The Secrets of Married Women

by Mason, Carol

  Argh. What will never be again! I feel it like a great big pain of absence. I have to plant my fist in my ribcage. We were all just individuals towing the line of life, and then our lives somehow became connected up, and deep investments in friendship were made. I cannot accept that they suddenly all count for nothing. Or that we’ll never all be friends again. Or that I’ve lost Rob. I stare out of the glass doors, at arriving cars, coveting some vision I have of him pulling up in a taxi, leaning forward, reaching in his back pocket to pay the driver. And then he’d climb out, hair cut, beard shaved off. The gorgeous, immaculate Rob of old. The sexy apprehension in his eyes that would turn to look for me. And then he’d see me, standing by the door. A sea of people would bob between us, but they wouldn’t be able to separate our gaze. Nothing would. And in that moment we’d know: that our love was stronger than whatever came to divide it. And Rob would smile, a happy-ending smile. And I would run to him.

  I shut my eyes now. And I will, that when I open them, what I have imagined will be real.

  I open them. I look at my watch again. It’s twenty past. Our flight leaves in forty minutes.

  If he’s coming, he’s cutting it fine.

  Epilogue

  The baby is born in May. I name her Hannah, after my mother’s mother. We bury my mam one week after the birth of her only grandchild. The grandchild she saw but never knew was hers. My mam surprised us by dying in her sleep—the day before she was to be admitted into a home; I had finally got my dad to agree to it. People made the same remark at the funeral: about one life ending to make way for another. I could never have imagined I’d look at my mother’s dying like that—as though you somehow trade in a mother for a daughter—but, strangely, in a way, it helps to.

  It turns out that’s why I was so sick. The doctor left a message to call, but I never did. A combination of me just not being very ‘with it’ at the time, and maybe fear that I was going to be told I’d caught some kind of sexually transmitted infection after all. Who knows? But I never, ever, thought I could be having a baby. I was pretty certain of my dates. I’d taken the morning after pill! Of course, the doctor never mentioned the failure rate. Anyway, I found out I was pregnant soon after Rob never showed up at the airport.

  The airport. I’ll never forget how I felt when I stood there and watched that plane take off without us both. I couldn’t pick my heart up off the floor on the Metro back through to Sunderland, carrying my suitcase, my bag full of hope.

  It was an awful shock at first. Andrey’s baby. A child who would be forever attached to a terrible memory, and the one mistake I would undo if I could. A baby who came along when I was quite sure I could live happily without kids. And a child that meant Rob would never have me back now.

  But I try not to think of that anymore, or of the past, or the life I had and what I’ve lost. At some point you’ve just got to stop punishing yourself. I still feel bad about cheating and always will, but that’s just me, and my strong but momentarily misguided morality. But I’ve got over punishing myself. And I don’t wish it had never happened. Not when I look into Hannah’s little face and see her flex her moist little pink mouth that I keep dropping kisses on. Or I feel her little sausage fingers tighten around mine. I can only thank God for her. I can’t imagine my life without her.

  The loss of Rob is the gain of Hannah. A weird way to look at it, but such is life.

  But even if I wanted to pine and mourn and beat myself up, really, there hasn’t been time. Between working, being fired, being pregnant, being hired somewhere else, being split up, being shacked up in the spare room of a senior citizen’s bungalow, I’ve been very much just coping with life as it’s been flung at me.

  The flat I moved into before Christmas is hardly my dream place to live, but at least it’s in a nice part of Gosforth, in a professional, family neighbourhood. I’m on the first floor of a three-storey townhouse owned by a couple of retired teachers who live downstairs. I was worried at first about the baby crying, but they don’t have grandkids and said they actually find the noise quite soothing. Which is more than I can say for myself. Hannah does cry a lot. But nowadays, strangely, I don’t. I often wonder if she detects sadness in me, and decides to cry to save me the trouble, if this little bundle of baby is somewhat telepathic.

  I tried to find him: Andrey. It’s odd calling him that. I like to think of him as nameless, faceless, everything-less. That was a hell of a decision to make. I didn’t think he’d be care to know that he was a father; he certainly didn’t strike me as the family type. But I felt his right to know was bigger than all my reasons not to tell him. But the main reason I did it was for Hannah. I just had to think of Leigh or Rob to know how hard it was to grow up knowing nothing about your own dad. I remember Rob’s speech to me about the fractured family. I didn’t know where to start, of course. I couldn’t go knock on his door because, strangely, I’ve never had any memory of where he lived. Certain events of that episode are just locked out of my mind. So I went to the Civic Centre, his employer, and managed to find out the sort of confidential information they’re not supposed to tell you, but if you catch the right girl on the right day and tell her your life story, you might get lucky. She was a single-mother herself. Yes, she said she remembered him: lovely-looking bloke. Turned out, Andrey left his job at the end of last summer. She believed he moved out of the area. That was pretty much in keeping with what I knew about him. I was ready to leave it at that, but then I placed an announcement in the personals of the Sunderland Echo and the Evening Chronicle. For a second I wondered if Rob would see it, but I can’t really see Rob looking in a newspaper to find love. It was a very weird message to write, and what I ended up writing sounded crazy, really. ‘To a certain Russian on a beach. You have a daughter. From a married woman who you once thought would be impressed by a fancy car.’ He’d get that, if he read it. I included a PO box so he could get in touch with me, dreading that he actually would. I still check it. Seven weeks on and I’m still getting mail. Mind you, it’s very bizarre stuff. Men wanting to meet me, take me on holiday, marry me. One who sent me a picture of his penis! Someone who claims he’s in the Rolls Royce Club of Great Britain. A lesbian couple who offer to buy Hannah for ten thousand pounds. A very old man who sent me a picture with the caption: ‘Let me be your sugar daddy.’ There’s a lot of oddballs out there. But one day, when my daughter asks, I’ll be able to look her in the eyes and say that I tried to find her father. And I’ll probably tell her stories about how she’s related to the Princess Anastasia, the only vaguely interesting bit of Russian history I ever remember.

  As for her ever calling anybody else daddy, I don’t hold out much hope there. It’s been ten months since Rob and I split, and I’ve never as much as thought of another man. On the rare occasions I do think of sex, it’s still sex with Rob. This doesn’t bode well for my future. I don’t know how I’ll ever move on to anybody else. Because Rob was, and always will be, my one and only. In my heart—if not, alas that one time—in places farther south.

  A little news flash here… Wendy is doing very well. The operation was a success and she’s been given a clean bill of health. She’s got a job working part-time for a solicitor—a much older, Jewish gentleman who she’ll say, with great understatement, is a very nice man in a ‘father-figure’ way (translate: I think she might actually have shagged him). And a few weeks ago she finally got her degree. Okay, so she didn’t just ‘go for it’ like she vowed she would that day in Durham. She actually dithered and self-doubted for a few more months with the result that she won’t be able to apply to Northumbria Uni now to do her qualifying course until next year. But I actually believe it will happen. I’m convinced that before she’s fifty (as she joked)—or maybe mid-fifties—she really will be a lawyer. Then it’ll be the old middle-finger salute to Neil. I can tell that she’s dying for that day. Revenge, even to good people like Wendy, is sweet. ‘Sometimes I still have to take time to mourn him,’ she’ll occasionally say. ‘But mour
ning him is better than living with him.’ Her lads are doing well, although Ben developed psoriasis, something that the doctors say can be triggered by stress. Interestingly, they still refuse to see their father.

  Leigh and Neil are a bit of a different story. They ended up having a massive bust-up and she went home to Lawrence. Lawrence, not surprisingly, when I think of his phone message that day, took her back. But—and here is the surprise—only for about a week. Then he threw her out. Told her he was a happier person before he ever met her. So she went right back to Neil, who still says he doesn’t want her, who still makes the occasional pitch to Wendy to take him back. Little Molly lives with her dad, although she sees Leigh every weekend. Supposedly until she gets herself sorted. But apparently she’s not getting sorted. Wendy saw her by chance in the town centre and said she looked almost unrecognisable, grey hair, no make-up, dark glasses, and gaunt.

  I got a card off her. A ‘congratulations’ on the birth of my baby card. Don’t know how she found out. Maybe it was an olive branch. I’m sure that in her own way she loved us, as we loved her. Although she still hasn’t apologized to Wendy. But she did send her a Christmas card, saying Wishing you Peace from Leigh. Not Leigh and Neil. And Peace? It doesn’t even sound like something Leigh would say. Wendy and I tried to fathom it, but, as usual when the subject comes to our once best friend, we can’t.

  But I think of her quite a bit. How could I not when we were so close? I’ve run the gamut of emotions but in the end I just come back to pity, because Leigh was, is, and always will be, a very damaged person. I suppose I’ve forgiven her for what she did to me. I can understand her desire to lash back. But much as I’ve tried to blame her for my going astray—trying to convince myself that I only did it because I somehow followed her example—I know deep down that I can’t pin that on her. I was a big girl. And even if she’d never ratted on me to Rob, I’d still have got pregnant, so he’d still have left me. Actually I find it hard to think too badly of somebody I thought so much of. I’ll often catch myself smiling over some of the daft little laughs we had. There is a massive void in my heart where a good pal once resided. Sometimes it saddens me because I think I’ll never put that sort of faith in a friend again. A part of me will always be guarded. But maybe that’s not a bad thing.

  As for myself, Rob still won’t talk to me.

  He took my getting pregnant very badly. I had to tell him of course, because I was sure he’d find out. The North East, as I learned the hard way, is a small world. In light of our history it seemed like a very cruel blow that the man I was unfaithful with should succeed where my husband had failed. There was a big silence down the phone when I broke it to him. And then he said, ‘Well, be a mother and be happy Jill. Don’t have any regrets.’ And then he hung up.

  He still claims he’s selling the house. But I regularly drive over there looking for the For Sale sign on our lawn, and I still haven’t seen one.

  Ironically, today happens to be our anniversary. Hard to believe how different my life was a year ago. Today is also Hannah’s baptism. I wasn’t going to bother with all that business because I’ve never been what you’d call religious, so it seemed hypocritical. But my dad nearly had a kitten: ‘You have to christen her! Or you know what she’ll be, don’t you?’ he whispered: ‘She’ll be a bastard.’ My dad still doesn’t know that Rob isn’t the father; I want him to leave this world still having some respect for his daughter. But one day I caught him stuffing photos of her in an envelope with Rob’s address on it. I snatched the package off him. ‘Don’t ever do anything like that behind my back, Dad!’ He never said anything, just narrowed his eyes at me, as though he knew something.

  ‘I don’t think women can be those, dad,’ I said, reeling from the shock of the bastard comment. ‘Only men.’

  ‘No, they can lass. If she doesn’t get christened that’s what she’ll be. A bastard.’

  He’s not quite got the right end of the stick has he, although as usual my dad hits close to the mark. But my child will never be fatherless. I plug her arms into the cream and white knit cardigan that she’s going to be wearing overtop the cream and white knitted dress that was mine when I was christened. I will be both parents to her. And whenever I’ve got my “dad” hat on and I don’t know what to do, I’ll try to imagine what Rob would have done under the circumstances, and I’m sure we’ll bluff our way through it somehow.

  Hannah is taking my last name: Mallin. Hannah Mallin. I wrote it down before I chose it. Wrote it, spelled it out loud, went around saying it, liking the flow of it, the rhythm, the n’s and the l’s. When I married Rob I kept my own name because I thought Jill Mallin sounded better than Jill Benedict. I regret that now though. I regret not taking all of him while I had the chance.

  Rob. Still his name resonates in me with loss, after all this time. I pick Hannah up and squeeze her to me by her stodgy little shoulders. Sometimes I get moments where I disbelieve how my life has turned out. This is one of them. Hannah starts to cry.

  My dad taps on the bedroom door. ‘You ready? We’re going to be late.’ I look at him, dressed in his suit and cheerful mauve tie that’s already got a tea stain on it and he’s only had it on two minutes. My dad who lost my mother and acquired a single, unemployed daughter with a baby, and never for a moment has been anything other than a trouper. ‘No more doing the Ray Charles….’ I keep hearing him say, a thousand times a day, even when I was just thinking of doing the Ray Charles, and it makes me smile. Yes, family sticks. Friends don’t always. Not even husbands. But I thank my lucky stars that I was born of a close family. I lift little Hannah above my head, and jiggle her there.

  ‘She’s a beautiful little babsy, yes she is!’ My dad coos to Hannah and he thumbs her little cheek. My daughter’s head looks like a white eggshell with a little bit of pale carpet fluff on it. Her skin, with its flush of pink cheeks, is just like my mother’s. But in every other respect—her eyes, her nose, the shape of her face and her mouth—she is, uncannily, the image of her father. Every time I look at her, I see him, and I probably always will.

  Sometimes I’ll catch my dad staring at her. ‘She’s the living double of Rob, isn’t she?’ he’ll say. I’m sure he only says it because he knows damned well that she isn’t.

  ‘Really? Hmn. You think so?’ will be my reply. Then we’ll stare each other down until one of us—usually me—has to break away first, with some excuse about how I have to go to the toilet, or it’s time for dinner. I often wonder though, if he connects it all to the Russian, and our day out at the beach. My dad has always been a man to know more than he’ll ever let on.

  I settle Hannah on my shoulder, patting her big square nappied bum, and she nearly pulls a handful of my hair. I walk into my parents’ bathroom and look at the two of us in the mirror. I did get my figure back quickly, all but a few pounds. Although nowadays I really don’t care. I think of all the time I spent focussing on all my bad bits. Don’t they say that sometimes you just need something bigger than your biggest problem to realise you never had anything to worry about? However, considering I sleep only about two hours a night because of all the crying she does, I actually think I look pretty good.

  ‘Come on lass,’ my dad says, patting my shoulder. ‘It won’t get prettier the more you stare at it.’

  Last time I went to our local church it was for my mam’s funeral, and in the back of my mind, I was hoping that Rob might come. He didn’t of course. How could he come and comfort me? And how could he come and not? But I know how much it would have hurt him to stay away. He loved my mother.

  Rob. My head floods with him again, like it’s prone to do at all the worst times. Hannah lets out a great big bawl. Saves me the trouble.

  The other day, cleaning my stuff out, I came across something I had long ago forgotten about. A pocket-sized blank book with a silver cover, in which my mother had written quotes that she had collected over the years: quotes about love. She gave it to me as a wedding present. I remember ten yea
rs ago thinking it was very sweet and sentimental and typical of her, but not much more. I suppose I hadn’t lived enough back then.

  "The most powerful symptom of love is a tenderness which becomes at times almost insupportable." Victor Hugo