Being Committed

by Anna Maxted

  I’d parked my car outside Guy’s flat, so when Guy asked me to come inside to watch his showreel, it was easy to say yes. Even though I suspected that ‘showreel’ was a modern term for etchings. He was sweetly proud of his showreel, all two minutes of it, so I said nice things. He kissed my ear, and I let him.

  ‘Stay,’ he whispered.

  ‘I can’t,’ I said. In my scumbag heart, I thought Jack might ring at 3 a.m. Which he sometimes did. Then, my lousiest move, I added, ‘But you can come home with me if you want.’

  He said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  I drove home (although ‘home’ was a bit of a fanciful description of my rented abode – one room that closed in on you and a bed that fell out of the wall). It was around two in the morning. I parked the car a way down the road near the roundabout – it was hell for parking where I lived – and trotted towards my block.

  I knew someone was following me. For a start, they hadn’t bothered crossing to the other side of the road. Which meant they didn’t care if I saw them. This was bad news. I started to run and – for good measure – screamed, ‘Help, help, fire, FIY-EEEERRR!’ (I wouldn’t ever waste my breath shouting ‘Rape!’ or ‘Murder!’ Samaritans are choosy these days. They respond only to ‘Fire!’)

  ‘Hannah, shut the hell up. It’s me, Jack!’

  I stopped and spun. How embarrassing. I signalled to various neighbours peering blearily from windows to return to bed.

  ‘Jack, you psycho, what were you …?’

  I saw he had a bottle of champagne in one hand and a bedraggled bunch of sweet peas in the other. I like sweet peas. They have a beautiful scent and aren’t half as brash or mindless as roses. I feel that a person who gives you sweet peas has put thought into their choice. I had mentioned this theory to Jack, weeks before. My heart beat fast and my cheeks burned red. I was grateful for the dark.

  He jerked his head in the direction of the roundabout. The council had planted grass and a few shrubs on it. ‘Waiting for you. I think I fell asleep under a bush. Where have you been?’

  ‘Out,’ I said. ‘But now I’m back.’ I touched his face. ‘Look at you. You’ve got moss in your hair.’

  He grabbed me, tipping me backwards in a flamboyant embrace.

  All the way upstairs I told myself I hadn’t done anything wrong. Well, I hadn’t. But I could have. I could have arrived home with Guy in tow. And if I had, it would have been my choice. I felt like a person who misses a flight that subsequently crashes. I was shaken. I never called Guy again, and he never called me, so I exonerated myself. I wasn’t to know that Jack would choose that night to turn smoochy on me. It was very unlike him.

  But our relationship changed. Most people exist in their own little worlds – I’ve done 143 miles on a follow, and the bloke didn’t have a clue. He never looked in his rear-view mirror. There’s too much going on in people’s minds for them to notice what’s around them. That’s why there are so many car accidents. And yet, evolution does well with the poor materials at its disposal. Whenever we connect with anyone in an investigation, we don’t look them in the eye. We look at their chest. If you look someone in the eye, they’ll remember your face for ever. Even if they’re not that bright, there’s some genetic programme that triggers their memory. Not what you want when you’re walking down their street a few days later.

  Jack had never seemed entirely present when he was with me. This – as I mentioned – made me feel jittery, and yet, perversely, I also found it reassuring. I don’t like being smothered with attention, I start feeling shifty. I prefer to have space to breathe.

  Whatever was going on in Jack’s mind that prevented him from totally committing to being with me even when he was with me, I was grateful for. Some men need to be master of their woman’s soul – I wasn’t sure I had one.

  And yet, the night I slunk home from Guy’s place, the instinct that whispers something isn’t right kicked through Jack’s self-absorption. There was nothing unusual in me getting home late, or being evasive. But it was as if Jack sensed a change in the air.

  For the first time, I could feel that he wasn’t holding back. He behaved like a man in love, a man who realised that he might have something to lose. It was a rush, as most scary experiences are. Another of my Grandma Nellie’s unheeded sayings was, ‘Be careful what you wish for.’ I was nineteen, an age at which you reject any club that would have you as a member. Without using anything as advanced as words, I showed Jack that I preferred him as his old unbothered self.

  He snapped out of it. I told myself I was pleased. I didn’t want him to need stuff from me – I didn’t find that attractive. I was more comfortable with him treating me as a challenging pastime. That’s how I treated him. I do realise that in a relationship you are required to give support. But you’re happier to give it when you know it’s a luxury not an essential. Otherwise it’s a duty, not a kindness. It’s the difference between feeling good about the two of you, or bad. Jack slid back into his sarcastic skin with ease. Which was why I was so surprised when, five months later, at Christmas, he asked me to marry him.

  The wedding you know about. That’s where I differ in opinion from Gabrielle. She sees a wedding as a marvellous celebration of everlasting love. I see it – as I see all the significant occasions in our lives – as an opportunity for other people to make money. Perhaps this is because of what happened to Jack and me afterwards. We might have survived my housekeeping and his travels (even though I think if you believe that absence does make the heart grow fonder you’d be well advised to check with yourself whether you like your partner). But then Jack and I went to dinner at my friend Evie’s. She was a relatively new acquaintance. She’d had a slew of different jobs, and did a few weeks of blagging before leaving for a stint in telesales. I told her a lot, for me. What I mean is, she knew about Guy.

  I don’t mean to sound Dolly Parton about it, but Evie, who wore her thick honey-blonde hair in a great luscious rope of a ponytail, could have had Guy, if she’d chosen. But, sitting across the dingy room, she saw me make the conscious effort not to chew my Biro when our boss brought him over to my desk, and didn’t try anything. I’m not great with girly rituals and pacts but even I understood that as Evie had courteously passed on Guy for my benefit, it was expected that I throw her a scrap of gossip about what she’d missed.

  Anyhow, when Evie’s dinner invitation was issued, Jack and I had been married for five months, and I hadn’t seen Evie since our wedding. And, of course, there’d been no chance to talk then. The man Evie was dating had forced Jack into another room to see, of all things, a treadmill – this bloke was picturesque but the most boring person ever. I was watching Evie tip a jar of Chicken Tonight into a pot, and telling her how Guy had made the decision that had changed my life.

  She flicked a satin strand of hair out of her face. ‘So you ask Guy to come for a shag at your place, and just because he can’t be bothered to drive ten minutes for sex, he turns you down – and that’s the one night that Jack surprises you with sweet peas and champagne. My God, Hannah. I bet Jack wouldn’t have married you had he known.’

  There was a loud crack behind us, as Jack banged his wine glass down on the table with enough force to snap it.

  ‘You bet right,’ he said, and our marriage was over.

  As the door shut, I caught the look on Evie’s face. I’d call it a smile of horror. I found it hard to talk to her after that, and we lost touch around the same time Jack moved out.

  Which was the following day.

  I know that sounds extreme. But – oh, the irony – I think it was only then that I began to understand my husband. He had been under the impression that we had been in an exclusive relationship for months before the sweet pea night. Meanwhile, there was his girlfriend, trying to organise a fuck with another man. Jack loved me, but I hadn’t believed it. I needed him to build me the Taj Mahal.

  ‘So you’ve been screwing this bloke.’

  ‘No! Well. Yes. Once. Ages a
go. We had a thing. But not that night! We kissed, nothing … serious.’

  I tried to explain, but I fumbled it. Terror wiped fifty points off my IQ as I stood there. My panicked mind blurred the lines. I couldn’t give Jack straight answers. The joke of it was, under acute stress it was plain that Guy was nothing to me, whereas Jack was everything. I could see him putting two and two together, making five. He’d been away a lot recently … I’d been cold towards him …. I’d cheated on him … now … then … what difference?

  He could have ordered me out of the flat, but instead he went to stay with his older sister, Margaret. I rang him at her house in Richmond, to try to explain again … better, but in my heart I knew it was futile. There would always be doubt, and Jack needed to be a hundred per cent certain. He was too proud to accept less. He couldn’t choose his parents, but he could choose his wife. And now, he found, he’d chosen wrong.

  Jack allowed me to lie to friends and family about our reasons for divorce to save himself from embarrassment, not me. We said we never saw each other and we’d grown apart. (Keep it bland and people will believe you.) He thought the truth would make him seem undignified, even though the reality is most people don’t think like that. Rightly, they see the shame as being all on the adulterer’s side.

  Ten years on, I summoned the memories, and the shame of it felt like yesterday. At the time, people said I was coping well, and the more they said it, the better I coped. This will only hurt if you let it, I told myself, and remember, no one’s died. I succeeded in not thinking about Jack, and what might have been – a feat I achieved by working hard and watching an awful lot of television. But gradually I found that the less I did, the less I wanted to do, until I could barely do anything. That might not sound ideal, but it had the required effect. Everything was reduced – feelings, ambitions, energies, desires – my existance became nicely muffled as if I were living under a layer of snow.

  Jason had dragged me out of my stupor. So, you see, I owed him a lot. Even so, I cannot express how much I did not want to contact Jack.

  But my father insisted.

  Chapter 9

  I could have traced Jack in ten minutes, but Peter rang and I had to deal with him.

  Peter was a regular client of Hound Dog. His problem was an obsession with a woman who had no interest in him. Katya was young and very pretty, from Bulgaria. She had a boyfriend back home. She’d taken a cleaning job at Peter’s house. Other people give their cleaners five-pound tips; Peter gave his a Mercedes. Her only collusion in his fantasy was to accept it. I quite admire that. He insisted she have it, so she took it. Maybe she thought, what a kind man. And if she didn’t, I admire that also. Peter hadn’t said, ‘If you take it, I expect sex,’ so I say fair enough. If you can’t say what you mean, don’t be surprised if people don’t do what you want.

  Greg refused to install a video camera in Katya’s bedroom, as this was ‘perverted’. He did, however, bug her kitchen.

  Greg had made an exception for Peter. Normally, if a person comes in convinced that their partner is cheating, Greg asks, ‘Are there children?’ His second question is, ‘Are you in business together?’ If the response to both these enquiries is no, he replies, ‘Dump them. You haven’t got a relationship. Your relationship has broken down.’

  But Peter was prepared to spend any amount of money and Greg had four boys to put through private school. Peter, therefore, had not brought out the best in Greg, who was reluctant to be reminded of this and had thus assigned all dealings with Peter to me.

  Peter was ringing because something he’d heard had convinced him that Katya was in love with him. He’d heard her say to a friend on tape, ‘I really want Peter tonight.’

  I’d listened to the tape myself on his instruction and – having hit Rewind seventeen times – I had bad news.

  ‘Peter,’ I said, ‘she didn’t say, “I really want Peter tonight.” She said, “I really want pizza tonight.” Peter? Hello? Peter? You still there?’

  I sighed and replaced the receiver. Then I sighed and picked it up again.

  My plan was to call Jack’s mother and, failing that, Jack’s father. I had numbers for both, and I couldn’t imagine either one had moved house. They weren’t the type. I could pinch my nose and pretend to be from the good old DSS, claiming to have sent National Insurance contribution forms for Jack to the wrong address. Nothing to worry about, we can send out another set, but he needs to sign and return them, where should we …? Or, I could be myself.

  Before I met Jack’s mother I made a few assumptions about her. Based on Jack and his high self-opinion, I decided that from the moment he was born to, possibly, last week, she hadn’t stopped telling him, ‘You are so handsome, you’re such a beautiful baby, you’re the most handsome, clever baby in all the world, you are such a clever boy, your mummy loves you so much, she thinks you’re gorgeous, and funny, and clever, and so kind, there’s no other baby as special as you …’

  I was mistaken.

  I have rarely met a person so devoid of warmth. It was as if she had no soul. I guessed she must be very unhappy. She chain-smoked throughout our visit, mostly in my face. I refrained from flapping my hand in front of my nose, as I didn’t want to be as rude as she was. I noticed how tidy the house was. It was like an ornate and immaculate ashtray.

  Every china ornament had its place. The carpet was white. There were huge sofas in a flowery print that looked as if they’d never been sat on. The matching armchairs had clear plastic casing over their arms to prevent the material being sullied by human touch. I saw only two family photos, stiff studio poses, in silver frames. Didn’t they possess their own camera? This was a serious indication, I felt, of a dysfunctional family.

  Gabrielle and Oliver’s place was higgledy-piggledy with pictures – although, to be fair, Ollie is a photographer – but still, I saw them as a sign of joy and health: Gabrielle and Oliver getting married, Gabrielle and Oliver in the Maldives, Gabrielle and Oliver in New York, Gabrielle and Oliver in Thailand, Gabrielle and Oliver in Hyde Park and – later – Gabrielle, Oliver and Jude in the hospital, Jude and Gabrielle in the garden, Jude and Oliver in bed, Gabrielle, Oliver and Jude in Sardinia, Jude, Jude, Jude, Jude, Jude, Jude, Jude.

  Before Jude was born, Gabrielle had declared that she didn’t want the house overrun with children’s toys and baby paraphernalia. After Jude was born, she told me, ‘It’s his home too. Why shouldn’t he have a presence?’ This was after I tripped over a garish push-along trolley in the hall. As I rubbed my shin, red lights flashed, a computerised voice said, ‘I-am-an-ape,’ and then burst into a jaunty rendition of ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’.

  In Jack’s parents’ house, he didn’t have a presence. He was twenty-one, but there was nothing to indicate he had ever lived here. Jack’s mother didn’t offer us a cup of tea or a biscuit. I couldn’t imagine Jack running around as a seven-year-old playing cowboys and Indians with his older sister, Margaret. (I’d met her – against all odds, she was a laugh.) I couldn’t imagine him stamping the mud off his Wellington boots in the pristine kitchen with its ugly cork matting. Cork matting was surely in fashion about a hundred years ago, but this floor looked like new. I couldn’t imagine that Jack had ever been allowed to look after the school rabbit, let alone entertain the thought of owning a puppy. She didn’t kiss Jack hello when we walked in. She didn’t touch him, which made me want to.

  I decided to pinch my nose and be from the DSS.

  As I searched for the number, hands trembling, I thought about other things. Jason. Roger. The two men who mattered to me were convinced that this was the right thing to do. I swallowed, in a futile attempt to introduce moisture into my dry throat. I wanted to believe them.

  My father had said, ‘Hannah, my darling girl, you made a bloody mess of your first marriage, and my feeling has always been that it could have worked, had you stuck at it. I suspect that’s your secret feeling too. And I’m certain that the sense of failure that goes with a failed ma
rriage’ – I’d wished he’d stop using the word ‘fail’ – ‘has impacted on your relationship with Jason. Particularly as it now emerges that you’ve been resisting a fresh start. You need to thrash it out with Jack; say all the things that went unsaid. You were both young and immature and silly. But I think you’ve been scarred by the mistakes you made, and the consequent fear is preventing you from committing to a new life with Jason.’

  He had to be right. I had been affected by the death of my first marriage, particularly as – I now realise – I was its killer. In the ten years that I hadn’t seen Jack, my work had given me a thousand opportunities to observe other people messing up their relationships. It was remarkably easy to do. But … all the same, what was I going to say to Jack that would magically cleanse my soul? Just because you watch ER, doesn’t make you a brain surgeon. I wasn’t sure that I had learnt much that was useful from my job. Of course, I’d picked up some stuff, but I couldn’t swear that it would help me conduct a second marriage with any more heart. My knowledge only became applicable when it was too late.

  I knew the signs of a cheat. It varies slightly, depending if the cheater is male or female. A man is likely to tell his suspicious partner that she’s mad – ‘You’re imagining it. It’s all in your head. You need to see someone …’ – that sort of rubbish. But something will have changed. He may invest in a phallic object, like a car, a purchase that makes him feel younger, even if his mistress is the same age as him. Balding men also tend to do something with their hair. He might cause arguments to give himself the excuse to storm out – and go and see his lover. He’s not likely to get new pants as, I’m sorry to report, in most households women still do the washing. He might, though, become more attentive, do the dishes, for instance. Guilt.