The Secrets of Married Women

by Mason, Carol

  I’m about to, but then the kitchen door flies open and I just about get knocked off my feet. My mother glares from my dad to me, lucid eyes of seafoam green. ‘She! She!’ She says indignantly, as she must have overheard him. ‘Who’s she? The cat’s mother?’ She continues to stand there staring at us, indignantly, like a spinster headmistress in a tizzy.

  My dad looks at me and I look at him. And in that instant, everything diffuses and we have a small chortle. Then comes the weirdest baritone song from my mother’s tiny little body. “You’ll never miss your mother, till she’s gone!”

  ~ * * * ~

  ‘I thought we’d go to Stolley’s and have a look at a carpet,’ I tell Rob when I’ve got him in the car after I’ve dropped the dog off at the kennels. ‘I fancy a new one for the bedroom.’

  He groans. ‘Carpet? Bedroom? On a Friday night?’

  I try not to smile. It’s raining again. The wipers are going like the clappers and I can barely see.

  ‘This isn’t the way to Stolley’s Jill.’

  ‘You’re clever.’

  ‘Well what are we going this way for then?’ He studies my side-profile and I try not to smile. Then I tell him about our getaway I have booked for our anniversary, and he’s floored. ‘You booked this?’ I nod massively, squeeze his hand.

  ‘Shit Rob, I pressed your shirt before I left and now I think I’ve left the iron on.’ I’m just braking hard as the traffic’s slowing down. The car hydroplanes.

  ‘Which iron?’ Rob gives me that look.

  ‘Oh… I suppose it was the shut off one.’ I wink at him.

  When we get moving again I take off gingerly as the car seems to be pulling back on me as I try to accelerate. ‘You’re driving like a senior citizen,’ my husband says.

  I barely get the words, ‘I think there’s something wrong with the car’ out of my mouth when my ‘battery low’ light comes on. ‘Oh, shit! The battery’s going flat.’

  ‘Ignore it. Those lights have come on before when there’s been nothing wrong. We’re not far now. I bet we’ll get there just fine.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we call the AA?’

  ‘Well you know how long we’ll wait. Let’s just get there. We’ll call while we eat dinner.’

  I do my ‘you win’ sigh. Rob gives my hand his ‘I know best’ squeeze. We turn off the motorway and follow a trunk road. But it looks suspiciously like we’ve arrived in a field of sheep. ‘I think you missed the turning,’ he says in that God-you’re-useless tone.

  ‘I don’t think I did!’ I peer through the splashing rain hoping to find the main road again. I don’t get far when our car seizes, the dash lights up, and then everything dies. ‘Right,’ I say, in that tone.

  ‘Right, what?’

  I want to kill him. I always listen to him and it always buggers everything up. Any minute now he’s going to say ‘I told you so’ and then I’m going to kill him. We sit there moments, me mentally counting down to it coming.

  ‘I tol—’

  ‘Hup!’ I wag a finger. ‘Don’t even think about saying that.’

  The rain pelts a broken tune on our roof. We have some stupid argument now about who’s going to truck to the nearest sign of civilization to find out where we are, so we can tell the AA where to find us.

  ‘You are because I’m not wearing a coat!’ he says.

  ‘You are, because I’ve got good sandals on, plus I did all the donkey-work for this weekend to start with because you couldn’t get a romantic idea in your head if your life depended on it! And besides, in case you haven’t noticed, you’re the man and I’m the woman, and this isn’t going to be another example Me Tarzan, You Jane, where I do everything and you just cop out. And besides it was me who wanted to call the AA right away, or did you just forget that, Mr. I’ve Seen The Bloody Lights Come on Before?’

  ‘All, right, all right!’ he says. ‘I think I got the point!’ And he gets out of the car, swearing and pulling his collar around his ears, and I watch the navy blur of him disappear down the road and I swallow a small chuckle.

  An hour later I’m shivering like mad. Some sheep come up to my window and go Mehhhe! God this is great, isn’t it? Where did he go? Canada? I bet he’s taking longer just to annoy me. And I’m cold and I’m famished and my gastric juices are devouring my stomach lining. I always keep chocolate in the glove compartment for these sorts of emergencies. I pull the thing open. Pity I always eat it when I’m not supposed to. Rob comes back days, weeks, months later, like a drowned rat. ‘The tow truck’s on its way and it’ll tow us to the hotel and then take the car to the closest garage. Fuck,’ he says, water dripping off his nose end. I start to laugh.

  ‘It’s not funny!’

  I hear another ‘Mehhhhe! and take fits of the giggles.

  He sits chattering his teeth, smelling of fresh air and woken-up cologne. ‘Are you very cold and very wet, or by any chance just very wet?’ I hide behind my hands while he playfully bashes me. I peep at him out the corner of my eye. Rob. I love him. I do. My head, my heart and soul are just filled with him. I wish he’d just take me right here in the car!

  Look up there I see a pig flying.

  Another hour later a walking tattoo with a central nervous system tallies us up at his big back end and then we hop in his truck and off we go. Rescued. Rob slides an arm across my shoulder. We fall into the nearest pub and eat. By the time we get to the hotel it’s after ten o’clock.

  They’ve let the room. We didn’t guarantee it for late arrival.

  Twenty quid in taxi fees and seven guest houses later, because apparently the world and his wife come to Bamburgh since it got written up in the Mail on Sunday’s Best Romantic Getaways, we manage to find a room. It’s hardly the place you’d open a bottle of expensive champagne in. More like the home for a cheerful glass of Henkell Trocken. But do we care? Let’s get this straight: we do not care. We are just so knackered, and I have that awful burpy stomach because I went so long without food then ate greasy crap.

  Rob goes upstairs to the shared bathroom to take a shower. ‘I hope you’ve brought your own toilet paper. There’s none up there.’

  I look at him, sexy with his towel around his waist. All his chest hair is glued up with this white stuff. ‘Ergh!’

  ‘Yeah, the shower’s not working either. Bastard sears you like a minute steak, then you get soaped up… nothing.’ He puts his T-shirt on, climbs into his underpants. ‘You smell something funny in this room?’

  I sniff up. ‘Like what?’

  ‘Death. Formaldehyde.’ He climbs into bed.

  Methinks I’ll save the nursey outfit for tomorrow. ‘Ow! Heck!’ I catch the front of my shin on the bed-frame and hop around in a circle. It’s Rob’s turn to smile. ‘God, Rob, these sheets smell like dirty old man’s hair.’ Plus the carpet’s got those sticky, leathery black marks. I must remember not to stand on it in my bare feet when I get up to pee in the hand basin in the middle of the night. I just knew this was going to be a ball. Balls up, more likely. I climb into bed. Rob moves his arm for me to snuggle under. ‘Happy anniversary, treasure,’ he says, and then, ‘Thanks for bringing us here’—like he actually means it! Two minutes later he’s snoring, like the Northern Sinfonia drowning in the North Sea.

  When we wake up, the rain hasn’t let up any. We go to pick up the car then walk around the town, looking in gift shops and ducking in for cups of tea. Tonight’s the night. Oh yes baby. Champers. Dinner. Dress up outfit—pathetic attempt to prostitute myself to my own husband. I can’t wait. We wander around Bamburgh Castle and stare across one of its walls at a very foggy Northumberland beach that’s completely deserted except for one of those birds with a very long neck on a rock. Where is everybody? Probably in the hotel we should have been in, spending the day in bed. There’s something serenely beautiful about this though. The castle, the beach, the fog. Nobody around but us. We stare across the sea that, today, looks like a big grey undulating prison blanket, and I remember our honeymoon when we had
sex in the dunes and I got sand-mites up my you-know-where. Then I say something brave. ‘I was thinking the other day that maybe we should adopt a baby.’

  Some seagulls do a shocking scream overhead but Rob doesn’t even look up. I wait, look at his profile, his long, slim-bridged nose with its perfectly rounded tip, his right eye that’s not blinking, the dark blue of its centre and the fringe of long black curly lashes. ‘I thought you said you weren’t bothered about having a kid.’

  ‘I’m not really. But sometimes…Well, like the other day at the barbeque, I just thought how I could see myself having a daughter like Molly, who I could be close to like I’m close to my own mother. I think that would be very nice.’

  ‘Not one that sings all the time.’

  ‘Good God I hope not.’ He’s being remarkably good-humoured. ‘But also Rob, my main reason is I sometimes think when we’re old who’ll be there to call in on us? Who’ll come for Christmas? Whose weddings will we go to? We’ll have literally nobody. There’ll be nobody to care whether we live or die.’

  Still his gaze doesn’t budge. ‘I can’t live my life worrying about when I get old Jill.’

  ‘I know. Neither can I. I mean, I’m not. It’s just, well, in some ways I think it’d be good for us. For you. To be a dad. You’d make a lovely dad.’ I take a risk here. ‘I was even thinking I could get an appointment and find out about sperm donors.’

  He glares at me. ‘Sperm donors? You want some strange man’s semen in you? Someone who you’ve never even seen? You’ve just picked him off some list?’

  Ergh. ‘Well, when you put it like that...’ My heart’s thumping now. I clutch the cold castle wall. ‘But who said you pick them off a list?’ Has he been researching this?

  ‘What if you got HIV?’

  ‘Oh Rob, it’s pretty regulated. I’m sure -’

  ‘You won’t know the first thing about him! His family history! What you were passing on!’

  ‘I think they have to declare stuff like that.’

  ‘Oh yeah. Some bloke who sells his sperm for money. He’s probably really honest.’

  I want to tell him Lawrence did it. But then he’ll know Leigh and I have talked about this and then he’ll be even more angry with me. ‘Rob, let’s not make a big thing. It was just a thought.’

  ‘Well from all this thinking you’ve obviously been doing Jill I’d say you’ve made your mind up.’

  ‘I’ve what? How do you draw such conclusions? That’s not true! I punched in ‘sperm donors’ on the Internet, read about three pages on the subject, now you’re making it sound like I’m giving you some ultimatum.’ I want to throttle him and say I just want to talk about it! Like normal people. But I try to keep it cheerful. ‘Look, really, the way I feel right now I’m probably about 50-50 wanting a kid. But then other days—most days actually—I’m like, twenty-eighty, as in hardly wanting it at all. It’s true. I’m not just saying this to make you feel better. In fact, it’s the strangest thing that I can be so ambivalent to something as primal as a woman’s desire to give life.’ I think I am saying this slight exaggeration mainly to make him feel better.

  He stuffs his hands in his pockets, leans against the wall with his back to the beach, looks at his shoes that are impacted with sand. The wind blows his hair around his face. ‘I told you this before Jill, if you want a kid that badly I understand. It’s not right of me to deny you that.’ He looks up, scours my face, looking more handsome and more pained than I’ve ever seen him. ‘If I could give you a baby Jill—if there was a pill I could take or an operation I could have—I’d do it gladly. It would make me the proudest person in the world.’ He moves his hand toward my face but takes it back quickly. ‘But I can’t. And there’s not a damned thing I can do about that. He moves hair off his eye, puts his hands in his pants pockets, looks back to his feet again. ‘But you can do something about it. You could go find somebody else and be a mother. But I hope to God you’ll do it before it’s too late.’ He turns and looks across the water and the mist seems to blow in a close cold circle around his head. ‘What would hurt me the most is if I thought you stuck around another ten years and then realised that staying with me was the biggest mistake you made, and then you’d live the rest of your life bitter because of it. I don’t want a bitter wife. I don’t want to have to carry around your regrets as well as my guilt for the rest of my days.’

  God it sounds like he wants rid of me. I press the corners of my eyes. I mustn’t cry. Tears will only affirm in his stubborn mind that pain about this topic is eating away at me. So instead I link him, force my words out through a big smile. ‘You’re being mad. I don’t have regrets and I’m not bitter, and I never will be. I just thought that if we decided we still wanted a family, adoption would be one way for us to have it.’

  He stares heavily ahead. ‘I don’t know, Jill. If I can’t have one of my own… How do I know I could love somebody else’s?’

  ‘Oh please! Look how much you love Kiefer and he’s a dog!’ He gives me a penetrating, querying, washed-out look. ‘I know you Rob. If somebody put a little baby in your arms and said it’s yours, you would love it instantly and madly with your entire being. Because you’d know it was a little baby that somebody gave away, that somehow found its way to you.’

  ‘Well…’ he says, still not blinking. ‘Maybe you’re right.’ Which means, I’ve had it with this topic now. He turns and starts walking. The seagulls squeal again, and he looks up at them, and his feet make a lonely leaving sound that reverberates through the castle walls.

  We go and sit in another tea room, but our mood hangs damper on us than the rain. And then we drive back to the hotel, calling off at the same pub for a plate of mince and dumplings and a beer, which we consume in critical silence again.

  I don’t know how much more of this I can take.

  We go to bed early because there’s nothing else to do. Rob lies with his back to me. With hurt and anger etching around my tone I ask him, ‘Rob? Are you going to talk to me, or even say goodnight?’

  He extends an arm over his shoulder, pats me consolingly.

  ‘For the fifty-fifth time Rob—and this is the last time I will ever say it—I swear I’m not bothered if we never have a kid. I really, truly, am not. I thought you were. I thought that’s why you’ve gone into this shell. So adoption was my solution.’

  ‘I’m not in a shell,’ he says, in about as sorry a tone of voice as you’d ever hear from somebody who’s supposedly not in a shell.

  It pains my soul that our day has ended this way. I had such high hopes for it. ‘Hold me. Please,’ I say to him. If I don’t manage to connect with him on some level now, it will feel like we are broken beyond repair. There’s a resistant pause, then he turns onto his back, lifts an arm for me to settle under. He just holds me, and lies there thinking. I can feel his blinking eye against my temple.

  Sunday is more of the same. Weather wise, everything wise. We decide to head back early.

  Rob drives, and I sit there quietly staring out the window, my champagne, lovely dress, and tart’s outfit burning a hole in the suitcase. I think Rob needs to see a doctor. It’s not enough for me to plant magazine articles on infertility around the house. This is bigger than that. Bigger than me. But if I mention him seeing a doctor, he’ll believe that I think he’s sick. Besides, Rob is a macho northern male. He won’t lie down on any quack couch and pour out his heart. Suggesting it will only make him think I don’t even know the man I’ve been married to for ten years. Maybe I don’t. Maybe it’s me who should see a doctor.

  The dark green Northumberland landscape slides by. Am I to give up on Rob ever being anything other than a rather withdrawn but abiding partner to me? I’m too young to settle for that. And none of this is my fault. And then my thoughts drift to a certain Russian. And unlike other times when I’ve stopped them, I just let them fly. They carry me home, playing like some soothing background track on the personal stereo of my mind.

  When we pull up at o
ur front door, my eyes latch onto something on our ‘Welcome’ mat. ‘What’s this?’ I ask, opening the car door before Rob has even put us in park. Lying in plastic wrapping on our doorstep—a very rained on plastic wrapping I might add—is a massive bunch of red long-stem roses.

  A pain builds up on the bridge of my nose. ‘Where did these come from?’ I scoop them up in my arms, their dewy fragrance punching me.

  I turn and look at my husband of ten years leaning on the open car door, head cocked, watching me. His sad face bears a quietly pleased-with-himself look. ‘I had a man deliver them yesterday. I didn’t know we wouldn’t be here, did I? They were supposed to be a surprise. One that doesn’t bark and crap on the carpet.’

  Chapter Ten

  ‘I’m dying to give you the updates on the shag of the century, but first, how was your anniversary?’ It’s Leigh. I’m in Boots filling a basket.

  I can tell she has little interest in my anniversary so I give a basic answer. ‘It was nice Leigh. Very nice.’ I find myself, coincidentally, in front of the condom shelf, my eyes going over colours, textures, sizes. I walk further up the aisle to get away from them and find myself staring at men’s deodorant. Old Spice. A sea of it.

  ‘Was he impressed with the nurse’s outfit and the bubbly?’ She’s giddy, giggly and annoying.

  I wish I’d never told her. ‘Very.’

  ‘Did nursey-nurse and her medicine chest mend things in the old penis department?’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with his penis Leigh. His penis has never been the problem.’ I say it a bit too loudly. A fellow shopper looks at me with startled fascination.

  ‘So I can assume you did it then?’

  Oh, I can’t have my sex life reduced to this level. I walk off down another aisle to get away from people. ‘We did.’