Unsuitable Men

by Pippa Wright

  ‘You said you thought I should go out with the unsuitable men,’ I said, my voice beginning to wobble. Auntie Lyd had been a defender of the whole idea from the beginning, and now she was using it against me.

  ‘I thought you might derive some amusement from it, Aurora. A distraction to get you over Martin. Not that you would use it as an excuse to feel sorry for yourself, sulking over Martin – still – and being appallingly rude to Jim whenever you encounter him.’

  I knew she would bring it back to Jim, I just knew it.

  ‘I should have known you’d take his side,’ I muttered.

  Auntie Lyd’s eyes flashed with anger. ‘It is not a matter of taking sides, Aurora,’ she said. ‘What do you think this is, the playground? We are all adults here, and it’s time you began behaving like one.’

  ‘I just know he’s taking advantage of you, Auntie Lyd,’ I said. I could feel that I had started snivelling like a child, and that my argument was as pathetic and ill-thought-out as a child’s, too. ‘With his highlights, and his horrible T-shirts, and this never-ending plumbing job that’s costing you a fortune.’

  Auntie Lyd stiffened in fury. Her nostrils flared as she pulled herself up to her full height.

  ‘Jim is an honourable man who has been very kind to all of us, Aurora. He has been supportive and helpful while you have flounced around like a spoiled brat. And for you to stand there and be such an unconscionable snob about him disgusts me.’

  I bit my lower lip hard to stop my chin from wobbling. I was afraid if I tried to speak I would dissolve into tears.

  ‘I’m so disappointed in you, Rory,’ said Auntie Lyd, shaking her head. I’d never seen her look at me like this; all the warmth had gone out of her eyes. ‘So very disappointed.’

  She turned and walked down the stairs towards the kitchen. Her quiet disappointment was a thousand times more hurtful than her shouting had been.

  ‘I’m not a snob,’ I called out, but she’d already gone. ‘I’m not.’

  I got changed in my room, hiccupping with sobs. Auntie Lyd had been the one constant in my life, after Martin. More reliable than either of my parents, and certainly more present. And now she had turned on me, just like Martin had. I couldn’t believe she had accused me of being a snob – me! The girl who was treated like some kind of proletarian serf at work. The one without a trust fund or an ancestral home or a family tree going back to William the Conqueror. My chest heaved with the unfairness of it all. I had to get out of the house as quickly as possible, and stay out for as long as I could.

  I sneaked down the stairs with stealth, picking up my handbag, which had been hanging on the banisters since last night. Scouring its depths, I still couldn’t locate my phone. Laughter rose up from the basement kitchen as I closed the door behind me and I felt even more desolate than before. Worse than Auntie Lyd and Jim discussing their anger at me was this, their evident shared amusement at my misery, their hilarity while I was still crushed.

  Compounding my unhappiness was the fact that the man behind the bar in the pub said no one had handed in a phone last night. It was as if the whole world was conspiring against me. I could only think of one solution to it all: to hide away for as long as possible. If I had been braver I expect I would have run away somewhere; turned up unexpectedly at a faraway friend’s home for the weekend, or booked myself into a hotel for the night. But the best place to hide on a grey March afternoon, for one as risk-averse and cash-strapped as me, seemed to be the cinema.

  I settled into my seat in the darkened theatre, hardly aware of what film I was going to see. I’d chosen it purely based on the fact that it started in the next few minutes. The sparse audience – a few pairs of thirtysomething women, a couple of men on their own – suggested this was no blockbuster, or perhaps it just suggested that people with real, active lives didn’t go to the cinema in the middle of the day. A few months ago I’d have been horrified at the idea of going to the cinema by myself. I’d have thought everyone would have pointed me out as the sad single girl on her own. Today, though, it felt like a blessing: a place to hide out by myself, unseen by anyone. And who cared what anyone else thought? As the adverts boomed out of the speakers I shrank down in my cushioned seat so that I could rest the back of my head against it. The wall of noise was strangely soporific, drowning out my own thoughts and replacing them with a comforting blur of meaningless sound. I felt my eyelids droop before the film had even begun. It turned out to be something with subtitles – I think it might have been Polish – but I struggled to concentrate. Instead I let myself drift off to the accompaniment of incomprehensible dialogue.

  I stirred awake to the soft thump of cinema seats springing back into position. Lights flickered on. Two women walked up the aisle wiping their eyes. I caught the words ‘searing’ and ‘masterful’ as they passed me. The man in the row in front blew his nose loudly. I felt a little relieved to have been spared what had obviously been a draining cinematic experience.

  Outside it was still light, and I wondered if this day was ever going to end. I had hoped to return home under cover of darkness, when I could sneak up to my room, pull the covers over my head and believe that my new beginning would come tomorrow. There was a French restaurant across the road from the cinema – I’d been there with Auntie Lyd often as a teenager for moules marinière and rough red wine, which my aunt insisted that I was old enough to drink from the age of fifteen. I knew it was dimly lit and staffed by waiters who rarely condescended to notice their customers. It was just the sort of place to while away an hour without being disturbed, or indeed noticed. When I stepped inside, the white-haired owner looked up from the bar and motioned me over to a corner table, so dark that I couldn’t read the handwritten menu. I asked for a glass of wine, and he returned with a squat tumbler filled right to the top.

  ‘Extra for you,’ he confided, unusually friendly. ‘Extra pour la nièce de Lydia Bell. Ah, les belles filles Devereux.’

  He waltzed back towards the bar, humming a tune that I recognized as the theme of Those Devereux Girls, sung by Auntie Lyd’s co-star, Linda Ellery. I turned the tumbler in my hands, watching the play of candlelight on its surface. It was always strange to be reminded of Auntie Lyd’s celebrity, faded though it might have been. I suppose with the selfishness of youth I had grown up thinking of Auntie Lyd as someone who belonged to me, instead of seeing her as a person in her own right, with a public identity in which she was no one’s aunt. I sipped my wine slowly, letting its warmth spread through my chest. I thought of Auntie Lyd’s house, where she always seemed to be on her feet, cooking or cleaning or gently offering advice. Where she kept the peace between Percy and Eleanor without ever taking sides. Where she’d offered me a room, rent-free, without question, never asking how long I would be staying or making me feel that I was in her way. I remembered the pile of Country House magazines in her living room; she’d read every column I’d ever written and subscribed to a magazine in which she had no interest, just for my sake.

  And I’d repaid her by being selfish and thoughtless and rude. She was right: I’d assumed that my brave and clever aunt was some doddery woman to be made a fool of by the conniving plumber. Whatever Jim’s motives, and I still suspected them, Auntie Lyd could take care of herself. More than that, she took care of everyone else, too. I owed her a proper apology. I left the rest of my wine sitting on the table and said goodbye to the owner, who called after me to send my aunt to see him soon.

  The afternoon light was just turning to dusk as I turned the corner into Elgin Square. One street light cast an orange glow from the far side of the children’s playground, but the rest of the square squatted in a murky gloom. On the white steps of Auntie Lyd’s house I could see the figure of a man, sitting with his head held in his hands, his dark coat spread out on either side of him. I had imagined this sight so many times that I doubted what I was seeing, certain I must have hallucinated it. I stopped still. Even from this distance, even with his head buried in his palms, I knew
that figure better than any other. I would have recognized him from twice the distance. Martin.

  As if he had felt my eyes on him, Martin raised his head up, and slowly got to his feet. My legs carried me unsteadily towards him. His hand reached for the wrought-iron gate at the bottom of the steps just as mine did, and for a moment we both stood there, the gate between us, our fingers touching.

  ‘Rory,’ said Martin, putting his cold hand over mine. My first thought was to snatch my hand away, but instead I stayed still, waiting to hear why he was there. We were standing so close that I thought he must be able to hear that I had almost stopped breathing.

  ‘Yes?’ I whispered.

  ‘Your aunt’s had a heart attack. I’m here to take you to the hospital.’

  28

  It felt both entirely familiar and perfectly surreal to be at Martin’s side in his car again. As if nothing at all had changed, and also as if everything had. Martin explained all that he knew: Auntie Lyd had collapsed at the butcher’s this afternoon. The butcher had found a next-of-kin card in her wallet and, failing to reach me by the mobile number listed, had called the number marked ‘Rory: home’. Thank God Martin had been there to take her call. He told me he had driven to the house and found that no one knew where I was. The plumber had taken Percy and Eleanor to the hospital to wait for news, while Martin had sat alone on the cold steps waiting for my return. I was sick with shame. As if I hadn’t already felt guilty enough about taking her for granted, now my proud aunt had collapsed in a butcher’s shop, all alone, taken away in an ambulance by strangers with no way to contact her nearest relative. While I self-indulgently slept in a cinema, and drank wine afterwards, feeling sorry for myself.

  Martin glanced at me as I huddled in the passenger seat, not speaking, dry-eyed with fear of what I would find at the hospital. He rested his palm on my thigh, stroking my leg with his thumb as he drove. When we were together I used to tease him about this dad-like move, calling it the Reassuring Thumb-Rub, but I didn’t feel reassured at all by it today. I let him carry on, though; it felt rude to pull my leg away when he’d come all this way to help me. I just wanted to see Auntie Lyd and make sure she was okay. Martin had said she was going to be fine, but what did he know? I cursed myself for losing my phone yesterday. How could I have been so stupid? It proved to me what I should have realized long ago – messing around with unsuitable men, trying to be someone I wasn’t, brought trouble not only to me, but to the people I cared about. After all, who had ended up coming to the rescue but Martin, my once-suitable man? Didn’t that tell me something important about the sort of person I should be with? It wasn’t like Malky had rushed to my aid, with his guitar on his back and his dog at his heels.

  Martin dropped me off at the hospital entrance and went to park the car once I’d given him some cash; luckily I had a lot of pound coins in my purse because apparently the parking charges were astronomical. Outside the hospital two thin old men stood in their dressing gowns, attached to drips which swung, full-bellied, next to them. They passed a cigarette between their yellowed fingers.

  ‘Can you tell me where the cardiology unit is?’ I asked as the automatic doors slid open ahead of me.

  The man nearest me coughed into his sleeve and wheezed, ‘G Wing, dear.’ His companion gave me a wan smile of sympathy.

  I took the stairs, not willing to wait a moment for the lift to arrive, and feeling, too, that I wanted to punish myself in some way for letting Auntie Lydia down. I forced myself to run up the four flights until I felt that my lungs would burst. My chest had only just stopped heaving when I pushed open the door marked CARDIOLOGY WAITING ROOM. There, looking pathetically small on the hard yellow plastic chairs, were Eleanor and Percy, their hands clasped. I had grown so used to seeing them both every day that I registered with a shock, in this unfamiliar environment, how frail they both were. Here in the harsh, antiseptic surroundings of the hospital, uncertain and confused, they looked elderly and frightened.

  ‘Rory,’ Eleanor quavered, standing up with difficulty. ‘Rory, my dear. You mustn’t worry. Lydia is going to be quite all right.’

  ‘Is she?’ I asked, grasping her hand. ‘Have you seen her?’

  ‘None of us has seen her,’ said Percy, rising up from his seat to stand next to Eleanor. ‘But Jim spoke to the doctor. He said it was a very minor attack. Lydia will have to stay in for a few days, but she is going to be just fine.’

  ‘I want to see her,’ I said, looking around for a nurse. ‘I want to see her. Where’s Jim? Is he with her?’

  Eleanor and Percy looked at one another. ‘I’m not sure where Jim is, dear,’ said Eleanor, leaning a little on Percy.

  ‘He said he had to sort out a few things, didn’t he, Eleanor?’ said Percy. ‘He said he’d be back soon.’

  ‘How long has he been gone?’ I asked. ‘How long have you been waiting here?’ It seemed outrageous to me that Jim would just leave these two frail pensioners alone in the hospital. Eleanor’s face was lined with exhaustion and worry; they should have been at home.

  Percy waved his hand dismissively. ‘A few hours. It’s nothing; nothing.’ He stumbled a little at Eleanor’s weight on him.

  ‘You both sit down,’ I said. ‘My boyf— I mean Martin, my friend Martin is here. That is, he’ll be here any minute. I’m going to get him to take you home. You shouldn’t have had to wait here all this time.’

  ‘But we wanted to, dear, for Lydia,’ insisted Eleanor, sitting back down gratefully.

  ‘Auntie Lyd would want you both to be at home. I can call you if there are any updates. You’re both far too good to have waited for so long. I don’t know what Jim was thinking of, leaving you here with no way of getting back.’

  ‘We could get the bus, dear,’ Eleanor suggested gently.

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ said a voice from the door. Martin glided into the room, extending his hands to Eleanor. I remembered suddenly how charming he could be when he tried; my mother had always adored him. ‘Eleanor Avery, how is it possible that you don’t age like the rest of us? And Percy Granger? How marvellous to see you again, sir.’

  Eleanor’s eyes swept from Martin to me, trying to assess the situation. I silently wished her luck with that one, since I had no idea what was going on myself. It had been extraordinarily good of Martin to come all the way to Clapham to find me; it seemed quite bizarre that he was still at my side instead of driving back to North Sheen and his new girlfriend.

  ‘If Percy and Eleanor need a lift home then I insist on taking them,’ said Martin, executing a Reassuring Thumb-Rub on my shoulder. Behind him I saw a nurse passing the waiting-room doors.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said distantly, distracted by the nurse, who failed to turn into the waiting room as I’d hoped. I turned back to him. ‘Yes, that would be brilliant. Thanks so much, Martin, it’s really kind of you. Thank you.’

  Martin helped Percy and Eleanor up and led them towards the doors. When he’d ushered them out he took a step back into the waiting room and wrapped his arms around me. Before I knew what I was doing, I buried my head into his shoulder, inhaling the familiar scent of his coat.

  ‘I’ll drop them there and then I’ll come back to wait with you,’ he whispered into my hair. ‘You shouldn’t have to wait on your own.’

  ‘I’m fine. I’m really fine. You’ve done more than enough,’ I said. I pulled out of his embrace before I got too comfortable there. His behaviour was confusing me. As was my own. Why was he here? And wasn’t I supposed to be shouting at him? Furious and angry? Not just falling gratefully into his arms as if we were still together.

  ‘No, I’m coming back,’ Martin insisted. I started to protest, but he placed a silencing finger on my lips. ‘Anyway, I’ve got a twenty-four-hour parking permit so I shouldn’t waste it.’

  When they had gone I stepped out into the corridor, but the nurse had gone. There didn’t appear to be anyone else I could ask about Auntie Lyd, so I went back into the empty waiting room. It seeme
d to have been designed to keep anyone waiting in maximum discomfort – the plastic chairs were welded on to a metal rail so that they couldn’t be moved, and their ergonomically designed curved edges discouraged any position other than sitting sharply upright. No wonder Percy and Eleanor had looked so drained by their hours here. I appreciated there was probably some important medical reason why everything needed to be wipe-clean – superbugs or something – but it felt as if all the grief and fear was magnified and reflected in the harsh, unrelenting surfaces of the room. I shuffled to the edge of the row, where a Formica table-top offered a selection of reading material; when I got closer I saw that it consisted entirely of NHS leaflets about looking after your heart. I picked up one about giving up smoking and put it in my bag, hoping if I gave it to Auntie Lyd she would be weakened enough not to use it as a weapon against me.

  I hated to think of her, somewhere in this hospital, on her own. I should have been with her to hold her hand, to tell her I was sorry. I wanted to talk to a doctor, to take charge somehow. It had hurt to hear that the person who had spoken to the doctor was Jim; it should have been me. I should have been there. But I had only myself to blame. Who else should the doctor speak to when a woman is brought in, unconscious, with no relatives, accompanied only by her tenants and a plumber? Poor Auntie Lyd.

  As well as making the waiting room relentlessly uncomfortable, whatever sadist had been in charge of the decorating had neglected to provide a clock. Perhaps it had been kindly meant – trying to spare anxious relatives the torture of the slowly ticking hands. But without my phone, a clock, or even a window to show the passing of time, it was impossible to gauge how long I had been there. When the waiting-room door swung open at last, I looked up gratefully.

  Instead of the nurse or doctor that I’d hoped for, it was Jim’s highlights that I saw peering round the door. Seeing me, he edged into the room quietly, as if fearing I might launch straight back into the argument we were having when I last saw him. He was carrying a Marks & Spencer’s bag and I felt a rush of fury towards him – he’d left Percy and Eleanor here, all on their own in the hospital with no way to get home, so that he could go and do some light shopping? I sat on my hands and counted to ten. It would help no one to lose my temper with him again. Auntie Lyd would want us to get on, especially now.