Crowded Marriage

by Catherine Alliott

  “But he won’t know where he is!” said Rufus, running to the window. “Won’t know the territory!”

  “So he’ll make new friends,” snapped the vet, “charm a few locals, a very advisable thing to do when you’re new to an area!” He flashed me a look then turned back to glare at my son. “And anyway, sonny, you should have thought about that before you set about trapping the poor wee animal, shouldn’t you?”

  Rufus hung his head with shame and his eyes filled up. My blood briefly boiled.

  “There’s no need to take it out on a small child!” I snapped. “If you’re going to yell at anyone, yell at me. I’m the one who suggested bringing him here!”

  “Aye, well, you’ll think it through a bit more thoroughly next time, won’t you? Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m a busy man and I’ve got a surgery to clean up!”

  He snatched a tissue from a box and held it to his nose, his gaze sweeping around his decimated surgery. My eyes followed his in dismay.

  “Oh God, I’m awfully sorry,” I mumbled, suddenly contrite. “Here, let me…” I crouched down, attempting to pick up bits of broken test tube from the floor, but my handbag swung off my shoulder and got mixed up in all the wee and glass.

  “Och, away with you,” he shooed us, exasperated, swinging the surgery door wide. “I’d rather do it myself. Go on, be off!”

  Needing no further prompting and mumbling yet more effusive apologies, I grabbed the box and backed out, bowing low like Uriah Heep, ushering the children ahead of me from the room. We passed like spirits down the corridor, through the waiting room, and were halfway to the front door and freedom when a voice behind me brought me up short.

  “Would you like to settle up now, Mrs. Cameron?”

  I stopped. Spun round.

  “Only, we always ask emergency calls to settle up on the spot,” the receptionist informed me, tapping her pencil on her pad, lip gloss and blue eyes gleaming. “Since we’re taken by surprise in the first place, we think it’s only fair, d’you see?”

  “Um, yes. I see,” I muttered, shuffling meekly back. She leaned over her desk and peered into the empty box.

  “Ah. No Bunny Thumper Cuddles, I see?”

  “No,” I cleared my throat. “He, er…”

  “He’s staying here for a bit,” Tanya informed her coolly. “With the vet.”

  I glanced down at her admiringly. Nice one. And true, after a fashion.

  “Really,” said the receptionist drily, handing me a bill for £30. “That’s our standard charge, Mrs. Cameron, but perhaps you’d like to settle your whole account while you’re here?”

  My whole account. Damn. I looked into her mocking blue eyes and wished I’d thought to cash my cheque for the paintings; put some money in the bank.

  “Er, no, just the thirty pounds, for now,” I mumbled, getting my cheque book out. I scribbled away.

  “So…” she murmured silkily, resting her elbows on the desk, lacing her fingers together and resting her chin on them as she watched me write. “Flowers for the headmaster, flirting with the postman, and now wild rabbits for the vet. Whatever will you pull out of the hat next, Mrs. Cameron?” I glanced up in horror. A little smile played on her lips. “Something for the farrier, perhaps?”

  She caught the eye of the ruddy-faced man behind me, with the bull terrier. He snorted with laughter.

  “Fine by me, luv. Just don’t tell the missus, though, eh?” He winked. “Keep it shtoom!”

  I went pale. Rufus glanced up at me anxiously.

  “Word gets about in a small place like this, you know,” the receptionist said softly as she took my cheque, whipping it from my hand with her long red fingernails. Her eyes were hard and knowing. “You want to be careful, Mrs. Cameron. Very careful indeed.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  A few minutes later found me sitting very still in the driving seat of my car, the children clambering into the back. I gazed blankly out of the windscreen, my eyes wide and staring. She’d been trying to tell me something in there. No, correction: she had been telling me something in there, very forcibly in fact: telling me in no uncertain terms that I was making a fool of myself. My eyes cut back through the plate-glass window and I saw her side on at her desk in reception. I watched as she flicked back her long blond hair and leaned forward in her pink jeans to reach a sheaf of papers…long blond hair and pink jeans…oh God. Piers’s remark came winging back to me. Of course. She was one of the girls he’d seen coming out of Crumpet Cottage, one of Pat’s girls. How many were there, I wondered. And what was I doing swelling the ranks? I went hot. Looked down at my hands in my lap. They were tightly clenched.

  “Are you all right, Mummy?” Rufus’s face in the rearview mirror was anxious.

  “Yes. Yes, fine.”

  I gave a bright smile and turned the ignition. Then I let out the handbrake and we drove away.

  We passed out of town and into the lanes. The hedgerows flashed by in a riot of late spring colour: red campions and yellow cowslips nodded and tossed their dazzling heads in the breeze, but I hardly saw them. My mind was racing. I knew what this was all about. This wasn’t about me throwing myself at headmasters, or vets, or any other local hunk you care to mention. This fiasco with the rabbit, this excuse to see Pat, was symptomatic of something much more worrying, something much more visceral. It was about a deeper insecurity, to do with being scared, and lonely, and reaching out and clutching—well, at whatever was there, frankly: at whatever alternative came my way and could fill a gap. A gap in a marriage. This wasn’t about me finding other men attractive. This had nothing to do with Pat Flaherty. This was about me counting the number of times my husband made love to me, about living with someone but not being able to reach them, about a vacuum in a marriage. It was a cry for help. And actually, what Pink Jeans had done was point this out very succinctly. This wasn’t really me behaving in a desperate manner, this was me reacting to a desperate situation. A situation I couldn’t control—had no control over—and was too scared to confront, for fear of what I might find out.

  My breathing became shallow as I raced down the lanes, gripping the wheel. I hadn’t wanted to face this, had done my best to sit on my hands and deny it, but now, here it was, served up on a plate in front of me. And I’d denied it many, many times before. Oh, yes.

  I remembered once in London, when I’d known Eleanor was in town, Alex coming back late from work, very late. I’d crept out of bed, and from my window, had seen him get out of a taxi, seen the spring in his step, the confident swagger: not the gait of an exhausted man who’d been ploughing through a workload at the office—no, the step of an elated man. And as he’d turned and bounded up the path, I’d seen the look in his eyes and known too that this was a man brimming over, a man who wanted, finally, to unburden himself, to come clean. I’d nipped back to bed, and when he’d come into the room, I’d pretended to be asleep. I’d heard him breathing, could feel him standing over me, could smell the fresh air on his suit as he watched me. Then he’d said my name.

  “Imo? Imo, are you asleep?”

  I’d kept my eyes tightly shut, digging my nails into my hand, staying still, but remembering too, to breathe. I’d sensed him hovering there a moment longer. Eventually, though, he went to the bathroom. When he got into bed beside me, he let out a sigh that had ripped through me: a sigh full of sadness and regret; full of longing.

  By morning, of course, his confessional moment had passed and he was sober and rational: no longer full of the need to communicate, no longer so keen to share the news with me that he was in love with another woman. And the moment passed for me too: I made it pass. I put it from my mind to such an extent that I managed, not to pretend it had never happened, because after all I still had the nail marks in my hand, but to pretend I’d been mistaken. Pretend that, in fact, all he’d wanted to do as he’d stood there in the moonlight calling my name, bursting with information, was tell me his plans for the summer. Our plans. To take a villa in Spain with som
e old friends, the Frowbishers—“too expensive but let’s do it anyway, darling, let’s take a break”—and later that year, we had. Yes, that had been it. But in my heart, I knew I’d ducked the moment.

  When love is withdrawn from a marriage, its absence is not felt immediately. After all, the fabric of the union is still there: the house, the mortgage, the child, the sofa that needs cleaning, that fact that you still owe the Hamiltons—but slowly, and I mean drip drip slowly, over time, you realise the jewel has gone, and you miss its sparkle. Everything goes just a little bit darker, like God fiddling with the dimmer switch. But you stumble on in the gloom, taking care not to trip over the evidence, until one day, quite unexpectedly, you’re sent sprawling by a crassly stuck-out leg—almost a cartoon leg—and in my case, with pink jeans on. Me, who’d nimbly sidestepped some much firmer evidence, who was adept at ignoring The Signs.

  In London, The Signs had tended to start at the weekend: Alex, sitting in the drawing room in Putney, the Sunday Times in his hands, not reading, just gazing ruefully over the top into space. When I’d inadvertently catch his eye, he’d give me a quick, overbright smile before returning hastily to the Business section. He’d drink quite a lot too, sitting up alone, late into the evening, creeping to bed when I’d gone to sleep.

  Then would come the spurious errands: the nipping to the shops for extra milk when we already had plenty, the trips to check the tyres at the garage, always with his mobile, and then—a less pensive, less reflective Alex: an Alex with a spring in his step, an excited light in his eyes, a man with a plan. Finally would come the late night at the office. Never a whole night—he was never that careless—but it would be midnight before he was back, and then, for a day or two afterwards, the excited light would dim to a more contented glow. He’d be very sweet to me, and to Rufus, and very good about the house. Washing up would be done, clothes would be tidied away, flowers would appear, and there’d be trips to the park too, which ordinarily had to be prised out of him: Alex pushing Rufus higher and higher on the swings, a fun daddy, a cool daddy, and then walking home together, Alex insisting we hold hands, the three of us, like a family in a soft-focus photograph. But always the three of us, never the two of us in a quiet restaurant for supper with a baby-sitter for Rufus—no, Rufus had to come too. And this, a man who was impatient with children; who sometimes treated his son like an irritating friend of mine who’d come to stay—why can’t he just go to bed? Why is he crying? Why won’t he eat his food? But on these occasions, Rufus was crucial. He was his shield.

  And of course, Rufus wasn’t going to question this mercurial good humour. He loved having a daddy who played football, a daddy who took us all to Starbucks on a Saturday morning, but always, I noticed, a daddy who watched his diet. Who, as Rufus and I tucked into hot chocolate and muffins, would sip his black espresso in clothes that a cynic might suggest were slightly too young for him. Never ridiculously so: the leather jacket was brown, not black; the jeans never too low slung or tight, but still…And the hair, always recently washed—possibly blown dry—swept back continually with his hand. Once, when he’d got a spot on his chin, I could see he’d covered it with my concealer. I didn’t mention it.

  But these carefree days wouldn’t last and soon he’d be back to the sad, wistful Alex, gazing over the top of the Sunday Times, snapping at Rufus if he suggested a card game or a bicycle ride, and then there’d be impromptu trips to the garage, and then the overexcited husband, then the late night—and so the cycle of our lives would go on. He was like a junkie who needed a fix, and the fix wasn’t me.

  It is to my eternal shame that I never investigated his mobile or went through his pockets. I’m not proud of that. There were no depths to which I would not sink to protect my family, to remain uninformed, to be innocent of all charges of knowingly living in a faithless marriage. I was ruthless in my denial. But now this. A well-aimed catty remark from a woman who was intent on protecting her own domestic interests, but in a much pluckier way than I was: a combative blonde who fought for her man—“Hands off!” with a flash of her red nails—whilst I shrank from the evidence: condoned it by my silence.

  I took a deep breath, the deepest I’d taken for some time—most of my breathing tending towards the shallow these days—and let it out shakily. Right. This was it, then. A final demarcation line. A line that I’d stumbled upon quite by accident, but a line there was surely no mistaking.

  Driving too fast, but actually quite skilfully, I swung the car left down a narrow lane and drove off towards the next village. After a while, Rufus broke off from playing Scissors Stone Paper in the back with Tanya, and glanced around at the unfamiliar scenery.

  “This isn’t the way home, is it, Mummy?”

  “No, but it’s the way to my home,” remarked Tanya, twisting round in surprise as I bumped down the track towards the trailer park. “Scissors!”

  “Oh, I wasn’t ready!”

  I drove slowly through the grid of caravans and mobile homes, venturing where the local police daren’t, and drew up outside the largest one, surrounded by pansies planted in piles of old tyres. There were net curtains at the windows, and by the open front door, Cindy the Alsatian dozed on a chain. An assortment of old baths, prams and bicycles were piled in a heap round the back, like an avant-garde climbing frame, and three or four children were using it as just that. A couple of old men sat smoking in ancient deck chairs, watching them, as Shelia hung rows and rows of grey school knickers out on a washing line.

  “Shelia?” I called out of the window. “Would you do me a favour?”

  She turned. “Oh, hello, luv.”

  “Would you have Rufus for me for an hour or so? There’s something I need to do.”

  She came towards me, round the side of the trailer, taking pegs out of her mouth and regarding me quizzically. My voice was rather shrill, perhaps.

  “Course, luv.” She bent and peered in at the window. “You all right?”

  “I’m fine,” I assured her brightly as the children clambered out, Rufus making gleefully for the hideously dangerous-looking climbing frame. “I haven’t fed them yet, I’m afraid. We’ve been at the vet’s.”

  “You’re all right. I was just about to feed this lot. They can have fish paste sandwiches with ’em. Sure you’re OK? You look a bit peaky.”

  “Fine.” I plastered on a smile. “Really fine. Thanks, Sheila.”

  She opened her mouth again, but whatever kindly concern she had for me was lost as, with a screech of tyres that had the lad next door polishing his Harley Davidson glancing up admiringly, I was off.

  I headed towards Little Harrington and the Latimers’ with a remarkably clear head, and for once, something approaching steel in my heart. Yes. Yes, I flaming well would. As I swept up the front drive, past the little lodge house—Pat’s house, otherwise known as Crumpet Cottage, I thought grimly—the steel didn’t waver. Nor did it waver as I got out of the car in the vast gravel drive and sprinted across to the looming manor house, nor when I mounted the steps to the heavy front door guarded by a matching pair of stone griffins. Oh yes, the front door was very definitely where I wanted to be right now, not cringing apologetically round the back at the tradesmen’s entrance, not creeping and crawling, and who cared if the dogs barked? I gave the door a mighty rap with its brass knocker, all nerve endings tingling, face set and determined, but no fear. Oh no, no fear, and no second thoughts, either.

  As the huge house resounded to the outraged howls of various Labradors and lurchers, footsteps came across the marble hall; soft but hurrying. Who on earth could it be, banging like that, they seemed to say. The door opened cautiously and Vera peered around, frowning. Her face cleared as she saw me, and she blinked in surprise.

  “Oh. Hello, pet.”

  “Is Eleanor in?” I blurted out, feeling, I realised, as Alex must have felt when he came home late that night in the taxi, brimming over with the need to unburden himself, to spill his load, only my load was all the more heavy for bein
g so overdue.

  “She’s not, I’m afraid, she’s—”

  “In London?” I cut in accusingly, not recognising my harsh tone.

  Vera looked taken aback. “No, not in London, although she has been up there, but no, she got back this afternoon. She’s gone out to see a girlfriend.”

  “Oh.” I was deflated for a moment. Damn.

  “Will she be long? Can I wait?”

  “Well, she’s out for the evening, like, but she’s going to be ever so cross because she’s forgotten her handbag.” She jerked her head across to a quilted Chanel bag, sitting on the hall table. “Must have gone out in a rush with just her car keys, but it’s got her purse an’ that in it, and her door keys, and Piers goes to bed early so I suppose Muggins here will have to wait up to let her in.”

  I looked at the bag on the table. “D’you know who the friend is? Where she lives?”

  “’Aven’t a clue, luv, but she’s renting in the village, I’m told. Not been ’ere long—friend from London, I think. Milly? Mandy? Something like that.”

  “Well, it’s not a big village. She shouldn’t be difficult to find.”

  She snorted derisively. “That’s as maybe, but if you think I’m crawling round looking for her with her ladyship’s handbag, you’ve got another think coming. I don’t know the number or nothing. Any road, I don’t suppose she’ll be that late. I’ll tell her you called, luv.” She went to shut the door.

  “I’ll take it,” I said, not quite jamming my foot in the door, but near as damn it. I reached deftly across to the table and my hand closed on the bag’s chain strap.

  “Oh, well, I don’t know…” she faltered, confused.

  “Honestly, it’s not a problem, Vera,” I said smoothly. “I’m going that way anyway. And I know Eleanor’s car. It’s bound to be parked outside.”

  “Well, I suppose…” she looked anxious. “But I’m not sure I like handing her bag over, just like that.”

  I laughed. “You’re only handing it to me, Vera. And don’t worry, if I don’t find her, I’ll pop it back, OK?” I flashed her a smile.