Diary of an Unsmug Married

by Polly James

  Greg does another few sit-ups, if raising your head, but not your body, counts, while I try to work out how to get his full attention. It’s not easy, given how focused he seems.

  ‘Love-life’s sort of what I want to talk about,’ I say, eventually. ‘Getting one, I mean.’

  ‘Well, why didn’t you say so?’ Greg says, rolling over sideways and sitting up. ‘I’m all ears, so fire away.’

  Oh God, now I’ve gone and done it. There’s no choice but to spill the beans.

  After I’ve told him (almost) the whole story, Greg’s appalled, but also fascinated. I don’t think he’s ever thought of me as someone with a love-life – and certainly not one involving an International Director of a Global Oil Company. Now he doesn’t know what to think.

  ‘Are you sure about this, Mol?’ he says. ‘Max is so nice – but, God, this Johnny must be rich. Has he got any daughters who are single and fancy-free?’

  ‘One,’ I say. ‘She’s about five years old, so you’re out of luck.’

  ‘True,’ says Greg. ‘Though you’d better not mention her to Mr Beales. Just in case.’

  THURSDAY, 9 SEPTEMBER (DAYTIME)

  Greg and I spend all morning and half of the afternoon arguing about the finer details of Plan C, in between dealing with the usual suspects. Finally, we reach agreement: I am to text Greg as soon as I meet up with Johnny, and if we change location, and again when I get home. Which has to be before 1:00am or Greg will declare a state of emergency, phone the police, and report me missing.

  I don’t want to think about what will happen after that. There’s no turning back now, anyway – not now that Johnny’s already in the UK.

  ‘Arrived Heathrow, and boarding train,’ he says, in a text. ‘Can’t wait to see ALL of you.’

  As I’m reading the message, my mobile rings. I’m so startled that I nearly drop it, and I’m even more flustered when I see that the caller is Max. Bloody hell. For one panic-stricken moment, I think that he may be able to read Johnny’s text, simply because it’s still on the screen when his call comes in. I am really losing the plot.

  ‘What time are you going to this Law Society thing tonight?’ he says. He must be driving, as I can hear the car engine in the background.

  ‘What?’ Oh, yes – my cover story. I am such a useless liar.

  ‘Seven-thirty. Why?’ I say, after a pause.

  ‘I’ll be back sooner than I thought from this customer’s house, so I’ll be home in time to give you a lift,’ says Max. ‘Which hotel is it that you’re going to?’

  Oh, good God. My mind goes blank for a minute. I can’t think of a single hotel apart from the real one, and I can’t tell Max the name of that. Then I recall the Marriott County Hall.

  ‘The Marriott,’ I say. ‘You know.’ (I hope he does, as I’m not entirely sure Lichford even has a Marriott, now I come to think of it.)

  ‘Oh, right,’ says Max. ‘That’s a bit of a long way out. You’d better be ready by seven, then. See you when you get home. ’Bye, darling.’

  Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. Where is the bloody Marriott? I ask Greg, who starts to laugh. It turns out that it isn’t even in Lichford, but is miles out in the sticks somewhere. I’d need to take out a mortgage to afford a taxi back into town, and I’d be horribly late even if I did.

  ‘What’s it worth?’ says Greg, after I’ve explained my dilemma.

  ‘What?’ I say. I can’t think straight.

  ‘What’s it worth, to save your arse?’ he says. ‘Obviously, I’ll have to pick you up at the Marriott in the Gregmobile, as soon as Max has dropped you off there, then drive you back to the right hotel, just in time to meet the Baron of Oil.’

  Sometimes that boy is a genius – even if he does take advantage of other people’s difficulties. Now I have signed my life away for the next two months. Greg says I have to deal with every campaign postcard and lobbying email, single-handedly – plus I have to make coffee whenever he likes.

  ‘Without swearing at me,’ he says, as we shake on the deal.

  This date had better be worth all the discomfort it’s causing, that’s all I can say. I’d cancel the damn thing if Johnny wasn’t almost here. It’s not as if I can take a last-minute raincheck, though, is it? Not when he’s come all the way from Moscow, just to see me. God knows why – I look like hell.

  It’s going to take a lot more than Connie’s abandoned make-up samples to hide the guilt and stress that’s written all over my face. As well as today’s crop of new wrinkles.

  THURSDAY, 9 SEPTEMBER

  (VERY LATE EVENING)

  What a total shambles. It seems that I am much better at affairs of state (at an admittedly wholly unimportant level) than I am at affairs of the heart.

  When Max drops me off at the Marriott – which really is miles out of Lichford – Greg is waiting for me in the lobby, hiding behind a parlour palm. So far, so good. He bundles me straight into the Gregmobile and heads back into town as fast as he can.

  Considering what a terrible driver Greg is, this is not as frightening as it could have been, although there is one very hairy moment when we almost catch up with Max, who is waiting at a set of traffic lights. I don’t think he notices us but it’s unnerving, all the same.

  To avoid any repetitions, we then have to pootle along at about 20mph for the rest of the journey, which makes me late for the meeting with Johnny.

  I rush into the hotel, looking very windswept and even more harassed, and am so busy trying to smooth my hair out that I walk straight into someone waiting at the reception desk.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he says, in a very snooty way, then, ‘Molly?’

  ‘Johnny?’

  God, he looks exactly like Putin. Same build, probably the same height – considerably shorter than Max, though thankfully not a midget like me. He even has the same air of authority, initially, but this doesn’t last, when he fails to get the hotel to sort out the error they’ve made with his booking.

  He’s been given a single room instead of the luxury double he’d booked – probably because he normally has someone like me to arrange his hotel accommodation, and is incapable of doing it himself. Let’s hope the similarity with The Boss ends there.

  Things improve slightly when we sit down at our table, even though we’re still being very polite and formal. It feels more like an interview than a date so far – and you’d never guess we’ve had virtual sex! I completely forget we have at first, and am quite embarrassed when I do remember.

  It doesn’t help that Johnny keeps staring at me, which makes me feel really, really self-conscious, though I don’t think he can see my incipient beard. Luckily, the lights are dim.

  ‘Molly,’ he says, after I’ve spent ten minutes asking him about his rail journey, and apologising for the state of Network Rail, ‘you are not the Transport Secretary. You have much, much better legs – even better than I remembered. Now, for God’s sake, calm down, and have a drink.’

  I have three G&Ts in quick succession, which seem to do the trick, as I relax a bit. Then we eat and everything gets better and better. For a while at least.

  We’re just two people, talking: about life, our hopes, how we feel about the choices we’ve made since we were last together. No one mentions kids, or bills, what’s for dinner, or the mystery of where all their socks have gone. And no one needs to go to A&E. I haven’t felt this way in years: like a woman, not a function – or a paramedic.

  By the time we’ve finished dessert, it’s already quite late. Johnny leans back in his chair and looks at me for a moment, half-smiling. Then he says, ‘So, now what, Molly? Do we go to my room? No pressure, if you don’t want to – but I know I do.’

  No pressure, my arse. Half a continent travelled, the vagaries of Heathrow and British Rail negotiated, a hotel cock-up and an à la carte dinner paid for using Johnny’s platinum credit card. I could hardly say no, even if I wanted to. And I don’t think I want to, anyway – though I’m not sure whether my shivering
is due to excitement, nerves or the omission of my thermal underwear in honour of the occasion.

  ‘Okay,’ I say, after what seems a very long pause.

  Johnny takes my hand as we walk along the corridor. It’s the first time we’ve touched, and it feels more intimate than you’d think possible for such a small gesture. Then he opens the door to his room, flicks off the overhead light that the cleaner must have left on, and leads me inside.

  Oh, God, God, God. Past the point of no return.

  ‘So here we are,’ he says. ‘At last. I’ve waited a very long time for this.’ He pulls me towards him and leans forward to kiss me.

  ‘Ouch,’ I say.

  My hair has caught in the hinge of his glasses.

  Untangling it seems to take ages and, once we’ve managed it, Johnny puts his glasses down on the chest of drawers. This is a relief, as I’m sure I look a whole lot better without them. Then he moves in for another attempt at a kiss, misjudges the distance and head butts me.

  ‘Ow!’ I say, or rather, yell.

  He steps back, catches his foot on something, and promptly falls over the corner of the bed.

  There’s a hell of a crash and I start to laugh. Uncontrollably. It’s a nervous thing: I always laugh when someone falls over – though I stop when I switch the light back on and see the bloody gash on Johnny’s forehead and his deeply unamused expression. He must have hit the edge of the bedside table when he fell.

  So, just when I should have been turning into a femme fatale, I have to do a Florence Nightingale instead: cleaning the wound and searching in my bag for a plaster, while Johnny lies on the bed with a terrible squint.

  It’s not a good look, but I try not to judge him for that. I doubt he can focus on anything without his glasses, judging by how thick the lenses are. I can’t see a thing when I try them on in a misguided attempt to lighten the mood. No wonder he thinks he fancies me: to him, I’m in soft-focus, all the time.

  ‘There’s no need for that,’ he says, as I try to shine my key-ring torch into his eyes to check for concussion. ‘Come here. We haven’t got all night, though I wish we had.’

  He shuffles over on the bed so that I can lie down beside him. Then he takes me in his arms – it’s a good job I’m so small, as the bed is absolutely tiny. He starts stroking my shoulder and kissing my neck, and then his mobile rings.

  ‘I’d better get this,’ he says, after replacing his glasses to peer at the screen. ‘Sorry – I’ve got no choice.’

  Half an hour later, he’s still talking, though God knows what about. His side of the conversation seems restricted to questions about degrees of fever, and the number and location of someone’s spots. It must be another Global Oil Company disaster. What have they done now? Poisoned a water supply, or something?

  I am dying for a cigarette so I mime that I am going outside onto the balcony, but Johnny waves at me to wait. Then he says into the receiver, ‘Hang on a moment – room service is here.’ He covers the phone with his hand and says, ‘Molly, I’m really sorry this is taking so long. It sounds as if my youngest’s gone down with chicken pox.’

  Youngest? Youngest what? Oh, Christ. Youngest child. Johnny’s on the phone to his wife. His wife. And what the hell do I think I’m doing, when my husband is at home managing our lunatic son and waiting for me to come back? I deserve to be hung, drawn and quartered for this – or, at the very least, shot.

  I find my shoes and my bag, blow Johnny a kiss and walk out, before he can even hang up the phone.

  When I reach the lobby, I spot a taxi that’s just dropped someone off at the hotel, so I dive into the back of it and arrive home before the Newsnight credits have finished playing. Max is asleep on the sofa and hasn’t heard me come in, so I tiptoe upstairs and take a shower, as fast as I can. I feel so grubby – even though I’ve already had chicken pox.

  Not that I was likely to catch anything else, given that there was no exchange of bodily fluids of any kind. There wasn’t any nudity, either – so I could have worn my thermals, after all.

  FRIDAY, 10 SEPTEMBER

  I wake to mad beeping from my mobile. A barrage of texts, all from Johnny.

  ‘Good morning.’

  ‘I’m so sorry about last night.’

  ‘I can’t stop thinking about you.’

  ‘When can we meet again?’

  ‘I’m on the train. And wishing I wasn’t.’

  Max looks a bit curious, so I tell him the texts are all from Orange.

  ‘Bastards,’ he says. Orange’s relentless marketing is a sore point with Max. He always claims that they send him so many text messages that they obscure the very few that I send him – which is why he never replies to those. That’s the sore point with me – though, to be honest, it’s probably a good job he rarely uses his phone, otherwise it might have been him calling me last night, instead of Johnny’s wife calling him – at exactly the wrong moment.

  Unless it was exactly the right moment, to stop me in my tracks …

  Five more minutes and anything could have happened, though further injuries seem a more likely outcome than sex, on the basis of what had gone before. God knows why Johnny wants a repeat performance of that.

  I’m not at all sure that I do. As it is I can barely look at Max when I leave for work.

  ‘What the hell happened to you?’ Greg says as I walk into the office fifteen minutes later.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ I say. ‘I forgot to text you.’ Then I realise the significance of what he’s just said. ‘Oh, hell! Did you report me missing to the police?’

  ‘Um, no,’ says Greg. He fidgets a bit, and then says, ‘Want a coffee?’

  He’s obviously forgotten that that’s my job for the next two months, to repay him for the lift to Johnny’s hotel last night. I’m about to say so, when I realise why I’m off the hook.

  ‘Why didn’t you phone them?’ I say. ‘Weren’t you worried about me?’

  ‘Well, I would have been,’ says Greg. ‘But, after I went for a run, I fell asleep in front of the TV and didn’t wake up again until eight am. This exercise thing really tires you out.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ I say. ‘I could have been dead, for all you knew.’

  ‘Don’t be daft, Mol. If you can cope with the nutters we get here, you can definitely handle an oil baron by yourself. So how is the man from Moscow, anyway? A success in the bedroom as well as the boardroom?’

  ‘What man from Moscow?’ says The Boss. ‘And what did you say about success?’ He has a snakelike ability to creep up on you. It’s quite repulsive.

  ‘Igor,’ says Greg, winking at me. ‘And I was being ironic. Substitute “failure” for “success”.’

  How does Greg do it? How does he know?

  SATURDAY, 11 SEPTEMBER

  I am obviously not cut out to have an affair, so I am going to be much nicer to Max and see if I can win him back from whatever – or whoever – it is I need to win him back from. And I’m going to ignore Johnny’s attempts to persuade me that it’s pointless to try. He’s just being cynical, or opportunistic, or both.

  I shall help Max with the gardening today and see if we can bond over a love of nature.

  ‘I can manage by myself, Mol,’ he says, ‘if you’d rather do something else.’

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ I say. ‘Now how can I help? Nan always said green fingers were hereditary, and she was a brilliant gardener.’

  After I have fallen over a trowel, cut through the tap-root of my favourite clematis and dug up a stack of freesia bulbs by accident, Max suggests I get a deck chair and ‘sit down and enjoy the autumn sunshine, out of harm’s way’.

  Out of Ellen’s way might have been safer. No sooner have I made myself comfortable than she appears, hanging a pile of washing on the line. Why has she only got matching sets of underwear?

  ‘Still smoking, then, Molly?’ she says when she spots me over the back wall. (Why do people think it’s necessary to state the bleeding obvious?)

  ‘Um,
yes,’ I say. I almost add, ‘D’you want to make something of it?’ but decide that would make me sound like Steve Ellington, so I don’t. I remain a master of restraint. I’d say mistress but, in the presence of Ellen, this would provoke uncomfortable thoughts.

  ‘You really should give up,’ says Ellen. ‘It’s a filthy habit.’

  I have no idea why some people’s filthy habits are deemed disgusting, while certain other people’s are considered worth bragging about and doing in public – mentioning no names beginning with E – so I light another cigarette from the butt of the previous one, just to show Ellen who’s the boss.

  The effectiveness of this is somewhat undermined by an immediate coughing fit, but I think I manage to disguise it by pretending that I have choked.

  While Max pats me on the back, a little too hard, Ellen turns her attention to him.

  ‘You should give up, too, Max,’ she says. ‘Nicotine’s linked to erectile dysfunction, you know.’

  Max stops patting my back, but doesn’t seem to know how to respond to that, so I do it for him. Unasked.

  ‘Not a problem Max is familiar with,’ I say, before realising what an idiot I am. Even if Ellen doesn’t already know the truth of that statement – argh – now she’ll definitely want to check it out.

  ‘God’s sake, Mol,’ says Max, disappearing into the shed and closing the door with a bang.

  ‘Anyway,’ says Ellen, after a pause. ‘I suppose I’d better get on with this.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘So should I.’

  The trouble is, I’m not exactly sure what ‘this’ is, in my case. Or in hers.

  SUNDAY, 12 SEPTEMBER

  Max is in a horrible mood, and seems to be getting through an entire packet of extra-strong mints every five seconds. He’s trying to super-glue the root of the clematis back together, but his concentration isn’t up to its usual standard.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ I say, after he’s spent the last five minutes swearing about having stuck two of his fingers together. ‘And why do you keep eating so many mints?’

  ‘I’m giving up smoking,’ he says, peeling his fingers apart.