by Anna Maxted
The shrink shifted in her seat. ‘Jason, I’m so sorry. We have to finish in a second. I have a patient waiting downstairs.’
‘OK, but I just want her to know that if only she could acknowledge why she is like this it would make all the difference. I mean,’ he glared at me, ‘she hasn’t even told you—’
The shrink stood up. ‘I’m afraid we have to end right now.’ She paused. ‘Told me?’
I frowned at Jason. Then I understood. ‘Oh!’ I said. ‘I’ve been married before. When I was twenty. For five months. I’m a raddled old divorcée consumed with bitterness and regret. Is that relevant?’
Chapter 6
It’s the one thing I have in common with Jennifer Lopez. (Apart from the size of our bottoms, I suppose I should add but won’t. I’m not as good at putting myself down as I should be.) God, it was embarrassing. This wedding was massive. My father wanted a fuss. I’m quite a show-off, so I was happy to co-operate. In my head I was crowing, ‘I am the bride! You have all got to be nice to me!’ Your wedding day is the day you can get your own way, no matter what. Up to a point.
My friend Martine – we went to school together – was a bridesmaid. She said, ‘You’re only asking me because I’m fat.’
‘You’re right,’ I told her. ‘I only asked you because I thought you’d make me look grrrreat!’
She grinned. ‘Yeah, go on then.’
Martine was one of the few friends who didn’t think my marriage to Jack was a mistake. (My various relatives were torn. A cousin’s wife’s father, a man I’ve met twice in my life, said to me, ‘Congratulations. I don’t hold with these feminists – what do they call themselves, “singleones”? A woman’s life is pointless unless she has a ring on her finger.’ I replied, ‘Really? I’ve never been a fan of anal sex.’) The point is, most of my relations couldn’t decide whether to sanction my decision or condemn it. Was it about time I became respectable, or was I tying myself down when I was barely out of my teens?
As the cousin’s wife said, ‘Hannah, marrying at this age is not normal when you’re middle-class and educated. You’re supposed to want a career and the freedom to explore other relationships first.’ (As opposed to simultaneously, you imagine.) I looked at her like she was mad. First, I wasn’t that educated. Second, why should marriage hinder my career? If anything it would help it as, with any luck, I’d no longer be trawling the streets for men at all hours. Third, did she think that Jack was, as she’d put it, ‘my first’? (I resent people who use phrases like ‘my first,’ so the person they’re speaking to is practically obliged to imagine them having sex in order to complete the sentence. It’s not nice.)
My father, though, was delighted. He loved Jack. So did my mother, I could tell. And so did I. He was a shit, which I liked. He started out as a solicitor for a City firm that had a reputation for employing beautiful people. He was arrogant and rude, but funny and good-looking, so he mostly got away with it. Like Jason, he went to my school, but the two boys never really got acquainted, as Jack only joined for the sixth form and Jase was three years younger. Unlike Jason, though, Jack didn’t seem to be wild about me. Turned out we’d attended the same junior school – maybe he remembered me from the days when I used to chase boys round the playground with a bogey on my fingertip. Our relationship reminded me of a cat toying with a mouse. I didn’t mind. I liked playing games; I got bored otherwise. Jack amused me.
He was an insane Elvis fan, but not in that tedious, showy way that people often are. Jack was a purist about Presley, which I found acceptable. I asked him, ‘Would you rather I died if it meant Elvis came back to life?’
He paused. Then he said, ‘Would I get to hang out with him?’
We used to compete to annoy each other. A particular favourite of mine was calling his mobile when I knew he was on the train.
‘Where are you?’
‘On the train.’
‘Pardon?’
‘I’m on the train.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I’M ON THE – oh, piss off, Ratfink!’
He called me Ratfink. Not what you’d call romantic, but I thought it was cute.
I mainly agreed to marry him because I thought it would wind him up. How right I was. He actually put a lot of thought into the proposal. It started (bear with me) on Christmas night. I’d fled my family in their red paper hats as soon as was decently possible and raced to his flat, a tiny space on a main road above a Greek restaurant. Jack hadn’t moved back home after university, and nor would you if you had his parents. They were half-human, half-glacier.
On tearing the wrapping off my gift, I was enraged to find that he’d bought me a jigsaw puzzle. A thousand pieces, the bastard. There was no picture on the box, so I said, ‘This better be good. What’s it of?’
He smiled and said, ‘One way to find out.’
At about 3 p.m., Boxing Day (I got distracted, also I’m not good at jigsaw puzzles) I pressed in the last piece, in a disbelieving daze. The whole damn thing was black, except for five words in white. ‘Ratfink, will you marry me?’
I rubbed my eyes, blinked. My head felt as if it were full of helium and my hands shook. I turned round to see Jack leaning in the doorway, a strange look on his face.
I said, ‘Yes, OK, now where’s my real present?’
Jack was not a gushy person, and because he didn’t bombard me with romantic verse (I had a Hallmark idea of love, aged twenty), I assumed he was in control of his feelings. So I fought to control mine. I’d take what I could get, not make a fuss. My Grandma Nellie said, ‘It’s not the hen that cackles most that lays the largest egg,’ but I wasn’t inclined to listen to her. When I told Martine that Jack had asked me to marry him, her mouth fell open like a trap. She said, ‘I didn’t think men like Jack proposed. I thought men like him were shaggers.’ I thought so too. Ever since I’d known Jack, he’d seemed aloof.
We were on nodding terms at school. We got together (although it was less formal than that) outside the Everyman Cinema in Hampstead, after going to see Hard Boiled, separately. I trod on his foot in the foyer, apologised, said, ‘Oh! Hello!’, checked to see if, like me, he was alone.
I got this surge of adrenalin, standing close to him. It was insane. He didn’t move away.
‘What did you think, Hannah?’ he said.
I felt a bolt of pleasure that he remembered my name. It meant something, made me reckless. I said, ‘All that killing, it makes me want to kiss you.’
He stared at me, and I thought he was going to say, ‘Fuck off.’ He said, ‘Go on then.’
I stood on tiptoe, and kissed him quickly on the cheek. I pulled away and saw that he was smiling.
‘What?’ I said.
He touched a finger to my mouth and said slowly, ‘There was an awful lot of killing in that film.’
The sex was – excuse my limited grasp of the superlative – amazing. It freaked me out, to be honest. I didn’t like to think about it.
I’ll tell you about the wedding, though. It was not the style of wedding Jack would have chosen. It was the style of wedding my father had chosen, and as he was paying, we’d let him choose. He’d been so excited. He bought all the magazines and kept ringing me at odd hours. Once it was, ‘I’ve seen these cufflinks, they’re bloody superb! One cufflink says “Dream” and the other says “Man”. What do you think?’
What I thought was that Jack would rather one cufflink said ‘Dick’ and the other said ‘Head’. What I said was, ‘Daddy, they sound hilarious. But I think Jack already has cufflinks. Why don’t you get them for yourself?’
There would be a silence, during which I’d hold my breath. Then, ‘Great idea! I’ll wear them!’
Or, it would be, ‘Hannah. Freeze-dried rose petals or featherfetti?’
‘Daddy,’ I said, ‘what are you talking about?’
He kept delegating chores to my mother, at one point encouraging her to undergo a make-up trial at the hands of a ‘make-up artist’. Judging from the result
s, this woman was more of a graffiti artist. My mother did her duty. She sourced bouquets, tiaras, cakes, all according to my father’s direction. I was grateful to her. It’s not as if we don’t speak. We have a formal relationship, that’s all.
As for Roger, I was pleased to be making him happy. Not many fathers get involved like that. Martine reported an exchange with her father. She’d told him about my dress. I’m not an elaborate kind of girl but, to my surprise, the straight-down, no-fuss designs, far from turning me into Grace Kelly – even Gene Kelly would have been nice – made me look like a white post. It was the – what does Gabrielle call it? – flouncy Cinderella-style skirt that suited me. Even I could see the difference. Then I saw the price tag: £2,000. My father didn’t blink.
Anyway, Martine was about to get to this bit when her dad interrupted. He said, ‘So how much does a wedding dress cost these days? A hundred pounds?’
Martine found this amusing. Truth was, at that point, I thought a wedding dress cost a hundred pounds.
If you believe in wiffle-waffle, there were bad signs. I was having my hair fiddled with at some salon, five hours before I trotted down the aisle. The girl jammed the tiara into my scalp and said, ‘Are you in a play?’
Jack had got wrecked the night before, and looked like death. I hadn’t got wrecked. The decision was pure vanity.
It was a strange day. Jack’s parents were there, scowling at each other. I’d say his mother lowered the room temperature by about ten degrees. They separated the following year. I kept them at a distance from my father. He was on a high and I didn’t want their sourness to taint him. My mother cried from the ceremony to the carriages. By midnight her face had puffed up like a chipmunk. Jack was very serious. Probably, I thought, he was wondering what he’d got himself into. He’d chosen his suit, bought me a gold ring so thin as to be barely visible (my choice), and turned up. That was his contribution.
I’m not complaining. I made a list of my friends, which took four minutes, and fitted into my dress. I was happy to hand over to Roger, and Jack was busy on other projects. All the same, the end result was a shock. It was a bit … Miw Hiw. My father had booked ‘Original 1930s London Taxis’ for both me and Jack. I felt a right prat (even though when we stopped at the lights, a cyclist smiled at me and mouthed, ‘You look beautiful.’ What a doll). My father wore a lime silk waistcoat, which made him look like a jockey. At the reception, we discovered personalised candles on every table. If there’s one superfluity in life, it’s personalised candles. The photographer and the toastmaster were like a pair of failed television personalities. It was a tough call who was the bigger moron.
The whole event, including fish, must have set my father back twenty grand. That’s quite a lot of notes to stuff down the toilet. I’ve not looked at our wedding photos since and my dress is scrunched up in a big white ball at the top of my wardrobe. You do feel bad. It feels fraudulent to go through all that clamour – my father’s friends and business associates were there – only to quit the relationship five months later. I had to call every guest, announce the news, and send back their presents (which in some instances, where cut-glass vases were involved, was a pleasure).
The end of the marriage was a shock. Despite everything, I do think on the day Jack and I were happy. Scared, but happy. We chose a first dance (they make you). I can’t remember the title but the chorus was, ‘When you’re with me, baby, the skies will be blue for all my life.’ Jack held on to me so tight I struggled for breath.
Now, I see it differently. A man doesn’t propose aged twenty-one, unless he is in the grip of a very strong emotion. Nor does a woman accept. But I was such a baby, a year younger than Jack and I think it was significant. I had no perception. I never considered that he might assume he had married me for life – I couldn’t envision that far. I thought thirty was death. I couldn’t see beyond the next day. I was obsessed with Jack and trying not to be. Even marriage didn’t convince me he loved me; even when he said, ‘I love you’, I wasn’t convinced.
Apart from my stupidity, the trouble – one of the troubles – was that Jack had decided that he no longer wanted to be a lawyer. He was ambitious. He wanted to be a theatrical agent. At first, I didn’t believe him. I didn’t want to. I suppose that I feared that any sort of change would take him away from me. I said, ‘A theatrical agent? What, did you read that in a book?’ But he was serious. He took voluntary redundancy and set about establishing himself in his new career.
This involved getting work experience at a large agency and spending every spare minute at the theatre. He’d go to what he called ‘crappy rep’ and amateur dramatics society performances and drama schools, theatre groups; he’d even attend school plays, watch a bunch of fifteen-year-olds hamming it up in an assembly hall – any place where he might spot an undiscovered talent. I laughed at him about the assembly hall bit and he replied, ‘Hannah. There are so many parts for teenagers.’ Not that anyone would have taken notice of him then, but it was useful. He chatted to other agents, casting directors. It got his face known.
The marital home was, for financial reasons, the tiny flat above the Greek restaurant. And, for a while, it felt like a palace. His wedding present to me was a huge carved oak bowl, containing what looked like two dinosaur eggs. They were smooth ovals, polished grey-brown stone, heavy, cool and beautiful.
‘They’re fertility stones,’ he said. Then, ‘Probably pinched from some poor village in Africa.’
My wedding present to him was a new bed. It, also, was oak. It was a sleek, colonial-style four-poster, and I wasn’t sure if you were meant to drape white organza over the top to create a canopy. We didn’t, but I liked the idea that we might.
I had allowed myself to relax, briefly. After the ceremony, Jack had been so uncharacteristically tender. I woke up one morning to find him stroking my face. I opened my eyes and he turned the stroke into a nose-pinch. For two months we saw no one but each other. Jack liked to cook, and he cooked for me: Thai jungle curries that filled the flat with the aromas of lemongrass, lime and coriander; coconut milk sticky rice with mangoes. ‘I like to watch you eat,’ he’d say, as I tried to scrape out my bowl with chopsticks, and we’d fall on each other. He’d pepper my face with hot chilli kisses. Now it’s as clear as a poke in the eye, but it wasn’t then. I was naïve, convinced that love was not about giving of yourself. I thought it was about holding back. And so, when Jack’s new career stole his attention from me like a mistress, I pulled away from him, wrapping myself in solitude. I convinced myself that he was away from me because he wanted to be. It didn’t occur to me that he was looking ahead to how he could make things better for us, in time. Simply, we didn’t talk enough. I didn’t have the emotional vocabulary and nor did he.
I became the housekeeper by default, a role I resisted. The dishes stacked up like stalagmites. Damp towels mouldered in piles. In Jack’s absence, I refused to do a weekly shop. The mere idea of it and I imagined myself trudging round the same branch of Tesco, every Thursday for the rest of my life. I preferred to subsist on whatever I found in the kitchen cupboards.
Once Jack came in and I was eating a dinner of dates, followed by teaspoons of ground almonds. Ground almonds rape your mouth of moisture. I had to swallow five times before I could speak. Jack accused me of ignoring him – not my style. I think, in retrospect, he was bewildered by my sudden coldness and, perhaps because of his upbringing, his reflex was to match it.
It was a pity it ended how it did. I’d always thought we understood each other. We didn’t. There were huge swathes of each other’s personalities that we’d misread entirely.
Well. I hadn’t seen Jack for ten years. Meanwhile, here was Jason offering me a second chance, despite my poor performance in the therapy session. Jason was a far nicer person than Jack, or myself. Jack and I were sensible to divorce, despite the terrible pain we caused our families. My father. We were too alike, we would have destroyed each other. Our relationship was far too uncontrolled.
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br /> Meanwhile, I had an opportunity to realign my life with Jason, a pure, sunny person, a good – not to mention gorgeous – man. Jason would lift me up where I belonged. As for his conditions, they didn’t bother me. He was as menacing as a kitten. There was also the small, unworthy thought that I had invested too much time not to persevere with Jason. As Grandma Nellie liked to say (to any woman older than ten), ‘You’re not getting any younger.’
We stood outside the shrink’s office and I squinted up at him. The sun was in my eyes. I said, ‘I can learn to give a little, Jase. Just tell me what to do.’
Chapter 7
When Jason listed his conditions, I was shocked. I’m not often contrite but when I am I expect that in itself to make people relent. Often when someone is angry with you, all they want is for you to admit they’re right. Once you accept blame – or, at least, give the appearance of accepting blame – their anger fades. Jason was breaking my rules which meant that all of a sudden, I was a person with a lot of problems. This annoyed me because none of them was my fault.
I drove straight round to see my father.
I could only conclude that Jason’s love for me was less reckless than it once had been because what he was asking of me was just a little more than I’d expected. I respected him that much more. Even if it did mean trouble. But Roger would know what to do. I had absolute faith in my father which, I think, is important. Most people I regard as idiots.
Talking of whom, Martine rang as I was speeding down the Bishop’s Avenue (the most vulgar building site in London) to ask where the hell I was. She was sitting in the pub eating a bag of crisps and a man had just made oinking noises at her.
Any other day, this would be nothing to do with me (it’s unjust that fat people are given a hard time by strangers for eating in public, but I have no sympathy for Martine, as she enjoys provoking them) but I was reminded that we had arranged to meet. I explained. Martine choked on a crisp. Through the coughing, I discerned a croaked intention to come to my father’s house.