The Foster Husband (2 page)

And I took Minnie, of course. I knew Matt would be upset about Minnie. Sometimes I thought that he had bought me a puppy just so he could guarantee there would be someone in the house to greet
him with boundless enthusiasm when he got back from work – God knows I couldn’t always manage it. I couldn’t leave her behind. He was never at home anyway, so who’d have
looked after her when he was away for work? And even when he wasn’t away, she’d have been too lonely on her own in the house all day. I should know.

Perhaps if I’d thought a bit more about what I was running to, instead of what I was running from, I’d have brought a bit more with me. Perhaps I shouldn’t have left with
nothing after all; I hadn’t even fought for any of it.

‘Excuse me, are you okay?’ asks a voice. I realize that I’m resting my forehead against the outside wall of the bakery, as if I’m trying to press my head through the
grain of the wood. I’ve only made it a few feet away from the shop doorway. Minnie whines at my feet, confused by my immobility. I’m not sure how long I’ve been standing here.

‘Thanks, I’m fine,’ I say, straightening up and smoothing my hair away from my face. ‘I just felt a bit faint, sorry.’

‘Do you feel all right now?’ the woman asks, looking concerned. I see she has an apron wrapped around her hips, and I suddenly recognize her as the woman who served me coffee in the
bakery. I feel mortified that she’s seen me like this.

‘Yes, fine, thanks, fine,’ I repeat firmly. I cannot take sympathy at the moment, especially not from strangers. It makes everything worse, as if all of my problems are written on my
face for everyone to see, visible even to a passing acquaintance. I take my sunglasses out of my coat pocket and put them on. I have a horrible feeling I might be about to cry and I can’t
bear that she might see me break down.

‘That’s a lovely little labradoodle puppy you’ve got there,’ she says. I appreciate her attempt to change the subject, but I wish she’d just leave me alone. The
painted wooden slats of the bakery wall had been cold and solid on my forehead. Comforting, somehow. I could have stayed there for a while.

‘She’s an Irish water spaniel,’ I say automatically. I don’t know why I always feel I have to correct everyone – it’s not like Minnie cares what breed they
think she is. Matt would say it’s because I always have to be right. Maybe it is.

‘She’s lovely,’ says the woman, bending to pat her. Minnie squirms with delight at the attention, rolling onto her back to present her fat round belly. ‘How old is
she?’

‘Five months,’ I say. I know, before the woman even opens her mouth again, that her next comments will be: what’s her name? Hasn’t she got enormous paws! Will she get
much bigger?

There were days in London when I would have this exact conversation five or six times. And I’d be grateful for it; that might be the most I’d speak all day, until Matt came home. And
when he didn’t come home? Well, then I’d just speak to Minnie instead. Poor dog. Sometimes I wondered if, behind that enthusiastic canine grin, she was thinking, Will she
ever
shut the fuck up?

But this woman is going off on a tangent.

‘Aren’t you Prue’s sister?’ she asks, looking up.

‘Yes, I’m Kate,’ I admit, slightly haughtily. Prue is eight years younger than me. I prefer to think that she is my sister, rather than I am hers. It’s a minor
distinction, perhaps, but one of those that matters a bit too much between siblings.

‘I thought you must be,’ says the woman, smiling. ‘You look exactly like her. I’m Cathy, by the way. Friend of your mum’s actually. You look just like her
too.’

It’s strange how in London people identify me by my unusually white-blonde hair – halfway down my back and untouched by hair dye. It’s the one thing that makes me stand out
from the crowd, which is helpful when you’re only five foot two. But here it’s simply the way that everyone can tell I’m one of the Bailey girls. There’s no escape;
it’s like wearing a badge with my name, age and family history on it.

As a teenager I never managed to set foot in a local pub without someone immediately recognizing me as Sandy’s underage daughter and officiously marching me out. And even though now I am
back I can drink legitimately, clearly I won’t be able to do so without someone commenting on my family roots.

‘Oh right, yes,’ I say. ‘Of course. How nice to meet you, Cathy.’

She stands up from petting Minnie and sets her hands on her hips, as if she’s sizing me up. ‘Sandy says you hardly ever come back to Lyme. Are you here on holiday?’

‘In a manner of speaking,’ I say stiffly. I wish she’d take the hint and leave me alone. Must everyone in Lyme have an interest in my private life? ‘Just taking a break,
you know how it is.’

Her smile suddenly falters. Obviously she’s remembered what’s really brought me home. Does everyone know? Has there been some sort of public announcement in the
Bridport and Lyme
Regis News
? ‘Kate Martell, formerly Bailey, formerly the one who got away and made herself a glamorous life in “that London”, has slunk back to Lyme in disgrace, her marriage
over, her career finished.’

‘Well, I’d best be getting on,’ says Cathy, hurriedly looking at her watch. She attempts another bright smile, as if that will make everything better. ‘I just wanted to
make sure you were okay out here.’

I smile politely; I’m good at that. Keeping up the appearance that all is fine.

‘Thanks,’ I say.

‘Send my love to your mum and Prue,’ she calls as she turns away, heading back into the bakery, where I hope she might spill some hot tea on those gossiping old biddies who were
sitting behind me.

‘Mmm,’ I say, non-committal, even though she’s too far away to hear my answer.

To send her love to Prue I might actually have to speak to Prue, and so far I seem to be unable to do that without arguing with her. I wonder if I’ve grown so defensive and angry that I
can’t speak to anyone without ending up in a fight. But then we were always like that; I shouldn’t have expected that anything would be different, even though fifteen years have passed
since we last shared our home town.

This is Lyme. The only changes here happen at geological speed; imperceptible to the human eye. Everything is just as it always was, and that, for me, is very much the problem.

Minnie pulls on her lead towards the beach, in the opposite direction to the bungalow. I don’t blame her for not wanting to go back indoors, but we can’t hang
around the town all day, purposeless. To be perfectly honest, we have been entirely without purpose since we arrived here a week ago, but the important thing is that we should be purposeless out of
sight of people who will report back to my family, so I drag Minnie back towards the path along the river.

I already have a severe case of the guilts about my life of highly visible leisure. It wasn’t so bad in London where no one was around to comment on what I got up to on my own all day.
Sometimes the Turkish shopkeeper would pointedly ask, ‘Busy day?’ as I perused the newspaper headlines without buying anything, but it wasn’t hard to ignore him. Anyway, he was
nicer to me once I got Minnie – I could flick through the magazines as long as I liked while she sat on his lap and let him feed her bits of pitta bread. But yesterday Mum gently mentioned
that her friend – Cathy, I now realize – had seen me in the Town Mill Bakery most mornings, which is about as close as my mother gets to openly criticizing my behaviour.

I know in Mum’s eyes eating breakfast in a cafe is not only a wasteful extravagance tantamount to eating a five pound note that has been spread with butter and jam, but also a symbol of
the demise of the family unit, in which everyone should eat their meals together in happy harmony. But since there’s no room for me and Minnie at their house, I don’t see that it makes
any difference to the social fabric of Lyme Regis whether I eat breakfast alone in my granny’s bungalow or alone in a cafe. Although it can’t be denied that my savings are being eaten
up one costly croissant at a time.

Despite my gloomy mood, I have to admit it’s a gorgeously mellow morning, there is a soft light on the turning leaves that hang over the water. A family of ducks huddles on a stony island
in the middle of the flow, quacking and waggling their tails, jostling for position in the small space. I should have kept a bit of croissant to throw to them; I’ll remember tomorrow. Lyme is
beautiful on a morning like this. It’s cool enough to be snuggled into my parka, but warm enough that I’m happy to linger, peering into the gardens that back onto the leat towards the
Mill. There are apples lying in the grass, windfalls ready to be collected, heavy rosehips dragging down the trailing thorny shoots. It all makes me feel a bit D.H. Lawrence-ish, admiring of
fecundity and sumptuous fruity ripeness.

I should appreciate this. I could be stuck in an office, or in a meeting. This is freedom. I should be happy to be here, instead of feeling that I’m in exile, cast out from the life
I’ve left behind. Perhaps I am doomed to wander the streets alone forever, while gossiping locals refer darkly to my past. I could become a tourist attraction all by myself; ‘The Head
of Marketing’s Woman’ or something. Catchy, no? Although of course I am not Matt’s woman any more. The Head of Marketing’s Estranged Wife-Soon-To-Be Divorcée
doesn’t sound like she’d offer the French Lieutenant’s Woman much competition. Although I have always imagined it would be rather cool to swish around in a cloak.

We’ve reached the end of the riverside path. It stops at a bridge, which offers us two choices; one direction will take us back towards the town, the other leads up the hill towards Granny
Gilbert’s bungalow. Minnie looks up at me, unsure which direction to take. You and me both, I think. But we take the path most travelled; the one that goes back to the bungalow. The one
that’s not going to make any difference.

There’s a reason why tourists don’t bother visiting Hill View Close, where Granny Gilbert’s 1960s bungalow faces its identically unattractive neighbours across bleakly paved
low-maintenance, wheelchair-accessible front gardens. No one poses for family photographs outside the boxy glass porches; no one stops to admire the sickly fern turning yellow in Granny
Gilbert’s living-room window next to the Neighbourhood Watch sticker. No one wanders these Lyme Regis streets and dreams of escaping the rat race for a new life in this cul-de-sac. Which
would be why Granny Gilbert’s house has been on sale for over a year without a single offer. The estate agent’s board gives the house an even more forlorn look, like a poster
advertising a show that has long since left town.

This is the kind of home you move into not out of optimism and excitement and choice, but out of compromise. You move here when your garden has become too much for you, because your
family’s concerned that you are unsteady on the stairs these days, because you no longer need all that space just for yourself. Because you’ve split up with your husband and have
nowhere else to go. I should be grateful for this. I am. It’s a place to live, for nothing. But it’s hard to see this move as the fresh start I thought I was running to. I feel quite
far removed from the Liz Taylor-style glamorous divorcée I’d hoped to be, and a bit more like Liz Taylor in the declining wheelchair-bound friend-of-Michael-Jackson years.

The front door opens with a pop of insulation foam; Granny Gilbert liked her home to be hermetically sealed from every possibility of draught. I’d claim she was an early environmentalist
if it weren’t for the evidence in her undersink cupboard of the world’s largest store of aerosol cans, promising to buff every possible surface to a reflective shine. Although
I’ve kept the doors and windows open every day since I arrived, the house still reeks of chemicals – Misters Sheen and Muscle are my new housemates – and both Minnie and I sneeze
every time we step into the hall.

I head straight for the back door to fling it wide open.

Granny Gilbert’s garden is nothing special, just a square of patio surrounded by some scrubby rose bushes that Mum has hacked down to stumps, but I feel astonished every time I see the
view. It’s like walking through the wardrobe into Narnia. Fooled by the drab interior of the bungalow, you don’t expect to be presented with a scene straight from a watercolour
painting. The hill drops down towards the town, the streets as clearly laid out below us as if they were marked on a map, and beyond them the flat, grey sea stretches to the horizon, flashing and
glittering when the sun breaks through the clouds. To the right, houses further up the hill block the view towards the Undercliff, but to the left the eye follows the rise of the cliffs up past
Black Ven and Stonebarrow to the Golden Cap, its sandy peak yellow and bright against the dark sky.

I can feel my heart lift; it’s strange how a view can do that to you. Maybe it’s something that happens when you get older. I don’t remember being awed by the scenery when I
visited Granny Gilbert as a child – the biscuit cupboard was my main focus then – but every time I step into the garden now I understand all over again why someone would move to one of
these plain, ugly bungalows. Once you’re inside, you don’t have to look at it, and from the garden you can feel like you’re flying over the town.

‘Sandy, dear? Is that you?’

Minnie starts as a voice calls out from behind the rose bushes. She runs back to hide behind my legs.

‘Hello?’ I say to the shrubbery. ‘It’s not Sandy, it’s her daughter, Kate.’ I haven’t yet met a single neighbour but, to be honest, I have kept my head
down every time I’ve left the house, unwilling to meet anyone’s eyes in case I’m drawn into a conversation. I’d rather not have to explain my circumstances to everyone in
Lyme.

I hear the harsh scraping sound of something metallic being dragged across paving stones, and then a muffled grunt. Two gnarled brown hands, a flaming red nail on each finger, grasp the top of
Granny Gilbert’s garden fence with purpose. Rising up behind them, like the sun over the horizon, is a lavishly rubber-petalled orange swimming hat. And finally, a face, wrinkled and tanned
to the consistency of biltong, in which two dark eyes twinkle brightly.