How to Find Your (First) Husband

by Rosie Blake

  Darren forwarded the disc, an hour, two, my eyes scanned the screen, people came in, sped up, grabbed things from shelves, moved forward, hands going everywhere, slapping money on the counter and looking like a Benny Hill

  sketch.

  ‘Wait, stop, HALT!’ I shouted when the first two failed. I believe HALT had the right amount of authority as Darren instantly reached to pause it.

  ‘Rewind that bit,’ I said, feeling my cheeks get hot (brought on no doubt by the use of ‘Halt’). ‘Um…please.’

  The man emerged, backwards, turned to the counter, put the items back and left again.

  ‘Play, play,’ I urged.

  The scene slowed down and in walked the man of my description, stooping a little in the doorway (tallish), the grey screen unable to show his hair colour or eye colour.

  ‘That’s him,’ came the voice on my left. Maureen was peering through her glasses, nose tilted in the air as she followed his movements.

  I turned to her. ‘So do you recognise him?’ I asked.

  She shuffled towards the screen; Darren had frozen it in place so Andrew stood, hand held out, unseeing ahead. She narrowed her eyes, sucked in her breath and finally said, ‘No.’

  All the air whooshed out of my lungs and I dropped my head. ‘Oh.’

  ‘What’s he buying?’ she asked. ‘That could be your clue, my love.’

  I leaned forward. ‘Newspaper, Yorkie, lottery ticket.’

  ‘Yorkie’s a chocolate bar for men,’ she nodded reassuringly.

  ‘But I know he’s a man, it doesn’t tell me anything.’

  ‘Newspaper suggests he’s the educated sort,’ she continued.

  So this manly, educated, tall man was Andrew – but how was I meant to find him?

  Darren was quiet by my side, and then he put a hand on my shoulder, ‘I think he was in the pub that day,’ he said.

  I spun around. ‘Really?’

  ‘I think so.’ He nodded. ‘He ate there, caused a fuss over a steak and kidney pie from what I remember.’

  ‘Well I’m sure he would have had good reason,’ I said, bristling in defence of him already.

  ‘What are you saying about our pies?’

  ‘Now, now, you two, don’t lose focus,’ Maureen said.

  ‘Yes, sorry,’ I said, keen not to lose my one lead. I looked at him. ‘Do you think. Well, could we see if anyone remembers anything?’ I asked.

  ‘We’ll go and see Paul.’

  *

  This event was deemed so important by Maureen that she insisted on locking up the post office and marching over to the pub with us. So we followed, like cygnets after the mama duck, as she led us over the green and into the back entrance of the pub. The kitchen windows were steamed up and there was a sound of metal clanging and water bubbling. An enormous man, ample rolls of flesh rippling down him, his chin sticking out like a small ping-pong ball jutting out of his bearded face, emerged from a cloud of steam. He was wearing a similar striped apron and had a perplexed expression on his face – no doubt due to the sudden invasion of his kitchen by two eager women and his chef.

  ‘Paul, do you remember last week that gentleman who had a problem with the steak and kidney pie?’

  Paul’s eyes narrowed, perhaps assuming me to be from the Council of Pie Complaints board, and he was slow to respond. ‘P’rhaps.’ The one word was drawn out in a thick West Country accent.

  ‘You do remember!’ I jumped up and down like a child on Christmas morning.

  ‘Right,’ Darren said. ‘Well this is…’ He turned to me.

  ‘Isobel Graves,’ I dived in, adding my surname in case that would help give me more gravitas.

  ‘Isobel Graves and she wants to track him down. I thought we might have his details around. Didn’t he stay the night?’

  Oh, I thought, head dropping a fraction, if he stayed the night he couldn’t be local. I had been picturing him in the kitchen of one of the cottages that lined the green, puffing over an Aga as he put together his dinner for one, me bursting in, him startled (until he saw who it was), inviting me to stay, drawing across a gingham curtain, pouring a wine…This would not be possible if he had stayed the night.

  ‘He did not, but he did write me an email. First one we had in over four months too.’

  ‘An email!’ I gushed like he had just unveiled some incredible new invention.

  ‘Yar.’

  I felt Maureen bristle with excitement beside me, muttering, ‘Oh my,’ under her breath.

  ‘Could you, if it’s not much trouble, could you show me?’ I asked, pleading eyes trained on him.

  Perhaps sensing the desperation, he sighed and walked through a door to a side room. ‘Wai’ there.’

  I waited, grimacing at Darren and Maureen as the second hand on the kitchen clock dragged round, each tick loud, despite the bustle of the kitchen.

  Paul emerged from the office holding a sheet of paper in his hand. ‘Printed it, didn’t I.’

  I sucked in all my breath as Paul came round to show me it. He was sneering at the email, distaste hardening his features.

  To whom it may concern,

  I recently ate the ‘Award-Winning’ Steak and Kidney Pie in your establishment. It was advertised in the menu as containing the finest cuts of British beef but, as I pointed out to your barman, my cuts were mostly fatty gristle. I would like to know which prize

  you entered where…

  ‘Pompous…’

  I wasn’t tuning into the mutterings around me. I was too busy looking at the bottom of the sheet, underneath where Andrew had signed off. At the email signature where it said in italics: ‘Andrew Parker, teacher of Geography, Somerset House’.

  Squee.

  Got him.

  Dear diary,

  Mum dressed me us up as a pirate today and said that we were going to the beach to build a castle and also find treasure with our spades. It was fun because she invited friends from school too and I played with them all but I most liked playing with them in this order:

  1.Andrew because he kept being a parrot and it made us all laugh and he gave me his chocolate gold.

  2.Lyndon because he let me wear his eye patch.

  3.Annie because she helped me make the moat really good.

  4.Jenny

  At the bottom is Jenny but she was still quite fun.

  I x

  Chapter 10

  Helford

  I was off to see Moregran. It had been nearly two years and aside from the regular postcards postmarked ‘Helford’, there had been no other contact. Moregran was so named because of me. On meeting a second ‘Gran’ in a two-week period, I had turned to Mum and asked, ‘More Gran?’ and the name had stuck. Moregran lived in a bungalow in a tiny road in Helford, a stream flowing past the bottom of her garden. She owned a shocking collection of garden ornaments so ugly that her neighbours had been forced to plant very tall hedges to block them out. There was the usual array of sleeping cats and frogs on lily pads, but one of my favourites was a large rat seeming to emerge out of the earth, his body cut off and his little rat hands pressed to the ground. He had featured in many a nightmare of 1993.

  She was sitting, knitting furiously, by the window in the front room as I turned into the narrow driveway. The sound of the gravel made her look up and her face broke into the most melting smile. Switching the ignition off, I couldn’t wait to get out and give her a massive hug. I had missed her – her easy humour, kind words and non-judgemental ways. Never once had she told me to do anything, scolded me if she felt I was in the wrong, she just seemed keen to hear all about the goings-on in my life. She also made the world’s greatest oatmeal and raisin cookies and, as I walked up the path and she opened the door to me, the familiar smell fresh from the oven hit my nostrils.

  ‘Moregran,’ I said, giving her a hug. She
was a little shorter than me and her bobbed grey hair smelled of rosewater and Earl Grey tea.

  ‘I’ve put the kettle on,’ she said as way of greeting, ‘and I thought you might like to stretch your legs.’

  ‘Perfect,’ I said, not bothering to take off my jacket but following her through to the kitchen, glancing briefly into the living room.

  Moregran had taken her interest in ornaments to another extreme in there and over the fireplace there was an entire collection of porcelain ducklings following their mother and a family of strangely blue glass owls on a sideboard.

  ‘I’ll pop it in flasks. You still like your tea sweet, don’t you?’ she asked, heaped spoonful hovering.

  I nodded and watched her stir it in, closing up the flask and handing it to me.

  ‘Cookies are in the silver foil,’ she said, patting what I now saw was a bumbag around her waist.

  ‘Where did you get that?’ I asked, pointing at it and realis­ing I hadn’t seen one since 1988.

  ‘The fanny pack?’

  If I had sipped the tea, I would have spat it.

  ‘The, er, bumbag.’

  ‘The Internet, an American company. I needed something to keep my mincemeat cake in,’ she said matter of factly.

  ‘Who doesn’t,’ I agreed, following her out of the kitchen giggling.

  ‘Get on,’ she smiled, rolling her eyes.

  We walked along the footpath at the back of her house and wound our way around the village, over the bridge, a sharp intake of breath on seeing the still blue of the Helford River beyond, boats idle in the water, their reflections quivering in the ripples. Turned a corner and dove into the wild crop of trees, skirted our way down past hedges filled with stinging nettles, sporadic clusters of tiny orange flowers and ivy that clambered over tree trunks, suffocating branches. A shady, winding path led down to a view over Frenchman’s Creek. We both stopped to stare at it as Moregran summed it up, ‘It never gets old, this view.’

  Finding a bench in memory of ‘Jack who loved to sit by the creek next to Mary’ surrounded by long grass quivering in a light breeze, we sat side by side watching a kite floating on the breeze scanning the trees ahead, a man hauling a canoe to the edge of the muddy water and I felt a calm wash over me as I drank the sweet tea and smelled damp earth and garlic. Moregran hadn’t fallen for my first explanation of my unexpected appearance in the West Country and was probing, ready to unearth the big secret. ‘Yes, you missed us all but come on, Isobel, we know that isn’t it. What’s happened? Is everything alright?’

  And rather than lay open all my problems, the feeling that things were going nowhere – the hopeless jobs, the lack of an agent, the fact my career was at a standstill – I found myself telling her about Andrew, about seeing him on the screen in front of me and feeling that I had to see what had happened to him, had to know.

  ‘It felt like fate,’ I added as an after-thought. ‘I’d always wondered and then, bam, he was there in front of me and I realised I didn’t want to always wonder any more. I have to try.’

  I expected laughter, some light mocking perhaps. Now that I said it, it did sound so silly; absurd to go streaking over the planet on a whim because you always thought you’d live a certain way. Moregran was quiet for a moment, her flask at her side. ‘I do understand,’ she said, looking out at the sea. Then she shifted to look at me. ‘I wish I’d been as brave.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’d always thought Patrick Thomas was a lovely man and he’d asked me to dance before the war and your grandfather and all of that time,’ she said with a quick flick of her wrist. ‘But after, when I was alone and just with your mother, he’d written to me. Asked whether I would see him. Me being a fool I didn’t do anything about it, I was still so tied up in it all: your mum’s dad dying and all the misery of life then. Then I heard he’d moved away. Scotland. And I never did anything. But I thought of him, I wondered.’

  By the end of this outburst I could feel my eyes were wide in my head; I’d never heard anything about this Patrick or the idea that Moregran had ever lived her life with any regrets. So stupidly selfish of me, of course; she’d lived in Helford all her life, was widowed at twenty-three and raised Mum on her own. Of course she would have had men after her; she was a lovely, warm woman. I’d seen photographs of her when she was younger; she’d had the tiniest waist I’d ever seen and incredibly glossy hair that hung

  in waves.

  I imagined Patrick writing her a letter, hoping to hear from her, wondering and worrying about her, this girl he’d asked to dance as a young man.

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘I never even told your mother, darling heart, so how could you?’

  ‘Do you still wonder?’ I asked her.

  She smoothed her skirt down, a tiny hole from a moth ruining the line of the fabric. ‘Yes sometimes, fleetingly. He had a wonderfully infectious laugh, gentle and slow, building like a train.’

  ‘Do you know what happened to him?’

  ‘No, no, it’s a long time ago now, isn’t it?’

  We sat a while longer, watching for nothing and enjoying each other’s company. Wrapping my cardigan around myself, I felt better for telling someone; it was typical of Moregran to be supportive.

  ‘I think it’s wonderful,’ she said, getting slowly to her feet, one hand on her side. ‘Will you let me know how you get on?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Because even if he’s not right and, darling, he probably isn’t, you’ve tried, you’ve done something.’

  I went to interrupt but realised she was right; this wasn’t simply about finding Andrew. I knew that; it was more than that, it was making a change, following a new path. I needed to stage an intervention and this seemed like the first time in a long time that I wasn’t just being swept along by my life. I was actively making decisions, odd ones at times perhaps, but still I was being proactive.

  ‘You’re right,’ I said, standing up.

  ‘Let’s a have a pasty and shake on it,’ she said, heading back and in the direction of the pub.

  Seeing Moregran had given me the courage to tell Mum what I was really doing home and that I thought I had tracked Andrew down. She had been in the middle of practising ‘Edelweiss’ on her new electronic flute.

  She paused, tapping the flute to her mouth. ‘There was never a twenty per cent sale at Monsoon this week, was there?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You seemed so happy the other day,’ she pointed out. ‘And I wondered then, but I just thought you were really, really into shopping now.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, feeling a flood of guilt. ‘No, I had picked up on a lead,’ I said, sounding like I was a character in a detective novel. ‘And you came in when I got the news. I’m sorry.’

  ‘You lied,’ she said, looking at me, pulling her green shawl about her.

  I squirmed in front of her, looking at my toes. ‘I did,’ I confirmed.

  ‘Oh well, no matter,’ she trilled. ‘The truth all sounds rather marvellous. You will of course need to look your absolute best then, darling. Hairdresser, tomorrow, you and me.’

  Starting to practise once more, her eyes twinkled at me in delight.

  Dear diary,

  H’l stxhmf to write in code. That said ‘I’m trying’ but it is tiring as I forget the order of the letters in the alphabet sometimes but because I am going to be a spy like Pussy in James Bond I have to otzbshbd. That said practice. Obviously when I write in the real code I won’t write down what word it is as that would be stupid and probably get me killed. I like spies because they kick boys down in the straw when they are mean and boys are stupid apart from Andrew who is my best friend today.

  We have written things in code together and he says this is the special way we can talk. He tells me secrets like how he is sad sometimes that his dad doesn’t liv
e with them any more and I tell him about things too at home, about Mum sometimes making me embarrassed when she wears odd things to pick me up in, and he says we will always have our special way of talking.

  I x

  Chapter 11

  ‘Is that a good temperature for you?’ Tanya asked.

  ‘Hmm, yes,’ I mumbled, distracted by her rubbing at my head in a circular motion. God, I loved a head massage in a hairdresser and Tanya was amazing at them. She scratched behind my ears. Oh, Tanya, come and live with me. I had to bite

  my tongue and focus on the rank swirled ceiling tiles so as not to start moaning and thrashing about in the leather chair.

  We were on a ‘girls’ day out’, which basically involved: hairdresser, random loitering in jewellery shops and some kind of patisserie visit. Mum was currently trussed up in foils under a heater that emitted terrifying beeps, occasionally summoning one of the colourists to run from the back as if her hair might suddenly set on fire.

  It had been a couple of days ago now that I had returned from Moregran’s and sat Mum down to explain to her what I had really been doing in Cornwall. On hearing news of the email in the pub, she had moved into a whirlwind of activity.

  ‘The Internet,’ she explained, beckoning me into ‘her office’ (aka the attic), ‘is basically magic.’

  She fired up a state-of-the-art computer that rested under the wooden eaves, next to a photograph of Dad, her and I on the beach looking windswept and happy. ‘I am totes on LinkedIn,’ she said, tapping his name into the search engine. ‘Everyone is; we’ll easily find him now.’

  ‘Totes, Mum?’

  ‘It means totally,’ she explained. ‘But apparently it’s the new way of saying it. I like it.’

  ‘You totes do,’ I said, grinning at her.

  ‘Be careful or I shall totes not make you any food.’

  ‘I apologise sincerely,’ I said, hand on my heart, earning myself a smile and the certainty that lasagne would be mine.

  ‘Okay,’ she announced. ‘No Andrew Parker from Somerset House on LinkedIn, but we should just Google him, darling. Google, Google images,’ she cried, jabbing at the keys.