by Georgie Hall
I’m awake at 4 a.m. So far so normal. Crying a bit. Keeping it quiet. Standard.
I am going to run away. I’ve planned it all meticulously.
Less usual.
Paddy is sleeping in the spare bedroom.
But it’s not about the kiss; he doesn’t even know about the kiss.
*
When I was thirteen, my mother had an affair with our next-door neighbour, a writer called Howard Cozens. I came home early from school and caught them in a clinch on the patio. Not a restrained Brief Encounter embrace; no, tongues and everything.
They spluttered an excuse about running lines for a play they were rehearsing – Mum had taken to am-dram with gusto, Howard was a leading light – but when I saw the show a few weeks later nobody kissed beyond a peck. Howard’s hand had been up Mum’s top…
The more I tried to make sense of it, the angrier I got.
Dad was still a barrister back then, away lots of weeknights. This impostor – conveniently home by day while his GP wife was out curing the sick – had taken full advantage. I went on the hunt for evidence and found a fat pile of letters stashed in a cliché shoebox in my mother’s wardrobe, bemoaning his miserable marriage and eulogising Mum’s tits. He’d written pages. My singular thirteen-year-old instinct was to see off the threat. I burned the lot. Then I glued together an anonymous note – a proper cut-and-paste newspaper ransom, entirely harvested from that month’s Jackie magazine – which I posted next door at dead of night in a brown envelope, carefully marked Mr H Cozens, Private and Confidential so his wife wouldn’t accidentally read it and be hurt: I know What you’VE been UP to. It sTOPs here, OR EVERY-one else Will Know TOO.
I assume he read it, although it was never mentioned. When the play run ended, the aftershow party took place at our house and I policed it vigilantly, marking Mum to ensure she and Howard remained a respectable distance apart. I even waited for her outside the loo each time she went in it, which Mum got fed up about because she was in there a surprising amount. Or so I thought at the time; not so surprising now that I’ve also had three children and developed a bit of a wine habit.
*
Let’s track back to yesterday…
The Italian has a prosecco bottle in one hand, champagne flute in the other and his tongue in my mouth. I have my arms around his neck and the giggles.
Paddy is outside, his shadow falling across the open doorway. ‘Hello?’
With classic French-farce timing, I dive right, Matteo left. How he hides a bottle, two glasses and a semi so fast I have no idea but by the time Paddy bounds in, Matteo is on the sofa with this month’s Canal Boat magazine on his lap, looking coolly casual and I’m panting guiltily by the galley peninsula, so hot and sweaty it’s entirely normal.
‘I didn’t expect to find you here.’ Paddy puts a kitbag on the work surface. ‘It’s an unexpected treat.’
How can he not realise? In my head, I’m playing a scenario in which Paddy punches Matteo, then I defend my actions by bringing up the basque/Love Lube/cuffs and punch Paddy.
‘You remember Matteo from the restaurant? I bumped into him after my ten o’clock viewing!’ I over-play it as they shake hands in a very Macron/Trump way.
‘I tell her I must see this beautiful boat I hear so much about!’ Matteo enthuses, still keeping Canal Boat magazine clamped in place. ‘It’s stupendo, my friend!’ As the handshake crunches tighter, Matteo flashes his eyes at me behind Paddy’s back, indicating my arm, and I realise his lucky golden charm is now dangling from my jacket sleeve. It drops, bouncing off my shoe.
‘Thanks. I’ve been doing quite a lot on her recently.’ Paddy turns back to me and smiles. It’s his shifty smile.
I smile shiftily back, putting my foot over Matteo’s cornicello. Ohgodohgodohgod, this is hell. ‘Anyway, what are you doing here?’ I ask.
‘Just passing. Had to see a client.’
I eye the kitbag, wondering what’s in it. Fetish gear? Is he meeting her?
‘Tell me more about this beautiful boat!’ Matteo effuses and I’m grateful for the covering fire as Paddy does just that: The Tempest’s authenticity and rarity, her long working life, her meticulous restoration and conversion, the care lavished onto her, the extras. Soon they’re male bonding over talk of combustion engines, gearboxes and prop-shaft couplings.
‘Tell me,’ Matteo asks, ‘did you ever see Travelling Man?’
‘Did I ever?’ Paddy looks positively boyish. ‘Got the DVD box set at home.’
He has?
Matteo is beyond thrilled such a thing exists. Soon they’re running an episode-by-episode analysis. Both agree that a scene involving a crop helicopter and Chirk Aqueduct was a classic.They’re so absorbed they don’t notice me kick the gold cornicello charm out of sight.
‘Dad and me came across the original narrowboat, Harmony, on the Grand Union a couple of times,’ Paddy tells Matteo. ‘Even bought her lifebuoy ring as a memento. She’s a floating art gallery down Somerset way now.’
From the Italian’s face, my husband could be saying he dived the Titanic wreck and brought up Madeleine Astor’s diamond choker. I’m in shock, but I barely have time to adjust to all this male bonding before it comes unglued.
‘If you throw in that lifebuoy with the deal,’ Matteo slaps Paddy on the arm, ‘I might even buy this boat for the crazy price your wife named.’
Now Paddy looks like he wants to punch him, which is getting more on script.
‘Perhaps you should leave me to talk to Paddy about this?’ I tell Matteo in a mad, gritted-teeth way, wishing more than anything that I hadn’t let him kiss me.
‘Of course!’ He winks (winks!) and leaves with lots of ‘ciao!’, ‘a dopo!’ and a ‘call me!’ phone mime directed my way, leaving me with the distinct impression I’ve just been played by a pro.
Or am I flattering myself?
*
Here I am awake, seventeen hours later, rerunning highlights of the Hollander domestic that followed.
We fade up on the interior of a narrowboat. It’s midday. Sunlight streams through the portholes as Paddy and I face each other.
‘My family want to sell this boat,’ I tell him, freshly kissed and boozed wet lips trembling like Sue Ellen Ewing’s.
‘Have you no fucking idea what she means to me?!’
At this, I start pacing around and wringing my hands in time-honoured guilty soap-wife fashion. ‘I do, Paddy. I do.’
‘What were you THINKING, agreeing a price?’
What was I thinking of? How hot I was, mostly, and not in an adulterous and desirable sense.
To help us along, my phone rings at this very moment with ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’. It’s my mother’s ringtone and we both know it. I reject the call.
‘I might have guessed your parents would do this to me.’
‘Don’t blame them, blame me! This is my fault.’
At this, my husband kicks the sofa, which I think on reflection was a subconscious reflex against my mother who had it reupholstered in flowery toile de jouy.
We both watch as a prosecco bottle rolls out from beneath it.
‘Your loyalties have never been fucking clearer,’ Paddy whispers through gritted teeth, and I know with a thudding heart and dry mouth that it’s my cue.
‘And what about YOURS, Patrick Hollander?’ I march into the main berth and try to pull open the drawer containing the Love Lube and fluffy handcuffs but it’s stuck fast. When I try to open the wardrobe, the handle comes off. Finally, I feel under the pillows for the cat-o’-nine-tails and lift it up like Crocodile Dundee. ‘Explain THIS!’
*
If it had been a soap opera, it would have gone to a commercial break at that point, not carried painfully on.
I don’t want to think about what happened next. The clock’s taunting me. 4.15 a.m. Dawn’s already breaking outside, the birds chorusing, my heart digging up its own worms.
Did my mother ever lie awake at this hour worrying about her marria
ge, her vanishing options, whether she’d ever feel alive again? Was Howard Cozens part of that? She never had to stress about money or work in the same way I do, but maybe that just left more time to panic about her diminishing value, to feel despair at the short, bright window in which women are seen as physically attractive in our culture of small screens and shopfronts, from seventies Miss World contests to today’s Insta selfies. When we age, without warning the net curtains drop on that window of opportunity. The glass ceiling is only one of the dimensions women must break through. We have to stay visible.
Somehow I managed to host two more property viewings yesterday, fetch Edward, do the online shop, cook, message Lou and even return Mum’s calls with ever-cheerier messages as we played answerphone tennis until bedtime. She knows something’s up, she always does.
Today, I am going to run away. To do so, I must get up at usual o’clock and act as though everything’s fine.
Now, illogically, my mind keeps bleating I need my Mum, but I can’t stop myself remembering Howard Cozens’ moustache engulfing her lips and his groping hand up her top. I’ve survived years by not thinking about that day.
Which means I’ve never examined it from an adult perspective. Now it’s playing on a loop and at last I can understand why Mum looked at me with a glint of terror whenever we had cross words for months, years, afterwards. She thought I was going to betray her. But I just wanted to protect her. Protect us. I never breathed a word.
Big relief all round when Howard and his wife moved away soon afterwards.
As far as I’m aware, I’m the only one in the family who ever knew about Mum’s fling. I’ve no idea how long it went on or whether it went below the belt. I prefer to think of it as a theatre company romance. I’ve seen those happen too many times to count. We all lose perspective when confined together working intensely on a stage show. It’s why the Curse of Strictly Come Dancing strikes marriages so often. Those are horribly public. Most, like Mum’s, get boxed up and stored away somewhere so we almost forget they’re there.
*
Let’s return for Part Two of the floating Hollander fight. We fade up on the bedroom cabin of a narrowboat just after midday. I’m holding up a cat-o’-nine tails accusingly. ‘EXPLAIN THIS!’
‘You weren’t supposed to find out like this,’ Paddy splutters.
Whilst still livid about my prosecco-swilling boat dealing, he’s also now looking suitably chagrined, and seizes gratefully on the broken wardrobe handle which he starts to reattach.
I’m looking tearfully at the cat-o’-nine-tails. ‘Who whips who?’
‘I don’t know! I just thought it might get things going again.’
‘What things?’ I glare at his crotch, imagining Size Ten Mistress administering to its secret fantasies. No erectile dysfunction when that’s getting a BDSM play-whipping.
‘It was supposed to be a surprise, OK?’ He glances angrily over his shoulder. ‘You didn’t seem too keen on the chairs, so I switched plans.’
I gaze at him in shock, then down at the whip. ‘This is an anniversary present?’
‘A night away in the boat, I thought,’ Paddy opens the wardrobe to test the handle, revealing the lacy lingerie, ‘just the two of us.’ He grits his teeth. ‘Except you want to bloody sell her.’
‘You got all that for... me?’ It’s taking a while to sink in.
‘Well, I’m not bloody wearing it.’ He slams the door shut. ‘It was Miles’s idea, wasn’t it?’
‘Skimpy undies and sex shop toys?’
‘Selling the boat.’
‘I tried to talk him out of—’
‘You just brokered a deal!’
‘Accidentally.’ I put the whip down, hot with shame. That kiss. No, don’t think about the kiss! This is about Paddy’s secrets and fetishes, not my headrush error.
‘Like you “accidentally” celebrated it by opening a bottle of champagne?’ he fumes. ‘That was for our anniversary too, by the way.’
‘Where did you get it all from?’ I open the wardrobe again, faced with crotchless peekaboo finery. ‘Please don’t tell me it’s that sex shop on the A46 where the Little Chef used to be?’ Was that where he disappeared to before yesterday’s cricket match? Cruising the aisles of Warwickshire’s adult superstore before coming here to set the scene for seduction?
He can’t look at me. ‘It wasn’t there.’
‘Did you buy it online then?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘It does if you mistakenly think your wife’s still a size ten,’ I point out. ‘We get free returns if it’s Amazon Prime.’
As I examine the labels on the underwear again, a memory triggers: The Dreamgirl peephole chemise, The Feisty corset, The Lucky Night body stocking. I know these names. They all come from a script I learned long ago, a performance perfected for a small elite audience of women.
And when I realise where my husband acquired them, it makes me want to cry.
‘Oh, Paddy.’
*
Discovering that the sexy kit in The Tempest came from a box of leftover Ann Summers stock in our garage should have been laughable. But it wasn’t. It was torture, a hung, drawn and quartered brain-freeze:
On one hand, relief. My Paddy has not been perving around sex shops, leaving his parked car on show to the commuters of Leamington. Celebrate!
On the other hand, guilt. He must have felt so confused when he found that box, so betrayed I never told him about my brief stint selling sex toys to yummy mummies.
On one foot, anger. He hasn’t bought me lingerie, he found lingerie. He didn’t even CHECK IT WAS MY SIZE. And what’s with the whip and cuffs?
On the other foot, sadness. It doesn’t make me want a carnal canal mini-break with Paddy; imagining he was having sex with another woman was the turn on. QED, I am the pervert.
I should have known that box was still knocking about, just one little brick in a great wall at the back of the garage that I never find time to sort through or throw out, and which drives Paddy mad because the boat trailer and dinghy only fit in at a tight angle. There are lots of boxes. As well as storing the usual things like old toys, camping equipment and Christmas decorations, a significant proportion are mine, some dating right back to my rented flat era. If investigated (which it seems Paddy has), they mostly contain hundreds of books and plays which I can’t bear to throw out, along with theatre programmes and friends’ letters and holiday souvenirs, and the box of party shoes I could never hope to wear again, drunk or sober. A boxed-up me that no longer exists. Paddy doesn’t hang on to little mementos in the same way I do; just big things like barges. He’s pulled out one of my bricks, a brick that could bring the walls down.
And when I pointed out that I knew where all this came from, Paddy ’s pride was like a smoke bomb. He didn’t want to talk about that. There was something much more urgent to discuss, after all. That thing I didn’t want to talk about: the pressing matter of a boat sale, a wheeler-dealer Italian and a bottle of celebratory prosecco – not to mention the mystery chocolates.
*
Back to the narrowboat for Part Three, we fade up on the galley at ten minutes past midday.
I am looking at the box of chocolates on the work surface. They’re from the new luxury chocolatier on Bridge Street, a handmade selection in a huge, heart-shaped box. The printed label reads TO EMMA FROM A BIG FAN.
Paddy stands tall in the saloon, a totem of enraged dignity. ‘I suppose he got you those to sweeten the deal? Well, you can tell Mateus Rosé or whatever he bloody calls himself that it’s off. He can keep his dirty hands off her. We’ll take out a loan, buy her back.’
‘I won’t go there again! It almost cost us the house last time.’
‘This boat’s like family to me, Elz.’
‘Like the one you abandon to spend so much time on her?’ I am wildly resentful of the boat at this particular moment, of Paddy’s possessiveness over her, my brother hustling her, the Italian hankering for her.
‘So it’s all about her! What if I don’t want to tag along, trussed in a crotchless playsuit?’
‘This is bloody typical of you right now.’
I cross my arms. ‘Tell me, Paddy, what’s “typical of me”?’
‘Negative, argumentative, jealous, selfish.’
‘Keep going.’
‘It’s like you bloody hate everything: me, this boat, your work, the kids, going out, staying in, sex.’
‘Let’s roll that back and pick out the priorities, shall we? Mine: you, work, the kids, not necessarily in that order. Yours: this boat and sex. IN that order.’
‘When’s in hell’s this thing going to end? What happened to the bubbly Eliza I married?’
‘Maybe that bubble popped.’
‘And maybe I’m running out of fucking patience too! I’ve had bloody enough of this.’ He storms off the boat.
*
At this point, still mildly tight and wildly self-dramatising, I take another look in the wardrobe and confirm I’ve been married to a man for over twenty years who still doesn’t get what turns me on, or know my cup size. Nor does he know what menopause really entails.
I’m not sure I always know any of these things myself. I wish I could talk to him about it all without getting embarrassed or frightened. I wish we could be intimate again without it being just about sex. I wish I still believed in myself as an object of desire. And I wish I hadn’t kissed Matteo to taste the difference.
I am at least grateful for one thing.
Paddy has made it clear exactly what he wants, what will make him happy. And I want to give it to him. Because there’s one thing my husband forgot to add to the list of the things that I hate right now: losing.
*
The dawn chorus is driving me mad, like the neighbours having a party I’m not invited to. I get up to have a pee, and as I’m about to climb back into bed, I realise somebody is moving about in the kitchen below. Is it Paddy?
I creep onto the landing to listen, but I can hear his deep sleep breathing through the spare room door. Worried that it’s Ed getting in a panic about his Outward Bound trip, I head downstairs, but nobody’s in here.