The Other Woman's Shoes (32 page)

‘What makes you so sure?’

‘Well…’ Martha couldn’t think of anything else to say. She’d assumed that Jack would spend Valentine’s with her but, thinking about it, there weren’t any guarantees.

‘How do you know he won’t want to spend Valentine’s night with one of his many other naked friends?’ inquired Eliza.

How indeed?

‘Look, Martha, I don’t want to seem unnecessarily cruel but’ – But she was going to be unnecessarily cruel, Martha just knew it. – ‘you’re looking really great at the moment, and you’ve always had the sweetest nature, but, Babe, there are a lot of great-looking girls out there – hundreds of them – and, well, men rarely fall for sweet natures.’

Oh.

Martha didn’t want to ask but she knew she had to. ‘What
do
men fall for?’

‘Great tits. A challenge. Kylie Minogue.’

Martha looked down at her average tits; small-but-perfectly-formed was the best description she could ever hope for.

Martha thought Eliza had been entirely clear, but Eliza obviously saw a need to be more explicit. ‘I mean, I know they say that more than a handful is a waste, but neither of us has even a sufficiency. And you’re not Kylie – you can’t even sing – and as for being a challenge…’ She
stopped mid-sentence, as though there was nothing more to be said.

‘What?’ demanded Martha. ‘Why aren’t I a challenge?’

‘Martha, you’re available, caring and predictable. Does that sound like a challenge to you?’

‘I’m not going to play games. It’s just not me. Besides, I’d lose.’

Eliza looked at her sister and once again thought how utterly horrific this situation was. Martha should not be getting divorced, she wasn’t brutal enough to forge her way through the dating jungle. It was obvious that Jack was going to make mincemeat of her, it was only a matter of time. Although Martha had repeatedly insisted that Jack was just for fun, it was clear that she was falling for him. Falling hard.

It was also clear that Eliza was wasting her time trying to preach caution.

She wasn’t trying to be a killjoy; she was honestly worried for Martha. ‘Right then, if you are insisting on continuing with this
relationship
’ – she said the word in the same way most women say
pornography
– ‘then at least make an effort to understand him, give yourself a fair chance.’ Martha was all ears. ‘Men like Jack–’

‘What do you mean, “men like Jack”?’ interrupted Martha.

‘Men who are too good-looking for their own good.’

Although Eliza didn’t intend it to, her comment increased Martha’s ardour; Martha fizzed with pride.

‘Men like Jack aren’t planners,’ pursued Eliza, ‘so what you need to do is something, everything, to put yourself in the forefront of his mind. Easy access, so to speak. It’s
an ever-increasingly competitive environment out there, Martha. You have to cut through the clutter.’

Martha got the impression that Eliza was practising a pitch for raising the budget on a music video. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You have to be the first and last woman he thinks of every day.’

‘How do I do that?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, think creatively.’ She glanced at the kitchen clock. ‘I’m late for work, we’ll talk about it tonight.’ Eliza kissed her niece and nephew and blew a kiss to her sister. ‘Give it some thought, think out of the box.’

The door banged shut behind Eliza.

34

‘You did
what
?’ asked Eliza. She was absolutely aghast and couldn’t for the life of her hide it.

‘Well, it was you who said I had to cut through the clutter, put myself at the front of his mind,’ defended Martha.

‘But, Martha, you sent out all the wrong signals.’

‘Did I?’

‘Oh God, you are a case.’ Eliza stared at the spreadsheet on the screen in front of her. The numbers were beginning to blur into one another. She almost wished that she hadn’t picked up the phone; she didn’t need this. ‘Yes. They’re not children, Martha. Chocolate, for fuck’s sake? Why didn’t you just take a copy of the
Beano
and some Johnson’s baby wipes and be done with it? You don’t want to be seen as a mother. You want to be seen as fun.’

‘But I am a mother, and moreover, I thought it was fun. You know that Friday Crunchie feeling. It is a Friday.’

‘Well, you’ve blown it. You’re buggered. You’re
never
going to see him or hear from him again.’

Martha’s enormous and overwhelming crime was that she had dropped in at Jack’s office and left three Crunchie bars in reception. One for him, and one each for his colleagues Drew and Dave. Martha had wrapped the chocolate bars in brown paper, tied the parcel with black ribbon
and marked it ‘urgent’. She hadn’t included a note. She was quite pleased. It had taken quite some restraint not to include a note; she thought it gave the impression that she was cool and mysterious.

The delivery of chocolate was not a totally unmeditated gesture. For one, it
was
Friday afternoon, and in a matter of hours Jack would be coming round to see Martha. She was so excited, she’d had that Friday Crunchie feeling all day. (To be accurate, she’d had it all month.) The odd thing was she wasn’t alone in thinking this. Jack had texted her and said he had that Friday feeling.
And
Jack had a surprisingly, scandalously, sweet tooth.

Another motivation was that Eliza had said Martha was predictable; Martha had been stung.

It all added up to a Crunchie bar.

She’d delivered the package at three-fifteen after a particularly intense day of swapping flirty text messages. However, it was now six-thirty and she hadn’t heard anything from him yet. She’d expected him to call straight away. She was stuck in that miserable no man’s land of an embryonic relationship. She was tortured.

There were of course a number of factors that could explain his silence. Perhaps he hadn’t received the package: maybe it was still lingering, unnoticed, in an in-tray somewhere. He might not get his post until Monday morning now, which would ruin the joke entirely. Or maybe he
had
received it but thought it was from someone else (she should definitely have included a note; it was stupid, arrogant not to). Or possibly he’d received it and thought it was a ridiculous, infantile thing for Martha to have done. Had she embarrassed him? Martha generally felt very
confident in Jack’s company, but perhaps she didn’t know him as well as she thought – It wasn’t as though they were proper girlfriend and boyfriend. He had other naked friends. Were Crunchie bars presumptuous?

Martha called Eliza at work for guidance and succour. Eliza did take away Martha’s horrible feelings of uncertainty but she was not at all cheering. Eliza firmly believed that the third explanation was a certainty.

‘When were you supposed to be seeing him next?’ demanded Eliza.

‘Tonight.’

‘Tonight? So
why
did you get in touch at all? There was no reason to speak or contact him today if you’re seeing him tonight.’

‘I got in touch because I was thinking about him and I wanted him to be thinking about me. You said the first and–’

‘Last woman he thought of. Yes, I know, I know, but bloody hell, Martha, you are
so
ignorant. Don’t you have any understanding of the dating rules?’

‘No, not really,’ admitted Martha. She was inches away from reminding Eliza that she was newly dumped and had been out of the ‘game’ for over ten years. She had bugger-all idea about what to say, or do, to influence. She had no clue how to lure. She used to have. She was sure she had had some idea in her youth – but now? It was all text-messaging and mobiles, and they gave the game away by saying how often you’d called, what time and where from; it wasn’t easy to be subtle. Also, because of the sophisticated missed-call feature on every phone, you couldn’t kid yourself that he must have called when he
clearly hadn’t. If he hadn’t called it was a cold truth. She was out of her depth. But she thought that giving a Crunchie bar was quite innocuous. A fun gesture. She hadn’t realized that it was breaking the rules and would lead to the certainty of being dumped.

‘We’d been texting. He’d even said he had that Crunchie feeling, and I’d texted back that I knew exactly what he meant and that I’d had that exact feeling for a while now.’

‘What?’ Eliza was obviously disappointed with Martha’s attempt to explain and justify her actions. ‘Well, to start with, you should definitely not have texted him today at all. There was no need if you were expecting to see him. You have to play it cool.’

‘Do I?’

‘Yes!’ ‘Duh’ wasn’t articulated; it didn’t need to be. ‘How many times did you text him today?’

‘I don’t know. I lost count. About four.’

‘Martha! Bloody hell, you should
never, ever
text more than once in a day.’

‘But he texted me too,’ said Martha in self-defence.

Eliza ignored this. ‘And then you sent chocolate. Well, forget it, it’s over. Start checking out your Filofax for alternatives, Babe, you’ve left yourself wide open. There is
no
way he’s going to get back to you now you’ve opened yourself up.’

With that happy prediction, Eliza swiftly changed the subject and started talking about a pair of brown cord jeans she’d seen in Karen Millen at lunchtime, and thought she might buy the next day. Then she said to Martha that she had to go, she had to finish her spreadsheet on the budget for some video or other.

Eliza said she had a date and wouldn’t be back until late; Martha needn’t wait up.

Martha was barely listening.

Martha fed the children, bathed them and started to read to them. Maisie, as usual, paid no attention whatsoever to the progress of the story, the concept of turning pages in sequence, or indeed which way up the book should be held. She irritated Mathew by chewing its corners and snatching at the pages. This induced an almighty row that Martha found she had little patience for. Instead of carefully negotiating her way through
Peter Rabbit
– by offering Maisie distractions and pleading with Mathew for his understanding – she smartly popped Maisie into her cot and tucked Mathew into his bed. She turned out the lights.

Martha pulled the sitting-room curtains closed. Stupid of her to imagine that February was anything other than bleak. She stood with her bottom resting on the radiator, which she’d hiked up to full heat, and folded her arms across her body – but she still couldn’t get warm. She picked up the remote and flicked through the channels; nothing could hold her attention, not even the tawdry goings-on in
Eastenders
. On automatic pilot, Martha wandered through to the kitchen and opened the fridge. She stared inside and tried to decide what to eat. The problem was, she wasn’t hungry. None of it looked tempting. She had no appetite.

He hadn’t called.

How exactly had a Crunchie bar opened her mind and her heart?

She pulled out a bottle of chilled white wine, and opened it. She carefully poured herself a large glass; she no longer guiltily looked around the house, waiting for someone to shout at her for doing this. She supposed that was some progress. But then she thought how frequently she was opening a bottle of wine and immediately doubted that it was. She could clear away the children’s tea plates, she could wash up. She could put on a load of washing, or do some ironing; there was always plenty of that. She could tidy the drawer where she kept plastic carrier bags. These were the kind of tasks that she used to do when she was waiting for Michael to come home and he was caught in a long meeting. None of it appealed.

She flicked through her CD collection. She had a number of recent acquisitions: Chemical Brothers, Nelly Furtado, Röyksopp. She was proud of her growing collection but, sadly, none of them suited her mood right now. She didn’t have any Smiths. ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’ would have been perfect.

She couldn’t believe it. Eliza was right. She was wrong. He was a faithless, fickle and, and, and… Martha searched around for a word that was damning enough. A faithless, fickle, ordinary man, she seethed.

Why hadn’t he called? He was supposed to be coming to see her tonight, but he hadn’t called to confirm the arrangements. Martha didn’t know if she should make her own supper. The thought of a lifetime of lonely suppers was too distressing; she knew she wouldn’t be able to swallow a bite.

He’d found someone new.

He was probably kissing her collarbone this very second.

It was clear that he would be spending Valentine’s Day, and for that matter every other day, with a new woman. Who was she kidding, but herself? Probably several new women. She was forgotten. What was so wrong with a Crunchie bar? Because things had been fine up until then. Did men really hate it so much when you showed them you cared?

Martha thought about Michael. Her caring hadn’t done much good there, either. She took a slug of wine.

But Jack had even made plans. He’d talked about the summer. He’d actually said things like ‘can’t wait to see you with a tan’. What was that, if it wasn’t planning ahead? Of course, she knew Michael had said that they’d be married for ever and he’d lied about that. Of course, after that she should have taken everything any man said to her with a mountain of salt. But she’d believed in Jack. She didn’t know why. It defied logic and reason, but she had. Martha pounced on her mobile and reread the text messages that he’d sent her that day. They were, without exception, flirtatious, witty, friendly.

Martha didn’t get it.

She poured herself another glass of wine, and noticed that she was shaking with rage. She couldn’t imagine ever feeling serene again. The world was a disappointing place. He was just as disappointing as her husband, and the next man in her life would be just as disappointing too. Her arms felt like lead. She couldn’t raise them even to waist height to continue pouring her drink. She put the bottle down before it slipped out of her grasp. The glass that was in her other hand wasn’t as lucky: it fell to the floor and smashed. She didn’t bother picking it up.
The glassware that she once loved meant nothing to her.