The wrong man, p.3
The Wrong Man, page 3
‘It’s only my sister and Julia,’ she reminded him more gently, not wanting the day to face ruin so early on. ‘We haven’t seen either of them for ages…’
‘Nonsense. You and Julia are always jumping around doing those exercises together.’
‘Very rarely now – with us living down here. It’s not jumping around anyway, it’s yoga and I haven’t been for ages.’
Michael folded the newspaper neatly back together and crossed his arms. ‘It’s just the thought of enduring all you women that I find a little daunting.’
‘I tried to invite Tim and Pippa, but they were busy.’
Michael humphed and disappeared in the direction of the lavatory, taking the paper with him.
As she cleared up the kitchen and set about peeling apples for the crumble, Jane seriously tried to think who else she could have invited to make Michael feel his own needs were being better catered for. She knew none of his work colleagues, since he had never invited any of them back to be entertained, even when they had lived in London. While Jane would have hated sweating over recipe books in the interests of pleasing the expensive palates of Michael’s various bosses and their wives, she could not help wondering about it. The fact was, that apart from Tim Croft and an old mate called Des, whom he rarely saw, no name sprang to mind – unless she counted Michael’s younger brother, Christopher, who lived in Oxford and to whom he’d never been particularly close.
Jane, on the other hand, was on amicable terms now with several mums in the area, mainly through school and sitting in playgrounds, and would have loved to stretch some of these friendships to include husbands. But Michael was very resistant to such notions. He worked too hard to be bothered with any superficial socialising, he said, claiming to prefer spending what little spare time he had relaxing with his family. But as Jane heard Tom bang on the loo door and Michael’s muffled roar of response from within, the notion of a relaxed family life seemed little more than a shimmering mirage, vanishing as quickly as it was glimpsed.
The moment their two guests arrived however, Michael came alive. Having spent the previous two hours pointedly burrowing through sheaves of work papers – much to the consternation of the children, who wanted him to play – he leapt to his feet for Julia and Mattie, issuing drinks and witty small talk as if it was the most natural thing in the world. And Jane marvelled, not for the first time, at how much more fluently he communicated with people he knew less well, people who offered no threat of intimacy. It was incredible, seeing him now with her sister and her best friend, his bad mood apparently forgotten, his face breaking into smiles that showed his handsome teeth and made them feel welcome. It was like watching a different person. Yet, who was she to criticise the clicking of such switches? Everyone did it, Jane told herself, suppressing a twitch of something like envy. It was a long time since her husband had put on such an act for her.
A blast of unseasonal February warmth made it just possible for them to take their after-lunch coffees outside on the patio, while Hattie napped and Tom let off a bit of steam. The garden was a simple rectangle in shape, not exceptionally large, but perfect for a family. At its far end, a tree-house, a sand-pit and a long swing, graced the outstretched limb of a small oak, filling the lumpy, unkempt bit of lawn which ran alongside a tangle that had once been a vegetable garden.
Mattie sat cross-legged on the grass instead of a patio chair, blowing tremulous smoke rings at the bright blue sky and jigging her legs to some silent tune playing inside her head. Jane, watching the faint grey circles rise and fall apart on the chilly spring breeze, shivered as she shifted her chair nearer. Beside her, Michael and Julia talked in an animated way about the art of French polishing.
‘How are you, Mattie?’ she asked, the tone of her voice communicating the sincerity behind the question.
‘Oh, you know me – up and down.’ She fiddled with a dangling bit of skin near the cuticle of her left thumb. All of Mattie’s fingertips were stubby and raw where she had gnawed at the soft flesh. Once upon a time, their mother had painted her nails with a thick, repellent varnish called ‘stop ’n’ grow’, guaranteed to cure the habit. But Mattie, being Mattie, had pronounced the stuff to be delicious, and feasted on her chipped fingernails with more cannibalistic fervour than ever. Jane smiled to herself as she remembered the episode and then immediately felt sad. Where had it gone, all that easy anger of childhood, when the things to fight against were so obvious, so deeply felt? Grown-up enemies and sorrows were so much more of a blur; there were no goodies and baddies any more, just a confusion of feelings.
‘Have you been painting?’
Mattie squirmed and looked away. ‘Not really. Too bloody knackered half the time. I’ll do a bit in the summer, I expect, when the light is better. It’s still so dark in the evenings – by the time I get in from work anyway.’ She shook her dark curls and shot Jane a mischievous grin, out of nowhere, causing her sister a familiar, but painful, stab of motherly emotion. ‘I’ve become a movie junkie. I curl up on the sofa with my duvet and a few bars of chocolate – it’s great.’
Jane, knowing that Mattie was probably seeking a reassuring reprimand or two, deliberately held back, simply shaking her head with a smile. Mattie was a good painter; it was sad that she felt so little compulsion these days to do it. Being someone’s personal assistant didn’t suit her – she was almost certainly lousy at it – but it paid for her rent and cigarettes. And chocolate. Judging from the blotchy pallor of her sister’s face, she had been consuming little else.
‘Just you take care,’ Jane said softly, leaning forward to brush her fingers across Mattie’s marbled cheek.
‘And how about you, big sis, are you well?’ Mattie stood up and put her sunglasses on as she asked the question.
‘Me? Oh, I’m fine,’ replied Jane automatically, staring up at the giant reflector lenses, seeing a warped image of herself, a hunched woman in a chair. Then quite suddenly she started to cry, terrible tears that simply spilled down her face of their own accord.
‘Jane? What the—’ Mattie quickly knelt beside her and took her hands. Then Julia noticed that something was wrong and came leaping to her other side waving a handkerchief. Jane felt spectacularly embarrassed and acutely aware of Michael, sitting helpless in his chair, watching the scene of his weeping wife and the clucking women probably with horror. She knew herself that it was a truly dreadful thing to do – to burst into tears at a Sunday lunch for no reason at all. But it had crept up on her out of nowhere, stealthy and appalling, like a sudden sickness. And once she had started, it took several minutes to stop. She blew her nose hard on Julia’s immaculately ironed hanky.
‘I am sorry, all of you – I don’t know what got into me.’
‘Don’t tell me, it was my new sunglasses – I can take it. I’ll burn them the minute I get home.’
‘Dear Mat, I love your glasses.’
‘Would a drink help?’ It was the first thing Michael had said.
‘Thank you, Michael, but I’m fine now.’ There was an expectant pause, as if all three of them were waiting for an explanation. But she had none to give.
Julia and Mattie left soon afterwards. At the door, Jane laughed reassuringly with them and blamed it all on hormones.
‘I’ll call you,’ said Julia with a firm look.
‘What was all that about?’ Michael asked, when they had gone.
‘I – I don’t know.’ Jane concentrated hard on clearing the table, instinct telling her that she had something to hide, though quite what, she wasn’t sure.
‘Nobody just bursts into tears without there being some kind of reason for it.’ Michael stood in the kitchen doorway, arms folded across his broad chest, his strong, square face set in an expression of vigorous determination.
‘I suppose… I suddenly felt sad.’
‘Crying and sadness are commonly associated, this is true.’ The impatience in his tone made her rattle the plates. Upstairs, Harriet began to cry in her cot. ‘Perhaps you could be a little more explicit? After all, I don’t think your behaviour could exactly be described as normal.’
‘Normal?’ Jane looked at him for an instant before returning her attention to stacking plates. ‘I don’t know, Michael, I don’t know,’ she burst out, feeling close to tears again. ‘I’m sorry, but that’s the truth of it.’
‘Steady on, we don’t want to scare the children with all this hysteria, do we?’
Tom was standing beside his father, holding a complicated Lego construction up for approval. For an instant Jane felt that the child understood more than the man, that he was tuned into her in a way so deep that it made Michael a mere stranger by comparison.
‘I say, you’re not pregnant, are you?’ he went on, holding Tom’s creation but not looking at it.
‘No, Michael, I am not pregnant. There are other reasons that women cry.’ She wiped the table mats and stacked them back into the box, the sides of which were badly battered and held together with stiff, ageing Sellotape. They had been a wedding present from some distant relative of Michael’s who now lived in New Zealand – brilliantly coloured birds of the world, laminated so securely that their plumage shone with as much brightness as they had on the day they were unpacked.
‘Good. A baby is about the last thing we need.’
‘It’s a space rocket,’ said Tom for at least the fourth time, but very loudly now, so that Michael had to respond and Jane could escape. At least it felt like escape, as she sidled past the two of them and got on with the immediate demands of her daughter and a messy kitchen.
But all through the domestic chores of that day and the rest of the week, the unprompted outburst of crying sat in Jane’s mind like an unanswered question. She was greatly alarmed by it. To have embarrassed herself was bad enough; but far worse, was the sense of not having been in control. Some fundamental ground in her life was shifting and she was losing her balance.
4
‘You need a break,’ remarked Julia a couple of weeks later in a tone of voice that was both scolding and kind. ‘Too much bloody domesticity – baby dribble and Hoover bags – it drives most women to drink in the end. Lay down the rubber gloves and demand a holiday for yourself.’
‘Oh Julia, I can’t.’ Jane was trimming the fatty edges off some pork chops. The telephone was wedged between her ear and shoulder, causing considerable neck-ache, since the conversation had gone on for some time. ‘You know I can’t.’
‘I know you won’t, which is quite a different thing.’
‘Michael would have a fit and who would look after the children and where would I go?’
‘Rent a nanny from one of those agencies and go to a health farm. Tell Michael it’s that or a divorce.’ She laughed. ‘Be bold, woman, demand your rights.’
Jane sighed, not in the mood for her friend’s flippant confidence. ‘Rights are complicated things when you’re married. And anyway, all your suggestions are outrageously expensive. It’s impossible.’
‘Nothing is impossible, Jane,’ she retorted, ‘you’re going woolly-headed, that’s all. You’re not seeing anything beyond the wallpaper.’
Even for Julia this was curt. ‘Well, thanks for the advice,’
‘Don’t go all defensive. Tell me to shut up or bugger off, but don’t curl up in that bullet-proof shell of yours – it’s very distressing for those of us left outside in the cold.’
Jane put the phone back on its wall slot next to her shelf of kitchen jars, feeling dazed and alone. Once upon a time, it had been easy to love Michael. She looked at the pile of raw pork in front of her, pink and moist, streaked with white fat, and wondered if human flesh looked like that, beneath the skin. These days love did not come to her fresh and inspirational as it once had; now it was a stale remembered feeling that she had to dig from her mind with force. She started to cut the meat for the stew, but her knife was blunt and the pork resisted, its fatty streaks so interwoven with the pink flesh that she could not separate them. The fat with the meat, she thought, the rough with the smooth, for better for worse, and she gave up on her task, tearing the meat into big pieces and throwing them into the pan regardless.
Michael must have missed his train. Outside, a failing sun was casting its last beams across the garden, illuminating the spring-green of the grass and making the young faces of the leaves stand out against the dusky sky like jewels on metal. The blurred screen of a television flickered on in the upstairs room of the house next door; from the other side of the fence, the hollering of an angry child broke the stillness of the evening. Jane, whose own children had been asleep for half an hour at least, took a glass of wine and sat in one of the patio chairs still parked at odd angles from the not entirely successful Sunday lunch a couple of weeks before. The chair’s once shiny metal frame was now thick with rust; orange speckled with black and brown. She rubbed and picked at the worst patches with her fingers, knowing it was futile, but wanting the shine to return.
After a while she gave up and checked her watch, before going to the little shed beyond the oak tree at the bottom of the garden, where she had hidden a pack of ten cigarettes and a lighter behind an old paint tin. Having lit one, she inhaled slowly, closing her eyes, enjoying the dry burning at the back of her throat and the faint sensation of giddiness. Perhaps Julia was right; perhaps some time alone was all she needed. Time and uninterrupted sleep. Jane took another drag, aware of the smell of garlic and onions on her hands and the tiny shreds of pork still stuck under her fingernails. The faint sound of a slamming door gave her a jolt. She hastily dropped the cigarette and set off back towards the house, balancing on the balls of her feet to avoid the worst of the late February mud.
‘Oh, there you are.’
‘My God, Michael. You startled me. I thought you’d be on the later train.’
‘So, I can still surprise you, after all these years.’ He was in a good mood, smiling, saying nothing about the cigarette – though he only kissed her on the nose. ‘They’ve changed the train times – British Rail strikes again, so to speak.’ He sniffed the air, which smelt of mint – sole survivor of an inherited, erstwhile herb bed – mixed with smoke. ‘The garden isn’t looking too bad.’ He tugged a small twist of bindweed from the nearest shrub and put it in his pocket. ‘What’s for supper?’
‘Pork. A sort of stew.’
He blew vigorously on his hands and rubbed them together. ‘Great. It’s bloody cold out here. Let’s get inside.’
‘It’s not that cold, it’s lovely. I was going to sit with my drink for a bit.’
‘Really?’ He gave a snort and stomped back inside, only to return a couple of minutes later wearing an anorak and bringing the wine bottle and a glass with him. He placed them carefully on the table before sitting down in the chair nearest hers.
‘Good day?’
‘More or less.’
‘Children all right?’
‘Tom wailed at the school gates and Harriet lunged at the shelves of the supermarket like a mini sumo wrestler. So pretty normal all round. What about you?’
‘Monstrously busy.’
‘You always say that.’
‘That’s because it’s always true. Will supper be ready yet?’ He patted his stomach which was flattish but soft.
‘Shall we talk about our marriage instead of supper?’
‘Whatever for?’
‘It might be interesting.’
‘I highly doubt it.’ Michael laughed, pouring himself some wine.
There was a terrible complacency in his aspect which struck Jane with such force that for a moment she could not speak. Had it always been there, she wondered, or had it edged into him, an early, teasing component of what he would become.
‘Why are you in such a good mood anyway? Have you been given a pay rise or found a mistress or something?’ she countered, with a wicked urge to knock all the smugness out of him.
But Michael looked even more pleased, enjoying her banter. ‘No such luck on either account, I’m afraid.’ He stretched as he grinned, thinking of the crisp perfection of Antonia’s presentation and the neat pleated slit at the back of her pinstripe skirt. ‘Perhaps I feel good because I’m almost thirty-five and not yet bald or fat or poor or lonely.’
‘Those are all negatives. It’s not the same as saying I’m slim and rich and surrounded by people I adore.’ She eyed the thick curls of his hair. ‘You’re certainly not bald.’
‘And I do adore you.’ He reached out and patted her hand.
Jane sat unmoving, unable to respond, suddenly rigid with cold. It wasn’t enough and it wasn’t true. Michael adored her according to his moods; if he felt good, he said he adored her. It had nothing to do with love. She withdrew her hand and cupped her wine glass to her chest, staring into the yellowy liquid, watching a bobbing fragment of cork on its surface.
‘I’m starving. And Christ, now it is cold.’ He jumped up from his chair and walked briskly down the garden to where she had dropped her cigarette. Gingerly, he picked it up, holding it as he might a dead worm, before hurling it into the mass of variegated ivy that grew along, through and round their garden fence in a collage of greens.
Jane went inside to boil some water for peas. Why was trying to talk about the real things so hard, she wondered, when, in many ways they knew each other so well. Once it had been simple enough. When her parents were killed and Mattie went off the rails, Michael had empowered her. Just the sound of his voice had been soothing. She had loved his unflurried rationality, the way he weighed up what had to be done, assessed things, sorted them out, tackled them head on without fear.
