Invitation to the Married Life Read online

  The designers of The Wine Bar were not innovators in their field. They had converted the small Nottingham premises in precisely the same genre as thousands of wine bars in other cities: high-backed chairs, inadequate tables, posters on the walls, the inevitable potted plants whose dull leaves claimed all vitality had been drained from them by the shadowed, smoky air. But for all its lack of charm, The Wine Bar was always crowded, noisy, popular. Thomas, who had been coming here for five months to meet Gillian, increasingly disliked it and had often suggested an alternative. But she felt at home in the place – Thomas could see why, having come to know her own flat – and resisted. So they continued to conduct the daytime part of their affair at a small table in the window, which Gillian had recently taken to calling ‘our table’, and was much annoyed if it was ever occupied by others.

  She had secured it today, probably by arriving at noon: the graphics studio in which she worked seemed not to mind the flexibility of her hours. The familiar sight of her – indignant shoulders hunched up, spiky fingers riffling through peanuts as if they were worry beads – filled Thomas with gloom. Her total lack of joy in life had struck him within moments of meeting her, in this very place. The only thing that had intrigued him – mildly – ever since, was that any human soul could remain so bleak. She had had a happy childhood, friends, lovers, a job she enjoyed, and yet everything, most especially Thomas, seemed to cause her offence. As he approached her, Thomas relished the thought of her ignorance: she could not guess, sitting there sipping at her large glass of thick tomato juice, that in half-an-hour he would be gone for ever from her life.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, arriving at the table.

  ‘Hello, Tom.’

  Thomas sat down and propped the parcel up, on the floor. The seat of the ridiculously small chair cut into his thighs, making them splay and bulge. The table top was too small to hide them.

  Preoccupied with her own reasons for indignation, Gillian never noticed his discomfort.

  ‘You’re late,’ she said, ‘so I went ahead and ordered.’

  Thomas had no intention of apologising. ‘Time was against me,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t I get a kiss, at least?’

  They both leaned forward, brushed mouths. Thomas could smell sardine. A picture of her last night’s solitary supper flashed into his mind. She had a terrible passion for sardines, which she ate from the tin with raw onions and some kind of dark gritty bread.

  An overweight girl in jeans and a T-shirt dumped scampi in the basket in front of Gillian, accompanied by a knife and fork wrapped in a paper napkin.

  ‘Yummy.’ Gillian picked up a piece of scampi in her fingers, unable to contain herself. ‘I’m ravenous. I didn’t order one for you. Didn’t think you’d like it.’

  ‘Quite right,’ said Thomas. Food was another of their incompatibilities. He ordered himself a gin and tonic and a tuna sandwich. ‘Any news?’ he asked.

  ‘Not a pussycat.’

  ‘Oh, dear. I am sorry.’

  ‘You know me. Nothing ever happens.’

  Thomas scrutinised her small, whey-coloured face. He could never quite remember it when she wasn’t there – except for the eyes, the translucent gull’s eyes, so sparse of eyelash there would have been no point in attempting to enliven them with mascara. They were the most intense eyes he had ever known, with a mean, accusatory glitter he had grown to dread. Gillian was altogether bird-like, he thought – beaky little nose, the bleached bone shining through transparent skin: claw-like fingers and toes, cocky strut of a walk. How on earth . . . ? he often asked himself.

  Many times he had reflected upon the unfortunate mistake which had resulted in this paltry affair, and could never quite explain it, even to himself. The initial meeting – yes. Any man, bored and lonely, might have succumbed, had he chanced upon an available girl that December night.

  Thomas had arranged to meet a colleague, in this then unknown wine bar, for a drink after work. The colleague had not turned up. Gillian, at the next table, eked out a sullen-looking tomato juice, alone. She pretended to be engaged in a crossword puzzle. After four glasses of inferior wine, depressed at the thought of the evening alone in his hotel, Thomas introduced himself and suggested they share a further bottle. She had agreed, surprisingly eager. They talked, for some reason Thomas failed to remember, about biorhythms. Then Gillian supplied a crisp little word portrait of herself: health freak, militant socialist, the sort of girl who would march in the name of many a cause. Yes, she had spent a month at Greenham – the most meaningful experience of her life so far. Irritated from the start by her ghastly vocabulary, Thomas had told himself to be tolerant. This could be interesting, he remembered thinking. He had never met anyone like her before. And that first evening, in retrospect, was the only good one. Being with her felt like a slightly wicked adventure, a new experience. By midnight they were in her studio flat drinking herbal tea. Events after that were not entirely clear in his mind. He had had nothing to eat since lunch, and too much to drink. As the sludge-green walls of her flat swirled treacherously before his eyes, and Gillian’s head bobbed up and down like a juggler’s orange, it was all he could do to comport himself with some dignity. In fact, he was forced later to remember, pulling off her jeans was a process he could never have accomplished without her help. His hands had been as useless as frozen gloves: his normal skill with buttons and zips had quite deserted him.

  But he can’t have been that maladroit because he then noticed Gillian’s cheeks were now blotched with scarlet – ugly, hard-edged shapes that R. Cotterman, watercolourist, would have abhorred. Also, she mewled like a chained dog straining for freedom. Thomas was amazed by her stick-like thighs. She had the figure of a girl of twelve, which was faintly disturbing. But she was surprisingly strong. She interrupted his gaze with an impatient push. He found himself sprawled on the hideous duvet, where he encountered the first whiff of sardine, a smell which was to become all too familiar. Definitely in charge by now, she scrabbled all over him like an eager squirrel.

  Next morning Gillian offered Thomas carrot juice and muesli and berated him for being tired, clumsy, and generally inadequate. But when he left, breakfastless, an hour later, she suggested they should meet for another drink next time he came to Nottingham. Somehow, the arrangement became a habit, and by now they had lumbered on for five months. Why? That was the enigma.

  ‘As a matter of fact, not quite nothing,’ Gillian was saying as she plunged a piece of scampi into a pool of tomato ketchup. ‘Jenny came round to my place for supper last night.’

  ‘That was nice,’ said Thomas.

  Jenny was her colleague at work. He had met her once: a scraggy little thing in a shrunken jersey and etiolated jeans. She had looked critically at Thomas and had hardly spoken. Plainly, he had not come up to the mark.

  ‘Yes. We had a hot meal and, guess what? This’ll surprise you – we shared a bottle or two of wine.’

  ‘Good heavens, that does surprise me indeed,’ said Thomas, who was never offered anything but herbal tea. ‘Were you celebrating something?’

  ‘Might have been.’ Gillian looked down almost coyly.

  Thomas could not bring himself to ask what: his interest was rarely flared by her snippets of news. He drank his gin and tonic in silence, watching Gillian’s odd, huffy movements as she dipped her bread in the rest of the tomato ketchup and sucked at it, making a smudged scarlet web round her mouth. He vowed that never again would he associate with a girl whose manner of speech, as much as her table manners, were likely to drive him mad.

  Her head suddenly snapped back. A flycatcher tongue darted briefly at the red mess. She caught his eye, braced herself.

  ‘Why don’t you ever call me Gilly?’ she hissed. ‘You know how much that would mean to me.’

  Thomas sighed. God knows how many times she had asked him that question. God knows how many times he had given her his ‘unreasonable’ answer.

  ‘Don’t let’s go into all that again, please. You k
now I can’t, I don’t want to, I never shall. Why can’t you just accept that?’

  ‘The trouble with you, Tom, is that you’re afraid of intimacy. Aren’t you?’ The gull’s eyes scoffed over him.

  ‘I dare say I was brought up to believe that a certain formality between people has its advantages.’

  ‘Huh. Between lovers?’

  ‘In the case of this ridiculous Gilly business, it’s not that I stick to your real name for the sake of formality, but just because I detest the word Gilly. I find it aesthetically unpleasing to the ear, if you really want to know.’ There, he was away. Here was his chance, sooner than anticipated. Now all he had to say was that none of it mattered a damn anyway because tonight it was to be goodbye, curtains, finito -

  ‘I just wanted to try one last time,’ Gillian interrupted, ‘to make quite sure that you had no intention, ever, of making the smallest concession to my wants. And I am sure.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about –‘

  ‘You’re a bastard, Tom: a selfish, unthinking, fat, pompous, conceited, unfeeling boor – and I’m here to tell you, that as far as I’m concerned it’s goodbye, curtains, finito, for ever.’

  She wiped her furious mouth with the back of her claw; straightened herself up, triumphant.

  ‘And just in case you’re interested, which I don’t suppose for a moment you are, Tom, Jenny’s moving in.’

  There was a silence between them. A horrible picture, involving the sardine duvet, came into Thomas’s mind.

  ‘You mean . . . ?’

  ‘I mean she’s moving in. Think what you like.’

  Gillian pushed back her chair and stood up. She hoisted a very old school satchel onto her shoulder, pulling the stuff of her T-shirt taut so that Thomas could see the bones of her mean little chest beneath it.

  ‘So, bye then, Tom. Cheers. I can hardly say thanks for the memory.’

  She strutted off, bird’s head eagerly forward, bony shoulders hunched in their usual, off-ended position, gull’s eyes darting about for some new prey to arouse her indignation.

  Thomas watched her walk past the window. She gave a brief wave, no smile. Thomas did not wave back. It occurred to him it was the first time he had seen her look cheerful.

  When she was out of sight, he glanced at his watch: time for another drink. Then, to Doug’s surprise, he would turn up early for the board meeting. He would also get his secretary to ring Rachel and say plans had changed: he would be home for dinner after all.

  Every morning the ritual of Rachel’s secret life began in the same way. She would stand at the bedroom window, watch Thomas fling his expensive briefcase on to the passenger seat of the Mercedes, then hoist himself into the driving seat. He never looked up.

  When the car was out of sight, Rachel returned to the vast double bed. She added Thomas’s two pillows to her own. The pillows were huge, old-fashioned squares, inherited from her grandmother (you could not buy them today), encased in fine linen, hand-embroidered with swirling initials in the corners. The letters were so delicate in design that Rachel often wondered if they were inspired by an illuminated manuscript. The flourishing ‘A’, she liked to think, with its honeysuckle tendrils, was the work of a fifteenth-century monk.

  The barely creased top sheet and blankets had been turned back, as if by an efficient maid preparing for her employers’ night: this Rachel had done herself before going down to breakfast. On the large round bedside table, among the clutter of photographs, flowers, pens, notepads, engagement diary and piles of books, was a cup (white porcelain splattered with violets) of fresh coffee. Its smell fused with that of winter jasmine.

  Rachel took off her slippers. For a moment she felt the pleasure of soft thick carpet beneath bare toes: then, between the sheets, the delicious contrast of chilled linen with its random whirlpool of creases which the toes could sensuously explore. She shifted herself into a position of maximum comfort, searched for her reading glasses and put them on. Beside her lay the Telegraph, battered by Thomas’s rough handling, and her own neat copy of the Independent. They would take her half-an-hour to read. She would begin at nine o’clock. For the moment she cast her eyes up to the intricate ceiling of the four-poster bed, marvelling as usual at the fine geometry of the chintz pleats, the exquisitely central rose made of the same stuff. The building of four-poster beds was no mean art, and this one had cost Thomas several thousand pounds. It was a wild purchase she would never regret.

  There was silence in the room. Rachel closed her eyes, waiting for the guilt, the daily guilt, to ebb away: then she picked up the first paper, and took the first sip of coffee.

  She often wondered if, had it not been for the unfortunate combination of events one day eighteen months ago, she would ever have discovered her addiction.

  It had begun as a perfectly normal day: letters at her desk in the morning, taking Thomas’s clothes to the cleaners, shopping for something for dinner. It was a particularly cold January, and she returned from her small expedition to the local supermarket with stinging cheeks and frozen hands. To warm herself, she heated the remains of last night’s carrot soup, and sat at the kitchen table cradling the hot earthenware mug. It was a functional rather than cosy kitchen: not a place where the family normally sat or ate. The silence, that bitter day, only punctured by erratic ticks from the fridge, made her shiver. Unwanted thoughts came to her mind, concerning the void in her life now that Helen had gone. Her duties as a magistrate, and her work for several charities, and the occasional business dinner party, took up a certain amount of time, but there were still many hours to spare. In the past, she remembered longing for the time when she would have hours to herself during the day, to read or listen to music undisturbed. Now that she had them, they were less wanted. In the three months since Helen had been away (thereby shattering the former discipline of arriving home at four after school, needing tea and encouragement with homework) Rachel had read most of the books she had been postponing for years, and had listened to hours of concerts on the radio. But the enjoyment of such luxury was beginning to pall. The shadow of a strange, unnameable guilt had crept up on her: she should be doing something, surely, instead of wasting her days, her life, her once competent and curious mind. At Oxford, she had read Law: perhaps she should resuscitate her skills and try, even at this late stage, to get some sort of legal job. But enthusiasm for this idea did not flourish, as it had in the days before marriage. Enthusiasm for any sort of job, in truth, was unavailable. And so the conflict grew: guilt at the pointless life on the one hand, lack of inspiration as to what she could do on the other. She did not discuss any of these matters with Thomas, but they became a preoccupation.

  As one who had always abhorred the disturbances of introspection, Rachel made a great effort, that cold afternoon, to deflect her wearisome thoughts. She rose and washed-up her mug, dried it slowly and put it away. Outside a nasty yellow sky was broken into shifting flakes by a strong wind. The geriatric tree in the small back garden, all knuckles and fists and scraggy arms, tore at this chipped sky in terminal frenzy. Rachel found herself smiling at its anger. Deeply rooted in life between the paving stones, it knew its fate all too well: another spring, another flowering, another interminable year just standing. Their conditions were similar.

  It was exactly the sort of afternoon on which Rachel would most have liked to stay at home, lit the fire and retired to an armchair with Turgenev’s short stories. But, in fear of further disagreeable thoughts, and to prove to herself she had some strength of will, she decided to go out. She had recently spent a morning exploring the contents of her linen cupboard and had discovered that, after twenty years of neglect, many sheets were beyond repair. This afternoon, then, she would take a bus to Oxford Street and become cocooned in the linen sale at John Lewis. Quickly, before she could change her mind, she put on her thickest coat, scarf and gloves, and made her way to the bus.

  The outward journey she rather enjoyed. Wedged warmly beside an old lady in
a fur coat, she looked through the steamy windows at the passing flotsam of humanity, cold faces blasted by the wind. As always, she wondered what each one of them had had for breakfast, where they were coming from, where they were going, why, at that precise moment, they happened to be in her vision, innocent of her interest. She wondered how many thousands of people each of us merely sees, a most provocative connection, before they vanish for ever. She wondered if all her companions shared her hopeless curiosity about every passing human being, or if this was some worrying kind of mental disturbance which, in the end, would drive her mad.

  In the linen department of John Lewis, she did her best to concentrate on the matter in hand: sheets. She studied her list, looked at tickets with their sale prices screaming in red ink, took off a glove to run a warm finger along flanks of percale, sea island cotton and, most desirable of all, real linen. Where should she begin? It was uncomfortably hot. A needle of sweat ran down her spine. The bland overhead lighting made the piles of white sheets reflect like snow. Curiously, she seemed to be the only customer. Had no one else in London run out of sheets? There was something unnerving in the emptiness of the place. Perhaps it was all a mistake. Perhaps she was not meant to be here, and the bargain sheets, arranged merely to tempt her, could not be sold. When she had made her choice, the saleswoman, if ever she could find one, would laugh at her and say it was all a trick. . . .

  A man was suddenly at her side. Cheap suit, wall eye, chunks of hair slammed down with grease.

  ‘Would Madam like any assistance?’

  Yorkshire accent. Old-time courtesy. How many years since anyone had addressed her as Madam? Rachel stared at him, amazed. But, dizzied by the unaskable queries that fizzed in her head, she was unable to answer his question. At what point in his life had this man said to himself, That’s it, then: the linen department of John Lewis? What, in his frugal Northern childhood, had made him aspire to the alien world of Oxford Street? On his wages, where did he live? Was he one of the millions of commuters thrust daily into the city, their tedious working days beginning and ending with tedious train journeys? What had he eaten for breakfast? She felt instinctively he was a Ready Brek man. Had a wife cooked it? Was he a happy man? From his helpful eyes, she could not tell.