Invisible Women

by Sarah Long

  He pulled a piece of paper out of his bag and pushed it across the table to show her. It was a diagram with arrows and half sentences written within loopy bubbles. ‘Become an author/visionary’ was the message in one of the bubbles, as though Matt could turn himself into Hemingway or Martin Luther King if he just put his mind to it. She looked across the page, where a different course was suggested. ‘Start your own business’, which sounded more achievable, if a little non-specific. ‘Refine a go-to-market proposition’, was written in another balloon, she wasn’t sure what that meant.

  Matt’s eyes were gleaming at all the possibilities.

  ‘So, what do you think? Really stimulating, wouldn’t you say?’

  Tessa stared again at the diagram, trying to make sense of it.

  ‘Umm. Well, it’s a bit . . . vague.’

  ‘Of course it’s vague, this is just the starting point! Next stage is to work out where to take it from here. I can’t tell you how great it is to have someone show me the way ahead!’

  Tessa wanted to share his enthusiasm but couldn’t quite overcome her own common sense.

  ‘It’s easy for her to say that,’ she said slowly, ‘but not so easy to see where it leads. It’s like a website I was looking at the other day, about how housewives can relaunch themselves in midlife. It’s written by some crazed American homemaker, you know the sort, always making patchwork quilts. What was it she said? Ah yes, I remember now.’

  She leaned forward and gave Matt an intense, psycho stare to deliver her line in a Californian accent.

  ‘You are the president, CEO and star of your own life!’

  In the old days, Matt would have laughed at her impersonation, but now he just looked cross.

  ‘Well what’s wrong with that? You’ve got to be positive about embracing change.’

  ‘Not necessarily. I’ve never understood why change is always supposed to be a force for good.’

  ‘Because otherwise you just go mad with boredom!’

  He glared at her.

  ‘Of course you should change if you want to,’ she said. ‘But on the other hand, you could just carry on as you are.’

  Tessa had never quite got to the bottom of what Matt’s job entailed, but he did seem enormously well paid for something it was hard to put your finger on. She had glanced though his PowerPoint presentations, beautifully laid out charts of abstract vocabulary which meant nothing to her.

  Matt stared at her, unsmiling, through his silly glasses and she noticed a wiry grey hair curling out of his nostril.

  ‘Carry on as I am?’

  He had raised his voice and the woman at the next table glanced across at him, then at Tessa, then back to her menu.

  ‘It’s alright for you, faffing around all day doing God knows what! I tell you, if I had your life, I wouldn’t need to see a life coach, I’d know I’d got it pretty cushy.’

  Tessa looked down at her hands and noticed a new liver spot, one she hadn’t seen before, just at the knuckle of her wedding ring finger. Do stop complaining, she thought. We have a comfortable life, you never used to object, what is your problem?

  ‘I’m sorry if you feel that way,’ she said, ‘I know it seems a bit unfair, but you were more than happy for me to stop working and, quite honestly, I don’t know what sort of job I could get now. Besides, it’s not as if we’re short of a bob or two.’

  ‘If we’re not short of a bob it’s because I go out every day to be humiliated in a job I hate.’

  ‘You didn’t use to hate it. I thought it was going really well, with your digital anthropology and everything.’

  ‘I make the best of it, but I’m not happy. And if I wasn’t having to carry you and the kids, I’d be free to walk out tomorrow and do something else. Something that employs my talents, that gets to the essence of who I am.’

  Good luck with that, Tessa thought.

  ‘Oh look,’ she said, ‘here come our starters.’

  She took comfort from the warm yellow of the saffron mousse, the colour of crocuses. The softness melted into her mouth; texture in food was so important, it brought new levels to flavour. Matt was slicing vigorously into his sausage.

  ‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘when we agreed you’d take a career break, I thought it was just while the kids were small, I didn’t realise it would be for twenty years!’

  Neither did I, thought Tessa, I didn’t really think about it at all. I blithely walked away to a happy-ever-after fug of domestic bliss, without a thought for the future. I didn’t anticipate sitting here decades later, listening to you bore on about what a drain I am on your resources.

  Neither of them wanted pudding, so Matt settled the bill and they stepped out into the night. He had calmed down once Tessa had apologised and shown more interest in the life coach. ‘You only live once, it’s true,’ she said, ‘YOLO as kids would put it, and of course you must explore your inner whatever.’

  ‘Let’s hail one, shall we?’ said Matt, raising his arm at a black cab.

  ‘Grim day at work, apart from my meeting with Trudi,’ he said as they climbed in. ‘I had to bite my tongue when one of my planners came in whinging about his stress. I said to him, I’ve got two words to say to you; heat and kitchen. He looked completely blank so I had to spell it out to him, “if you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen, mate, this isn’t a bloody nursery”. Anyway, turns out he’s just been signed off for a month in the Priory, so I’m bound to have HR all over me like a rash again but, honestly, couldn’t we all do with a month’s pampering on full pay? I certainly could have done when I had my bad patch a while back, but I just soldiered on because that’s what I do.’

  It was a few years ago when Matt had what they now referred to as his episode. One morning he had been unable to get out of bed. ‘I just can’t do it’, he’d said, ‘I can’t get up, it’s all going round in my head and I don’t know what to do’. It was frightening to see him like that, Matt who was always so confident and definite, suddenly diminished by his intense anxiety. Tessa had helped him through it, he had refused to see the doctor, didn’t want to blemish his record, he said, and she had so admired his courage in pulling himself back from it. At the time, she suggested he leave his job, they would sell the house, change their lives, go back to a flat in Brixton, it was all the same to her. All she wanted was for him to get well.

  Back home now in the bedroom, she lay next to her husband in the darkness, holding hands in a post-coital truce. Sex was the currency of their deal, she thought. She didn’t earn, but she still performed. The thought made her uneasy, for what did that make her? A provider of physical comfort in all its forms, the homemaker who acted as a warm sponge to her sponsor: meeting his needs, listening to his hopes for the future, reflecting him at twice his natural size, as Virginia Woolf put it.

  She turned on her side and rolled away from him as his breathing settled into a slow heaviness. She wasn’t sleepy, their discussion in the restaurant was going through her. Taking care not to wake Matt, she crept downstairs. It was deathly still in the office, in contrast to the lively images that tumbled on to the computer screen from Facebook friends in different time zones around the world. As she hoped, there was a message from John.

  Having supper in Amsterdam. So looking forward to seeing you. Couldn’t sleep last night!

  It wasn’t just her, then. She imagined him lying in his hotel bed, thinking about her, the same way she’d been thinking about him. He would be eating his dinner now; bread and sprinkles washed down by a pint of milk probably, that’s what she remembered eating in Amsterdam; no wonder the Dutch were so tall and pale on that carb and dairy overload. She messaged back:

  What you eating?

  Steak, my lover.

  Cheeky form of address, she thought as she pinged her reply:

  Your WHAT?

  He was quick to explain.

  Say it with a West country accent, then it’s nothing personal. Like saying my dear. Though of course I meant it pers
onally .

  Of course he did.

  Haha, I wonder what we’ll eat on Friday. So excited, how long since we met?

  She wasn’t expecting the level of detail that followed:

  Thirty-two years, four months and three days. Since I missed my chance with you. And buggered up my life forever.

  He must have been drinking more than milk, this was getting maudlin. He quickly corrected himself.

  Sorry! Didn’t mean to press send!

  She should play it down.

  Oh well, all water under the bridge.

  He wasn’t having that.

  Oh minimize, minimize! Gosh, look, I spell in American

  What was this talk of minimising? It sounded like psycho jargon, but then again he was American and was bound to have had therapy, what with the divorce and everything. And having had his life buggered up forever – he claimed – by Tessa consistently turning him down: at their parties, in the sand dunes, and that time in her garden, when he was so desperate for her, as they canoodled up against the clematis.

  She tried to picture him eating his steak.

  Are you having room service or are you in the restaurant?

  Restaurant. I’m saving room service for another time when I’ll have company. The very best company

  She imagined them together in the unmade bed and someone is knocking at the door with a trolley, so they straighten themselves up to open the door and the waiter wheels in their dinner, then John flamboyantly removes the silver covers of the platters . . .

  She cut short her fantasy and instead gave a business-like reply.

  See you Friday. 4 p.m., terminal 5.

  Two more days, counting them down xxx

  If she wasn’t able to sleep earlier, it was now completely out of the question. She crept back into the bedroom and slid between the covers, closing her eyes to dream. She hugged her secret to herself and drifted off to sleep.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ‘Don’t give up all your men friends when you marry.’

  Blanche Ebbutt, Don’ts for Wives, 1913

  On Friday morning Matt was in ebullient form over breakfast, mentally preparing for his clay pigeon shoot.

  ‘I’ve always been a good shot so this is the ideal opportunity to show them I’ve still got it. Life in the old dog yet!’

  ‘Woof-woof!’ said Tessa, suddenly light-hearted at the thought of her illicit rendezvous this afternoon. She kept picturing herself running towards John in slow motion, like the schmaltzy airport scene in Love Actually. She jumped up and cleared the plates with renewed energy.

  ‘They’re lucky to have you, as I keep saying.’

  ‘I know, and I really appreciate it, Tessa, the way you big me up. It’s a frail thing, the male ego.’

  He grabbed her leg as she walked past.

  ‘I’m sorry you had to cancel Lily and Ian this evening, will you be stuck at home pining for me?’

  ‘Actually I might go out with the girls, see a film or something.’

  Why did she say that? Why not tell him the truth?

  ‘Good plan.’ He nodded.

  ‘And while I’m in apology mode, I’m sorry I’ve been a bit crotchety recently. I was over-the-top heavy with you in the restaurant the other night. Thank you for being so understanding.’

  She put a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  Lay your sleeping head, my love, human on my faithless arm. Faithless nothing, she wasn’t faithless, nothing had happened. Meeting an old friend for a drink didn’t exactly turn her into Madame Bovary.

  ‘And I’m sorry if I was unreceptive to all that life coach bollocks,’ she said. ‘I’m probably wrong, but it just sounds like bullshit to me.’

  ‘It’s one of the things I like about you, your intolerance of bullshit. But you’re wrong about Trudi. She’s helping me to find myself.’

  ‘Suppose you don’t like what you find?’

  ‘Oh stop it, you cynic!’

  He stood up leave.

  ‘Thing is, we’re doing alright, aren’t we?’ he said. ‘Not too much to complain about.’

  ‘Nothing at all. Two lovely children, an almost-paid-for home. What more could you want?’

  ‘Exactly!’

  ‘Well, you’ve changed your tune.’

  He was like a yo-yo, she thought, after he’d left for the office. One moment doom and gloom, the next he was Pollyanna, all sunshine and light and bringing his wonderful brand insights to another big fat corporation. And, in truth, they really didn’t have anything to complain about, which was why she felt so little sympathy when he did.

  *

  Driving towards his day of country sports, Matt felt more positive than he had for a long time. It was only a job, after all, and when he was in good spirits like this, he could remind himself that what really mattered was his happy home life: the children he adored and his darling Tessa. Even if she did drive him mad sometimes. He let his mind wander back to their first meeting, a scene he often revisited when he was feeling well disposed towards her. It was after a cricket match on Hampstead Heath where he’d batted magnificently and he’d been celebrating with the team, sitting outside a pub with a pint of beer on a warm summer evening. She’d come up to him, brown legs beneath a green striped ra-ra skirt, hair tied up in a white chiffon scarf. ‘I’m dying of thirst,’ she’d said, ‘do you mind if I have a sip, my friend’s getting them in but there’s such a crush at the bar.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ he’d said, then watched as she downed the whole glass. Afterwards they had wandered out onto the Heath until the early hours. The next day he rang his best friend to let him know he’d just met the girl he was going to marry.

  Retirement might not be so awful, after all, provided they had enough to live on and one of his projects for this weekend was to fully assess his pension prospects. He remembered driving out to Suffolk one weekend to visit Tessa’s uncle who had settled into village life after a career in the City. He had become the archetypal pub bore with cloth cap and pipe, joining a coterie of purple-faced old blokes who met up every night without fail in the local inn, or ‘hostelry’ as they preferred to call it. He had taken Matt and Tessa along that evening, after he’d been away for a few days. ‘Where’s your note?’ one of them asked, merrily lapsing into schoolboy talk, demanding proof of permission to skive off games. He and Tessa had laughed about it, finding them completely ghastly. But now, a few years down the line, Matt could see the appeal.

  Finally, the M4 was thinning out so he opened full throttle and put the Maserati through its paces, revving up in anticipation of his morning shoot.

  *

  Here I go, thought Tessa, it’s the silver wedding weekend all over again. Her hair was whooshed up, potential outfits were laid out on the bed and she had packed an overnight spongebag, just in case. She had hesitated about the spongebag. If she left it out, there would be no question of her missing the last train home. But leaving it in implied she was potentially thinking of staying the night. In the end she told herself it was a precaution, imagine there was a problem on the railways and she’d just HAVE to spend the night and then she wouldn’t have her contact lens solutions.

  This was a lie and she knew it because she could always get a taxi home.

  Matt wouldn’t notice the expense, not with the amount that passed through their bank account, dribbling away on the fripperies that were supposed to bring pleasure if you were lucky enough to afford them. A case of Margaux grand cru, a hand-blown glass vase, a bespoke tailored shirt. It made her anxious thinking about it, the way they wasted money.

  Not that it made you any happier. When they first lived together in Brixton, their idea of luxury was an occasional takeaway from the local Indian, peshwari nan with its juicy sultanas and butter chicken, they’d get out the jar of mango chutney and chilled cans of lager and feel like kings, tucking into the feast set out on the tiny Habitat table they’d bought with a seventy-five percent discount in the sale.


  She slipped a spare pair of knickers and the silver wedding silk pyjamas into her Birkin handbag, which was now looking a little dated if truth be told. After some consideration, she settled on a black waterfall cardigan, black trousers and black suede boots, enlivened only by a deep orange scarf. Colours were all very well, but she’d rather look thin than anything and for that there was no beating black. She put on her make up, making free use of concealer beneath her eyes, then added a nostalgic finishing touch – a spray of Rive Gauche, she’d bought it from Boots in its bold silver, blue and black packaging, the smell of it taking her right back to when it was ‘her’ signature scent.

  Packed and ready with hours to spare, she called Sandra.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ said Sandra. ‘I bet you’re wearing the waterfall black cardigan.’

  ‘How did you know? Seriously, I’m turning into Shirley Valentine here, I’ll be talking to the wall soon. I’ve got four hours to kill.’

  ‘Your pathetically small life that will soon be over.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Doesn’t Pauline Collins say something like that in the film? Which is completely our story, by the way, we have now reached that age.’

  ‘Stop it! Anyway John looks nothing like a Greek waiter. And certainly nothing like Tom Conti pretending to be a Greek waiter.’

  ‘Well if you’re bored, you could always come along and look at fabrics with me here at Chelsea Harbour. I’ve got to choose a cover for Megan’s beloved old armchair. I’ve told her it would be cheaper to throw it away and start again, but she won’t have it. She already knows it can’t go in the living space, I’ll only let her hide it away in the spare bedroom.’