Other People's Husbands

by Judy Astley

  And then she thought, hell, why not take chances when they come? Who was it said you should always make love as if it was for the last time? Because one day, as Conrad had hinted, it surely would be. The spring day was fabulous, they were lucky: alive, energetic, healthy and he was right . . . She kicked off her shoes and felt the sun-blasted heat of the stone terrace on her toes. She stripped off all her clothes quickly and jumped into the pool before the thought of the cold water changed her mind, her breath taken by the shock of the chill. Conrad swam alongside her and ran his fingers along the inside of her thigh, kissing the back of her neck.

  ‘Your bed or mine? Or what about in here? Though I have to say,’ he laughed, ‘this water could be warmer!’

  Sara took his hand and swam away, towing him with her to the shallow end. She walked up the steps and looked back at him. ‘OK, studio,’ she said, collecting her clothes from the back of the chair, and quickly pulled her dress over her wet, cool body. Conrad followed her out of the pool, pulled her close against him and kissed her.

  ‘I’ve missed this . . .’ she murmured to him.

  ‘Hiiiii ! Thought I’d find you out here, gorgeous day like . . . Oh!’ Sara’s sister Lizzie had a voice that could slice tempered glass. ‘Aha! What are you two up to?’ She looked the naked Conrad up and down. ‘Hmmm . . . I get it. Here . . .’ She picked up a towel from the table and threw it to him. ‘Cover up, Conrad. I’m a highly excitable woman.’

  ‘Lizzie! How did you get in?’ he asked her, idly drying his hair with the towel.

  ‘Side gate. Does no one ever lock up around here? If you left gates open down in the far west, you’d find your mower and your garden table on offer at the nearest car boot sale before you’d blinked!’

  ‘It was bin day. We have to leave it open for them,’ Sara told her.

  ‘So you two were skinny dipping! How romantic!’ Lizzie squealed, hugging her sister. ‘Ugh, you’re all soggy still! Hope you don’t mind me just turning up like this, Sara. It’s just . . . we have a bit of a home crisis and I thought, well where better to sort it out than here with my nearest and only sister? It’s Jasper. He doesn’t want to go to school any more. So, well, I don’t want him skulking about at home doing nothing and pretending he’s “finding himself “, because that would involve lying in bed till past noon every day. He’s decided he wants to paint and the obvious solution was, why not come here and stay with you for a while and he can see what life’s like with a real artist?’

  ‘Oh Lizzie! You’re such a sweetie and you never change! Didn’t think to phone first? Or email? You might have driven over two hundred miles just to find we’d gone off to Spain or something!’

  ‘I did phone! I called last night from the Travelodge at Yeovilton – didn’t Cassandra say? I told her we were on our way and she said it was fine!’

  ‘Hey, it’s all right. And it’s so good to see you,’ Sara reassured her, leading her into the house. ‘Cass must have forgotten. She’s got a lot on her mind, but you’re here now . . . and – so where is Jasper?’

  ‘Er . . . he came in the gate ahead of me, saw you and Conrad canoodling naked in the pool and bolted to sit in the car. He said you were “sooo like, barrassin” or words to that teenage effect. Such a privilege to get that many words out of a seventeen-year-old. I was quite shocked.’

  ‘You didn’t have any such scruples though, did you Lizzie? Were you hoping to catch us in flagrante?’ Conrad laughed. ‘Yes darling, in fact I wondered about joining in. I bet you could still take us both on, Conrad. I remember one time in Ibiza back in ‘75, just before I had Tamsin. I was with Pablo and ooh, names escape me these days . . . was it Michael or Pierre . . . or possibly both?’ Lizzie’s eyes went dreamy and distant. Conrad took the chance to sidle out of the kitchen to go and get dressed, blowing Sara a regretful kiss as he went.

  ‘Oh spare me, please! Your old-lover stories go on for hours and in too much detail!’ Sara laughed at Lizzie. ‘And of course Jas can stay for a bit. But only if he doesn’t mind babies. Cassandra’s moved in for a while with Charlie.’

  ‘And . . . er . . . while I’m this side of the Tamar,’ Lizzie went on hesitantly, ‘would you mind very much if I stayed for a little teeny while as well? It wouldn’t be for long . . . only until I can . . .’

  ‘Oh Lizzie, not again!’ Sara looked at her sister’s face, which revealed something strongly resembling a hint of guilt. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve left Jack! How many husbands can a woman get through in one lifetime?’

  ‘As many as will have me, darling,’ Lizzie said. ‘Though at my age it’s certain to be a fast-diminishing number and they’re usually other people’s. I’ll go and give Jasper the good news. If I can prise him out of the car and off his mobile, I’ll get him to bring our stuff in. You are a darling, Sara, thanks so much for this. What did I ever do to deserve such a generous baby sister?’

  *

  ‘You’re smiling,’ Sara said to Conrad. He was still panting slightly. She put her fingers lightly over his heart and felt for a safe, steady rhythm. It was thumping a bit, unsurprisingly, but seemed regular enough. Would she always do this now after sex? Just to make sure that this wasn’t going to be the final way out for him? People joked about men dying with a smile on their faces, but she couldn’t even remotely see the amusement value here, not now.

  ‘Why wouldn’t I smile?’ Conrad turned towards her. His blue eyes were bright and full of happiness. She wasn’t going to comment on the recent scarcity of sex, not say anything to spoil the moment, something trite and whiny like ‘it’s been ages’. Even if it was rare, it was worth the wait. How, and here she thought of Marie again, how could new sex with even the most devastating stranger be better than this?

  She felt tingly, floppy and as if she wouldn’t be able to move for hours. She pulled the patchwork quilt over both their bodies and stared up through the sloping glass roof of the studio to where, far above, a plane was passing, leaving a skinny line of white across the blue. She imagined passengers on it, looking at the little electronic map on the monitor and thinking, oh, London’s down there.

  ‘This is like being really young again, way back when we first got together, isn’t it?’ she commented.

  ‘What, leaving your sister and Jasper to settle in and sneaking down here for a quick one? Lucky they didn’t follow!’

  ‘Lizzie knew better. I’m sure she could tell, the way I quickly told her which rooms she and Jasper could have, practically threw the mugs of coffee at them, then scarpered. She knew all right,’ Sara giggled. ‘Just like my parents did that first time you came to stay in Devon, and we went out to the barn saying we were going to see if there were owls.’

  ‘And you went back into the house with hay all over the back of your clothes. Not much of a giveaway, that!’

  ‘Like I said, we were young then.’

  ‘Well, one of us was young then,’ he corrected her, laughing. ‘You’re now at the great age I was when we first met. Though . . .’ he leaned over to her, softly kissing the edge of her mouth, ‘you still seem nineteen sometimes. Especially at this moment, with your features all soft and full of love. I should paint you like this. If I could even begin to capture that look, I’d do it right now.’

  He wasn’t smiling any more. ‘You look sad,’ she said, stroking his face.

  ‘No, I’m not sad. I’m just concentrating on what you look like,’ he told her. ‘If we could take one sight with us into the next life, it would be this one.’

  ‘You’re doing it again. The death thing,’ she said, sitting up abruptly. ‘Don’t talk like that, Conrad. Don’t spoil the moment. You’re not going anywhere, right? I don’t want to have to hear you blathering on about heading for death for the next twenty years, OK?’

  ‘Sara . . .’

  ‘No! Just . . . stop it! You’re frightening me – I’ll start thinking you’re going to do yourself in or something. Oh God, you’re not planning to, are you? How cowardly would that be? You copping
out and leaving us all? Promise me you won’t even think about it!’

  ‘All right,’ he said, simply. ‘I won’t think about it.’

  Sara snuggled against him again, feeling better. And yet . . . when she analysed exactly what he’d said, she couldn’t quite make herself feel as comforted as she needed to be.

  Art is making something out of nothing and then selling it.

  (Frank Zappa)

  ‘I’m going to put a No Vacancies sign in the window,’ Sara told Marie, as she flung her bag on to her favourite sofa in the far corner of the staffroom. ‘It’s exhausting having so many people in the house, especially when one is a baby, another is a teenager and two are eternally squabbling sisters. Conrad is an absolute delight to live with by comparison, even considering his funny little ways and his peculiar hints that he’s up to something weird and wonderful that might involve jumping off a high building.’ She sent a quick mental plea to the president of the immortals here, warding off the fleeting possibility that she might have hit the spot with this thought.

  ‘All men have funny little ways. Mike won’t wear shoes in the house but never considers that leaving them right in front of the door, so you have to move them to open it, is not a sensible thing to do. And he polishes his Black & Decker gadgets as if they’re heritage silver. Mad. So which are the squabbling sisters? Pandora and Cass, or you and Lizzie?’ Marie asked, examining scarlet marks on her left wrist. She stroked her skin gently, smiling dreamily.

  ‘Not me and Lizzie – we’re past that, thank goodness, though I’m not saying she doesn’t drive me nuts. She’s ten years older than me – why do I still think this should make her a fully fledged grown-up? She’ll never be grown-up! This is the third husband she’s left – plus several of other people’s . . . No, it’s Conrad she picks little niggles with these days, not me. She thinks he’s gone . . . what was it she said? Oh yes, “tame”, that was the word she used. She thinks he should be out hell-raising like a “proper artist”. I don’t know quite what she means by that, but for some reason she’s always had it in her head that painters should collectively go in for serious excess, like rock stars. He’d rather lie on the sofa and watch Casualty.’

  ‘Doesn’t she know that aged rock stars – well, the ones who aren’t Keith Richards – mostly end up playing golf and taking up fishing?’ Marie said. ‘You can’t get less “excess” than that.’

  ‘Exactly. You tell her. I’ll be right behind you.’

  The two of them had the room to themselves so far. The rest of the teaching staff were out making the most of the lunch break or hadn’t yet arrived, which wasn’t surprising – the room wasn’t a particularly inviting one. You wouldn’t choose to spend unnecessary time in it. The walls were painted Institution Beige; tables and cupboards were left over from the days when the building had been a school, and the sofas and chairs should have been con-fined to a skip years before. Council resources didn’t exactly run to redecoration or refurbishment for mere casual staff. But Marie had excitedly pleaded with Sara to come in especially early so she could, as she put it, Tell All. Sara wasn’t entirely sure that ‘all’ was something she really wanted to hear, but Marie wasn’t having any argument. Right now, she looked keyed up enough to explode, reminding Sara of schooldays when girls who’d lost their virginity would come in glowing with new knowledge and a desperate need to brag.

  Sara was feeling a bit distracted. Ben had told her that he was coming into the college again this afternoon for more research into his Guardian piece. Much as she loved Conrad, she was surprised how strangely giddy she felt, anticipating seeing Ben again. This too reminded her of schooldays – had the boy she fancied really turned up at the school gate to meet her, or was he hoping to run into her much prettier best friend? The thought of seeing Ben made her smile uncontrollably, and gave her an inkling of how Marie must be feeling. Ridiculous. It was almost like having a silly teen crush on someone. This was something she definitely wasn’t needing in her life. You don’t do this at my age, she told herself as she pulled her attention back to Marie’s newly tumultuous sex life, proof, if any was needed, that you did do crushes at their age.

  ‘OK then – out with it, Marie.’ Sara relented, filling the kettle and then looking through the cupboard for a couple of mugs that were the least cracked and stained. ‘You’ve been smirking in that “dying to tell you” way ever since we got here. You’d better tell me . . . though how much detail I can cope with, I’m not sure! I take it things went all right with the flying Scotsman?’

  ‘All right? That would be the understatement of the century!’ Marie sighed, dropping heavily on to the sofa. Sara heard one of its last few springs give way. Poor sofa – could it take the strain of Marie’s overexuberance?

  ‘So how was the lunch?’ Sara teased. ‘Was Le Caprice as good as ever?’

  ‘Lunch was fine. Lunch was lovely, what bit of it I could eat. Lust is wonderful stuff – such a brilliant appetite suppressant.’

  ‘You should suggest it to WeightWatchers for their list of sure-fire diet tips,’ Sara told her. ‘Did he mention his wife, or was home life definitely off the menu? I always wondered if you just pretend they don’t exist, those in-convenient real-life people.’

  ‘We talked about books and films and things, but absolutely not about our families and children and all that stuff that would make it ordinary. If you do that, it takes the romance out of it.’

  ‘I’ll bear it in mind in the unlikely event that I’ll ever need the info! I’ll know where to come for expert advice.’ Sara poured boiling water on to the two tea bags, watching the sepia tones bleed darker and darker from the tea, enjoying the smoky swirl of colour. ‘So – did the basque go down well?’ she asked Marie.

  ‘Oh yes! And so did Angus!’ Marie closed her eyes, smiling ecstatically, remembering.

  ‘Eeeuw! Stop right there – too much detail! I only meant . . . actually, I don’t know what I meant. Did he appreciate the effort you’d made, is all, I suppose? Was he surprised when he found you were sort of gift-wrapped?’

  ‘Surprised? Well not very, actually. We’d discussed it all in lots of detail by email. The airwaves or ether or what-ever must have been sizzling! The nipple-rouging thing backfired slightly, though.’

  ‘What?’ Sara poured milk into the mugs. She suspected she should have sniffed at it first, checked it wasn’t off. Too late now. She handed tea over to Marie and perched on the arm of the sofa, carefully in case it gave way, in a position where she could see if anyone came in to interrupt their conversation. It was hardly typical staffroom chat, after all. A bit of grumbling about various partners’ thoughtlessness over birthday-present choices was usually about as personal as it got in here. Only the week before, there’d been a long discussion about why any man would imagine his partner would be thrilled to unwrap oven gloves.

  ‘Angus had told me he likes really pink nipples,’ Marie said, peering down her own low-cut top.

  ‘It’s OK, you don’t need to show me . . . I’ll imagine Bengal Rose from the gouache colour chart,’ Sara laughed.

  ‘Oh, I wasn’t going to get them out, not in here!’ Marie giggled. ‘I was just thinking about what I did. Mine are a bit pale so I thought, well, I’d enhance them for the occasion, as it seemed to be a special request. So after you’d gone home when we’d been in Selfridges that day, I went into Space NK to have a look for something suitable. There I was, just browsing and trying a few shades of glossy blusher on the back of my hand, and this nice girl, about your Cassandra’s age, started talking to me about skin tones and saying maybe I’d need this shade or that one. I didn’t like to stop her and say, oh it’s not for my face, I want to make my nipples pinker for my lover. I mean, you don’t, do you? I wonder what she’d have thought if I had said it, though. Young people have no idea, do they? Like that sweet girl I bought the basque from. If they only knew . . .’

  ‘So did it work? The blusher?’

  ‘Oh no – you see that’s the
thing. I ended up with some lip gloss that was exactly the right shade for my mouth. Not at all right for my tits. He said it tasted funny too, like cheap sweets . . .’

  ‘OK – enough again!’ Sara held her hand up. ‘So you’ll be seeing him some more?’

  ‘Oh yes!’ Marie smiled. ‘But I think possibly we’d better forget the handcuffs next time . . . they’ve made marks. Mike was asking what I’d done. I told him it was a bracelet. Which it was really, wasn’t it? It wasn’t exactly a lie.’

  ‘No, Marie, it wasn’t really a lie,’ Sara reassured her. She felt a bit sad. Here she was, stuck between Marie’s delight in her part-time lover and the deep, uncertain misery of Mike’s reluctant suspicion. What to do? The sensible answer, of course, was nothing. And yet . . .

  ‘Look, Marie . . . I saw Mike in the park yesterday and he asked me things about you. I probably should have phoned you immediately to warn you but . . . well, if I had, and he was around, he’d have twigged that it was because he’d spoken to me, and thought there was something in what he’d said.’

  ‘What? What did he say?’ Marie looked stricken, wide-eyed and scared. ‘He can’t possibly know about Angus! Did you.. . ?’

  ‘Marie, of course I didn’t say anything! I wouldn’t! It’s just he’s noticed you’re looking good and to be honest you are rather going round with a secretive smirk on your face! Look, I know you think he wouldn’t notice you unless you were dressed in nothing but a B&Q tool belt, accessorized with chisels, but he’s not entirely stupid, you know. Just . . . please, take care, won’t you?’

  ‘I will, I will, I promise. I don’t want to hurt him, that would be the very worst thing. I absolutely don’t want to lose him – the Angus thing isn’t about not being with Mike,’ Marie wailed. ‘God, what have I done? Oh, I wish . . . !’

  ‘Wish what? That you’d never got involved with Angus?’

  ‘Oh Lord no! I just wish I didn’t have the kind of stupid face that gave all my secrets away! How is an honest woman supposed to get away with a harmless spot of extra-marital?’