A Crowded Marriage

by Catherine Alliott

  “Everything’s going to be fine, you’ll see. Things will pick up.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe. And meanwhile?”

  “Meanwhile, well, meanwhile we’ll think about it. About…Eleanor’s offer.” I swallowed. “Golly, this isn’t something that can be decided overnight, Alex. There are all sorts of things to consider, to throw into the equation. What about Rufus? What about his friends, his school—”

  “There’s a little local school he could go to near Stockley. It’s a church school—free. And he’d probably get a place. I’ve already checked.”

  “You’ve already…” I stared. My mouth dried. He was serious. Deadly serious.

  “But…he loves Carrington House. All his friends…”

  “He’ll make new friends down there, Imo, and we can’t afford Carrington House any more. Even if we decide to stay in London, he’ll have to go to a state school.”

  “A state school!” My blood froze. What—where they sniffed glue and beat up the teachers? Over my dead body. Not my sweet, precious Rufus.

  “And move somewhere smaller. We could still stay in Putney, but it would have to be a flat. A maisonette, maybe.”

  I got up from the table and went to the French windows, clutching the tops of my arms, my heart pounding. What, in the area where everyone knew us, so everyone knew we’d gone down, not up? When everyone was moving to bigger houses with bigger gardens, the Camerons went smaller? With Rufus at a state school where he’d be bullied and picked on? I gazed out at the neighbour’s wisteria tumbling prettily over the garden wall. He knew he’d got me. Knew I was cornered. But turning to look at him now, I knew how much that pained him too. The sadness in his eyes was not pretty to watch. I turned back to the window; rested my forehead on the cold glass. Tilly had got quite a decent divorce settlement from Alex. In his guilt, he’d been generous. They’d sold the family home eventually, but she’d got the lion’s share of the capital, and of course he paid for Lucy and Miranda’s schooling. There was no talk of them leaving their private American schools, I noticed. I dug my nails hard into the palm of my hand. But I’d known all this when I’d married him. Known he would always support another family, and that I had to be happy with what was left. And I was—very happy—as long as I had him. And it wasn’t as if I contributed anything, either. Wasn’t as if I had a proper job.

  When I looked round again, he was at the far end of the kitchen, at the sink, his back to me. His hands were deep in his pockets and his shoulders sagged in his blue jumper. It struck me, for the first time, that he looked older. I had a sudden flashback to how he’d looked striding down that corridor at Weinberg and Parsons all those years ago; so dashing and handsome, coat streaming out, blond hair flying. I took a deep breath and went across to him. I put my arms around him from behind and rested my head on his back. He didn’t turn, but stayed staring bleakly into the stainless steel depths.

  I sometimes wondered if Alex ever missed the life he’d had. The house in Flood Street, the glamorous social life, the restaurants every night, the opera. As I held him, I felt his disappointment at the way things had turned out permeate through him. It cut me like a knife. He didn’t want to be bailed out by old friends. He didn’t want to be shamed into accepting charity, and Eleanor had done it in such a way that it didn’t seem like that. We’d be doing her a favour. As usual, she came out of this shiny and bright, a far, far nicer person than I was, who just wanted to hold on to the trappings of my life, to be like Kate across the road, with my child’s private school blazer and cap hanging in the hall and my occasional girly lunches and the odd invitation to charity balls, when in fact—we were out of our depth. Alex had clearly known it for some time, and I…well, I’d known too, but I suppose I’d been fooling myself. Clinging to the wreckage. I swallowed hard and squeezed him tight. And actually, I could cope with anything, except his sadness.

  “We’ll sleep on it, darling, hmm?” I whispered, my voice, when it came, surprisingly croaky. “Let’s think about it.”

  Chapter Six

  Kate dropped the frozen packet and a million petits pois shot, like tiny green missiles, to every corner of her kitchen. She turned, her face shocked.

  “You’re not.”

  I nodded miserably. “We have to, Kate. We’ve been through it so many times now. Unearthed every unpaid bill, every final reminder, every threatening letter. I tell you, it’s not a pretty sight.”

  It wasn’t. Alex and I both suffered from brown envelope syndrome, my policy being to ignore them and pretend I’d open them later, but I was horrified to discover he’d gone one step further and popped them under sofa cushions. We’d decorated the kitchen table with them last night, sat down opposite each other, and forced ourselves to face reality.

  “Yes, but this is so drastic. Moving out! Things will improve, surely?”

  I took a deep breath and prepared to take on the role of my husband, the executioner, as Kate played me, the condemned: pleading, arguing, imploring for a stay of sentence. I shook my head as I’d been taught. “Apparently not. This is the second year running he hasn’t had a bonus, Kate, and it’s not just him either,” I added loyally. “The whole of the city’s in chaos. People are losing their jobs left, right and centre. And as far as the house is concerned, if we don’t jump now, we might be pushed,” I said, echoing the master’s voice.

  “What, you mean the bailiffs?” She gazed at me without blinking.

  I shrugged. “Who knows? I mean I agree, I thought they only appeared in Dickensian costume dramas, but apparently they still exist—just look a bit different these days. Ford Mondeos and jangling bling, as opposed to tailcoats and top hats.”

  Kate sat down unsteadily opposite me at the table. She looked stricken. I hoped she wasn’t going to cry, because if she did, I surely would too.

  “I can’t bear it.”

  I nodded miserably. “I know. Neither can I.”

  She rested her arms limply on the table and gazed at me, her huge, baby-blue eyes filling up. I looked out of the window, in real trouble now. We both knew how much it meant to have a mate across the road to pop over and confide in, to have a laugh, a coffee, a piece of chocolate, to cheerfully character assassinate a few mothers at school, to have such instant gratification literally on each other’s doorstep, but it was more than that. Recently, Kate and I had become very close. I knew things about her that I have a feeling no one else did, and she knew things about me I certainly wouldn’t have told anyone else. I think she’d found it easy to confide in me because I didn’t mix with her elevated social set and wasn’t likely to spill any beans, and I…well, I just liked her. What had started as a convenient friendship to do mainly with proximity had blossomed into something rare and precious to do with compatibility.

  She got up quickly from the table to save us both from a nasty scene and went for the dustpan and brush in the broom cupboard.

  “Bloody peas,” she muttered, brushing them rather ineptly into the pan. She threw them in the bin.

  “You’ve thrown the dustpan in too,” I commented.

  “What? Oh.” She retrieved it absently and slung it in the cupboard. Then she turned and folded her arms, regarding me beadily like someone looking into the eye of a storm.

  “I can’t help feeling you’re panicking. That this is crisis management.”

  “Oh, we are,” I agreed. “And it is. A crisis, I mean. And if we have any chance of saving ourselves we have to move fast. We’re going under here, Kate, sinking well below the surface. Eleanor’s offer is a lifeline.”

  “Eleanor,” she spat, opening the fridge door to get some salad out for lunch. “I thought you couldn’t bear her! Thought you reckoned she still had her claws into Alex and was just waiting for her chance to pounce. Well, now you’re offering it to her on a plate!” She tossed a cucumber and a pepper on a chopping board. “She’ll be all over him like a rash!”

>   “I think I’ve overreacted,” I mumbled, chewing a fingernail. “In fact, I’m sure I have. Eleanor, is, in actual fact, a very sweet person.”

  “Bollocks,” Kate scoffed, chopping up the cucumber with alarming zeal. “Last week you told me she was a conniving hussy who’d married for money and was regretting it on a daily basis. You told me she was thoroughly disillusioned with chinless Piers and looking for some extracurricular action with her eyes firmly on your husband!”

  “I did not,” I spluttered, colouring up. “I mean—I—I certainly remember saying that if you marry money you pay for it, but I’m pretty sure I was generalising. I really don’t think for one moment she’s after Alex.”

  Kate turned and waved her knife dangerously at me. “You said, the last time you went to stay with them, she practically got her tits out at the dinner table. You said it was a black tie event for twenty with a magician doing the after-dinner entertainment and she might just as well have done the juggling herself.”

  “Did I?” I was horrified. “God, how awful. I’m such a cow. No, no, she looked lovely that evening. Just a bit—you know. Chilly.”

  “And you said that when you walked into the billiards room after coffee she was bending over the table with Alex bending over behind her showing her how to pot the red. You reckoned he’d have been potting something else if you’d come in two minutes later.”

  “Yes, but I misinterpreted that,” I said quickly. “Alex explained to me in the car on the way home, it’s a bit of a running joke with them. He’s always tried to teach her billiards, ever since they were little, and she’s always been hopeless.”

  “Ever since they were little,” Kate scoffed. “Ever since they were little and he was the land agent’s son and she was the farmer’s daughter and they went to Pony Club together and grew up in each other’s houses. He plays on that as if that excuses their overfamiliarity.” She stopped suddenly. Saw my face. Went a bit pink. “Sorry. That was out of order. I didn’t mean…well, I’m sure you’re right. You misinterpreted it. And I’m just upset.”

  I got up and we met in the middle of the kitchen, hugged each other tight.

  “I’m upset too, Kate; can’t bear the thought of going. Can’t bear it. And I hate the thought of being beholden to her too.”

  She drew back sharply and looked at me. “Oh, I wouldn’t take it rent free.”

  “We’re not going to,” I said quickly. “Alex would have, but I made him ring a local estate agent and find out what the going rate was for renting a dilapidated cottage round there. It’s peanuts, actually, but Alex has written to Piers saying it’s a terribly generous offer, blah blah blah, but we’ll only accept if they let us pay rent. I do have some pride.”

  “Quite right,” she said, fishing a tissue out of her sleeve and blowing her nose loudly. She went back to butchering the cucumber.” And what about your house? Number forty-two?” She jerked her head over the road.

  “We’re not going to sell it, we’re going to rent it out.” I perched on the edge of the table. “Alex wanted to sell, but I’ve talked him out of it. We’re getting a stonking great rent for it, incidentally, so who knows? In a year or so, when we’re back on our feet, maybe we can move back? Come back to London.”

  Kate smiled down knowingly at her red pepper and chopped away in silence. “You won’t,” she said eventually. “No one ever comes back. Once they’ve gone, they realise how much better life is out there. And aside from the fact that I’ll miss you like hell, I think that’s what’s upsetting me so much. The fact that I’ll still be in sodding London with my successful husband and my vast sums of money, and you’ll be in a little cottage in the country with roses round the door and a veggie patch at the back and a few chickens in the yard. Heaven.” She sighed. “What’s it called—Rose Cottage? The Orchard? Go on, make me drool.”

  “Shepherd’s Cottage.”

  “Shepherd’s Cottage,” she breathed, putting her knife down for a moment and gazing straight ahead. “Even better. More kudos, less chocolate box. With baby lambs gambolling on the hillside behind you and trout glistening and leaping in the brook? Typical!” She brought the knife down with such force that half the red pepper leaped off her board in alarm. I picked it up and she gouged away at the seeds inside it like a Shakespearean henchman going for Gloucester’s eyes. I gulped.

  “Well, you’ll come down and see us, of course. Spend weekends, and we’ll come up here. You know, to dinner, the theatre…”

  Even as I said it, though, I knew it wouldn’t happen. Knew that, whilst Kate would be blissfully happy mucking in with the steam stripper and the Polyfilla on a Saturday morning before munching a ham roll on a back doorstep, Sebastian, after a hard week at the operating table, could probably think of better things to do. Likewise, theatre trips would be unlikely to feature in the Camerons’ social calendar for obvious financial reasons. The truth was that our lives, which up to now had been so intrinsically woven, so intricately stitched together, were going to be pulled apart with alarming ease. A relationship that had taken many hours of coffee drinking, school running, scooping up of each other’s children and cooking of kitchen suppers to perfect, was to be shelved in moments.

  Kate dredged up a great sigh from her L. K. Bennetts. “Of course we’ll see each other. Of course. I’ll come down for the day in the school holidays and bring the children, and you’ll pop up here occasionally when you’re in town, but…it’ll be different. It’ll be the end of an era. The end of…old ways.”

  We exchanged sad little smiles, and might have exchanged another hug, but Kate sensibly picked up her knife and began paring again in a more measured, slightly less manic way. “But a new start for you, my friend, which is just what you need. What you both need. Time to move on.”

  That evening I told Rufus, who was much more stoic and phlegmatic than I’d imagined. He mulled it over for an hour or two without saying very much, but then, later that evening, came to find me in my bedroom.

  “Where will I go to school?” he demanded, raising huge brown eyes to me in the mirror. He was sitting at my kidney-shaped dressing table, swivelling on the stool and playing with old lipsticks in my drawer, twisting them up and down while I changed the sheets behind him.

  “Oh, Rufus, you’ll love it. It’s a dear little church school in the village, much smaller and cosier than Carrington House, and it’s got a fantastic reputation.”

  I’d steeled myself to ring Eleanor a couple of days ago and she’d instantly raved about it and given me the headmaster’s number.

  “Everyone says it’s a brilliant school,” she’d gushed down the phone. “All the local children go, and Vera’s children adore it.”

  “Vera?”

  “My daily.”

  “Ah.”

  “And the head’s great, apparently,” she’d rushed on. “He’s new, really dynamic, really turned the school around. Terribly charming too, I gather.”

  He must have been having an off day when I rang.

  “This term? No, I’m not convinced I can. We’re full to bursting.”

  I’d explained that my husband had already telephoned and secured, I’d been led to believe, a place for Rufus.

  “Oh, yes, I remember now. I did speak to your husband. But it was all very hypothetical. I certainly didn’t promise anything.”

  Oh, splendid.

  “Um, I’m a friend of Eleanor Latimer’s,” I breathed shamelessly, perhaps hoping that by dropping the local nob, he, in turn, would drop everything.

  “Are you indeed?” he’d barked back. “Yes, well, you can tell her from me that the next time her dogs crap all over my playground I’ll bloody shoot them.”

  “Right, will do,” I’d quaked. “But in the meantime…?”

  “In the meantime, leave it with me. I’ll see what I can do.”

  And the line had gone dead.

 
A week later I’d received a curt missive via email informing me that since a child’s father in Year Five had tragically been killed in a combine-harvesting accident, the family were moving away and there was now a place for my son. Dead man’s shoes, I thought, reading it in horror. Heavens, was this the sort of place we were going to? Did people fall into combines as a matter of course, skin rabbits with their teeth and pop ferrets down their trousers before they went shopping?

  “A church school?” Rufus turned to face me from the dressing table. “What—you mean it’s in a church?”

  “No, sausage, it’s run by the Church. Which makes it, well…” I shook a pillow into its case, smiling, “Christian. Caring. Nice.”

  In my mind’s eye I imagined a chubby, smiley vicar in a billowing cassock sweeping into the little wooden schoolroom and beaming kindly down at the rows of rosy-cheeked children sitting cross-legged before him, delivering a homily about how all God’s creatures were precious, and then blessing them before they ran out into the fields to play, the little girls with pigtails flying to skip and spin hoops, and the boys to dam streams and look for frogs.

  “Do they still have Dib Dabs in the country?”

  “Of course they do. You’ll buy them at the village shop.”

  Now Rufus and a couple of the aforementioned apple-cheeked boys were stretching up over a counter, conkers hanging from their pockets, to hand their pennies over to a dear little currant bun of a lady, who was beaming widely and taking down a glass jar full of pear drops.

  “But you know, Rufus,” I regarded him kindly, “the pace is slightly slower in the country. You might find it’s all humbugs and catapults rather than Dib Dabs and Game Boys.”

  “Oh.” He looked disappointed. “What’s a humbug?”

  “A humbug is a slimy bastard who says one thing and then does something entirely different,” snarled Alex, sweeping into the bedroom and flinging his briefcase on a chair. “See my boss on this subject.” He wrenched angrily at his tie.

  “Golly, you’re early. Good day?” I hazarded nervously.