‘I suppose I am. Then again, I have reason to be.’
He looked up from the bread roll he was buttering. ‘I’ve already apologised for being late. I couldn’t help it. It’s my job. There’s no need to be so antsy.’
Just at that moment the waiter delivered the truffle roulade. On any other night Maggie would have devoured it. But not tonight. She wasn’t hungry. The anger that had been building inside her ever since she witnessed ‘the kiss’ was about to erupt.
‘Is snogging with Miss Twenty-Something part of the job?’
‘What did you say?’
‘You know, the girl in the pink T-shirt and black tights. What have you told her about your marriage, Josh? Did you say that Kylie tricked you into it and you’re miserable as a result? Did you tell your youthful paramour that she’s the great love of your life? And did you forget to mention that you’d recently used that line with someone else? Did you happen to tell her you were having dinner tonight with that very person? And what the hell were you doing in the hour between leaving the book signing and coming here?’
The colour drained from his cheeks.
‘Now, Mags, I don’t know what you think you saw, but it’s all about perceptions. Chloe’s a tactile kind of person. It would be easy to misinterpret her gestures.’
‘But I couldn’t misinterpret yours. They left no room for ambiguity.’
‘Don’t be like that, Mags. You knew it wasn’t exclusive, or forever.’
She had to admit he had a point. She had been indulging in a flirtation with a married man. Albeit one whom she thought was unhappily married. All the same, Maggie had gone into it with her eyes open, at least in regard to his wife. But she hadn’t ever imagined there was another woman. She’d thought that was her role. As for ‘forever’, he was right about that. Josh Houghton had never done forever, not in any of his relationships. She pushed aside the plate of uneaten roulade and placed her linen napkin on the table.
‘We can still be friends, can’t we?’ he asked.
Where was her handbag? She bent down and peered under the table. Then she spotted it wedged against the wall. She stood up in a manner she hoped was imperious.
‘I’m not sure how that would work,’ she said. ‘Friends are supposed to be honest with each other.’
‘Well, let’s keep in touch by email.’
When she glared at him, he added, ‘I don’t mean internet sex, Mags. Just platonic stuff.’
‘Do you know what I used to say about you, Josh? “Once a prince, always a prince.” But I was sooo wrong.’ She noticed people at the surrounding tables craning their heads to hear the conversation between the famous Dr Josh and his female companion.
As she turned to leave, Maggie added one final sentence, enunciating every word as if she were an actor: ‘It’s taken me more than thirty years to work out the truth about you, Josh Houghton, and the truth is you’re an A-grade tosser.’
For a few seconds a stunned silence overtook the busy restaurant. Then slowly conversations resumed. Maggie knew who they’d be discussing, but she didn’t care what people thought. It was something she should have said a long time ago. She strode out of the restaurant and walked purposefully towards the lifts.
When she reached the hotel basement, Maggie abandoned the composed façade and collapsed into the driver’s seat of her car. She glanced at her watch. Although it wasn’t even midnight, she’d already turned back into a mouse. Surprisingly there were no tears, but something far worse was enveloping her. A sense of utter desperation. The dark prospect of a life without Josh Houghton. Ever since she was eighteen, he’d been her Destiny. There had been ups and downs, of course – long separations, then magical reunions – but she had always assumed that eventually it would dawn on him that Maggie Taylor was the one he’d loved all along and the others were simply stand-ins. It was the stuff of almost every romantic movie she’d ever seen.
But the forever-after wasn’t going to happen. Not now. Not ever. This evening had been an epiphany, though not of the positive kind. It was the death of her dream. A dream which had persisted for decades in the face of overwhelming evidence that it was a delusion. Why did a supposedly intelligent woman keep making the same mistake with the same man? This time she had even consciously sought him out. If she’d seen a character like herself in a movie she would have asked, ‘What’s wrong with that woman? Nobody could be that stupid. Can’t she see he doesn’t love her?’
Now her place in his life had been clarified once and for all – she was the second-stringer, the one he sought for temporary solace when his fiancée was overseas or his marriage had ended or he needed an extramarital diversion. Worse still, she wasn’t the exclusive fill-in. There had probably been a series of ‘Maggies’ throughout Josh Houghton’s life.
As she started the ignition, she felt woozy. Was it the champagne? She’d drunk a glass and a bit. Would that put her over the limit? It didn’t help that she hadn’t eaten since lunchtime. Not even one mouthful of the roulade.
Somehow she was able to drive home – stopping at red lights, putting on the indicator for a turn, even obeying the speed limit. The human brain was amazing in its ability to operate automatically. Good old cerebellum keeping things together when the frontal cortex was going haywire.
Once she was home, she poured herself a straight vodka. She swallowed a third of a glass in one go but didn’t feel any better. So she drank the rest. Then she lay on the sofa, surveying her adult life. If it was a film, it would be called Waiting for Josh Houghton. But, apart from the three separate attempts to make him love her, the rest had been so dull nobody would want to watch it. Female protagonist: Maggie Taylor, a middle-aged spinster schoolteacher whose social life consists of a fortnightly gathering to discuss novels, together with a weekly trivia night. She teaches an extinct language and knows a lot about movie romances, yet nothing about real relationships – not the ones that endure anyway. Any producer worth his salt would have consigned that scenario to the garbage bin. Maggie poured herself another glass of vodka.
Apart from her parents and her dog, nobody had loved her, not in an all-consuming, unconditional kind of way. It was all very well for her colleagues and students to like and respect her, but if she died unexpectedly, they’d be sad for a week or two and then forget her. Soon it would be as if she had never existed. They would remove her name from the staff list on the school website. The only place she would continue to linger would be in the old newsletters, a ghostly presence lurking in archival photographs: Ms Taylor with her netball team or Ms Taylor and her Latin class at the Nicholson Museum.
After she finished the vodka, Maggie went to the bathroom cabinet where she kept aspirin and assorted medicines. Right at the back was a packet of sleeping pills, prescribed by the GP after her father’s death. She had only ever taken one, on the night before his funeral. Not being used to drugs of any kind, it had literally knocked her out, so much so that she was almost late for the funeral the next morning and spent the entire day in a groggy daze. She checked the use-by date. It had expired a month earlier. The label said ‘Take half to one tablet nightly, as directed.’ She knew alcohol and sleeping pills could be a lethal combination. But how many? She swallowed a handful with a glass of water, resumed her place on the sofa and waited for it to be over.
She was starting to feel drowsy. Was this how it ended? Drifting off into an eternal sleep. But the process wasn’t serene at all. The room was spinning around her. And even when she closed her eyes tightly, the movement continued behind her shut eyelids.
It was too late now to write a note. Her head was fuzzy, her hand limp. Anyway, what could she say? If she wrote about being cheated on by the man she adored, she would seem like a pathetic idiot. And whether she left a note or not, there would still be a post-mortem. It didn’t matter that the pill packet was sitting on the coffee table next to a half-empty vodka bottle; they would do it anyway because the law required it. Maggie shuddered. Post-mortems. They would cut her up and sew her b
ack together. How horrible. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all. Worse still, she hadn’t left instructions for the funeral. What if they played ‘My Way’? She hated that song. And who would deliver the eulogy? Oh no! It would be Edward Clarke. And then there was her darling, Rufus. The most important entity in her life. She couldn’t leave him behind, even though he would probably be well looked after by the numerous families who adored him. She tried to stand up, but her limbs felt like lead. Then she heard her mobile beep. Surely not a message from that bastard, Josh Houghton? She picked up the phone and tried to read the words, but they resembled hieroglyphics. Her glasses were on the coffee table. She stretched across and grabbed them with a numb hand. The blurry symbols on her phone formed into letters.
Maggie, I need you. Can you tell me if Telly Savalas shaved his head or was he bald? Kevin
Was she hallucinating? Or was she already dead? In the real world nobody ever sent a text like that. Then she started to laugh. Not a normal laugh, more like the cackle of a maniac. Quickly it turned into hysterical sobbing. When her chest ached so much she couldn’t cry anymore, she vomited all over the polished blackbutt floor. Among the detritus she imagined there would be the sodden white remnants of the sleeping pills.
Afterwards, Maggie went to the kitchen, poured herself a glass of water and returned to the sofa. Being sober enough to realise she could soon become dangerously dehydrated, she managed to drink the entire glass. Then she must have fallen asleep. When she woke it was daylight. Her head felt awful – the worst hangover of her life. The clock above the mantel indicated it was nine o’clock. She had slept the entire night. Suddenly she remembered school. It was already first period. She texted Carole:
Stomach flu. Sorry. Won’t be in today. Maggie.
The deputy would definitely be pissed off with her for leaving it so late to tell him. On the other hand, she hadn’t taken a sick day in two years.
Using the arm of the sofa as a support, she stood up. Apart from a blinding headache and a dry throat, she didn’t feel too bad. Hesitantly she padded to the kitchen and drank a glass of water. Then she cleaned up the floor as best she could with damp paper towels and discarded the detritus in the bin. After that, she turned on the television and watched a series of lengthy advertisements for wrinkle creams, steam mops and stomach flatteners. At lunchtime she ate a bowl of cereal. In the afternoon she watched a string of American soap operas, not sure where one ended and the other began. All the women seemed to have swollen lips and long manes of hair, while the men were unnaturally good-looking and answered to earthy names like Clay and Tor. At some point she fell into a deep sleep. She was dreaming about a truffle roulade when the ringing of her phone jolted her awake. The room was in darkness, except for flickering images from the television. She reached for her phone, put on her glasses and checked the caller ID. Thank goodness, it wasn’t Josh.
‘Hi, Kevin.’
‘Hi, Maggie. How are you? Carole said you had a stomach bug.’
Suddenly it struck her. It was trivia night.
‘I’m on the mend now, thanks. I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you about Telly Savalas.’
‘It’s just that I was doing some late-night study,’ he said in his monotone, ‘and the toupée question from week five got me wondering whether there might be another hair question coming up.’
‘I’ll do some research and let you know.’ It was the least she could do, considering his silly text had probably saved her life.
‘No hurry.’
‘Has the trivia started yet?’ she asked.
‘It’s interval, Maggie.’
‘Oh. Is it that late?’
‘It’s nine-fifteen and I’m out here on my own.’
Something about his remark made her feel guilty, as though she’d abandoned him to the fates.
‘You should get back inside. They’ll be starting again any minute. How are things going, anyway?’
‘Literature isn’t really our strong suit, but we’re doing okay.’
‘I forgot all about Literature Night. How did you go in the best-dressed contest?’
‘The Usual Suspects won it. They came as the beasts from Where the Wild Things Are.’
‘And what about you? Did you wear your tuxedo?’
‘Yes, and I slicked my hair back like you said.’
‘I wish I’d been there. I feel as though I’ve let you down. Gatsby without Daisy.’
‘You couldn’t help being sick.’
‘No, I suppose not. Anyway, I’ll be back next week, I promise.’
‘Good. It’s not the same without you.’
Suddenly there were tears in her eyes.
Trivia Night
Kevin
Kevin checked his watch. Maggie was right; he’d better hurry. He climbed the fire stairs two at a time and strode down the corridor, passing one of the Amazons, who was just emerging from the powder room. Her crinoline dress indicated that she was a character from a Victorian novel, though he had no idea which particular one.
‘Hey, aren’t you the One-Man Band?’ she asked.
He turned towards her. ‘Not anymore.’
‘You look really cool in that tuxedo. Which character are you, anyway?’
‘Jay Gatsby.’
‘I’m Jane Eyre.’
As she batted her eyelashes at him, Kevin gulped.
‘There’s something different about you,’ she said.
‘I’m not wearing my glasses.’ He couldn’t imagine Gatsby in heavy-rimmed spectacles so he’d worn his contacts instead.
‘You look much better without them.’ Then she moved so close to him that the smell of her perfume filled his lungs. ‘Do you know what one of our team calls you?’
Kevin steeled himself in anticipation of a pejorative title such as ‘geek’ or ‘egghead’ or the term that always made him wince, ‘idiot savant’.
‘She calls you Mr Memory. It suits you.’
‘Mr Memory?’ Kevin responded. ‘From Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 film of The 39 Steps?’
‘I thought she’d invented the name.’
‘No, Hitchcock did – or his screenwriter. The character didn’t appear in Buchan’s original novel.’
The Amazon was staring at him as if he was a circus act. Turning in the direction of the auditorium, he said, ‘We’d better get back to our teams.’ He indicated that she should go first, but the Amazon remained exactly where she was.
‘Do you want to have a drink with me at the end of the night?’ she asked.
The invitation was so unexpected he had to rethink it to make sure he’d heard it correctly. Taking a step backwards, he replied, ‘Sorry, I can’t.’
‘Just one drink?’
For a moment he hesitated. Then a sentence formed in his head. But would it work? Being a novice at lying, he had no idea.
‘I’m already spoken for,’ he replied in a strangled voice.
‘Is it that woman you always sit with?’
‘Maggie? Yes. It’s Maggie.’ His second lie. Why not? The first had been successful. All the same, the effort required in the creation and execution of two successive lies had left him feeling as though he’d just lifted a bag of cement.
‘She’s not here tonight though, is she?’ said the Amazon, leaning closer.
‘No, she’s sick.’ At least that was true.
‘Too bad. Maybe you can come for a drink after all.’
Kevin squirmed. ‘Sorry, I really can’t.’
The Amazon stared into his face while he studiously avoided making eye contact with her. Finally she said, ‘Well, I’ll see you round,’ and headed back to the auditorium, leaving a cloud of floral perfume in her wake.
Sweat was beading on his brow. Phew! That was a close call.
WEEK
NINE
Maggie
On Wednesday morning Maggie was back at school, still dogged by a nasty headache and a queasy stomach. The first thing she did was to disappear into the ladies’ roo
m, where she took an aspirin and washed it down with water.
‘How’s the stomach?’ asked Carole, as she entered the room and deposited her handbag in a locker.
‘Better thanks. It was just one of those twenty-four hour things. How did trivia go?’
‘Not so good. We slipped back a place. We really needed you last night, Maggie.’
‘That’s what Kevin said.’
‘Kevin?’
‘He phoned me during interval.’
‘Did he tell you about the question that every single team got wrong? We all put the same wrong answer. What are the chances of that happening?
‘Depends on the question. What was it anyway?
‘Who coined the term “brave new world”?’
‘I bet everyone said Aldous Huxley.’
‘How did you know?’
‘It’s the obvious answer.’
‘Well, apparently the correct answer is Shakespeare.’
‘That’s right. It’s from The Tempest. “How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in’t!”’
‘Kevin said you would have known that one.’
‘I bet he made a great Gatsby.’
‘Actually, he did. He’s quite good-looking when he gets dressed up.’
‘I was intending to come as Daisy Buchanan. Though I’m a little plump for Daisy, I’m afraid.’
‘No, you’re not,’ Carole said unconvincingly.
‘How’s Edward? Has anything happened on the job front?’
‘Not exactly. But he has a new project underway – only it’s top secret.’
‘Is it health-related?’
‘Kind of. If I tell you, you won’t let on to anyone else, will you?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Well, he’s writing a novel.’
‘A novel!’ Maggie tried not to laugh. ‘Edward doesn’t know anything about literature.’
‘That’s what I said when he told me. But he maintains that he’s going to learn on the job. And he’s already finished the first chapter.’
The Trivia Man Page 14