The Secrets of Married Women (9 page)

He looks at me with sad hostility. ‘I don’t know what you’re on about.’

‘I can’t stand this heartbreak between us Rob.’ My voice breaks. ‘You can’t withdraw from me like this. It’s cruel. And unfair. And you’re not like that. This is what I don’t get. It’s like… it’s like your heart’s not in it anymore.’

‘In what?’

‘In this. In me. In marriage...’

He sits there on the floor, legs drawn up, elbows on knees. Kiefer walks rings around him, attention-growling, his tail slapping the table. ‘Is there somebody else? Is that what it is?’ Funny, I think I’m less afraid of this than the alternative.

He gets up abruptly, and it takes a lot to get Rob angry. ‘Now you’re being ridiculous. I’m not listening to anymore of this.’ He walks through the arches into the kitchen.

I quickly pad after him, with Kiefer following. But then he just picks up his car keys off the windowsill and walks down our passage to the front door. ‘Where are you going?’ I trot after him.

‘Out.’

‘Out where?’

He throws up his hands. ‘Out.’

‘I won’t let you run away.’ I kick my slippers off and waggle a foot into one of my trainers; Kiefer takes off with the other one, thinking we are playing a game. ‘I’m coming with you.’

‘No you’re not.’

I try to snatch the keys off him and he sends me a look that’s filled with frustration and despair. He goes to open the front door but I try to block him. My heart is thumping. Part of me wants him to hit me because it’s some show of emotion isn’t it? ‘Don’t go,’ I plead, wrestling my other shoe off the dog. ‘I swear, if you walk out this time don’t come back.’ I don’t mean it.

‘Don’t be a drama queen,’ he says, and lightly moves me aside. I make a grab for his arm again but he’s already outside. I run after him, thinking about hurling myself onto the bonnet if I have to. I don’t recognize myself. I’ve become a raving lunatic.

‘Come back,’ I beg. I don’t want him getting in a car and driving when he’s mad. Nosy Eileen Sharrett from down the road passes with her bulldog with the pink nose and glowers at me over our hedge. When she gets by, I burst into tears. Rob backs out of the drive, the dog whimpering to see him go. I go inside and the house feels bereft now. I always recognise my love for Rob more in these dark moments after we fight, where there’s the possibility I might have lost him. I sigh, go to the window and stare out at the empty spot on the drive, willing our car to come back. He’d do this after our petty little spats. Walk out. Drive off. Get to the end of the street and come back. The second he’d walk back in that door, we both knew all was forgiven. We’d even laugh about it. We’d go to bed, snuggle, glad to have one another back.

But he doesn’t come back. I sit on the bottom stair. Kiefer sits on the dusty parquet and growls at me because I’ve upset his lord and master. Then I realise something. For the first time I’m angry with Rob more than I feel sorry for myself or for us. And I’m helpless more than I’m optimistic. My bag is under the hall table. I dig in it for a hankie and come across a piece of paper. I open it out.

Andrey and a phone number. I never did throw it in the bin.

‘They had a row yesterday, Leigh and Clifford.’ Wendy polishes off her second glass of wine while I am barely down my first. Rob’s worked late all this week. You could say he’s avoiding me. ‘Jill, I didn’t know what to do. They were screaming like an old married couple. It was totally odd, perverse behaviour for two adults who work together.’

‘What was it all about?’ I’m agog. Wendy, looking young and sparkly in a ‘dressy up’ version of a skimpy, ragged John Rocha sweatshirt, crosses her arms and leans on the table.

‘Well, Leigh was telling me
Fatz
isn’t a popular brand with the size 16s and over. But he’s squashed her idea to launch a ‘Thin’s Not In’ fashion show, since he apparently spoke with one of his celebrity friends who said you’ll never sell any woman on the concept that fat is more acceptable than thin. Leigh said she wasn’t trying to change people’s perceptions about body image, she was only trying to find a fun way of selling fitness wear to ‘normal’ people ie: those of us who don’t look like catwalk models. I saw some of the models she had in to audition. They were ‘normal’ bodied Sophie Dahl or Nigella Lawson types—which was supposed to say you don’t have to be thin to wear the
Fatz
brand.’

‘What’s wrong with that?’
Sounds rather God-who-cares? to me.

‘Well it’s all wrong Jill. The opposite of thin isn’t ‘normal’ is it? I mean, I’m a size fourteen at my thinnest, and I’m normal. By saying Thin’s Not In and showing somebody like me, well, it’s supposed to be liberating and legitimising me, but really it’s just saying I’m somehow unacceptable. It just perpetuates the notion that if you’re not Kate Moss you’re not good enough.’

The waiter slaps our pizzas down. I’m ravenous but Wendy is far more interested in conversation than food.

‘It’s Bridget Jones all over again. I mean, Renée Zellweger wasn’t heavy, was she? Yet the character in the book was so obsessed with her weight, that when you saw Renee you just went, well what’s wrong with her body? Many women would kill to have it.’

‘I know.’ I shake hot chillis on my pizza which looks perfectly-cooked, moist, and free of too much mozzarella; just how I like it. ‘I always said they needed more of a lard-arse in the role.’

Wendy gets her analytical look. ‘So in this case, I would have thought if you’re making a powerful statement like ‘Thin’s Not In’ you need to have some very real-looking people who are genuinely large and proud of it.’ She taps her knife handle on the table. ‘I hinted this to her, but she said there was no way
Fatz
clothing was going to be seen dead on a load of ‘heifers’.

‘She didn’t say that!’

‘She did. But the very point of the show was to attract heavier people to the brand! So see what I mean? Sometimes her thinking doesn’t make sense.’ She rotates her pizza plate between her hands, like it’s a steering wheel, like she’s trying to decide which triangle to cut into first, then she abandons it again. ‘If it were me organising it, I’d have the fashion show, but I’d get rid of this ‘Thin’s Not In’ business. I’d put a wide range of body-types up there to show that it’s all about the clothes not the weight, and
Fatz
is for everybody. Then you’re making it a positive thing rather than fixating on this tiring issue of thinness.’

‘Makes sense.’
So Leigh, what she’s basically saying honey, is that your brilliant marketing idea lays an egg
. I smile. Wendy is like a kid in a toy shop. Totally newfangled with this idea of the working world. I’m happy for her. ‘It seems like an awful lot of drama to sell exercise pants, Wend, if you ask me. I think I’m glad I have a simple job, with sexy footballers to look at and a group of girls who work to live, not the other way around.’ She mops some of the oil off her pizza with her napkin. I’m hoping this is a sign we’re going to start eating. Wendy’s about the only person I know who knows little gems of dietary wisdom like the fact that most of the calories of Brie are in its skin. Sometimes she’ll use her knowledge as a reason to desecrate the stuff or refuse to go near it, other times, to say,
And really who gives a damn
?

‘Well poor Leigh’s done months of work for the show that he was previously all for, and now he’s calling it off. He got hysterical when she told him he was listening too much to his silly showbiz friends and not thinking for himself. He tends to zoom around the place in some battery-operated tizzy-fit, his face getting as pink as his velour tracksuit.’ Wendy does some zooming impersonation with her hands and I tuck into my food because I’m tired of waiting for her. ‘Poor Leigh seemed embarrassed that I’d seen him be so belittling with her. Because he did say some pretty horrid things.’

‘Like?’

She picks mozzarella off her pizza. ‘I can eat this or I can leave it…’ The two sides to her love-hate relationship with calorie-ridden food. She shoves it in her face.
Finally!
We have lift off
. ‘Oh, I hate telling tales out of school…’

‘Don’t. Tales make the world go round,’ I smile. ‘Bet you were embarrassed sat there listening to all of it.’

‘I pretended I wasn’t. I picked up the phone and had a very long conversation with a dial tone. Acted like I was sure this sort of outrageous, juvenile behaviour is part of any office.’

‘It’s certainly not part of mine. Uproarious giggles are about as heated as we get. The girls and I went for lunch today and talked about footballers and the latest in who’s-zoomin-who in the Manager’s office. We had a grand old time.’ I drop an oily mushroom on my white jeans
.
‘So it hasn’t put you off working there?’

She seems to measure the question. ‘No. So long as nobody is behaving like that with me, then, as Neil said, I’ve got nothing to worry about, have I? Besides, Leigh and I went for lunch. I told her she handled him brilliantly. She told me how she used his private toilet the other day and saw what she thought was toothpaste by the hand basin. It was Preparation H. We had a good laugh.’

I grin. ‘Have you ever thought about going back and finishing your degree?’

‘Now why would I want a degree when I have an Almost Degree!’ She always calls it that. Her face takes on that look of resigned impatience. ‘I do think about it sometimes. In many ways I don’t know what’s held me back. It’s been three years since Nina… All I’d have to do is two more courses.’

‘So go for it.’

‘Well it sounds easy when you put it like that.’ She shrugs. Which, I can tell, means,
end of subject now
.

She asks about me now. I keep it fairly benign—the usual suspects: my parents, my boss, the neighbours, the puppy and how he would rather garrotte himself on his choke chain than just stop pulling me. ‘So, how’s being a working woman fitting with your home life?’ I ask her, to get off the topic of me. What I mean is,
How is Neil adjusting to not being the centre of your universe?

‘Oh lately he’s been working so much again. So instead of watching the clock until he comes home, I fill the time in with chores that I can’t get done during the day anymore.’ Neil used to do long shifts, and was often gone from home for days. Where to, Wendy rarely knew. She’d live off her nerves, anticipating some ominous knock at the door. But now he’s high up in the chain of command, he doesn’t go away anymore. ‘When he’s home, I make sure I put everything else aside. If the laundry’s not done, so be it. I’ll make a nice dinner because that’s about the only time my lads will talk to me. Then when they’re off up in their rooms, we’ll open a bottle of wine, put on a bit of nice music and have some nice couple time.’ That’s about the closest Wendy gets to referencing a sex life. Wendy is a private girl. You never know if she gets constipated before her periods, nor do Leigh and I have any idea how many men she slept with. I think it’s one. Leigh thinks she might be a dark horse, that she might have a whole sordid past that she’s hiding.

‘But I must say he’s been very supportive. Neil is very supportive. Always.’

‘In what way?’ I’m visualizing piles of laundry he’s ironing. Him slugging a huge trolley around the supermarket.

‘Just everything really. He knew how much I wanted to get back into the workforce.’

Yet when an admin job came up at Northumbria Police he didn’t want her applying for it. She never told me this directly, but hinted and hedged, and didn’t bother to try to fill my jumping-to-conclusion silences.

‘He’s very supportive.’ She smiles, in a last-word sort of way, like a much prettier, more animated version of a Stepford Wife. “I’m full!’ She slumps back in the seat. ‘And after all that talk about fat and thin, you’d better not even ask me if I want dessert.’

‘Do you want dessert?’

‘Yes.’

We order two tiramisu.

It crossed my mind to mention that Rob and I aren’t getting on too well lately, without actually telling her all the details of course. (Perhaps if she’d share something very personal about Neil and her, I would open up. But she’d have to go first.). I decide against it. When she opens her purse to pay the bill, handsome, supportive Neil smiles at us from the plastic picture window.

~ * * * ~

Saturday morning. Our phone rings. I prop up in bed on an elbow, squint to see the clock. I was banking on Rob being around today to see if we can peck and make up. But he’s already gone to work, and it’s not even 9 a.m. I pat for the handset on the night table, dreading it being a mother emergency. Things have been ominously quiet since our day at the beach.