Deranged Marriage (3 page)

Marcus liked to boss me around at work and at home. I liked his flat. My main priority was dating someone with his own flat. I was going up in the world. Marcus’s flat was a small one-bedroomed basement abode in Fulham. At that time, Marcus and his flat were my ambitions. I felt like the woman of the house as I provided all sorts of food and even did his housework. I loved that flat.

We broke up when I changed jobs to become an account manager. On reflection, I think that him telling me what to do at work turned him on and when he could no longer do that there was no passion. I had never thought of him as kinky while we were together, but deep down I think he was. We didn’t break up straight away, but that was because I was too blind to see that he had lost interest in me. Eventually he spelled it out. So I said goodbye to Marcus and I cried buckets over that flat.

From then on my relationships and dates don’t even warrant cataloguing. As my friends watched on, they exclaimed my love life a disaster. Which it was, but I wasn’t unhappy about it. I had flings, little meaningless fun flings. I had one-night stands. As long as you’re safe I don’t think that admitting a need for sex is a problem. The trouble is that one-night stands are like buying sweets. You so want them until you’ve got them and then once you’ve devoured the last one they leave you feeling a bit sick. Or like when you’re in the sweetshop and there’s this big selection to choose from and then you get them home and find that you’ve picked out gobstoppers instead of aniseed balls.

But Joe changed all that. He changed my relationship history, for ever, simply because I knew I didn’t want him to become part of it. I wanted a future with him, and I realised it on the day when we had our first row.

The day of the row dawned ordinarily enough. I was at work, arguing with Freddie.

‘“Stand By Your Man”,’ Freddie said.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘“Stand By Your Man”, Tammy Wynette?’

‘I hardly think that gives across a strong feminist message.’

‘Yes, but we are talking about
new
feminism aren’t we. No longer the dungarees and lesbian brigade, the new feminist isn’t afraid to wear nail varnish.’ Freddie smiled as if he had discovered the meaning of life. I sighed. Our brief was to come up with a promotion for
Zoom
, the new deodorant for women who wanted to be in control of their lives. The advertising agency was producing ads for a new girl band who would be sponsored by
Zoom
, and we were publicising the competition. We were trying desperately to come up with the perfect song to front the campaign. I was trying but Freddie was, as usual, taking the mickey.

‘Although you might have a valid point about
new
feminism being different, I still think that standing by your man is pushing it a bit too far.’

‘I thought you might appreciate the sentiment,’ Freddie teased.

‘Freddie, this is about
Zoom
, not about me and if you want to use this whole exercise as another excuse to take the piss, then go ahead, but I am warning you that if you do, I will pitch for a foot odour campaign and make you run it.’

‘Point taken.’ We smiled at each other and went back to our brainstorming.

Freddie had already won. The more I tried to think, the worse it got. All I could find in my head was a wobbly rendition of ‘Stand By Your Man’. And as I only knew the first few lines, it was a repetitive rendition. By association, it led me to think of Joe.

Joe and I had, at that point, been together for three months. The beginning of December heralded not only incredibly cold weather but also the fact that Joe and I had come through the precarious early days. I hadn’t spent too much time analysing my feelings, but when I thought about him (which was a considerable amount), I would warm up, fluff up and my insides would do a funny little dance.

‘So,’ Freddie interrupted. ‘What are we wearing tonight?’ He clapped his hands together.

‘OK, we have fifteen minutes to go get a coffee and discuss my wardrobe, after which we will come back and you will finish that proposal before I let you out of here.’ I was such a commanding figure as a boss.

‘Whatever,’ Freddie replied in deference to my authority. I rolled my eyes, grabbed my purse and set off for Coffee Republic.

We sipped lattes and talked through my wardrobe.

‘What are you doing tonight?’ I asked, finally remembering that I wasn’t as selfish as I made out.

‘I’m seeing Hannah.’

‘Hannah?’ Yet another girl I hadn’t heard of.

‘She’s just some girl, nothing for you to worry about.’

I laughed. Freddie liked to think that I was jealous of all the other women in his life. Of course nothing could be further from the truth. I liked having him as a friend, and I enjoyed working with him, but I certainly didn’t fancy him. Freddie’s views of women were just a touch cynical. ‘So, how come you never ask for wardrobe advice?’

‘From you?’

‘What’s wrong with my dress sense?’

‘Your dress sense is great for you, but you always try to make me look gay.’

‘That’s because you act gay.’

‘Oh, here we go. Ten reasons why Freddie is really a closet case...’

‘You have impeccable taste, you love gossip, you always wave your arms around, you are incredibly pretty, you work in PR, you are afraid of spiders. I can’t think of any more at the moment.’ I used to be able to come up with a longer list, just to annoy him but the novelty had faded. The whole Freddie ‘gay thing’ had become a bit tedious.

‘You just want to be a fag-hag, and because, despite all your attempts of stereotypical accusations, I am straight.
I
love
women
. Generally I want to sleep with all women—you excepted. But, Holly darling, if you want to continue this crusade of yours to try to convert me, go ahead. I am far too secure in my heterosexuality to be even remotely upset.’

‘Fine, let’s go back to work then.’ I laughed, despite his protestations, it still riled him.

Freddie was indisputably straight, he wasn’t even camp. But when Francesca interviewed me for my job she told me that Freddie was gay. She told me that he would be my deputy, and then she leaned across her desk and whispered, ‘You do realise he’s gay’, into my ear. I didn’t; I hadn’t met him but I didn’t tell her that. When we became friends, I soon discovered that if Freddie was gay, he was doing a wonderful impression of a womanising cad.

Freddie explained to me that Francesca believed that only women and gay men should be allowed to work in PR. He hadn’t told her he was gay, she had just assumed, and he left it at that. The first office party we had the Christmas after I joined, Freddie engaged in some very public saliva-swapping with Francesca’s PA and the boss discovered, much to her disdain, that she couldn’t sack someone for being straight. They had since developed a healthy working relationship, and I had since developed a need to tease him about it. Although we behaved like schoolchildren most of the time, we were very good at our jobs.

Francesca Williams PR is a growing company, so the roles that Freddie and I had were advancing with it. Being a big believer in delegation, Francesca left the day-to-day running of accounts with me, while she concentrated on new business and marketing. I, in turn, ran the accounts with dictatorial control and Freddie as my right-hand man. We both worked hard, and although Freddie was supposed to defer to me, I regarded and treated him as more of an equal.

At six-thirty, I approved all the work that needed my authorisation and left the office.

I paced the flat and waited for the doorbell to ring. It was almost painful. I had arrived home from work at quarter past seven, which left me forty-five minutes until Joe was due. But I was ready early, which annoyed me because being early was uncool. I had bathed, changed and applied my make-up. I even painted my fingernails and I still had ten minutes to spare. I sat on the sofa and inspected my nails, fighting a strange urge to bite them. I felt unsettled but had no idea why. I was sure that it couldn’t be the fact I was ready early.

When Joe and I first started dating we met in bars or restaurants, but soon we had progressed to the stage where he could meet me at my flat, we could go for dinner around the corner, we could get home without hassle. No pretence. We had cleared the pretence hurdle. The pretence hurdle is when you don’t want to assume you are going to end up sleeping together although you know you will. So you arrange to meet somewhere equidistant between both flats—Joe in Camden, me in Clapham—and then at the end of the evening, you wait until he utters the classic line, ‘My place or yours?’ Sometimes we met in Clapham, sometimes Camden. And if we did go out to the West End, for example, we always discussed whose flat we’d be staying in that night. It was a relationship landmark.
It
was
a
relationship
.

It was quarter past eight and he was late. The buzzer hadn’t buzzed. The phone hadn’t rung. I would have called his mobile, but I figured that fifteen minutes was probably too soon and if I did call I would come across as being neurotic and I definitely wasn’t. Maybe I was, but there was no way I was going to admit it.

I had just emptied my second glass of wine when finally he arrived. The first thing I noticed after I let him in and he kissed me, was that he had been drinking. The smell of beer and the fact he was late annoyed me.

‘You’ve been drinking.’ I sounded like a fishwife.

‘Only a couple. Sorry I’m late but I had to see a mate about something.’ Ugh, that is such a male thing to say.

‘About what?’

‘Shall we go to dinner? I’m starving, I’ll tell you on the way.’ I should have known then, or even before then, that the evening would go wrong.

‘I forgot about this stag do I have to go on this weekend,’ Joe said as we walked to the restaurant.

‘This weekend?’ I repeated.

‘Yeah, this weekend. It’s a mate I knew from college, haven’t seen him in ages but when he told me he was getting married, I promised to go on his stag weekend.’

‘Where is it?’ I could feel my indignation rising.

‘Amsterdam.’ Joe was smiling.

‘Amsterdam?’

‘That’s why I was late. I had to meet him to make the travel arrangements.’

‘But Amsterdam is full of whores.’ It was all I could think of. At this point we arrived at the restaurant.

‘Are we going in?’ Joe asked. ‘Holly, come on, I’m sorry I forgot to tell you, but I promise I won’t sleep with any whores.’ He had a smile on his beautiful lips. His eyes glistened the way they always did when he’d had a drink. He looked so sexy.

‘Does that mean you’ll sleep with women who aren’t whores?’ I was so angry. Irrational, I know, but I was past the point of no return.

‘Of course not.’ His smile disappeared; he looked hurt.

‘Joe, we were going to dinner on Saturday.’

‘I’m sorry, I forgot. But Tony is only getting married once.’

‘You hope.’

‘Holly, don’t be like this. Look, you can go for dinner with one of your friends.’

‘I could, Joe, yes, but I wanted to go with you.’ My voice was ice-cold. A total overreaction.

‘Holly I’m sorry, if it means that much to you then I’ll cancel.’

‘Good.’

‘You mean you really want me to let down an old friend who’s getting married?’ He looked incredulous.

‘Yes.’

‘Well I won’t.’

‘Why did you say you would then?’

‘I didn’t think you’d be so unreasonable.’

‘Well, now you know, don’t you. I’m going home and if you follow me I’ll scream.’

I walked off without looking back. Then I went home and cried.

A while later, when the anger had subsided, I felt blanketed by warmth. Here I was trying to be mad at him, but instead I couldn’t help but smile. My feelings had been there from the beginning, but in true twenty-first-century form they were buried beneath the rubble of ‘dating’.

Dating is a game. It’s a battle of wills: who calls who, who chases who, who concedes defeat. You’re so busy sitting by a phone that has taken a vow of silence that you forget the reason you’re sitting there. That was what it was like in the early days of the Holly and Joe saga. We played games, we cancelled dates, and we kept our cool. Not any more.

If it hadn’t been for the convention demanded by modern relationships, I would have known I was in love with him from the word go. I would have let my emotions flow through me enjoying the sensuality of every single drop. But instead I hid behind the dating game.

I understand why we behave this way. Because although I felt elated, I also felt naked. I stood there without my skin, my defence. I was stripped bare and every single emotion I possessed was on show in my personal exhibition. Love is incredibly welcome, but it is also unwelcome, because it brings with it vulnerability. Happiness and vulnerability go hand in hand in love.

I had sorted out my feelings for Joe, I could only hope that he hadn’t decided that I was a mad banshee, and that he felt the same way I did. After all, my reaction had been out of character. But I couldn’t find out, because it was too late, and I didn’t have the words. Instead, I wrapped myself in my duvet, and smiled myself to sleep.

Chapter Three

Early the following day I took my smile with me to the office. The first thing I did was to send Joe an e-mail. I told him that I was sorry. I asked him to forgive me and call. How could he resist?

E-mail might be thoroughly modern but it’s just as annoying as every other method of communication. I still had to wait for his response, which hadn’t arrived by lunchtime. I was terrified in case I’d blown it.

‘Holly,
Zoom
are on the line.’ I looked at Dixie and my smile became a grimace. I picked up the phone to Phil Can, my biggest client, and managed to behave professionally through the conversation. As soon as I put down the phone I told Dixie I was going out and left the office.

My office is near Leicester Square, so I walked around, clutching my mobile phone and willing him to ring. He didn’t. I didn’t feel like eating so I just walked. I debated giving him a call but couldn’t. I’d held out my olive branch, it was up to him to take it. Bastard. Lovely, sexy, delicious bastard.