The Would-Be Wife

by Annie Wilkinson

  Still no response. She gave it a hefty kick, and after another couple of minutes of futile hammering and kicking she ran downstairs breathing fire, and left the house without another word.

  Some school kids had left off playing and stared when she emerged. A couple of passers-by walking their dogs stopped to get an eyeful. Lynn barely saw them as she stormed out of the garden and pulled the creaking gate shut before marching past the underwear-bedecked hedge and over the littered pavement. She stopped suddenly, and walked back to something she’d seen lying amid various other items – a little gold watch with a pretty gold bracelet – the sort of thing a girl might be given for her twenty-first birthday. With narrowed eyes and a vindictive little smile Lynn carefully placed her boot-heel on the watch’s dainty face and pressing on it with all her might she ground it slowly and deliberately into the pavement.

  Chapter 4

  In the short passage between Janet’s front door and her dining room, Lynn spilled it all out. Janet listened without comment then went to the dark oak Welsh dresser that she and Dave hadn’t quite finished paying for and extracted a bottle of brandy and a glass.

  ‘You’re in shock,’ she said, pouring out a generous dose. ‘Here, sit down and drink this.’

  Sinking down onto one of the dark oak Windsor dining chairs Lynn took the glass and gulped, choking a little at the fiery feeling of brandy coursing down her throat. She had never liked the stuff, but drinking it made her feel a bit calmer. Janet replaced the bottle.

  Good old Janet, the sort of rock-solid, two-feet-on-the-ground pal who never lets you down, Lynn thought. They’d been friends ever since the start of their nursing days. Janet was a bit taller than the average, with long light-brown hair that she wore taken up, the kind of girl you’d pass over in a crowd and only realise her sterling qualities when you really got to know her. All the girls in their set had been around the same age, but Janet had always seemed older, more reliable, more capable and less excitable than the rest of them. Janet had soon become the leader of the pack, the one they all took their cue from – and Janet had been the first of them to be married.

  Lynn recovered her breath and looked into her friend’s calm hazel eyes. ‘I’m shocked, but I’m not in shock,’ she said. ‘I’m hopping mad. I’m so furious I don’t know where to put myself. I’d have liked to drag her out of that bathroom by her hair and chuck her out of the window, after all her bloody tarty clothes.’

  Janet’s face was expressionless. ‘What about him?’

  Lynn took another gulp of brandy and closed her eyes. ‘I would never have believed it. I’d never have believed he’d do a thing like that. In our house. In our bed! Her nightie, next to his pyjamas – I’d never have believed him capable of it.’ She opened her eyes and looked at Janet’s face, so inscrutable it was obvious something was hidden behind the mask.

  ‘What?’ Lynn demanded

  Janet’s eyebrows twitched upwards for a second. ‘Nothing. Just that something about leopards and their spots springs to mind.’

  ‘Not you as well. You sound like my mother. I knew what Graham was before I married him, according to her. Well, I admit I knew he’d had a few women before I married him, but I didn’t expect him to be having any after! I thought he’d changed. When he stood up in church and promised to forsake all others and keep only unto me, I actually believed him.’ Lynn put her drink down on the polished oak dining table and delved into her bag to find a pack of Embassy. ‘God, I need a cigarette. Have you got a light?’

  ‘Matches in the kitchen,’ Janet said, discreetly sliding a coaster under the glass before going to fetch them. Lynn followed her.

  Janet picked up a large box of cook’s matches and struck one, holding it to Lynn’s cigarette. ‘What are you going to do?’

  Lynn inhaled. ‘My mother thinks I’m going back to him.’

  ‘And what do you think?’

  ‘I’m ringing the police! I’m getting that slut thrown out of my house.’

  ‘There’s the telephone. The number of the station will be in the book.’

  Lynn rang and spoke to the desk sergeant, her eyes widening and eyebrows rising to meet her hairline as she listened to his answer.

  ‘What did he say?’ Janet asked, when she replaced the receiver.

  ‘He said if she’s there as my husband’s guest there’s nothing they can do about it!’

  ‘His guest,’ Janet repeated with a grimace. ‘So that’s what you call them these days. Guests.’ She thought for a moment, and then gave a mirthless chuckle.

  Lynn’s face twisted into a wry smile. ‘It takes the biscuit, don’t it?’

  ‘Not half. Most folk would have a different name for somebody like that. Well, what are you going to do?’

  Lynn took another drag on her cigarette. ‘Get a divorce,’ she said, on the out-breath. ‘What choice have I got, if he can move another woman into my bed after five days? He doesn’t even care enough to try and hide it! There’s no point going on with it, is there?’

  ‘Don’t seem like it,’ Janet said. ‘It’ll mean going back to your mother’s though, and it don’t sound like she really wants you there.’

  ‘Hard luck for her, then. I’m never going back to that house, once I’ve got all my stuff. And I’m never sleeping in that bed again, either.’

  After a long pause, Janet volunteered: ‘Brian Farley’s good, of Farley and Brown. My cousin had him when she got her divorce.’

  ‘I’d have liked his mother and father to have seen it – what I saw.’ Lynn said, cheeks flushing and eyes darting fire. ‘I’d like to fill them in on their Graham’s antics. It’s about time they saw their wonder boy in his true colours. It’s about time they knew what a little shit he really is.’ She took another gulp of brandy.

  ‘They probably already know,’ Janet said. ‘Dave’ll be home soon. He can drop you off at their place in the van if you like, and you can get Gordon to run you back home; let him get an eyeful. But she’ll probably have scarpered by then.’

  Lynn decided to take a chance on that. Dave drove her to Graham’s parents, who kept a tiny fruit shop on Bricknall Avenue and thought themselves several cuts above the fisherfolk of Hessle Road. But now Lynn had something to show them that might just bring them down to earth.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Graham greeted his parents, when Lynn led them into the living room.

  His mother gave him an injured look. ‘We’ve come to see you, Graham.’

  ‘They’ve come to see what you’re up to, is more like it, Graham,’ Lynn said.

  On the settee sat a girl in a yellow crocheted micro-mini and knee-high white boots, with her dark hair bobbed Mary Quant style. What struck Lynn most about her was the brilliant green eye-shadow covering her eyelids – not so much shadow, she thought, as traffic lights set to ‘go’.

  ‘Aren’t you going to introduce us, Graham?’ she demanded.

  ‘This is Mandy,’ Graham said.

  Graham’s mother gave Mandy a dubious smile. His father assumed a disapproving expression and gave her a brief nod.

  ‘Hello, Mandy. I’m Lynn, Graham’s lawful wedded wife. This is his mother, Connie, and his dad, Gordon. ‘This is Mandy,’ Lynn repeated, turning to Graham’s mother. ‘Mandy’s living in my house, now, Connie. I’m out, with Simon, and she’s in. She’s sleeping in my bed, with my husband, and seeing she’s still here, I reckon all her trollopy stuff is back on my dressing-table, as well.’

  Graham faced her with a stunning composure. ‘This has got nothing to do with them; I don’t know why you brought them,’ he said, and turning to his father added: ‘You’d better go.’

  ‘They’re not going. They’ve every right to be here,’ she said.

  ‘They’re going. None of this is anything to do with them.’

  ‘It is something to do with us, Graham. We’ve got a grandchild here,’ Connie protested, her clear green eyes fixed on her son.

  ‘They’ve every right to be here. My name’s on
that mortgage agreement as well as yours, and they’re my guests, so they’re staying,’ Lynn insisted

  ‘No, you haven’t got a grandchild here,’ Graham answered his mother. ‘Lynn took him to her mother’s when she left me.’

  ‘Left you!’

  ‘Left you?’

  Both Gordon and Connie turned to stare at Lynn.

  ‘Last Sunday,’ Lynn said, ‘six days ago, when I found out about the green-eyed yellow idol there. I came back today like the dutiful wife I am, but he’d already moved her in. Quick work, that, wasn’t it?’

  The pink-lipsticked mouth below the brilliant green eyelids opened. ‘You broke my watch!’ it accused.

  ‘Well then, take it back to whoever gave it to you,’ said Lynn. ‘Explain how it came to get broken and tell them you want a new one. I’m sure they’ll be happy to replace it, under the circumstances.’

  ‘Her mum and dad gave her that!’ Graham exclaimed.

  ‘Hard luck for them, then. If they’d brought her up with better principles it’d still be in one piece.’

  ‘You broke it, and you’ll have to pay for it,’ Graham insisted.

  Lynn gaped at him, so taken aback it took her a moment to gather her wits. ‘No, Graham, I won’t have to pay for it,’ she said at last. ‘You’re my husband, so you’re responsible for my debts – by law. So you pay for it if you want to, and I’ll be presenting you with a few bills of my own before very much longer. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. I’m going upstairs to get some of my things now, and then I’ll be off.’

  She took a last look around the living room, and felt a stab of anguish to see that not only had all Simon’s toys been cleared out of sight, but his toy box was gone as well. There was not a single thing of his left in the room, nor, when she checked, was there anything of his in the dining room or the kitchen. Every trace of him had been removed. He might never have existed for all there was of him downstairs, or upstairs either – except for his bedroom. Ever ything belonging to him had been thrown in there, and the door firmly closed. In the master bedroom Mandy’s suitcase stood open as before on the chair under the window, with all her things back in it, but none as yet arrayed on the dressing table.

  As if in a trance, Lynn packed clothes for herself and Simon and went downstairs. The door to the living room was closed, and the company inside were talking to each other in murmurs inaudible to her. Feeling like an actress in some Brian Rix farce she left, without pausing to say goodbye.

  She knew there was severe pain in the offing, like the time she’d had a wisdom tooth pulled with the dentist’s knee almost on her chest as he dripped sweat onto her and nearly broke her jaw with his heaving and wrenching and twisting. The local anaesthetic had numbed her face and had given her a long respite before the agony started. Then it had arrived, with such excruciating intensity that painkillers had hardly touched it and she’d had to take two days off work. The heartache she had coming was going to be just as bad as that, and it would go on for longer. But for now, a total and merciful numbness engulfed the whole of her.

  Dave was waiting in the van when she got out. He wound the window down.

  ‘Made it up, have you?’ he asked.

  ‘No, and never likely to.’

  ‘Hop in. I’ll run you back to your mother’s, if you like,’ he said.

  She got in the van, grateful for the kindness. He slipped into first gear and pulled away from the kerb. They travelled in silence until he said: ‘There’s something in the glove compartment might take your mind off your troubles.’

  She opened the glove compartment, and pulled out a couple of girlie magazines.

  ‘Not likely,’ she said, putting them back. ‘They’re not really my cup of tea.’

  ‘Oh well, never mind, eh? Still, there’s no reason for a good-looking lass like you to go short, is there? So if you’re ever feeling the pinch, just give me a ring. Ring me at work, and I’ll pick you up, take you for a run to somewhere nice and quiet. Five one eight four three . . . and I’ll be with you in a jiffy.’

  ‘Thanks a lot, Dave,’ Lynn said, loading her voice and expression with such withering sarcasm he’d have had to be blind, deaf, and a moron to miss it. But she suspected he had.

  Chapter 5

  After an almost sleepless night, Lynn was up before the cold grey dawn, and leaving Simon and her mother in bed she went down to St Andrew’s Dock. The scent of the Humber and the fish, the raucous crying of the white-winged seagulls as they skimmed over the waves and wheeled round the ships to perch on the rails and rigging, and the sight of the trawlers unloading or waiting to unload were all comforting reminders of a happy childhood. She’d hardly ever set foot on the dock after marrying Graham, but nothing had changed. There was the same constant movement in the same twenty acres of water space, the same shuttle service of twenty or thirty ships a day, in and out of the dock on every tide. The fishermen were still catching the fish, the bobbers unloading it, and arranging it in aluminium kits of ten stone, ready for sale. The quayside was swarming with men – fishermen, bobbers, barrow-boys, buyers and sellers, constantly jostling to and fro in a mile of covered market. The air was full of their cries and shouts and the rattle of boots on the cobbles. Set foot on St Andrew’s Dock, and you were in a different world, she thought. When she’d married Graham and moved out of the area this world had ceased to exist for her, and she’d half imagined that it had ceased to exist at all. She was almost surprised to see it all still here, still going on as it had in those far-off days when she used to stand at the lock pits and wait to be lifted onto her dad’s ship as it eased through.

  With cries of ‘Cod! Cod!’ ‘Haddock!’ ‘Plaice!’ a gang of bobbers was at work winching the last of the Arctic Fox’s catch up in baskets from the hold and swinging them on ropes to the men waiting on the quayside – called ‘bobbers’, Lynn had been told, because they often had to ‘bob’ out of the way as baskets laden with roughly ten stone of fish came hurtling towards them. The bobbers tipped the fish into the kits and swung the empty baskets back on their ropes as if working to a rhythm, never missing a beat.

  Lynn’s father was walking towards her dressed in clean shore clothes after a good hot shower and change from greasy boiler suit and boots. Medium height, medium weight, good humoured and easygoing, he was the rock she had always been able to depend on.

  ‘Well, this makes a change. It’s not often anybody comes to meet me these days. I’d have thought you’d still be tucked up in bed with that husband of yours.’ He gave her a quizzical smile and dropped his black oilskin sea bag to give her a bear hug. ‘Did you miss your old dad that much then?’

  She felt a pang of guilt at that, and for the first time she noticed the sprinkling of white hairs among the brown, and the lines around dark eyes that were as warm as ever. She took his arm and squeezed it.

  “Course I missed you. I always did, didn’t I? Did you have a good trip?’

  ‘We caught plenty of fish, but I won’t say we had a good trip until I know what the market’s like.’

  ‘Have you seen our Anthony?’

  ‘He was in before us. Probably home by now.’

  The kits containing the fish from the Arctic Fox and all the other trawlers would soon stretch for nearly a mile along the quayside, each labelled with the owner’s name, ready for sale. The prices always started higher than anybody wanted to pay and gradually came down, Dutch auction style. Lynn and her father stopped for a while to watch.

  ‘A hundred shillings,’ the auctioneer cried, ‘ninety-nine shillings, ninety-eight shillings, ninety . . .’

  The buyers crowded round, watching him like hawks, torn between getting the fish at the lowest possible price and the risk of hanging on too long and losing the lot to a competitor.

  ‘At!’ someone shouted – the word that sealed the bargain.

  Buyers and auctioneer raced on to the next lot without pausing for breath, while the buyer’s labels were dropped into kits that were soon on the barro
ws, with the boys racing them away over the cobbles to the nearby fish processing plant, to be washed, filleted, trimmed, iced and boxed, and sent off on the lorries.

  Her father smiled. ‘Aye, it looks as if we’ve had a good trip,’ he said. In reality it made little difference to him – as Chief Engineer he earned a good salary – but he was due a small share of the poundage – the profits of the trip. After the auction the salesmen would tot up the totals, and when the skipper arrived in the office at ten o’clock for his interview with the owners they would have the value of the trip, and the share of skipper and crew would have been calculated on it.

  ‘I hope our Anthony’s done as well,’ Lynn said. Anthony was a bosun. Like the skipper and the mate, he was a shareman, his earnings geared more to the value of the catch. If the catch was poor, so was Anthony.

  Chapter 6

  ‘It’s a dirty bird that fouls its own nest,’ her father said, when Lynn had given him the latest news from Marlborough Avenue. The good humour was gone, and he pushed his empty mug towards Lynn’s mother with a frown. ‘Why didn’t you tell me, Nina?’

  Her mother filled the mug with more tea and pushed it back, undaunted and unapologetic. ‘What would have been the point of spending ten bob on a telegram to tell you something you couldn’t do anything about? What were you going to do, from hundreds of miles away? Not to mention the fact that we haven’t got a code for “your daughter’s husband’s having it off with another woman”, so I’d have been telling the sparks as well. It would have been all over the ship, from the skipper to the galley boy. Besides, I thought it was just a storm in a teacup. I thought it would all have blown over in a week, and she’d be going back to him.’

  ‘Going back to him?’ Lynn echoed. ‘I won’t be going back to him now, will I? She was showing no sign of going, and he evidently didn’t want her to – and the police say if she’s there as his guest they can’t turn her out of the house. So what would I be going back to – three in a bed? And Simon in the middle of it?’