A Perfect Husband

by Hilary Boyd

  In the end he decided to go over to Freddy and his mother’s flat. Take the risk. His mother and stepfather checked their phones regularly. In the time it took him to ride to West London – roughly twenty minutes – one of them would have replied and then at least he would be there to talk to them properly.

  As Dillon, deciding to avoid the West End, wove in and out of the evening traffic on Euston Road, buses piling past him, the night air cold and reviving after the stuffy office, he thought about his stepfather and began to suspect the worst.

  The problem wasn’t so much the wedding – his mother had assured him she’d bail them out if there was a problem, and he knew she had the funds, which he would somehow have to pay back – as Freddy’s integrity. He had told Lily, quite specifically, that he had paid the balance. He’d told her, and she’d told Dillon, a week ago. And he hadn’t. So where did that leave them all?

  Maybe there genuinely has been a cock-up in the transfer, he told himself, not really believing it. Because how could Freddy lie so blatantly to Mum, knowing so much rested on it? How could he do that? He couldn’t, was the answer. By the time Dillon arrived in his mother’s square, he had almost convinced himself the bank had to be at fault. They didn’t always get it right. That, or Freddy was having a nervous breakdown, had completely lost the plot. His mum had been saying for weeks that he was very stressed.

  Why, oh why didn’t we plump for the Italian restaurant round the corner? Nino is a friend. It would have been perfect, he thought as he arrived at his mother’s block, dismounted and chained his bike to a lamppost. Undoing the strap beneath his chin, but keeping the helmet on his head, he rang the penthouse bell. No answer. Neither had there been any response to his urgent calls and texts. He wondered what to do next. It was only nine fifteen – Gabriela was out tonight, with her French partner in the theatre company, Benoît Simon. So he had time before dropping the bombshell.

  He was hungry, but he didn’t fancy sitting alone in a restaurant. After a few minutes of standing about on the pavement, he decided he had to eat and wandered back onto Sussex Gardens, found a basement Malaysian café and ordered a takeaway beef rendang and rice, which he took back to his mother and stepfather’s block in a thin blue plastic carrier bag.

  A young couple were leaving and Dillon held the heavy glass door for them, then entered the mirrored, marble-floored foyer. There were two padded black leather chairs flanking a small rectangular glass-and-chrome table. He sank into one and opened the cheap plastic containers of food. The curry was oily and tepid, the beef so tough it threatened to pull out his teeth. He ate it anyway, starving as he was, receiving some disapproving looks from various haughty residents passing him on the way to or from the lift. But no one challenged his presence there.

  He must have nodded off, because the next thing he knew, his mother was shaking his shoulder, her look full of concern. ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked. ‘Is everything all right?’

  Dillon quickly stood up, trying to collect himself from a vivid anxiety dream about a boat full of people he didn’t know powering towards some rocks. He kept shouting, but no one seemed able to hear.

  His mother and stepfather were staring at him, waiting for him to respond.

  ‘I’m . . . I needed to catch you. You weren’t answering your phones.’

  ‘We were at the National,’ his mother said, reaching into her bag for her mobile as she spoke. ‘What is it, Dillon?’ He thought she looked tired and not entirely pleased to see him.

  The lift doors opened and a tall grey-haired man stepped out, giving them a cursory glance.

  ‘Evening, Harrison,’ Freddy said, nodding to the man, who nodded back with a half-smile. ‘Let’s go up,’ he added, taking Lily’s arm, waving to Dillon to follow.

  No one spoke as the lift creaked its way to the top floor. Freddy pulled his keys from his jacket pocket and opened the front door. Dillon could see that his stepfather looked tense, his face unusually pallid and drawn. He wondered if they’d had a row.

  ‘I’ll get some wine,’ Freddy said.

  Dillon didn’t stop him, just followed his mother into the sitting room and sat down on the sofa while she stood by the mantelpiece, a hand on it to steady herself as she slipped off her heels one at a time, spreading her manicured toes into the rug with what looked like relief.

  ‘Tell me.’

  Raising his eyebrows, he asked, ‘So you don’t know, Mum?’

  ‘Know what?’ Now she was staring at him, a puzzled frown on her face.

  ‘That the wedding money hasn’t been paid and they’re cancelling the booking if it’s not in the bank by tomorrow morning?’

  ‘That’s rubbish,’ she said, brushing her dark fringe off her forehead with a dismissive gesture. She moved over to the charcoal club chair on the right of the fireplace and sat down with a weary sigh. ‘Freddy told me he paid it a week ago. They must have got it wrong, lost the payment or something.’

  His stepfather came into the room, holding three glasses upside down by their long stems, a bottle of red wine in the other hand, all of which he put down on the coffee table.

  ‘Dillon says the money hasn’t arrived at the Roof Gardens. They must have lost it.’

  Dillon watched Freddy closely as he straightened up, shot a glance at his mum. There was no surprise on his face, just a closed, wary expression, as if he were silently calculating something. Another lie? Dillon wondered.

  Freddy stood looking down at them, both hands now thrust into the pockets of his jeans. He had pulled his blue shirt out of the waistband, taken off his shoes, revealing a pair of bright red socks. Dillon waited.

  Addressing Dillon, he said, ‘Why didn’t they call me?’

  ‘Suzie has, she says, a number of times, but you didn’t get back to her.’

  Freddy shook his head in apparent despair. ‘I gave her both numbers, but she’s probably been ringing my other phone. It fell under a bus yesterday, on the Strand. I was taking it out of my top pocket and the damn thing slipped out of my hand and landed in the bus lane just as a number eleven was going past. Smashed to smithereens.’

  ‘Bad luck,’ Dillon said, trying to keep the impatience out of his voice, ‘but what about the money? Suzie says we’ve got till midday tomorrow.’

  Freddy finally looked concerned. ‘Can’t think what’s gone wrong.’ He reached along the sofa and patted Dillon’s arm. ‘Don’t worry. Leave it with me. I’ll sort it out in the morning. I asked Angus to do the transfer, so maybe he forgot or something . . . I hope he didn’t send it to someone else!’ He picked up the wine bottle and unscrewed the top, pouring a small amount into a glass and taking a sniff, a sip. Nodding a little in appreciation, he proceeded to pour wine into each of the glasses, handing one to Lily, one to Dillon, then sat back with his own cradled in his left hand.

  Dillon didn’t know what to say. But he didn’t believe his stepfather.

  ‘Umm, yeah . . . That’s great, Freddy . . . Thanks . . . But the thing is . . .’ He stopped, having no idea how to phrase his concerns. He could hardly call him a liar to his face with absolutely no proof. A phone under a bus? Really?

  ‘You’re looking worried, Dillon. Please don’t,’ his mother chimed in. ‘If Freddy says he’s paid the money, then there isn’t a problem. It’ll be some idiot in Admin. They must have hundreds of bookings there. I’m sure stuff goes astray all the time.’

  ‘I promise I’ll ring Suzie first thing. They aren’t going to cancel a high-profile wedding like ours. It would look terrible.’

  Dillon took a deep breath. ‘That’s exactly what they are going to do, Freddy. Suzie was quite clear. She says they have people queuing up to book our slot.’

  Freddy gave a short laugh. ‘Well, she would say that, wouldn’t she? She’s only winding you up to make sure she gets her cash.’

  ‘So you’re saying the wedding is solid?’
>
  ‘Of course it is,’ Freddy said. ‘Do you honestly think we’d sit by and let Suzie Cream-cheese cancel your big day?’

  His mother shot him a sympathetic look. ‘Poor Dillon, she must have really freaked you out to get you rushing over here at this hour.’

  He took a large gulp of wine. The taste of that revolting beef still lingered on his tongue and he was only too happy to wash it, and his anxiety, away. He remembered Gabriela and pulled his phone out of his pocket, checked the screen. But there was no message.

  ‘I’d better get home,’ he said, finishing the wine and putting the glass down. ‘Sorry to have intruded.’

  ‘Stay the night,’ his mum said. ‘Please. You can’t drive home drunk.’

  He laughed. ‘I’m not drunk. And it’s only a bike. I’m not in charge of a lethal weapon.’

  Freddy didn’t insist and Dillon got the impression he was relieved his stepson was leaving.

  As he mounted his bike, his face flushed from the wine, his fingers fumbling with his chin strap, he tried to banish the sense of calamity that still hovered, no matter how much his mother and stepfather assured him that everything was just hunky-dory.

  Chapter 16

  Freddy lay beside his sleeping wife in the darkness and knew that the game was up. It was no longer a case of if he would be discovered but when, and how he should manage it to inflict the least possible damage. His luck had been terrible this past week. The not-inconsiderable chunk of money he’d had – which was almost enough for the wedding – was long gone, although at one stage on Friday night he’d had more than enough for that and a few weeks’ living as well. Now he had barely a thousand in cash. Nothing else. His three credit cards were maxed out, his debit card blocked, his phone account cancelled. There was no ‘other’ phone: he’d had to buy a pay-as-you-go and make up the bus story. Sometimes, he thought, I wish I wasn’t such a convincing liar. He’d never be in this mess, he reckoned, if someone had called him to account sooner. Not that he was blaming anyone else.

  In a way, as he lay there, he felt more relaxed than he had in weeks. Not happy: he was far from happy at the thought of confessing to Lily. In fact he couldn’t even go there in his head. But the pressure was off now. The pressure to find money here, there and everywhere, to finagle, screen cred­itors’ calls, lie, lie and lie. He’d failed, and he knew he must take the consequences on the chin. That had been his father’s favourite expression: ‘Take it on the chin, son.’ Which meant, in Vinnie Slater’s terms, ‘Stand there and let me beat the shit out of you until you scream for me to stop, because it gives me enormous pleasure. But don’t blame me: this is all your own fault . . . son.’

  Freddy allowed himself to think about his father for a moment. He rarely did, pushing the pain back into the box whenever it threatened his thoughts. The last time he’d seen him was, what, twenty-five years ago? Maybe longer. Vinnie still tried to get in touch, usually around Christmas, probably because he was drunk. But Freddy wasn’t tempted. He told everyone his father had Alzheimer’s. And who knew? Maybe he did by now – he must be nearly seventy-six.

  Turning in the darkness to fit his body against Lily’s warm back, he wondered if this was the last time she would let him do so. By tomorrow night she wouldn’t be speaking to him, no doubt. But he was too tired even to feel that particular pain. He wanted so badly to sleep and hoped, not for the first time, that he might never wake up.

  *

  Almost inevitably, Freddy did wake up, at around six the next morning. He’d slept flat out, no dreams that he could remember, and now, as he looked at his dishevelled reflection in the bathroom mirror, he felt as if he had the worst hangover in the history of the world. But it wasn’t a physical hangover. He picked up his shaving bowl, wet his brush and swirled one into the other until he had foaming, soapy bristles to sweep around his chin. This morning he saw his mother’s eyes looking back at him. Not only their colouring of deep brown, the thick, dark lashes, but also the expression of hurt and fear that had hung about Maria for as long as he could remember.

  Their looks came directly from Maria’s Maltese mother, Pina – a beautiful girl who’d turned heads and, as a consequence, had been knocked up as a teenager by an English soldier at the start of the Second World War, then swiftly abandoned. She had brought up Maria in Valletta, the capital, with no help from her shamed family, cleaning for the well-off British administrators and diplomats, enduring the nightmare siege of the island, and coming out skin and bone, all her meagre rations given to her precious baby daughter.

  As a child, Freddy had loved those trips to Malta. His grandmother was fierce and uncompromising – she’d had to be to survive – but also kind, and she had adored Freddy. They would sit together, cross-legged, on the cool tiles of the kitchen, in the baking afternoon heat, and she would tell him stories about the island, the war, his mother.

  By then Pina lived in a small flat near St Julian’s Bay, about twenty minutes north of Valletta. It was five minutes’ walk from the sea, where they would swim off the sharp rocks of the bay in the clear, deep, aquamarine water of the Mediterranean. But he’d particularly loved being there because his father had had to stay behind and mind the Leicester pub. It was a month of safety and calm every summer, when his nerves were not raw and jangling at every sound that might signal his father’s presence. And each year it became harder for him and his mother to go home.

  He went through to the kitchen. Dawn was breaking over the city, the wash of light beautiful and serene. He knew Lily was unlikely to be up for at least an hour, but he quietly laid the table, being careful not to chink the crockery, then broke some eggs into a bowl and put a small pan on the unlit stove with a chunk of butter in the bottom and a wooden spoon, ready to receive the eggs for scrambling. He filled the filter paper with coffee grounds and topped up the water, cut bread from a French sourdough loaf, slotting the slices into the Dualit toaster, poured grapefruit juice from the carton in the door of the fridge into two small blue glasses and finally retrieved the marmalade from the cupboard to put in the centre of the table. The simple preparation stopped him thinking. He refused to think. ‘Live in the moment,’ people were always smugly insisting these days – as if they did any such thing – and this was the moment he clung to, because it felt like the last moment of his life.

  *

  Lily, rumpled and half asleep, her dark hair sticking out at odd angles, smiled as she saw the table.

  ‘Sit,’ he said. ‘I’ll put the coffee on.’

  She did as he told her and sipped the juice, watching him as he turned the gas on and ground pepper into the eggs.

  ‘Sleep well?’ he asked.

  She nodded. ‘Like a log. That play was so intense, it exhausted me.’

  He laughed, marvelling that he could do so with such ease. ‘Bit dark for my taste. There didn’t seem any hope, no chink in the despair. Good production, though.’

  ‘Hmm, you know me, I like dark. But I get what you mean. A tad too relentless, maybe.’

  Freddy spooned a neat pile of warm egg onto her white china plate, then some on his own, and sat down opposite her.

  ‘Thanks. This is lovely,’ she said, as she began to spread her toast.

  They discussed the play some more over breakfast. Freddy would have been happy to talk about it till the end of time rather than allow a gap in the conversation through which the chaos might slip. Just this last minute of peace before Armageddon, he begged silently to an uncaring universe.

  But the bubble of tranquillity could not last. Lily, her meal finished, wiped her fingers on the white cotton napkin Freddy had put beside her plate, pushed back her chair to cross her bare legs and pulled her dressing-gown over her knees. She glanced up at the wall clock beside the fridge and said, ‘I suppose it’s too early to ring Suzie?’

  Freddy felt his body close down, his heart somersaulting, Olympic style. This is it.
r />   ‘I can’t pay,’ he said simply, unable to sort out the vast jumble of information that it would be necessary, eventually, to impart to his poor wife.

  He saw her frown, her face go still.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’ve fucked up, Lily. I mean seriously fucked up. I’m broke.’

  It seemed such an inadequate description of his situation, but it was the best he could do. Words piled up to be spoken, but he held back the flood for a few moments longer.

  Lily, still frowning, leaned towards him. ‘Broke?’

  He nodded. ‘The studio is in the shit, I’m talking receivership, and me, personally . . . I’m bankrupt, Lily. I can’t pay for Dillon’s wedding.’

  Tears welled in his eyes as his wife continued to stare at him, uncomprehending.

  ‘The studio is bankrupt?’

  He wished she’d react instead of repeating his words back to him. Wished she would do something, say something, get angry . . . get it over with.

  ‘How did that happen?’ she was asking. ‘I thought it was so successful . . . You said it was always booked up. What on earth went wrong?’

  ‘Bad decisions . . . bad debts . . . I invested too much in the new mixing desks and software . . .’ Even now, when the chips were, literally, down, Freddy found the truth was stuck fast in his throat.

  ‘No! So this is what’s been bothering you. Why didn’t you tell me, you idiot? I can help out, lend you some money till you get back up and running.’ She shook her head at him. ‘I’ll pay for the wedding. I offered right from the start. He’s my son, my responsibility – you didn’t have to be so generous.’

  She reached across the table and took his hand. ‘We can sort this out, Freddy. Is it very bad, the debt? Would my money be enough?’