by Pippa Wright
‘It’s probably a good idea for you to have a quick look around in case he’s missed anything,’ suggested Auntie Lyd.
‘He won’t have done,’ I said flatly. Martin’s ruthless organization had been one of the things that had attracted me to him. After my chaotic childhood with Mum, his certain knowledge about how things should be done, his sheer reliability, had been as head-turningly attractive to me as a six-pack was to other girls.
‘Let’s have a look anyway,’ she insisted. ‘I’ll check the bedrooms, you take the bathroom.’
She pushed me gently but firmly towards the en suite. As I stepped into the bathroom, the heels of my boots ringing on the hard tiled floor, I heard Auntie Lyd slide open the mirrored doors of the built-in wardrobe.
I looked around the room. There was nothing in here of mine. Nothing at all. I hadn’t expected there to be: Martin wasn’t dishonest;of course he’d return everything that belonged to me. But there were some things here that didn’t look like they belonged to Martin either. A bottle of floral-scented pink shower gel, and one of Herbal Essences shampoo. I turned my head towards the other side of the bathroom, slowly, as if expecting to see something truly repellent. And I did. An eyelash curler on top of the toilet. A packet of make-up-removing wipes wedged down the side of the sink.
It says something about my state of mind at that moment that I had a wild flare of hope that these might perhaps be the possessions of Martin’s previously-unknown-to-me transvestite alter ego. Surely I could deal with that? I was an accommodating sort of person; we could work it out. But angry suspicion was slowly replacing the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.
‘Rory!’ exclaimed Auntie Lyd, as I stormed past her and ran down the stairs. ‘Where are you going?’
I furiously scanned the living room for more incriminating evidence, but everything was just as I’d left it: the huge flat-screen television crouched on the wall, its red standby light winking malevolently. I switched it on just long enough to confirm that it kicked straight in to Sky Sports as usual. The kitchen, too, seemed clean. Until I opened the fridge. Inside were a half-empty packet of fresh raspberries, two skinless chicken breast fillets and a carton of fat-free yogurt from Waitrose. I may as well have found Martin in flagrante. Left to shop for himself, he would never venture further than the corner shop or the takeaway menu. These were the supermarket shopping choices of a female of the species.
Auntie Lyd was right. Even bloody Ticky Lytton-Finch was right. He had another woman.
3
It was a bit of a surprise to me to find that I genuinely wanted to talk about Martin to Ticky when I got into work. Perhaps it was because Auntie Lyd was being annoyingly dismissive every time I tried to bring him into conversation. She held up a silencing finger whenever I mentioned his name; I would have got more sympathy from Mr Bits, her ancient marmalade cat. And perhaps it was because I had realized, while gnashing my teeth and wailing into my pillow (thank goodness Auntie Lyd had given me one of the rooms at the very top of the house), that I appeared to have very few friends left who were exclusively mine, rather than mine and Martin’s. I couldn’t call up Darren and Rebecca, or Anna and Max; for all I knew they were already arranging cosy paired-up evenings with Martin and Whoever-she-was. I was outside of the couple zone for the first time in eleven years, and I couldn’t bear that any of them might see me pressing my face up against the glass, pleading to be let back in. I’d called Mum in Spain, where she lived with Steve, husband number four, but she’d been busy heading out to a golf lesson and hadn’t had time to chat for long. I had even been desperate enough to consider calling Dad, before realizing that it would alarm him too much if I deviated from our usual scheduled calls at Christmas and birthdays only.
I’d spoken to my old university flatmate Caroline – first-time mother of a three-month-old baby – who had burst into sleep-deprived hormonal tears as soon as she heard my voice. I didn’t dare make it worse by telling her about Martin. And by the time I hung up I didn’t have the energy to face another rebuff. It seemed that, for all of my defensive insistence that I had plenty of other people to talk to, Ticky was the only one actually available.
Whatever my reasons, Ticky didn’t seem remotely surprised by my sudden urge to discuss everything with her. She took it as her due; of course it was only a matter of time before I would volunteer my personal life for her dissection.
‘I think this is, like, raaahlly healthy, Roars. First step to recovery and all that. So, like, tell me about the other woman,’ she said, propping her elbows on her desk and resting her chin in her hands. ‘Who is she?’
I felt my eyes fill with tears.
‘I don’t know who she is,’ I said. ‘I don’t care.’ That was a lie. I was desperate to find out who Martin’s new woman was. I’d already spent an unhealthy amount of time on his Facebook page this morning, scrutinizing tiny thumbnail photographs of every woman on his Friends list. I had narrowed it down to a shortlist of ten before forcing myself to de-friend him for the sake of my sanity. But I wasn’t about to share that with Ticky; I was too ashamed of my stalker-like behaviour.
‘Yah, yah,’ nodded Ticky with approval. ‘Totes the right attitude, Roars. There’s no point obsessing over his new bird. You’ll drive yourself crackers. How long do you think it’s been going on?’
‘Months,’ I intoned glumly. ‘He had a weekend away last month and now I think he must have been with her.’
‘No way – the weekend in Wales? But he said he’d gone with his schoolfriends Paul and Al!’
Ticky’s elephantine memory for detail never ceased to amaze me. She could remember everything about people’s personal lives to the most ridiculous degree. If you said that you were going to a wedding on Saturday, Ticky would remember immediately, although you had mentioned it only once before, that this was the wedding of Annabel and Marcus, and wasn’t she the one whose father had left his wife for her sister, necessitating some complex extended-family seating arrangements? If she ever focused her uncanny talent for recall on her job, she would be unstoppable.
‘Yes, I’m certain of it,’ I said, although I wasn’t. I felt it was true and that was the same thing. I wanted to think the worst of him. It stopped me from wanting him back.
‘Utter bastard,’ sympathized Ticky. ‘Did you really not suspect a thing?’
She tilted her head to one side speculatively as I spoke, prompting me with the practised skill of a professional interviewer and leaving tactical silences that I rushed to fill with teary rantings. When I finally ran out of confessional, she leaned forward for a machine-gun burst of sharp questions that, once finished, achieved what I had previously thought to be impossible. It actually exhausted my desire to speak about Martin. It was as if Ticky had wrung me out like a wet cloth. I knew my sense of release was merely a by-product of her bloodsucking; but the effect was astonishingly lightening. I wouldn’t have believed that I could actually feel grateful to Ticky Lytton-Finch. Perhaps I had misjudged her all along.
‘So, Roars, you’re twenty-nine,’ she stated briskly, twirling her hair into a bun at the top of her head. ‘My sister says all the good men are snapped up by thirty-five. Tick-tock, tick-tock.’
Perhaps I had not misjudged her after all.
‘It’s far too soon for me to start dating,’ I said stiffly. The very idea made me shudder. I’d always gratefully skipped over those complicated women’s magazine articles about dating – when to text, how long to leave it before returning an email, whether or not you should have sex with your new man before you’d had the ‘exclusivity’ talk. It all sounded like a different world to the slow, long-ago unfolding of my relationship with Martin, where our accidental daily encounters in the university library had become less accidental as that first term went on, until, almost without our having ever discussed it, we were a couple.
‘Well, Goouurd, of course it is too soon for you to, like, start another long-term relationship,’ said Ticky, tossing her thick blonde
hair to one side. ‘But raaahlly, if Spreadsheets Martin is your only boyfriend then, like, that means you haven’t been on a date in eleven years.’
‘No,’ I admitted. I didn’t feel like going on a date for at least another eleven years, to be honest.
‘Thing is, Roars, like, you don’t have time to waste at your age.’ She ignored my glare. ‘Saahriously. I’m not suggesting you, like, try to find your future husband or anything, but you do need to get out there and get some practice. Try out a few duff ones to get back in the game, you know?’
‘Oh God, I can hardly bear it,’ I groaned. ‘Duff ones?’
‘Yah. You remember Hen Milroy-Pennington?’
‘Do I?’ I asked, uncertainly. It was never easy to keep up with the huge cast of friends that populated Ticky’s social life.
‘Yah, you do. Fashion PR? Tall? Dark hair?’ That narrowed it down. At least 90 per cent of Ticky’s friends, and the female staff of Country House for that matter, were blonde. In my early days at the magazine I had naively believed that there was some posh gene that bestowed blonde hair upon them, along with an inability to speak quietly and a propensity to turn up one’s shirt collars for no reason. Then I had discovered that, with rare exceptions, they owed their colouring to the hand of an expensive hairdresser rather than nature.
‘I think so,’ I said, not really sure but wanting her to get to the point.
‘Yah, right, well, Hen has just got engaged. Eiffel Tower proposal, baguette-cut diamond so big she can hardly lift her hand, announcement in the Telegraph: the works.’
‘Right,’ I said, feeling my face pinch up bitterly. ‘How lovely for her.’ Ticky really was extraordinarily tactless, I thought, bringing up engagements to someone so recently dumped.
The point is, Roars, a year ago she set herself a proper mission to go out and meet as many men as possible,’ said Ticky. ‘She went on forty-three dates in the year before she met Hecks. Forty-three!’
‘Hecks?’
‘Hector Armstrong-Calthorpe? Number eleven in Tatler’s Most Invited?’ said Ticky, looking astonished that I didn’t immediately recognize his name. Ticky and all of the Country House staff had a habit of assuming that everyone was as intimate with their social bubble as they were themselves. ‘Not actually important, Roars. What is important is that she met a lot of unsuitable men before it all happened with Hecks. A lot.’
‘Unsuitable men?’ I echoed.
‘Yah. Use them for practice, you know? Get used to the whole dating scene by going out with people you’re not interested in – get the crap ones out of the way, right? Teaches you about what to avoid in future and then you’re, like, all chilled and relaxed about dating when you meet a man you’re raaahlly interested in.’
‘Right,’ I said, hesitantly.
‘Yah, it’s like me and old Fuckwit Farquharson? Totes unsuitable but the bonus is that I absolutely know for future reference that I am not prepared to get down to business with a man who wants to call me “Nanny” in the sack.’
‘Did he?!’
‘Oh Goouurd, yes. I had to dump him when it escalated horribly one night,’ she shuddered.
‘How?’ I demanded.
‘I don’t really want to talk about it,’ said Ticky, looking away as if the memory was painful. ‘Let’s just say I didn’t know until then that they made nappies in adult sizes. But now I know the signs, I won’t be going there again.’
‘What are the signs?’ I said, in genuine fascination.
‘Please – I can’t,’ said Ticky, holding out her hand to stop me prying further. It seemed her appetite for emotional sharing was strictly a one-way affair. ‘Thankfully there is just one Fuckwit Farquharson, but the thing is there are lots of other fuckwits out there and you are bound to encounter some sooner or later, yah? It’s good to get them all out of the way so you can get on with meeting someone great. I mean, surely there were some unsuitable men before you got together with Martin?’
‘None,’ I said, casting my eyes down to my desk in embarrassment. It wasn’t like I’d been one of those teenagers who wore a chastity ring and swore to keep herself pure for marriage, but my love of ancient castles and encyclopaedic knowledge of William Morris textile designs were not exactly irresistible to the boys of my youth. When Martin first started talking to me in the university library I’d been as astonished by his attention as I was flattered.
‘Sorry,’ said Ticky, rolling her eyes. ‘Stupido. Forgot he was your first proper boyfriend. But that is all the more reason you need to go out with some unsuitable men. I mean, most girls go out with, like, a series of bad boys in their twenties and then settle down with a nice sensible boy when they hit thirty. But you, Roars, you’ve spent your whole adult life in a relationship with a sensible man. A boring man, frankly. You, like, totally need to get some bad boys out of your system.’
‘Define “bad boy”,’ I said, with some trepidation.
‘Well, have you ever been on a date with a tortured artist, for example?’
‘No.’
‘Guy in a band?’
‘No.’
‘Toyboy?’
‘No.’
‘Married man?’
‘Ticky! No, I certainly haven’t. I haven’t been out with anyone unsuitable at all. Ever.’
‘Well, Goouurd, of course the ultimate irony is the one man you do go out with for eleven years turns out to be unsuitable anyway,’ Ticky said, sitting back with a satisfied smile. She was too pleased with her neat conclusion to consider that it might be painful for me to hear.
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ I said, wincing slightly.
‘So you have been out with an unsuitable man, Roars – you can tick cheater off your list now.’
‘Great.’
‘But don’t you see this is a good thing?’ said Ticky with earnest enthusiasm. ‘Getting unsuitable men out of your system is, like, progress. I mean, every nutter and loser you encounter brings you closer to realizing who is really suitable for you.’
‘You’re not really selling this to me, Ticky,’ I said.
‘Sahhriously, Roars,’ she urged. ‘The thing is, everyone’s a little bit mental – even the good ones. Even you. But if you don’t know what sort of mental is your sort of mental, then how will you recognize the right man when he turns up?’
‘It’s a nice theory, Ticky,’ I said, looking at my watch to try to terminate the conversation. ‘I’d probably better be getting on with things.’
‘Oh faahrk, is it really twelve-thirty?’ exclaimed Ticky, grasping my wrist to check the time. ‘There’s a Stella McCartney sample sale just off Bond Street; I’d better get a faahrking wriggle on. Laters, Roars, and chin up. It could be worse. You could be nearly forty.’
She collided with Martha Braithwaite, our formidable features editor, on the way out. A lady whose age, while undisclosed and subject to much office gossip, was certainly well over a decade north of forty. ‘Sorry, Marth, no offence,’ Ticky carolled as she barged past.
Martha frowned darkly. ‘I just came to see how you were doing on the April layouts,’ she said, peering into the office.
‘Fine, Martha, just fine,’ I said, completely untruthfully. I hadn’t even looked at them and I could tell from Martha’s gimlet-eyed stare that she knew it. ‘Getting on to it right now.’
Her eyes narrowed with suspicion. She had always been an exacting boss, but ever since she had been passed over for the editor’s job she had become even more demanding. Amanda had been parachuted in above her thanks to a bulging contacts book, impeccable breeding and a private income which allowed her to overlook the relatively impecunious salary. Middle-class Martha, for all her hard-won experience, simply hadn’t been able to compete with a glamorous society blonde who was more used to staying in country houses than writing about them.
Even three years later, Martha seemed to feel the need to prove her superior journalistic credentials by leaping on everyone else’s errors, as if the Bettertons might belated
ly recognize her eye for detail and appoint her to her rightful role. As that was yet to happen, the more insecure she felt, the more she micro-managed the rest of us. Or tried to. Ticky and Noonoo were equally impervious as Amanda and just ignored her. Lysander had little time for her, and nor did Flickers. Which meant that the focus for most of her dissatisfaction was me.
I hadn’t helped myself by failing to spot that our art director Jeremy had switched, after a long and drunken lunch, two captions in the proofs for the December issue, so that a Christmas cake was referred to as ‘His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales’ while our future monarch was labelled ‘A nutty organic fruitcake’. The resulting press furore, and numerous cancelled subscriptions, had been probably Martha’s happiest time at Country House since Amanda’s appointment. Jeremy and I had shared the blame, while Martha grabbed the triumph.
These days I checked everything three times and now, under Martha’s watchful eye, I bent my head over the proofs once again.
4
Auntie Lyd’s two remaining PGs appeared to have a complete inability to sleep beyond the first glimmer of dawn. Despite my being the only person in the house who needed to get up for work on a regular basis, in my short time there I’d discovered I was the latest riser by several hours. I would wake most mornings to the heavy clunk of the water pipes as the boiler warmed up for Percy Granger’s usual 5 a.m. shower. This early alarm call told me I had two hours until I needed to get up, but I found I rarely went back to sleep. Although rolling myself back up in the duvet should have felt decadent and lazy, instead I felt trapped in a cocoon of obsessive thoughts about Martin. I found I could whip myself up into a frenzy of fury by remembering everything he ever did to hurt me or betray me; I replayed scene after scene in my head until the repetition made me weep at the very tedium of my own thoughts. I imagined him romping with his new girlfriend in the en suite bathroom – a scene which I enjoyed ending by having them both slip on a fat slug of her Herbal Essences shampoo, injuring themselves horribly. But it was no comfort from the awful truth, which was that the clanking of the pipes woke me, each morning, from dreams in which Martin and I were still together.
