my stomach. ‘I have to be pregnant,’ I said to Rob. ‘Why do I have morning sickness? Why is my period late?’ Rob would get annoyed. ‘Azoospermia,’ he’d say. ‘I have no sperm. I’m unable to produce a baby.’ But I was sure we were going to prove the doctors wrong. And then my period would come and I’d plaster on a happy face for Rob, but inwardly I’d massively mourn that baby I’d been so sure I was having. I felt like they say amputees feel when they loose a limb—knowing it’s gone but feeling it’s still there. Then I’d say, Jill, snap out of it; you can’t miss what you’ve never had. But you can. You can grieve without having lost.