by Adele Parks
‘You should make yourself unavailable. You should go out more. You can’t stay tied to the telephone for the rest of your days.’ Martha shot Eliza a horrified look. ‘Not that this – err – issue will last the rest of your days but… err…’ Eliza gave up; her grave was deep enough.
‘But where would I go and who with? I don’t have any real friends.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘Well, none I can talk to at the moment.’
‘That’s because you’ve chosen not to tell them about your situation. If you were more honest with them you might find you had more support.’ And in fact Eliza was slightly fed up of being the only person who Martha turned to, to obsess about her situation. Eliza was Martha’s sister and as such her best friend, but as her sister, she was also entitled to dish out the healthiest dose of straight-talking.
‘But it would be so humiliating. Michael is bound to come home soon. I couldn’t stand a lifetime of condescending looks, of their sympathy and smugness. Imagine if everyone knew I’d taken him back after such a–’
‘Brutal rejection.’ Eliza finished the sentence for her. ‘I don’t think you’re being fair to your friends. I think you’ll find people are a lot more sympathetic than you imagine.’
But Martha couldn’t tell anyone. She felt such a failure, such an idiot. She didn’t even know why he’d left. She didn’t understand it. She knew she wasn’t perfect, but who was? She’d always tried her best. Tried so damned hard. They’d said ‘until death do us part’. They’d said ‘for better, for worse’. She’d meant it. Surely if the worst they’d had was a few sleepless nights and a bout of colic they should have been able to get through this. Rows are healthy. You read of couples who stand by each other through appalling situations – illness, redundancy, infertility, death. Some couples weathered storms – how was she going to admit that he’d buggered off at the first sign of drizzle? She worried that if she told people Michael had left simply because he was unhappy, they would assume she was hiding some crucial piece of information. They’d suspect that she’d had a torrid affair, or that she was an alcoholic, or that she was hiding a gambling addiction, or something equally dramatic.
Or worse. They’d mistakenly think that Michael was a spineless, irresponsible coward, because from the outside – if you didn’t really know Michael – Martha could see how someone might jump to this conclusion. After all, it wasn’t really very nice leaving your wife and kids, was it? It would have been more responsible and more courageous to stay and try to put things right. Martha didn’t want people thinking she was married to a spineless, irresponsible coward. Besides which, by not telling anyone Martha could try to pretend it wasn’t happening. If she didn’t answer the telephone or accept any invites, if she stayed indoors and alone, she might just be able to make time stand still. She just might.
‘I don’t want to go out with anyone else. I don’t want to see anyone else,’ Martha repeated.
Eliza sighed. She fundamentally disagreed with her sister and wondered when it would become appropriate to say so. Was a marriage worth fighting for just because it was a marriage? She bit her tongue. ‘Well, OK then. But maybe you shouldn’t let him off the hook so easily. Maybe you should demand some answers. Make him think about what he’s doing,’ she suggested.
Martha was desperate and tired. Her patience was slowly beginning to ebb away. Perhaps Eliza was right that Michael would respect her more if she were more exacting. And Michael did need help. Martha was considering the serious possibility that he’d had a breakdown, it sounded more feasible than the body snatchers having got him. It was true that she was getting nowhere fast with this current strategy. Every time Martha ticked off a day in her diary she felt and feared her marriage was slipping from her grasp.
So Martha changed tack. She took the fourth date as an opportunity to quiz, grill and cross-examine Michael relentlessly. She clawed at the open wound that was their separation and found that she’d shown the measure of her hurt and frustration even before the waiter took their order. This new approach didn’t help either; if anything it made matters worse. Martha hadn’t thought it was possible, but Michael became more and more distant and withdrawn over the evening.
‘When did you stop loving me?’ she demanded repeatedly. She believed that if she knew this much she’d be able to fix things. She’d be able to go back to the time and the Martha that he did love.
‘I haven’t.’ He sighed and he wished Martha would leave off. He hated having a responsibility to this woman. This woman he wasn’t in love with any more. He hadn’t wanted his life to turn out this way. He’d wanted to stay in love with her but he wasn’t.
‘So you do still love me.’ Martha couldn’t hide her eagerness.
‘Yes, in a way. You’re my best friend.’
‘That’s enough, isn’t it?’ Martha begged, hopefully.
Why did she do this to herself? Michael wondered. ‘No. I don’t want to stay with you just because I’m used to you,’ he sighed reluctantly.
His words punched her in the stomach. Martha was flattened. She was lying face down in the boxing ring, the taste of blood in her mouth, the voice of the referee ringing in her ears. Martha took a deep breath and reminded herself that she was down, but not out. ‘What did I do wrong?’ she cried miserably.
Michael didn’t answer.
‘Am I a bad mother?’
‘You’re a perfect mother,’ he affirmed.
‘Am I a bad wife?’
‘No, you’re a perfect wife.’
‘So loving me, my being your best friend, my being a perfect mother and wife, and the fact that we have two children together isn’t enough for you?’ demanded Martha.
‘No, it’s not. Something’s missing.’
‘You greedy bastard.’ Martha wasn’t sure how it happened. It must have been reflex but she threw her glass of wine at him.
That was their last date.
Martha couldn’t see the point in arranging another. She doubted Michael would agree to go out with her again. He hated scenes and wouldn’t be able to forgive her for the spectacle in the restaurant. Besides which, when they’d been to the cinema together the previous week, he’d flinched when he accidentally touched his knee against hers, his wife’s. Martha thought she might vomit with the pain.
That night she lay in bed alone, no longer even expecting or hoping to sleep. What he’d said about her being a perfect wife and mother but that still not being enough for him was worse than his leaving. It was crueller than his complaints. If he thought she was the perfect wife and mother but still didn’t want her, then what he was saying was her best simply wasn’t good enough. She’d spent ten years trying her best, wanting to impress Michael, wanting him to feel proud of her, wanting him to validate her – and she’d failed.
The last four weeks had been pure hell.
After the wine-throwing incident, Martha had sworn to Eliza that she wouldn’t make contact any more with Michael, and that she’d simply wait until he contacted her. Eliza hoped he would because Martha hoped it, but she wasn’t banking on it. Martha had shown remarkable restraint for all of four days (it felt like four years) and then today the estate agent had called Martha asking if she could clarify why there was a delay on the exchange of contracts. Was there a problem he could help with? Martha had wanted to shout, ‘Yes there is a sodding problem, but no, you can’t help. Not unless you can turn back time.’ Instead she called Michael.
She hadn’t planned to be at all emotional. She’d vowed she wouldn’t cry. She would try not to berate him about his lack of responsibility (because whilst most of Martha had been shocked and horrified at herself, for flinging wine in a restaurant, a tiny little bit of her found it liberating, she could easily imagine it becoming addictive). She would quell her anger. She’d be aloof, calm, entirely Lauren Bacall. So she was as surprised as Eliza was to find herself regressing to hysterical sobbing and pleading for Michael’s return.
She couldn’t
even trust her own emotions.
Martha took the tea from Eliza and wrapped her hands around the mug. It was a very mild October but Martha felt permanently cold.
‘Should I ring the estate agent for you?’ asked Eliza. She lowered herself down on to the floor and sat with her back against the wall, next to Martha. ‘You have so much to sort out even if Michael does come back–’
‘What do you mean “if”? Of course he’s coming back,’insisted Martha through her gulps of tea and tears.
‘Erm, right, yeah. Well, when Michael comes back you aren’t going to be in a position to buy a new house. You’ll have to rest, and reassure one another before you’ll be in a position to galvanize your spirits to tackle a move.’
‘But the Bridleway would be the perfect fresh start,’ Martha cried.
‘It would be associated with all this confusion. You’ll find another house when the time is right,’ said Eliza. She squeezed Martha’s knee reassuringly.
‘It’s more than a house to me,’ Martha wailed.
‘I know, Babe. But you’re going to have to let it go.’
Martha felt another shriek of pain sear her body. She was clinging to the idea of the dream home because she was struggling to accept the enormous change that had been thrust upon her. Wasn’t it enough that her husband had left her? That he’d deprived the children of the stable family she’d always wanted them to have? That he’d obliterated her past and destroyed her future?
But then, put like that, what did a house matter in the grand scheme of things?
Martha took a deep breath and tried to recapture some of the self-control for which she was (historically) famous. ‘OK, pass me the telephone. I’ll call the estate agent.’ And whilst the brave smile was frail, it was genuine.
15
Eliza’s recent dates had not been much more successful than Martha’s. Her belief in the happily-ever-after with the man-with-a-pension-plan had taken a severe bruising from Martha and Michael’s split, but she wasn’t going to admit this.
Eliza had expected to arrive at Martha and Michael’s that Monday morning and be guided and helped. She’d expected them to be pleased with her adult decision to move out of a dead-end relationship and find someone who wanted a couple of kids and an endowment policy. She’d even thought that they would introduce her to some of Michael’s friends at the golf club. She was looking forward to being mopped up into their happy family environment, which she’d so often admired. She’d wanted to read the kids stories in the warm orange light of their bedrooms, bedrooms packed with toys and dreams. She’d been looking forward to doing her share of playschool and swimming-class car runs. She’d wanted to join the dinner parties, she might even have been eating chioca, for God’s sake. But this scene of domestic bliss had disappeared.
Vanished.
Gone.
If she felt cheated, God alone must know what Martha was feeling.
Instead of being the recipient of mugs of hot chocolate and platefuls of oatmeal cookies, Eliza found herself in the eye of a confusing, complicated marital storm. Her first thought had been to turn heel and leg it back to her parents’, or even Greg’s, but one look at Martha had wiped such thoughts entirely from her head. Eliza was needed.
Naturally, as a single thirty-and-some-months woman living in the twenty-first century, with a large number of friends in a similar position, Eliza was well practised in the ‘All men are bastards’ line. She also knew that the immediate shockwaves of a break-up could only be salved with chocolate, wine and weeping. The next stage was naming and shaming: calling the man in question everything from an arse to a reptile and listing his many, many crimes against womankind. And the final stage to recovery was shagging in a random, risqué and raunchy manner. This method to mend a broken heart had been used by Eliza and her friends after the breakdown of countless affairs. However, Martha completely rejected Eliza’s tried and tested remedy. She did accept the odd glass of wine and on one or two occasions she even drank just over half a bottle at one sitting, but she wouldn’t touch chocolate. Nor would she diss Michael. She kept insisting that he must be confused or sad. She wondered what she’d done wrong and insisted that this must be hurting him as much as it was hurting her.
‘I doubt that,’ Eliza yelled in frustration. Eliza had spent days watching her sister on her hands and knees mopping spills, changing nappies, picking up toys, begging the children to eat or sleep at the appropriate times. She’d watched her clean cupboards, floors, windows and the tops of wardrobes. Eliza couldn’t decide if Martha thought these tasks essential or whether they were a ploy to keep busy. Eliza tried to help by bathing the children and reading them bedtime stories, but Mathew sensed there was something wrong and clung pathetically to his mother. Eliza often found Martha asleep in Mathew’s bed – one night she found her curled up in a tight ball in Maisie’s cot. Eliza was shocked, not only at the lengths mothers would go to to placate their children, but also by the size of Martha. Her big sister suddenly looked so tiny.
Vulnerable.
Besides her refusals to get blathered and fat or to berate her ex, Martha also contravened tradition in the third strand of the recovery program. Even Eliza could not imagine Martha shagging her way to restoration.
Eliza, on the other hand, was quite keen to get laid. She hadn’t realized how great a sex life she and Greg enjoyed until she’d abandoned it, and now she missed sex. Not Greg. She was sure she didn’t miss Greg. What was there to miss, except noise and chaos? But she did miss something, so it must be the sex. Yet getting laid wasn’t proving as easy as she’d imagined.
In the very early days, it would have been insensitive in the extreme for Eliza to mention her imperative need to access Martha’s address book. Oddly, Martha had not greeted the news of her sister’s split from Greg with quite the enthusiasm Eliza had imagined she would. She’d simply commented, ‘Poor Greg, poor you.’ Eliza reasoned that she’d caught Martha at a bad moment.
After a couple of weeks of living together, Martha suddenly found some enthusiasm for Eliza’s plan to find a new Mr Right. The right Mr Right. ‘I know some chaps who might be what you’re looking for,’ she mentioned casually one evening as she was flicking through her address book.
Eliza thought it was quaint that Martha had an address book, not a PalmPilot. All of Eliza’s friends had Palm-Pilots. She also thought it was quaint that Martha called blokes ‘chaps’.
‘Who, who?’ asked Eliza, without bothering to disguise her enthusiasm.
‘Well, you could start with Ted.’
‘Ted?’ Eliza couldn’t help thinking of Play School. What sort of name for a grown man was Ted? Did this mean he would be particularly hirsute? Still, she shouldn’t allow herself to be put off at this embryonic stage, she could always think of a nickname, which was much more street.
Martha was smiling, she knew her sister well enough to guess what was running through her mind. ‘Should I go on?’ she asked playfully.
‘Yes. Yes, of course, what does he look like?’
‘Surely you ought to be asking what his prospects are if you’re so hell-bent on this scheme of finding yourself a respectable husband with a pension plan etc, etc.’
‘Well, yes, true,’ Eliza admitted reluctantly, ‘but I don’t want to date the Elephant Man, not even if he is the CEO of every blue-chip company in Britain.’
‘Oh, I see,’ said Martha smiling, and betraying the fact that she knew her sister would never settle for anything less than a beautiful man.
‘What?’
‘Nothing. I’m not saying a thing. Well, Ted is a banker, he’s tall, blond and generally considered fairly handsome.’
‘Blond?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Eliza, don’t say nothing when there is blatantly something.’
‘I prefer dark-haired men.’
‘So Ted’s a “no”, then?’
‘He
’s a “maybe”. Let’s write a list.’ Eliza jumped up to find pen and paper. She thought it was a very good sign that Martha had managed about a dozen sentences without turning the conversation back to Michael. Maybe this was exactly what Martha needed – something to take her mind off her own problems.
Eliza sat down on the sofa next to Martha and drew three columns. At the top of the columns she wrote, ‘Hot’, ‘Might Do’ and ‘Not if He were the Last Man Alive’. Martha grinned. Underneath ‘Might Do’ Eliza wrote ‘Ted’.
‘There’s Tarquin. He’s dark-haired. He’s a solicitor.’
‘Is that his real name? You really know someone called Tarquin?’ asked Eliza, astonished. ‘No, I’m sorry, I couldn’t. I’d laugh every time I said it. I couldn’t imagine calling out “Yes, yes, yes, Tarquin” whilst I’m in the throws of pash. It’s simply too try-hard.’
‘Well, he’s not responsible for his name,’ laughed Martha. ‘His parents saddled him with it before he could articulate any objection.’
‘But he does have the option of changing it by deed poll. An option he’s obviously chosen not to take advantage of.’
‘He’s very nice.’
Eliza sighed and wrote ‘Tarquin’ under ‘Ted’.
Martha went through her entire address book and tried to muster up as many eligible men as she could. Eliza always found grounds for objection: ‘sounds too posh’, ‘definitely too short’, ‘silly name’ featured frequently, as did ‘can’t dance’, ‘sounds dull’, ‘sounds selfish’, ‘divorced – too much baggage’. This last comment prompted the exchange:
‘Sorry, Martha. I didn’t mean anything by that.’
‘Why are you apologising to me?’
‘Well, I’m not saying everyone will think a divorcee has too much baggage,’ lied Eliza, embarrassed that she’d put her foot in it.
