Second Chance (3 page)

When I rang my hosts the next morning to say thank you, great party and sorry I had to rush off, I was told that Paul Farringdon had stayed on searching for me when everyone else had left, that to get rid of him, they'd had to give him my telephone number and hoped I didn't mind.

For a few days I waited to hear from him and had to admit to feeling disappointed, even aggrieved, when he didn't ring.

A month or so later I happened to run into him at a local estate agent's. We both seemed embarrassed, but all the same decided to have lunch together, during which we didn't refer to the party or my sudden disappearance, but talked of property prices, the merits of various districts and the horrors of negative equity. We were both looking for a flat, he because he had had to move out of the marital home which was his wife's, and I because the lease on my present flat was running out.

We looked through lists together. We seemed to have the same priorities; a fairly quiet road with no pub or takeaway within fifty yards and no more than ten minutes walk from the tube or a good bus route.

It was early June, I remember, and sunny. We ate pasta and tomato salad and drank a very rough Chianti. I liked the thorough way he mopped up his salad dressing; I find something reassuring about a man who's fond of bread.

‘What happened to your mother?' he asked when he'd finished eating. ‘Did she recover?' He'd remembered our conversation. He looked over at me as though really anxious to know.

‘She did recover. Eventually. More or less.'

‘Is she still alive?'

‘Yes.'

He leaned back in his chair and looked at me for a moment. And I felt that something had been decided. This man was interested in me and I in him. The sun was suddenly white and dazzling and I put on a pair of rather glamorous sunglasses and waited for him to make the next move.

He invited himself to the theatre in Greenwich where I was playing that night. I wished he was seeing me in a leading role, or at least one I was proud of, rather than in a small part in a fairly worthless play which I'd taken because it slotted in rather nicely between two tellys. Anyway, I was pleased when he dismissed the play as sexist rubbish, said he'd decide what sort of actor I was when he saw me in something better, and then drove me to an interesting but unassuming restaurant in Blackheath. I was not so pleased, though, when he dropped me off outside my flat about an hour later, without even a perfunctory kiss; a brief squeeze of the hand only.

I'd summed him up as straightforward and unaffected; mature, in fact, but felt, all the same, that there was a subtle difference between maturity and advanced middle age. He was interested in me, I knew that, but didn't seem prepared to make any definite move. Perhaps it would be another month before I saw him again. He hadn't even given me his telephone number.

I was annoyed with myself for feeling so let-down. My last affair, which had lasted about three years, had ended six months earlier and, though it was I who'd finally decided on the break-up, I was still finding the nights long and lonely. I knew I was ready to start again. I wanted another affair, but more loving than the last and less destructive. Why had I decided on this man whom I hardly knew? He wasn't exactly handsome, but easy on the eye for all that; good bones, lines around the eyes, a smile that seemed tender rather than clever or malicious.

I went over our conversation in the car and the restaurant. Had I said something to shock him? People sometimes accuse me of being outspoken and tactless, but I'd had no occasion for it, we hadn't argued or disagreed about anything. Had I seemed too eager, asked too many questions about his work and his family? If that was it, I had to accept defeat. I always ask too many questions.

All the same, I would have liked to show him my flat, all my pretty things; three antique rugs, some Meissen cups and saucers, my French bed with the heavy lace bedcover I'd recently dyed with china tea. I'd spent over an hour tidying up: I'd have a wretched time finding my clothes the next day.

I got myself to bed, but couldn't sleep, disappointment eating into me. I was thirty-three, I told myself, perhaps too old for easy conquests. But he's a lot older, I said the next minute, at least ten years older. Who does he think he is? He asks for my phone number at a party and doesn't ring me, then takes me out for a meal late at night and doesn't proposition me. I went over the time we'd spent together, minute by minute. I liked the way he'd taken care of me without being officious, the way he'd chatted to the waiter, asking his opinion about what to order. I hate men who're haughty with waiters – and it's always men – I realise it's only a lack of self-esteem, but I still hate it. And men who pretend they know absolutely everything there is to know about wine. How can they know anything at all about poetry and music and art, the things that really matter, if they spend all their time learning absolutely everything there is to know about wine. For about an hour I thought about all the foolish and pompous men I'd had dealings with in my life. But at the end of it I found myself even more convinced that Paul Farringdon was different; caring and kind.

I felt too disappointed, too cheated, to sleep. I grieved and fretted and tossed and turned in my king-sized bed and at eight o'clock, still wide awake, I got up and went to my tiny guest room and tried again in a cool, fresh bed with only a sheet and a thin weave blanket over me. And this time I slept. And because I was in a different room, didn't hear the phone.

I slept until three. It was a beautiful fresh day, the light, coming in from the garden instead of the street, apple green. I thought of iced water and coffee, but was in no hurry to get up either. I was pleased I'd slept through half the day. I knew I'd start feeling hurt and aggrieved again as soon as I was fully awake.

This time I heard the phone. It was Paul. ‘You were out early,' he said. ‘I phoned, hoping we could lunch together.'

A sob came up from my throat. ‘Did you say lunch?'

‘Yes, but I suppose you've had some by this time.'

I didn't answer. Why couldn't he have suggested lunch last night so that I could have had a decent night's sleep? ‘I've only now woken up,' I said. ‘I was awake all night.'

‘Why couldn't you sleep? I thought you'd be exhausted after your performance last night. That's why I didn't suggest coming in.'

‘I thought you didn't want to. And that's why I couldn't sleep.'

It was his turn to be silent. ‘You're very direct, aren't you,' he said at last. ‘I've never met anyone before who says exactly what they mean. I'm not used to it.'

‘Are you complaining about me already?'

‘Kate, I simply can't believe my luck. I simply can't believe you wanted me last night. It stuns me.'

I counted to ten. ‘I want you now, too.'

Another silence. ‘I'll be with you in half an hour.'

‘Half an hour? There's no traffic here on Sunday afternoon. It'll only take you ten minutes if you hurry.'

So lovely, that first time together. Even though the flat was on the first floor, we could smell the roses and honeysuckle in the garden.

Perhaps it was my fault, after that beginning, that things moved so fast. Within three days Paul had suggested that we buy a house between us rather than a flat each. But I was wary, knowing from experience that when two hardworking people share a house it turns out exactly like marriage but without the wedding presents and the party. And when they separate they still have all the books and tapes to sort out.

I held out for a few weeks. During that time he spent most of the time in my flat and I found I liked him more and more. He was domesticated without being faddy and good-humoured without being tiresomely cheerful at all times. Could I ever, I asked myself, find a more loving or more civilised partner? Definitely not. There might be something missing – that frisson of danger perhaps – but it was surely something I was now mature enough to do without.

What small events govern our lives. I can't now escape the thought that I was feeling ready to settle down at that time because I'd recently lost a television part I'd been up for. My agent had been convinced I'd get it; it was the juvenile lead in a fairly lightweight domestic comedy; I'd been full of confidence as I went to the audition. But the director dismissed me as being ‘just the teeniest bit too old'. I must have looked stunned because he hastened to add, ‘Of course, in the stage version with the right make-up and lighting, you'd have been quite marvellous. But perhaps not on the box, darling.' I took a taxi home, feeling too old to face the Tube. Something hardened inside me. I felt fifty – and over the hill.

Was it in this mood of near-desperation that I decided that Paul was the perfect candidate for a long-term partner and the father of my children? Certainly, I soon became as enthusiastic as he about buying a family house. Whenever I had time off work, I'd be out looking at yet another ‘highly desirable' property, ‘surprisingly spacious', ‘recently restored to the highest standards', and always in ‘a sought-after residential area'. I looked at a dozen or more before finding one that was even moderately acceptable, with, at least, a large kitchen and a garden with a tree.

After an exhausting few months when everything that could possibly go wrong, went wrong, we moved in; by this time too poor and too shell-shocked even to have a house-warming party.

A few weeks later I wrote telling my mother about Paul; that we were thinking of settling down together and perhaps having a family and suggesting that she came up to meet him. Very soon I got a postcard – a picture postcard – from her.
No, you bring him here and let me know when.

I'd never taken any previous boyfriend home, but somehow knew that Paul, though having middle class written all over him, would manage to fit in.

It gave me pleasure to think of how excited my mother would be, about the preparations she'd be making, cooking and cleaning. She'd lately become extremely house-proud. I think it dated back to the time I'd bought her the three-piece suite.

It was about three years ago when I'd had a sizeable cheque from a film. I was delighted, of course, to be able to give her the money, but less than enchanted to find that she expected me to go to Shrewsbury with her to choose it; to an out-of-town discount warehouse. ‘The furniture they have is not cheap,' she was at pains to point out, ‘but they have a huge choice at very reasonable prices.'

It was an immense place like an aircraft hangar, packed tightly with voluptuous, marshmallow-soft sofas and chairs of every conceivable colour, shape and size.

A three-piece suite is a comfortable and not completely unaesthetic seating arrangement, but hundreds of them displayed together seemed like a vision of out-of-control consumerist hell. I'd decided on the set of the first film I one day hoped to direct, its title,
Murder in Comfort
, the background music and all the cast, while my mother walked round the warehouse's entire stock three times and a smaller selection at the back eleven or twelve times. After I'd been summoned to approve her final choice – I did, it was comfortable and relatively plain with no scrolls or braid – she sat on the chosen sofa and fainted. From excitement and extreme exhaustion I suppose. I loosened her jacket and fanned her with my newspaper, while the salesman rushed for a glass of water. Though I suspect he was close to fainting as well by that time.

‘My mother would like me to take you home to see her three-piece suite,' I told Paul when he came in that night.

‘Goody,' he said.

I used to sleep with her in the lumpy double bed heavy with blankets and quilts. She was often very restless, plunging about like an animal in a trap. Sometimes I dreamed that there were horses running up the lane after me, but it was only my mother tossing and turning. At other times, she'd moan in her sleep and call out to my father. ‘Philip. Philip.' Her voice would take on a high, thin note so that the name sounded like a whiplash. I've never been able to like that name.

‘Do you like the name Philip?' I asked Auntie Jane on one occasion. I was probably seven or eight at the time.

‘Haven't thought about it. It's better than Jeremiah, I suppose. Or Theophilus. There were lots of those around here years ago. My grandfather was called Jubilee because he was born on the day of Victoria's in 1887. Jubilee Morgan. That seems a bit cruel to me, but he seemed to rejoice in it. His farm failed, mind, but he became a lay-preacher and a bit of a poet after. A name does affect your nature, for sure. Now, if your Uncle Ted went bankrupt, he wouldn't find anything to turn his hand to. There's no point in thinking of being a lay-preacher, for instance, if you've got a name like Ted Jones because nobody would take you seriously. Isabel Kingdom Brunel is a fine name. With a name like that you'd have no difficulty building Paddington station.'

‘Is Isabel a name for a man?' I asked. But not wanting to doubt her, added, ‘Perhaps there's a different spelling, like Francis?'

‘Oh, you've lost me now. You're too clever, altogether.'

‘Are your boys clever?' I asked her. I couldn't help being interested in her sons though they were so rough and ugly. She'd given the three of them old-fashioned Welsh names: Iestyn, Bleddyn and Rhydian. I couldn't tell which was which because I was always too nervous to look at them properly.