“You’re the boss,” he said, pulling out.
We roved around, getting lost in an industrial estate, negotiating the same one-way system several times, rejecting this theme bar and that steak restaurant, until we came to a pub, The Three Bells, on a nondescript roundabout. “What about here?” he said. “It looks okay, doesn’t it?”
It had filthy net curtains on the windows and a garish banner advertising some television event “Live.” It wasn’t quite what I’d imagined, some little local bistro with a menu on a blackboard and carafes of rough red wine. “Absolutely,” I said. “A drink’s a drink.”
We got out and went in. Pete opened the door for me, with a semi-bow and then, shrugging his arm over my shoulder, steered me to a table. We had our choice. It was almost empty. There were a couple of teenagers playing pool and an old man in a sheepskin coat at the bar. A big screen television was showing MTV on one wall. It was still sunny outside, but it was dark in here as if it was underground. I sat down in the corner, next to a line of fruit machines flashing like Las Vegas.
Pete went to the bar and came back holding a gin and tonic in one hand and a beer mug full of Coke in the other. “Driving,” he said, chucking two packets of cheese and onion chips from his pocket onto the table.
“That’s a shame,” I said. “You should have taken the Tube too.”
“Maybe,” he said, screwing up his eyes, then added, “Naaa,” as if it would have been too complicated.
He opened one of the packets and started munching. He offered the packet to me. I shook my head and he delved his fingers back in again. Like a Big Mac, cheese and onion chips are delicious in your own mouth, revolting in someone else’s. I tried to ignore them. He said, sympathetically, “So, your weekend? Bloody nightmare was it?” I started telling him all about it, describing Ed and Pea and the others. He was smiling as if interested, but he was also tapping the table in time to the music. Britney Spears was miming to the song on the screen above the bar, her tiny headset mike buzzing in front of her mouth like a large insect. And the only comment he made was “She sounds a corker; bit of a goer is she?” when I told him about Louisa.
“So how was your weekend?” I said. “How was your week?”
He said, “Fine, fine.”
There was a pause. Pete continued to tap his hands on the table. I said, “There’s a chill in the air isn’t there? We had a picnic today, Fergus and Dan and me, I mean, on the common, and . . . um, there was really quite a breeze.” Pete shook his head, back and forth, rhythmically. There was a smile on his face but I don’t think he was listening. “And what else? We bumped into Lucinda, running in her new au pair. She told me, while the girl was poop-scooping after one of the dogs, that she’d looked ‘high and low’ and this girl was ‘the best she could find.’ ”
I expected him to laugh, but he said soberly, “She does seem to have her hands quite full with all those children.” And then he stopped drumming and opened his mouth wide to get a particularly large chip in.
We didn’t stay there very much longer. I finished my drink and would have had another, but Pete said if he had any more Coke, he’d be “pissing all night.” Then I said we should go for dinner but he gestured to the empty chip packets and said he wasn’t that hungry so we idled back out to the parking lot and stood by the van wondering what to do. What did you do on proper dates? It had been such a long time. What did Jake and I used to do? I think we just used to talk. In fact, I think we’d sat in some pretty dingy pubs, but somehow . . . Well, that was then. This was Pete. Pete was different. This was a different kind of relationship. I’d had talk. This was something new.
Pete looked at his watch. He said some mates were meeting in Fiction at 10:00 p.m. and if I . . . I said, feeling scared and shy and old, I didn’t think so really, did he? And he said, “Yeah, you’re right. So er, what else then?” He didn’t want to drink. He didn’t want to eat.
I said, “There’s always late night shopping at Safeway’s.” But he didn’t laugh.
He said, “No, I’ve done my groceries this week. Look . . . I think I might head off back to the flat. I’m pretty knacked and . . . but if you want to come, I’d be . . .”
It wasn’t the most fulsome of invitations so I was going to say no, but Pete nipped away for a moment, to the other corner of the parking lot, to help a couple push-start their car, and when he came back, cheerful, shouting “all right, mate” over his shoulder, and slightly breathless, I heard myself say, yes, I would. It was the first time I’d been to his flat. When we got there, Pete took the steps down to the basement two at a time and went straight in ahead of me, leaving the door open behind him. The hallway smelled damp and dark, musty like a cupboard that’s been closed too long. There were pizza flyers on the floor, cab cards, some ruffled up plastic bag, and, on the wall, one of those buttons that switches on a timer light. The timer light went out.
“I’m in the kitchen,” he called from a small galley off the sitting room. He was scooping instant coffee into “My Mate Went to the Tower of London and All He Brought Back . . .” mugs. He chucked the spoon into the pile of dishes in the sink.
“You’re supposed to go, ‘brrrrnnggngng,’” I said. Blank look.
“Like in the ad?” Incomprehension.
“It doesn’t matter.”
He said, as if something had just occurred to him. “Are you hungry?” He opened the fridge and, with a “ha-ha,” brought out a boxed pizza. “What do you say?” he said, already ripping off the cardboard wrapper and trying to squash it into the microwave.
I said, “I say, I thought you didn’t want anything to eat?”
He said, “Didn’t I? Well, I guess I’ve got an appetite now.” I took the pizza from him and cut it into quarters so that it would fit and stood back while he switched it on. He told me to go and sit down, to make myself at home, so I went into the sitting room. It looked like an unmade bed. There were papers on the chairs and cushions on the floor, mugs and dirty plates on the table, and towels draped over an exercise bike in the corner. I cleared a copy of Loot off the sofa and sat down. There was something hard and knobbly under my bottom. I put my hand down and came up with some dumbbells, which I laid carefully on my knee, and stared at.
There was a ping and Pete came in, nudged the dumbbells onto the floor with his knee, and handed me a plate. “Tucker,” he said. “Wrap your nostrils around that.”
I took one chewy mouthful and said, “Actually. It’s a funny thing. But do you know, I find I’m really not that hungry.”
Pete, one eye on the TV Guide, said he’d have mine. Then he said, “Oh great: it’s Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?” and put the television on with his spare hand. It was a very big television. I wasn’t used to seeing Chris Tarrant so big. He was coaxing a flight attendant from Bicester up to £4,000. “In the famous quotation from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, music is the food of what? Time, appetite, love, or ears?”
“Time,” said Pete.
“Love,” I said
“Nah,” he said, wrinkling his nose. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” I said. “Everyone knows that.” Then I caught his expression and added, “Well anyway. You know what they say: they’re only easy if you know them.”
“Yeah, all right, clever clogs,” he said.
A little bit later, I said, “So Pete, what are your plans?”
Pete still had a mouthful of pizza. I waited, listening to the sound of his chews, until he swallowed. “What plans?” he said, finally.
“Don’t you want to travel? Isn’t that what all Australians do?”
“Yeah,” he shrugged. He started another mouthful.
“And where would you go if you did?”
This time he didn’t bother swallowing. “Thailand?” he said through his pepperoni.
“Anywhere else?”
“Phuket? I don’t know. Can I phone a friend? Ha. Ha.”
“No, I’m being serious,” I said. “I’m just trying to find
out more about you. I don’t even know if you plan to settle in England or whether you’re about to go back to Australia. Are you?”
He put his plate down, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and licked the remains of tomato off his fingers. He seemed to be giving it a lot of thought. “Dunno,” he said finally.
I said, “But do you think you’ll go back some time?”
“Maybe,” he said.
“Soon?”
“Crickey,” he said. “You and your questions. I dunno. Come on. Go 50/50.” He wasn’t talking to me now, he was talking to a sports instructor from Weymouth. I grabbed the remote control from under his plate. Chris Tarrant and the sports instructor disappeared with a hiss.
“We never talked,” I said.
He didn’t notice the change of tense. “Okay. Okay. Sorry. Sorry.” He shifted slightly and put his arm around me. “So,” he began, “let’s talk . . .” Then I realized one of his shoulders was easing me down onto the sofa, that a hand was climbing up my newly waxed leg.
“That’s not . . .” I said, beginning to protest. His hands were inside my new taupe heels, slipping them off. “What I meant,” I said.
Chapter 22
Of course, I did sleep with him in the end. It would have seemed churlish not to. Not after all the fuss I’d made about having a date in the first place. But it was over. I knew that now. I’d probably, in the back of my mind, known it for some time, but it was the dumbbells that finally did it for me. The cheese and onion chips and the dumbbells. Our relationship had been all about sex, not because there wasn’t time for it to be about anything else, but because that was all it was. There was nothing else to it, nowhere else for it to go. And even the sexual attraction was based on a false premise. I’d thought he was so natural, so physically in tune with the elements, with the plants he tended, but it turned out even his muscles were artificially boosted.
I cried a little bit in the taxi on the way home, but the tears stopped as quickly as they came. The realization in lots of ways made everything simpler. It was me and the kids now. Jake and Claire. Me and the kids. I’d make a life for us after the separation, on our own. We could start again. There was no point mourning the past, I thought, opening the door of my sleeping house. I just had to get on with things.
Mel had flown home from France on Tuesday night, while I was with Pete. She had one last day off before going back to work and was due to have lunch with Piers at Pizza Express. She’d missed him, she said. So we met in the park in the early morning. There was a chill in the air, and the sun made striped shadows through the trees.
Milly and Fergus had run off to investigate some boggy ground near a tree trunk. They were poking about with sticks, squawking with laughter every time they managed to fish a knot of brown foliage out of a puddle, whispering, daring each other to dip a sandaled toe.
“At least it’s still warm enough not to mind,” I said, as we watched them venture in, bent double with pleasure and naughtiness. “In a few weeks’ time, we’ll be shouting, ‘No. Not in those shoes . . . You’ll get cold feet.’ ”
Mel said, “So, come on. What’s going on?”
We had talked all the way over, covering all the small inconsequential business that binds good friends; that tells you more about each other’s state of mind than any amount of soul-searching. She had told me about her holiday. Nice house. Good pool. Irritating sister-in-law. I had burbled about some Ultima eyecream recommended in the Saturday papers. “Apparently it ‘does as much for your bags as 100 years of sleep.’ ”
“In your dreams,” said Mel. I knew we’d get to me in the end.
I said, “Do you think I can let Dan crawl around? He’ll get very messy, but it seems unfair to keep him harnessed in.”
She didn’t say anything. She sat down on a bench and waited. I undid the straps on the stroller and put Dan down on a drier piece of ground. He set off immediately, scrabbling across the grass on his hands and knees to join the other two in their homemade bog. “Oh well,” I said, “Doesn’t matter. He’ll dry off too.”
I sat down next to her on the bench. Someone had written “Sue loves Pog” in small felt-tip letters on the wood between us (Sue I suppose), only they’d written “loves” in the form of a heart. I tried to rub the heart out with my finger as I filled her in. I told her I wasn’t quite as mad as I had been, that I had the gardener in perspective, but that I did think things had gotten serious between Jake and Claire, and that he was probably on the verge of leaving me. It’s like seeing a wall coming toward you, I told her. You know it’s going to happen, you know it’s going to hurt, but there’s nothing you can do but brace yourself. I also told her that I had to take a lot of the blame, that I’d let it happen. I’d been awful. Brittle. Unapproachable. Worst of all, when I could have been fighting for him, I’d frittered away the time with some hunk from Down Under.
“Down Under being the operative words?”
“Well maybe.”
“At least there’s that,” she said.
We both laughed. Or I tried to.
Milly and Fergus had run out of the trees and were heading away from us, elbows and knees and splashes of color across the yellowing grass. Mel said, “Do you think they’d make it to the border before we stopped them?”
“They’ll come back,” I said. “They always do.”
We watched them reach the pond, where they leaned against the railings, looking over their shoulders occasionally at us, taunting us with their daring. Dark clouds with white edges billowed across the sky, skudding like missiles toward the sun. The pond darkened, and Milly and Fergus turned and started back, slowly, solidly, hand in hand, like an old couple. Mel put her arm around me. “I’m so sorry.” I could tell she wasn’t sure what sort of thing I wanted her to say.
I said, “You’ve got to tell me what to do. I’m in the middle of it. I can’t see round it. I don’t know what’s what anymore. Do I want Jake back even if he wanted to come? Do I want the gardener? No. Or should I be on my own? I’ve never been on my own. It would be good for me, wouldn’t it? What do you think I should want? What do you think I should do?”
She took a deep breath. She said, “Well. Maybe you should fight for Jake. If he can give her up, if you can forgive him . . . you won’t be able to go back to how things were, but you can go on. You could make a life together, couldn’t you? It might not be perfect, but you’ve got small children and they deserve some consideration in this. I mean, you always used to be so good together, so relaxed—no one else did cozy as well as you do—and I don’t know. I don’t think it’s always a choice between being happy or being unhappy—I suppose I’m talking about Jake here—sticking in an ‘unhappy relationship. ’ I think if you make a decision to stay and it seems hard, it doesn’t mean you have to be unhappy for the rest of your life; you just have to try a bit harder to find happiness, root it out in the circumstances in which you find yourself. I don’t think happiness is something that comes or doesn’t; I think it’s something you have control over.”
“But if he really loves her . . .”
“Well maybe he does now. Maybe he doesn’t. Who’s to say how long it would last anyway? In a way, that’s why I’m still with Piers. It’s comfortable and comfortable only gets more comfortable as time goes by. Passion doesn’t. Anyway, I have to say, I always assumed Jake really loved you, Maggie. I know he didn’t say much, but he was just one of those men. Carried it deeply, not on his sleeve, but in his heart, which is where it counts. And actually I can’t believe that’s changed. Not really underneath.”
“I don’t know.”
“This could just be an infatuation with Claire. Maybe you should see her for starters. Tell her to fuck off. Go round there. Cause havoc.”
“Maybe Jake and I need some time apart anyway.”
“Absolutely not!” Her eyes were bright. “That’s the worst thing anyone ever does. Never ever have space. Don’t give yourself space and don’t, whatever you do, let Jake.
It’s space that kills relationships, not mistakes. Once you have space, then, all sorts of things start happening and none of them good.”
I smiled. “Okay. Okay,” I said. “Point taken.” I got up to collect Dan who had crawled over to the trash can and was beginning to pull himself up to investigate its interestingly smelling contents. When I came back and had wrapped him up in the stroller, I gathered the V-neck of my cardigan into a bunch to protect my chest. It had gotten cold suddenly. “And what about my Australian?”
“Dump him,” she said, standing up and brushing the bottom of her jeans. “Now.”
I was cleaning out the bath a couple of hours later when the doorbell went.
“Coming!” I shouted, peeling off the rubber gloves and jumping down the stairs.
Pete was standing on the porch looking doleful. He was shaking drops of rain from his hair, moving his weight from foot to foot to keep his bare legs warm.
He said, “You rushed off so quickly yesterday. I just wondered . . . I mean, are you cross with me for not having been around . . . ?”
“No,” I said. “Not at all.”
He looked surprised. “And I was a bit short with you yesterday. To be quite honest I wasn’t really in the mood but . . .”
“No honestly,” I said. “It didn’t matter.”
“Oh.” A look of relief came into his eyes, then he half-closed them. “I suppose I can’t kiss you then, can I?”
I said, “No.” I had Dan on one hip. Fergus was descending the stairs on his stomach. Head first.
“Look, I’m a snake,” he told Pete.
Pete ignored him. He said, head on one shoulder, “When then?”
I didn’t know what to say. Mrs. Allardyce was creaking by with her walker on wheels. She was wearing her raincoat. Not my nemesis anymore, my salvation. I waved. She peered round her plastic rain hat to say, “Hello, dear. Better get home before it pours.”
I said quickly, “Any news?”
She smiled. “Well, it’s not cancer. Old age probably. I’ve got a puffer.”
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