Other People's Husbands Read online

  Floss shuffled closer, sniffing at the path, telling him it was time to move. Conrad got up to follow her and the two of them ambled along, turning left on to the Thames towpath where the view was of riverfront gardens on Eel Pie Island. Occasional cyclists whizzed past but it was the jogger who caused the trouble. Conrad idly threw a long, fat stick for Floss and she lolloped after it, giving him a backward glance as she ran. ‘It’s OK, girl,’ he called to her. ‘If it’s demeaning to chase it, don’t bother.’ Floss took no notice but picked up the stick and started bringing it back to him. The collision was initially between dog and runner, who, overtaking man and dog, sidestepped the long stick that protruded from Floss’s mouth and managed, at the same time, to crash into Conrad. As he tripped and slid uncomfortably down the steep riverbank, he heard a muffled ‘Sorry!’ as the jogger hurtled onwards, iPod blasting, pedometer clocking up, no thought of looking back.

  ‘Fuck and bugger.’ Conrad swore in the direction of Floss, who stood above him as if wondering what she should do. She gave a couple of uncertain barks. He tried to shift himself towards a handhold but the nearest shrub was just out of reach. Instead, alarmingly, he felt himself slip closer to the water. There had been a lot of rain lately and the river was running fast and high. He could let himself slither down to a cold watery death or he could sit like a helpless baby and wait for rescue. What a choice. An old man’s choice – and not really one at all.

  ‘You all right love?’ There was a cackle of witchy laughter from above him and Conrad warily risked looking up, to see a pair of women of similar age to himself. One of them he’d seen a few times before – a cheerful egg-shaped sort in a lilac beret and the inevitable beige mac, who always addressed the good-morning greeting to Floss rather than to him. Fine by him – he appreciated peace and privacy. Dog-walking didn’t have to be the social event that so many liked to make it. You had to decide on the why and if, when it came to mid-walk conversation

  He couldn’t move. Conrad was stuck and felt strangely remote in his realization that he wasn’t physically capable of getting himself out of this position. A younger, fitter man would have no trouble scrambling up the bank. A younger, fitter man would have power in his limbs, flexibility, strength. He’d had those, rather assumed they were still there in some kind of emergency pack – where were they? Somewhere along the years they’d been used up without him really noticing. What was it he’d just been thinking, only minutes ago, about feeling much the same as usual (apart from the hip, the night peeing, the sex expiry, the longer-teeth thing)? Now he didn’t feel remotely youth-strong. When he needed it, the vitality bag proved to be empty. This was vile. Demeaning.

  ‘You don’t want to be sitting down there, dear,’ Lilac Beret’s companion called, ‘you’ll catch a chill. Here, have a hand.’

  The two women, holding on to branches of elder, reached down and gratefully he allowed them to haul him up the bank. They were surprisingly powerful.

  ‘At our age we have to look out for each other. No one else will,’ Lilac Beret told him. ‘Bloody runners, that girl never even looked back.’

  ‘You could sue,’ her friend ventured, looking eager at the idea.

  Conrad thanked them, brushed mud from his jeans, called to Floss and slowly, heavily, conscious of his fast-thudding heart, retraced his steps to the path through the bracken towards where he’d left his car. At our age, he thought miserably. These could be the people he would one day be sitting alongside, parked in a care home to endure an incontinent future of wipe-clean chairs and endless blaring daytime TV. They were kind, friendly, cheerful and sweet, but he wouldn’t want to share the rest of his life with them. Would they think him a miserable git because he didn’t want to join in the sing-songs of ‘White Cliffs Of Dover’ and ‘Roll Out The Barrel’, or might they too prefer to listen to Bob Dylan and John Lee Hooker? No, he didn’t think they would. Something about the lilac beret on one and the turquoise satin jacket on the other said Cliff Richard to him – back in the late fifties they’d have thought Cliff racy but a Nice Boy, safer than Elvis. Before him they’d have been keen on Frank Sinatra.

  He added another item to his list of things he wasn’t going to do any more. Life. It was time to leave life’s party. The girls were grown-up now and more or less sorted. Sara would have time to find someone else, someone with a racing chance of outliving her, someone who wasn’t going to sap the last of her vitality by falling apart at a fair old pace, as he surely would. Leaving her a widow in only her mid-forties was the kindest, most generous thing he could do for her, to save her from having to live for years with a decaying husk of a man. It would be his final gift. It was time to go.

  To his surprise, the decision quite cheered him up. For one thing, it meant he could get back to having sex. He liked sleeping in the studio; watching old movies or cricket on TV at four in the morning was a guilt-free delight, but he did miss Sara’s warm soft body. He would somehow keep his own premises but visit her bed, the way the nation imagined royalty managed these things. With his personal expiry date sorted for the near future, he could surely count on having enough sexual gas left in the tank for the duration. Good – a cheering upside to imminent death. Now all he needed was to work out how to die.

  Conrad drove over Richmond Bridge, turned off the main street and parked under the chestnut trees on the far side of the Green. ‘Two minutes,’ he said to Floss, who was now lying in the passenger seat’s footwell, half asleep. He climbed out of the car, shoved 50p into the parking meter and hoped he could still walk fast enough to Tesco Metro and back for the time not to expire. Inside the store he went straight to the front till. ‘Twenty Gitanes please,’ he said. ‘Oh, and a cheap lighter.’

  It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Why hadn’t anyone told her? Cassandra chucked Pride and Prejudice on to the floor, got up from the sofa and went into the bedroom to look at her six-month-old son as he slept and snuffled in his cot. She stood beside him, corkscrewing a slightly greasy strand of her hair in her fingers and watching the baby’s uneven breathing. Why couldn’t she just cut off from this mother-thing, relax and get on with something useful instead of counting the minutes to when Charlie woke up again? When would real life come back? Would it ever? When he was awake he needed all her attention. When he was asleep she was permanently tense, forever on the alert for that first stir, the involuntary upward jerk of the tiny arms, that little bleat before the baby worked out what waking up meant and started howling for food. Cassandra was guiltily aware she was supposed to use these precious few hours to catch up on her work. She had an essay on Hardy and the Industrial Revolution to write and should be working her way through Jane Austen in any spare time. Spare time? What was that?

  ‘You should have quite an easy time of it in the early months,’ the midwife had told her in that breezy manner of the childless. ‘It’s a simple matter of feeding and sleeping and the odd bath.’

  For the baby, that was supposed to be. So, right – that was a joke, was it?

  Cassandra, several months into motherhood, could still barely fit those things in for herself. The health visitor down at the clinic had given her that look, the one that said, ‘If you approach things in an organized way it’ll all be fine.’ She was keen on the magic word ‘routine’, as if babies, mothers and their useless bloody partners ran on some infallible form of autopilot. The woman had been so wrong. That was a total joke, a cruel one; not only had Cassandra completely lost track of what ‘spare’ was in terms of time, but her ability to absorb any serious literature seemed to have gone the same way as her once-tight stomach muscles. Body and brain, she was reduced to a formless jelly. Twenty-one years old and nothing but a blubbery, exhausted lump. What would she be like at thirty? How did people ever have more than one child? Presumably by having two of them in the active-parent mix. That would help.

  Cass lay on the bed, pulled up her top and pinched a thick wodge of her midriff flesh between her fingers. It looked mottled and felt doughy, and
she was sure she could see individual clods of fat beneath the skin. It reminded her of the clayey lumps of earth on her mother’s spade last year, when she was digging the hole in the garden to bury the last of the pet rabbits. There’d been so many, one after another since Cass’s fifth birthday, and their names, and the order of their being, were fading from her memory. What were once loved pets with individual characters were now morphed into one giant, multi-shaded bunny.

  Sometimes in the stew-hot hours of the night during the last weeks of her pregnancy, while Paul was beside her deep in the sleep of the blissfully untroubled and she was lying awake with one foot out from the duvet trying to get cool, she’d gone through the rabbit names, trying to get back to sleep by remembering them in order. She could always start off OK with Blossom, then Flopsy and Moll and Steven (where had that one come from? Pandora probably – she could just see Panda’s big-sister sneer, hear her haughtily insisting, ‘My rabbit’s having a proper name’), but from then it was a blur. Her mad aunt Lizzie had confided that she did the same getting-to-sleep trick but with old lovers, starting from the schoolboy who’d dealt with her inconvenient virginity and moving on through the one-night stands of the hippy late sixties right through to what she called the ‘amusements’ that she’d indulged in during her three marriages. Would that be it for ever now for Cass, she wondered? No lovers, just half-forgotten pet rabbits to count when lying awake and weepily sleepless in this tiny, tatty flat?

  Paul. She could guess where he was now. He’d be in the Union bar playing pool and eyeing up the Sports Science students. He liked a firm, tight bum on a girl and where better to find one than on a sleek, springy athlete? He’d liked Cass’s; swore (though mostly when he was pissed) that he still liked it, but then the other night he’d asked her (and there had been, as he’d asked, an element of heading for a staircase in the pitch dark), did it always take this long to get back into shape after a baby?

  ‘How the hell should I know?’ Cass had shrieked, out-raged by the question, screaming out insecurity of which he should have been more aware. She didn’t feel like a girl any more. She’d crossed over into woman-land, mother-land, and would never come back. Paul, on the other hand, didn’t seem to be in any way different since fatherhood. He was just the same silly what’s-the-hassle lad.

  She looked at the clock beside the bed. Charlie wouldn’t sleep much longer – it was hardly worth starting the essay now, and she’d only made half a page of scrappy notes anyway. If she started, it would either all be rushed rubbish or she’d have to break off and would lose the thread when she went back to it. She was taking Charlie over to her parents’ place for dinner too, which took out the whole evening and meant that yet again the work wouldn’t get done. Not that she minded, really – the thought of home food and home comfort and even sharing table space with her prickly know-it-all older sister was almost enough to make her sob with longing.

  This wasn’t working. Paul should have been home an hour ago. He’d promised that today he’d come back early and deal with all the surplus junk in the tiny space she could hardly call a hallway: the surfboards still sandy from his previous weekend’s trip to Croyde, the skis that had been there since February, the heap of smelly trainers. He’d turn up eventually, all dopey grin and ‘sorry’ in that annoying public-school drawl that became ever more incomprehensible and devoid of consonants the drunker he got. The sink was full of dishes (his), the bedroom was a junk shop of abandoned clothes (his) and cheap rubbish furniture (the landlord’s). Drawer fronts were coming apart and the wardrobe door was off, leaning against the wall. Cassandra and the baby were a tiny, tidy island in the middle of the chaos.

  ‘Sod it,’ Cass murmured, looking at the debris. She didn’t want this disorder around her perfect new-minted child. Paul had promised he’d change, be more organized, keep things clean, respect the baby’s newness and fragility and make at least some effort to try and hit the standards aimed for, surely, by any parent. But the reality was that nothing had changed for him, unless you counted the way all the girls, many of whom would never previously have given him a second look, thought him ‘so sweet’ for the way he was with Charlie. How little it took – he only had to push the buggy into the college and they were all round him like flies on meat, going ‘aaaah, cute’ and not just at the baby. Other than that, well, life ticked on just the same for him – bar/football/getting wrecked/daytime telly/ Monster Munch.

  Cass reached under the bed and hauled out a couple of big bags. She packed quickly – there wasn’t much here that was hers, really. So many of her clothes still didn’t fit her that she’d left them at home in her old room, hardly able to bear to see them, let alone bring them back to this scuzzy little flat and have them taunting her from inside the doorless wardrobe. She didn’t want this any more. She was heading home. And not just for dinner.

  Art must take reality by surprise.

  (Françoise Sagan)

  ‘Goodness – I know babies need a lot of kit but . . .’ Sara commented, as Cass made her third trip from her car into the house with bags. What she’d brought was lined up in the hallway, starting with Charlie in his car seat at the bottom of the stairs and stretching back to Cass’s laptop and a pair of black bin bags by the door. These looked suspiciously like laundry, which was no surprise – both girls had left home yet still seemed to think the washing machine was for their casual use – but Sara hoped it wasn’t Paul’s washing as well as Cass’s and Charlie’s. Cass was only twenty-one – she shouldn’t be drudging around for her idle boyfriend. Moreover, Sara’s inner feminist reminded her, what did age have to do with it?

  ‘There. I think that’s it,’ Cass said, sitting on the bottom stair and reaching down to tweak Charlie’s sock, which was dangling off his foot. ‘Just about everything. You don’t mind do you, Mum?’

  She looked despondent and slightly sheepish, not meeting Sara’s eye. Sara also noted that her hair looked straggly and matted and needed washing, and that the skin around her nails was bitten and flaking. Poor girl, this independent-motherhood bit was taking its toll. She’d been so determined that it would be all right, that she and Paul could manage, pointing out that there were solitary teenagers, years younger than her, coping fine by them-selves in tower-block bedsits. She, on the other hand, was a privileged and relatively affluent student, flat-sharing with her equally privileged and definitely affluent trust-fundx boyfriend. The three of them were, she’d insisted proudly, A Family.

  ‘I’m not sure. It depends what’s to mind. What’s wrong, Cassie?’ Sara could guess what was coming. It didn’t take a genius to recognize that a stricken-looking daughter unloading all her worldly possessions was going to be on the premises for more than an evening. Was this post-natal depression kicking in late or something else?

  Cass’s eyes filled with tears and she covered her face with her hands. The cuffs of her pink linen sweater were bitten and holed. She hadn’t done cuff-chewing since she was fifteen and was picked on by the school nasty girls who gave her a hard time when Conrad, in a Sunday Times piece on the gardens of contemporary painters, had been photographed naked lying face up on the diving board, surrounded by pots of priapic agapanthus at their most suggestive about-to-flower stage.

  Sara sat on the stairs beside her daughter and put her arm round her. ‘Come on, tell me. It’ll be all right.’

  There was a long intake of breath, then out it all came. ‘I can’t do this! I’m so tired and I thought it would be so easy!’ She shook and sobbed. ‘And why can’t I do it? Other women can!’ Sara winced at the word ‘women’, recognizing, as Cassandra herself had earlier, that this represented one of life’s big moving-on moments. She’d become a grown-up along with becoming a mother. Barely beyond her teens, she seemed years older, right now, than her single, child-free sister of twenty-four.

  ‘No one can do it all by themselves, Cass. It’s the same for all new mothers.’ Sara knew this wasn’t necessarily the most reassuring thing to say, but she could onl
y go with the truth as she knew it. ‘And you’ve got all your university work too – that’s as much as having a demanding full-time job as well as a baby. What about Paul? Doesn’t he help you?’ Sara felt the inner feminist prodding her again for using the word ‘help’. It made the childcare sound as if it was really entirely Cassie’s role, as if when he joined in he was bestowing a generous favour, not taking an automatic fair and equal share of the responsibility – but then in the early months, if the feeding doesn’t involve bottles, it was hard to prevent it being mostly a mother’s role.

  ‘He’s got rugby training all the time,’ Cass muttered. ‘And his dissertation to do. And . . . I hate the flat . . . it’s a minging filthy pit. It never feels clean, whatever I do, and . . .’The tears began rolling again.

  Sara picked up the nearest of the bags and started to take them upstairs. ‘It’s all right – you don’t have to explain. I can guess,’ she said. ‘Your old room’s big enough for you and Charlie for now. We can sort something else out later, depending on what you decide about staying.’

  ‘It’s only for a little while, Mum. I’ll be OK soon.’ Cassandra picked up some bags of books and hauled them up the stairs. On the wall at the top was the familiar strange, gold-dappled painting Conrad had done of her and Pandora as children, playing in the garden. His signature spare yet bold brushstrokes looked so casually placed and random to the passing glance, but there was that depth, that magic capturing of the easy animal grace of children running. You could almost hear them laughing, smell the soft, lush grass beneath their flying feet. Cass touched the painting with her finger as she passed, feeling love and warmth and the safety of being back home.