by Sophie Duffy
‘How about a nightcap?’
Unfortunately all we have is a bottle of cherry liqueur that Joe’s mum brought back from Switzerland when she went skiing some time ago. Adrian is not put off easily and soon tucks in after his initial distaste. I stick to a cup of tea. I have a feeling I might need to keep my wits about me which is difficult after all that over-priced wine chased by those (regrettable) flaming sambucas.
‘Where’s this Joe bloke then?’ asks Adrian, flicking through a copy of the New Statesman that he knows can’t possibly belong to me.
‘At a meeting.’
‘With the Trots?’
‘They’re not Trots anymore. Haven’t you heard?’
‘Oh yes, I’ve heard. That’s right. They’ve sold their souls to get into power.’
‘I wouldn’t know.’
‘Still not a political animal, Philippa?’ he asks, throwing the magazine down on the coffee table that separates his chair from the sofa that I am hogging to myself.
‘Not really,’ I yawn. ‘I’m more of a fluffy bunny.’
‘Show us your tail.’ He gets up from his chair and moves my outstretched legs out of the way so he can sit down on the sofa next to me. Close to me.
‘Do you mind?’
‘Go on,’ he says. ‘Just one little peek.’
He is edging nearer and nearer to me. And I am not totally against the idea though of course he is married. To Toni. Well, not actually technically married. They’ve never officially tied the knot. Does that count?
Yes, I think it most probably does, I hear Jiminy Cricket whisper in my ear.
‘I think I’d better call you another cab,’ I say with some degree of firmness.
‘Let me stay here, Philippa. On the sofa,’ he adds. ‘Pleeease.’
He is obviously much firmer than me because I let him. I fetch a spare duvet and pillow and leave a note for Joe in the kitchen, advising him to steer clear of the lounge till morning.
‘Make sure you call Toni,’ I say before I shut the door.
That way I can sleep with a clear conscience knowing I’ve done my best. I’ve tried to get him to do the right thing. But knowing somehow that he probably won’t.
Like Cinders, Joe is normally home before midnight. But, Fate sticks her oar in and entices Joe to spend the night with his almost-girlfriend, a Blair Babe from John Smith House. And as it happens, my conscience must be a little murky because I can’t get to sleep no matter how hard I try. Maybe it has more to do with the knowledge that Adrian is lying on the sofa on the other side of the wall, but I do keep wondering what is going through Toni’s mind. Whether she is sick with worry that Adrian hasn’t come home. Or relieved. I make myself think it is the latter. It’s amazing what you can convince yourself if you set your mind to it. If you are desperate enough. And yes, I am desperate. I must be.
In May, Joe and his comrades (who aren’t really comrades anymore) find themselves on the winning team for once. Tony is Prime Minister and the days of Tory bashing are done. For now. Even I manage to get my hopes up, my political conscience having finally been pricked – though not my moral one which I am happily ignoring while I carry on seeing Adrian. And I mean ‘seeing’ in every sense of the word. I am a mistress. The other woman. The phrases filthy harlot and disgusting slut spring to mind accompanied by the far-off image of a little Margot Fonteyn galloping down the road after her mother, hair scraped back neatly in a bun. Glass tinkling to the floor. Maybe I am my mother’s daughter after all. She, who betrayed her friend, Sheila. And me, betraying her daughter. The next generation making a muck-up. But, hey, I think, chin up. As everyone is saying: things can only get better.
And actually they aren’t bad for a while. Adrian makes the treacherous journey south of the river whenever he can, which is surprisingly often. I don’t ask what he tells Toni about where he is, where he is going. She is absorbed with adoption plans. Adrian says she won’t even register his absence – though I am not sure that is entirely true. But if he is surplus to requirements, I am only too happy to have what is left over.
Apart from the romance in my life, things carry on as before. I still have my job and I still have Evelyn and Judith’s allotment offerings. And I still have Joe.
‘Isn’t it time you got a place of your own?’ Adrian asks after one evening when we’ve had to share a living room with three local councillors and an MP’s researcher before discreetly withdrawing to my room to get down to basics.
‘I can’t leave Joe,’ I say. ‘He’d be lost without me.’
‘You?’ he says, kissing my shoulder that he’s just uncovered. ‘You’re a pig. I thought I was messy but you’re something else.’
‘We can’t all afford cleaners,’ I say, a cheap dig at Toni.
He stops kissing me, turns away. ‘I didn’t fall in love with Toni for her cleaning.’
‘I don’t want to know why you fell in love with Toni, thank you very much.’ My voice sounds hauntingly like Helena’s, hoity and proud. Adrian turns back to me.
‘But I’m not in love with her anymore.’
‘Are you in love with me?’
‘Maybe,’ he says. ‘Are you in love with me?’
‘Maybe.’
Oh dear. I have a piece of toilet paper stuck to my shoe. One that I know is there but however much I wave my foot about, it just won’t go. (And my metaphors have really taken a turn for the worse.)
Maybe we are in love, it is hard to say. I know I like being with him. I know he is annoying and arrogant and facetious and a poser and an ex-druggie and an adulterer and a golfer and that he makes me laugh. He makes me feel I am living a life, my own life – not one I’ve borrowed from a library or read about in the bookshop.
But. There is always that niggle. A niggle that has nothing to do with Jiminy Cricket but that has everything to do with that old fear, the one that has been handed down to me from Helena. The feeling this will all end in tears. That those tears are waiting just round the corner.
By the end of August when Evelyn and Judith are up to their ears in courgettes and spinach and runner beans, this niggle proves to be right. I am in another place metaphorically speaking to where I was at the start of the summer. Adrian would like to get me physically to another place. He’s even suggested helping me out with a deposit for a flat.
‘East Dulwich is a good area,’he says, ‘for south east London. You should try there. It’s up and coming. Prices are going to rocket’ (etc, etc, estate agent blarney).
But now Adrian is in a different place; he’s gone away for the weekend with Toni, to Torquay of all places, staying with Sheila and Bernie and Coco the dog. Even Justin will be putting in an appearance there apparently – if he still calls himself Justin. It could be Beowulf for all I know, it has been that long since I’ve had news of him.
Joe and I are staying in London with the tourists (not that there are too many in our neck of the woods). We decide to have a lazy boozy Saturday together. We drink beer in the park (the other end from the winos and from little bottles, not cans), sitting on a rug, watching young lads play football and children on the swings. We take a boat trip on the Thames, the only breezy place in the city, and I think of Mr Raby eating his tea at three in the afternoon. We enjoy a long balmy evening in the pub garden, drinking more bottled beer and fighting off the midges. No Adrian, no Blair Babe. Just two best friends.
I am woken very early the following morning by Joe. He is standing next to my bed in his boxers and I wonder if he is sleep-walking. I have time to notice he has the legs of a rugby player though he wouldn’t know what to do with a rugby ball any more than Evelyn would. (She thinks PE should be replaced in the National Curriculum by gardening. ‘When have you ever seen an allotment invasion?’) Then, I realise he is speaking to me.
‘It’s the phone,’ he says. ‘Bob.’
My heart flutters. Why is Bob phoning at this time of day? Something must have happened. Maybe it is Helena. Maybe she is dead. She is dead and I will
never see her again. Never get the chance to have a mother.
All these thoughts pass through my brain on the short journey to the phone in the living room next door.
‘Bob?’
‘Philippa,’ he coughs. ‘Have you heard? Switch on the radio. The television.’
It can’t be Helena. She wouldn’t make it to the news. And then I see what has happened. At least I think I can see but it doesn’t quite make sense. I must be mistaken.
‘Joe! Come here!’ I call out. He thuds back in the room trying not to spill two mugs of tea (oh-why-don’t-I-love-him-like-a-boyfriend?), a worried look in his eye. I point at the television where we see news footage of a car wreck. In an underpass in Paris. I can hear Bob in tears down the end of the line. The rattle of pills. And I remember how we saw her on that hot day in July. Cheryl with a tea towel wrapped round her head. A newly-wed Princess gliding down the Mall, a halo of sunlight wrapped around hers. And now she is dead. Even Joe, a staunch Republican to the end, is quiet. There is nothing to say. Not yet.
‘I’ll phone you later, Bob. Take it easy,’ is all the words I can put together. Of course I am relieved my mother was not in that car, but I feel strangely moved by what I’ve seen. And can never guess at what will follow.
‘I’m going to phone Sheila,’ Bob says before putting the phone down. And my heart drops still further.
I stay indoors all that day, in my pyjamas, watching the news updates along with much of the nation, aware that something extraordinary has happened. And nothing can be done to change it. When I watch the CCTV footage of Diana and Dodi leaving the Ritz, I want to tell her to turn back, to spend the night in the hotel, to leave in the morning and to live a long life. But – like poor Lady Jane Grey – it is too late. The clock keeps ticking. The heart of the princess has stopped beating. She’s been used by those around her. It was always going to end in tears.
At work the next day, Evelyn is not herself. She keeps sighing and blowing her nose and saying ‘I can’t believe it.’ This is what many people are saying, lining up at the cash point, in the bakery, on the streets, in the shop: I can’t believe it.
Later in the week, Joe is at the stage where he believes the nation to be in the grips of mass hysteria, though he has time to be annoyed with the Queen and proud of his Prime Minister, whose honeymoon period is suddenly over. If it is a wave of mass hysteria, Evelyn and Judith are bowled along in it, tugging me with them. Evelyn says she and Judith are going up to Kensington Palace to pay tribute.
‘Would you like to come with us? We’re going as soon as I’ve shut up shop. On the bus.’
‘Alright,’ I say. And I am surprised at how much I want to do this.
So a few hours later, Judith arrives bearing an interesting bouquet of nibbled pinks, some frothy-looking fennel and a few sticks of curly celery.
‘I know,’ she says in her stuff-and-nonsense voice. ‘A pretty poor show, but the best is over.’
‘Don’t worry.’ Evelyn tries to be cheerful. ‘I’m sure she’d approve of the sentiment.’
‘Do you think so? She was such a stylish creature. This back to nature approach is more down Charles’ street… ’
‘Come on, you two,’ I say. ‘We can get a candle from that new poncey shop over the road. That’ll brighten things up.’
‘Splendid idea,’ they chorus.
But I’m not sure any of us are feeling particularly bright about the pilgrimage.
When finally we arrive in Kensington, we aren’t altogether sure how to get to the Palace but it isn’t a problem; we follow the people with flowers. I’ve never seen such a bizarre sight: women I expected, yes, but not all those men in suits – as if there’s been a spate of infidelity in the area and this is all they can come up with (is Adrian out there somewhere?).
We are directed by a policeman as to where to line up – an orderly British queue for an extraordinarily un-British show of emotion. We shuffle along reading the notes and poems people have written to their Princess. There are flowers spread out like they’ve grown into a field. Photos. Candles. The smell of perfume is overwhelming.
We lay down our offering and Judith lights our candle with a match borrowed from an American who is strangely overwrought by the whole process. I am quite shocked to find myself here, crying over a woman I’ve never met but who I did once get very close to one summer’s day. A woman whose picture used to stare out at me from the magazines and papers in Bob’s News. A woman who was a mother. Who is now dead.
What would happen if I were to die? Would anyone notice? Who would grieve for me? Who’d light a candle? Evelyn hands me a tissue from her pocket-sized packet of Kleenex. It is just as well everyone else around here is crying because I don’t look out of place. I am one of many in a crowd of tearful strangers. But what they don’t realise is that I am crying for me. For the bad person I am. For what I am doing to Toni who only wants to be a mother.
Or maybe I am wrong. Maybe they do know. Maybe they are all crying for themselves.
And that is when I decide to end it with Adrian. To walk away from yet another doomed relationship. Jiminy Cricket is telling me I’ve got to do something.
Unfortunately for me, Joe has been gripped by his own hysteria. It is his turn to be in love. On the day of Diana’s funeral, whilst I stand alone on the Mall, he asks his Blair Babe to move in with him and although he would never ask me to leave, what else can I do?
So I find myself flat-hunting for a place just big enough for me and Tiger, using the money Wink left me, put away for a rainy day. For that rainy day has come. That rainy day is pouring down on me, washing my life away down the drain, leaving me broken-hearted, guilt-ridden and abandoned once again.
Surely, surely, from now on, things can only get better?
2006
You will get better. You will get stronger because I am stronger. They say that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. And this tiny hole will most definitely not kill you. It will heal and mend and your heart will beat strongly, healthily, properly. A persistent rhythm. A good beat. Boom, boom, boom. You are my baby-with-no-name and I love you. It is you I have been waiting for all my life.
Chapter Eighteen: 1999
It’s a Knockout
Another funeral. This time it is Bernie’s. His faulty starter motor has finally given up, leaving Sheila stranded on the hard shoulder of life. A widow. You might think she would be relieved to be a free woman, free to cadge a lift anywhere, preferably with Bob, driving off into the sunset of late middle age. But now Bernie has gone, she at last reverts to being the devoted wife she was when they first tied the knot all those years ago in Wolverhampton, when Devon was still a place they liked to go on their holidays.
Sheila puts her heart (much stronger than Bernie’s) and soul (somewhat confused) into the making of the funeral. Most of Torquay seem to be here, paying their respects, and a good portion of the West Midlands. But these two groups will mix well. It was the sprinkling from London – Toni and Adrian, Justin and me – that is quite possibly a recipe for disaster.
I’ve attended more than my fair share of funerals but thankfully this one is taking place in another venue, Bernie and Sheila being Roman Catholics. But a funeral’s a funeral when all’s said and done. It would make a change to be invited to a wedding or a christening. At this rate the prospects of either of these life-enhancing events being staged on my behalf are highly unlikely. Maybe Toni will have more success. She might possibly manage to drag Adrian up the aisle one of these days or even manage to procure a baby from somewhere or other. For they are still together, still a couple of some description, which is surprising given Adrian’s apathy but not given Toni’s tenacity. (She’s had no luck with Romania and is now looking much further afield, to China.)
They are sitting in the front pew next to Sheila. Toni is holding her mother’s hand in a rare moment of support, though it isn’t quite clear who is supporting who. It could even be mutual. This thought, I am ashamed to admi
t, disturbs that old green monster, the one who watched Toni pirouetting around Tip Taps in front of a war veteran and a mother in tears. A mother who loved her. Who didn’t want her to flee the nest.
Right now, tutus and ballet shoes are a long way away. The only thing on Toni’s mind is the father who doted on her, championing her above Terry, her more lacklustre older brother. And there he is, sitting next to his mother, holding her other hand, looking sombre rather than grief-stricken. Justin who is still Justin and might be Justin for good now. You can’t go changing your identity for ever (unless you’re Madonna maybe). He is forty-four. Well and truly a grown-up though he still looks to me like the teenager who hung around the garage with his mates, giving me Chinese burns. He is a travel writer now – got the travel bug when he was living with his great Dane, doing odd pieces of writing here and there. Turns out he is good at it. Much better than he ever was at selling houses.
Justin has a new girlfriend, Mel, who is very small and petit, almost on a par with Mandy Denning – half my size and twice as pretty with sleek hair and funereal clothes that manage to look fashionable rather than borrowed, like mine. I’ve had to raid Bob’s wardrobe for a black cardigan as I left my jacket in London in the rush to get home. He is sitting next to me now, my Bob, dressed in a new dark suit that actually makes him look well-groomed. Dapper, almost. It has been a long time since he’s bought a new suit. The last one had sported big lapels and flared trousers and was worn only twice, both occasions in honour of Wink. It still hangs in the wardrobe amongst his other cardies. ‘I’ll never get rid of it,’ Bob likes to say. ‘It’s of great historical value.’
Six strapping men lug Bernie’s coffin past us and Bob hands over his handkerchief as I am still not in the habit of carrying around a pocket-sized packet of Kleenex. He can no longer ignore my sniffs as one or two unknown people have turned round to find out the source of such grief. And real grief it is. I have to dab at my eyes that are brimming with tears as I realise just how fond of Bernie I was, with his winks and his bamboo canes and the way he scooped me out of my cot one summer evening long ago.