∗
Nick was waiting in the hall. He was very obviously agitated.
She wasn’t late. She’d done nothing wrong. It had to be the…
‘… Bonus?’ she mouthed.
The look on his face told her everything. It was finally official: no bonus again this year.
Fuuuuuck.
The kids had picked up on the atmosphere of catastrophe and had slunk off to the playroom.
‘Bad year in the markets,’ he apologized.
‘No one’s blaming you.’
He was devastated; earning money was how he validated himself.
‘We’ll sort something out,’ she said.
Later, when she’d put the girls to bed, she found Nick in his office, surrounded by lever-arch files of bank statements and credit card bills.
‘Where the fuck does it all go?’ he asked helplessly. ‘Everything costs so much.’
Their mortgage, most of all. They’d bought the five-bedroomed house three years ago, just before Nick stopped having the Midas touch. Nick had insisted on buying such a big house. He’d said it was what she deserved. She had liked where they’d been living, but because he’d been so insistent, she went along with it. And she’d believed him when he assured her that they could afford it. Then interest rates had crept up a couple of points, which wouldn’t have impacted too much on a normal-sized mortgage, but on a massive one like theirs…
‘Let’s write down everything we spend money on and see what can go,’ she suggested. ‘School fees,’ she started with. ‘We could move the girls to a cheaper school.’
‘No.’ He groaned, like he was actually in pain. He was so proud that his children were in a private school. ‘They need stability and Verity wouldn’t survive in a state school.’ Their current school had small classes with individual attention. ‘She’d be bullied to death. What about Melodie? Could we manage without her?’
Melodie was their nanny, a capable Kiwi who had about twenty other jobs on the go.
‘She’s working the bare minimum as it is.’ Marnie got the girls to school and Melodie worked from 2.30 to 6.15. ‘If she goes, I can’t work.’
‘Could you go part-time? Just work mornings?’
‘No.’ She had already asked Guy about it. ‘It’s a full-time position.’
Nick scribbled some calculations to see if Marnie’s salary was more than Melodie’s wages and decided that it was, barely.
‘Mrs Stevenson?’ he asked. Their cleaning woman.
‘I’m a full-time working mother. She’s absolutely fantastic. And she costs fifty quid a week.’
‘All right, okay,’ he grumbled. He tapped his pen nib against his notebook. ‘But something has to give somewhere.’ He swept a look over her. ‘You spend a fortune on your hair.’
Mutely, she stared at him. She needed her hair even more than she needed Mrs Stevenson. The expensive cut she was prepared to forgo, but not the colour. A picture of herself with two inches of grey roots flashed in her head. She could never leave the house again. It was proving a big enough challenge at the moment, even with perfect highlights.
‘And all those… healing things you do. Meditation and acupuncture and… what’s that thing you were at tonight? Cognitive something?’
‘Counselling. But I won’t be going back. And I don’t do any of the others any longer.’ Because none of them worked. ‘How about your gym membership?’ she suggested. ‘Perhaps you could jog around the common instead?’
Aggrieved, he said, ‘I need to go to the gym. I’m up to my eyeballs in stress. Anyway I’ve paid for the rest of the year.’
‘Okay.’ She braced herself to address a truly painful subject. ‘Your car…’
‘My…? Are you barking? If I show up for work in a Ford Fiesta, it’s the same as having “Loser” stamped on my forehead. I need the Jag to keep the respect.’
‘I’m not suggesting a Ford Fiesta. But…’
‘What about yours? A Porsche? Why don’t you get a Ford Fiesta?’
‘Fine. I don’t care.’ The Porsche SUV was too big, guzzled an appalling quantity of petrol and was far too much of a yummy-mummy cliché.
But that seemed to make Nick angrier. She should care.
‘Holidays,’ she said. ‘We spend lots on them.’
‘But we need a holiday. It’s the one thing we really need.’
‘We don’t need any of it.’
He’d got used to dropping a grand on a suit; buying three of them in one go. She’d got used to it too. Handing over seven hundred pounds for a handbag – merely something to carry her stuff in – when she could just as easily pick up a bag in Next for thirty quid.
But Nick had celebrated her extravagance: if his wife could afford to spend a hundred and fifty pounds on a haircut, it signified that he was a success.
It was humiliating for him to ask for constraints on their lifestyle.
‘At least we have each other,’ he said. ‘We’ll get through this.’
It was such a dishonest statement that she couldn’t reply. He opened his mouth to press his point home, then abandoned the plan.
Sitting among the files which detailed their extravagant attempts to spend their way to happiness, he looked entirely beaten; the intensity of her sorrow left her breathless.
‘I’m sorry, Nick,’ she whispered. ‘I’m so, so sorry.’
‘I want to be a trophy wife.’
It was Marnie’s sixteenth birthday – Grace’s also, of course – and the conversation over the celebratory dinner had meandered into considering what their futures held.
Grace had declared her ambition to be a journalist; Leechy, who was always present on family occasions, had said she wanted to work in a ‘caring profession.’
‘As a nurse, maybe,’ she’d said.
‘A doctor,’ Ma had said quickly. ‘Forget about being a nurse in this country. You get paid a pittance and have to work all the hours.’
Then they’d all looked at her. Marnie, what do you want to be when you grow up?
She’d had no idea. She already felt grown-up – in some ways utterly jaded – and had no particular enthusiasm for anything. The one thing she was sure of was that she’d like to have children, but round here that wouldn’t count as a career.
‘Come on, Marnie, what do you want to be when you grow up?’
‘Happy.’
‘But what job do you want?’ Bid had asked.
Embarrassed at once again being out of step with everyone else, she’d considered saying that she’d like to be an air hostess, then realized that aspiring to be a trophy wife would upset them even more. Not that she had any chance of being a trophy wife; she wasn’t tall enough. It was like being a policewoman or a catwalk model, there was a minimum height requirement.
‘A wife!’ Ma was scandalized. ‘Marnie Gildee, I brought you up to think differently.’
‘Not just any wife,’ Marnie said flippantly. ‘A full-on trophy job.’
She’d said it to shock because she’d been so uncomfortable with Grace and Leechy’s certainty. ‘You got married,’ she accused Ma. ‘You’re a wife.’
‘But it wasn’t my sole ambition.’ Ma had worked in the trade union movement all her life. It was where she’d met her husband.
‘You’re not even blonde,’ Bid turned on Marnie with sudden venom. ‘Trophy wives are always blonde.’
‘I can be blonde if I really need to be.’
Mind you, she wasn’t entirely sure that was true. She’d tried bleaching a handful of her hair and it had gone green. But she wasn’t backing down.
‘What’s the point in me having career plans?’ Marnie asked. ‘I’m hopeless at everything.’
‘You? You’re so gifted.’ Ma’s voice rose. ‘You could do anything you wanted. You’re far brighter than Grace and Leechy – sorry, girls, just calling a spade a spade. It’s a crime to squander such gifts.’
‘Me?’ Now Marnie was almost angry. ‘Who are you confusing me with?’
br /> She and Ma glared at each other, then Ma looked away; she didn’t believe in mothers and teenage daughters being at loggerheads, she said it was a myth put about by soap operas.
‘Confidence,’ Ma said. ‘That’s all you lack, confidence.’
‘I’m hopeless at everything,’ Marnie repeated firmly.
And she proved herself right.
By the time Grace was covering mutilated bodies for the Times, Marnie had done a degree in economics, graduated with a lacklustre 2:2 and fulfilled her own prophecies by being unable to get a job: she was granted several interviews on the basis of her resumé but couldn’t convince anyone to employ her.
It was then that she discovered she hadn’t been lying when she’d said she wanted to be a wife.
Without a husband she felt small and raw. A boyfriend wouldn’t do, not even a long-term one. She wanted a ring on her finger and a different surname, because, on her own, she wasn’t enough.
Her shame was almost as corrosive as her longing – she was Olwen Gildee’s daughter; she’d been hardwired with a certain amount of independent-woman thinking and it sat uneasily with her wish to surrender.
But getting married wasn’t as easy as she’d anticipated.
There were two kinds of men: those who fell so far short of Paddy’s glittering charisma that she couldn’t bear to let them touch her, and the Good Ones. And with them, it was like the job situation all over again. They were initially enthusiastic, but once they reached a certain point in the interview process, something changed: they saw her for who she really was and they started to back away.
It was her fault. She’d get drunk and tell them the contents of her head: her horror of the world and of the human condition. She woke up one morning, hung-over and shaky, and remembered the night before, saying to Duncan, a happy-go-lucky lawyer, ‘Don’t you ever wonder why we were made with a finite capacity for pleasure but an infinite capacity for pain? Our ceiling for pleasure is low but the floor for pain is bottomless.’
He’d tried putting forward different arguments – after all he was a lawyer – but her misery proved too much for him. Eventually he’d said, close to panic, ‘You need help. I hope you sort yourself out.’ He’d paid for the dinner, he’d seen her home, but she knew he’d never get in touch again.
By her mid-twenties, she was living in London and a pattern had established itself: she scared away all the Good Ones. And she scared herself, by being unable to stop.
The thing about London was that there was a constant supply of new men. She didn’t have trouble with the initial attraction – she had a type of melancholic beauty that men responded to; she didn’t see it herself but knew it existed – but she always managed to self-destruct.
In sympathy and exasperation, Grace called her the suicide bomber.
By the age of twenty-seven, Marnie had become accustomed to waking too early in the morning, in the horrors. Slipping further and further into isolation, she had become the sum of her rejections. She was starting to give up.
Then she met Nick. Handsome (if a bit short) in a rough-diamond sort of way, he had a swaggery bantam-cock confidence which made her smile. His job required nerves of steel; he loved children; he had an optimism that was contagious. He was definitely a Good One. From the moment he saw her, he wanted her. She recognized the look, she’d seen it enough times on enough faces, but it didn’t make her hopeful. She knew what always happened next. Despite promising herself that she wouldn’t, she got drunk and got weird. But the strange thing was that Nick wasn’t scared off.
When she told him the terrible things in her head he laughed but with tenderness. ‘Tell me why you would think like that, Sweets.’
He didn’t entirely get her, but he was willing. His intentions were clear: her happiness was his project. He had never failed at anything and he didn’t intend to start now.
For her part, she found him extraordinary. He’d had little education but could survey any situation – human, political – then fillet it with efficient speed and emerge with the salient facts. An energy surrounded him, a type of forward-moving buoyancy and he was always slightly ahead of the zeitgeist in his choice of wine, holiday destinations, haircuts…
More reassuring than his coolness was his sentimentality: Nick cried at anything to do with children and animals, and although she teased him for being an over-emotional cockney, she was relieved. Coldness would have been a deal-breaker.
‘Why do you love me?’ she asked him. ‘It’s not because I’m middle class, is it? Please don’t tell me you think you’re trading up?’
‘Fuck off!’ he declared. ‘Who cares about any of that? I love you because you’re a shortarse.’ Nick was five foot eight. ‘We’re the perfect height for each other.’
‘He calls us Short and Shorter,’ she told Grace, in one of her monitoring phone calls.
‘Nicknames,’ Grace said. ‘Things are going well.’
‘Yes,’ Marnie said, but doubtfully.
‘Never mind why he loves you,’ Grace advised. ‘Why do you love him?’
‘I don’t know if I do. I fancy him, like I really… the sex, you know, it’s gorgeous, but I don’t know if I love him.’
That changed late one night when they were walking back from a restaurant to where Nick had parked his car. There was the sound of tinkling glass and the whoop of a car alarm, then Nick exclaimed, ‘That’s my motor.’ (He’d once claimed that he could always recognize his own car alarm, it was like a mother hearing her baby cry.) He did a speedy once-over of the street, to establish it was safe. ‘Got your phone, Marnie? Wait here.’
Then he began to run towards the three blokes who were breaking into his car. They saw him coming and scarpered but, to Marnie’s amazement, Nick ran after them. The three men split from each other and went in different directions but Nick kept running behind one of them – the biggest. Nick had a tight, wiry body and he was fast. They both disappeared into an alleyway which led to a local housing estate and some minutes later Nick returned, panting and disappointed.
‘Lost him.’
‘Nick, that could have been dangerous… you could have been…’
‘I know,’ he gasped. ‘Sorry, Sweets. Shouldn’t have left you here alone.’
It was the turning point for her: his courage in the pursuit of what was right was what made her fall in love with him.
She believed in him.
She wanted to be his.
It was time, she decided, to take him to Dublin to run him by her family – and it was a success.
Even though they had opposing economic ideologies, he charmed Ma and Dad. Grumpy Bid (who couldn’t give a damn about socialism) and Big Jim Larkin (the dog before Bingo) adored him. ‘How could you not like him?’ Grace said. Even Damien let himself be coaxed into admitting Nick was ‘a decent bloke.’
Nick talked incessantly, bought drinks for everyone and declared himself delighted with Ireland.
‘It’s over,’ Grace said to Marnie. ‘Your time in the wilderness.’
And so it appeared. A man had seen beyond her misleadingly pretty little exterior to the murkiness within and hadn’t run for the hills – but she kept having to check.
‘Why do you love me?’ she asked Nick again and again.
‘You’re the salt of the earth.’
‘I am?’
‘Yeah! Kindest heart of any person I know. See the way you’re always crying about people you’ve never even met.’
‘That’s not kindness, that’s… neurosis.’
‘Kindness,’ he insisted. ‘Brainy too. Plus, you’ve a great pair of pins, you cook a proper hot curry and when you’re not boo-hooing about the state of the world, you can be a bit of a laugh. That’s why I love you.’
‘I won’t ask again,’ she apologized.
‘Ask as many times as you like, Sweets, answer’ll be the same. Happy now?’
‘Yes.’ No. Almost.
Marnie tried to accept that she’d finally got what she w
anted. But she couldn’t shake the fear that there was a catch.
There was always a catch.
Friday. Wen-Yi was on the prowl. ‘Marnie,’ he hissed, as soon as he saw her. ‘Mr Lee? He should have got that form yesterday. All he had to do was sign it and send it back.’
‘The post hasn’t come yet. As soon as it does, I’ll alert you.’
‘Mr Lee is a powerful man,’ Wen-Yi said. ‘He would be unhappy to lose this sale.’
She hated when he said things like that. It made her feel ill with fear.
‘Post has just arrived,’ Guy said. ‘Let’s find out.’
Striving to fake an expression of keen expectation that every envelope might contain Mr Lee’s returned form, she opened the post. About halfway through the task, she began to believe that it might actually appear.
So profound was her conviction that, when everything was opened, she was genuinely perplexed.
‘That’s weird,’ she said. ‘Not in today’s post.’
‘What? Why not?’ Wen-Yi slammed his stapler against his desk. ‘Where is it?’
She couldn’t stop herself glancing at her handbag. She half expected it to start pulsing and glowing.
‘It must be lost in the post,’ she said.
She’d tried that before but Guy had told her that that happens only once every ten million letters. It was as convincing an excuse as saying that the dog had eaten your homework.
Agitated and frustrated, Wen-Yi ordered, ‘Ring him. Find out what’s happening.’
‘Okay.’
But what would be the point? Instead she rang her own phone number and left an efficient-sounding message asking Mr Lee to call her asap.
Then she scribbled his address on a Post-it and announced to the office, ‘Just popping out.’ She tried to sound cheerful. ‘I need to go to the chemist.’
Guy watched her go, saying nothing, but taking it all in.
She ran to Rymans and this time managed to purchase an envelope and a stamp. Mr Lee would get the form on Monday, would sign it immediately and it would be back to Wen-Yi by Tuesday. That should be enough time.
Oh what a tangled web.