The Secrets of Married Women (5 page)

‘She wouldn’t see it that way.’

‘She didn’t. She said good jobs were overrated.’ She gives a hearty shrug. ‘But that’s easy to say when you have one, isn’t it? Don’t get me wrong I’m very grateful she hired me when nobody else would, but it’s a bit humbling when you compare yourself.’ She pulls a big smile on me. ‘The whole thing of women juggling a career and family… I’d have liked that problem to solve.’

‘Well you shouldn’t compare yourself to Leigh. You had twins in your twenties. Your parents had passed away. Neil’s had retired to Spain. You had literally nobody to help you. Leigh has Lawrence. And Neil—’

‘—was never there.’ Her gaze goes around the car park again. ‘Speaking of my workaholic husband, where is he is now?’

‘I’ll take you home.’

‘No. I don’t want to tell him not to bother, not when he’ll be on his way.’

Because that would be awful for him. If he’d driven unnecessarily for even five minutes. I look at my generous, considerate friend. From the moment I met her—through her younger sister, Joy, who I used to work with when we both had Saturday jobs in a pub as teenagers—I liked her massively, instantly, and the feeling stuck. (Joy moved to Australia years ago and married an outback man, and nobody really hears from her now). Interestingly though, because Leigh’s an open book, in many ways I feel I know her on a deeper level than I do Wendy, even though I’ve known Wendy twice as long. (Leigh and I met when I did a brief temping stint at M&S where Leigh was a junior buyer, and we just instantly hit it off). Leigh can sometimes piss you off; Wendy never does. There’s a radiance to Wendy that comes from the inside out. It’s that of a person who is genuinely happy and has nothing hiding in her. This makes for a very uncomplicated friendship. ‘So you’re not regretting taking the job?’ I had misgivings about it, though I don’t know why.

‘Oh I’m thrilled to bits! There’s a lot to do. It’s not brain surgery, but it’s detail. So I’ve got my lists written out and my post-it notes all over the computer, and I’m trying to teach myself Excel because Clifford said he could use me helping him with some spreadsheets.’ Humour twinkles her straight face. ‘It took me a while to realise he wasn’t talking about something that goes on the bed!’

Her dark brown eyes soften again. ‘Leigh was particularly sweet the other day. She took me out for a nice lunch because it would have been Nina’s birthday. She’d have been three.’ She searches my face. ‘I literally don’t know where the time’s gone Jill.’

I squeeze her hand. ‘Oh Wend. I’m sorry. I remembered the date but didn’t know whether to bring it up.’

‘That was sweet of you both to remember.’

How could we not? Wendy was nearly finished a part-time degree at Northumbria when she surprised everybody by falling pregnant with Nina. It was a difficult pregnancy from the word go. Then Nina was born severely premature, making the possibility of her living as fragile as a snowflake on the plume of a feather. There were so many problems, but she kept bouncing back. Then she had to have part of her liver removed. But she survived when all the doctors said she wouldn’t. Then Leigh and I were at the hospital visiting. The doctor came in and broke the bad news. I remember Wendy and Neil, Leigh and me, walking to the incubator, and watching Wendy’s large finger stroke Nina’s limp little finger-like arm. And I think that was the day I started to rethink my views about not wanting to be a mother.

‘Here he is!’ she illuminates as the black Range Rover rolls up. Neil gets out, hair the colour of white light, striking on such a young face. He saunters around the front of the car in his charcoal suit with the top button of his white shirt undone, the knot of his grey tie yanked down mid-chest. Immaculately dishevelled. Like you could put him ‘as is’ in a magazine ad for just about any luxury item and he’d sell it off the shelves. That, plus his degree of forgivable cockiness, and the fact that he puts the bad guys away for a living, makes him a real ‘knicker-creamer’ to use Leigh’s vulgar expression about him.

‘My chauffeur arrives!’ Wendy latches onto his arm. His perfectly handsome young-Paul-Newman face cracks a smile at me. It strikes me that if Lawrence had been half an hour late, then just breezed out of the car and hadn’t instantly apologised, Leigh would have made him bleed, as I’d have done to Rob.

Neil’s mouth meets Wendy’s plump, coral top lip. Then his blue gaze, cool as a breath mint, looks over the top of her head, right at me. ‘Alright Jill? What’s new?’ I feel his hand lightly in the small of my back. He doesn’t wait for my answer. ‘So how’s the job then?’ he asks his wife. Odd timing for a question like that, I think.

Her gaze hangs on his face and she moves into him so he has to put his arm around her. Wendy first met Neil when he was a twenty-five-year-old police sergeant who stopped her car on Christmas Eve and offered her a free ice-scraper, and like a fool she put her mouth on it and blew because she thought she was being breathalysed. ‘It was good. Very good,’ she sparkles. I suppose she’ll fill him in when they get home.

‘So this Clifford hasn’t got her running the company yet,’ he says to me, extracting himself from her and putting her at a bit of a distance. ‘She can still find time for yoga.’ Wendy playfully slaps him and sends me a look that says isn’t he hilarious! Then she bends to pick up her sports bag. And Neil gazes at my friend’s generous backside in its lycra yoga pants with a certain appreciation that makes a quiet part of me pine. Does Rob ever look at me like that? If he does, I’ve never really caught him doing it. ‘Our Paul wants picking up at the arena too. I’m not sure where Ben is,’ he says, covertly looking at his watch. Then he runs his hands through his hair in an impatient gesture.

‘Movie,’ she says, mimicking Ben’s grunt. ‘Ben speaks to me with one word or a shrug of the shoulders. The men in this family don’t like to give too much away,’ she looks at Neil then fans her face. ‘Phew. Is it me or is it warm?’ Her eyes run over her husband and I feel like you often feel around these two: as though you’re gate-crashing a raunchy, private party. Leigh and I think Wendy and Neil have a rollicking sex life.
And she never has to say to him ‘Don’t you have a headache?’
as Leigh will say, and chuckle
. And he never has to slap her to see if she still has a pulse.

It’s probably all an act
, Rob will say, when I report this to him.

‘Come on then driver,’ Wendy pushes him ahead and her lovely big bum in its tight pants seems to fold in smiling, self-satisfied creases. Neil puts his hands in his pants pockets and saunters to the driver’s side. And then my friend throws me a look over her shoulder that’s not meant to ignite good-hearted envy in me, but somehow it does.

I drive home via the grocery store, then Pause for Paws where I leave the dog when Rob can’t take him with him to work. As I drive down our street, Kiefer hangs out of the window barking at the world, giving me a headache. In my kitchen I dig in my shopping bags for the ingredients to make my quick Thai Chicken Curry. I’m starving. With being late into work this morning, I missed lunch in my efforts to suck up to He Who Stares At Me Scornfully. I can’t instantly find the scissors so I try to open my bag of rice with a sharp knife. It goes through the tough plastic—and my finger—just as Rob walks in. ‘Hiya treasure,’ he shouts from the hall, then he sings, ‘Why do you have to be a teenager in love...’

‘Very funny.’ I remember the silly little conversation we had earlier about my being a juvenile.

Upon sight of his lord and master Kiefer’s tail thrashes a tune on the parquet floor. ‘All right there my angel?’ Rob strokes him and Kiefer gets the hysterics. He stands on his hind legs and the pair of them start dancing around the room. There are three of us in this marriage, so it’s a bit overcrowded. After they’ve smooched, Rob’s gaze plants on mine. He slides my specs down my nose, lays a tender little kiss first in my eye socket and then on my lips. ‘Hiya you. My little Lolita. Are you feeling better now? Did your yoga class make you, you know, all chilled?’ Rob loves mocking these sorts of things.

‘It did. Ish.’ I hold my finger up and wiggle it.

‘Good God Jill! What’ve you done?’ He marches me to the sink, thrusts my hand under cold water. ‘You’ve got to stop doing things in such a hurry! Hang on, I’ll get a bandage.’

‘Oh Rob, it’s just a little cut.’ A sea of blood swirls down the plughole. I watch my hubby of nearly ten years, in his white T-shirt that strains appealingly over his broad chest, open the junk cupboard above our fridge. And then there is an avalanche of odd shoes, empty gin bottles, Hoover bags, cookery books, panty liners, Christmas cards, you name it, to which he says
fuck
. He tries to stuff it all back in there and says
fuck
again because everything keeps spilling out. Personally I avoid this cupboard at all costs for this very reason.

‘Where do we keep the bandages Jill?’

‘I don’t think we do keep bandages Rob.’

‘Well why not? We seem to keep everything else.’ He picks up a panty-liner in his fingertips and says, ‘Jesus.’

He’s sexy when he’s vexed.

‘And how many times do I have to tell you that you need to leave this by the oven in case there’s a fire?’ He brandishes the miniature fire extinguisher he bought for me last Christmas, which I keep trying to throughout with the rubbish, because I get tired of humouring his paranoia. But he always drags it back out again and plonks it by the oven, which just gets in my way, so now I stuff it up there in the unmentionable cupboard. ‘Stay there. Don’t move.’ He disappears down our narrow parquet passage that flanks our main living area that’s essentially three rooms knocked into one. Something builders liked to do in ‘70’s semis to give the illusion of space. I hear him climb the stairs, his work-boots imprinting manly thuds above me. He reappears with a roll of loo paper.

‘Oh Rob! My arm’s not hanging off.’

His warm hand holds up my wrist, and his other carefully winds loo roll around my wound, stopping only to pop a kiss in the centre of my forehead, a slow and loving process of mummification. ‘You could have sliced your finger end off.’ His voice is soft and treasuring.

‘Pity, it’s my middle one too. I use it so much.’ I demonstrate. He pretends to bite the rude gesture. I watch my husband as he works away on me. His serious, fine-featured face, eyes of the darkest grey-blue, the knit of his brows under his tumble of chestnut hair, and his tight-drawn concentrating mouth. I feel intensely loved, and fill with this urge to kiss that concentration off his face. He must catch something in my expression, because he does a double-take, gives me that Are-you-thinking-what-I’m-thinking? look. So I give him the oh-you-bet-I-am-baby one back. Our gazes hang there. My heart does a wild ticking. I don’t know when it was that we last had sex. Then his hand that was bandaging me up, slows. His thumb that was pinned to my wrist, strokes it. My eyes savour his even-tempered mouth with its up-curled edges. And I forget all about my headache, my finger, the curry and my hunger. I close my eyes and drift in to him. My face is poised upwards waiting for his kiss; his breath makes little draughts on me. Seconds pass… Nothing happens.

I open first one eye, then the other. And somewhere far inside me, a cringe slowly unfurls. Rob is studying me, just peaceably taking the measure of my face. His eyes have apology written all over them: the kind that would choke you if you tried to voice it. For a second he tenderly joins his forehead to mine, and we just stay like that in recognition of something that is between us
.
Then he drops my limp hand and shifts his attention back to my finger, his expression void like a doctor’s. ‘There,’ he pops a chaste kiss on the big fat white poultice, doing a very good job of ignoring my bewildered scrutiny. ‘All better now.’ The room seems to lose oxygen. I don’t move immediately, giving him a chance to redeem the moment. But he turns his back to me and starts making a big surrogate fuss of the dog. I turn back to my vegetables. Aubergine. Mushrooms. I immerse myself in slicing them as a feeling dies inside of me. He roughhouses Kiefer on the kitchen floor. I clash a can of coconut milk on the marble counter, thrust the opener in it, recognising the impatience that has ignited in me. The onions are making me cry. I mop my eyes with the back of my wrist, push cubes of chicken off my chopping board into the pan. ‘You’ve not seen the green curry paste have you?’ I ask him as I peer into the fridge. ‘I swear I just bought a new one.’ My voice sounds fallen, as though what is lost between us will never come back.

‘Eh? Curry paste? No.’ Rob is leaning over the kitchen table now, thumbing through the Evening Chronicle. ‘Oh, you mean that green stuff in the jar? Yeah. I think I ate it.’

I close the fridge door with my elbow, nail a hand on my hip. ‘What?’

‘Yeah, I think I had it on toast the other night when you were out.’

‘You ate it? On toast? Green curry paste?’

He scowls over his shoulder. ‘Yeah. Why? It’s great.’

I throw my hands up. ‘Well how am I going to make curry now then?’

He sends me a guilty smile.