Thomas and Mary

by Tim Parks

  JULIE

  I met Mary Paige in the dog park. She used to come late afternoon with her cocker spaniel. I had Donna, of course. She was in heat at the time, and it was keeping them apart we got together. I must have told her I sometimes looked after other people’s dogs for them, because she offered me money to keep her Ricky, while she was away for a week and of course I said yes. Then she told me I must never bring Donna to the park when she was in heat. It was just common sense. She was right.

  She gave me more than I’d asked to keep Ricky, and a nice present as well, a cashmere cardigan. That’s the kind of person Mary is. Really generous. And full of energy. We started to take the dogs for walks together whenever I had time. Boy, did Mary take long walks! Instead of the usual half an hour with the mutts on their leads, sniffing round familiar corners, she’d drive us up the hill beyond the industrial estate and into the woods. Then we’d climb up to the ridge and set off northwards through open fields and across farmyards, through hedges, over fences, whatever. Mary was a powerhouse. Striding along with her hands linked behind her back and her shoulders pushed slightly forward, she’d just go on and on. Sometimes we’d do ten miles and more. You needed good shoes. The dogs would be exhausted. I lost quite a few pounds. It was fantastic.

  And she knew so much about everything. She could tell you a million things about local history, about nutrition, health, exercise. And about dogs. She pointed out to me that Donna had a problem with her hips and told me I should get it seen to, but I really didn’t have the cash to start expensive stuff with the vet. When we got back, just before lunch or just before dinner, she liked to go for a drink, maybe in the garden behind the Torrington. An aperitif, she called it. Usually sparkling wine. Sometimes a martini. She was always happy to offer. With crisps or nibbles, anything would do. In the teeth of everything she said about diet. Sometimes, laughing, she’d ask if I’d roll a cigarette for her. She used to smoke long ago, she said, though it didn’t look that way when she puffed on my Golden Virginia. She looked like a kid playing with cigarettes for the first time, making elegant gestures with her hands and pouting her lips to blow the smoke here and there. Coughing. Then maybe bursting out laughing. You couldn’t help but love her.

  I think she wanted someone to look after. Maybe because the kids had grown up. Certainly she always showed a helpful interest in the shit I was going through at the time. I was seeing a lawyer about my ex who was refusing to give me my share of the flat we’d bought years ago, and that he was still living in. Mary talked me through the options every which way; also whether I should move in with Brad. She was very sharp about men, though it was a bit confusing how she’d swing from super-romantic to super-pessimistic: how beautiful it was being in love and having children and what shits men were when they ignored you for years and betrayed you with some young scrubber then tried to chuck you away like an old yoghurt pot. We laughed about it, but I realised she had her own troubles. She didn’t talk about them. She wasn’t a blabbermouth, or after sympathy.

  Sometimes she’d bring her boy along on the walks. Mark. I liked him a lot. He had a quiet, laconic sense of humour. The problem was, he really wasn’t up for these giant walks. He kept complaining, saying no one had said how long we’d be out for, how far we’d have to walk. And no one had mentioned that there was no mobile signal up in the hills. He needed to send a message to someone. He felt cut off. ‘For God’s sake, cheer up,’ Mary cried, ‘the walking’s good for you! Keeps you fit.’ Whenever her son was pissed off, that was when Mary most fizzed with fun and energy. I felt a bit sorry for the boy. He was trying to pluck up courage to leave a girlfriend. These things aren’t easy, especially the first time. When I asked him why he came along if he didn’t want to, he said he found it hard to say no.

  Mary was enthusiastic about me and Brad living together. She had this thing that all women should have children, though she couldn’t understand what I could see in a guy twenty years older. Why not someone my age? But the fact was I got along pretty well with Brad. It was always good to be with him. I knew we would be happy. Then I didn’t have much time left for changing men, if I was going to be a mother. The only headache was, I told her, that I needed all the space I had to make my dresses. I design and make dresses, super quirky dresses, with odd materials of every kind. Once a month I load them in the van and take them down to London to sell in Camden Market. If Brad moved in, there would be nowhere to work and nowhere to store all the stuff I need.

  ‘Take a room in our house,’ she said. ‘Store your stuff in the garage. It’s big enough.’

  At first I could hardly believe she was offering me this. It seemed too generous. She wasn’t asking for any rent or anything.

  ‘Mark likes you,’ she said. ‘And Ricky loves Donna. It’s good having someone around. Why not?’

  That was the first time I realised her husband wasn’t living at home. Or not always. Sometimes he was there at the weekend. The rest of the time he was in town. It was an uneasy situation. I could see everyone was on edge about it. I thought they should sort themselves out, frankly, decide where they were going and get on with it, though it was hardly up to me to say anything. Once I drove her husband – he was called Tom – to the station when he was heading back to town. At the station he asked me to roll a fag for him exactly the way Mary did. He smoked hungrily and you could see he was dying to start again. ‘You’re divorced, aren’t you?’ he asked. ‘Was it hard?’ ‘Not as hard as giving up smoking,’ I laughed. ‘I never managed that.’

  ‘I’m the other way round,’ he said. ‘I can keep away from cigarettes most of the time, but I find it impossible to make the final break with home.’

  I told him that from the moment I walked out on Roger, nothing on earth would have induced me to go back. Not for five milliseconds. Ever. I closed the door behind me and never spoke to him again, never answered his emails, never accepted his phone calls. I did take Donna with me, though.

  We were drinking a coffee at the tables outside Costa, since he had half an hour before his train. When I said this he went quiet for a while, concentrating on his cigarette. Then, stubbing it out, he said he admired my strength, but he found it very sad to have spent a long part of your life with someone and never to see them again, lose all the positive things there had been between you. ‘Damn right it was sad,’ I said. ‘But not as sad as living with Roger had been.’

  He laughed out loud and shook his head and asked me questions about Mark. He missed Mark, he said.

  Brad moved in with me and I took all my work stuff over to Mary’s place and set up my sewing machine and other tools in the bedroom her grown-up daughter had once used. It was full of school textbooks and sports trophies and a million old CDs. I must have listened to all of them over the months. She gave me a key to the house too. It was pretty incredible. I worked really well there. The light was great. I brought Donna and left her in the garden with Ricky, or kept both of them beside me while I worked. Dogs are good company. What Mary did meantime, I’m not quite sure. Sometimes she was out with Ricky. Most days she went swimming. Or to Pilates. She was doing some freelance stuff too, she said, with advertising companies, though I never asked what exactly. I reckoned most of the money came from the husband. The fact is you could never tell how much money Mary had. She was very generous. And there was a woman who came to clean twice a week. On the other hand she was always saving on everything. She bought the food on offer at the supermarket. The heating was always turned down low, or just plain off. I didn’t complain.

  I had tea and a snack with Mark most afternoons when he got back from school. It was fun talking to a teenager. He was going through a big self-esteem crisis, with not being able to fire his girlfriend. I guess the situation with his parents didn’t help. I told him not to be hard on himself. It doesn’t help. To be honest, I had started to feel more comfortable with Mark than with Mary, and I think Mary guessed this, because sometimes there was a sort of tension in the air if Mary got back when
we were chatting. I headed upstairs to finish my work. In the end, if Mary was nearly twenty years older than me, I was nearly twenty years older than Mark. So maybe it was natural I felt the same things for him that Mary felt for me. It was a nice kind of affection. But for some reason it confused things a bit when all three of us were together.

  Then Mary asked me to drive her to France. I couldn’t believe it really, couldn’t believe the reasons for her going and couldn’t believe she wanted me to go with her. It was like this: Mary had decided to go to Zambia for three months. She was going to do some volunteer charity work there – I never figured out exactly what or why she wanted to do this. As a result, there was the problem of what to do with Ricky. As she saw it, that is, because Mark didn’t think there was a problem at all. Mark said he could look after him. He wanted to look after him. He loved Ricky. But Mary said he wouldn’t be able to, he was out too much, he wasn’t old enough or responsible enough, one day he would forget and the dog would go unfed or would be trapped in the house when he needed to get out. Mark protested, but Mary was determined. I said I was more than willing to help out. Mary said she couldn’t burden me with her dog. I said it was only fair I gave a her a bit of time and help with all she was doing for me, letting me have the room and the storage space. She was making everything possible for me, I said, so I was really glad to feed the dog and take it out if need be.

  Mary shook her head. Ricky was used to really long walks, she said. He was a special dog. She would feel guilty if she didn’t have him properly cared for. The fact was, she had some French friends who now had a farm down in the Dordogne and a couple of dogs. She wanted to drive there and leave Ricky and the car with them. The problem was she didn’t trust herself to drive such a long way on her own. She didn’t get on with motorways, never mind French motorways. She would pay me for my time, she said, and the flight home. She would fly on to Zambia from Paris. I thought it would be a good opportunity to take some samples with me and show them around the markets in Paris. I had never been to Paris. So I said yes.

  Weird trip. We had a place booked for the Tunnel, but Mary insisted on leaving so early that we arrived almost three hours before our slot and wasted more time hanging around the miserable little centre they have there than we would have lost using the ferry at half the price. Mary was pretty nervous, I think, but determined to be jolly, like we were girls on holiday, then worried the dog would get sick, or not have enough water to drink, or the border control people would stop us because the vaccination papers weren’t in order. It was amazing how many things Mary could think of to worry about. In the end Ricky was absolutely fine, snoozing away on the back seat, but since Mary didn’t like the kind of music I like, we ended up sitting in silence or listening to news stations on the radio. In French. I drove the whole way.

  In Paris we shared a room in a cheap hotel that accepted dogs and she took me out to eat and the next day she took me round all the sights – the Tower, the Louvre, Notre-Dame. She knew the city amazingly well. It seemed her French was really good. She talked to everybody, buttonholed people at bus stops and on the Métro, chattering away. I didn’t understand a thing. In the evening we had to trail around to find a bistro that didn’t mind dogs, but we finally found one. Ricky lay on the floor beside Mary. She had this routine of getting him to do things like sit up and touch his nose on the palm of her hand, or first his nose, then one front paw, then the other front paw, then his nose again. After which, to reward him, she popped something in his mouth. Usually she kept biscuits or some special kind of doggie treats in her coat pocket, but tonight she’d run out of them, so she started cutting tiny pieces of meat from her steak. She must have fed him half her dinner, which wasn’t cheap. But the dog was so happy and cheerful, it felt like it was worth it. Ricky was one of those dogs that give you the impression they are always smiling.

  Then Mary wanted to go for a second bottle of Sauvignon. She’d been getting me to eat typically French things – pâté, duck – and talking ten to the dozen about when she was a student, boyfriends she’d had, how she used to stay out all night to drink and dance then be in her lessons at nine and still get great grades.

  I said I’d drunk enough.

  ‘Come on, Julie!’ she laughed. ‘You’re only young once, let’s go for it.’

  So I had to tell her I was pregnant. I’d just heard for sure the day before we travelled. ‘Fantastic!’ Mary cried. She thought that was fantastic and she started talking me through all the tests and stuff I’d have to do and all the preparations, and giving me stories about her own pregnancies and telling me to take gynaecologists with a pinch of salt because they often tried to scare you, just to make you do tests in their private clinics.

  ‘But why didn’t you tell me right away?’ she asked.

  I shrugged. I didn’t really know why I hadn’t told Mary.

  ‘I suppose I still haven’t got used to it myself,’ I said.

  She laughed and said yes this was a huge change in my life, and then she persuaded me to have one more glass anyway and said how much she was looking forward to having grandchildren herself. It would be great to have a new baby around, she said, without having to actually produce it yourself. She laughed and poured. She’d ordered a half-litre carafe. Mary really was a fantastic person to be with.

  Then I asked her why she was going to Africa like this when she was so attached to her children and the dog. I couldn’t understand it.

  Mary frowned and sighed. She called the waiter again and ordered sweets. Something I just had to try, she said. It was called Poire belle Hélène. She made me pronounce it twice.

  ‘So what does that mean?’

  ‘Pear beautiful Helen,’ she said. ‘Beautiful Helen pear. Pears poached in syrup, basically. The French are good at this stuff. Trust them to put pears next to Helen of Troy.’

  ‘Sounds sexy,’ I laughed.

  Then Mary said she was going on this voluntary service because she had to do something with her life. The kids had grown up. Her husband was always busy and away. She needed to prove to herself that she could still be useful and positive.

  She spoke offhand, but her voice sounded brittle. She had drunk more than she usually did. I felt a bit sorry for her.

  ‘You should leave him,’ I told her. ‘Kick him out. Or force him either to stay or go. One thing or the other.’

  Mary smiled. She said I didn’t understand. It was a long and complicated relationship, she said. ‘A bit like a Gothic castle, with parts that are still liveable and parts that crumbled to ruin ages ago, and very likely parts with skeletons in every cupboard, and for sure a ghost or two in the cellars or the attic. Not to mention the secret passages! And the rats behind the tapestries!’

  She tried to laugh about it. She needed to get away for a while, she said. It would be good to be doing something useful for other people. Africa was the only continent she had never visited at all. It would be fascinating.

  ‘He’s shifty,’ I told her. I tried at last to be completely frank with her. ‘I mean, he’s a nice enough bloke, but you can see he wants out. It’s written all over his face. You should go to his place in town,’ I suggested, ‘and challenge him. You should find out what he’s doing there. A man doesn’t find a place away from home unless he has another woman. That would settle it. Go there and have it out with him.’

  The Beautiful Helen pear arrived and Mary did a lot of oohing and aahing over it. She didn’t want to think about Tom, she said. ‘What are you going to call the baby? Do you want a boy or a girl?’

  Later, when we were in bed in the hotel room about to fall asleep, she told me, ‘The important thing is, don’t give up your career for the baby. I was too generous. Then you’re left high and dry.’

  The following day we drove down to this farm in the Dordogne and then Mary’s friends took me to the station in Limoges and I went back to Paris to hawk my stuff round a couple of shops and markets. Mary had spent the whole drive fussing over the dog. She se
emed distant, as if she really didn’t like what had been said in the restaurant. She didn’t want to go back there. By the time I flew home she was on her way out to Zambia.

  Those three months were perfect. I took Donna over to their house every day and made my dresses. Business was going well. I’d had the smart idea of ripping out printed circuit boards from old computers and building them into the clothes I was making – on the sleeves, or the belt, or round the hems of a skirt – and people were really going for it. A shop in Manchester had agreed to take them on a regular basis. So I was finally earning enough to live, feeling almost comfortable, and the pregnancy wasn’t giving me any morning sickness either. On the contrary, it was a pleasure. I kept Mark a bit of company in the afternoon. We talked about music and clothes and I made a really wacky jacket for him. He loved it and even went to college in it a few times. He was at art college now. When his scooter was out of action, or it was raining, I would give him lifts here and there, since their place was really off the beaten track. I picked up his dad a couple of times from the station too when he came to visit, though I couldn’t roll him a cigarette now because with the pregnancy I’d finally stopped smoking.

  ‘From one day to the next, I just stopped.’

  ‘I’m all admiration,’ he said.

  Towards the end of the three months Mark finally managed to fire his girlfriend. We had an impromptu party that day. He was so pleased with himself. Brad came over after work with some beer and there were a couple of friends of his as well. It was quite a party, thinking back, and also maybe a party to mark the end of this little period of independence. In any event, I was really getting fond of Mark, like he was a little brother, and feeling really lucky to have met Mary in the dog park that day, when she came back from Zambia and told me I’d have to get out of the house with all my stuff as soon as possible.