by Mason, Carol
Chapter Fourteen
‘You still haven’t heard anything about your tests?’ I ask Wendy as Leigh and I sit with her in Café Espagne. I can’t keep avoiding them forever.
‘Probably not for another week.’ She seems so completely unconcerned. Leigh seems agitated, in a distant sort of way, if you can be distantly agitated. Her attention is far across the room, inhabiting another body, another life. This is really becoming tiring now. When Leigh goes to the toilet, Wendy says, ‘I have to leave that job Jill! I can’t stand it anymore. All the petty fights. A twenty-hour argument over whether the sequins on the new hot-pants should be gold or baby blue. They’re a couple of dizzy, deranged prima donnas. They’re completely dysfunctional. I’ve never seen or heard of anything like it. I have to get out. Urrrrrhhh!’ I’ve never heard Wendy this desperate before. ‘Jill, I have a brain. I have an almost degree. I don’t need some massively important career, but I can’t do this anymore—act interested in things I don’t give a damn about. I need to get out of bed every morning and feel like something I do helps improve one person’s life or, even just…helps improve my own. That would be a start.’ She glances in the direction of the toilets, hurriedly whispers, ‘She’s so changeable. Especially lately. One minute she’s telling me I’m great and the next she’s saying I didn’t do enough media calls because none of the journalists across the country are coming to the event. Clifford overheard me mutter to myself, Well maybe that’s a reflection on the event… And then he told her the whole reason why nobody’s coming is because the idea stank from the start.’ She shakes her head again. ‘It’s so silly. It’s overpriced exercise pants that, let’s face it, despite all the claims to the contrary, go bobbly after you’ve washed them twice.’ Leigh comes back from the toilets. Wendy shuts up.
Then Wendy goes to the toilet, and Leigh says, ‘I have to talk to you Jill! It’s urgent.’ And I feel like an elastic band being pulled at both ends and it’s about to snap, and it’s not going to be pretty.
‘I’ve fallen in love,’ she declares a few hours later, over a low-slung table in a turquoise tea-lit bar in Gosforth, when it’s just her and me.
I stare vacantly at her through a fug of exhaustion and disinterest.
‘I love him Jill. I don’t know how it happened. But it did.’ She positively glows.
‘You mean Nick?’
She scowls. ‘Well, who do you think I mean?’
‘You’re in love with Nick?’
She looks momentarily hesitant then says, ‘Like I’ve never been before. With anybody.’
‘But what about Molly and Lawrence?’ The magnitude of this hits me now. ‘My God Leigh! What about your family? What about his? Is he in love with you too?’
There’s a guarded look in her eyes. ‘Which do you want me to answer first?’ She seems a little pissed off with me. ‘He’s not one of these men who uses the love word easily, Jill. A part of him is afraid to show his true feelings. His wife is the weaker one in the relationship so he’s never been able to vulnerable. And he’s never been able to tell anybody that but me.’ She averts her eyes, picks up her martini glass. She sounds angry on his behalf. ‘But he says he’s crazy about me, which is the same thing.’ Her tone is chirpy, over-convincing. She looks thin, like you could snap her in two, in her skinny leopard-print pants and a black ribbed V-neck top. On the surface, confident, yet nervy and fragile somehow.
‘You’ve got to end it Leigh. You said it was just going to be a fling, that you’d pull the plug after a month. What happened to giving it an expiry date?’
She looks at me as though the reminder is in bad taste. ‘I can’t! I have to leave Lawrence.’ Her eyes fill up.
‘Leave Lawrence? What about Molly?’
‘Obviously, it’d just be until we got ourselves sorted. Then she’d come live with us.’
‘You can’t leave your own daughter!’ What is she? Mad!
The glass she’s holding tips slightly, sending vodka onto her trousers. She sets it down. ‘I said I’m NOT leaving her! This would be temporary, to cause her as little upheaval as possible.’
‘And what about his family? His wife? What about his poor kids? Where does that leave them when he ups and walks out on them?’
She stares at me through the thin darkness of this near-empty room, looking like a balloon that’s suddenly losing air. ‘His wife! His wife! You’re taking everybody’s side but mine.’ Then there’s a heavy silence. She puts a hand over her mouth, clutches her face as though the magnitude is only properly dawning on her right as we speak.
‘Leigh! The only side I’m taking is the side of sense.’ I lean over the table because the waitress is standing by the bar watching us with a bit too much interest. ‘You’re going to leave your family for a married man with kids who can’t even tell you he loves you? Has he asked you to do it?’
She shakes her head, grudgingly. ‘Not in as many words. But I know it’s what he wants. I think he’s waiting for me to initiate it because he doesn’t want to be the bad guy in all this.’ Her voice is a valiant tremor. But then she cups her hands over her nose and mouth again. Tears roll down either side. ‘Oh Jill, I feel so bad for Lawrence. It’s going to kill him. What am I going to do?’
‘End it and forget about it. You don’t have any other option.’
She wipes under her eyes where her mascara runs and there’s something desperate and pleading in the way she looks at me and I don’t know whether I’m more angry or sorry for her.
‘I can’t,’ she says. ‘I love him.’
‘Oh come on. You love the fact that he’s charming and he’s into you. You love the sex and how he makes you feel.’
‘Isn’t that enough?’
‘If you were both single, maybe! But this isn’t long-haul stuff Leigh. It was a fling, and you’ve got it all carried away. God, he’ll probably crap himself if you go telling him you’ve left your family for him!’
She is vehemently shaking her head, her double-hooped gold earrings that he bought her tinkle like wind chimes. ‘You don’t know how unhappy he is in his marriage. It’s all been an act. He’s only stuck it for the kids. She was never right for him. All she’s done is stick to him like a leech. She doesn’t know what he needs. She’s never known. But I know.’ She’s stabbing her chest with a red-painted fingernail.
Smart, cynical, wordly Leigh. Has she really fallen for the ‘my wife doesn’t understand me’ line? She narrows her eyes at me, ‘I might have known you’d never understand.’
‘Oh come on! If I wouldn’t understand why are you telling me?’ My bluntness stuns her. But I’m on a roll. ‘Leigh, you’ve always said you could never fall for a cheat. You said trust and fidelity were everything.’
‘But he’s only cheated with me because I’m special. That doesn’t make him a bad person. If anything it’s a clear sign we’re meant for one another. And despite what you think, he doesn’t take it lightly. He’s got a conscience about what he’s doing.’
‘He took you to his wife’s home, after you’d exchanged two and a half emails. He wanted to screw you in his wife’s bed! That’s having a conscience?’ I’m getting loud.
She shakes her head, wordless. I glance across at the bar and the waitress is staring at us goggle-eyed. So is the barman.
‘He’s my soul mate Jill.’ She snivels looking wistful-eyed. ‘He—he completes me.’
‘Oh bollocks. Tom Cruise said that in Jerry Maguire! It was TV again a few nights ago!’
Her long heavily-made-up eyelashes flock open like a chorus-line of centipedes doing the Can-Can. ‘Speak your mind, why don’t you!’
‘Thanks,’ I fire back, and then she looks astonished and then she titters.
I titter too, I don’t know why, because none of this is funny. ‘Look Leigh, if nothing else, think how much your life is going to change if you leave Lawrence. Who’s going to do all your laundry? Have your favourite muffins toasted in the morning? Put you at the centre of his universe, becau
se he loves you even more than he loves himself? Will he do that? Mr. Big Bloody Position in the Retail Industry who walks out on his wife and kids? I somehow don’t think so.’
She watches the flame bounce in the turquoise tea-light. ‘It’s not like that,’ she shakes her head, unsurely. ‘How do I leave him when I’m in love with him?’
‘Just don’t go back! Don’t see him again! You said it yourself. It wouldn’t matter who you were married to. You need risk and adventure. How long before you go off Nick? Then when does it stop?’
‘It’s more than that. I know you think like that, but the hours I’m not with him I don’t know where to put myself. I can’t bear thinking he’ll go back to her, and I’ll limp back to Lawrence and the old routine.’ She shakes her head again. ‘Jill, I’m not like you, I’m not gorgeous. Men don’t do double-takes when I walk past them. I’m very realistic about the level I attract. And I never imagined a man of his calibre would be interested in me.’ She looks at me hard. ‘You know all my life men have made me feel like crap. I’ve never been with somebody who makes me feel so good about myself.’
‘Lawrence doesn’t make you feel like crap,’ I remind her, and she glares at me, as though, again, I have no right saying that. ‘Leigh you can’t want to be with a man because he makes you feel good about yourself. You’ve got to feel good about you, regardless of men.’
She twists a paper napkin into a sausage. Her mother really has a lot to answer for. ‘You don’t understand,’ she just keeps saying.
‘Well you’re right. I don’t. Maybe I can’t.’
It hits me how ugly all this is. How ugly we are. I had standards for how I lived my life. And the gulf between them and what I’ve done is more than I can bridge. My head has started to tremble. I’m trying to stop it but I can’t.
I’m aware of her studying me, of the easy shift in the air from her crisis to mine. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asks quietly, her green eyes filling mine. ‘Look at you Jill. What’s a matter?’
I try to breathe but even my breath is shaking. Inside of me, there is such unspeakable rage and regret. She will not wangle this out of me. As tempted as I am, I must never, ever tell her.
So I tell her.
I tell her the whole thing.
And as I do, I rue it. Because when I get to the part about how I fled from his room practically pulling my underwear up in the hall, I see something in her eyes. Glee.
She gawps at me for moments, her jaw dropped open. Then her look hardens. ‘Well,’ she says. ‘This is a shocker, isn’t it? I think it’s a case of the pot calling the kettle black.’
‘What?’ It takes me seconds to register this slap. ‘I am nothing like you! I never was!’
She crosses her arms at her chest in some sort of shocking physical standoff with me. ‘Oh because you’re so beautiful and you’ve only ever had one man? Give it a rest.’ She rolls her eyes. ‘I’ve always known you’ve judged me. You and Wendy took some pleasure in being the good girls who never felt they missed out. I’ve always been different haven’t I? Somebody you both liked to have around for entertainment, but whom you couldn’t quite approve of.’
‘But that couldn’t be farther from the truth!’ Surely I didn’t do that? Laud my virtue over her? I mean, I know I’ve always taken such pride in having only ever been with Rob…
‘Yes Jill, all along you sit there and you listen to my secrets and you want all the details, but in the back of your mind, I’ve known you’ve looked down on me.’
‘Looked…what? I’ve envied you!’ I feel a pain build in the bridge of my nose. ‘How can you think this! Damn it I’ve always known that my having only been with one man has bothered you, for some unfathomable reason… You’ve lauded your promiscuity over me but I’ve always sensed you secretly regretted it and would try to make yourself feel better by making me feel I’d missed out.’ Her eyes widen in speechless shock. ‘But I never thought your resentment would run this deep.’ I shut up because I really don’t want to get into a big fight. ‘But Leigh,’ I keep my voice down, ‘you’re dead wrong if you think I’ve never felt I’ve missed out. A part of me has thought that maybe I should have lived it up more in my twenties, then what happened in my marriage might not feel as bad. And that’s not a reflection on my love for Rob. Maybe it’s just a natural response under the circumstances. We all have our demons, Leigh. We all do.’
She contemplates me as though she doesn’t give two stuffs about my demons. And I register something. That I am losing a friend. And with her she takes my biggest secret. In my mid thirties I catch myself learning one of life’s tough lessons—that there’s no such thing as friends you tell everything to: only on Sex and the City.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says after a long silence. ‘I don’t know why I turned on you like that Jill. I suppose I’m just pissed you never told me about the Russian, after everything I told you. I sometimes feel like my personal business is everybody’s business. But yours and Wendy’s... You’re both so careful. Especially her. I sometimes think you must tell each other things but you keep everything from me. Because you two are the good girls and I’m the bad.’
‘Oh stop saying that! You know Wendy’s guarded. She never says anything to anybody.’ What are you, a child?
She holds my eyes for moments. Then she does that thing of looking shiftily around the bar, and I know something else is coming. She sits up tall in her chair. ‘Well, Jill, now that we’ve said all this I might as well tell you everything. You’ve not been honest with me, well I’ve not exactly been honest with you either.’
I look at her. Something in her face, a quiet gloating, is frightening me.
‘I’m going to tell you something that you’re not going to want to hear, but you have to promise me that you’ll still be my friend.’
‘Stop it. You’re frightening me. I don’t like this, Leigh.’
She leans forward. ‘You have to promise.’
‘That’s not fair!’
She titters. ‘I know, but I’m making you.’
I titter a little too, more because her look of leery triumph has made me nervous. ‘What the hell is it then?’ I gabble.
She sits back now and primly weaves her fingers in her lap, staring at her red-painted thumbs. ‘Jill, you’ve been a good pal to me, but it seemed easier at the time to not tell the whole truth. Back when I thought this thing was going to be very short-lived.’
I’ve almost forgotten we’re in a public place. The waitress comes and asks if we want another drink. We both hurl a ‘No!’ at her, and she says, ‘Gawd! All right!’ and walks away, glaring at us.
Leigh suddenly looks quaky and unsure of herself again. ‘I have to tell you something pretty terrible Jill, so you’d better brace yourself. Something I’m not exactly proud of.’ She holds my eyes. I hold my breath. ‘See,’ she says, ‘thing is, I’ve not been having an affair with any client at work. There never was any Nick. It’s Neil I’m in love with.’
Chapter Fifteen
I sit on our chocolate corduroy sofa nursing a glass of wine. And, in the twilight of our room, with the dog snoring on the cushion beside me, I tell Rob everything.
Well not everything. Everything as it pertains to Leigh.
‘Keep out of it Jill,’ he says.
‘But she’s going to do something terrible, I can just tell. She’s got this mad idea they’ve been harbouring feelings for each other for years!’
‘No they haven’t! I never had the impression he was even remotely attracted to her.’
‘Well I know, neither did I.’ I mean, I know she’s always thought him gorgeous. But Wendy’s having a drop-dead gorgeous husband has always just been a bit of a giggle, something to pep up the conversation. As though if he didn’t exist we’d have had to invent him.
‘She’s obviously menopausal.’
‘I think she’s more than that. She’s ready to walk out on her marriage for him. On her daughter!’
‘I always knew she was crackers.
’
‘Oh, come on! Who could have ever predicted this? Not me and I was her best friend!’ With more than a bit of irony I wonder who would have ever predicted me.
The dog stretches, yawns, pushes me with his back paws as though he’d rather have the sofa all to himself.
‘No kid wants to grow up knowing they were a product of some crap, failed relationship. And no kid wants to grow up with only one parent. Frankly I would never wish that on a kid, having been there myself,’ Rob says.
I sometimes forget that Rob’s dad absconded before he was born. Rob’s mother tried to love him even more to compensate, but, as Rob once told me, You don’t want that. You don’t want a mam who tries to be a dad too. You want two proper parents. And you just want to be a little boy.
‘Well there’s Wendy’s lads too? What happens to her and them when he runs off into the moonlight with Leigh? What am I going to do Rob? I can’t sit by and watch Leigh do this, take Neil away from his family.’
He leans forward in the chair, resting his elbows on his spread knees. ‘Yeah you can. It’s not your business.’
‘It is my business in some ways. Remember it was me who introduced Leigh to Wendy in the first place. She says she was besotted with him from the word go. How does that make me feel? Like I somehow helped get them together.’
‘Oh stop. That’s daft. Anyway that was years ago, and they only started bonking now, if that’s to be believed. Besides, you make it sound like you’ve got some control over what Neil does. You don’t. If he leaves Wendy then he obviously wants to. And, who knows, maybe he does love Leigh. Hard as that is to believe. But either way, there’s nothing you can do to stop any of it.’
