by Ali Mercer
‘Not all women are like that,’ I said.
Our eyes met. He gave me a rueful smile. ‘I’d like to think so,’ he said.
He paid in cash, and walked out into the spring sunshine without looking back. The tip he left me was so generous I nearly ran out into the street to give it back to him.
* * *
I didn’t expect to see him again. I thought it’d be a one-off, an anecdote: the good-looking guy who I gave a last-minute trim just before closing time, the day before he was due to go to a funeral.
When I walked into the Green Man, I was fully expecting to find Karen there waiting for me, annoyed because I was late but also pleased to see me, and eager to tell me whatever the latest developments were in her love life.
Sean was there, pulling a pint for someone. But there was no sign of Karen. Instead, sitting at the bar, was a recently familiar, freshly trimmed head gleaming in the muted light, the short back and sides I’d just worked on: Mark, reading his book again.
Maybe I should have let him be. But I didn’t. Instead I went right on over and said, ‘Hello again.’
He looked up and grinned. ‘My hair saviour. Can I get you a drink?’
‘Well…’
‘Please, I insist. You might as well tell me what you like, or you’ll have to take pot luck.’
‘I’ll have a gin and tonic, then. Thank you.’
‘Gin and tonic, please,’ Mark said to Sean.
Sean made a non-committal noise that could have meant anything from Get lost to All right then. As he moved to fetch a clean glass he gave me a filthy look.
He had no right to be jealous. I’d never given him the impression he was in with a chance. And the last thing I needed right now was him glowering at me from behind the bar.
‘Mark, this is Sean, my housemate,’ I said.
Mark looked at Sean without much interest. ‘Oh, you share a house, do you?’
‘Yes, there are five of us.’
‘It gets pretty rowdy,’ Sean said, looking daggers at Mark now. ‘Usually lots of people around, playing music, that kind of thing. Especially on a Saturday night.’
I felt myself blushing. Sean was seriously trying to put Mark off coming back home with me… as if that was likely to happen! Really, he was being ridiculously possessive. Completely out of order.
‘Sounds fun,’ Mark said blandly.
‘It passes the time,’ Sean said with another cold look for me.
He gave me my drink and took Mark’s money and gave him his change, giving off a vibe of poorly suppressed antagonism the whole time. I hoped the pub would get busy quickly so that he’d be run off his feet and wouldn’t have time to glare at us. It wasn’t exactly going to be easy to enjoy a nice relaxed chat with Sean radiating hostility the whole time.
But then, to my relief, Sean seemed to give up. He took himself off to the other end of the bar, flicked through one of the papers and started doing the crossword.
‘Friendly chap,’ Mark said under his breath.
‘He’s usually all right,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what’s got into him.’ Though I had a pretty good idea what was up. I just hadn’t realised Sean liked me quite so much.
Mark asked who I was meeting and I told him about Karen, and gradually I became less self-conscious. It felt so good being there, talking to him, it was as if we’d always been meant to meet.
When we’d both finished our drinks he said, ‘How about another?’
‘But you’ve got a funeral tomorrow,’ I said. ‘Shouldn’t you be taking it gently? You know, having an early night?’
‘It’s only just gone six,’ he pointed out.
‘True.’ My stomach rumbled. ‘But I’m a lightweight. If I have another drink without eating anything I’ll fall over on the way out of here.’
‘Let’s go get something to eat,’ he said.
I said yes. Of course I said yes. I was hungry. And I felt sorry for him, and I fancied him rotten. Also, I was curious. Intrigued. I wanted to know more about him. About the funeral he was going to. The woman who’d betrayed him. He seemed so lovely, so perfect… why on earth would anyone do that to him? And what on earth could anybody else possibly have that he lacked? I wanted his story – all the things he might have told me if he’d learned to trust me, if I’d cut his hair not just the once but again and again, over months and years.
Karen would understand… wouldn’t she? I decided to ask Sean to let her know where we’d gone… if she ever showed up.
He was still busy pretending to be engrossed in his crossword and looked up resentfully, as if I’d just interrupted something important.
‘You remember my friend Karen, right?’ I said. ‘The blonde one who talks very fast, who’s going out with the bald guy with no neck?’
He shrugged. ‘Yeah, I remember.’
‘If she turns up, will you tell her I’ve gone to the pizza place round the corner? She’s welcome to join us.’
Sean raised his eyebrows. ‘Yeah, right. Sure she is. Who is that guy you’re with, anyway? Do you even know him?’
‘I’m starting to,’ I said.
As if it was any of his business! But then, he had a crush on me, so of course he didn’t like seeing me with someone else. He couldn’t help himself, any more than I could.
Mark took my hand as we left the pub together, and it felt quite natural. We found a phone box and he waited patiently outside while I got my little floral address book out of my bag and rang Karen.
One of her housemates answered and told me she’d had a big row with her boyfriend the day before and then he’d turned up that evening with flowers and wine and her favourite takeout, and they’d been in her room ever since. I left her a message and hurried off to join Mark.
‘Turns out she’s fine. She’s with her boyfriend. Sorry about that – keeping you hanging round waiting,’ I said.
He gave me a grin that told me I was more than worth it. ‘Don’t apologise. It was nice of you to be worried about her. Most people would just assume they’d been stood up. And you don’t even look that annoyed. You must be very forgiving.’
I took his hand again. ‘Let’s just say I think it’s turned out all right.’
We went to the pizza place, ate, shared a bottle of wine. He drank most of it, but I still had enough to get tipsy – I was a lightweight, as I’d told him. The conversation was easy. I entertained him with stories of my customers, and he allowed himself to be entertained. He didn’t seem to be in the mood for talking about himself, and I didn’t push him to. I figured he was after distraction, and I was only too happy to help.
Over coffee I said, ‘Won’t it make it worse, tomorrow, if you turn up with a hangover?’
‘No, that’s exactly what I want,’ he told me. ‘I want to be so hungover I can’t think about anything else.’
‘So… how are you getting there?’
‘Oh, don’t worry, I’m not driving. I’m going by train. I can’t drive.’ He sighed. ‘I’m a useless person, Jenny. A failure. I did one year of a PhD and then I didn’t get any more funding and I had to give it up, and now I work in a bookshop and I have no idea whatsoever what to do with the rest of my life.’
‘I’m sure you’re not useless at all.’
He looked at me seriously. ‘You’re very sweet, aren’t you?’
I shrugged. ‘I try to be.’
There was a pause during which he carried on looking at me and it became possible for me to ask the question that had been on my mind ever since he’d told me why he was so keen to have his hair cut that day.
‘So… if you don’t mind me asking, whose funeral is it? Was it someone close?’
His eyes went very cold. They were pale blue, the kind of blue that reminds you of the colour of the sea on a cloudy day, and that lends itself to turning icy.
‘No, not close,’ he said. ‘It was my aunt. I actually didn’t know her. It’s really just a family obligation thing. My mother’s on her own – my dad pass
ed away a couple of years ago. So I’m going along as moral support.’
‘That’s good of you,’ I said, then, with a sense of exposing something important about myself, ‘My dad isn’t around any more, either. He died of a heart attack when I was little.’
‘Mine crashed his car into a tree. There were questions asked about it, but in the end the verdict at the inquest was accidental death,’ Mark said.
‘I’m so sorry.’
He was looking at me in that special, serious way again. Under the table, his legs pressed against mine on either side and squeezed them together. As if what he wanted wasn’t sex, but someone to embrace, to hold on to.
‘I’m sorry about your dad, too,’ he said.
Then he asked for the bill and insisted on paying, and we went out onto the street and found that it was pouring with rain.
We joked about it ruining his haircut and he suggested taking shelter at the nearest possible place and I asked where that was and he said just round the corner… his flat, and would I like yet another coffee? Or maybe something stronger?
I said, ‘What about tomorrow?’
‘Oh, don’t worry about that.’
He pulled me in towards him and kissed me, and then I really was completely lost.
* * *
Later on, when we were in each other’s arms on his sofa with the lights down low and the album of the moment playing in the background, he said he had something to tell me.
‘I’m married. But we’re separated.’
‘Did she have an affair?’
His face twisted up as if he’d just been physically hurt. Then he composed himself. ‘She fell in love with someone else. A colleague.’
‘Oh.’
I could have said thank you and goodbye, got up, straightened my clothing and gone home. But I didn’t. I carried on lying there.
‘So technically this is cheating,’ I said.
‘You could see it that way, I suppose.’
‘Nobody could ever cheat on anybody unless someone helped them do it. I’m not really that kind of person.’
‘I know you’re not,’ he said. ‘I could tell that about you straight away. You’re kind, and decent and honest, Jenny. And those are rare qualities, believe me.’
‘If I was all the things you’ve just said, I’d go.’
‘Don’t go.’ He pulled me towards him and held me tight. ‘Don’t leave me, Jenny.’
And I didn’t, and by and by I let him lead me to the bedroom.
He had told me that the flat belonged to a friend who was away and had let him stay, that he had never been there with his wife. Paula. He said her name with a peculiar mix of softness and bitterness and protectiveness, as if he was letting me into something intimate, something he wouldn’t normally have wanted people to see. Something he was ashamed of.
I’d heard that tone of voice, that mix of hatred and nostalgia, plenty of times when people talked about their exes. It was the sound of love gone wrong. It was that, more than anything, that convinced me it was over between them, and allowed me to put the thought of her out of my mind.
It didn’t occur to me that what he was doing might be a kind of vengeance. It didn’t feel that way. I’d had boyfriends before, but this was different. It was the first time sex really made sense. That was the night I understood it wasn’t all about awkwardness and risk, and whether you looked all right and were any good at it, and whether his body was going to do what it was supposed to do and whether yours would too.
Mark showed me that it was about being with someone. Really being with them. And forgetting everything else.
Afterwards, when he said he thought the condom had split, I did a swift but vague calculation of the odds and said, ‘Oh, never mind. I’m sure it’ll be fine.’
‘You sure? I wouldn’t want you to be worrying about it,’ he said.
‘I’m not worried.’
He pulled a face to say that in that case, he wasn’t worried either. ‘Apparently it’s a lot more difficult to get pregnant than people realise.’
‘You seem to know an awful lot about it,’ I said, with a smile to show that I was teasing him.
‘What I do know,’ he said seriously, ‘is that right here, right now, I’m happy. With you.’
And then he took me in his arms again and kissed me. And there I was, drowsy and lucky and warm, all wrapped up in the cocoon of the moment as if neither us nor time would ever be going anywhere. And it really did feel as if nothing could go wrong.
Sixteen
Paula
Someone once said that those whom the gods want to drive nuts, they give what they want. I had wanted a baby more than I’d ever wanted anything in my life (including my husband, not that I was going to tell him that). But living with Daisy turned out to be very different to longing for her.
All the awful bits of motherhood (childbirth, lack of sleep) were so much worse than anyone let on, and the good bits (peaceful, milky cuddles, admiring the baby when she finally slept) were satisfying in their way, but took a lot more slogging to get to than I’d imagined.
I began to have a sneaky sympathy for my mother’s concerted selfishness throughout my childhood. After all, she’d been through all this with me. No wonder she thought she deserved to enjoy herself.
My daughter finally arrived after a twenty-four-hour labour that ended with a caesarean section. The whole thing felt like being bombed from the inside, and then trying to make a new life in the rubble. For a long time I couldn’t see beyond the next sleep, the next feed. I knew I couldn’t really complain. After all, I’d asked for it. And who would I have complained to? Not Mark, who clearly wasn’t entirely loving it either, but at least got to disappear off to work once in a while. Not my mother, who would just have said, ‘I told you so.’ And not my friends, who would have thought there was something wrong with me.
It was just nature’s savage little practical joke, and I was on the receiving end. There was nobody to take it out on… and nobody to blame but myself.
I was completely cured of baby hunger – I couldn’t even imagine being broody ever again. My figure, which I’d once been vain about, was wrecked: I was suddenly soft and saggy where I’d once been firm and supple, and it would have taken a much more rigorous campaign of exercise than I had time for to restore it. And then, as the broken nights took their toll, my looks began to go, too.
As for my libido… that had pretty much disappeared, or was it that Mark had stopped fancying me? It was hard to tell. We managed to have sex occasionally, but it wasn’t what it had been, and since it was the one part of our life together that could be relied upon to smooth out everything else, I was aware that I ought to make a bit more of an effort. But somehow I couldn’t summon up the energy.
It wasn’t just that I wasn’t wild with lust for Mark; I wasn’t wild with lust for anybody. I couldn’t even imagine having a crush. The feelings I’d had for Lewis, my long-ago colleague, seemed to belong to another life.
I was actually glad that brief infatuation had never been consummated, and had never moved beyond a little drunken handholding, for all the trouble it had caused. I’d never seen Lewis naked, or found out what he was like in bed, or whether he snored and hogged the duvet and was moody in the morning – in some ways, I’d never really got to know him at all. All I was left with was a vivid memory of his warm brown eyes and the knowledge that, for a little while, he had really, really liked me, and I had really liked him too – which wasn’t nothing, given that even in my twenties, when I didn’t look knackered and harassed all the time, I had never been the kind of woman men made a beeline for.
With Mark, I’d made most of the running – I’d pursued him, not obviously, of course, but strategically. With Lewis, there had been no strategy; it had just been something that happened. An accident. With hindsight, it was obvious that I shouldn’t have told Mark about it. If I’d waited, it would have died a death of natural causes. Instead of which Mark had moved out for a c
ouple of weeks, and I’d had to change jobs to persuade him there was really no risk of anything ever happening, and then had spent months, if not years, making it up to him. Right up until the point where we’d had Daisy.
And now I wasn’t capable of making anything up to him any more.
At least I’d learned the useful lesson that you didn’t have to tell your husband everything. It didn’t even occur to me to try to talk to him about how gruelling I was finding motherhood. After all, it was pretty obvious, if only he chose to see it. And I really didn’t want to have to listen to him telling me that he felt the same way about fatherhood. It just would have been too infuriating, given that I was the one who looked after Daisy most of the time. And there was absolutely no point in me explaining how much I resented him for sleeping peacefully while I struggled to settle her during the nights. He was the one who was working and earning, and I wasn’t. I would just have to keep going, and wait for things to change.
Once or twice other women I met at coffee mornings or music classes, women who had older children as well as babies, recognised that I felt I wasn’t doing a very good job of motherhood and kindly told me it would get easier. It did, in some ways. But in other ways – ways I had never anticipated – it got harder.
When Daisy was a year old I found a childminder and started to do a bit of proofreading a few days a week from home, and the guilty freedom I felt as I walked home after leaving her was offset by the sudden new challenge of having deadlines to meet, as well as the depressing reality of how little was left of my earnings after I’d paid for her care. It was also matched by guilt of another kind – guilt that I could barely begin to acknowledge, even to myself.
