Difficult Husbands

by Mary de Laszlo

  Difficult Husbands

  Mary de Laszlo

  Bookouture

  Contents

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  Dedication

  Prologue

  1. Dumped For An Inferior Model

  2. Another Difficult Husband

  3. More Complications

  4. An Unexpected Legacy

  5. Dreading Christmas

  6. Hint Of A Mad Idea

  7. Warring Grandparents

  8. Plans For Ravenscourt

  9. Divided Loyalties

  10. First Impressions

  11. The Great Inspection

  12. The Father of the Child

  13. It Must Be Made To Work

  14. Difficult Husbands

  15. The Other Wronged Wife

  16. At The End Of Her Tether

  17. Shooting The Brochure

  18. Telling the Children

  19. Getting The Husbands To Ravenscourt

  20. A Jolly Christmas Day

  21. Geriatrics

  22. A Touch Of Passion

  23. Foot Loose And Fancy Free

  24. Easier Said Than Done

  25. All’s Fair In Love And War

  26. Tough Decisions

  27. A Difficult Meeting

  28. A Dubious Offer

  29. An Unwelcome Visitor

  30. No Such Thing As A Free Lunch

  31. An Unexpected Arrival

  32. On The Wrong Track

  33. Granny and Grandpa

  34. Independence

  35. The End Of The Affair

  Epilogue

  A Letter from Mary

  Published by Bookouture

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  An imprint of StoryFire Ltd. 23 Sussex Road, Ickenham, UB10 8PN. United Kingdom

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  www.bookouture.com

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  Copyright © Mary de Laszlo 2014

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  Mary de Laszlo has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work.

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  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers.

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events other than those clearly in the public domain, are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-909490-72-7

  Acknowledgements

  With many thanks to my agent Judith Murdoch and my editor Claire Bord.

  To my family and friends - love always.

  Prologue

  Christmas in Summer

  ‘Reset.’ The director, his hair tied carelessly back in a ponytail, called out, and for the umpteenth time Lorna knocked on the fake front door, complete with Christmas wreath, while an underling, with the rosy face of a mischievous cherub, scattered fake snow at her from above. This tickled her nose and made her sneeze and the director sigh, call ‘cut’ and the whole take started again.

  Christmas, anxiety gripped her, Christmas in summer. If only it was over when this shoot was. Even though it was months away she was dreading the real thing; her first Christmas without Stephen, without even her parents to escape to.

  ‘Reset.’ This time it went better. She opened the door and the camera focused on the ‘room’ conjured up in this stark warehouse. She counted to five while she pretended to be amazed by the magic she saw before her; blazing logs in the fake fireplace, cards hung in streamers among sparkling decorations. There was a show of Christmas fare laid out before her – at least she hadn’t had to cook it, the thought scudded through her mind – then the camera wheeled away to groups of happy, happy people toasting each other with pretend champagne. There were some spotless, tidy children behaving so nicely and quietly – a dream Christmas, when in reality it was often hell.

  A small girl – pretty in pink – ruined this cheerful scene by tearing the paper off a ‘present’ only to find a block of polystyrene concealed under the glitzy paper. She howled in disappointment.

  Poor little thing, Lorna thought, as her mother scuttled onto the set to retrieve her sobbing child, that is life though, disappointment often lurks under the glitz. She caught the eye of one of the ‘happy’ people, a woman whose face held remnants of beauty, who’d confided in her before they started shooting that she hated Christmas, her memories of a houseful of cheerful, noisy family celebrations taunting her, now she was alone.

  At last it was over, ‘a wrap’. Thankfully, Lorna took off her winter clothes, handing them back to the wardrobe girl. She signed her chit, waved goodbye to the others and left, going back into the sunny day, probably the best one of the summer and she’d missed it while she acted out Christmas inside. Being an extra or ‘supporting cast’ as it was now called, was just another, rather unpredictable way – a fun way, if you didn’t count the early starts – of earning money.

  It was a strange world of unreality; the commercial she’d just worked on portrayed only the pleasure of Christmas. There was no sign of it being a religious feast, or of unhappiness from a fractured family. It peddled dreams and perhaps spawned resentment in people, most people she’d have thought, especially in these hard times, who’d never achieve such a spectacle.

  What would her Christmas be like this year? She could hardly bear to think of it. All those years of special, magical times with her parents and siblings, and continuing it all with her own children. Even when her parents died she had never confronted the fact that there could come a time when she could be alone for Christmas.

  Lorna got into her car, hoping she wouldn’t get lost going home. These studios were usually stuck out somewhere on an industrial estate and were difficult to find, even sometimes for the Sat Nav. She always headed off hours early for if you were late on set you were sacked – that was it. ‘End of,’ as her children would say.

  Her children, the thought of their pain when Stephen left them brought tears. Marcus said he’d probably go away for Christmas, not able to bear it without his father there, the father as he used to be. Flora slammed a few doors, muttering the same threats. This Christmas she could easily be alone, for the first time in her life, and it terrified her.

  1

  Dumped For An Inferior Model

  Lorna’s stomach churned like an out of control washing machine as she hovered outside the door to her ex-husband’s love nest. There was no make believe here, no fake door opening to reveal a Christmas wonderland as there had been in the publicity shoot she’d done way back in the summer. Christmas now swamped the shops and cluttered up the media, filling her with dread as how it would be this year, the first one without Stephen.

  She jabbed at the bell quickly before she lost her nerve, before the ache of her broken heart overwhelmed her. Footsteps clacked on a wooden floor, hesitated, continued, and the door was cautiously opened. A girl stared fearfully at her.

  Faced with her in the pallid flesh, Lorna was surprised. This was hardly the sexy siren she’d imagined. ‘Hello,’ she greeted her sourly. ‘I’m Stephen’s ex-wife. The horrible woman, who never loved him, never bought up his children or kept the house and his life in order.’

  Stephen’s ‘sex toy’, as Lorna thought of her – the only way she could deal with this frightening change in her once kind and dependable husband – was ‘bottle blonde’ with dark roots and a doughy complexion. She jumped back into the flat as if she were about to be lynched. Lorna crossed the hall in
a couple of strides into the living room, tossing the envelope containing Stephen’s mail onto a table by the door. The girl followed her, shooting nervous glances at Stephen. He stood rigidly at attention by the pseudo-marble fireplace, his expression like that of a schoolboy caught out with a porn magazine by his mother.

  He looked old – and he was – and, sour joke, he had left her for a ‘younger’ woman, when she, his wife, was far younger than he was in the first place.

  ‘You may not notice the age gap now, darling, but you will in a few years,’ her mother warned her, though her eyes had lit up at Stephen’s lean and athletic looks. He’d weathered well, like an old piece of furniture. He had been much cherished by her, she reminded herself, and it hurt to look at him; so familiar, so loved and yet now so different.

  He’d been her boss; they’d been drawn to each other at once, a coup de foudre, no less. Early on in their marriage, in her insecure moments, she’d wondered if he might leave her for someone more mature, not so ditzy, who couldn’t remember the aftermath of the war, ration books and a young Cliff Richard, because they hadn’t been born yet. But to her and everyone’s surprise and the children’s utter horror, he’d upped and left with someone who could in fact, she glanced at the girl, be not much younger than her, though there was a kind of waif-like look about her that might appeal to a man who seemed to have lost his self-esteem and sense of identity.

  Why on earth was she putting herself through this agony? Lorna asked herself. There was no need; until now the post office had presumably re-delivered Stephen’s mail successfully, but she’d been hit with a sort of defiance, sick of bundling up his letters and sending them on, letters that had come home when he had not.

  Even now, standing here in this drab love nest, its drabness exacerbated by the autumn colours of the trees outside, glided by the October sun, she realised that she still harboured a faint hope that this trauma was just a mad moment, an old age crisis, a nightmare she would wake from, and that he would come back to her. She’d have found him waiting here, the man he used to be, before the shock of losing his job had lured him into the clutches of a dubious shrink and this waif. Seeing he was not, she felt unbalanced and alone. Now she understood why some women, like her dearest friends Gloria and Rosalind, would rather carry on living with the devils they knew, than be alone.

  Once they’d been so happy, so madly in love. She must not cry; must not stand here snivelling while this new woman in his life looked on. They were divorced, only just but divorced all the same. She still had not come to terms with it or the guilt she felt that she might have been able to prevent it, if she hadn’t been so occupied with her new cake business at the time, or questioned more thoroughly his furtive absences from home.

  She’d trusted him too much – or some might say taken him for granted – to suspect anything as monumental as this.

  To steady her nerves, Lorna concentrated on the room. It was a rented flat in Earl’s Court, with coffee-coloured walls, a beige and brown carpet and upholstery; the colour of shit, really. Dull and safe to suit all tastes, except for hers. She wondered what the bedroom was like, and the word stabbed her like a knife.

  Stephen didn’t look well, hardly a good advertisement for a rampant sex life. Perhaps it wasn’t rampant, surely he was past rampant, he had been with her, anyway. Their lovemaking had become cosy, sporadic. She, wondering if he was afraid of impotence, and dared not mention it. She knew from friends that one mention of the dreaded ‘I’ word was a sure way of seizing up their hydraulic system.

  ‘This is not doing you any good, Lorna.’ Even his voice, once so rich and vibrant, sounded tired, and despite everything, it tore at her heart. Perhaps he was stricken by some mortal illness added to whatever happy, solve-everything pills his bloody doctor had prescribed. The man she had loved had been spirited away by a drug pusher hidden under the guise of a sleek, fashionable shrink, although, and this hurt her most of all, he had started to see this girl before his mind had been addled by the shrink. He’d met her in a club he’d been taken to by some of his colleagues to cheer him up, on the evening he’d been made redundant. It hurt her to think that this woman possessed something Stephen thought he needed that she, his wife, did not.

  ‘I’m off now. I don’t know why I came, perhaps to remind myself that our marriage is really over.’ Lorna said, scrutinizing the round face of the girl, whose slightly bulbous eyes reminded her of a Pekinese. All she needed was a squashed nose then she could be entered for Crufts, she thought bitchily. She couldn’t remember the girl’s name, if she’d ever known it. When Stephen told her he was leaving – pacing round their living room not meeting her eyes – he’d said, ‘I’ve found someone else, she’s had a difficult life and needs to be looked after’.

  ‘I need to be looked after,’ she’d wailed. ‘Have you forgotten you promised at the altar that you’d look after me until death us do part?’

  ‘You’re different, you’re strong and you’re so busy now with the shop and … you’re never here, always out doing things.’ He’d gone on to tell her about this girl’s sad life, on and on as if he couldn’t help himself and he expected her to understand. It was ‘she’ this and ‘she’ that. Perhaps he didn’t know her name either, but just felt macho and wanted by someone more vulnerable than himself and, guess what? She needed a visa. Looking at her now, Lorna thought the only thing in this girl’s favour was her youth and that was wasted on her.

  ‘None of this is helpful,’ Stephen’s voice held desperation.

  ‘Helpful to who? Or is it ‘whom’?’ Lorna challenged him, pain making her harsh. ‘It is hardly helpful to your wife and children to walk out on them just to help a complete stranger. Why can’t you work for a charity if you want to help people in trouble?’

  The girl gasped, her hand clawed in Stephen’s direction, as if afraid Lorna might turn her over to some homeless organisation, or contact Immigration and shop her for being illegal, if she was.

  ‘Why did you come, Lorna? You could have sent on my mail, you have before.’ He fixed his eyes on some point over her head.

  It was the approach of Christmas that had made her wobble, come to ‘suss things out’ as Marcus would have put it, coupled with a foolish hope that once Stephen had seen her in this dreary flat beside that dreary girl, he would have realised his mistake and been mortified at his out of character behaviour, and, despite their recent divorce, come back home. But she’d been wrong. He seemed devoid of emotion, for her, or the girl. No doubt the happy pills had wiped them out; if you feel nothing, then life is possible.

  She would not see Stephen and this girl again, he’d made his choice and it wasn’t with her. She had failed him in some way she couldn’t fathom but she must accept it and move on. Was there, she wondered, in this competitive society, some sort of kudos at finding your other half enamoured with a glamorous ‘sleb’ or even royalty, instead of a plain, nondescript person like this one?

  Lorna charged down the two flights of stairs to the front door of the block of flats. It smelt stale, of lost hopes, adding to her misery. She hurried out into the street, gulping in the chilly air. How could Stephen have given up their comfortable home life for this? Had he chosen to return here because he remembered that time from his youth when Earl’s Court was thought exotic; studded with flats and bed sits, humming with a hotchpotch of races and creeds, all bringing their own rhythm and vitality with them? He’d lived in a huge, draughty flat not far from here and she’d blissfully given her virginity to him there one winter’s afternoon. The memory smote her now, bringing the tears that were never far away.

  She’d thought that their marriage would only end in death, probably his, as he was so much older than her, twenty and three quarter years, to be exact. Had she been too smug, pulling up the drawbridge on the outside world, not seeing the storm approaching? She was convinced that his early retirement had brought this destruction. Stephen’s firm had been taken over and those near retirement made redundant, and
he’d never seen it coming, imagining his job was safe. It was a sudden and savage end to his career. Stephen was sixty-three, with two, possibly three more years to go before retirement. Losing his responsible, well-paid job shattered him; he had, as the experts loved to say, ‘lost his identity.’

  It had been a shock to her too; she had never envisaged such a brutal end to his employment. She’d tried hard to be supportive, to keep her own fears – of less money, and of finding something to keep him occupied – to herself. It hadn’t helped that just before he’d lost his job, when life was stable, she’d used most of the money her mother had left her to buy a share in the cake shop with her friend, Martha. It was sod’s law that as Stephen lost his job and needed her there to lean on while he adjusted to this massive change in his life, she had become frantically occupied in getting this business off the ground.

  At first Lorna was pleased he was there with time to help her to make sense of all the figures and rules and regulations, but he’d become dictatorial. This had upset Martha, who had put in most of the capital, so Lorna had felt she must stop asking for his advice. Perhaps this had made him feel even more unwanted, emasculated even, until he took up with this needy girl and, later, got into the clutches of the Harley Street drug pusher. It was like a bereavement; the man she’d known and loved, and who’d loved her, had gone. His body was still there, he still looked the same, but he was not. She’d heard people describe losing members of their family to dementia in the same way.

  She turned into the Earl’s Court Road, the smell of a kebab shop reminding her she was hungry. She’d hardly had any breakfast, the thought of seeing Stephen and his new set up had taken away her appetite. But she’d done it, faced it once and for all and must now, difficult though it was, accept that she was a divorced – no, an independent –woman again.