Rosie Meadows Regrets...
Page 3
‘Harry,’ I shouted, ‘if you stay here you’ll freeze to death!’ My eyes sparkled briefly in their tired old sockets at this, but I bade them dim. No, no. Only in your dreams, Rosie. On he snored.
‘Right!’ I screeched importantly. ‘That’s it !’
I scrambled out of the car and ran round to Harry’s side. I flung open his door with a flourish. It was time for the Last Resort, a method thus far used only on a handful of occasions due to its inherent danger, but tonight was going to be one of them. I ran back to my side, got up on to my seat on all fours like a dog and began pushing Harry towards his open door. It was like moving a mountain. I put my shoulder against his and shoved for all I was worth, swearing and cursing, puffing and panting, when into my line of vision came an elderly man and his dog. They came along the pavement, stopped, and watched with interest, taking a moment out of their late-night constitutional to witness this piece of street theatre. I ignored them and pushed on regardless.
‘He’s going to fall on the pavement and crack his head open,’ the man observed at length.
‘That’s the idea,’ I muttered through clenched teeth.
There was a pause.
‘Ah.’ He nodded. Reassured, he moved on up the street.
Interesting exchange that, I thought, panting away. Obviously it was all right for me to inflict wilful bodily harm on my husband, it was accidental bodily harm that had bothered him. Finally, I gave one last superhuman push and Harry began to roll, and roll, and then j-u-s-t at the last minute as he was about to hit the pavement, he stuck his leg out and saved himself. Yes, well, he always did, didn’t he? I sat panting, marvelling as he swung the other leg round and somehow stumbled to his feet, like a dazed elephant coming round from a drugged dart. Extraordinary, I thought, that inherent instinct for survival. It seemed that Harry, like the poor, would always be with us.
As he started to weave his way precariously up the garden path to the front door, I locked the car and quickly nipped past him, beating him to it. It was important at this juncture to stop him rapping on the knocker and hollering ‘What-shall-we-do-with-the-drunken-sailor?’ through the letter box, as was his wont.
‘Well done,’ he muttered as I opened the door and hustled him through. ‘Well done, old thing.’ Oh yes, I forgot to mention that. When I married Harry, I’d been lucky enough to lose my Christian name as well as my surname. I was no longer Rosie Cavendish, but Old Thing Meadows.
As I breathlessly steered him through to the sitting room, Alison, our baby-sitter, was already getting up from her chair, tucking her magazine in her bag and turning off the television.
‘Had a good evening?’ she asked shyly.
‘Lovely, thanks, Alison, how about you? Has Ivo been all right, everything okay?’
‘Oh yes, he’s been an absolute angel as usual. He woke up at about ten o’clock so I gave him a drink and he went straight back down again. I hope that was all right?’
This was quite a long sentence for Alison and she went a bit pink. She was a sweet, shy girl of about seventeen from across the road who adored children, particularly Ivo.
I smiled. ‘Of course, that’s exactly what I would have done. Well done.’ I had some money ready in my hand and I quickly slipped it into hers. ‘Sorry we were a bit late, by the way.’
‘Oh no, you weren’t really – oh! No, that’s far too much, Rosie.’ She looked at the notes in her hand.
‘No, please, take it.’
Alison was the eldest of five children and money was tight across the road. I knew that this was her way of getting a few nice clothes; in fact I knew for certain that her shiny black sixties-style mac which she’d proudly shown me when she’d arrived had been bought with her baby-sitting money.
‘Thanks.’ She beamed. ‘I can get that miniskirt from Top Shop now.’
‘Oh good,’ I rejoined enthusiastically, and as I watched her glow with pleasure it occurred to me that perhaps that was what was missing from my life. A miniskirt from Top Shop.
‘Well, I’ll be off then,’ she said. ‘’Night, Rosie. Goodnight, um, Mr Meadows.’ She looked nervously at Harry. She never knew quite what to call him or what to say to him. He stood swaying in the sitting-room doorway, blocking her path to the hall. She edged towards him but he didn’t move aside to let her through, instead he looked her up and down, his eyes running blatantly and rather mockingly over her youthful figure in her cropped Lycra top.
‘Ah, you’re off then, are you, um –’
‘Alison,’ I put in quickly. He never remembered her name and she’d been our baby-sitter for over a year now.
‘Ah, yes, Alison. Son and heir been behaving himself?’
‘Perfectly,’ she said, trying to edge past him.
‘Good, good.’ He shut his eyes and swayed dangerously. Oh God. He wasn’t just pissed, he was catastrophically drunk.
‘’Scuse me a minute,’ he muttered. ‘Must have a slash.’
He turned and stumbled from the room, but instead of turning right to the loo, he turned left, and opened the cupboard where we keep the coats. Without turning on the light and before I could open my mouth to speak, he’d unzipped his flies and started peeing. Noisily. At length. Against the coats. As I stood there frozen with horror, I heard the unmistakable sound of water on plastic, and I just knew. I knew because I’d hung it there not a few hours ago. He was peeing all over Alison’s shiny new mac.
Alison and I stood shoulder to shoulder, waiting, aghast, until the tinkling torrent subsided. There was a pause. Then a muffled, and slightly confused ‘Bugger’.
A moment later, he staggered out.
‘I say, I’m awfully sorry, Abigail old thing, I appear to have pissed in your coat pocket.’
It was at that moment that I knew for certain. I could no longer live with this man, he simply had to go.
Chapter Two
In case you think I’m the sort of girl who’d divorce her husband on the strength of a pissed indiscretion after a party, I’d like to say I’m not. It was simply the straw that broke the camel’s back and one way and another my back was getting pretty humpy. It wasn’t as if we were in uncharted waters either, oh no, I’d been here before. Leaving Harry was nothing new. I’d packed twice, got to the end of the road twice, I’d even – after he’d prodded me in the middle of the night and mumbled, ‘Come on, pig, off to market,’ got as far as my parents’ house once, but never Right Away. Never For Good. It was with a certain amount of trepidation, therefore, that I opened my eyes the following morning and tested my resolve. I explored it fairly tentatively at first, expecting it to cave in under the slightest pressure, but to my surprise it held firm, even after seven hours’ sleep. In fact it came to me with such startling clarity that this was the day that I, Rosie Meadows, was destined to leave her husband, that I bounced out of bed with an alacrity I hadn’t shown in years.
I tiptoed over to my dressing-table mirror and gazed at my reflection, hooking my straight blond hair back behind my ears. Did I look different? Did I look determined, decisive, as if I meant business? A pair of troubled green eyes stared anxiously back at me. Well, no, probably not, but the important thing was, I did mean it. This time I was certain. This time I was off.
I crept around the bedroom, pulling on jeans and a jumper, being careful not to wake Harry, then stole from the room, shutting the door gently behind me.
‘Mu-mmy … Mu-mmy … Mu-mmy …’
The steady chant that had originally woken me was getting louder now, and as I hastened across the landing I felt like a footballer trotting out from the tunnel to the roar of his fans on the terraces. ‘Mu-MMY!’ it crescendoed as I opened his door.
‘Iv-O!’ I responded enthusiastically as I reached into his cot, picking him up for our first clinch of the day. But not too clinchy, I decided hastily, dropping to my knees and wrestling him to the floor, he was always pretty pongy first thing. I struggled with a stinking nappy, a wriggling child, and a hermetically sealed box of ba
by wipes – some manufacturer’s joke – then snapping him into a clean nappy – I’d yet to summon up the courage to put him into pants – I hurried him into his clothes. Ivo’s big blue eyes gazed at me in amazement. Pyjamas were usually perfectly acceptable at the breakfast table.
‘Sorry, darling,’ I muttered, thrusting his legs into trousers and hoisting him on to my hip, ‘got to get out of here this morning. Got to get a wiggle on, as they say.’
We hurried downstairs and Ivo watched from his high chair as I whizzed around the kitchen, snapping machines on as I went. Toaster, kettle, microwave and washing machine whirred into action as I buttered toast, warmed milk, washed clothes and threw coffee down my neck. I badly wanted to go and break the news to Alice and I was keen to leave before Harry had a chance to intercept me. I didn’t particularly want him to spot the marital meltdown message that I felt sure was written all over my face.
But no such luck. Ten minutes later, just as I was spooning the last of the Ready Brek into Ivo’s mouth with one hand and unloading the dishwasher with the other, the doorway suddenly filled up with stripy blue pyjama. Harry yawned, stretched, and scratched his head like a great bear.
‘Oooh, dear me. Feel a bit liverish this morning.’ He patted his tummy tentatively. This was Harry’s usual euphemism for a stonking great hangover. He looked me up and down and frowned. ‘You’re dressed early.’
‘Am I?’ I said guiltily. ‘Oh well, I just thought – you know, it’s such a lovely morning, I thought I’d take Ivo to the park.’
He gave an incredulous grunt and lowered himself slowly down at the kitchen table. There he sat, waiting to be served. I made a mug of coffee and set it in front of him.
‘Nasty feeling I’m in disgrace,’ he muttered as he stirred it. ‘Seem to remember I was out of order last night.’
‘No more than usual,’ I said lightly.
‘Tell the girl I’m sorry, would you? Spastic colon.’ For a moment I thought he was insulting Alison again but then he went on, ‘Doctor says it’s quite common in chaps of my age. You know, with my levels of stress.’
Stress! I boggled quietly into the washing-up.
‘Says it’s all linked up with my irritable bowel.’
‘Ah, right.’ Personally I couldn’t see what his irritable bowel had to do with peeing in the coat cupboard, but I let it pass. ‘You should get that seen to then,’ I said, humouring him. ‘Go and see a specialist. I seem to remember I booked an appointment for you once, someone Tom recommended in Harley Street. Did you ever go?’
‘Certainly not,’ he growled. ‘Don’t want some fellow peering up my arse.’
‘It was a woman actually.’
‘Christ!’ Harry spat his coffee across the table. ‘Jesus, the lengths some women will go to to get their hands on a fellow!’
I considered this, elbows deep in suds. ‘You mean, you think she spent five years at medical school purely in the hope that she might one day peep up the male backside?’
‘Don’t joke, Rosie,’ he growled. ‘Believe me, there are some desperate women out there.’
I looked round at his glowering form hunched over his coffee in his M&S extra large pyjamas, his fair hair flopping over his forehead. ‘Oh, I don’t doubt it, Harry, and you’re right, it’s no joke. It’s not safe for a man like you to walk the streets these days with so many predatory women lurking about. I’m amazed you even venture out of the house.’
Harry gave me a quick, suspicious look. ‘What’s up with you this morning anyway?’ he said sharply. ‘You’re being very pert. Very … puckish.’
‘Am I? Sorry.’ I instantly dropped the puckishness and reverted to doormat mode, hiding my guilty face in the sink and scrubbing a pan vigorously. God, I mustn’t get too carried away here, mustn’t get overconfident. The last thing I wanted was for Harry to suspect anything. There was no point in muddying the waters with rows and recriminations when what was called for was a swift, clean break. Happily, Ivo caused a diversion.
‘He’s dribbling again,’ Harry said suddenly. ‘Look, Rosie, it’s disgusting, it’s all over his chin. For God’s sake do something!’
I took a cloth from the sink and wiped Ivo’s face as Harry sat there, mute with horror. I lifted Ivo out of the high chair. ‘It’s just a bit of milk,’ I muttered. ‘For heaven’s sake, Harry.’
When Ivo was born, Harry had been delighted. A son, an heir to the Harry Meadows throne, the Meryton Road semi-detached dynasty – what more could a man want? He’d been euphoric with joy, toasting his genes, his manhood, his marvellous equipment, congratulating himself – even congratulating me, once – but when the grim reality of bringing up a child had dawned, he’d taken a very dim view of the whole thing. Harry’s idea of parenthood was to have a clean, bathed child with neatly parted hair in scaled down gentleman’s pyjamas presented to him at six o’clock in the evening to dandle on his knee for a few minutes. He might even warble, ‘This is the way the ladies go, nimble, nimble, nimble,’ but when the first signs of up-chuck appeared at ‘gallop-a-gee, gallop-a-gee’, he’d hand him straight back to his mother.
The irony was, though, that Harry’s relationship with Ivo had up to now been my stumbling block to throwing in the towel and rejoining the free world. Call me old-fashioned but I’d firmly believed a boy needed a father and, good, bad, or indifferent, preferably his own father. And so I’d stayed. But recently a creeping realization had begun to persuade me that surely, if I knew in my heart I’d never stick it out for ever, wasn’t it better to go now? Before Ivo knew too much about it? Before he was six, ten, fourteen, when it would be that much harder? I experienced a brief pang of regret as I pushed Ivo’s arms into his corduroy jacket, but I gulped it down, hardening my heart. As I hoisted him on to my hip, I turned a bright smile on my husband.
‘We’ll be off then,’ I said, hopefully not too portentously.
‘Where are you going?’ he mumbled through the propped up Telegraph.
‘Oh, just round to Alice’s. Are you going to do some work today?’
‘Don’t I always?’
‘Yes, of course,’ I murmured, although this was debatable.
Doing ‘some work’ in Harry’s case generally meant having a long, leisurely breakfast, changing his clothes – three or four times sometimes, our Harry was very sartorial – before slowly making his way to the top of the house where, as he walked through the study door, he suddenly became – abracadabra – a property developer. Now since Harry owned precisely two properties, one of which we lived in and one of which he rented out, you can imagine this was stressful stuff. Little wonder this pressure cooker of a job was playing fast and loose with his bowels. Little wonder he had to relieve the tension by making a series of morning phone calls to his friends – most of whom were called things like Bunky, Munky and Spunky and had similarly stressful jobs – and little wonder that finally, when it all got too much for him, he had to lie prostrate on the sofa till lunchtime. The rest of the day would go something like this. At precisely twelve o’clock the telephone would disturb him, he’d stagger to the desk and the conversation would go:
‘Humpty?’
‘Boffy!’
‘How’s tricks?’
‘Surprisingly sluggish actually’ – I loved that ‘surprisingly’ – ‘fancy a spot of lunch?’
‘Why not? See you there at one.’
And off he’d go to his club, always optimistically taking the car, and always returning without it, the worse for wear in a taxi. After a few attempts at getting the key in the door, he’d stagger upstairs again, collapse on the sofa, surface at five, have a bath, drink heavily, eat supper, drink even more heavily, and go to bed. Oh, it was a full-time job.
I glanced at the clock as I made for the front door. ‘See you at the end of play then,’ I called.
I stopped dead in my tracks. See you at the end of play? Had I really said that? God, I was even beginning to talk like him now! I shuddered and hurried off down the path.
‘To the park and then on to Alice’s.’
‘At this hour? People like that don’t get up till about ten o’clock. They’ll still be snoring in their pits, hallucinating into their beanbags.’ He frowned. ‘And anyway, I thought I told you I didn’t like Ivo going on that bike.’
‘He’s got a helmet on, Harry,’ I said patiently as I loaded Ivo into the baby seat of my pushbike. ‘And anyway, he loves it, and we’re only going through the park.’
What Harry actually meant was he didn’t like to see either of us on the bike. Image was all with Harry and this one was far too Bohemian for him. What he’d really like was for me to be dressed from head to toe in navy blue with the odd touch of minimalist white – pants and pearls – and for Ivo to be dressed as a sailor. Then he’d like us both to be strapped firmly into a dark green Range Rover with Ivo clutching a black-market copy of Little Black Sambo. Thankfully, funds at Meryton Road stretched only to the pants for me and the sailor suit for Ivo, which I had actually put him in once for a visit to Alice’s, only to be met by her horrified face at the door as she squealed, ‘Oh God, you’ve got him in a uniform! You’ll be pinning medals on him next. Quick, get him out of it before he becomes anally retentive!’
I gave Harry a winning smile as I pushed a beaming Ivo to the gate. ‘See, he loves it, look.’
‘Hmph,’ he grunted. ‘Well, just be careful. Don’t want to break the son and heir’s neck.’ (Just as I had relinquished my Christian name, so, incidentally, had Ivo.)