Highly Unsuitable Girl

by Carolyn McCrae

  With no job to do Anya found time hung heavily on her hands. Every week she went up to London to shop for expensive shoes and clothes she would never wear and eat extravagant, and unwanted, meals at fashionable restaurants.

  She read a lot of novels and wondered whether to write one herself, she had enough material from her life for several, but somehow she never got round to it. She did buy a word processor and spent a month transferring her hand written diaries onto floppy disk.

  As she typed up the diaries of 1968 she felt how lost and broken she had been then. She recognised the self-pity which she was feeling again. Now, as then, she felt that she had nothing to look forward to. As she worked through to the early 70s she wondered what her life would have been like if she had channelled that discontent more positively. She could have countered Kathleen’s influence and she would have made a career for herself. She and Geoff could have made a good life together and she would have been with a man she loved and who loved her. She bitterly regretted giving up so easily.

  Saturday 6th May 1989

  Geoff’s Geoff Jr Jr is 10 today. Rosemary is 8 and James is 7. There’ll be a party which will probably be ruined by Grandma Kathleen and Aunty Margaret fussing around making them eat jelly and play pass the parcel or musical chairs. Geoff always said how much he had hated his birthday parties. I hope G’s GJJ has a happier time.

  Perhaps too many of her entries were self-pitying, perhaps far too many related to birthdays and anniversaries of people who were no longer part of her life.

  Tuesday 10th April 1990

  Geoff 40 today. 40! that means it’ll be me soon. I wonder if Kathleen has allowed him to celebrate. It will of course be 40 years since Her Loss. A far more important anniversary than her only son’s big 4 O. What a happy day that’ll be!

  She had made a mistake by rushing into divorcing Geoff because she had wanted to be free to start again before she was 30 and now, ten years later, her life was on hold because she wouldn’t let Peter go. Was that a mistake too? She knew she was being vindictive, she knew she was being unreasonable. She just didn’t know how to be anything else.

  Women of her age were guiding their children through their teen years, supporting their husbands as they reached the peaks of their careers. She could do neither of these and she had no one to blame but herself.

  Thursday 9th August 1990 Liverpool

  40. And what have I got to show for it? A degree, two failed marriages and a great deal of money in the bank. Wonder if Geoff is remembering it’s my birthday. He used to make such a fuss of it, lots of cards and presents. It seems so long ago.

  Yesterday P said he’d be away for a few days. He’s obviously forgotten it’s my birthday. Since he won’t be around I decided I’d risk leaving the house and come north so I booked a suite at The Adelphi and drove up. The room’s much nicer than the one where I screwed that chap for twenty quid. That was 22 years ago, almost to the day. More than half my life. Where has all that time gone?

  I got a taxi down to the ferry and watched as others walk around the deck as it crossed over to Woodside. Walked up to The Anchor, it was still there though it looks as if it has gone down market, if that were possible. There was a bunch of yobbos hanging around outside, probably the next generation of Longtons. The surgery was still there but no Dr Hill on the plaque so I went in. I should have expected it. It’s nearly 20 years. But it was still hard to hear he died only last year. I should have come up to see him. I wonder if he ever thought of me. I wonder if he was disappointed in me. I expect he was. I am.

  The few times Anya thought about what she was doing to herself, to Peter and the people he loved she was almost ashamed but as the months passed she became more determined not to give Peter any grounds on which to divorce her. If he’d really wanted to, he could just have upped and left and gone to live with his Jennifer. One day, she told herself, she would find she could do something with her life other than fuck up other people’s.

  Sunday 26th August 1990

  I woke up wanting to see old places and old people so I drove first to the Golf Club. I calculated Tim would get away from his wife as early as possible on a Sunday to allow plenty of time in the bar before heading back home to change before Sunday lunch. I reckoned he’d be back in the clubhouse by 12 latest and I didn’t want to miss him.

  There’s a new extension but otherwise nothing much has changed. Unlike me. That carefree, super-sure girl I’d been has long gone. She’d been so confident she could do no wrong, so sure that anything and everything she did was allowable and anything and everything she wanted to do was possible. If I met that girl now I don’t think I’d like her. I’m not sure if she met me she’d be very impressed. I’ve done nothing at all that she would have wanted me to have done. Except make a lot of money.

  Tim was wearing a pink jumper and crimson cord trousers, probably not the most flattering. Most surprising thing is he’s gone grey. All that curly blond hair he had been so proud of has gone. If he’d been a punter coming through the door of March and March I would have said he was wealthy, he had that air about him. His car (blue Jag, personalised number plate TJC 2) shows he’s doing well, despite no doubt having to pay enormous sums in maintenance to Margaret and private school fees for the children.

  I followed him as he drove out. He turned into a private road less than half a mile from the golf club (why hadn’t he walked?). All the houses were six beds, at least, detached triple garages, swimming pools, tennis courts, each one set in over an acre of some of the most expensive real estate in the county. I did a quick valuation, well into 7 figures. He turned into a drive where the electric gates parted as he approached.

  She drove slowly passed the closing gates, catching a glimpse of red brick through the trees, and headed into the country towards the house that had been her home. She needed to know if Geoff still lived there; it was where she always pictured him.

  She parked at the end of the lane so she could slowly walk past. There was a new concrete curb along the road edge, separating it from the grassy hedgerow, and one or two new builds in what had been gardens but it still felt like countryside. Her hedge had grown and no one, unless on horseback, could see into the garden so she walked through the open gate. There were no cars in the driveway and no sound of children playing from the garden.

  The trees she had known had grown, bushes she had planted had reached maturity, the lawn was carefully tended and the green stripes showed it had been recently mown.

  “Can I help you?” The voice made Anya jump. She turned and was relieved to see a middle-aged woman she didn’t recognise.

  “I’m so sorry to disturb you. I was unexpectedly in the area and thought I’d call on the off chance that an old friend still lived here.

  “An old friend?” The woman sounded suspicious.

  “Geoff Philips”.

  The woman showed no sign of recognising the name. “No one of that name lives here. Mind you we’ve only been here a few months and the people before us had only lived here a year or so.”

  “So you wouldn’t have an address for the Philipses?”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “Thanks anyway, sorry to have bothered you.”

  Anya felt the woman watching her as she walked back down the lane. She wondered where they had moved to, they certainly wouldn’t have left the area though she had seen no references to them in the local paper for some time. She drove towards the town, there was one place she knew they would be on any Sunday lunchtime.

  She parked where she had done in January 1976 when she had seen Fiona and her parents arriving for Sunday lunch. She sat wishing she could transport herself back to the last time she had sat in a car outside this house. She would do things so differently. She wouldn’t divorce Geoff. She would hang on, regardless of what he and his mother and sister could throw at him. She should have known Geoff loved her and she loved him. She should have had faith that they would have found a way through it all. She drove home resolved
to get something of her life back.

  Monday 27th August, 1990

  Talked to P at breakfast. Explained I was going to go back to work on the properties. He seemed surprised, asking dryly if the money I got from the business hadn’t been quite enough. I asked him why he had never moved out, we’d be nearly 3 years into the 5 by now. He said he would never leave his parents’ home. It was the house he and his brother had grown up in, it held memories he liked to think of as well as ones he tried to forget. Bastard. I’d often wondered why he hadn’t gone to Jennifer and left me to it. What is this power houses have over people?

  On Sunday I visited the houses that have mattered to me, one way or the other, since I came south and I wasn’t happy in any of them. No, that’s wrong. I probably was happy I just didn’t know it at the time. Something has got to change.

  Under different circumstances the first day of October 1992, would have been a day to celebrate but breakfast for Anya and Peter was the same cold affair it had been for years.

  “Fifteen years Peter. I won’t say Happy Anniversary.”

  “Best not.”

  Anya soon realised something was wrong. Peter wasn’t turning the pages of his newspaper. Normally, by the time he finished his coffee, all the supplements would be put to one side and the paper would be folded to expose the crossword which he would have half finished.

  “Is everything all right?”

  She didn’t expect a response.

  “Is Jennifer ill?” Anya’s false concern finally stimulated Peter to answer.

  “No. She’s not ill.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “She’s moved.”

  “Moved?”

  “Yes. Moved. Gone back to Shropshire. It’s where she was brought up. She said it was obvious I was never going to be free so she’s gone. I would have married her. I would have done if only you had given me a divorce.”

  It horrified her when she realised tears were rolling down his cheeks. She had never seen him cry. It upset her more than she could have imagined.

  “You must have known it was coming.” She tried to sound sympathetic but knew that, after so many years of bickering, even had she succeeded he wouldn’t have heard it for what it was.

  “I suppose I did. I just didn’t want to think she’d really go. You’re always so busy you won’t have noticed but I’ve hardly been out of the house for the four weeks since she left.”

  “A month?”

  “A month in which time you’ve barely noticed me, so wrapped up in your own little world are you.”

  Anya realised he was right, she had long ago stopped wondering where he was and what he was doing. Perhaps she should have noticed more.

  “How long have you known her?” Anya was genuinely interested. It hadn’t seemed important to know anything about her husband’s lover until now as his tears filled her with a guilt his words could never have effected.

  “Do you really want to know?”

  She thought for a few seconds and then spoke gently “I think I do.”

  “I met her in 1982, the 5th of June.” Anya thought that odd, he rarely remembered dates. She did a quick calculation, for more than two thirds of their marriage he had wanted to be someone else. She almost apologised to him for the shocking waste of love and life. “You were out of the office that day and she came in wanting to sell up. Her husband had died leaving her with a house she couldn’t afford and children in private schools. He had been something in the city and there had never been any shortage of money but they had never saved a penny. There was an enormous mortgage on the house and she was in a bit of a state.” He paused, waiting for the sarcastic comments about ‘poor little thing, cried on your shoulder did she?’ but none came. He caught Anya’s eye and was surprised to see real sympathy. “I helped out where I could, made sure the sale of the house went through smoothly, found her a smaller one at a good price, made sure that went through. Everything very professional but, well, we both knew it was going to be more than that.”

  Finally Anya spoke. “When did you first sleep with her?”

  “Christmas Eve that year.”

  “Ten years ago.”

  He carried on as if she hadn’t spoken. “The children were with their grand-parents and we had a few too many mulled wines. It just happened.”

  “She must have loved you very much to wait around all that time.”

  “We did fight it you know. It was a long time before we talked about getting together permanently. But we didn’t want anyone to get hurt.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. You.”

  “And I was just too wrapped up in myself.”

  “It was obvious you weren’t terribly interested in me.”

  “I’m sorry.” She was surprised to find that she meant it.

  “You and I haven’t had a marriage for years but Jen wouldn’t have me while I was still married and you were always going to make divorce difficult. One divorce is unfortunate but two seems careless.” He spoke with dry irony.

  They both thought how much of their lives had been wasted because doing nothing had been the easiest thing.

  Peter regained his thoughts first. “And you had the Crosses and the Philipses.”

  She looked at him, surprised. “What do you know about them?”

  “Not much. Just that you can’t let them go. You were always checking the papers to see if there was anything about them. Jenny said I shouldn’t worry about it…”

  “You talked about this with Jenny?”

  “Of course I did. She said you’d never go back to him.”

  “How the hell would she know?” Anya managed, with difficulty, to keep her anger at bay.

  “We were both hoping you would.”

  There was an uneasy silence as Peter topped up their coffee, spilt some and Anya rushed to clear it up, it gave her time to calm down.

  “You never loved me did you?” Peter asked in what Anya had always thought of as his ‘little boy voice’. She found it rather pathetic but she was over her anger and said nothing. “I mean you married me because it suited you at the time, not because you loved me.” Anya started to say something denying that what he said had any truth in it but Peter put his hand up to silence her. “You invested nothing in our relationship. It was the job you married, the business, the prospect of making something of yourself, or whatever other stupid reason there might be but you didn’t marry me because you loved me did you? I didn’t realise at first, it took a year or two but I did eventually.”

  Much of what Peter said was true. Anya just shrugged and put the mug to her lips.

  She was unprepared for what Peter said next.

  “We really should have seen a counsellor about not having children. We should have found out the reason, whether it was your fault or mine. If we’d had children we would have been a bit more cemented together. You know the worst thing is that in all these years you’ve never trusted me enough to talk about it. Every month in those first few years I thought you’d say something but you never did. It was as if you knew you weren’t ever going to get pregnant.”

  “That’s right.” She spoke quietly. She could never have told him. She had never cared enough to tell him.

  “Right?”

  “I can’t have children. I thought you knew. I thought I’d told you.”

  “How on earth would I know?” Peter spoke slowly, barely containing his inadequate anger.

  “I thought I must have told you.” She shrugged her shoulders.

  “You didn’t. I never gave up hoping. Why did you never tell me?”

  “I thought I had.” She repeated.

  Eventually he broke the uncomfortable silence speaking with barely contained resentment. “Do you think you might explain to me now?”

  She had long ago forgiven her mother, she understood why the sterilisation had had to be done but she would never forgive her father. Victor had had sex with his 15 year old sister ruining not only her life but her baby’
s and, Anya recognised, the lives of all the people she had allowed herself to get close to. She had never told anyone, not even Geoff, how could she tell Peter?

  She spoke, in the end, without thinking, the sentence spoken before she realised what she said. “I was sterilised.”

  “Sterilised?” He seemed surprised, as though it was not the answer he expected.

  “I was seven years old.”

  “Seven?” Peter was shocked.

  “I didn’t know until my mother died and I was reading through her papers. She’d kept all the forms. I’ve still got them in her silver trunk.”

  “It’s unusual to sterilise someone so young isn’t it?” He sounded concerned.

  Anya sat turning her mother’s ring round and round her finger. It was strange, she thought, to be having a civilised, sensible conversation with Peter for the first time in years and it was about the most fundamentally personal part of her.

  “I understand exactly why it was done and, if I’d been my mother, I’d have done the same.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve never told anyone, not Geoff, not anyone.”

  “Perhaps you can trust me with the knowledge. Maybe our fifteen years together is worth something.” He waited for her to say something, but when she didn’t he gently prompted her. “Perhaps if you told someone it might not be such a burden.” She looked up at him. He was a kind, understanding man. She had been so cruel to him.

  “My mother was just 16 when I was born.”

  “So she was under age when you were conceived?” Peter was trying to help.

  “Yes. She was raped.”

  “Oh. I understand now.”

  “No you don’t. You couldn’t possibly understand.”

  “She was raped, she was pregnant, she didn’t trust men, she never wanted the same to happen to you.”

  “Being sterilised would not have stopped me being raped.” Anya pointed out sensibly.

  “I suppose not.”

  “It was who raped her that was the problem.”