by Minna Howard
The girl took the dress and the man paid for it, as she knew he would. Sarah packed it up in tissue paper, all the while making polite noises about how pretty it was.
The man took out his credit card, platinum no less, and pushed it into the machine. After he’d entered his PIN, she retrieved the card, reading off his name as she did so. Christian Harrington.
Wordlessly she handed him back his receipt and his card, and gave the dress in its glossy bag to the girl. Just another middle-aged fool, she thought to herself, and did not watch them leave.
Three
‘Super-sexy stud seeks lively companion,’ Linda read, as she peered at the screen on her laptop, laughing. ‘What a choice. How about this one? Handsome, articulate, young forty something, loves music, the theatre, good food and having fun. Seeks slim, stylish, sensuously attractive lady to share enjoyment of life.’
‘If they are all so attractive and fun-loving, why are they alone?’ Sarah remarked, but she laughed, too.
‘All these men want slim women. No wonder they are alone, if they are so fussy and I bet most of them are no oil-painting themselves; at least, not one you’d want to hang on your wall.’ Having a passion for chocolate and cake Linda had given up on the battle to stay slim.
‘I’d much rather enjoy the pleasures of life than be a thin, crotchety old stick, impaling men on my hip-bones’ was one of Linda’s favourite remarks, though the only man she had to impale was her husband, Gerry.
Sarah had spent the evening here with Linda. Gerry wasn’t there, which was unusual. He’d been packed off suddenly to some hot spot by his company, in place of someone who’d fallen ill.
Sarah liked Gerry. He was large and amiable, comforting, like an old teddy bear. The four of them had often done things together before Dan had left. Going to films, trying new restaurants, even going on holiday together. She took another gulp of wine. Really she’d drunk too much this evening. She’d regret it tomorrow.
Negative thoughts began to push themselves into her fuddled mind. She must not allow herself to think that Linda had only asked her to supper tonight because Gerry was not here.
Linda had been very kind these last few torturous weeks, asking her to lunch or coffee at the weekend though each time Gerry was out somewhere – playing tennis or golf or like this evening when he was away. She hardly ever went out in the evening just occasionally to a film with a girlfriend and it was then she would have liked to have gone out. The days were almost bearable, the desperate ache of her loss containable. She worked in the shop and had designs to work on at home. But the evenings were long, and she hated being alone night after night in that huge double bed. Weekends were torture when she saw other couples her age pottering around contentedly together, just as she and Dan used to do. Now, she felt like a pariah. Linda didn’t trust her near Gerry. Did her other girlfriends feel the same?
How could she tell them that she didn’t want their husbands? If she had, she would have grabbed them when they were younger, more attractive.
Linda turned back to her laptop. ‘Encounters Dating. These people must be all right – it’s run by The Times. They sound far more exciting than Dan. Gerry, too, for that matter.’
‘What if one of them was Gerry or Dan?’ Sarah attempted a laugh. ‘Imagine turning up for a hot date and seeing one of them sitting there.’
‘Oh, Gerry wouldn’t do anything like that.’ Linda’s smile was awkward. ‘He’s not the slightest bit interested in...’ she paused, flushed, ‘well, you know... bed. Anyway, there’s more to life than sex, isn’t there, and it’s a little undignified at our age, don’t you think? After all, we know we love each other and we have lots of cuddles.’
Linda would never have confided such a thing if she hadn’t drunk too much. Sarah didn’t think sex was at all undignified; well, not between people around the same age, anyway. Dan had a dodgy back, which had sometimes interrupted their lovemaking by going into spasm. How was it holding up with this new, younger woman? She had a sudden image of him, contorted like one of those ancient figures after the volcano at Pompeii, stiff and immovable, encased in lava. To her amazement, it made her giggle.
Linda misinterpreted this and shot her a pained look. ‘We had a very active sex life until last year. Then it became rather boring, and neither of us can be bothered with it now. I bet yours and Dan’s was the same.’
Sarah was not going to discuss their sex life with Linda, it was too personal and it would probably be all round the Crescent by lunch-time. It had been very exciting at the beginning, but these last years it had become comfy, not especially ambitious. Was he up to all sorts now? Would his spasmodic back stand up to it?
‘It depends,’ she said, in answer to Linda’s question on sex being undignified, ‘but I do agree there is more to love than sex.’
‘Of course there is, though you’d never think so nowadays. All these young girls popping into bed with anyone they fancy, then bleating about commitment, or crying rape if they change their mind. They all say they are having such fun with their drink and sex binges, but I think they are a cry for help not a cry of joy.’ Linda poured herself out some more wine.
Sarah wondered if Polly popped into bed with anyone she fancied. Sarah had been engaged to Dan at her age, so it hadn’t been an issue, though of course morals were different then.
‘I think it’s threatening people’s relationships. I mean, take Dan.’ Linda sat back self-righteously, as if she were an expert on such matters. ‘Middle-aged men can be so influenced by such things. No doubt he felt he was missing out on some tacky other life, quite forgetting that there were so many more important things that he’d worked so hard for and succeeded at. Now he’s thrown them all away, looking rather ridiculous while he does so. I mean, why do men put so much importance on what they can do with a few inches of gristle?’ She laughed sourly. ‘Surely their brains are more important?’
Sarah got up. It was time to go home.
When she opened her front door, the light was on and music was playing. Polly rushed into the hall to greet her. ‘There you are, Mum! Where were you? I’ve been so worried. I’ve been trying to call you but it kept going to voicemail.’
‘Pol.’ She kissed her, her heart contracting with fright. ‘Are you all right? Why are you home today?’
Polly frowned, her pretty mouth sulky. ‘Why should anything be wrong? I said I’d be here for the weekend.’
‘Of course you did, darling, and it’s wonderful to see you. I thought you’d be coming tomorrow. Sorry to have missed your calls,’ she added. ‘I switched my mobile off.’ She hugged her again, relishing her warm body in her arms. How she’d missed this close contact with a living person. ‘I wasn’t expecting you till Friday. I’d have stayed in if I’d known you were coming. When did you arrive?’
‘About an hour ago. Where have you been?’ Polly demanded again.
Sarah refrained from saying: Now you know what it’s like, worrying about someone being late home. ‘I had supper with Linda, that’s all.’ Reading the unspoken question in Polly’s eyes, Sarah knew she had been worried that she’d been out with a man. Funny, that; both she and Tim had urged her to find someone else, as if it was only a matter of going to some shop and picking out the right size, colour and shape, as you might a garment, but in reality they did not like the idea that she might find someone new. ‘Sorry, love, no hot date. Just Linda. Not even Gerry was there.’
‘You were there ages, it’s nearly midnight.’
Sarah put her arm round her. ‘So? What’s so special about midnight? Will my clothes turn to rags, my coach to a pumpkin?’
Polly laughed. ‘Oh Mum, it’s good to see you laugh. I’m sorry. I just came home a day early to surprise you, and you weren’t here, and then I was worried when you didn’t answer your mobile.’
‘I’m thrilled to see you. Have you eaten?’
‘I found some dusty cereal at the bottom of the box. There’s nothing much in the fridge,’ Polly said repr
oachfully.
At once Sarah felt guilty. She should have been here, kept the fridge filled with pasta, cheese and eggs, as she had in the old days. Steady on, she scolded herself, don’t go down that road again. You are being independent now. Polly doesn’t look as if she’s starving, and no doubt she manages to eat well enough when she is not at home.
She sensed that Polly had come home to find reassurance. Finding the house empty and hardly any food in the fridge had unnerved her. She hugged her. They all needed propping up now.
Polly sat on her bed and told her about Joe, the new man in her life. Occasionally she saw Polly glance at the space in the bed which Dan used to occupy. Sarah had moved herself into the middle of the bed now, piling up the pillows to make herself a sort of nest. Though neither remarked upon it, she knew that they both felt hurt and betrayed at his absence.
*
The following Saturday, Sarah took the bus up to Bond Street to buy a present for her godson’s eighteenth birthday. She wandered up the street, browsing at the lavish windows as she went. Everything seemed very expensive. She’d end up going to the jeweller in Walton Street; they always had things she liked, but it was fun looking here first.
The throb of a car engine distracted her. A red sports car juddered to a halt. She was overwhelmed by a dizzy sickness. It was the same make of car that Dan had bought; she couldn’t remember the registration number. It resembled a monstrous frog, squatting there at the kerb. The driver’s door opened and a man got out. It took her a moment to realise that it was Dan. He got out slowly, his back bent over, his bottom out, as if he was about to sit down again. Slowly, he straightened up. To her surprise, she felt a pang of sympathy for him. Had he really looked as old as this before?
He went round and opened the passenger door, and a young woman sprang out. So, this was Nina. The jealous pain almost stopped her breathing. Nina was dressed in black and had red hair – not bright red, more a sort of glaring copper probably from a bottle. Her face was long, rather pale; she was certainly not a beauty.
Dan looked up and saw her. Sarah stood rooted like a tree on the pavement. He looked surprised, a little guilty; he gave her a hesitant smile.
‘Sarah – how are you?’
Nina stared at her, glanced enquiringly at Dan before scrutinising her again. The familiar look that Nina threw Dan unleashed the anger lurking inside her. This man had been her husband, the father of her children, and he had given it all up for this nondescript woman.
‘How do you think?’ she retorted, coming closer to them.
Dan’s mouth twitched with a nervous smile; his hand fluttered feebly in her direction, as if he wanted to placate her.
She went on, ‘I needn’t ask how you are, Dan. You look terrible, so ill.’ Fear flashed in his eyes and she felt a pang of guilty triumph. Dan was a hypochondriac – you only had to remark that he looked unwell and he would be round at the doctor’s surgery in no time.
‘He’s very well,’ Nina retorted, glaring at her.
‘Well, he doesn’t look it. Perhaps I should have gift-wrapped him for you, all glitzy paper and sparkly ribbon,’ Sarah said spitefully.
‘What a bitchy remark, Sarah. Not like you at all,’ Dan said, looking at her reproachfully.
‘Who’s the bitch?’ Sarah retorted.
‘You’re very unkind,’ Nina bleated.
The anger at his destruction of their lives was as hard as a shield inside Sarah.
‘Really?’ she said. ‘And I suppose he has told you what a terrible wife I was to him? How I didn’t understand him, made his life so miserable he had to escape to you?’ As she said this, she saw from Dan’s shameful expression that she had hit the mark. This betrayal hurt her more than anything that had gone before.
‘Sarah, this isn’t solving anything,’ he said desperately.
She felt as if she were on a stage and must perform. People hurried by, but she thought that some lingered, sensing an exhibition. ‘That,’ she said, loudly and clearly, ‘is a sign of your guilty conscience. By telling lies about me, you feel you can excuse your selfish, ridiculous behaviour. You know we had a good marriage, but you threw it away for the trappings of adolescence and you are making a fool of yourself.’
‘Give it to him, girl!’ a man passing them quipped.
Sarah came to her senses then. Dan had his arm round Nina. He looked white and anxious. Nina’s face was hard, pointed like a little mouse. What, honestly, did he see in her? She supposed it was bed, but she didn’t even look sexy. ‘You know what they say about old fools, Dan.’ Her voice was quieter now. It held a note of regret. She left them, walking quickly away back to Piccadilly, down to Hyde Park Comer, down half of Knightsbridge, until she reached her jeweller in Walton Street. She saw nothing as she walked, but she felt that if she stopped she would fall apart. Had she really said those things? She meant every one of them, though the deep pain of his loss still seared through her.
What were they doing in Bond Street? Visiting jewellers, too? Was he going to marry her, or buy her some bauble to cement their love? She must not think about it; she must seal her mind from such thoughts. She wondered what their friends thought of Dan and Nina. Did they ask them round together? But what an insignificant little mouse she seemed. Was that why he had gone with her? So he could rule over her, get her to do what he wanted? Did that make him feel good? Had Sarah made him feel bad?
She strode down the street alongside Harrods. Was that it? Had she become too bossy?
She reached her jeweller’s. The man on the door opened it for her and welcomed her in. This courtesy pricked the old tear-ducts, but she controlled herself enough to ask to see some cuff-links.
She’d never seen her godson wear anything smart; no doubt Nick would really like an inexhaustible supply of beer and cigarettes. But perhaps one day he’d grow up and get a job that occasionally warranted wearing a pair of nice cuff-links. Sarah chose a simple silver knot design, with the understanding that Nick could change them if he wanted to. But knowing Jenny, his mother, she would put them away until he became respectable.
She left the jeweller’s with her package neatly wrapped. Once, the shop used to have glossy bags to carry things home in, but now they advised her to put her purchase in her handbag so as not to draw attention to it.
‘A sad reflection of the times, madam,’ the doorman remarked to her as she left.
‘It is,’ she agreed, but in the mood she was in she’d be a match for any mugger. The anger at Dan, Nina the mouse and that frog-like car – the description sounded like the title for a children’s book – still squirmed and bubbled inside her. She marched down the street and turned sharply in the curve of the road leading to Fulham Road, and walked smack into somebody. He trod on her toe painfully.
‘Watch where you’re going!’ she barked at the jerseyed chest of the man she’d collided with. He put out his hands to steady her, to steady himself.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, holding her a little away from him.
She looked up into his face, frowning with annoyance and pain. He had swept-back grey hair, light brown eyes that looked at her in concern. She’d seen him before, and she saw the flash of recognition in his expression.
‘I’m really sorry. I do hope I didn’t hurt you,’ he said, one hand still under her elbow.
Her big toe throbbed like mad. She longed to pull off her boot and rub it, but the boots were too long and the whole action would be too complicated, too undignified, to perform in the middle of the street.
This was the man who had brought that silly little girl into the shop. She had lumped him in with Dan, as a pathetic ageing man, destroying all that was good in his life for a selfish whim.
She glowered at him. ‘Yes, you did.’ She forgot this man and thought of Dan. ‘You hurt me dreadfully, now let me go,’ she tore her arm from his grip, ‘and watch your step in future.’
He started as if she had slapped him across the face. ‘I’m so sorry, where did I hurt you
? Shall we sit down somewhere? Have a drink?’
She did not want him to be nice to her, this man who preferred little girls to grown-up women.
‘No, thank you.’ She took a step away from him, but the movement hurt her toe and she winced.
‘Can I call you a taxi to take you to hospital, or home?’
‘No, you cannot. Just leave me be.’ She bit her lip against the pain and pushed past him.
She hobbled up the road as fast she could. To her relief, a number 14 bus arrived at the stop and she got on it. Whatever was wrong with today’s middle-aged men? In her mother’s day, it used to be middle-aged women who were so miserable with their empty nests and their ‘nerves’. She didn’t know a single woman like that today. It was the men who seemed to have gone completely to pieces.
Four
The charity lunch party, held in aid of breast cancer, was in full voice. Sarah knew quite a few of the women there. It was a stand-up do, and people were shovelling food into their mouths, balancing a glass and trying to talk at the same time.
‘I’m so sorry about you and Dan,’ Gail, one of her neighbours, blurted in her ear, as if she felt she had to get it out. ‘It gave me such a shock; after all, you seemed so… solid.’
Sarah, who had been quite enjoying the lunch, now felt as though a damp blanket had been thrown over her. She hated the gleam of prurient curiosity that appeared in some people’s eyes, as if they longed to know the dirt so they could smear it round in some superior way.
Seeing Dan and the mouse-woman, as she now thought of her, in the street had knocked her hard. It was bad enough knowing her name, but seeing her in the flesh was the final stab. If Dan had dumped her for some luscious, beautiful young woman, she’d be some way to understanding him, but had he disliked her so much he had to leave her for that nondescript little mouse. She was not too ashamed at her outburst, though it was rather out of character – but it was shaming to have shouted at that unfortunate man she’d bumped into in the street. It would be very embarrassing if he ever came into the shop again with his ‘pet’.