My Husband Next Door

by Catherine Alliott

  ‘And I’ll pay the going rate,’ she said, ignoring Ginnie. ‘Whatever the Watsons were paying, I’ll pay.’ Dignity was restored and she was going for the crown of thorns.

  ‘Yes, I know you will,’ I said miserably, wishing I didn’t have to take it. But I did. My mother’s chin rose stoically to accommodate the crown.

  ‘All the bills too.’

  ‘It’s included in the rent,’ I said wretchedly.

  ‘Bye, then, Mummy,’ plunged on my sister. ‘I’ll come by and take you to Woodstock soon. You wanted to see Blenheim, didn’t you? The gardens are glorious, and the lake. Tomorrow, if you like?’

  ‘Well, give me a couple of days to settle in, Ginnie,’ she said impatiently. ‘There’s no mad rush, is there?’

  And Ginnie agreed there most certainly wasn’t. Giving me a guilty peck on the cheek, she slipped away, in the manner of a woman, I thought, watching her scurry to her car, who’s just planted a small bomb.

  It reminded me of when the children were little and had a nasty cold, sometimes even a bit of a bug, but I’d take them to school anyway: deposit them guiltily in the playground – and run, desperate to get to my easel. Of course, they’d detonate at about lunchtime and I’d get a call from the school, have to drop my brush and go and get them. Naturally there’d be no question of Sebastian going, I recalled, spotting a curtain finally open at the top of the Granary. It always fell to me. Just as had the shopping and cleaning and everything else to do with the two houses we’d ever lived in – this one, bought from Ottoline ten years ago, the one in London before that – but that was how I’d wanted it. I’d wanted to be the wife of the famous painter who dabbled a bit herself: ‘Who is that beautiful girl? Oh, really? Sebastian Montclair’s wife? Mother of two? No.’

  And I’d loved every minute of it. Had played the part to perfection. Had often felt I was in a film, in fact, racing down the King’s Road in a tiny skirt with Diblet on a lead and Josh riding on the back of Tabitha’s pushchair, all of us laughing as I dropped her at nursery, then him at school, kissing them both goodbye. Running home to Flood Street via the little grocer’s on the corner to pick up a baguette, fruit, cheese, possibly a bunch of daffodils. Pablo, the shopkeeper, would stand in his doorway in his long white apron, shaking his head and calling: ‘Slow down! You do too much!’ I’d laugh and brandish my daffodils. Back I’d dash to my studio, my husband, my easel in the corner, only a tiny part of me divorced from the action, feeling like a spectator who’s wondering uneasily what’s going to happen next. Knowing things are not quite right.

  And slowly, insidiously, as the children grew older, this film did begin to get stranger. A bit jerkier, perhaps, before lurching on in its merry, rom-com way. The scenery was unfamiliar now, the action taking place in the country. Removal lorries arrived at a farmyard, and the young couple, last seen living at a house in Flood Street, emerged cautiously from a car as their children jumped joyfully, with their dog, to explore. And then it got more peculiar, this film, as unfamiliar people appeared. Like Isobel. Isobel, bottle-blonde and buxom, who wasn’t introduced slowly, maybe in a crowd scene at a party, or perhaps by implication with a shot of Sebastian reeling home drunk from the pub where she worked, lipstick on his collar – but with a bang, when I’d come back from shopping mid-morning, the children at school. I’d dashed upstairs thinking I had a good two hours at my drawing board in the attic – by now I’d abandoned the easel and was illustrating children’s books – and had popped to the bedroom en route to dump my bag. Stopped in my tracks. There he was, in bed with her. Waiting for me, almost. Looking me straight in the eye as I burst in, as if to say: It doesn’t matter how wonderful you are, Ella, what a bloody good job you do of managing things, of splicing together this delightful footage, I can still bring it to a shuddering halt, just like that. I can still press the nuclear button. Have done, too.

  Hadn’t he just?

  ‘Is this gas?’ My mother was saying. She bent over and fiddled with the knobs on the cooker, sniffing hard. If it was she’d be out cold by now.

  ‘No, electric,’ I told her, going across to demonstrate. I held my hand over the ring. ‘It just takes a moment or two to warm up. There’s no gas in the village. We’re not on main drains, either. In fact, the septic tank needs emptying; it’s a bit whiffy at the moment.’

  ‘And you have to do that, do you?’

  ‘Well, not personally,’ I said, momentarily diverted at the idea of prising open the vast lid and shovelling tons of neat sewage into barrows. ‘A tanker comes and siphons it away. I’m just saying that it might be a bit more rural round here than you’re used to.’

  ‘I don’t frighten easily, Ella,’ she told me crisply. ‘I was brought up in the country, don’t forget.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, realizing I probably had been trying to scare her. Hoping my woodworm and raw sewage would send her scuttling home, back to Dad. Except, of course, Dad wasn’t there. On a date, no doubt. All at once I couldn’t cope with the subterfuge.

  ‘Mum,’ I blurted suddenly, ‘I know about you and Dad. Ginnie told me. I can’t carry on pretending I don’t.’ She looked me frigidly in the eye. I blinked first. ‘Do you –’ and this was brave – ‘do you want to talk about it?’

  Her eyes glittered briefly. ‘No, I do not. And in any event, you’d hardly be the best person for the job, would you? With a failed marriage behind you? And for your information, even if I were the sort of woman who wanted to settle down for a cosy chat and a weep about such things, it wouldn’t be about me and Dad, as you put it. It would be about your father and his floozy. This has absolutely nothing to do with me.’

  And leaving me standing in the middle of my own holiday cottage, she sailed through the open French window to inspect her tiny garden, for all the world as if she were Lady Many Acres.

  As I said to Lottie later that afternoon, in her cottage across the stream on the other side of the village, it was as if she were doing me a favour. Not me her. We had a pot of tea between us and had already demolished an entire packet of chocolate digestives.

  Lottie looked pensive: the delicate skin of her forehead crumpling like tissue paper as it did when she was deep in thought, her china-blue eyes reflective. She tilted her chair back precariously and deftly flicked another packet of biscuits from the larder to fortify us. ‘Except she’s hurt, don’t forget. So she’s bound to lash out. People like that always do. It’s their first line of defence. Was that all?’ she asked, opening the packet.

  ‘Well, no,’ I told her. ‘Because, obviously, I was seething. So, obviously – stupidly – I followed her out to the garden shrieking: I was only trying to help! I did manage not to add: you ungrateful old bag – but I was literally shaking. She turned to me and said, “Help, Ella? Help whom? I’d be the vulnerable one, wouldn’t I, having shared and wept? You’d have the edge. That’s why people go into the so-called caring profession of counselling, you know, to make themselves feel better. To be able to say: Gosh, poor you, in comparison to me.” ’

  Lottie threw back her head and howled. She was a counsellor herself, amongst other things. I dunked my biscuit miserably, letting her roar. No one could laugh like Lottie: sides shaking, face quivering.

  ‘God, she’s sharp, your mum, isn’t she?’ she said eventually, wiping her eyes.

  ‘As a blade,’ I said glumly. ‘I told you, she should be running BP. I thought you’d be livid.’

  ‘Not in the slightest,’ she said, helping herself to another biscuit. ‘There’s an element of truth in what she says. Counselling is definitely a two-way street, and, actually, she’s right – it would have helped your relationship, wouldn’t it? If she’d settled down for a chat and a sob? You could have squeezed her wrist and offered her a tissue, and then the next time you saw her, when you took over a flask of soup or something generous, she’d find it hard to be quite so abrasive, having let her guard down.’

  ‘Abrasive? Repulsive, you mean.’

  ‘OK, repulsi
ve. But it would make life easier.’

  ‘But why shouldn’t it be bloody easier?’ I said petulantly. ‘I’m the one having her to stay.’

  ‘Yes, but she’s the one with the problem. She hasn’t come to help you out, to make you feel better; she’s come to sort herself out. Anyway, don’t get too bogged down. She won’t be with you for long. I should just grit your teeth and get on with it. If she wants to be ignored, flaming well ignore her. Let Ginnie be the one pussy-footing about and wringing her hands and getting swatted away for her pains. As you say, you’re making the biggest gesture by having her. If you ask me, it’s only a hiccup in a very long marriage. God, they must have been together for donkey’s years. She’ll be back with your father within a twinkling, you mark my words.’

  I did. Had always marked Lottie’s words, for she was not only my best friend, but my wisest by far.

  ‘You think?’

  ‘Of course. Matter of weeks. Days, even.’

  I breathed out gustily. Was genuinely heartened as I straightened my back in her creaky old Lloyd Loom chair, and even resisted the new packet she opened. Lottie didn’t, but then Lottie didn’t really care about weight, just bought something a bit roomier next time. And she was only a couple of sizes too large, anyway. And pretty too, so one didn’t really notice. Silky-straight blonde hair to her shoulders, that soft peachy skin, bright blue eyes like a doll and the most unlined face of a woman her age I’d ever seen. ‘At our age,’ she’d say, ‘you choose between your face and your bottom.’ No prizes for guessing which she’d chosen.

  She lived on the opposite side of the village to me, in a tiny blue terraced cottage, which was picture-postcard perfect on the outside, and terminally damp within. Especially in the winter when the river crept right up the path to her door. Lottie made do with sandbags and a cheerful smile and swept the water away. Her neighbours rang the council, put up For Sale signs and fretted – but she shrugged it off, saying it would soon be spring. She’d arrived on my doorstep just after we’d moved into the farm, with a bunch of tulips. ‘If you’re anything like me,’ she’d said, ‘you’ll be in a state of complete and utter chaos, so I thought I’d offer tea and sympathy at my place. It might cheer you up to see a house that’s been lived in for four years but is even more chaotic than your own.’

  I’d smiled and thanked her for the flowers. And then the following week, when everything in my house was pretty much where it should be but nothing felt any better in my heart, I’d popped round for that cuppa, wishing Sebastian would talk to me and knowing I needed a friend. I discovered that Lottie was not exaggerating. Her house, as she cheerfully put it when she opened the front door, was indeed a tip.

  ‘The trouble is, if I clear up, I can’t find anything,’ she’d wailed.

  She’d led me back down the obstacle course that was her hallway, strewn with finds from car-boot sales which would eventually appear on her Saturday stall in the market. We wound our way round pretty broken bird cages, delicate three-legged chairs, and an assortment of elegant yet wireless lamps, to arrive in her kitchen, where what looked like a full-scale model of HMS Ark Royal was being assembled on the table. Lottie – or Hamish, her husband – always had a project on the go. Always a big idea that was going to make their fortune. Hamish had once built half a boat in the garden shed. Almost all were cheerfully abandoned halfway through as a bad idea, whereupon they’d embark on the next.

  The present scheme involved a mountain of wool and an electric knitting machine, found at a boot sale. It was in perfect working order apparently and they were going to run up adorable baby bonnets and booties to sell to the smart boutiques of Cheltenham. I couldn’t quite see it myself, but I didn’t comment because it had been Hamish’s idea and hopefully that meant he was doing the knitting. A good thing. As Lottie freely admitted, being addicted to beautiful things, she certainly hadn’t married him for his brains: he was the bearer of few. In his youth he’d been an exceptional cricketer: tall and elegant, with chestnut curls and an aquiline nose, he’d gracefully send sixes and fours down the crease to the boundary, behind which Lottie sat, panting and adoring, clapping hard as lots of inside leg was displayed. Unfortunately he’d proved not quite good enough to play at county level so, newly married, they’d cast around for other things. Insurance, advertising, watch and car sales and carpentry had all had a brief mention on his CV, but he’d always been politely moved on – no one could ever be rude to Hamish with his easy smile and relaxed manner. Projects were now his thing, whilst Lottie brought home the real bacon.

  To be fair, Hamish was currently appearing in underwear ads for thermals on the back of the Sunday Express – if you’ve ever wondered who those lantern-jawed, greying-at-the-temple chaps are, now you know. But it was Lottie who left the house at eight and returned at seven. She was an acupuncturist at the local Holistic Centre, where I was quite sure her clientele came as much for her words of wisdom as her skill with the needle. This, she’d assured me, was just as well. She’d recently retrained – acupuncture being more lucrative than counselling – and hadn’t quite found her feet. Occasionally, nerves struck. I’d assured her this was completely natural. She’d only just started.

  ‘I’ll have only just finished soon,’ she’d said glumly. ‘When word gets about that the new acupuncturist can’t pin the tail on the donkey, let alone cure clinical depression. I literally have to see the needles and my hands start shaking.’

  ‘Only at the very beginning. When you first started,’ I consoled. ‘Not now.’

  ‘Remember when I kept saying: “Just a little prick”?’

  I giggled.

  ‘The women used to laugh. Found it amusing.’ She sighed. ‘The men didn’t, obviously.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘And then I got that complaint …’

  ‘Only one.’

  ‘I know, but the management said I was too frivolous. I didn’t tell them it was to calm my own nerves and that I had to laugh my way to the semi-naked body on the slab. And now? Oh, God, I don’t know, Ella, I just can’t seem to get it right.’ She shot her hands through her hair. ‘Can’t seem to be confident about it. It all seems so crucial somehow, to get the sodding needle in exactly the right place.’

  Well, it is, rather, I’d thought uncomfortably. But I didn’t say anything. Wriggled nervously instead. Personally I reckoned she’d be better off going back to the counselling, which she was so brilliant at, but Hamish was keen for her to keep going with the acupuncture and, one day, have her own practice. Here, at home, he thought.

  He was outside on the terrace even now, painting some terrible old garden table, which evidently had all the makings of the new reception desk. Apparently it was destined for the narrow hall, the one you currently had to limbo-dance down.

  ‘Have you tried talking to him?’ she asked, watching Hamish lope to the garden shed for more paint, moving with his long, easy stride. She was still so much in love with her husband it often made my heart ache to see them. She turned back. ‘Your father?’

  ‘Oh.’ I came back to her. To reality. And my mother in my back garden. ‘No, I haven’t. But Ginnie has. It wasn’t an unqualified success.’

  Lottie grimaced. ‘I can imagine.’

  She and my sister didn’t always see eye to eye.

  ‘So I thought I’d ring him up tonight,’ I went on quickly, not in the mood to hear her views on Ginnie’s shortcomings as a suitable emissary. ‘I was going to ring yesterday, but then thought – no. Give him a night or two alone in that house. He might be sadder than he imagined, knocking around on his own.’

  ‘Good thinking.’ She sipped her tea. ‘After all, it’s one thing to entertain dreams of an extra-marital fling, but quite another to have carte blanche to go ahead with it when your wife’s disappeared. I’m sure a few nights of a solitary boiled egg will take the wind out of his sails.’

  ‘Exactly,’ I said, immensely cheered. I wasn’t sure Dad could even boil an egg. I even wondered if I
should call the Watsons and say that if anything fell through with Millie Saunders, they could come back? Extend my ad in The Lady?

  ‘What about yours?’ I asked, dunking what I determined really was the last biscuit of the day. ‘Speaking of problem mothers?’

  Lottie’s mother was a formidable and ferocious ex-head mistress. She’d recently lost the plot a bit but refused to go into a home, even though she ate the cat food and emptied buckets of water from bedroom windows, splashing her neighbours.

  ‘Terrible.’ Lottie’s shoulders hunched in terror. ‘Much worse. And so rude.’

  ‘But not coming here?’

  ‘No, thank God.’

  Lottie, to her credit, and to Hamish and the children’s dismay, had offered to have her, but she’d refused to go anywhere. Had bellowed down the phone to Lottie: ‘Who, pray, in their right mind, would want to live in your house?’

  Lottie had replaced the receiver murmuring: ‘Well, you’re not in your right mind, so I’d thought you might.’

  ‘Hamish took a call this morning from Abdul in the Spar, where she does her shopping. He left me this note.’ She pushed it across gloomily. It read:

  Abdul rang. Your mother smashed a bottle of ketchup in his shop this morning. Sadly her attempts to clear it up with her bare hands were not entirely successful. No doubt frustrated, she then ran her hands through her hair. Terrified Shoppers Ran From Blood-Soaked Woman!

  ‘Oh, God.’ I passed it back, shocked. Wondered if in thirty years’ time Lottie and I would be such a problem to our own children. Or even fifty years’ time. Weren’t we supposed to live to a hundred now? What on earth would we do after the age of eighty? Potter round going gently gaga, being an emotional drain on our families? Or nimbly play bowls with ancient but toned brown legs in white shorts? The latter, I hoped.

  ‘Shoot me,’ Lottie told me firmly now. ‘If I ever show signs of turning into my mother. I give you full permission.’

  ‘I thought that was my job?’ Hamish came in through the back door, bending his head to accommodate his great height. ‘I thought I was the one wielding the shotgun?’ He stooped to kiss my cheek, flashing that famous smile. ‘Hello, doll.’