Unsuitable Men

by Pippa Wright

  ‘Married, of course,’ she said, her voice no longer dreamy but harder. ‘But unhappily so, he told me, he only stayed for the children. I know, I know how it sounds, but it’s hard to see these situations when you’re in the middle of them. For four years I waited for him to leave her. For four years we made plans. He bought the house in Clapham for us, you know? Put it in my name as a sign of his commitment to me. He was going to move in when he left, far away from his family home in Kensington. Make a new start together.’

  She closed her eyes again for a brief moment.

  ‘We’d named our children, even. Of course I felt terrible about his wife, but I told myself these things happen. People marry the wrong person. You can’t stop a love like ours. Silly lines straight from Those Devereux Girls. He wasn’t a man cheating on his wife, he was a man in love. Our passion was too strong. Ridiculous, really.’ She laughed bitterly.

  ‘Only Linda knew the whole story. I hid it from everyone, even your mother. Then Linda told me Paul had made a pass at her. I didn’t believe her, and we had a terrible fight. She said he was cheating on me, too, with anyone who’d have him. I said she was jealous, wanted him for herself. I walked out of Those Devereux Girls – told them I wouldn’t work with Linda any more.’

  ‘What did Paul say?’ I asked.

  ‘Furious, of course,’ said Auntie Lyd. ‘Not just about Lin’s accusation but, well, there went his ten per cent when the show got cancelled. But I told him I’d done it for us. I thought that showing him I would give up Devereux Girls for him, that I’d make a huge sacrifice like that to show my loyalty to him, would make him leave his marriage at last.’

  ‘Did it?’ I asked.

  Auntie Lyd looked at me and smiled wearily. ‘Yes, Aurora, that is why you see me here happily married to Paul with those children that we named way back when.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Linda was right, of course,’ she continued. ‘He’d been sleeping with half of his client list all along, all those eager young actresses like me, desperate to be loved. I was just one of many.’

  ‘But he bought the house,’ I said. ‘He must have been serious about you to have done that.’

  ‘What he was serious about, Rory, was putting his money where his wife couldn’t find it if they got divorced. She’d been threatening him for years; he was the one begging to stay. It was her money that had set up his agency, of course.’ She sighed again, but she was quite still and quiet, not agitated at all. ‘I was just a back-up plan. I expect he had several – he was always one to spread the risk.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘I left the agency, of course. And when I did, I checked over my statements. I’d always let Paul do that before. There were some – irregularities there. It seemed he’d not only been cheating on me emotionally, he’d been defrauding me out of money for years.’ She let out a long hissing breath. ‘So . . .’

  ‘Did you sue him?’ I asked.

  ‘Aurora,’ chastised Auntie Lyd gently. ‘Now it is you who is making up scenes from soap operas. I did not sue him. You will understand, I’m sure, that despite everything, in some awful way I still loved him. And I had no desire to drag both of our names through an ugly legal battle. All of the details of our relationship would have been splashed all over the papers.’ She shuddered. ‘It would have been too humiliating.’

  I nodded and waited for her to start speaking again.

  ‘I told him I was keeping the house instead of demanding back the money he owed me. Since it was in my name he would have had some difficulty proving it belonged to him without revealing a lot of things he preferred to keep hidden. He was so grateful I wasn’t going to cause a scandal that he just let me have it.’

  ‘And you never heard from him again?’

  ‘Of course I did,’ she said, smiling at me sadly. Her eyes returned to the primroses next to her bed. ‘I still do sometimes.’

  ‘But, you said he changed. Was he truly sorry? Did you ever forgive him?’

  ‘I don’t know if he changed, Rory,’ said Auntie Lyd, frowning slightly at my misunderstanding. ‘I haven’t spoken to him for thirty years, despite his efforts. Perhaps he did. I expect not. No, darling, I mean that the person who changed was me.’

  34

  When Jim arrived back, balancing three polystyrene cups of tea on a cardboard tray, Auntie Lyd was already asleep. He lowered the tray on to her bedside table and looked over at me, running his fingers through his hair, making it stand up in all directions. It was weird to me that he’d go to the trouble of getting highlights and yet be so unconcerned with how his hair looked most of the time.

  ‘Why do I get the feeling Lydia was just trying to get me out of the way with that little errand?’ he asked quietly, smiling over at her while she slept. ‘She didn’t really want a tea at all, did she?’

  ‘No,’ I admitted. For someone who was still unwell, Auntie Lyd had managed to engineer her discussion with me most efficiently. ‘She just wanted to have a talk with me on my own. Sorry to send you off for nothing.’

  ‘Do you want yours?’ Jim whispered.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I don’t need it. I think we can leave now, if you’re ready?’ Auntie Lyd seemed deeply asleep now, her breath steady and even. It didn’t seem like she would be waking any time soon.

  Jim helped me clear up the cubicle, moving a water bottle within reach and leaving her reading glasses near her hand in case she woke up in the night and needed them. Once we were sure Auntie Lyd had everything she might need, we left the ward, tiptoeing out silently so as not to wake her.

  I offered to get the bus home, but Jim wouldn’t hear of it. He cleared the passenger seat of his van of the Sunday papers and a half-empty crisp packet, apologizing the whole time for the mess.

  ‘So,’ he said, as we turned out of the hospital car park.

  ‘So,’ I answered. This was the first time we’d been alone since last night. I wasn’t sure if I should be saying something about it.

  ‘So your ex has come back,’ Jim said. He kept his eyes on the road, changing lanes as the van struggled up the hill. ‘That must be weird.’

  ‘It is weird,’ I agreed. It was even weirder to be discussing Martin with a man I’d been kissing just hours ago.

  ‘What’s going on there then?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘He thinks we should get back together.’

  ‘Do you think you should get back together?’ Jim asked.

  I looked out of the window. Two little girls pushed their scooters up the hill, leaning in towards the pavement with the effort of it. What did I think about it?

  ‘It’s exactly what I thought I wanted,’ I heard myself saying.

  Jim was silent for a while. ‘Oh?’ he asked, at last.

  ‘Exactly what I wanted when we first split up,’ I explained. I twisted a curl of my hair in my fingers. ‘Now I don’t know.’

  ‘How long were you two together?’

  ‘Eleven years.’

  Jim whistled through his teeth. ‘Long time,’ he said. ‘Do you still love him?’

  I considered the question.

  ‘I think so,’ I said. It was bizarre to be having this conversation with Jim, of all people, but he was oddly easy to talk to. Steering the van back towards Elgin Square, he seemed to be able to prompt me to talk about everything without betraying any Ticky-style enjoyment of the drama. I guess sometimes it is easier to talk freely to someone who’s almost a stranger than to the people you’re closest to.

  ‘Really?’ said Jim. He sounded surprised.

  ‘You can’t just turn your feelings off like a switch, can you? But I can’t work out if it’s just nostalgia that’s making me feel all of this, the memory of the relationship we had, or if it’s a sign I should give him another chance.’

  Jim exhaled through his teeth again. ‘What does your aunt say? I can’t imagine Lydia doesn’t have a strong opinion on it.’

  ‘Funnily enough she hasn’t,�
�� I said. I tucked the curl of hair behind my ear. ‘I thought she’d try to talk me out of even thinking about getting back together with Martin, but instead she just talked to me about people changing.’

  ‘Do you think they can?’ asked Jim, echoing my own question to Auntie Lyd earlier.

  ‘I do now,’ I said, thinking of my aunt. Thinking of myself. The question was, could Martin change?

  ‘Well. It sounds like you’ve made up your mind,’ said Jim. The van pulled to a halt at a set of traffic lights.

  ‘Does it?’ I didn’t feel remotely close to having made up my mind. If anything I was more confused than ever.

  ‘Listen to yourself. You’ve got that shared past, you still love him, you think people can change. What’s stopping you?’

  I turned to look at him, but he stared steadfastly ahead. I wondered how we could have this talk about me and Martin and yet fail to even discuss what had happened between us in the kitchen.

  ‘Jim,’ I said. ‘About last night.’

  He revved the engine and we pulled away from the junction. ‘Forget last night,’ he said. ‘We’d both had too much to drink. You were very emotional.’

  ‘I wasn’t—’ I began.

  ‘Rory,’ he insisted. ‘You owe it to yourself to think about your relationship with Martin properly. You can’t let yourself be distracted from a decision about the rest of your life by one drunken kiss.’

  ‘One drunken kiss,’ I echoed. Of course that’s all it was, I knew that, but did he have to say it so harshly? It wasn’t like I’d ever entertained the idea that I’d have some sort of relationship with Jim – why was it necessary to make it so very obvious that he had absolutely no interest in me? It felt like one of the My Mate’s Great unsuitables made flesh – Jim was closing a match that I’d not even seriously considered.

  ‘You’ve got a lot going on right now, Rory,’ said Jim. ‘That’s all I mean.’

  We turned into Elgin Square and he stopped the van in the middle of the road outside Auntie Lyd’s house, the engine still running.

  ‘Aren’t you coming in?’ I asked, picking up my handbag. ‘I’m sure Percy and Eleanor would love to see you.’

  ‘No,’ he said abruptly. ‘I’ve got to get on.’

  I let myself out of the van, sliding down off the high leather seat on to the road. Jim smiled at me as I swung the door shut. It was the kind of smile you might give to a child riding her bike without stabilizers for the first time: encouraging and protective, but with a little hint of anxiety about the outcome.

  ‘Good luck, Dawn,’ he said.

  35

  I wish I could say that the day we drove Auntie Lyd back home to Elgin Square was a day of glorious spring. It would sound so promising and positive to say that her arrival was heralded by sunshine and a chorus of birdsong, but unfortunately the weather that welcomed us was a thick grey mist that threatened, without ever doing so, to turn into rain. I chewed my fingernail anxiously, fearing it might be a bad omen. Not that I believed in such things, of course, but recently I had found myself descending into the sort of magical thinking where I seemed to see portents everywhere: if I threw this banana into the waiting-room bin without getting up (I had found it in my coat pocket yesterday, so black and squashed as to be inedible) then I should get back together with Martin. If I missed the bin, I shouldn’t. A black cat outside the hospital – was that good or bad? Auntie Lyd would have scorned it all if she had known; she who thought reading your horoscope in the paper was the act of a credulous fool.

  I glanced at her. So strong in the hospital, determined to come home, she seemed now to have shrunk into the passenger seat of Martin’s car, diminished somehow. It may have been just how she appeared from where I was, in the back behind the driver’s seat and awkwardly angled so I could keep an eye on her. Only Martin looked truly comfortable, legs stretched to full length, his strong hands grasping the steering wheel as he manoeuvred us confidently around the corners of the square. The wipers slid across the windscreen, revealing in the cleared glass a hand-painted

  Welcome Home Lydia

  banner streaked and spotted by the weather.

  Auntie Lyd laughed. ‘Is this your handiwork, Rory?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Martin laughed back a little too heartily, grasping the opportunity to share a joke with her. ‘Rory’s no artist. But I expect she can make up some waffly art history bollocks about its provenance, can’t you?’

  He turned in his seat to negotiate the car into a space just outside the house, and made a face at me to show that he was joking. I smiled back, latching on to the availability of a parking space as the good omen I’d been seeking. Everything was going to be okay.

  ‘Absolutely,’ I said, in a posh radio announcer’s voice. ‘Note how the artist creates the work, and then allows nature to penetrate it by exposing it to the elements. The smeared letters remind us of not just of impermanence, but of transformation and transition. The free brushstrokes reveal a confident artist at the peak of his powers.’

  ‘So it was Percy!’ exclaimed Auntie Lyd.

  ‘Eleanor too,’ I said. ‘And Martin hung it up before we left this morning.’

  Auntie Lyd smiled politely at him as he helped her from her seat but I could see it was going to take a bit more than a helping hand and a shared joke to get her to drop her defences entirely. Although she had refrained from expressing any opinion on whether or not I should go back to Martin, it was clear that she herself had yet to completely forgive him.

  I rang the bell to allow Percy and Eleanor to answer the door, as they’d asked. Martin had said it would be too cramped in the car for them to come to the hospital to pick up Auntie Lyd, which seemed not quite honest given the roomy interior of the Audi, and they had been a little hurt at the exclusion. Hence the idea for the banner and for the official welcoming committee, which I had hastily conjured up to create a diversion. It was bad enough that Auntie Lyd retained some of her suspicions of Martin; I couldn’t have everyone at Elgin Square against him or we would never be able to visit again if I moved back in with him.

  Eleanor flung open the door, stretching her arms wide. She had chosen to celebrate Auntie Lyd’s return by donning one of her best dresses, a floral Laura Ashley number that was probably older than I was. Its Victorian high neck and floor-length skirt gave her the appearance of having escaped from a period drama, except for her vivid blue eyeshadow. Behind her Percy stood back, as if in a receiving line, his hands clasped formally behind him. While Eleanor threw her arms around Auntie Lyd so hard that I put my hands out in case they toppled down the stairs, Percy remained so absolutely still that I wondered if he was feeling unwell. But as Auntie Lyd stepped over the threshold he burst into shuddering sobs, his hands flailing helplessly in front of him, and I saw that his previous restraint had only been an attempt to keep himself together. Auntie Lyd let him weep on to her shoulder, while Eleanor rubbed his back consolingly.

  I had been so worried about Auntie Lyd, and about myself, that I hadn’t given nearly enough thought to how frightening this must have been for Percy and Eleanor. Auntie Lyd was more than their landlady, she was their only family. If I had been anxious about what would happen to me without Auntie Lyd, I with a job and a regular salary and youth on my side, then how much more precarious an existence was it for the two of them? They had probably been kept awake with fears of the kind of places they could expect to live if they had to move, of council-owned residential homes, of trying to find rooms in shared houses at their age. I saw how brave they had been to hide all of this anxiety from me every day in favour of making sure Auntie Lydia’s niece wasn’t concerned about them. Their cheerful acting had been convincing enough to fool me, and I was ashamed of it.

  ‘Bloody actors,’ whispered Martin’s voice behind me. ‘Always a drama, isn’t it?’

  Before I could answer he raised his voice to address us all: ‘Right then, enough of this. I think it’s time we got our patient back into her sickbed. In we
go, Lyd.’

  I flinched as I saw Auntie Lyd’s shoulders tense. Martin meant to be kind, but he was so used to being in charge of everything that he didn’t see how much Auntie Lyd would resent being dictated to in her own home. Not to mention calling her ‘Lyd’, which only family were permitted to do. Percy, sniffing, let Auntie Lyd go, and retreated backwards to dab at his eyes with his shirtsleeve.

  Auntie Lyd turned around; no longer shrunken, she seemed to grow in front of us.

  ‘Martin. How kind you have been to Rory. I’m so grateful. And for driving me home today. Thank you.’

  Martin smiled with satisfaction, putting his arm around me as we stood framed in the open doorway. I couldn’t believe he couldn’t hear the frost in Auntie Lyd’s voice. If I were him I would have been putting up my hands in self-defence.

  ‘But I am, as you rightly say, a poor old lady invalid who needs her rest. And for that reason I would like to spend my first night at home with just family. I’m sure you understand.’

  ‘Rory?’ asked Martin, looking down at me with puzzlement. Auntie Lyd didn’t wait for an answer, but allowed herself to be escorted into the house by Percy and Eleanor.

  ‘Martin, it’s her first night home. She’ll come round,’ I said. ‘Just give her time.’

  ‘Give you time, give her time, it’s like I’m a fucking watch factory,’ he snapped, and then stopped when he saw my shocked face. ‘Sorry, sorry, Rory, sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. It’s just getting to me, all of this.’

  ‘Look, I’ve talked to Auntie Lyd about us,’ I began.

  ‘So you think there is an us?’ he asked quickly.

  ‘I don’t know, Martin, it’s been a strange week. I haven’t had time to think about it properly.’ Martin frowned; it was clear he felt that four days was plenty of time. ‘Time on my own, I mean. Can we just – I don’t know – can’t we just agree that we won’t contact each other for a few days, and then I promise I’ll make a decision? Just give me until – until the end of this week, okay?’