The Secrets of Married Women (6 page)

After we eat our bland dinner in silence, I drag myself upstairs. A pile of clean laundry that I made him bring upstairs yesterday is dumped in the middle of the floor. Well, to give him credit he did put it on the bed first, but moved it to the floor later so he could get into the bed. Rob will happily leave it there, just wearing things from it, chucking them off again, until the pile replaces itself like an exhibit for the clothing cycle of life. You’d never think Rob was a slob when you see him in his spanking white T-shirts, with his thing for Italian leather shoes. Nor when you see the fastidious pride he applies to his job (self-employed carpenter who can build anything from a chair to the house it’s going in.) I’m not particularly tidy myself—kitchen junk cupboards will attest. But picking up my own mess after a long day is one thing; picking up his can make me resentful. Sometimes I’ll chase him around the house thrashing his backside with a towel shouting I’m not your sodding mother! Mostly though, I just tend to do everything myself, because it’s less tiring than arguing about it.

I pick his dirty dog-walking shoe off the newly-changed, white Ikea duvet cover—scream!—and get some small urge to bash his brains out with it. Then I catch myself. I’m not really angry about this. In fact, I don’t want to be angry at all. I think of how sweet he just was over my finger—of all his good qualities. How he constantly offers to have my parents come live with us. The list is endless. Rob is massively supportive in the ways that count. I’ve just had a tiring day and the rejection tripped my switch.
Get over yourself
,
Jill.
It’s hardly the end of the world that he didn’t ravish you on the chopping board or playfully threaten to slam you with a large aubergine. Who goes on like that when they’ve been married all this time? Nobody.

Downstairs, Rob is staring through the window watching Keifer having a pee. ‘I hate how he squats to do it like that, Rob observes. ‘I think somebody’s going to have to show him how to do it like a man.’ He beams a smile at me. ‘How’s your finger?’

‘It fell off.’

He reaches for my hand, brings it to his mouth, kisses it. ‘A four-digit wife. I’ve always wanted one.’

Rhododendrons are abloom in gardens as I drive my mam and dad to the beach. Rob didn’t feel like coming. ‘You don’t mind if I don’t?’ he asked me as I was flossing my teeth, and he balanced a loo roll on my head.

I grinned. ‘So long as you don’t mind if I do.’

Long ago my dad and I decided it’s important to keep my mam looking the way she would have kept herself: elegant, immaculate, even if she was just hanging the washing on the line. So today he’s got her in her pink and green sundress and cardigan. He’s put too much blush on her cheeks though, and her lipstick is bleeding over her lip-line, making her look like a cross between Tootsie and one of those strange old birds you see in the films who rip their wigs off and are really serial-killers underneath. ‘How is David?’ she asks. This has to be the tenth time she’s said this in as many minutes.

‘Rob, mam. You mean Rob. He’s my husband. David is a lad I used to date fifteen years ago. The lad I dumped because he was a pound short of his taxi fare so he asked the driver if he could back up until he could afford to pay.’ Memories.

My dad titters.

‘David,’ my mam says, with an infatuated sigh. ‘David is a delicious boy.’

We park opposite a stretch of white Georgian town homes and the pink Seaburn Hotel where my dad used to bring us for Dover sole and claret for birthdays. My mam is carrying bags—the lunch she said she’d packed us. I was very impressed until I saw they were really bags full of toilet rolls. O
oh! We’ll enjoy these, won’t we!
I cooed at her. We truck over to a spot in front of the white pavilion that houses the toilets, and set up camp. I feel a bit guilty about not having brought the puppy now, but I was worried he’d hatch a stinker in the car. My dad troupes off to buy us ice-cream from the van but comes back empty-handed saying the driver was picking his nose. ‘Disgusting bugger. He was in it up to his elbow,’ he says. Details I don’t need.

We sit maybe half an hour and mam gets fidgety. She delves into the carrier and finds toilet rolls and asks me, with the haughtiest disdain, why on earth have I brought toilet rolls, and where, pray, are the sandwiches? Morrison’s supermarket is across the way so I decide to go and buy us something, rather than chance taking my mother into a restaurant.

They’ve done wonders to the seafront since I was little. New pubs, Italian restaurants and designer fountains front onto cinder toffee sand, and swelling green-blue waves like bolts of velvet in an upholstery store. I pass the amusement arcades and the fairground rides with the music blaring and the kids’ high-pitched squeals. In Morrison’s, I zip around filling a basket of things I know my mother likes, and in the check-out line I think of my conversation with Rob yesterday about how Arnold Swinburn had stood over my desk waiting to sign a letter I was typing, and was pointedly fingering through the
Hello!
mag on top of my in tray. ‘He was doing it to imply that I read magazines instead of doing my work,’ I grouched to Rob.

‘He probably fancies you, so he’s awkward around you and he hides it by being a bit of an arsehole. Men are like that. Especially married ones, because they feel guilty. So they want to make on it’s your fault for being too much of a temptation.’

‘Speaking from experience are you?’

‘What else would I be speaking from?’ He gave me his sly smile. Then he said I shouldn’t have magazines on my desk though, so I had it coming. So then we got into a fight. He said if I was that sensitive about it maybe it was because I knew he was right. I did a big ‘uuuurrrrrh’ and got the urge to clap a pan over his head.

Rob will sometimes wind me up just because he knows he can. But then again, if he’d just said, ‘You’re right dear,’ life would be boring wouldn’t it? Even if it would have been the right answer. I pay then I go briskly out of there.

I vaguely register that there’s a lifeguard sitting on one of those white lookout posts by the shore. I get back to the beach where our chairs are and… oh no. The towels are there. The chairs are there. ‘Have you seen an older couple?’ I ask some kids who have lilywhite bodies and legs caked with dark, wet sand. ‘They were sat right here.’

‘No, missus,’ the young lad says. I dump my shopping in the chair and hotfoot it across the sand to the toilets. What if she gets on a bus and we never see her again? Or worse, walks under one? I remember the lifeguard. I hasten down the sand in pursuit of his yellow outfit. ‘Mr. Lifeguard,’ I pant to the back of his head, as he gazes off to some kids playing on a crop of rocks. Then he turns and his eyes meet mine over the top of his sporty-framed sunglasses.

‘I’ve, I’ve…er. I’ve lost my mother,’ I say.

He’s handsome. Nothing like I’m expecting. Older. At least forty. With a yachtsman’s weathered complexion, velvety black hair that looks wet and raked back off his face, and intelligent, inquisitive eyes the colour of new pennies. ‘What?’ I say, because he’s studying me with a look that—weirdly—you could only call faint surprise.

Then he smiles a demolishing testosterone smile.

For a moment I can’t speak. Then I remember myself. ‘You have to help me. I’ve lost my mam and dad. They were here, now they aren’t and I’m panicked and I don’t know what to do.’

He peels off his sunglasses. ‘Well,’ he says, climbing down from his chair, and I can’t help but notice the bracing of his forearm muscles, and the small everyday detail of his having a body like a God. ‘Lots of girls lose their mam and daddy. Though they are usually smaller than you. Is nothing to panic over. I will help you to find.’

The accent throws me. The unusual rise and fall of his sentences. I think of what he just said, failing to see the funny side. ‘Look, this may sound like a big laugh to you, but my mother suffers from dementia. If she disappears and something happens to her, I just might have to kill myself.’

‘Well, we wouldn’t want that,’ he says, smiling at me with his eyes. Then he accompanies me back down the sand, asking concerned questions about my parents. But he keeps staring at me in an odd way. I decide that he’s awful for some reason. Can’t do his job for thinking lewd things about a woman.
Aren’t you a bit old to be doing this for a living?
I feel like saying, but don’t.

When I get back to the deckchairs my parents are sat there happily eating the sandwiches. ‘Oh!’ I cry, wanting to heap kisses on their heads and murder them at the same time. ‘You’re here! Where on earth have you been?’ I try to be nice, in case the lifeguard thinks I’m an elder abuser and calls the police.

‘You know, if you wanted the lifeguard to come talking to you, you could have just ask.’ He grins diabolically.

Oh God. This is going from bad to terrible. He thinks I made this up! My mam looks at him and a strange beam of recognition comes over her face. ‘Oh David!’ she says.

‘Oh Darling!’ the lifeguard gushes back, which makes a laugh pop out of me; I just can’t help myself. And then she gives her wide-eyed seal of approval then bursts into a strange baritone chorus of that song she’s taken to singing, to the chafe-end of your patience. ‘You’ll never miss your mother till she’s GONE!’ I do not know this extrovert person.

I clap my hands over my face. ‘Where the hell did you go?’ I ask my dad between gritted teeth.

‘To the toilet, chucka.’

‘You didn’t. I went looking for you.’

‘Not them toilets, chucka. The sea toilet. Your mam wanted to go au naturel.’

‘Oh.’ Her shoes are sopping wet. This man must think we’re mental as balls in a lottery draw machine. He starts chatting to my dad. But I can tell that my dad can’t understand a word he’s saying. I suddenly reconsider my opinion about him. He actually seems quite nice. A real looker too. That mouth. Lips like cut glass. It’s the kind of handsome you just don’t see every day, and when you do, a part of you has to stop and appreciate it. When he turns and catches me gazing at him like I’m trying to memorize him, I blabber, ‘Well, thank you for your help. But it seems we’re fine now.’

‘Is pleasure for me,’ he says still combing me with that gaze that says he is more than a little interested in me. ‘You walk with me back to my chair perhaps? For all my trouble.’

My mam and dad are having a tussle over a toilet roll. I suddenly feel as though I don’t know what to do. ‘Look, that’s fine, but I want you to know that I’m married.’

‘Why?’ he says, catching me by surprise.

‘Why am I married?’

‘Why do I care about that?’

I grin and feel faintly idiotic. ‘No reason.’

He laughs, as though he has won something. When he laughs, his face is even more shockwavingly handsome, if that is possible ‘You’re not from here,’ I start blathering. ‘Are you Italian? Greek, maybe?’

‘Greek!’ He scowls like I’ve insulted him. ‘No. I am Ra-shint.’

He’s rationed?

‘Oh! You’re Russian!’

‘He sounds like Mario Lanza,’ I hear my mother’s starry little voice. Then my dad growls, ‘Does he hell. My backside sounds more like Mario Lanza.’

He asks me my name.

‘Jill Mallin. That’s Mrs Jiill Mallin of course, not Miss.’

His eyes flick over me. I have to look away, look into my shoulder, scratch my head, anything to…

‘An-drey,’ he says, and holds out his hand for me to shake. Then with his other hand, he peels off his glasses.

The name is distantly familiar. Then I meet his eyes. Our pupils blot together. ‘Andrey, as in….’

The note on the car?

I have lived in this part of the world long enough to bet that there aren’t too many people with that name around these parts. ‘Do I… Do I know you?’

‘You could have,’ he grins. ‘But you never called.’

I clap a hand over my mouth, thinking, no there is something wrong with this picture. Then I get it. ‘Wait a minute, you don’t drive a posh car like that.’ I don’t want to sound inappropriate or that I’m putting his job down, but it’s the logical thing to say.

He does that business of putting his hand on his chest, pretending his feelings are hurt. ‘What? Because I am work as lifeguard on Seaburn beach? You English girls…You have such ideas about people.’ He wags a finger, tuts at me. Then his mouth comes close to my ear. ‘But as it happen, you are right. I don’t drive brand new Mercedes. I drive car that was parking opposite the Mercedes. I just happened to witness your very bad parking and I saw an opportunity.’ He grins.

I’m already flailing a sceptical hand. ‘This is too farfetched to be serious. It’s ridiculous actually.’ If he had wanted to hit on me, he could have just got out of his car and come and talked to me. Maybe his car is such a heap of junk that he didn’t want me to see it. His head was probably holding up the roof. I bet he didn’t dare get out or it’d collapse like a metal wigwam.