‘What can I do?’ I asked, putting down the wine I’d bought on my way home.
‘Nothing at all,’ said Auntie Lyd, just as Jim said, ‘Open the wine.’
‘I’ll open the wine then,’ I said, and went towards the drawer where the corkscrew was kept, but Jim got there before me. We both reached for the drawer handle at the same time
and he nudged me out of the way with his hip.
‘Oi, I’m in charge of the kitchen tonight, Dawn. Out.’ He handed me the corkscrew and guided me by the shoulders away from the work surface, where vegetables were laid out for
chopping.
‘So masterful,’ I said, feigning a swoon. Since our awkward talk in the van I’d kept my distance from Jim a little, and he from me. The overt hostilities were over now that we
were united in looking after Auntie Lyd, and he had resumed his constant teasing, but it was clear that neither of us was keen to repeat our kitchen tête-à-tête any time
soon.
From across the kitchen Eleanor shrieked, ‘Percy-will-you-get-away-from-that-bowl-with-the-lemon!’
Percy reluctantly handed over the half of lemon that he’d secreted in his palm, and Eleanor threw it in the bin. ‘Don’t blame me if the mousse is solid,’ he declared.
‘It’s
supposed
to be solid, Percy,’ hissed Eleanor. ‘Or it will run all over the place.’
‘What’s for pudding?’ I asked Jim, easing the cork out of the bottle of red wine.
‘Surprise,’ grinned Jim, exchanging a glance with Auntie Lyd. It was weird: I didn’t feel jealous of their rapport any more. If I moved out of the house, and back with Martin,
I felt grateful that Jim would still be around to help out if Auntie Lyd needed it. Not that I wouldn’t be – of course I wasn’t going to entirely disappear – but there was a
bond there that made me feel that Auntie Lyd was not going to be alone. She had a family – it might not be the husband and 2.4 children that I wanted for myself, but it was a family
nonetheless, and she was safe within it. Perhaps in a way that made them my family too.
‘A surprise pudding?’ I said. ‘Mmm, what’s it going to be, Jim, plumber’s plum pudding with a delicious sauce of grouting?’
‘You’ll have to wait and see. Like I said, surprise,’ he said mysteriously.
Percy and Eleanor were bickering in fierce whispers about who would carry the fish mould over to the fridge, tugging it between them like squabbling toddlers. Auntie Lyd tilted her head in their
direction to indicate that I should step in, and I was just about to when the doorbell rang.
‘The postman?’ asked Eleanor hopefully, looking up from the fish mould. I think we had all hoped that her new addiction to internet shopping might replace Eleanor’s early
morning whisky habit, but so far she seemed to be able to run both concurrently and quite happily. New eBay monstrosities arrived at Elgin Square daily.
‘Not at this hour, woman,’ said Percy, pulling at the fish mould again.
‘Did you invite someone else?’ I asked Auntie Lyd.
‘No,’ she answered. ‘Did you?’
I shook my head.
Jim wiped his hands on the apron that he’d tied around his waist. ‘Probably a gift from another admirer, Lydia. I’ll get it.’
Eleanor took advantage of Percy’s momentary distraction to wrest the fish mould from his grasp and march it over to the fridge. I opened the door so she could place it on a shelf and Percy
cast me the wounded look of the unexpectedly betrayed. ‘
Et tu, Brute?
’ he asked.
Auntie Lyd ignored us all. She appeared to be straining to hear the conversation from upstairs, probably hoping it wasn’t another gift of meat from the butcher, an apologetic wreath of
beef or something. Her face darkened. I started listening too. I knew that voice.
Steps thundered down the stairs to the basement and Martin burst through the door with Jim close behind him. His hair was dishevelled and his face red, as if he’d been running.
‘Martin?’ I asked, stepping towards him. He looked like someone else – not the calm, ordered man that I knew. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I’m sorry to interrupt,’ said Martin, breathing heavily. He dropped his briefcase on the floor. ‘I’ve come here straight from work. I couldn’t wait any
longer, Rory. I needed to see you.’
‘Mate,’ said Jim, moving cautiously towards him as if approaching an unpredictable wild animal. ‘Do you want a drink or anything?’
‘I don’t want a drink,’ Martin said, swatting him away without taking his eyes off me. ‘I just need to talk to Rory. Now. There are things I need to say. I can’t
wait any longer.’
‘Martin,’ I pleaded. Not now. Not here. We agreed we’d talk tomorrow.’
He looked around the room as if he’d just awoken from a dream in which he was somewhere else entirely. The table laid for dinner, the wine open on the windowsill above the radiator, pans
bubbling on the stove.
‘Well, isn’t this lovely?’ he said, taking it all in. ‘Everyone all together. Thanks for the invitation.’
‘This isn’t appropriate, Martin,’ I said firmly, taking his elbow. Didn’t he remember that Auntie Lyd wasn’t to be agitated under any circumstances? Although she
didn’t seem angry. She was looking at Martin with a curious expression; not so much anger as a kind of pity. ‘Let’s go upstairs and talk there.’
‘No!’ He wrested his arm away from me and took my hand instead. ‘I’m happy for everyone to hear what I want to say to you. It’s about time I said it.’
‘Martin,’ I hissed, feeling the eyes of everyone on us. I couldn’t believe he’d burst in here like this, demanding my answer before I was ready.
‘I know you, Rory,’ he said. ‘It was killing me waiting for you to make up your mind and then I realized – you never make decisions about anything. You always wait for me
to do it. Remember when we bought the house? You left everything to me, and wasn’t it better like that? Don’t I know what makes you happy? So here I am. I’ve decided for
us.’
He let go of my hand and reached into the inside pocket of his suit jacket, pulling out a velvet box with a curved lid. He stretched it out to me unopened, bending unsteadily down on to one
knee. I could feel myself shaking. Could feel the whole kitchen holding its breath.
‘Martin, don’t do this,’ I said. ‘Please.’
‘Rory,’ he said. He clutched the ring box in his palm so tightly that it looked almost as if he was threatening me with his fist instead of proffering something I should have been
glad to see. ‘Rory, let me make you happy. Let me make it right. Will you do me the honour of being my wife?’
I started backing away, shaking my head. Suddenly it was all incredibly clear. As if I was seeing Martin properly for the first time. I couldn’t spend the rest of my life with him. I
wasn’t even sure if I could bear to spend the next five minutes with him.
‘I can’t marry you,’ I said.
His smile faltered slightly, but remained, as if resistance was only to be expected. He rose to his feet and came towards me.
‘Rory,’ he urged, ‘you don’t have to do this any more. Just let go of the past. It’s all behind us now. We’ve got a future together. You and me.’
‘Please don’t, Martin,’ I said again, retreating away from him.
He dropped his arms by his side. ‘Rory?’ he asked. He squinted at me as if he might have accidentally proposed to Eleanor or Auntie Lyd, the wrong person entirely; his Rory would
never refuse him like this.
Perhaps
his
Rory wouldn’t have. But this Rory had.
‘What’s wrong, Rory?’ he said. ‘I thought this was what you wanted.’
‘No, Martin, this is what
you
wanted,’ I said, my fingers bunching into fists. ‘Everything is always about what
you
want. If you knew me at all, you’d have
enough respect not to come in here like this, interrupting me and my family—’
‘Your family?’ he laughed, sneering as he looked around the kitchen. ‘One dried up old has-been and her half-dead friends? A tradesman? This is what you call a
family?’
I saw Percy take a determined step towards Martin, squaring up to a man twice his size and less than half his age. From the corner of my eye I saw Jim shake his head at Percy and mouth,
‘Stay out of it.’
‘It’s more of a family than I ever had with you, Martin,’ I said steadily. ‘They’ve been more supportive and kind and loving in a few weeks than you ever were in
all the years we were together.’
Martin stepped backwards, bumping into one of the kitchen chairs. His voice was thick with anger. ‘After everything I’ve done for you.’
‘Martin. I am grateful. You’ve been incredibly kind over the last week. But I’m not going to marry you for it.’
Martin went very quiet. The belligerence seemed to drain away as we watched, his shoulders rounding over his deflating chest. He looked down at the velvet box in his hands. ‘Don’t
you even want to see the ring?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t care if it’s the Koh-i-noor diamond in there, Martin, I can’t say yes.’
He wrung the box round and round in his hands. ‘You’ve changed,’ he muttered at the floor.
I looked at Auntie Lyd. She hadn’t stirred from her chair or said a word. She’d left me to deal with this just as I saw fit. Percy and Eleanor held hands beside her. Behind Martin,
Jim stood ready to help the moment I asked. None of them would have dreamed of acting for me; they were just here to help with whatever I decided. And I had decided.
‘I have,’ I said proudly. ‘I have changed.’
I remember reading in a book once that a turning point in your life only becomes one in retrospect – that at the time you almost always fail to actually turn. You
continue living your life, and change creeps in by stealth, by many little turning points that you still fail to notice until – there it is, you’ve turned. There is rarely a moment of
great and shining revelation in real life. It’s only afterwards, looking back and trying to construct a narrative for your confused mishmash of conflicting decisions, that you think,
Oh
yes. That was it
. That was the point at which I knew things were going to change.
It was like that with Martin. The moment of refusing his proposal hadn’t been the turning point at all. Hadn’t I known as soon as I went back to our house, all those months ago to collect my things, that it wasn’t really my home, and never had been? Hadn’t I taken steps to change my
life by dating the unsuitable men? And yet I’d continued to dream about getting back together with him, tortured myself about whether to return to the life he was offering, without even
seeing that I had a whole life of my own going on right under my nose.
I looked back at the girl I was when I first arrived at Auntie Lyd’s, sobbing on the doorstep, as I might look at a stranger: with sympathetic compassion, but also distance and a certain
benevolent bemusement. I had thought that I was nothing without Martin, when really I had been nothing when I was with him. My opinions didn’t count – not to him but, far worse, not to
me. I had felt inferior to everyone, all the time, at home and at work; an outcast grateful to be allowed to play with the other children. Always the anthropologist, taking my assiduous notes on
the natives’ behaviour, standing outside of it all; believing that to be unnoticed was a kind of acceptance. How had I expected people to accept me when I was so busy studying them that I
hardly had time to think about who I was?
After refusing Martin’s proposal I felt empowered, emboldened, as if from now on I was going to stride confidently through life in the manner of Auntie Lyd as Destiny Devereux, all
shoulder pads and hairspray and ambition. I’d had the confidence to pitch to Amanda for the features editor role as I saw it, not as I thought she wanted it to be. I’d pressed for
Unsuitable Men to be promoted to the magazine from the website, but with a difference: I was hanging up my dating hat for now, as far as unsuitables went. I suggested the column be passed on to one
of Noonoo’s society friends – Kinshasa Norrington-Davies had just split from Timmo Windlesham and was as publicity-hungry as ever. She’d be perfect. I proposed more art history,
of course, and the return of Behind the Rope. And, thinking like a journalist, and with her prior approval, I had suggested former television star Lydia Bell as
Country House
’s new
agony aunt.
Naturally the features editor job had gone to someone else. Atlanta Beaulieu, formerly of
Tatler
, would be joining the staff in a few short weeks.
Ticky had been personally outraged, as if her three weeks of pencil skirts and pointy-shoed efficiency should have guaranteed her Martha’s old job, and mitigated against three years of
shameless work avoidance. ‘Like, did Maaahn not even notice that I have stayed until at least four-thirty
every day
?’ But her dress-for-success campaign had not been entirely in
vain. Amanda agreed that Ticky’s interrogation tactics should not go to waste – from now on she would be the first-choice interviewer at the magazine. It was enough of a carrot to keep
Ticky from backsliding into her old ways. For now, at least.
After the initial shock, I hadn’t been especially surprised not to get the job. It would have been too easy a ride to just sail into that promotion after spending so many years fading into
the background. Martha got her fairy-tale ending, running off into the Highlands with a billionaire bachelor; I got the real-life version. It was going to take more work before I got taken
seriously as a player when it came to my career. I’d been taking it all as seriously as I took myself – which is to say, not very. I’d thought myself so superior to the posh girls
who spent a few aimless years on the magazine before bagging themselves a husband and retiring to domesticity in the countryside, and yet I had been just like them: I’d treated my job as a
diverting distraction while I focused all my energies on my boyfriend as the only future that mattered. Now that I didn’t have the option of being rescued by a Prince Charming, it was time to
roll my sleeves up and get on with sorting out my own future.
But Amanda did agree to restore Behind the Rope as a website feature, and I was relieved of my Unsuitable Men duties once I’d finished writing a final column summarizing what I’d
learned from it all. I’d already abandoned several drafts without being able to come to any sort of tidy conclusion. I supposed I’d learned at least that dating wasn’t as scary as
I’d feared. That sometimes you can have a lot of fun with someone who doesn’t tick all the boxes – or any of them. I was an experienced sexter. And I was pretty sure I could now
identify a fauxmosexual at fifty paces. I wasn’t sure I was any closer to identifying a suitable man though. I’d always thought Martin was the epitome of suitable, and that had been
proved spectacularly wrong. I guessed that meant that a truly suitable man might come in an entirely different package from the one I had always expected. Perhaps that was the only conclusion I
could come to. It didn’t seem like much of an ending.