‘I’ll show you round,’ said Rob. ‘It won’t take long.’ He grinned. He looks happy here, thought Frankie. Really content. Perhaps he was happier. Now he was away from her. With his new flat and his freedom and his Jenny.
She followed him to the window where he pointed through the glass to the tiny balcony. He had a couple of pot plants on it. They didn’t look like they were on the brink of dying. They looked like he actually watered them.
‘Balcony,’ he said, unnecessarily.
She nodded. ‘Very nice. Those plants look like the kind Mum’s always bringing round for us. Er, for me,’ she added.
‘They are,’ he said. ‘She popped round.’
‘Oh! How did she know where you were?’ asked Frankie, incredulous.
‘She phoned me at work.’ Rob shrugged. ‘I got a lot of poor Rob’s.’
‘I bet you did,’ said Frankie.
‘There’s Josh,’ he said, pointing, and she could see him, kicking a ball around with a couple of other boys. Laughing his head off, a jumper tied round his waist.
‘Yes, I see him,’ she said. For some reason she felt incredibly sad.
Rob turned back to the room. ‘Living/dining/kitchen, as you can see.’ He swept his arm round the space. His sofa was a rather nice dark brown leather one, all antique-looking. She wondered where he’d got it from. Had he hired it? Or did it come with the flat?
‘Three bedrooms,’ he said, almost proudly. ‘Follow me.’
She followed, still holding Alice – although she was getting a heavy old lump, she didn’t want to put her down. He led her to a small bedroom that housed a double bed and a single. ‘Mine and Alice’s room,’ he said. The double bed had a pale blue cotton duvet and was neatly made. The single bed had a duvet and pillowcase set that was pink and had roses on it. It was very pretty.
‘A big girl’s bed,’ lisped Alice.
‘Yes, darling,’ said Frankie. ‘It is a big girl’s bed.’
At home, Alice still had a cot bed so it was a lot smaller. Alice’s big girl’s bed had her favourite rabbit on the pillow. There was a white bedside table next to it, with a little pink lamp and a drawer with a heart-shaped cut-out. Everything was so neat and tidy! Was Rob sure he lived here? Did he actually live in a fleapit next door and had broken into this pristine show home especially for her visit?
There was nothing else in the room, just one of those clothes rails you get in Argos, with a few of Rob’s things neatly hung on it. Neatly! It was unheard of! Perhaps the flat was so small he simply couldn’t be untidy here. Perhaps he’d been abducted by aliens and replaced with someone who gave a toss.
She would reserve her judgement. He was a messy so-and-so and always had been, she bet all the bedrooms weren’t as nice as this. If they were, she’d be quite angry, actually. How dare he be all tidy and conscientious here, when he never was at home?
Rob led her into the room next door.
‘The boys’ room.’ The next bedroom had two single beds. You couldn’t swing or squeeze a cat between them and surely the boys had to crawl up from the bottom of their beds to get in, but, again, it was tidy. She was flabbergasted.
‘And Tilly’s room.’ It was the other side of the narrow hallway.
Rob let her go in by herself. There probably wouldn’t have been room for both of them anyway; it was tiny. A single bed, chest of drawers and wardrobe. Flat-pack. She wondered if he’d put them up himself, without swearing. The last time he’d attempted any kind of flat-pack assembly at home, he’d ended up saying the F word fifteen times and they’d had to get a man in to finish the job. She was rather proud of herself, as last week she’d put a wooden shoe rack together all on her own. No fuss, no drama, no F words. Just the help of a forum on Google and a quick call to Grace. Who needed a man to cock it up?
A cuddly toy Frankie didn’t recognise was on top of Tilly’s bed. Everything was neat and tidy, tidy and neat. That was a line from the Mr Men book Rob used to read Tilly at bedtime, if he got home from work early enough. Mr Messy. Tilly loved it. As Rob put on a sing-song voice and described Mr Tidy and Mr Neat, who sorted out Mr Messy and made him a better person, Frankie used to stand in the doorway and laugh, thinking, ‘Nothing like Rob, then.’ That was before things got too bad. Before Rob became a Mr Messy who couldn’t be helped.
On the bookshelf in Tilly’s new room were a stack of about thirty Mr Men books. Square white books, all stacked together. He’d re-bought them. All of them. Her anger at his new tidiness momentarily disappeared and her eyes welled with tears. Stop it, she thought and shook them down. You wanted this. He lives somewhere else. He’s bought a few books – so what?
She went back into the living room. Rob was picking up a toy car from the floor.
‘It’s very tidy,’ said Frankie. ‘Have you got a cleaner?’
‘Nope.’
‘Has your mum been round to tidy up?’
‘No.’
‘Has my mum been round to tidy up?’
Laughing. ‘No!’
‘Then how come it’s so tidy?’
‘I tidied it.’
‘And you made the beds? I didn’t know you knew how.’
‘I’ve had to learn. I looked it up on YouTube.’
She didn’t know if he was joking or not. He leant over the back of the sofa and retrieved a basket of folded washing from behind it. Everything – T-shirts, children’s vests, socks – looked clean, smooth, folded. Where had this apparition of good housekeeping appeared from? Rob had always managed to crease a shirt transporting it from a hanger to his own body. How on earth was he able to materialise a whole basket full of nicely laundered clothing? As far as he was concerned, clean and pressed laundry just appeared from nowhere, done by the laundry fairy.
Rob’s washing smelt nice. Different from hers. A lavender smell. Rob’s washing. It was almost hilarious.
‘And you know how to use a washing machine as well.’ She realised she was sneering.
‘Of course. I learnt that too. I’ve learnt a lot of new things,’ he added, after a pause. And smiled. He held her gaze. She looked away, furious. There was a time he couldn’t even tell the washing machine from the tumble dryer, let alone how to operate either of them. Why couldn’t he have done any of this at home?
She glanced down to the basket and, finally depositing a now unbearably heavy Alice on the floor, picked up the corner of a clean white T-shirt.
‘Did you iron all this?’
‘Yes. Well, some of it. I’ve learnt a good technique. Hang straight from the machine to minimise ironing. It’s a good tip.’
‘I’ll remember it, thanks,’ she said sarcastically.
Bloody hell. He was giving her housekeeping tips. She couldn’t believe it.
Alice held up a podgy little hand and said, ‘Mama’ and Frankie gave it a gentle squeeze, then bent down and kissed her daughter on the cheek, breathing her in. She exhaled deeply. She supposed she should be pleased Rob was coping so well, for the children’s sake at least. She thought she’d be walking into a chaos of filthy-faced urchins and takeaway boxes. A social services job. But she’d got it all wrong. It was calm there. Organised. The children seemed happy. It was confusing. So, separately, they could each run a calm, ordered household, but together they were a disaster?
‘Rabby,’ said Alice.
‘It’s on your bed,’ said Rob.
‘I’ll get it,’ said Frankie.
As she walked to Rob and Alice’s room, she passed a door set into the wall of the hall. A cupboard. She opened it and a football magazine immediately fell on the floor. She was surprised more didn’t tumble out. The cupboard was jam-packed full of stuff. Toys, clothes, books, an empty cereal packet. A badminton racquet. Shoved in, rammed in. Stuffed to the absolute hilt.
He had a Monica Cupboard, like in Friends! A cupboard crammed full of junk to enable the immaculate apartment around it.
Weirdly, it made her smile. She felt better: he hadn’t turned into a completely s
aintly housekeeping robot, after all. Maybe the tidiness she had witnessed was proof of some kind of effort, rather than some warped male Stepford transformation purely to spite her?
She went back to the living room/kitchen and gave Alice her rabbit.
‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ Rob said. ‘I’ve got Hobnobs.’
She hadn’t planned on stopping very long, but she felt more relaxed, somehow, now she’d seen the secret cupboard. And Hobnobs were her favourite. ‘Okay.’
‘And chocolate digestives. And Clubs…’
‘Clubs?’
‘Oh yeah, we know how to live, over here. If you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit…’ he sang.
‘…join our club.’
She couldn’t help but grin. God, they were both really old. They knew the same silly advert jingles. The same lines. It had always been that way. They shared the same jokes, finished each other’s sentences. They had a few stock phrases they would complete for each other, including:
‘You’ll always find me…’
‘…in the kitchen at parties.’
‘You’re terrible…’
‘…Muriel.’ Then, ‘Mariel,’ they would both drawl in unison, in over-exaggerated Australian accents, referring to Muriel’s more glamorous alias.
‘We were on…’
‘A break.’
How they’d laughed at that episode of Friends, many moons ago. They loved Friends. They’d watched it every Friday night, with a Domino’s pizza, Ben and Jerry’s Funky Monkey and a bottle of Sol each with a lime segment stuffed into the neck of the bottle. Joey’s Man Bag, Monica’s Secret Closet and Ross and Rachel On a Break. How they’d laughed. And now they were on a break too. Frankie didn’t know how Rob felt about it. She thought, again, that he seemed pretty content. She hadn’t seen this far ahead, how he would be without her… She’d just wanted to get away from him.
She looked at the back of his head as he turned to put the kettle on. He’d had his hair cut. It looked neat around the ears. He hadn’t bothered getting it cut in the months before they’d split. It had started curling round the bottom of his ears and growing down his neck. It looked nice now, with its not unattractive sprinkling of grey.
They’d talked about that sort of thing loads of times. About getting old, going grey. They’d both assumed it was something they’d do together. She’d said she would always, always dye her hair, although maybe when she was a hundred she’d let it go a soft silver. He said he was dreading losing his hair and it going grey, and that this part of ageing was the one women had over men – they could dye their still-apparent hair and not look ridiculous, whilst men risked an odd, copper-coloured comb-over. She’d told him not to worry, that she liked grey hair, and if he started receding, he could just shave it all off and do a Grant Mitchell, as she found it sexy.
Rob’s hair hadn’t receded, but it was going grey. Frankie had an urge to reassure him, to say, ‘Your hair looks quite sexy, all grey like that,’ but she couldn’t, could she? She’d dumped him.
The one thing he’d done for her, at home, was to make her the occasional cup of tea. As the kettle boiled and he rummaged in a cupboard for teabags and sugar, it was almost just like old times. She felt conflicted. She’d dumped him because he was hopeless. He was probably still hopeless. But, at this moment, she missed him.
He turned and smiled at her, held her gaze. The smile hung between them like the Clifton suspension bridge. They’d been there once, the day after going to a friend’s wedding in Bristol. It had been a dreadful day, weather-wise, characterised by that soft summer drizzle – warm and very annoying. They had cagoules on with the hoods up. But buoyed by the romance of the wedding they’d just been to, and the fact that they’d only been married a year themselves, they had kissed at one end of the bridge. It had been a fantastic day. A fantastic kiss. And now, in Rob’s new flat, it seemed that either one of them could climb that smile, that bridge, to reach the other.
After a few awkward seconds, they let the smile fall. He wasn’t allowed to smile at her like that any more. They were separated. Estranged. ‘My estranged husband’. What an odd phrase. It made her think of a Victorian gentleman wearing a funny hat and pulling a cat’s bum face.
Rob handed her a mug of tea. She realised it was his Fimbles mug, from home. She hadn’t noticed it had gone. Then he reached to a high cupboard to get the Hobnobs. He’d lost a bit of weight. His jeans were hanging off his backside a bit. Was he eating properly? Proper meals? Was he feeding the children well? He must be. They certainly weren’t coming back home to her like starving waifs.
‘Are you eating okay?’
‘What do you mean?’ said Rob. ‘Does my mouth work? As far as I’m aware. I don’t think I’ve got an eating problem.’ She knew he was thinking of the ‘drinking problem’ scene in Airplane, the one where the drinking problem is Ted Striker missing his mouth every time. They’d seen and loved that movie a hundred times.
‘Ha, no. Are you eating properly? The right stuff? What are you giving the children?’ The mood immediately changed. She was nagging.
‘We’re all eating properly, thank you. Me and my children. How about you? Tinned spaghetti bolognaise and Cadbury’s chocolate fingers?’ He knew they were her favourites, when she could eat alone and have whatever she wanted. Things that required No Cooking.
‘As an occasional treat,’ she lied.
‘I hope you’re looking after yourself, the weekends I have the children,’ he said. Now he was nagging. His voice took on a hard edge. ‘Are you going out drinking? Having a lot of “me” time?’
He was being sarcastic, with the ‘me’ time nonsense. She knew he hated that ridiculous phrase. Still, it put her back up. She had never had any ‘me time’ when they were together. None. Except five minutes in the loo, from time to time. Even then, someone was usually banging on the door, demanding something. Whereas he had all the ‘me’ time in the world. Even his commute to work on the trains he moaned so much about was a blissful chance to just sit and do nothing, whilst she wrestled breakfast and nappies and mess and uniforms and tea and bath and homework and reading and bedtime.
He was also fishing, she knew, about what she was doing in his absence. She knew him. He wanted to know was she going out? Meeting other men. Had she met another man? Oh dear. No way was she mentioning Hugh and all the snogging…
‘It’s not really any of your business,’ she said coolly, bristling.
‘I hope you’re being careful,’ he said. ‘You know what I mean.’ If he’d been a jolly uncle figure or Sid James, he may have winked at this point, but he didn’t. He looked serious and a bit hacked off. He actually does think I’m going out and shagging other men, thought Frankie. And he looked bothered about it. Did he still fancy her?
‘Of course,’ she said, breezily. He could make of that what he wanted.
‘Anyway, right,’ he said, putting the biscuits back in the cupboard. ‘So…we have plans…’
Frankie baulked. ‘Oh…okay…plans, with the children? Of course. Anything nice?’
‘We’re going to the Natural History Museum. Going up on the train.’
‘Oh, great. Fab.’ They’d all wanted to go. She’d wanted to go. They’d talked about going this year, in the summer holidays. He knew that.
‘So, what are you up to today?’ He wasn’t going to invite her, then. For a family outing. It would just be the five of them.
‘Oh, plans, as well, you know. Things to do…places to see…’
‘Okay. Well, have fun,’ said Rob. He was actually ushering her to his front door. His clean, white front door. He’d even thought to buy a mat, too. It was all brown and unsullied. It said ‘Welcome’, like this was a proper home.
Before she knew it, she was outside his door and it had been shut – shut on him and his weekend with their children.
She stood for a second, like you do when you suddenly think of the perfect retort for a conversation you left ten minutes ago, then she t
urned and walked down the stairs.
Chapter Fifteen: Grace
Greg was waiting under a tree. A temporary outdoor rink, for the spring and summer, had been set up in the beautiful surroundings of Admirals Park, on the edge of Chelmsford. It was the prettiest rink Grace had ever seen. Her teenage roller-skating excursions had been to orange-lit hell holes with neon plastic everywhere. Here the rink was surrounded by trees and summer blooms. How scenic and civilised. Lovely. And it was the most perfect early May day – warm, with a gentle breeze, and not a cloud in the sky.
Greg was wearing jeans, black trainers and a black and white checked short-sleeved shirt, which showed off his great forearms. His dishwater blond hair was…perfect. His eyes flickered with merriment when he first spotted Grace and his lovely mouth broke into a grin. She’d made an effort with her appearance too. Skinny jeans. A long pale blue vest with a long white vest layered over the top. White canvas sneakers. She wanted to look cute.
She had sneaked out of the house again, this time via the overgrown back alley behind her house she’d forgotten about until she’d started lying to everyone. The path was so overgrown she had to keep high-stepping over stinging nettles and she kept her arms clamped to her sides so they didn’t get wrenched by brambles. She’d managed to make it unscathed.
‘What on earth have you got me doing?’ said Greg, as she neared him.
‘Sorry!’ She laughed. ‘It’ll be fun, I promise.’
‘Please don’t tell me you’re a British champion at this or something.’
‘No,’ she replied, drinking in his gorgeous face. He looked amazing. He wore the casual look as well as he wore a dinner suit. ‘I used to love it as a teenager, though. Hopefully I can remember what to do.’
She’d booked him for roller-skating and it had taken her a while to decide to do it. After Nana McKensie’s theatre evening, she’d been a little freaked by how attached she’d got to Greg. She’d cringed when she’d remembered leaning her head on his shoulder on the train and clinging to him at the train station. She hadn’t contacted him for a few weeks and had been proud of her willpower. Then James had collected Daniel, last night, and had said, while Daniel was getting in the car, ‘No sign of that bloke again, then? Has he dumped you?’ and after they’d gone Grace had sent Greg a text and asked him when he was free.
Year of Being Single Page 16