Highly Unsuitable Girl

by Carolyn McCrae

  “Am I really that selfish?” She asked rather tentatively after a long silence.

  “Yes, I think you are.”

  “Miriam said that as well.”

  “Miriam?”

  “The manager of Fishermen Rock.”

  “She said you were selfish?”

  “Selfish, self-centred, and a lot of other things as well. Maybe you are both right. Maybe I’ve just gone through life just using and hurting people.”

  She thought of her mother, could she have done more for her? Should she have recognised that she was ill, lonely and frightened? She thought of Kathleen and Margaret and now, with her reaction to seeing Geoffrey with Lizzy, she realised something of what they would have felt when this highly unsuitable girl breezed into their lives and took over their son. And then she thought of the men she still thought of as boys, Tim, David and John. She had led them on, she had undoubtedly used them and she had never, not until now, wondered how they had felt. She had stolen years of Peter’s life, and years of happiness from his new wife Jenny and her children. How much damage had she done to them? And how well did she really know the children who, for nearly seven years, she had been mother to? She had been so intent on doing the right thing, and being seen to do the right thing, she may have missed so many opportunities to get to know them as people. Had she ever worried about how they felt? Asked them about anything? Or had she always known best? She hadn’t known that Geoffrey loved to sail, what else didn’t she know about the children she had called ‘hers’? How many other people had she hurt? How many other people’s lives, wittingly or unwittingly, had she influenced for the worse? Matthew and Maggie, Tim’s children who would have been humiliated by their father’s humiliation, how many others? She began to feel as though all she had ever done was harm.

  “I’m so sorry.” She said, quietly and sincerely.

  “You have absolutely nothing to be sorry for. Anya, you have always done what you thought was best at the time, often, though not always, for the right motives.”

  “But I never looked at anything from other people’s points of view.”

  Tim didn’t argue. He took hold of her hand and squeezed it. “That’s not an easy thing to do, Anya, I don’t think any of us do it particularly well.” They sat for a while, Anya’s hand under Tim’s. She couldn’t bring herself to hold his hand properly but she was pleased for the reassurance the contact gave her. Since Vincent and Kenneth’s visit three days earlier she had been questioning so many things about herself. And now Tim was saying much the same thing. She was, and had always been, self-obsessed.

  It was some while before Tim broke the silence. “I want to apologise for New Year’s Night.”

  “There’s no need, let’s simply forget it ever happened.”

  “It wasn’t supposed to happen like that Anya, really it wasn’t. Nothing in our relationship has happened the way I wanted it to.”

  “What relationship?”

  “Nothing has happened the way I wanted it to happen since the moment I first set eyes on you.” Anya went to interrupt but Tim shook his head. “Listen. Please. Enough is enough. It’s time for you to listen. We’ve got at least an hour until we get you home just listen.”

  Anya gently took her hand away and listened.

  “It all began to go wrong under the clock that first evening. Geoff had wound us all up about meeting you after work. He had said you were the most beautiful girl he had ever met. He believed you would be able to hold your own against his mother and sister. He said you were clever, far cleverer than he was, and that you were beautiful. He also said that you were the most promiscuous girl he’d ever met. He didn’t particularly like you screwing around with so many other men but accepted it because you always came back to him in the end.”

  “Which I did. Ironic that really.”

  “We were expecting, well I don’t know really what we were expecting, at Charing Cross, I just know it wasn’t anyone like you. The moment I first saw you, even before I knew you were you, if you see what I mean, I knew I shouldn’t marry Margaret. I shouldn’t marry anyone if I felt the kind of feeling I had for you that evening. It wasn’t just lust, it was a recognition of a similar soul. I know that sounds ridiculous but it’s the only way I can explain it. When you first looked at the clock I thought this wonderful person might be Anya, then you walked out of the station and I thought you couldn’t be so I followed you. I had to know who you were. I have often wondered if it was love at first sight and have decided it was. You walked out onto the Strand, looking at shops, looking very lost and alone, you walked as far as the Savoy and then you turned back again.”

  Anya tried not to think of the word ‘love’. “I remember that. I was scared. I wanted to go back home. I should have done and then everyone I’ve hurt would have had different lives. I wouldn’t have ruined everything for everyone.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself Anya, you didn’t ruin anyone’s life. Certainly you influenced them but you should know that people are sometimes strong enough to ruin their own lives or just too weak not to. I watched you walking back down the Strand towards Charing Cross and I knew you were going to be Anya. I knew there was going to be a good reason for me to know this beautiful girl. I knew that we were meant to be together. Sometime.” Anya was surprised at the simple honesty in Tim’s voice.

  His tone became harsher as he continued. “I should never have married Margaret. I was far too young, far too immature to marry at all, especially to marry someone like Margaret with a mother like Kathleen. I should have been strong enough to say no. I should have been a lot of things I wasn’t. Isn’t it sad when you realise that too late?”

  Tim looked at Anya’s hand and turned it over. He raised the palm to his lips and kissed it. Anya did not resist.

  “You were brilliant at the wedding, all my friends asked who you were and how I knew you and why wasn’t I marrying you, even my mother. The moment I stepped out of the church, no it was earlier than that, the moment I woke up that morning, I knew I shouldn’t go through with it. I knew, and I think Margaret did too, that the marriage was going to be a disaster.”

  “But you did go through with it.”

  “I shouldn’t have but I did, I felt that I had no choice. There were so many reasons I had to go ahead with it, half the town was coming to the bloody wedding, mother would never have been able to face Kathleen, I would never have been able to face anyone. None of them seem like good reasons now but then? What choice did I have?”

  “None I suppose, though if you really felt it was wrong…”

  “I did. But I also knew I couldn’t do anything about it against the combined force of my mother, Kathleen and Margaret. It was just all too much.”

  “I seem to remember you waited at least until the middle of the wedding reception before breaking your marriage vows.”

  “Anya that was not your fault. It was mine completely. I wanted you more than you can imagine I wanted you to be with me and I suspected you’d have a bet with Geoff. I wanted you to win. Was I a bet?”

  “You were. I think that reception earned me more than a thousand pounds.” Money had seemed so easily come by and so easily spent those days. She felt the contrast with her current situation sharply.

  “Did you ever let me screw you other than for a bet?”

  Anya wondered at the question. Did he want her to answer yes or no? Which would be the less hurtful response? She answered simply and truthfully. “Those three days in January in that hotel in Covent Garden.” She saw the smile in his eyes and felt the pressure of his hand on hers.

  “It seemed so strange that you felt you had to escape from Geoff, you always seemed so happy with him.”

  “Appearances can be deceptive.” She wasn’t sure he had heard her.

  “I hated seeing you with him. It was so unfair. I thought at first that we had both married the wrong people, that you should have married me. But then I realised you and Geoff were happy, the glorious Anya happy with bo
ring old Geoff! But you were.”

  “We were, at the beginning anyway. That first year was great. But then there was Kathleen.”

  “If you’d married me you wouldn’t have had that cow of a mother-in-law on your back all the time. My mother always liked you, she stood up for you and had real rows with Kathleen about you.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “How could you? Why would you?”

  “I was happy with Geoff, we loved each other whatever it may have looked like from the outside. It was only later when Kathleen and Margaret began to put all that pressure on him that it all began to go wrong.”

  “I know. You were so happy with Geoff but I knew I never would be with Margaret. You know she tricked me into having the family so young?”

  “I did wonder that Christmas. You weren’t exactly acting the overjoyed expectant father.”

  “We’d agreed to wait for a couple of years and I’d hoped to be out of the marriage before children were involved, I could have left Margaret at the drop of a hat, but not children. Once Matt and Maggie came along I just had to sit back and watch you and Geoff being happy.”

  A suspicion began to form in Anya’s mind. She looked at Tim to see whether there was guilt written on his face before saying anything.

  “It was the only thing I could do.”

  “What was?”

  “I had to split you up.”

  “You what?”

  “I couldn’t face seeing you with Geoff for what might have been a lifetime when I was tied to Margaret. She would never have divorced me unless really forced into a corner, Kathleen would never have stood for it. And there were 18 years or more until the children grew up. So you and Geoff had to be split apart. With Geoff married to Fiona he would be as miserable as I was, I wouldn’t have to stare at happiness all the time.”

  Anya tried to comprehend the enormity of Tim’s confession.

  “So if you couldn’t have me you were damned if Geoff would?”

  “If I couldn’t be happy you weren’t going to be either, especially where I would be seeing you all the time. It wasn’t that I wanted you to be unhappy, just that you should be happy out of my sight.”

  It was some time before Anya could bring herself to say anything. She eventually slowly withdrew her hand from under his. “What an incredibly awful thing to do.”

  “Probably.”

  “No probably about it.”

  “You made it easy though. Once you realised Geoff loved you and would even stand up against his mother for you, the challenge went. Your marriage would have ground to a halt of its own accord one day, I just brought that day forward.”

  Anya wondered if there was a grain of truth in what Tim said. Perhaps she and Geoff would have fallen out of love with each other when they were in a world of routine.

  “You wore the chips on your shoulder like badges of honour. Do you realise how much time you spent bickering with Kathleen in those early days when we were all together on Sundays? You found fault in everything, had nasty little asides to Geoff which we could all hear, you put him in an impossible position. Geoff hated being torn between the wife he loved and his mother. It was so easy to suggest he left you at home. You really weren’t very attractive at that time. I almost stopped loving you.”

  “Love?”

  “Oh yes, Anya darling, I have always loved you.”

  She let the phrase hang in the air. The sound of the tyres on the concrete road surface seemed hypnotic as she gathered her thoughts.

  “Let me make sure I understand you correctly. You wanted me and Geoff to split up. You drove wedges between us including excluding me from the family yet why, when I wanted to divorce Geoff, wouldn’t you help me?”

  “Wedges were easily driven Anya. I may have sown seeds of doubt in Geoff’s mind but they would not have taken root if he had not, somewhere at the back of his mind, realised that you would leave one day.”

  “That doesn’t answer why you wouldn’t help me.”

  “I couldn’t. I couldn’t be seen to have anything to do with you. Since I was stuck with Margaret all I wanted to be was what the Golf Club wanted me to be, and the party. I was probably as arrogant and self-centred as you were.”

  She could not let that pass without interrupting. “You had no idea how lonely I was, how much I hated you, and Kathleen, everyone and everything.” She was surprised at how all those feelings of frustration still hurt. “It’s over 25 years ago and it still hurts that you all despised me, you all wanted rid of me. I was the ‘Highly Unsuitable Girl’. I was always going to be a misfit, I would always be on the outside and it still hurts like hell.” She realised she had tears in her eyes and wiped them away quickly. “I’m tired what with the journey, the delays, now all this reminiscing. Don’t make anything of it.”

  While she made a big thing of finding her handbag and opening it, searching for a handkerchief and wiping the minute amounts of moisture from her eyes he spoke, as if to himself.

  “I could never show you how much I loved you.”

  Anya rummaged in her handbag again. She needed time to think. All this history was leading somewhere, but she didn’t know where.

  “Anya. I was a shit then. Not even I would have liked me.”

  “What’s changed? We’re going through our lives, pulling them apart, trying to identify motives and make excuses for our actions when we were completely different people. What is that quote? The past is a foreign country they do things differently there.

  “L P Hartley, The Go-Between I think you’ll find.”

  “Very erudite.”

  “Life has changed us Anya. I know you think I’m still the same Tim that you screwed at the Golf Club Ball but I’m not. And you’re not the same person that went there with the sole aim of humiliating me.”

  “I didn’t see it like that. Not really.”

  “Yes you did. Why else would you seduce Matt and me?”

  “I seduced no one, you both wanted it without any persuasion on my part.”

  “You were too elegant, too beautiful, too available.”

  “I hated all of you that night. I hated what you all stood for, all that privilege, everyone being someone just because they were born to it rather than because they were good enough. Matthew’s friends were swanning through life without a care, worrying only about who would be captain of the golf club or acceptable to the local committee for this that or the other. You, they, and your son, were all shits from another world.”

  “Were we really that bad? Are we?”

  “Not as people. Not all of you. I just hated the way of life, the assumption that you were all better than everyone else. Geoff wasn’t like that when I first met him but then, when we moved south, he absorbed it, he became what his mother had always wanted him to be. He fitted back into that life of privilege and money as if he’d never had those four years in Liverpool. He eased into his mother’s view of what his life should be. It wasn’t mine.”

  “So all this was about class?” Tim seemed genuinely perplexed.

  “I suppose it is, was. If not about class what was it about? I had an attitude to life none of you could possibly understand because of who your parents were, and where and how you had been brought up. I may have had a good degree and been better educated than most of you but, as they say ‘you can take the girl out of the terraced house but you can’t take the terraced house out of the girl.”

  “No one ever said that.” Tim almost laughed.

  “It’s true though, you all saw me as Geoff’s bit of rough. None of you could understand where I came from, what I had gone through. None of you wanted to know anything about who I really was.”

  “Now that’s not fair. No one ever knows what other people go through even if they’re from the same family or background.”

  Anya realised here was yet another example of her self-obsession. She spoke slowly and sadly. “I was probably so tied up with myself I never tried.”

  “We’re di
fferent people, both of us, now.” Tim reached down and took Anya’s hand again. “Don’t be so hard on yourself Anya.”

  Anya decided to change the subject away from herself and her shortcomings, it had been an uncomfortable few minutes. “In all these times you were Geoffrey’s friend what did you talk about? And don’t say ‘man things’.”

  “He talked about his girlfriends and cricket and sailing, about his worries about exams but mainly about his Dad. He loved to talk about Geoff. I remember he went through a phase of wanting to talk about Geoff and Fiona. He needed reassurance that his mother and father had, at some time, loved each other. I suppose they were all the things he felt he couldn’t ask you.”

  “I suppose I should thank you. No, that’s horrid. I do thank you. You’re absolutely right. I couldn’t have helped him with those things.”

  “We didn’t speak all the time, and I’d always wait for him to contact me. I knew enough to know you were doing just fine.”

  “But you never helped me get custody. You didn’t help when I was fighting the courts. You could have done but you didn’t.”

  “I didn’t because if I had done and it had all gone wrong you would have blamed me and I couldn’t risk that.”

  “So you did nothing.”

  “You did it on your own.”

  “Only with a lot of help from David. But when I was respectable, you didn’t talk to me, you more or less ignored me for years.”

  “I didn’t think it was a good idea to get involved.”

  “You never came near us. Those years weren’t easy but you never offered help. You hardly even talked to me. How could you be like that if you loved me?”

  “I was always there for Geoffrey and for you, and the others, if you’d ever really needed it.”

  “How?”

  Her aggression and disbelief stung him into an admission he had promised himself he would not make.

  “Have you wondered how easily some of your properties sold? Oh yes. I know every single one of them has gone, the last one last September I seem to remember, very few properties sold that month.”