Other People's Husbands

by Judy Astley

  ‘Just on the corner here will be fine, thanks,’ she told him.

  ‘I must see you again very soon,’ he said when he’d stopped the car. ‘We need to talk about this exhibition. I’ll introduce you to the gallery owners. They loved your photos, thought it would work really well in the space.’

  ‘Great! I’m quite excited about getting back into it. It’s been a while. Call me,’ she said.

  He unfastened her seat belt then took her hand, pulling her towards him. The adrenalin surged again as he leaned forward and kissed her softly. This time it wasn’t the kind you could interpret as a just-casual-friends kiss. Nor did she exactly fight him off – quite the opposite. When, she thought as the kiss continued, was the feeling that she was being unfaithful going to kick in? Not today, it seemed. Eventually, confused and flustered, she disentangled herself from him and picked up her bag and the toy tiger from the car floor. She was having trouble working out how to breathe properly.

  ‘Bye, Ben,’ she managed to say as she fumbled with the car door handle. ‘And er . . . thanks for the outing . . . and the tiger!’

  ‘A pleasure. Truly. And the next time someone asks me when I was last at a fair, I’ll remember much better. I can tell them it was with someone else’s beautiful wife.’

  The pub was a long thin bar split into distinct people factions. Noisy with music, but one end, leading to an L-shaped alcove, was crammed with saggy old plum-coloured sofas where a bunch of students in scruff mode seemed to have found a speaker-free gap and were talking. That wasn’t the Goth end. Those were in the middle by the bay window, huddled together looking as gloomy as Goths should, round a big table beneath a black chandelier. Cassandra, as she half-dragged Jasper towards the bar, got a fleeting impression of tiny fingers holding glasses. The fingers weren’t truly tiny, of course, they were the only bits of visible flesh emerging from black fingerless Goth gloves. They all had them, as if it was compulsory. Some of the girls wore lacy ones, others were more hard-core in studded leather. Cass envied them. They had their chosen tribe, their comfort rituals of death-mask make-up and dressing up, and their support network. They could go to any town and hook up with their own crew just by asking around, looking around.

  She felt adrift, here with her younger cousin, living back home with her parents, already a parent herself, which separated her, somehow, from her peers. How many of these Goth girls had a baby at home, she wondered. Probably none. It would be hard, after all, to keep an extreme make-up habit like theirs going, if you had to remember to buy more baby-wipes and sort the triple-vaccine appointment. And all that black and the purple satin . . . it would show every smear of baby rice. She missed Paul. Or maybe she just missed someone.

  ‘Hey, you made it! Xavier’s here too. He’s just gone off to talk to some people down the far end.’ Pandora was behind the bar, doing her first shift at the Pumpkin pub. She skilfully operated a beer pump with one hand and poured tonic into a gin with the other. ‘Ice and a slice?’ she called perkily to her customer.

  ‘Were you born doing this? You’re putting on a perfect barmaid voice!’ Cass commented.

  ‘Pity I don’t have the tits for it,’ Pandora said, looking down at the front of her boyish little body. ‘Five pounds sixty please,’ she said, returning her attention to her customer. ‘OK now you, Cass, what can I get you? Please don’t ask for a fancy cocktail; they take ages and the place is filling up.’

  ‘No, just a beer in a bottle, please Panda, and what about you, Jasper?’

  ‘Same,’ he grunted. Cass noticed his attention was on the Goths. One girl in particular, with hair that looked mildly electrified. She must have hacked at it herself with blunt kitchen scissors. It was black, shot through with scarlet as if she’d run heavily bloodied hands through it.

  ‘Oooh . . . sorry, Jasper. If I was buying it would be fine, but as I’m selling, I just can’t. I don’t want to get fired on day one for flogging booze to my underage cousin. Think of something else? I’m really sorry.’

  Jasper scowled a bit and scuffed crossly at the floor, kicking the base of the bar. ‘OK, OK, I sort of expected it,’ he conceded. ‘Coke then. Real, not diet.’

  ‘Coming right up!’ Pandora trilled, giving them her professional smile.

  Cass fought back the urge to ask Jasper what the magic word was. She might be a mummy, but she wasn’t his mummy. She’d only brought him out to show him that there was a potential smidgen of night life in this town. If he was going to be staying a while, he needed to get out and meet people or he’d soon be as mad as Conrad.

  ‘Mum get back OK? She’s not usually that late, is she?’ Pandora asked Cass during a break in the customers.

  ‘Yeah – and well weird too. She looked all hot and she’d got this really ugly, like cheap toy tiger? The sort you get down the pound shop? She said it was for Charlie but she was kind of hugging it and stuff.’

  ‘Oh God. The all-hot bit might be her age or something. Are we going to have Dad going senile at the same time that Mum goes menopausal? How much fun will that be?’ Pandora giggled, moving up the bar to serve another customer.

  Cassandra didn’t see how it happened – it must have been while she was talking to Pandora that Jasper had slid under the radar and infiltrated the Goth table. He was on the curved window seat, squeezed up tight beside the girl with the blood hair. Partly she was glad that he, who seemed so silent in the house, could summon a useful level of social skill when he felt like it, but she also felt slightly abandoned. Pandora was busy with customers and Cass was relieved when Xavier approached, bringing with him a friend, quite a tasty, smiling one.

  ‘Cass, this is Josh,’ Xavier said to her, looking as pleased with himself as if he’d brought her a bunch of roses. ‘He’s doing English at Reading so I, like, thought you might get on . . .’ He slunk backwards along the bar towards where Pandora was serving a couple of young post-work men in too-big suits, leaving Josh and Cassandra to look at each other and think of some amusing way to get past the fact that they’d been so obviously set up.

  ‘Um . . . hi,’ Cassandra said, feeling a bit lame.

  ‘Yeah . . . right. You know him well, then?’

  ‘What, Xav? Oh, yeah . . .’ She didn’t want to say he was the cleaner at her house. That would sound so middle class and horribly posh. ‘He’s a friend of my sister.’

  ‘CASSANDRA!’ Pandora was leaning so far over the bar that she almost catapulted herself between the two of them.

  ‘What? What have I done?’ Cass demanded.

  ‘I want a word with you. Over here.’

  ‘Can’t it wait?’

  ‘Can I get you another drink?’ Josh interrupted. ‘What was it? Another beer?’ He looked at Pandora, expecting an offer of service, which wasn’t, Cassandra could see, very likely to happen.

  ‘Now please, Cassandra!’

  ‘Ooh I’m in trouble!’ Cass giggled. ‘She only calls me that when I’ve done something wrong!’ She followed Pandora further along the bar, leaving Josh looking confused.

  ‘What? I’m having fun here, can’t whatever it is wait?’ she hissed at her sister.

  ‘No. Look, I just wanted to say, don’t forget you’re like with someone. Don’t muck up the Paul thing completely, not without talking to him and working it through. Don’t start playing the field just for the sake of it.’

  Cass stared at her, trying to work out why her sister was interfering suddenly. ‘Panda, what’s it got to do with you? I’ve only just met this guy. I’m not about to run off and sleep with him. He’s probably just another Mr Hopeless. World’s full of them.’

  ‘Yes it is. But stop bloody looking for Mr Perfect. You can waste a whole lifetime on that. Work on what you’ve got.’ Pandora looked across the bar to where the pub manager was beckoning. ‘Gotta go; customers. I’ll never make it to day two in the job at this rate. Look, go home, Cass. Phone Paul, talk to him for fucksake before you screw it all up for good.’

  ‘Me screw it up? God t
hat’s rich!’

  Cass stormed away from her, back to Josh. ‘Yes, please Josh . . . another beer would be good. Pandora?’ she called across the bar. ‘When you’ve got a minute, darling sister!’

  ‘OK, will do!’ Pandora smiled at her sweetly. ‘So long as you’re sure you’ve got time – what time did you tell the babysitter you’d be back?’

  ‘Babysitter?’ Josh asked, looking alarmed. ‘You’ve got a baby?’

  ‘I haven’t got a babysitter!’ she protested. ‘As Panda knows quite well. Well, not a babysitter exactly.’

  ‘Oh, didn’t she tell you about little Charlie?’ Pandora didn’t miss a beat with her drinks pouring, managing two pumps at once and quickly turning to the optics to whack two shots of vodka into a glass for a customer. ‘Oh yes, she’s a fantastic mother, Cass. Charlie’s so sweet!’

  ‘Well thanks, Pandora,’ Cassandra said as Josh made a feeble excuse about forgetting he’d said he’d meet a mate. ‘Don’t imagine I’ll forget this in a hurry.’

  The perfection of art is to conceal art.

  (Marcus Fabius Quintilian)

  ‘That went well. Not.’ Pandora felt terrible. She leaned on the bar and covered her face with her hands so she wouldn’t have to see the door still swinging where Cassandra had stormed out so furiously. Josh seemed to have melted back into the depths of the pub.

  ‘What was all that about?’ Xavier asked. ‘Was there some kind of row? Josh quite fancied her.’

  So simple for boys, Panda thought: they fancy, they go for. A bit like animals. They don’t ask if there might be any obstacles in the way, and why should they? And Charlie wasn’t exactly an obstacle. Nor might Josh have thought he was one either, which was exactly the problem. If Josh was cool about Cass having a baby, where would that leave Paul?

  ‘My fault.’ She sighed. ‘I’m so stupid. There was something I really needed to talk to her about, but I haven’t found the moment. Now definitely wasn’t it but I panicked because she was giving your friend Josh what our girly secret pulling code used to call the sugar smile. Now I’ve screwed it up for her and she’ll never listen to me again. Probably never even speak to me again. How stupid am I?’

  ‘What was it you needed to tell her? Was it about Charlie’s father, the one she’s not living with any more?’ He laughed. ‘I work in your house, remember. I don’t miss much.’

  ‘You don’t, do you?’ She felt quivery suddenly. It all seemed a bit odd – this was the guy who whizzed round her bedroom with a duster and the Dyson. He’d emptied the tumble dryer the other day and left her underwear folded neatly on the bed. Perhaps he was wondering if tonight she was wearing the pink knickers with the white hearts. She was.

  She told him, ‘Look, the boss is letting me off the after-hours clearing, seeing as it’s my first day. Maybe I should go home and sort it out with Cass.’

  ‘Shame.’ He looked disappointed. ‘I’d thought maybe we could go back to mine . . . ?’

  ‘Oh! You sure? Well, yes that would be, um . . . nice.’ Was this where he became reunited with the heart knickers or was it a just-friends coffee and music situation? She was more up for the second option than the first. Otherwise wasn’t it all a bit fast?

  ‘Oh but Cass has left Jasper here!’ she realized. ‘I suppose I ought to take care of him. And I must phone her too . . . got stuff to say. Like sorry, for one thing. That would be the place to start.’

  Pandora looked across at the window seat, where Jasper seemed comfortable enough. He now had his arm round the blood-hair girl and was snuggled up close, though whether that was through lack of space or not, it was hard to tell. Did he really want her to play bossy big cousin? Definitely not. He knew the way back to the house . . . he’d be OK.

  ‘Actually, I’ll leave him with his new mates. They might be going on somewhere too. I’ll tell him we’re going.’

  Xavier was smiling at her. The sugar smile.

  Sara took two mugs of coffee out to the pool terrace. Conrad was in the pool, floating naked on his back with his eyes closed. Apart from the occasional volley of shots from the gun club across the river, all was very peaceful.

  ‘It’s nearly eleven,’ she said to him. ‘There’s no sign of Panda and I’m sure she said she’s got another shift at the pub today. I’ll go down to the studio and wake her and anyway, I want to get in there to sort out my paintings.’

  ‘If she’s late, it’s her own responsibility, not yours,’ Conrad said grumpily. He opened his eyes and blinked hard in the bright sunlight.

  ‘I know it’s her responsibility. But there’s nothing wrong with being kind is there? Why should I leave her to be late when I can help out?’

  ‘And only yesterday you were complaining about being put on,’ Conrad reminded her.

  Sara walked down to the studio and wasn’t surprised to find it locked. Pandora had been used to living in an area where you took personal security very seriously. She hadn’t got the keys with her so she knocked on the door, breathing in fresh dewy morning air and the scent of new plant life. The delphiniums that seeded themselves at this woodsy, neglected end of the garden were beginning to flower. She deadheaded a few of the bluebells and waited for Pandora to wake up. The pile of ash and half-burned timber where Conrad had set the remains of the tree house on fire was almost invisible now. Early that morning, Jasper had dealt with the worst of it, breaking up the least charred wood for future use as kindling for the log fire in the house, and raking the remnants of ash over the grass.

  There was no movement from the studio and it gave out a blank silence, in the way that Ben’s house had when it had been unoccupied. But just in case, Sara decided she’d phone Pandora’s mobile from the house. Panda was easily capable of sleeping right through any amount of door banging or an alarm clock.

  ‘She’ll have to grow up sometime and be responsible for herself.’ Conrad was still being negative as Sara came back to the terrace. He was out of the pool now and lying on a lounger with a towel round him. ‘She’s got by on her own for the past few years. Why go back to mummying her now?’

  ‘Mummying who?’ Pandora, wearing last night’s clothes, breezed in through the side gate. ‘I don’t mind you mummying me if it means a bacon sandwich is on offer!’

  ‘Panda! Have you just come home from last night?’ Sara asked her. ‘You look a bit . . .’What would be a word that was acceptable, she wondered. She settled on ‘dishevelled’. ‘Thoroughly rogered’ would be a piece of honest observation too far to a daughter.

  ‘Um . . . er yes. Walk of shame in last night’s clothes, that’s me,’ Pandora admitted, blushing a bit. ‘It’s OK, I only stayed over at Xav’s. I’ll just go and grab a shower. Got to go to work later.’

  ‘Dirty stop-out,’ Conrad chuckled as she went into the house. ‘But at least she looks happy. She hasn’t looked like that since the stupid Ollie boy went off travelling.’

  ‘I’m not going to say they treat the place like a hotel, because I don’t mind how they come and go,’ Sara said. ‘But I do wish they’d call and tell someone if they’re not coming home. Pandora last night; Lizzie before. I just think we should know who is here.’

  ‘Why?’ Conrad asked. ‘What does it have to do with us? They’re all grown-ups. Especially your bloody sister, though in her case it’s a term that only applies to years lived.’

  ‘It’s a simple safety thing. In case of . . . say a fire or something. Use your imagination, Conrad, I mean someone could die trying to find a person if the house burned down. Think of that, if whoever it was hadn’t even come home but hadn’t bothered to let anyone know. This is basic stuff.’

  ‘Fire. I wondered when we’d come to that. You’ve been dying to say something, haven’t you? I’m surprised it took this long. OK so I burned the tree house. I just felt like it, all right? It was no big deal; it was completely rotten, practically fell down in my hands. Actually,’ he smiled suddenly, his face brighter than she’d seen it for a while, ‘it felt wonderful! That great
blaze! You should have photographed it for your Elements class, Sara, shown your students what you can achieve in a suburban garden with some old wood and a can of fuel.’

  ‘You could have killed yourself,’ she said, then wished she hadn’t. She went and sat beside him on the lounger. He didn’t make a move to hug her, to touch her as he normally would. What was going on? Was not living really the thing he was claiming to aim at now? Was he starting some sort of grisly process of withdrawing from her? If there was a personality type for suicide, she definitely wouldn’t have had Conrad down as a candidate. Well, never before, anyway.

  ‘No I couldn’t,’ he said. ‘I told you. I don’t want to burn to death. No one in their right mind would.’

  ‘Right mind. Exactly,’ she said. ‘But . . . are you sure you’re completely in yours, Conrad? I was wondering, and please don’t take this the wrong way. Do you think it might be a good idea to see someone about how you’ve been feeling lately?’

  He looked at Sara as if she was the crazy one here. ‘What, some shrink? Someone who can say what, exactly? Because they don’t say anything much, you know, at these sessions. They’re only supposed to listen. And to what? To me ranting on that I think the descent into old age is over-rated and to be avoided by anyone sane? Then I would have to listen to whichever thirty-something idiot I’ve got across the desk telling me, “It’s all right to feel like that.” Like I need permission? No thanks. Who can know what it’s like, unless they’re also facing the same thing?’

  He seemed so angry. What was going on here? Sara looked at him and felt a surge of love and sorrow.

  ‘Come and walk Floss with me,’ she suggested, kissing him lightly. ‘Let’s take her out somewhere different. What about Oxshott Woods?’ A big place, the Woods, she thought. They’d have plenty of time to turn this weird atmosphere back to something more comfortable. There’d been a definite shift since she’d told him about the exhibition. And Ben. She tried to forget the taste of Ben on her tongue. Even the most fleeting thought of it sent adrenalin flooding her bloodstream. She both loved and hated the feeling. Where was the guilt? She very much wanted it to be there, to make her feel grounded again. This felt so horribly unsafe. Well, it was.