Laying the Ghost (6 page)

‘No, you were just being contrary. At the risk of you clouting me, I’d say you already sound a tad old-maidish.’

Nell couldn’t argue with that. She reminded herself of Mimi as a small child, having a foot-stamping ‘I’m
bored
’ moment.

‘Well why not? Who
are
these people who do all this “joining”, anyway? When are these abandoned-but-putting-a-brave-face-on-it women supposed to earn a living? There isn’t a moment in the day for that little consideration, apparently, not once you’ve got all those activity things out of the way. According to the book, you get up early and pimp your body down at the gym, then it’s hair, manicure, a gossipy lunch with someone, then an afternoon doing something worthily cultural. The implication is that that’s
every single day
! How exhausting, expensive and totally self-indulgent is that?’

‘Well, one thing you’re definitely signing up for is the
Stay
Safe course they’re doing down at the gym. While you were away a notice went up on the board. It’s a mixture of self-defence and tips on personal safety measures that any fool should already know but of course we don’t. I can’t go, the classes are on my Pilates night and God knows, I can’t skip those, but you should do it. Go and learn the stuff for both of us so that next time some little mugger twerp grabs your bag you can deck him and give him a fright.’

‘You know, that’s not such a bad idea,’ Nell told her. ‘If I’m going to be living on my own permanently I could use a few self-defence tips. Even when Alex was working away, I sort of felt – stupidly, I know – that I was safe once the chain was on the door, but I know it’s not enough. As for the other stuff, well – I guess I’ll just carry on as normal. Alex and I had pretty much separate lives for the last couple of years anyway, so nothing much has changed. And OK, you’re right in a way, I suppose sex would be good, maybe a long time ahead. Not yet though. Don’t relationships deserve a decent period of mourning?’

In this case, it crossed Nell’s mind, possibly she could do with a few months and an uncomfortable check-up to be sure Alex hadn’t left her with some unpleasant little health issues. What a sod he’d been, this last year or so.

‘Ah! You see? I was right!’ Kate looked triumphant, beaming at Nell in a way that made Nell think she’d already got a plan, ready hatched. She sincerely hoped
not.
Kate was good at plans – for other people. Not so good at her own, though. After her two sons hit the teenage stage she’d planned on a full-time postgrad course, but suddenly found she was the mother of a third boy, accidental Alvin.

‘Well, OK, it was the climate in Barbados,’ Nell admitted, laughing. ‘I always was a bit solar-powered in that department. Now that I’m back in freezing February England with layers and layers of clothes, sex seems very much less desirable. And out there in the steamy heat, it’s easy to blame the cocktails.’

‘Well, a drink or two on a sultry night and we all feel a bit rampant. It’s natural. It’s how we ended up with Alvin.’ Kate slid her fingers slowly up and down the edge of her mug, clearly thinking along the lines of Faye Dunaway giving the come-on to Steve McQueen in the
Thomas Crown Affair
chess game.

‘There was this cocktail list at one bar we went to that got to me,’ Nell told her. ‘All the drinks had provocative, raunchy names like Sex on the Beach, Between the Sheets, Slow Comfortable Screw, all the sort of smirk-inducing stuff that you felt a complete idiot asking the barman for. You couldn’t help thinking about sex. And then I started wondering, and I had this bit of panic: a kind of, suppose I never, ever do it again? Now that Alex has gone, suppose that’s it, for evermore? Shop shut, without even a closing-down sale. A Screaming Orgasm could end up as
no
more than a choice on a tacky cocktail menu, not a real-life option with a real-life man.’

‘Well you could always …’

‘No! Don’t even go there, Kate. I know what you’re thinking and I don’t want a Rabbit! Mimi has to live here too, remember. I don’t want anything in the house that I’d be embarrassed for her to find. Not to mention the buzzing. And besides, it’s not the same.’ Nell had actually considered this DIY option, back when Alex had given away his guilt by using bed-avoidance tactics. She’d concluded that sex with a bright pink, glittery plastic item would be too much like playing with toys meant for Barbie. On a bigger scale, of course.

‘You wouldn’t want your cleaner to find anything like that, either. I knew a woman who had a lovely big shiny black vibrator that she kept in her knicker drawer and one day the cleaner got it out, polished it up and put it right in the middle of the bedroom window ledge where all the neighbours could look at it.’

Nell giggled. ‘Wow, what was the cleaner doing searching through her underwear anyway? Andréa never would. That would be one employee you wouldn’t want to under-tip at Christmas!’

‘Too right. And me, I’d have fired her. Now as for …’

‘I told you …!’

‘Yes but I was just going to suggest …’

‘No, Kate. Give me a break.’

‘No, not a new
live-with
man. What you need is a
comfort
man! Haven’t you got some nice safe old boyfriend from way back tucked away somewhere that you could dig out and play with for a bit? Just to get you back into the market in a sort of safe, easy way? You should always hang on to a spare from the past, you know … it says so in …’

‘In
After He’s Gone
. Yes I know.’ Nell had read that section with yet another feeling of failure. No, she hadn’t got a backup sex supply, ready and available like a roadside rescue service. Who had?

‘What about that man next door?’

‘What?
Charles?
Are you mad? He bats for the other side, I think.’

‘But you don’t know?’

‘He lived with his mother all his life. She only died a few months ago.’

‘There are often good reasons for that.’

‘Well, she was pushing ninety …’

‘No, I meant reasons for living with their mothers.’

‘Are you kidding? Name one, Kate. Today’s challenge. Oh and he’s a sudoku obsessive.’

‘OK. You win on that one. But then his brother is there in the week, mostly, isn’t he? Don’t tell me he’s gay as well. Is it statistically likely?’

‘Ah now, Ed. Used to come and stay a lot but now he’s got a job at the sixth-form college and is here for every
term-time
week. He’s lovely, but only in a friends way. He’s the sort you ask to help when the fence blows down in a gale or your battery’s flat. The car one, I mean,’ she giggled. ‘Not the one in your Rabbit!’

‘Friends is a good enough way to start. Was he there at Evie’s party last night?’

‘He was, and he is very sweet, but …’

‘OK, we’ll keep him on hold for later. What about ex-lovers? Don’t you have an address book somewhere with the old shag list?’

‘I didn’t have a shag list,’ Nell admitted. ‘There was only really …’

Kate recoiled. ‘Oh God, Nell, don’t tell me there was only Alex! You surely weren’t a virgin bride?’

Fleetingly, Nell wondered if there was any such thing any more. It was almost tempting to tease Kate by saying yes, she had been, and see how long it took for Kate to email such a rare fact to all her Internet mates.

‘No … There was Marcus, who doesn’t really count, then Patrick for nearly five years. And then a string of non-serious boyfriends who didn’t much matter before Alex. But really, I don’t want …’

‘What … to see him again? I bet you’ve thought about it! Good grief, five years …’

‘No – I don’t even want to talk about him, actually. There’s no point. I haven’t seen him since we split up.’

She’d reread his old letters, though. No emails back
then,
just proper, personal handwritten items you could hold and smell and remember. What would Mimi and Seb’s generation have to remind them of the poignant times? Printed-out emails? Memories of two-word texts that were no more than CUL8R or LUVU? She wasn’t going to tell Kate that these letters were only feet away from her, in the dresser drawer.

‘Acrimonious split?’

Nell laughed. It sounded like a bitter echo. ‘Oh yes! I’d say that was definitely the word at the time. I met Alex fairly soon after that.’

‘Ah. Rebound marriage. No wonder it all fell apart. So will you tell me about it? And why haven’t you before?’

‘It wasn’t a rebound marriage,’ Nell protested. ‘If it had been, it would have fallen to bits much sooner, wouldn’t it? It was … oh I don’t know, a safe option, a comfort zone.’

‘And Patrick wasn’t?’

‘God no! Patrick was never about comfort. He would have been a heart choice. But he’d broken mine, so I went for the head option instead. Someone who made sense.’ Nell reached across the table and took a handful of tissues from the box. Where were tears coming from, all of a sudden?

Kate took her hand. ‘Always better to make love than make sense, you know, darling.’

‘Is it?’ Nell giggled through her tears. ‘Where does it say that in
After He’s Gone
?’

‘I expect it’ll be in the next edition. So what are you going to do about him?’

‘Who?’ As if she didn’t know what was coming. Nell held her breath, waiting for Kate to say his name.

‘Patrick. The one you cheated on Alex with.’

‘I didn’t cheat! Not once – I haven’t seen him since …’

‘You know I didn’t mean literally. I mean in your head. I bet you thought about him loads over the years. Poor Alex. I’m reluctant to waste my sympathy but, well, you’re lucky your marriage lasted twenty days, let alone twenty years. Did he know he played second fiddle to a ghost?’

‘That’s not how it was,’ Nell insisted. ‘There was no chance, no chance at all of Patrick and me getting together ever again. I gave Alex my absolute best shot, honestly.’

‘Honestly?’

‘Honestly. As far as I could.’

‘Exactly. “As far as I could.” And on that damning phrase – which, incidentally, reminds me of the thing Prince Charles said, “whatever love is” – I’ll give you just one piece of advice, one word: Google. Find Patrick and tidy up the past. Get whatever it is that still makes you cry so ridiculously easily out of your system, once and for all.’

4

Heroes And Villains

(The Beach Boys)

‘COME ON, MIMI
. Wake up! We’re getting off here!’ The bus lurched round the corner and Tess bashed Mimi hard on her arm.

‘Hey, you, I’ll have a bruise there now!’ Mimi squealed. An elderly lady wearing a pumpkin-orange crocheted hat tutted loudly from across the aisle. Mimi scowled at her. Old bat. You should have waited till after the school rush, she thought. Shrieky kids are what you get, before nine.

‘It won’t show on your tan, will it?’ Tess grabbed her arm and hauled Mimi out of her seat. Mimi reached back for her schoolbag. There was no arguing with Tess.

‘It’s not even our stop,’ Mimi grumbled. It was freezing. No way did she want to walk that extra quarter of a mile
to
school. It had been bad enough plodding up the road from home to the bus stop with the wind gusting under her hair and down her neck. She was sure it did it on purpose to punish her for that lovely week in the sun.

‘We’ll be late in now, you do realize that don’t you?’ she said as Tess bundled her on to the pavement. It was no good. What Tess wanted, Tess got – was that useful in a best friend? Mimi wasn’t sure. It depended on whether the best friend wanted the same as you did. If she did, it could make you lazy – you’d just have to hover around in her orbit and all you wanted (boys, parties, lifts to places) would come your way. But if you didn’t, if you wanted different things, you could have a life of battling to be yourself. It was heading that way at the moment. Tess kept having little goes at her: ‘Your hair would look good with pink highlights,’ ‘Not the New Look skirt, it’s like,
soo
not.’

Tess hadn’t always been like this, or had she? When they were seven and in ballet class, hadn’t Tess always got the best spot in the front row? Hadn’t she always wangled it so she’d been the one on the right when they were paired up for the ballet exams, which was where everyone wanted to be because you got to wear the pink ribbon and not the blue one and you got to go second with the set dance, which meant you also could see how rubbish your partner had been before you had your own go at it and could remind yourself where not to do it wrong? They’d moved on from the days of ballet class, though; it wasn’t
about
crowing over who was better at skipping sweetly through the birdcage dance and who passed the exam with Honours and who only got a Commended, not any more. This was about Boys. It was a big, all-important battlefield. It was the hottest competition. Tess, Mimi realized, was all ready for it today – full-scale make-up and her favourite boots, the high ones she’d been told at school
not
to wear.

‘I blame our parents,’ Tess was saying as they leaned into the bitter wind. ‘I mean, what were they doing, sending us to an all-girls’ school? Like they didn’t want us to know what fifty per cent of the population was about? Isn’t learning to live with men an education in itself?’

‘It is. It’s what Seb calls the Reality School,’ Mimi agreed, feeling slightly more spirited as she caught sight of a promising knot of St Edmund’s boys kicking a can around outside Tesco Metro. Joel might be among them. She liked Joel. Tess didn’t know this, but even if she did, it didn’t matter for once. Tess had already dismissed him as a nerdy boff. He was very quiet and very clever and not full of it like most of the others. Mimi was also inclined to be quiet and clever. She made an effort to be as full of rubbishy chat as everyone else, though, purely as a means of survival. It could be lonely being sidelined. A girl from the year above them had got the sideline treatment a year before and had left. Silent bullying, that had been the lecture they’d all been treated to after she’d taken the
overdose.
But no one had
actually
bullied her, not really. They just didn’t know her. It had been a simple, sad matter of no communication lines on either side, nothing spiteful. It had worked both ways.