Diary of an Unsmug Married

by Polly James

  ‘Hmm?’ he says, turning the TV on.

  I turn it off again, which makes him look slightly less good-humoured.

  ‘Talk,’ I say. ‘You know, that thing we used to do occasionally. Along with having sex.’

  ‘Oh, you’re having that sort of day, are you?’ he says. ‘Is it the result of your gin-fest with Greg last night? If so, maybe having a conversation now isn’t such a good idea.’

  Max sips his coffee and stares at the blank screen. He must be able to see something that I can’t, given how hard he seems to be concentrating. I stand in front of it and take a deep breath.

  ‘I want to know – um, well, I think I want to know – er, yes, I want to know what is going on with Ellen.’

  There, I’ve said it. Now I feel even sicker.

  ‘How would I know?’ says Max. ‘I haven’t seen her for days. Why?’

  Could he make this any more difficult? I run my fingers through my hair and then regret it. You should probably look your best when questioning your husband about his other woman.

  ‘That’s not what I meant,’ I say. ‘I want to know what’s going on between you and Ellen. I know there’s something. She’s outside in the garden, prancing around and singing about when you re-lit her boiler.’

  Max starts laughing, and I glare at him until he stops. It takes a lot longer than when I do it to Josh.

  ‘You’re serious?’ he says. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Mol. If you don’t know me better than that after all these years, what hope is there? Now can you please turn the TV back on? I want to watch the motor racing.’

  There’s so much I want to say, but for some reason I can’t find the words, so I press on and go for a cigarette instead.

  It’s a good job I’m not Kim il-Loon. I could cheerfully lob a ballistic missile at the sofa right this minute.

  SUNDAY, 17 OCTOBER

  I have another try at talking to Max this afternoon, while Josh is still out at work.

  ‘So, this Mrs Bloom,’ I say. ‘The one who keeps making you come home so late—’

  ‘Yes?’ says Max. ‘What about her?’

  ‘Well, are you sure her name really is Mrs Bloom? Not Mr Blunt, by any chance?’

  I give Max one of those tell-me-the-truth-or-else looks that work so well on Connie, on the rare occasions she’s tempted to lie. He looks back at me, with a bewildered expression.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ he says. ‘That sounds like something out of Cluedo to me. I haven’t even got a customer called Mr Blunt.’

  Oh, honestly. Does everyone in this family have to be so literal all the time? I count to ten in my head, then try again.

  ‘I didn’t say he was necessarily a customer,’ I say. ‘Or that she was, actually.’

  ‘Far too cryptic for me, Mol,’ says Max, patting his pockets down until he finds the keys to the car. ‘Got to rush, said I’d give Josh a lift home from work, seeing as it’s so cold. I’ll see you when I get back.’

  Gah. I wonder what someone else would think about the way Max is behaving if I told them about it? Maybe I should find out, so I call Greg, who doesn’t answer. It’ll have to be David then.

  He’s about as much help as a hole in the head, or less – if you believe what Mr Lawson claims. So much for best friends, that’s all I can say.

  When I’ve finally finished describing all the weird Ellen-related incidents there have been over the last six months, mine just says, ‘Well, I know you’ve wasted your potential, Mol, but I never had you down as stupid.’

  ‘What d’you mean, David?’ I say, trying not to over-react, and only just managing it.

  ‘It’s bloody obvious what’s going on,’ he says, exhaling noisily. ‘You’d be the first to say so, if it was happening to someone else.’

  I bet he’s smoking one of those stupid Cuban cigars he bought for his show-off renewal of vows. For a moment, I hope he chokes on it, until I recall that I did ask him to give me his honest opinion. He’s just got the wrong end of the stick, that’s all.

  ‘But I haven’t got any proof,’ I say. ‘And Max always goes beyond the call of duty to help people. You know that.’

  ‘Humph,’ says David, pretty ungratefully if you ask me, after all the repairs Max has done for him over the years. ‘There’s helping, and then there’s helping, if you see what I mean. If I were you, I’d come here for a visit while you decide what to do. Might help Max realise what he stands to lose.’

  I say I’ll think about it, but I won’t really. Leave the field clear for Ellen and more re-ignition of her boiler? That would definitely make me stupid.

  Oh, and here come Max and Josh, back already. They’re both shivering and stamping their feet up and down on the doormat.

  ‘It’s snowing, Mum,’ says Josh. ‘Look out of the window! It’s like Russia out there.’

  ‘It is,’ I say, staring outside. ‘Pretty, isn’t it?’

  No wonder Igor gets so homesick – even I’m starting to see how a fur coat could have some appeal.

  MONDAY, 18 OCTOBER

  I’ve got a funny feeling I really may have PMT today, though I’d rather die than admit it to Max or Johnny.

  I spend all morning bursting into tears at inopportune moments, not that there’s ever an opportune time to indulge in that. Not unless you’re about to be booted out of an X Factor judge’s house.

  Greg thinks I’ve gone off my rocker, and starts another campaign to cheer Molly up. He even donates a Twix to the cause. It doesn’t work, and just makes me weepier instead. Unexpected kindness always has that effect.

  ‘What on earth’s the matter?’ he says, when I hand half of it back to him. ‘It must be terrible if a Twix won’t sort it out.’

  ‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘I’m fine.’ Big fat tears roll down my face at the same time, though at least the crying isn’t the noisy hiccuping kind. That would be even worse.

  ‘Well,’ says Greg, ‘unless you’ve got some bizarre eye infection, you’re telling me porky pies. You look a mess. And move that invitation from the Mayor out of the way – you’re dripping on it.’

  He passes me a tissue from one of those little travel packs that his mum supplies. I’m sure she thinks he’s still a Boy Scout.

  ‘You should be singing from the rooftops today,’ he continues. ‘Seeing as Marie-Louise is back at work. Which means we’ve seen the last of you-know-who.’

  So much for that. No sooner has Greg finished speaking than Vicky comes swanning in and gives me a funny look, which stops me crying immediately.

  She’s in a very chatty mood. I much prefer it when she isn’t.

  ‘Molly,’ she says. ‘You need to buy a better-quality mascara. Yours is all over your face.’

  She tuts as I scrub it off, using another of Greg’s mum’s tissues, and then she moves her attention to the rest of me.

  ‘Look at the state of your nails, too,’ she says. ‘Why on earth don’t you grow them – or get yourself some false ones, if you can’t?’

  ‘Because I like to be able to pick things up properly,’ I say. ‘And I can’t see the point in long nails anyway.’

  Vicky looks down at hers, and wiggles her fingers to show those weird squared-off ends to their full cringe-making effect. ‘There’s always a point to being well-groomed,’ she says. ‘Men appreciate it, even if you don’t.’

  I can’t believe this is true of all men, whatever she says. The Boss’ grooming habits make me look like a beauty salon regular but, as I am trying not to rise to provocation, I don’t point this out. You should never let people like Vicky know they’ve rattled you. It’s better to be cool, yet polite, and to change the subject to something more neutral. In theory.

  In practice, as soon as I open my mouth, Freud sneaks in and takes control: ‘So, Vicky,’ I say. ‘How much longer are you staying with us? Marie-Louise is back now, you know.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Greg, rather too heartily, from the depths of the archive cupboard, where he spends a lot of time whenever Vi
cky is around. ‘When are you leaving? Is it soon?’

  He really should try to sound less keen for Vicky to go. If there’s one thing she enjoys – other than inspecting people’s nails – it’s frustrating the desires of others. (That’s as far as I can tell. Joan thinks The Boss may take a different view.)

  ‘Well,’ says Vicky. ‘I am a bit disappointed Marie-Louise is back so soon, but I spoke to Andy last night, and he’s persuaded me to stay on as an intern, until he can sort something else out.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Sort something else out, like what? There’s no budget to pay another member of staff, you know.’

  ‘No, there isn’t,’ says Greg, sticking his head out of the cupboard, but almost at ceiling height, which is most unnerving. ‘So what exactly is he going to sort out for you?’

  Vicky’s about to reply when Greg’s bloody foot chooses that moment to slip off the shelf that it’s balancing on, causing him to drop like a stone. It serves him right, but I wish he hadn’t let go of the boxes containing Adams–Edmonds in the process.

  By the time I’ve finished putting all the files back together, and Greg has found an old ice-pop in the freezer compartment and applied it to his twisted ankle, Vicky’s had a change of heart.

  ‘Thinking about it, it’s probably not my place to tell you what Andy has planned,’ she says. ‘I’m sure it was meant to be a private chat between the two of us.’

  ‘I’d kill her if I could just stand up,’ says Greg, in the paper aeroplane note he sends winging onto my desk. ‘I bet she’s after one of our jobs now. Probably yours, seeing as – technically – you’re in charge of me. And you’re a senior caseworker, not just a bog-standard one. Vicky strikes me as a meaningless status kind of girl.’

  He’s right, so now I shall have to add my job to the list of things I need to save, along with my sanity and my marriage. Now I’m crying again – so, of course, Johnny chooses exactly that moment to call me on my mobile.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he says. ‘You sound really sad.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say, caught unawares, and rushing into the corridor to get away from Vicky. ‘I think I just miss romance a bit. You know, someone who has eyes for no one else, and who really loves you. Like Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand, or Dr Zhivago and Lara What’s-her-name.’

  ‘Well, Dr Zhivago wasn’t set in Russia by accident,’ says Johnny. ‘It’s a lot more romantic here than in the UK. That’s why, if romance is what you want, I’m your best bet. I’ve been here so long, I’ve practically gone native.’

  I’m sure you shouldn’t be so surprised when the person you’re supposed to be having an affair with starts talking about romance.

  ‘Oh,’ I say, while I try to think of something better as a follow-up. ‘But you don’t make your life in Russia sound as if it’s any more romantic than mine. You’re always moaning about how dull it is.’

  ‘That’s because my Lara is in bloody Lichford,’ he says. ‘And won’t travel to Heathrow to reach me, let alone over the Urals in the snow. Or even let me come to visit her again.’

  I’m such a sucker for snow, and feeling guilty. Now I’ve only gone and agreed to meet Johnny again, just before the end of this month. And my hiccups are back, with a vengeance. I bet Lara never suffered from those.

  TUESDAY, 19 OCTOBER

  Greg has replaced The Boss’ photograph on the dartboard with one he covertly took of Vicky. He’s just landed three darts in a row between her perfectly drawn-on eyebrows, when she finally turns up, at about 10:00am.

  ‘There’s a man on a mobility scooter stuck in the corridor, outside the lift,’ she says as Greg rips her photo down, screws it up and throws it towards the bin. He misses and hits Vicky’s foot instead.

  ‘He’s enormously fat, and wearing the most vulgar shirt I’ve ever seen,’ she continues, bending down to pick the missile up.

  Greg and I look at each other, then both say, ‘Mr Franklin.’

  ‘I don’t know who he is,’ says Vicky, throwing the paper into my bin, thankfully still in a ball. ‘But someone needs to go and rescue him. He’s already knocked over the weeping fig.’

  ‘So why didn’t you help him?’ says Greg. ‘While you were in the vicinity?’

  ‘He looked really grumpy,’ says Vicky. ‘And he was smelly, too.’

  God knows why anyone who objects to grumpy constituents would want to work for an MP in the first place, but Vicky obviously doesn’t see it as a hazard of the job – which is how Greg and I find ourselves trying to manoeuvre a forty-stone man and his fatmobile, in a confined space, by ourselves.

  Mr Franklin is no more help than Vicky, and adds insult to injury by refusing to tell us how he managed to get through the ground-floor security doors and into the lift without anyone having noticed him, especially while wearing an XXXL Hawaiian shirt. Then he demands answers to questions about Coalition policies while we struggle to turn him around.

  After he’s covered bankers’ bonuses and VAT, he starts on the NHS. It’ll be the Ambulance Service next, probably after Greg and I have to be carted off by paramedics when we’ve collapsed in the corridor from exhaustion.

  ‘What are these reforms going to mean for my wife’s hip operation?’ he says. ‘Though maybe they’ll be an improvement, seeing as your lot did nothing to speed things up.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think that’s true,’ says Greg, jerking the scooter rather viciously.

  ‘Ow,’ I say, as Mr Franklin’s shopping bag falls off the handlebar and lands squarely on my foot. It hurts a lot more than a screwed-up ball of paper would.

  ‘Watch out, you idiots!’ says Mr F. ‘My HobNobs’ll be nothing but crumbs by the time you two have finished.’

  ‘I’d like to crush his other HobNobs,’ says Greg, under his breath.

  He looks cross enough to do so, too – so I have to step in before things get completely out of hand.

  ‘Well, has your wife been back to see her GP?’ I say. ‘She needs to tell him if her hip has got worse. When a GP refers a patient, it’s usually what they say in their letter to the hospital that decides how urgently the patient’s seen by a consultant.’

  ‘I hope you’re not just passing the buck,’ says Mr Franklin. ‘I know what you buggers are like.’

  I assure him that what I’ve said is true, while Greg makes various rude gestures behind his back. If there’s one thing Greg hates, it’s when MPs’ staff are accused of lying when they’re not.

  ‘Was that everything you wanted to talk about then, Mr F?’ he says, as, with a burst of energy borne of sheer desperation, we finally manage to turn the scooter around so that it’s facing the lift. Greg doesn’t wait for Mr Franklin to answer before he says, ‘Yes? Oh, good. ’Bye, then.’

  He gives the back of Mr F’s seat a congratulatory slap, while I press the button to summon the lift. Then we both leg it down the corridor as fast as we’re capable of moving – which isn’t very fast at all, as we’re both completely knackered, and one of us is gasping for breath. I must give up bloody smoking.

  We’ve almost made it to the door of the office when the lift goes ping, and we hear a plaintive voice: ‘Hang on, you two – what do I do when I get to the ground floor? You meeting me there in case I get stuck again?’

  Greg stops in his tracks, turns to face Mr F, then says, ‘Oh, no – don’t worry. There’ll be a nice girl with long dark hair coming down in a minute. Just tell her we said that she’d been sent to help you. She’s much stronger than she looks.’

  I raise my eyebrows, but Greg just taps his nose and winks. Then, as soon as we walk back into the office, he rushes over to his desk and hides all of today’s newspapers in the bottom drawer.

  ‘Where the hell have the papers got to?’ he says, rather louder than necessary.

  Vicky and I both shrug, at which point Greg blames the disappearance on someone from the Party offices, and asks Vicky to go and buy some more.

  ‘It’s an emergency, so if you could do it st
raight away, that’d be great,’ he says, as he puts a ten-pound note into her hand. ‘A constituent said there was a big piece about Andrew in one of them, but I’m not sure which.’

  ‘Ooh, lovely,’ says Vicky, for whom the word gullible occasionally seems to have been invented. ‘Maybe there’ll even be a photograph!’

  ‘Stranger things have happened,’ says Greg, as Vicky heads for the stairs and her date with destiny.

  She doesn’t come back for a very long time and, when she does, the look on her face suggests that this is yet another of Greg’s good ideas that I’m going to regret having gone along with. Especially when she discovers that there isn’t even a single quote from The Boss in any of today’s editions.

  Greg and I decide that now might be a good time to go for lunch.

  ‘You shouldn’t wind her up so much,’ I say, as we walk back from the pub. ‘Not when The Boss is behaving more normally since she got here.’

  ‘Huh,’ says Greg. ‘I don’t know why you’re defending her. She never has so much as a good word to say for you.’

  It turns out that he’s right. When I get back to my desk, the screwed-up photo of Vicky is no longer screwed-up, but flattened out, and lying on the sofa in the Oprah room. There’s no sign of Vicky, so I go to the Labour Party office to check if she’s there.

  ‘She’s gone home, I think,’ says Joan. ‘And good riddance, too – you need to watch your back with that one, Molly. She’s gunning for you. You should have heard what she said to Andrew about you on the phone.’

  ‘Well, tell me then,’ I say, after waiting what feels like ten minutes for Joan to continue without a prompt.

  ‘She said, “If you want me to stay, Andy, then you can forget about me being an intern. You can’t pay someone as useless as Molly and expect someone like me to work for free.”’

  ‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Oh, dear. Could you hear what Andrew said?’

  ‘No,’ says Joan. ‘But he must have asked her what she meant, because she said, “I mean incompetent, Andy. And yes, I’ll prove it. Just you wait and see.”’

  When I tell Greg, he says he’ll own up to the dartboard photo, and the Franklin stunt, but that might just make things worse. If Vicky got his job, then I’d have to work with her. Or, more likely, for her, seeing as her metaphorical balls are growing ever more golden by the second.