Other People's Fun, page 12
Something feels different in the flat. At first I can’t put my finger on it but as I drag damp sheets over the airer and snap the creases out of pillowcases I realise I feel lonely. I’ve never felt lonely here before. Alone, solitary, abandoned, yes; but ‘lonely’ has sharper edges. It’s as if Sookie has left behind her impression of me, along with the hyacinths, just at the moment when I was beginning to find my way in this new life. I feel the pitiful, too-willing presence of this shadow self as the evening passes, an unsettling companion while I watch Newsnight and brush my teeth, avoiding my own eyes in the mirror. Sookie has made me feel like this, and I do not like it.
Perhaps she said, poor old Ruth.
I wonder if my name will mean anything to him, if he’ll remember our encounter at the piano recital, or further back. But that hardly matters now. This is about her; it always is. Her sense that some things are slipping away while other things creep closer. Waxham is not exactly a catch by her standards, and yet I understand that to Sookie their entanglement represents something compelling and significant, a message from the past, a victory of sorts snatched back at the very last minute.
I hadn’t thought beyond the one good turn but for Sookie it was only the start. The day I throw out the hyacinths, their heads lolling on soft and slimy stems, she asks again. She is not anticipating a refusal. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ she says, and then she keeps talking, excitedly thanking me and telling me what a star I am, a godsend, the best kind of friend, ensuring the opportunity for a hesitant pause is lost. She does not leave space for me, because in her mind I take up so little.
When I come home, I find one bottle of Veuve Cliquot in a gift bag on the kitchen table, another (opened, a glass or two remaining) in the fridge. The times after that she leaves me a jar of Fortnum’s blackcurrant curd, a tambourine of champagne truffles.
One mild spring day I find the garden door left ajar. Sometimes the shower has been used. A towel shoved in the machine, with everything else.
In this way I realise I’ve been recruited to her adventure. I’ve become her bag carrier, her accomplice. To reinforce my complicity, she whispers when she rings me, even when Ava’s out, and in her whisper I hear relief because her great secret finally has an audience. I know better than to be flattered by her confidences. I serve a purpose. She has no one else. Sharing her secret with me gives it more substance, more crazy authority. After all, if someone wants to be seen, someone else has to watch.
During one of these calls, she mentions an anxiety: he’s showing signs of taking it all a bit too seriously.
I make a vague, interested noise.
‘No, I mean – of course it’s sweet, but I’ve always been so clear. I thought we were on the same page. Now I’m worried.’
‘What happened?’
‘Oh, it’s just a feeling I’m getting. Things he says – about his life at home, about me. Not good.’
‘He’s really into you,’ I say, and for a moment I feel sorry for him, for his wife, for the mess Sookie could make of it all.
‘He’s got this idea that he wants to take me away,’ she says. ‘I mean, ith impothible.’ She yawns, luxuriating in his folly, her sang-froid. A pause opens up while she waits for me to ask something.
I refuse to bite. Instead, I say, ‘Oh, just a reminder – if by any chance you run into Paul from upstairs, just tell him you’re from the estate agents.’
In the digital space, she continues to live her official life of buddha bowls and nature shots in Regent’s Park. She is moved by cherry blossom, a BBC drama about domestic abuse, a fundraiser for children with leukaemia.
One in every five posts is a mirror selfie. She has begun to list the provenance of her outfits (a mix of Vinted, Zara and Prêt-à-Porter): a development that suggests she might be trying to launch herself as an influencer.
On International Women’s Day she posts a series of old photos, or photos that have achieved bleached edges and sun spots with the help of a filter. Here are her younger selves, alongside other toddlers feeding ducks, little girls in hardhats, teenagers in taffeta or moon boots, new mothers brandishing babies. Today I’ve been thinking a lot about the incredible women I’m humbled to call my friends, she writes. I’m celebrating the friendships that began at Brownie camp, or during that season in Val-d’Isère (what happens in Dick’s Tea Bar stays in Dick’s Tea Bar!!) or while waiting to see the emergency paediatrician. Friendship is a superpower, and I am truly blessed to have so many wonderwomen in my life – women I love, whose love lifts me up. Thank you guys! I recognise quite a few faces. A twentysomething Jess is there, for instance, perched on a stool under a palm roof, sipping a tiki cocktail. (I do not feature. No surprise there. She has never bothered to take my picture. It wouldn’t occur to her. I am not that sort of friend.)
Murray is in town and they go to Madame Butterfly and Kitty Fisher’s.
The next time she calls with that cutesy finger-in-mouth diffidence that means a request is incoming, I say Elizabeth is here for Easter, so no can do, I’m afraid. ‘OK,’ she says, as if making allowances. ‘Fine. Must be lovely to have her home. How long is she staying?’
A couple of weeks, I say, though Elizabeth has made it clear it’s a flying visit. She has coursework deadlines, and then she goes straight into revision, and she finds it easier to focus in the university library. Kindly, she tells me she wishes she could stay for longer, and I almost believe this: she has a new appreciation for the bath, my cooking, and being able to walk around barefoot. Following my clear-out, she could easily unpack her bags but chooses not to, so her room, when I glance into it, looks as it always did, towels and bras and chargers strewn across the bed or over the floor: a transient chaos.
She meets Robin for lunch but doesn’t say much about it.
I offer to drive her back to university, imagining an opportunity for intimacy, a few hours in which we will chat and confide in each other, but she falls asleep as soon as we hit the motorway, waking up as we come off at the exit. When I suggest stopping somewhere nice for lunch, she says it might be easier to pick up sandwiches when we do the Big Shop. In the supermarket she chucks shampoo, toilet roll and peanut butter into the trolley while I choose a special-offer Italian red for Clare Snape. It goes into my overnight bag, along with Sookie’s fancy chocolates.
As we turn off towards the halls of residence, Elizabeth says, ‘No off-roading, OK?’ and then she laughs, glancing over to check my response, and I smile back, because it’s a brave thing to say and I would not have had the courage to say it, though of course every mile has brought me closer to that other journey, when Robin and I delivered her here, together: our final outing as a family.
Back in the autumn, there were many witnesses, maybe fifty, a hundred. Freshers and their parents waiting anxiously in their cars, unloading, or up in the flats. Today the grounds and reception areas are deserted. A cleaning trolley stands abandoned in the entrance lobby, as if housekeeping has been interrupted by an apocalypse. The smell of mop buckets travels with us as we go up the stairs, past posters promoting club nights, sexual health drop-in and counselling services. The place is silent, apart from our voices and echoing footsteps, the bump and rumble of the suitcase wheels. On the corridor leading to Elizabeth’s flat, there’s a small movement at the far end as a fire-door slowly swings shut. This evidence of an unseen presence is both a comfort and a little unsettling.
The flat, which looks over bike sheds and a section of dual carriageway towards the blocks of campus, has the air of a ghost ship. Elizabeth wheels her case to her room, with its fairy lights and cactus plants, while I unpack the shopping. I’m assembling our picnic lunch when a girl with a backpack arrives, and after their reunion Elizabeth is stiff and self-conscious with me, caught between homes, worlds, identities. ‘I should make a move, I don’t want to be late for Clare,’ I say, and then I hug her, feeling her awkward affection, and also her longing for me to be gone. ‘No need to see me out.’
Back at the car, I realise I feel shaky, almost tearful – low blood sugar – and curse myself for leaving my sandwich. I feel a little better once I’ve eaten a cheese pasty in a petrol station forecourt while checking Google Maps. When I text Clare my ETA, she replies with a thumbs up.
It’s market day in Clare’s village, a practical workaday market, stalls set out around the war memorial, with trays of vegetable seedlings and people digging scoops into sacks of dog biscuits. Clare’s house is just a few streets away. As I open the front gate and walk up the path, the clouds pull back and for a moment her little garden fills with hot, vivid sunshine, lime-green flaring in the grass and the jumble of pots by the porch. A dog barks inside, and Clare, her hand on his collar, is opening the blue door: ‘Just ignore Hector, he’s pretending he hasn’t had a walk today; absolute nonsense of course.’
Inside it’s cool and dim, beams and low ceilings, the distant smell of burnt toast and old wood fires. Clare moved in four years ago, following her divorce. She used to pass the house every day when the boys were at school, and always liked the look of it. The rooms needed a lick of paint and she put in a new kitchen; nothing major.
The terrier’s nails rattle on the flags as we observe the usual rituals – the giving and receiving of chocolates and bottles of wine and cups of tea and slices of cake, the talk of dogs, weather, varieties of rambling roses – while beginning the complex process of assessing one another.
As a girl, Clare was famous for being clever and self-reliant. She was at the edge of things, but it was clear she had chosen to be there, unlike the rest of us, and this gave her a certain cachet. She isn’t on social media so I know little about her now, beyond the details (GP, two adult sons) gleaned from Jean as she put us back in touch. Do pop in next time you’re passing, Clare emailed when she found out where Elizabeth was studying. Break the journey, stay the night. Was she pleased or appalled when I took her up on the offer?
Now she thanks me, again, for offering to speak to her son Joe, the student of modern languages who is wondering about a career in translation. She asks if he has contacted me. ‘Not yet,’ I say, and then I feel obliged to state again that I’m unlikely to be much use to him, as I seem to be stuck in – and here I do my best to strike a jaunty, carefree note – ‘the mid-career doldrums’. Clare is stricken he hasn’t followed up: you can lead a horse to water. Distressed, she pats Hector who scrambles to his feet, an irrepressible swainish hope in his eyes. ‘Yes, OK, you win,’ she says, rising and putting the milk back in the fridge. I’m welcome to join them for a turn around the village, or I can stay and settle in before supper. I say I’ll stay.
The bedroom has sloping ceilings and a view, from the just-open window, into gnarly apple trees. Daffodils in a jug and a collection of summer-holiday paperbacks on the chest of drawers, beneath a faded print of Salisbury Cathedral that no one has looked at closely for years. The cupboard, when I put my jacket away, is stashed with cricket pads, poster tubes and sleeping bags in stubby sleeves.
Once I’ve heard Clare and Hector depart, I kick off my shoes and lie down on the bed, allowing myself to feel tired, worn out by the drive, the goodbye and the prospect of hours of chat. Overhead, the white paper shade sways a little in the draught. In a neighbouring garden, there’s the squeak of a stiff tap turning, the thrum as a watering can is filled. I close my eyes. My breath comes and goes. Maybe, after all, it’s rather restful to be somewhere else, free of all responsibilities and associations.
I sleep, and when I wake up it must be from a wonderful dream, because though I can remember none of it I am conscious of the fast-fading bloom of some magnificent happiness, a retreating sense of delight and excitement. I lie there quite still beneath the paper moon, holding on to this sensation for as long as possible.
At supper Clare mentions her ex and his new partner, just in passing, as if they’re perfectly unexceptional people she doesn’t know terribly well. She was walking home from the allotments, she says, with a bag of spinach and rhubarb when she saw someone in the distance and she thought, that’s how Nick will look when he’s older. And it turned out it was him, after all.
I tell her my marriage broke down recently. Clare is sorry to hear that, she had no idea, Jean didn’t mention it.
‘I didn’t tell Jean. I didn’t want to. I can’t seem to find the words,’ I say. ‘In any case, it’s not much of a story. Most marriages seem to end for the same reasons – quite banal and unremarkable reasons,’ and then I find myself describing the journey down with Elizabeth earlier today, and how that brought back memories of the other time we’d made that trip, on a day when there were three of us in the car, and the car – like all the others – was stuffed with duvets, lava lamps and frying pans.
We’d followed the signs and joined the line of Audis and Toyotas snaking towards the accommodation blocks. Even in full sunshine these buildings had the gloomy aspect of prison hulks, and so I’d found myself remarking with too much enthusiasm on the planting scheme and the benches set out between sculpted grassy mounds (which, in truth, reminded me of golf bunkers). Robin had been quiet during the drive from London, but now he cursed the queue, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. There were ten or fifteen cars ahead of us, and we had already missed our allocated drop-off time.
The cars crept forward few feet, and then stopped again.
Robin glanced over the grass towards reception, and then, muttering about this being absolutely ridiculous, he checked the rear-view mirror. Too late I saw what was going to happen. ‘What are you doing?’ screamed Elizabeth, but he was already jamming his foot down and swinging the wheel, the engine roaring and the car accelerating over the cycle path and the walkway and onto the grass, bouncing up one of the mounds and down the other side, tyres ripping the turf. His face was mottled with fury and other less fathomable emotions.
It is odd, I say to Clare, how all those years of intimacy and shared endeavour can lead to a moment when you realise you hardly know someone at all. At the time, it seemed completely out of character, but perhaps I misunderstood. Perhaps this was the moment when he allowed me to see a long-hidden truth.
Clare has been listening closely, wincing and almost-laughing, and because such attention is a novelty I tell her some more, not a great deal, but as much as I want. When she gets up to fetch the water jug, she puts her hand on my shoulder and gives it a little squeeze.
She pours water into my glass and says, ‘It’s your story, Ruth, you tell it any way you can.’
Her divorce came through five years ago but she doesn’t really know when the marriage began to end. She tells me about the clues she kept missing or excusing, until he lined them up and sent them out to do the can-can for her, because by that point he wanted her to see and force the issue and take decisive action, so he could tell everyone – as indeed he did – that she was the one who told him to leave, that it was all her idea.
To her mind, there’s no shame in not thinking to doubt, never suspecting, never checking phones, bank statements, pockets – behaviours which, Clare understands from friends, are not that unusual, though they come at some cost, surely, to sanity and dignity.
Those last few months, if he came home on time, his car would pull into the drive and he would kill the engine and sit there on his phone for twenty minutes, thirty, and though occasionally he might glance towards the house, where she was starting supper or drawing curtains, there seemed to be nothing furtive to his manner, no particular effort to hide anything. If she asked, he said it was work, and she accepted that, as she did the times when he went AWOL and didn’t respond to her calls, because she trusted him and had faith in their relationship. Then it became obvious she was mistaken.
He agreed to go to relationship counselling, and that was helpful, not because the therapist was any good – she was inattentive, and in the quiet moments they could hear her stomach rumbling – but because at that first session Clare could see how little effort he was prepared to make, and so how much he wanted to leave her. This was the point at which she realised it was over. Numb with shock, she let him drive back through the fields and woods as tears soaked her top and dripped onto her lap. Now she understood she knew nothing about him.
They went back to the house, their home, and she found it transformed, the familiar, comforting spaces and objects imbued with horror. She stood in the kitchen with a cup in her hand, and the memory of buying the cup – a weekend in Lewes – was no longer delightful. She began to understand this was how it would be. Perhaps everything would be lost. She did not know.
That evening, conscious of his desperation to be free of her, a wild thing loose in the house, she forced herself to think of practicalities.
Her financial situation was not hopeless, she knew that.
The next task was to make herself conceive of a life without him, an imaginative effort that initially felt impossible, unnatural, beyond her. Doggedly, she applied herself. Like someone telling beads, she forced herself to consider the things she wouldn’t miss. His inability to reckon with his childhood, his compulsion to compete with the boys, his drift to the right, his bowel habits. Some time ago he’d made a contemptuous joke about a colleague who travelled to work by bus. Clare had buried that at the time but now she took it out and allowed herself to consider it. Over the months, or years, he must have compiled a similar list of her failings; and the thought of not being inspected for them on a daily basis lifted her a little.
So she thought about life alone, the evenings and weekends and holidays, and to her astonishment it didn’t look so bad. It looked OK. Almost immediately she could see there might even be some advantages.
The end of this marriage, Clare realised, did not have to be a tragedy for her. From childhood, she had received instruction in how a woman should feel and behave at such a moment. The lesson started with fairytales and pop songs, and continued through to great works of art: a relentless emphasis on the heartbreak, the fear, the shame, the bitterness, and also the guilt (for falling short in various ways, for not being enough). But to her amazement, Clare discovered this was not how she felt.
