More to Life Than This

by Carole Matthews

  ‘I think I know exactly what you need to make you happy, Kate.’

  ‘Do you? Well, I wish you’d tell me because I haven’t the foggiest idea any more.’

  ‘You need someone to help you reach for the stars.’ ‘I take it that person would be you?’ She risked an ironic smile.

  ‘Will Jeffrey take you there?’

  ‘Jeffrey isn’t generally a flying sort of person. He is definitely a feet flat on the floor man. He gets airsick when the plane’s still sitting on the runway.’

  ‘Don’t waste your life grounded by duty,’ Ben said.

  ‘I can wait until the children leave home to get my life back.’ Kate flopped against the pillow with a miserable snort. ‘It won’t be that long.’

  ‘How old’s Joe?’

  ‘Ten.’ So he had spotted a fatal flaw in her argument.

  ‘Eight years until he goes to university. Perhaps you might wait until they’ve finished studying, or they’re married, or they have children.’ Ben set his mouth sadly. ‘The reason you came here is that you’re unhappy now.’

  Eight years was a long time to spend in limbo.

  ‘Then it’ll be just you and Jeffrey and you won’t want to leave him then because he’ll be lonely. Suddenly, fifteen years will have gone by—the best years of your life—and you will still be trapped by duty. You’ll be fifty and no nearer to finding out who you really are.’

  She opened her mouth to protest, but what could she say? So much of it was true. The future stretched grimly ahead of her. She clamped her mouth shut and stayed silent.

  ‘What does your heart want to do?’ Ben prompted.

  What indeed? Controlling her heart was becoming like steering a particularly difficult supermarket trolley. It was veering erratically all over the shop. She knew exactly which way she should want it to go, but was having a devil of a job making it obey her.

  ‘Are you going to negate your own desires by doing what duty requires of you, or are you going to think of yourself for once? People sometimes have to move on, no matter how painful that decision is or how much hurt it causes.’

  ‘At what cost?’ Kate’s eyes were troubled. ‘I wish I could be like that. I wish I could just do what I wanted and walk away without looking back at the fallout. You can’t just pick people up and put them down when you’ve finished with them, like smelly dishcloths.’

  ‘People do it all the time.’

  ‘Not if they have any integrity. I couldn’t be like that. Sometimes, I wish I could.’

  ‘And this is one of those times?’

  Kate nodded without speaking. She looked at him. He was carefree, exciting, daring. Not to mention drop-dead gorgeous. Her life would be so different with Ben. With him she would be a person again rather than a wife and a mother. The brief time she had spent with Ben had been the happiest she could remember for a long time. There was a strong connection between them that was too deep-rooted to ignore. And on the other hand there was Jeffrey. Safe, dependable, reliable, solid. The Volvo of husbands. She had been with Jeffrey for ever. Could she simply turn her back on that and walk away? They had been through so much as a couple, there was a lifetime of history that would always bind them together. But, at the end of the day, was it enough to make her stay for another lifetime?

  She was back to the conversation she’d had with Sam. What did she really want? The heat and passion of fire, or the sure slow security of earth? But knowing what she wanted and knowing what she felt compelled to choose were two entirely different matters.

  ‘I can’t desert them, Ben,’ she said, sounding stronger and more convinced than she felt. ‘It’s too soon. I can’t rush a decision like this. I hardly know you. Perhaps…’

  ‘Ssh,’ he said, putting his finger to her lips. ‘Then this is the end.’

  He drew her down to him, covering her mouth with his, tender, insistent and unbearably sad.

  The end. Even the thought of it made her feel sick to her stomach. Sam forgot to mention that after the soaring heights of ecstasy and pleasure would come deep, debilitating pain. Yin and yang. The natural balance.

  chapter 45

  Tim was leaning on his car, when Jeffrey stumbled out of the station. He was wearing red checked trousers, a bright yellow jumper with FORE! emblazoned on the front and a faintly sardonic smile.

  ‘Fancy meeting you here,’ he said flippantly.

  Jeffrey stared blankly at him.

  ‘I followed your car,’ Tim explained. ‘I thought it was Michael Schumacher at first, the speed you were doing. But then I thought, no, Michael doesn’t drive that fast.’

  ‘She’s gone.’ Jeffrey’s voice was bleak with despair.

  Tim’s mouth set in a line. ‘I take it we’re talking about the Aussie from heaven?’

  ‘She’s gone,’ he repeated, dazed.

  Tim sighed. ‘Come to the golf club,’ he said. ‘My four ball will have to do without me today. Besides, they only strip me of every cent I’ve got. Bloody bandits.’ He put his arm round Jeffrey’s shoulders and steered him towards the Merc. ‘I’ll buy you a nice cup of coffee and you can tell Uncle Tim all your cares and woes.’

  Jeffrey shook his head. ‘She’s gone.’

  ‘Jeffrey, old bean.’ Tim clapped him on the back. ‘The record’s stuck. Now, you’d best move that car quickly, before you get a wheel clamp. Okay?’

  Jeffrey nodded obediently.

  Tim looked at the Merc and tutted. ‘Dear, oh dear. The only person I know who can park worse than that is my dearly beloved wife.’

  Jeffrey nodded so much Tim thought his head might drop off. He massaged his hands across his forehead in exasperation. ‘Follow me!’ Tim said loudly in the voice he normally reserved for Sonia’s deaf Aunty Lily. ‘There’s no chance you’ll find the fucking golf club in this state,’ he added under his breath.

  ‘I love her,’ Jeffrey said, staring at the tar-coloured coffee untouched in front of him. Was it true that too much caffeine gave you the tremors? If he’d drunk it, that would perhaps give him an excuse for the trembling he felt inside.

  ‘You lust her,’ Tim corrected. ‘That’s a very different thing altogether.’

  Jeffrey wrung his hands together. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘There’s nothing to do, mate,’ Tim said, tucking heartily into his second bacon bap. ‘You’ve had a close shave.’ He swiped the tomato sauce from the corner of his mouth. ‘From this you must learn.’

  The car-park was packed, but the clubhouse was like a grave. Everyone sensible was out playing golf, the thing Saturday mornings were invented for, whipping the dew from the grass and performing some overt male bonding, before they had to rush home to the family and do chores and supermarket shopping and wash the car.

  Tim leaned back in his armchair, raising a knowing finger. ‘The best things in life might appear to be free, but on closer examination you’ll see they usually come with a hellish price tag.’ When there was still no response from Jeffrey, he decided to resort to song: ‘You need to pack up your troubles in your old golf bag and smile, smile, smile…’

  ‘For God’s sake, shut up!’ Jeffrey snapped. ‘My life has ended.’

  ‘One tiny grain of sand on life’s endless beach has been washed away…’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘Mate,’ Tim sighed, regarding the crumbs on his plate, ‘that type of woman eats pathetic little men like us for breakfast. We are bacon rolls to them—tasty, but we only fill a hole for a few hours. They see us as a challenge. They think nothing of turning our lives upside down for one night’s fun.’

  ‘It wasn’t fun,’ Jeffrey objected. ‘Well…it was. But it wasn’t just fun. It was more than that. And I thought she felt it, too.’

  ‘How much fizz had you drunk?’

  Jeffrey glared at him.

  ‘I know,’ Tim said with resignation. ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘Natalie’s different. I know she is.’

  ‘Well, perhaps she is,’ Tim allowed.
‘But you can’t risk it. Look what you’ve got to lose. It’s taken you years to build up your rather enviable lifestyle. Are you prepared to watch it all go into the back pocket of some jumped-up little lawyer with matching his and hers Porsches and a barn conversion in the country?’

  Jeffrey said nothing.

  ‘Frank reckons Kate’s better-looking than Liz Hurley.’

  ‘And what does Frank know about anything?’

  ‘Naff all, mate,’ Tim said with a shrug. ‘But then what do any of us know?’

  ‘He can’t even make a decent cup of coffee.’ Jeffrey slammed his cup on the saucer until coffee slopped onto the table.

  ‘That may well be the case.’ Tim tried to sound soothing. ‘I’m simply trying to reintroduce some logic into this tawdry scenario.’

  Jeffrey sat up. Is that what it looked like to the outside world? A tawdry scenario? It certainly didn’t feel like that inside.

  ‘You are letting passion take over from ration,’ Tim quipped with a self-satisfied smile at his own wit.

  It was easy to see that Tim spent his working day running a marketing department, Jeffrey thought bitterly.

  ‘You now need to concentrate on some damage limitation, my friend,’ Tim advised. ‘You must make sure that Kate never, ever, ever finds out about this. Do not get the urge to confess your sins. Honesty, believe me, is never the best policy.’

  ‘I’ve never lied to her before,’ Jeffrey said. ‘Not big lies. I did once forget our wedding anniversary and had to rush into the garage on my way home from work to buy a tatty card and some wilting flowers. She guessed that it had slipped my mind, but instead of owning up, for some reason I chose to lie my way out of it. But that was the only time. It was stupid and awful. How can I keep a secret like this from her?’

  ‘It might help clear your conscience, but bear in mind she’d be wearing your bollocks as earrings sooner than you could blink!’

  Jeffrey did blink.

  ‘Women don’t forget these things,’ Tim continued. ‘And, despite what they may say, they don’t forgive either.’ He gave him an Uncle-Tim-knows-best look. ‘Keep it in, batten it down and let it stay that way, otherwise it’ll nibble away at your marriage like a slug at a bloody lettuce. First the edges will be chewed away, a bite at a time, slowly, slowly, until eventually it’s so riddled with holes that it isn’t worth hanging onto. It’ll be fit for nothing but the compost heap.’

  The average marriage lasted fourteen years these days, Jeffrey thought. He’d read it in the Telegraph. That probably meant if the seven-year itch didn’t get you the first time, it hit you twice as hard when it next came round. Was it possible for people to make a lifelong commitment now, when that meant thirty, forty, fifty years—more? Even fourteen years sounded like a long time compared to most of their friends. If he and Kate lived to be seventy, they’d have been married for nearly fifty years. How many people made their golden wedding anniversary? Was it even realistic to believe that you could love the same person for so long? Once he had thought so.

  Tim drained his coffee, shuddering theatrically as he swallowed. ‘If you want my advice…’

  ‘Do I have a choice?’

  ‘Forget Natalie. Forget she ever existed. File her in that tidy little brain of yours in a compartment marked Do Not Open and concentrate on papering over the cracks.’

  How could he do that when there would be so much to remind him of her? Every time they went to Ashridge Forest, she’d be there. Every time he caught a glimpse of his child’s belly-button ring. Every time he ate burnt food. How could he forget the feel of her skin, the taste of her mouth, her body wrapped so deliciously round him. She had opened his heart, when he never realised it had been closed.

  ‘Do you want some more coffee? A cup of tea instead?’ Jeffrey shook his head. ‘I’d better get back. I left the kids to their own devices.’

  ‘At least you know the house will still be standing, mate. You have a lot to be thankful for.’

  Jeffrey stood slowly from the table. ‘I’ll have to run the Hoover round before Kate comes home. Tidy up a bit.’

  ‘I take it that Natalie’s skill with her hands didn’t run to wielding a duster?’

  Jeffrey glared blackly at him and then broke into a reluctant smile. ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘That’s better.’ Tim patted him on the back.

  They walked out into the car-park, greeting acquaintances in similarly garish clothing bearing golf bags. The sun was still shining and life was going on despite Jeffrey’s domestic drama.

  ‘Do you think you can manage to get home in one piece?’

  Jeffrey nodded.

  ‘Phone me if you need to, mate,’ Tim offered. ‘Any time.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Jeffrey said quietly as he slid into the Merc.

  ‘It’ll get easier, you know,’ Tim assured him through the car window.

  Jeffrey sighed and let his hands rest wearily on the steering wheel. ‘Will it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Not overnight. But it will.’

  Jeffrey started the car engine. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘how come you know so much about all this stuff ?’

  Tim pressed his lips together and a shadow crossed his eyes, but it could have been the sun passing behind a cloud. ‘My seed has not always been confined to the garden of marriage,’ he said enigmatically, before he turned and walked briskly away.

  chapter 46

  Ben and Kate sat together at breakfast, slightly apart from the rest of the group, on the edge of the jokes and banter of those in high spirits at the thought of going home. Neither of them had any appetite. Was it obvious to the others that they were lovers now, not just friends? Did their lingering glances give them away—their loving looks? The fact that they were the only two looking depressed at the imminence of their departure? Had no one noticed the fact that they had gone to an inordinate amount of trouble to arrive separately, and the quiet fuss they had made about being forced to take the only two remaining chairs, which happened to be together? With all this talk of Chi and energy flow and goodness knows what else, could they not see the vibes that were palpably throbbing between them?

  Despite Kate’s feelings that they might as well have had a neon sign above their heads declaring We Had It Off Last Night! their classmates did not look up from their eggs and bacon, which they all attacked with gusto despite the evidence of several hangovers from the party.

  Only Sam, it seemed, had guessed their secret and he smiled sadly at them over his plateful of sausages. Her feet were entwined with Ben’s under the table and in spite of her resolve to stay with Jeffrey and all other good and wifely intentions, she knew she wanted to be doing this furtive foot-fondling for the rest of her life. She wanted to touch Ben’s leg under the table, to stroke his knee, to brush her fingers lightly along the length of his thigh. Their surreptitious glances grew steadily more desperate as the hands of the clock in the dining room contrived to whizz round as quickly as they could. Ben was the first to abandon his breakfast. Pushing his plate away, he said, ‘I’ve got to go and make a phone call.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Come up to my room when you’ve finished.’

  Kate watched him stride out of the dining room with a hideous sense of foreboding. She had finished, she thought, eyeing her congealed egg and a mess of fried tomatoes that looked like something’s disgorged entrails. I just want to know what it feels like to be without you. Even for a few minutes it was very horrible. Empty. Desolate. Would this be a constant part of her make-up from now on or would it, at some given time in the future, just stop—like a rundown clock?

  Everyone else was swopping light-hearted stories about the previous evening’s celebration—who had said what to whom, who had spilled drinks down whose blouse, whose hands had wandered with overt bravado to places where they shouldn’t. No one mentioned that she and Ben had slipped away too early to be considered polite, and they all laughed too loud at things that weren’t really funny with a forced joie de vivre that somehow seemed
put on for her benefit. Kate glanced at the clock again. She ought to be leaving soon or Jeffrey would start to worry. Wouldn’t he?

  Ben had his phone clamped to his ear. The line was terrible, snap, crackle and popping like a bowl of Rice Krispies. ‘Fi?’ he shouted, as he strode backwards and forwards across the room flinging clothes into his case.

  ‘Is that you, Ben?’

  ‘Have you remembered that you’re supposed to be coming to collect me today?’

  ‘Of course!’ she replied indignantly through the interference. ‘I’m on my way.’

  ‘Now?’ His heart plummeted.

  ‘I’m halfway up the M40,’ Fi informed him brightly.

  He glanced at his watch. In his mind, he’d bargained for Fi forgetting and needing to be cajoled out of bed, thus giving him another couple of hours with Kate. He’d imagined a stroll in the sunlight, a secluded clearing—anything to stretch time and delay the minutes before they had to part. Trust this to be the one day in Fi’s life when she decided to be punctual.

  ‘I’ll be there in the twinkle of an eye,’ she promised. ‘This baby moves a darn sight better than Old Faithful.’

  He had yet to tell her that the garage had rung to say Old Faithful was unlikely to move ever again.

  ‘Has the course been good?’ she yelled.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You still sound bloody miserable.’

  I am bloody miserable.

  Fiona waited until the fresh spurt of crackling had subsided to a mere hiss. ‘Does this mean the fair lady didn’t succumb to your not insignificant charms?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ Ben said firmly.

  ‘Is that I don’t want to talk about it, yes she did? Or I don’t want to talk about it, no she didn’t?’

  ‘It’s none of your business.’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ she insisted. ‘If it’s yes she did, and you’re sounding this suicidal, then it’s very bad news indeed, Benjamin.’