Fourplay

by Jane Moore

Cradling her wine glass in both hands, Jo started to talk about the night before. After so much silent thought on the matter, it felt odd to hear her own voice speaking about it. It also felt exceptionally therapeutic.

  Halfway through describing the way Conor had held her face, she was stopped in her tracks by Rosie letting out a deep sigh. “God, that’s soooo romantic. You are Mrs. Lucky living in Lucky House on Lucky Lane in the town of Lucky.” Rosie was prone to exaggeration. “Honestly Jo, you have no idea. Most men’s idea of romance is grunting, ‘You scrub up well for an old bird,’ before lunging at you. Sorry, carry on,” she added as Jo shot her an exasperated look.

  Jo completed her story, right up to the point where Conor had quietly let himself out of the house. “So that’s that. I’ll never be able to look him in the face again,” she said, with more than a tinge of regret. She looked up to find Rosie staring at her with a strange expression on her face.

  “So hang on, let’s get this straight. You got passionate with an incredibly handsome man with a great body and a good brain, who, instead of walking out and saying, ‘See ya,’ told you that he wanted to take you out on a proper date?”

  “Well, if you put it like that, yes.”

  “What other way is there to put it? If I was you I’d be round there right now with my diary in one hand and an indelible pen in the other.”

  “Yes, but that’s you. Your life isn’t as complicated as mine. Meeting a new man when you already have children is altogether different, because it’s not just about great sex and seeing what develops at a later date,” said Jo, taking a small sip of wine. “Besides, starting a relationship now just isn’t an option . . . with anyone.”

  “What, ever?” Rosie topped up their glasses.

  But Jo wasn’t listening. She was staring into the middle distance, various thoughts in her mind.

  “The most depressing thing about all of this is that it’s brought home to me how complicated it’s going to be if and when I start dating again. You never know whether something is going to turn out to be just a fling. At what point do you decide it’s something more and introduce them to your children? And what if your kids don’t like them?”

  “Conor knows them already, so you wouldn’t ever face that dilemma,” said Rosie. “And best of all, you wouldn’t have to suffer the indignity of dating lots of unsuitable men. Do you remember that time I took out an ad in the Sunday Times?”

  Jo burst out laughing. “I do. It was a nightmare for you, but it kept me entertained for months.”

  Desperate to widen her search for a man, Rosie had placed a personal ad two years earlier and received more than fifty replies. So she and Jo had spent a delicious Sunday afternoon sifting and giggling their way through the envelopes, placing them into piles of “worth a try,” “only if desperate” and “serial killers.”

  Rosie went on dates with all ten of the “worth a try’s” and even ventured into the “only if desperate” category a couple of times. But it proved fruitless.

  “Bloody hell, they should all be done under the Trade Descriptions Act,” she said one afternoon, after a particularly disastrous date with a man who had described himself as “huggable” and turned out to have more body hair than Chewbacca.

  Bent double with laughter, Jo had spent the next hour reading out descriptions from the personal ads while Rosie gave her slant on what they really meant.

  “Distinguished.”

  “That means fat, gray, and balding.”

  “Educated.”

  “Means he’ll speak to you like you’re a moron.”

  “Friendship first.”

  “As long as it involves nudity.”

  “This one’s used a lot. Professional.”

  “It just means they own a suit.”

  “Free spirit.”

  “He shags around.”

  “Honest.”

  “Pathological liar.”

  With all these social misfits around, it was little wonder that Rosie thought Jo mad for not giving it a go at least with Conor.

  Standing up, Rosie placed her empty wine glass on the mantelpiece and looked at the clock. It was just after midnight.

  “It’s pumpkin time. I’d better go, because I’m going to force myself to get up early for the gym which I hate. If God had wanted me to touch my toes, he’d have put them on my knees. Maybe I’ll just go to the beauty parlor instead, well, for an estimate anyway!”

  Jo giggled. “You always manage to cheer me up with your self-deprecation, however exaggerated.”

  “Happy to be of service. I’m off. If I stay here, we’ll just end up gossiping all morning and not a pot will be emptied, as my grandmother used to say.”

  “OK. Thanks for coming over. It’s really helped to be able to talk it all through with someone. I thought I was going to burst this afternoon.” Jo stood up and stretched her hands toward the ceiling, letting out a dramatic yawn.

  “Anytime.” Rosie yawned too.

  As Jo opened the front door, Rosie stepped outside and paused halfway down the mosaic pathway.

  “I’ve just thought of another crucial reason why you should give it a go with Conor.”

  “Oh yeah? What’s that?” smiled Jo.

  “He knows how to handle your mother.” With that remark, Rosie marched off down the street.

  Jo closed the door and slumped with her back against the stained glass window.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” she muttered. Just when she thought matters couldn’t get any worse, Rosie’s comment had reminded her that indeed they could.

  Her mother was arriving tomorrow.

  7

  slamming shut snapped Jo out of her trance-like state. She was sitting in the living room with Sophie who, though feeling slightly better, was milking her illness for all it was worth, watching videos with a suffering expression, swathed in her Barbie duvet.

  The doorbell rang and Jo felt her insides subside with dread.

  “She will not get to me, she will not get to me, she will not get to me,” she chanted under her breath as she walked into the hallway.

  “Mother, you made it!” she enthused as she flung open the front door.

  “Don’t sound so disappointed, dear,” said Pam, thrusting her cheek at her daughter to indicate a kiss was expected. Jo obliged, and as usual her mother turned her head at the last second which meant she got a mouthful of wiry gray hair and mock satin headscarf.

  “Now, where’s that poorly little granddaughter of mine?” Pam swept past Jo into the house.

  “She’s in the living room watching Home Alone for the umpteenth time.”

  Jo stood on the doorstep and looked down at the two large suitcases her mother had left there. It’s going to be a long stay then, she thought wearily, as she bent down to pick them up.

  Relations between her and her mother had been strained since the phone call immediately after Jeff had walked out. It had been two weeks before Jo had responded to Pam’s many messages, and even then she had made the call under protest after much pleading from Tim, who said he was going to commit hara-kiri if he had to play go-between any longer. Her mother had made a stiff apology and they had made an arrangement for Jo and the children to visit in a couple of weeks’ time. But the trip had been a disaster. From the moment Jo arrived, her mother had clearly made it her weekend’s ambition to make her daughter “see sense,” and try to patch up her marriage.

  “Worse things happen at sea, dear,” she’d said.

  “Yes, but I’m not at sea. I’m in a semi in South London,” Jo had muttered.

  “Don’t be facetious, Jo. You know exactly what I mean.”

  This kind of conversation happened every time Jo found herself alone with her mother, so she had spent the entire weekend trying to dodge their “little chats” as Pam called them.

  Her father had seemed curiously philosophical about the whole mess, and one of Jo’s fondest memories of her visit was a long talk they’d had sitting in the Pam-free sanctity of the
garden shed. As he sat and scraped the caked-on mud from his ancient wellingtons, Jo had told him the details of how she’d caught Jeff having an affair and how he said he loved the new woman.

  “Mum thinks I should fight for him,” said Jo, raising her eyes from the floor to gauge her father’s reaction to the remark.

  “Pointless,” he said matter-of-factly. “If Jeff has gone that far down the line with this woman, he needs to go and get her out of his system. Even if you had persuaded him to stay, you would both have ended up hating each other for it.”

  “Why?” Jo was surprised at her father’s clear-cut, insightful view. She had always thought him the type to avoid even thinking about emotional matters in any depth, let alone discussing them.

  “Because every time he was out of your sight you would be wondering whether he was with her, and it would eat you up. And even if he wasn’t with her and trying hard to stay away, he would probably start to resent you for it. Unfair I know, but I think it’s the truth.” He paused and looked at Jo apologetically, but she didn’t respond. “The best thing is to let the whole thing burn itself out, because, believe me, it will,” her father continued. “He’ll be missing the children already, and the age gap between them will start to grate once the novelty wears off. The question you need to ask yourself is, when he wants to come back, will you be willing to have him?” He looked directly at Jo, his eyebrows raised.

  She stared at the floor for a few seconds, then looked up and gave a halfhearted shrug. “At this point in time, I really have no idea.”

  Her father’s face softened. “You don’t need to know it right now,” he said. “In fact, you shouldn’t even think about it until it happens. Easier said than done I know, but just get on with your own life, and the rest will fall into place.”

  Jo had felt buoyed up by the conversation, liberated by the fact that at least one of her parents seemed to understand the pain and sense of hopelessness she was experiencing.

  She’d never heard her parents argue beyond the odd snappy remark here and there, but on this visit she was startled by a particularly bitter tirade from her father to her mother shortly after they’d finished Sunday breakfast.

  He had been sitting quietly in the corner of the living room reading the local newspaper, while Jo and her mother remained at the dining table chatting.

  Naturally, her mother hadn’t been able to resist the chance to drag up the subject of Jeff one more time before Jo and the kids set off back to London.

  “You have to work at a marriage you know,” said Pam, leaning across and picking a minuscule piece of fluff from Jo’s sweater.

  “I wasn’t aware there was anything that needed working at Mum.” Jo gave a we’ve-been-here-before sigh.

  “Well, they do say a happily married man never strays, so there must have been a reason why he did what he did.” Her mother’s mouth had set into a determined line.

  Jo had heard so many variations of Pam’s irritating perspective on her marital problems that she couldn’t even be bothered to get worked up about it any more. But on this occasion, she didn’t need to. Her father did it for her.

  “For Christ’s sake woman, will you shut up about the bloody subject! You’re like a stuck record. The poor girl has come here to get some support, not to be attacked at every given opportunity.” He was red in the face with undisguised rage.

  Pam looked so startled by her husband’s outburst that, for a moment, Jo thought she was going to cry. Her bottom lip trembling, her mother looked across at him with the hurt expression of a small child that has been told off and doesn’t know why.

  It was a defining moment for Jo. She had long ago realized her parents weren’t infallible as individuals, but she had never really considered their marriage might be anything but happy. Now it was staring her in the face for the first time that their relationship was far from the perfect picture she and Tim had imagined as children. It finally dawned on her that Jim and Pam had endured their own rocky patches, insecurities and compromises that everyone had to cope with. But they had obviously done a sterling job at shielding their children from the often harsh realities of married life.

  Perhaps I didn’t put enough effort into my relationship with Jeff because I thought happy marriages just happened, Jo thought to herself.

  In the past, she and Rosie had indulged in endless conversations about how their family backgrounds might have affected their own adult relationships. Rosie’s father had been a violent drunk and, as a child, she had witnessed many frightening scenes. At the age of nine, she had threatened her father with a knife to make him stop beating her mother, and the experience had never left her.

  “It’s not that I don’t trust men, I do,” she said once. “It’s just that I keep a sharp eye on how they behave after a drink. Any sign of even the slightest Jekyll and Hyde thing and it’s all over for me. Been there, seen it, got the bruising.”

  The avoidance of violent men was the only hangover Rosie seemed to have from her turbulent past, and this consoled Jo when she thought of the effect her and Jeff’s split might have on Thomas and Sophie.

  “If I keep things as friendly as possible with Jeff in front of them, then they might just emerge from it all with a realistic view of relationships, which is no bad thing,” she told Rosie. “I had an idealistic view because my parents seemed to have the ‘perfect’ marriage, and look where it got me.”

  Her thoughts were sharply interrupted by the unimaginable sound of her parents embarking on a full-scale row.

  “How dare you speak to me like that. I am merely trying to save our daughter’s marriage, rather than encourage her to give up on it, which is what you seem to be doing.” Her mother’s voice was quivering with emotion.

  Jim had thrown his newspaper to the floor and was pacing up and down in front of the fireplace. “Don’t start bloody crying, that’s all I need. It may have escaped your attention Pam, but Jeff left Jo, not the other way round. This is the twenty-first century now, women don’t need men to survive any more. She can get on with her own life.”

  Pam shot him a bitter look, tears welling up behind the large spectacles Tim always described as “Morris Minor headlamps.” “With that attitude, why does any woman bother getting married at all? You men are all the same, you always think the grass is greener. But it isn’t, it’s just different.”

  They fell into a stony silence, exchanging hard looks across the soft furnishings.

  “Look you two, don’t fall out over me,” Jo pleaded. “Jeff’s gone and, for the moment, there’s nothing I can do about it. Let’s move on.” Her words sounded convincing, but deep down she sensed her parents’ argument had nothing whatsoever to do with her marital problems.

  As far as she knew, from the limited, stiff telephone conversations with her mother since, things seemed to have settled down again after Jo had left. So she was surprised when her mother had called to say she would be making a long visit.

  Pam had never left Jim for more than a weekend before. It was just one generation behind, but Jo never ceased to be amazed by how different their marriage was compared to hers. She and Jeff had often taken separate long weekends away with friends to give each other a break from the children.

  As a teenager, Jo remembered shaking her head in disbelief as she watched her mother lay out her father’s clothes each morning.

  “He’s not bloody disabled, Mum,” she would snap, furious that her mother was displaying all the signs of a downtrodden serf.

  “I know that, dear,” her mother would reply, in a sing-song voice reminiscent of a Stepford wife. “Don’t start all your feminist nonsense with me.”

  Her mother had accused her of being a feminist so many times that Jo had enlarged and photocopied an old Rebecca West quote and stuck it to her bedroom door. It read, “I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.”

  W
ith a wry smile at the memory, Jo trudged upstairs with her mother’s suitcases and wondered whether her father was now walking around starkers because Pam had gone away. On the way down, she bumped into her mother coming the other way.

  “That poor child needs some fresh air rather than sitting around watching videos. I’m going to dress her and take her to the park to get some color in her cheeks,” she said.

  I like long walks, particularly when taken by people who irritate me, thought Jo. Pam always made her feel she was somehow inadequate as a parent, so her way of dealing with it had been to keep her mother at arm’s length. She realized that two weeks of painfully close contact lay ahead, and sat down on the bottom stair with a heavy sigh.

  Pam bustled back past her clutching a pink dress and matching cardigan, together with the white frilly ankle socks that Sophie had steadfastly refused to wear since a hopeful Jo had bought them a month ago.

  “They’re horrid,” she’d moaned. She had also declared virtually overnight that Barbie was “babyish,” thereby rendering her entire bedroom décor obsolete. But Jo noticed she still played with the dolls in the house—it was only in public that the plastic blond was now persona non grata.

  “You’ll be lucky,” said Jo to Pam. “She’s gone into her combat trouser phase since you last saw her.”

  She was nursing a cup of coffee in the kitchen when Sophie walked in trussed up to the nines in the pink regalia.

  “You flatly refused to wear that when I wanted you to.” Jo was open-mouthed with the injustice of it.

  Sophie was about to say something when Pam swept into the kitchen and answered for her. “You just have to be firm, dear. Children will always do as you say if you let them know who’s boss.”

  As Pam turned to place Sophie’s empty juice cup in the kitchen sink, Jo wrinkled her nose and poked out her tongue at her mother’s back.

  “Mummy, that’s rude,” piped up Sophie, ignoring Jo’s murderous glare.

  Pam wiped the work surfaces with an air of self-importance. “I don’t know what you did while my back was turned, Jo, but I suspect it wasn’t a good lesson in manners for your impressionable daughter. Come on, Sophie, let’s go to the park.”