Every Woman for Herself

by Trisha Ashley

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Copyright

  For Alfred Wilson Long, With love.

  Chapter 1

  Alien Husbandry

  Got up at the crack of dawn to kill the Fatted Breakfast before driving Matt to the airport, only to discover that aliens had stolen my husband during the night and substituted something incomprehensibly vile in his place.

  I expect their replicator was having a bad day. I distinctly remember marrying a gentle, long-haired, poetry-spouting Jason King lookalike with a social conscience, but what was facing me over the breakfast table was a truculent middle-aged businessman, paunchy, greying, and flaunting a Frank Zappa moustache edged seemingly with egg yolk: but I know better. The alien snot was the clincher.

  It was not a pretty sight, but fascinating for all that.

  I went and peered into the kitchen mirror to see if I’d changed as well: but no, I still looked like a miniature Morticia Addams.

  ‘Charlie,’ the Matt creature said impatiently, ‘did you hear what I said? About wanting a divorce?’

  I certainly had; what did he think had ripped the veils of delusion from my eyes? But I was temporarily deprived of speech as a quarter of a century of married life flashed before my eyes in Hogarthian vignettes: Flake’s Progress.

  The inner film came to a jerky halt. ‘Yes,’ I said finally, nodding. I understood.

  Unfortunately my memory was not of the selective kind, a cheery sundial remembering only the happy hours, so my recollections were freely punctuated with loss. Lost mother, lost virginity, lost babies, lost husband, Lost In Space.

  Charlie Rhymer, this was your life.

  Matt seemed disconcerted by my reaction, for some reason. ‘We’ve grown apart since I’ve been taking these foreign contracts, and I’ve come to realise that this will be best for both of us. In fact, we can divorce right away, since we’ve been separated for more than two years.’

  ‘How can we be separated when you’re here?’ I asked, trying to get my head around this concept.

  ‘But I’m not really here, am I?’ he said impatiently. ‘I’m in Saudi.’

  ‘But you’re back for quite long holidays between contracts – and you said it would be better if I stayed here.’

  ‘You would have hated it – you know you don’t even like leaving the house, let alone the country.’

  ‘But that’s just York – it’s got the wrong sort of outside. I’m fine at home.’

  ‘This is your home.’

  ‘I meant Upvale, and Blackdog Moors.’

  ‘You seemed eager enough to run away from it with me.’

  ‘That was love, and unplanned pregnancy, and Father.’

  Matt said earnestly: ‘Charlie, it isn’t that I’m not still fond of you…’

  ‘Oh, thanks,’ I said. ‘In fact, thank you for having me.’

  He ignored that; I’m not sure he even heard it, like most of the things I say.

  ‘It’s just that I’m not getting anything out of this marriage,’ he continued.

  ‘You make me sound like a bank. What were you expecting to get out? More than you put in?’

  ‘At least there are no children to complicate things,’ he said, which was a very low blow. He was starting to make me feel quite sick.

  ‘I’m sorry it’s come to this, Charlie, but we really can’t go on. I’ve been offered a long contract in Japan, and I can’t afford to continue maintaining two households.’

  ‘But the house … the mortgage?’ I said, my brain starting to limp onwards a bit now the first shockwave had broken over my head. ‘What will happen?’

  ‘The divorce will go through quickly if we are both in agreement – my solicitor will send you things to sign. Then I’ll pay you maintenance every month, so you won’t have anything to worry about. The solicitor will get in touch with you and explain everything.’

  ‘Will he? Is that what you’ve been doing this week, organising our divorce? Why didn’t you talk to me about it, instead of suddenly handing me a fait accompli on your last morning home? After all, I haven’t done anything, have I?’

  ‘No, you haven’t done anything,’ he agreed curtly. ‘Perhaps that’s just it. I’ve moved on, and you haven’t. Other women have families and careers and interests. Perhaps it’s time you got out there in the real world.’

  I’ve been cocooned for the twenty-odd years of my married life, and now suddenly I’m to be ripped from my chrysalis and told to make like a butterfly?

  He rose from the table. ‘I’ll ring you from Saudi, once you’ve had time to think it over.’

  Questions were already beginning to bubble scummily to the surface, like: when did he see this solicitor? How long had he been planning this? What does he mean, he’ll give me maintenance? Was there some other woman behind this? Who on earth would want him?

  ‘Hurry up and get the car out,’ snapped Alien Nation in a reasonable impersonation of my husband, ‘while I get my bags.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve got a plane to catch. It’s time to go.’

  It certainly was. I went into the conservatory, locking the door carefully behind me. Although it’s so tiny, once I’m in the middle where my easel and table are, you can’t see me for jungle plants.

  Palms, bamboo and bananas, and a fig tree in a big pot … Dense foliage and warm, slightly steamy, air.

  Matt banged on the glass a few times like a deranged moth, shouting, but I disconnected, picking up a brush and carrying on painting the tiny, naked, cowering figure at the heart of the rampant forest. It looked like Steve, the handsome young gardener at the park, and something threatening was definitely lurking in the undergrowth.

  Probably me: I often have lustful thoughts about him when I go there to sketch in the greenhouse, but in reality there is not enough cover to drag him behind even were he willing – and it is one of those ironic twists of fate that as you age you lust after fewer and fewer men, and those are the very ones who wouldn’t look twice at you.

  I really should have sown my wild oats before I got married; I fear it is now too late.

  Sometimes, too, I wonder if my body wouldn’t have rejected each pregnancy if they hadn’t been fathered by Matt? Perhaps our genes are incompatible?

  Too late for that, as well.

  * * *

  Much later I resurfaced to the sound of a familiar loud thud and yelp as Flossie (my spaniel) attempted to walk through the glass door again. But at least if she’d come out of hiding it meant Matt had gone.

  Flossie is not big on brains, but she has grasped that Matt hates her, a
nd it’s safest to keep out of his way. Of course she forgets sometimes, especially when overcome by greed, like yesterday morning when she was drooling over his feet at breakfast, and he kicked her when he thought I wasn’t looking.

  Later I went up to the bathroom and gave all my big silver rings a vigorous cleaning with his toothbrush and a bit of powdered floor cleaner. The rings came up a treat and I expect his teeth did, too.

  Flossie now sat in the dining room outside the conservatory door, looking dazed. (But this is not unusual.) She wagged her tail happily when she saw me coming.

  The breakfast debris still littered the table, and Alien Nation had left a note pinned down by the teapot that said he’d had to call a taxi, and if he missed the connection it was my fault.

  There was also the name and address of the solicitor who would explain everything to me.

  I wish someone would.

  Why do I never seem to grasp anything until a couple of years after it’s happened? I never know where I’m going, only where I’ve been.

  As Joni Mitchell says, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. I only know what I had to start with.

  Or do I only know what I think I had to start with? Or did I have what I thought I had, but somehow swapped it for an alien? Could living with me for so long have turned him into an alien?

  He was right about one thing – he’s changed, but I don’t think I have very much.

  Clearly that was my mistake.

  I took stock of my innermost feelings and discovered there weren’t any: I’m a blown egg, all shell and void.

  You might hear the sea if you put your ear to me, but that’s about it.

  Chapter 2

  Wrong in the Attic

  Lay awake all night with my mind doing hamster-in-wheel impersonations, then came groggily down this morning to find a letter from Matt’s solicitor.

  Isn’t this indecently fast? The letter said that since Matt and I were in agreement (are we?) and there were no children of the marriage, I did not need to have my own solicitor: just sign on the dotted line when asked to, and don’t make a fuss.

  The only good thing Matt’s sudden bombshell did was make me look at him and realise that he had turned into this alien, and an elderly one at that. Otherwise, who knows how long it would have taken for me to realise that I was beginning the slow trek through that long, rocky hinterland before fifty, hand in hand with a grumpy old man? (And as Sherpas go, he’d have been no Tensing.)

  * * *

  A day or two later Matt phoned, his usual bossy self, and instructed me to just do as I was told, basically, and he would see me right financially.

  That will be a novelty.

  And there was definitely an underlying threat there …

  I’ve finished the painting: miniatures of looming menace my speciality.

  When I lived on the moors among all those vast spaces I painted long, narrow landscapes where tiny figures were set like random jewels. But once transposed to the claustrophobia of a city (even one as beautiful as York) I began painting ever-smaller canvases in which the minute figures cower under threatening jungle foliage.

  They sell quite well through Waugh-Paint, a local gallery. Vaddie Waugh, the owner, says it’s because they are so small they are easily portable. Or maybe people just like having something small, dark and threatening hanging on their walls?

  * * *

  I haven’t told anyone about the divorce yet because it doesn’t seem real. And anyway, there’s only really the family to tell, and frankly I do not want to phone home and confess that not only have I failed in the motherhood stakes, I’ve also failed as a wife.

  The solicitor has explained everything to me, but it all slid away from my grasp immediately. All I understood was that financially we are up Shit Creek without a paddle, so there is no point in my fighting for half the house or a huge chunk of maintenance. The maintenance Matt does propose giving me is a pittance, though combined with my painting earnings I expect I will survive: Remittance Woman.

  * * *

  I know I won’t be able to keep the house, but the only thing I regret is my conservatory. I will have to return home to the Parsonage at Upvale – but where can I put my jungle? I can’t paint without it any more.

  I suppose I will have to find some kind of job, and a house of my own if I can afford it, because much though I love going home, it would be difficult to do it permanently after having my own place for so many years. I could live on my painting, but it would not pay a mortgage.

  Having looked around the house, it is amazing what Matt removed without me noticing before! Still, I do not wish to keep ninety-nine per cent of the household contents anyway, since they were never my choice, and in fact are as alien to me as Matt now is.

  Perhaps everything could go to one of those auction houses that take anything? I suppose I’d better ask Alien Nation if he wants to keep any of it first – if he ever phones again. He’s gone from checking up on me every other night (although after all these years he must know I’m either here or in Upvale) to one solitary, admonitory phone call.

  * * *

  A couple of weeks after the discovery that Matt was an alien, I opened the door to a most unwelcome visitor: Angie, raddled bride of Matt’s best friend and colleague, the revolting Groping Greg.

  ‘Angie! What are you doing here? I thought Greg’s contract didn’t end for another three weeks?’

  Of course, had I known she was home, I wouldn’t have opened the door without checking who it was first, from the upstairs window.

  She pushed a bundle of magazines and a box of chocolates into my arms. ‘These are for you,’ she said in the hushed tones of one visiting the sick. Then she trailed past me into the house exuding a toxic effluvium of sultry perfume and nicotine.

  If you dipped Angie into a reservoir it would turn yellow and poison many cities.

  I followed her into the living room where she draped herself into one of the minimalist white leather and birch chairs. She looked surprisingly comfortable, but then, she is all sinew and leather herself.

  ‘I had to leave Greg out there and come home early, because the cleaning service said we had weird noises in the attic. But anyway, after Matt told us about the divorce, I just knew you’d fall apart! And since you’ve got no friends except us, I said to Greg: “I’d better get back and help poor Charlie.”’

  Angie is not, and never has been, my friend. I disclaim her as a friend. Her presence is about as welcome to me as a tooth abscess.

  ‘I’m not falling apart,’ I assured her, which I wasn’t, because nothing lately seemed at all real. I wasn’t sure if I’d been living in a dream world for years and just woken to reality, or vice versa. Sleeping Beauty in her jungle. ‘Actually, I feel more as if I’m imploding – hurtling inwards on myself. There’ll be a popping noise one day, and I’ll have vanished, like a bubble.’

  ‘You poor thing! There, I knew I was right to come back. But look on the bright side, darling – you and Matt are having a friendly divorce, so it will go through really fast. Then he’s going to pay you maintenance, although I don’t suppose you’ll need much because you will just go back to that insane-sounding family of yours. Did you see your sister, Anne, on the news last night? There were bullets flying around her head, and she just kept on talking.’

  ‘Emily – my older sister – has second sight, so she knows Anne’s invincible to bullets. And I don’t know why you say my family’s insane. Matt was keen enough to marry me once he found out who Father was, even if he can’t wait to get rid of me now.’

  ‘Anne, Emily – and your brother’s called Branwell, isn’t he? What were your parents trying to do, breed their own Brontës?’

  ‘Yes – well Father was, anyway. He thought if he recreated the hothouse environment and we didn’t become literary geniuses, or Branwell became the literary giant, it would prove his point. You know – like in his book: Branwell: Source of Genius?’

  From her puzzled
expression, clearly she didn’t know.

  ‘And Charlie’s short for Charlotte, of course. When the experiment palled on Father he sent us all to the local school, and although Em didn’t mind being known as Effing Emily, I got very tired of being Scarlet Charlotte the Harlot. My family always called me Charlie, anyway.’

  ‘Weird!’ she muttered again. ‘I suppose you will go back there?’

  ‘I’ll have to, but I can’t just return as if the last twenty-odd years never existed.’

  Though, mind you, when I do visit home it feels as if I’d never left. Everything’s the same: Em running the place and striding the moors composing her lucrative greeting-card verses, Gloria and Walter Mundi haphazardly doing the work, Father writing his infamous biographies and installing his latest mistress in the Summer Cottage, Bran and Anne turning up on visits.

  And the moors. Nothing ever changed on Blackdog Moor except the seasons, that was what made me feel so safe there and so very unsafe here in York.

  ‘You can get a little job, can’t you?’ suggested Angie. ‘You’re not too old.’

  ‘What as? Besides, I might make enough from my paintings if I exhibited more.’

  ‘A London gallery, that’s what you need.’

  I shuddered. “Oh, I couldn’t go to London! All those people, and the dirt, and the noise…’

  ‘Don’t be such a wet lettuce,’ Angie said impatiently. ‘It’s time to stop being such a shy, mimsy little wimp once you’re past forty.’

  I gave her a look. I may be reserved, stubborn and quiet, but I plough my own furrow, as she should know by now. I’m an introverted exhibitionist. Why should I like crowds? I’m simply not a herd animal.

  No one could accuse Angie of being mimsy or shy. She’s at least ten years older than me, but her hair is dyed a relentless auburn, she wears eyelashes like tarantula legs, and her face has had every cosmetic art known to science applied to it at one time or another. Her body is lean, brown, and taut, except for the crêpe-paper skin.

  Flossie wandered in from her basket in the kitchen, wrinkling her nose at Angie and sneezing violently, before climbing onto my lap and regarding my unwelcome visitor with the blank expression only Cavalier Queen Charlotte Spaniels can assume. I’m convinced they are the result of an early failed cloning experiment.