This Charming Man

‘Say goodbye to Alannah.’ She pulled Daisy and Verity towards the car.

  That night she woke in the early hours, cold and sober and terrified, reliving the episode. Hearing her own voice, thick and drunk, insisting, ‘I never drink before six o’clock.’

  I never drink before six o’clock.

  What a stupid thing to say when it was obvious Fiona knew she was drunk.

  And the guilt about the girls! They were so precious and she had endangered their safety by driving them around while she was… not drunk… it wasn’t that bad, but not sober either. If anything had happened…

  Although it wasn’tasifshe’d planned it. If she’d known she was going to be driving, she wouldn’t have had anything to drink – not much anyway. Guilt slid into self-pity: why did it have to be that particular day that Fiona’s car had refused to start? Normally she’dbe sober mid-afternoon.

  It’s been weeks since I’ve waited until 6 p.m.

  Weeks and weeks.

  For a moment her heart felt as if it had given up beating, and that was the first time she thought, I’ve got to stop.

  ‘Why would Fiona Fife ask me if everything was okay with you?’ Nick asked.

  Fuck.

  She stared him dead in the eye. ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about.’

  Not for a moment had she expected that Fiona would rat on her.

  ‘Marnie, please tell me,’ Nick said. ‘Trust me, we can try to fix things…’

  ‘Nothing to fix,’ she said sincerely.

  She’d got good at lying. But this time she didn’t pull it off. Nick was obviously beginning to make connections, to join up the dots. She watched as he took an overview of their recent past and saw how the landscape undulated and shimmeyed for him, rearranging and repositioning itself into the truth.

  He knew.

  She knew that he knew.

  And he knew that she knew.

  He said nothing.

  But he began to watch her all the time.

  ‘What about your job?’ Grace asked.

  ‘Exactly. How could I go to rehab? I’ve got a job. Income that we need.’

  ‘I mean, don’t they mind you missing all this time?’

  ‘It’s not “all this time” –’

  ‘Oh shut up, it is. Why haven’t you been sacked?’

  ‘My boss –’

  ‘Guy?’

  ‘Yes, Guy, I think he… likes me.’

  ‘What do you mean, likes you? You mean fancies you?’

  ‘No. More like a… brother.’

  ‘Brother,’ Grace snorted.

  ∗

  This time last year, she’d been so excited at returning to work. Nick hadn’t got his bonus and it should have been regarded as a disaster but, at the time, she saw it as the saving of her. Suddenly she had a purpose; she would no longer feel the need to drink – at least not in the way she used to, lonely and alone. Her job was highly sociable, she was out and about meeting potential clients, having boozy business lunches and post-work debriefs in the pub with the lads. For the first time in a long time she was having fun.

  But the days passed without her bringing in any new business. The days became weeks and the sparkle of her new life began to dim. Then there was a lunch, with a potential client, and she thought they’d been getting on great; there were gin and tonics and wine, then port, then grappa, and they’d been matching each other drink for drink and she didn’t understand how she was so drunk and helpless, while he remained capable enough to laugh at her. The mâıtre d’ was sharp-eyed enough to ring for a taxi for her and the following day she was grateful for the incessant vomiting that prevented her from going to work and facing her shame. She got Nick to ring and tell Guy she had a gastric bug; Guy replied that the mâıtre d’ had phoned to remind her that she hadn’t been able to remember her pin number yesterday and she still owed for the lunch.

  After two days she returned to work and endured the good-natured jibes about her drunken state; Guy was the only one who didn’t join in. She apologized and promised him it wouldn’t happen again. But that very evening she went to the pub with the lads and drowned her shame in vodka, enough to make her happy and numb. Rico was the one who helped her walk to the cab.

  Another week passed without her making a sale and she began to wake with dread. When each fruitless day came to an end, she sought someone to go for a drink with; there was so much fear to wash away. Sometimes Craig or Henry popped into the pub, but after one or two drinks they peeled away; lightweights. The only person she could rely on to be consistently available was Rico.

  The number of nights when she lurched home, late and incoherently drunk, stacked up.

  Initially Nick reacted with fury, then one Sunday afternoon he sat her at the dining-room table and said, with heavy portent, ‘We need to talk.’ When he told her he was ‘desperately worried’ about how much she was drinking, she already had her response prepared: most of her business was done socially; she wasn’t out enjoying herself, she was working.

  In that case, Nick pleaded, could she please do so in moderation.

  A reasonable request, she decided: from now on three drinks would be her limit. But despite her sincere intentions, her after-work drinking continued to be shambolic and excessive. She couldn’t understand it – after a couple of drinks, the whole thing seemed to take on some life of its own.

  She started to miss days at work; she’d only been back twelve weeks and she’d taken five sick days. And she had yet to do one deal.

  Her life began to feel full of sharp edges, there was no comfort to be found: she hated being at home because of Nick’s watchful anger; she hated being at work because of her failure as a broker; the only place she wanted to be was the pub, and the only person she was comfortable with was Rico. He was the one person whom she felt wasn’t passing some sort of judgement on her. Also, he made no secret of the fact that he found her attractive, and she was flattered. He was young – younger than her, in any case – and very good-looking: dark-haired and dark-eyed.

  After less than two weeks, Nick sat her down for another serious conversation. Once again Marnie promised a fresh start, and she meant it. Really meant it. She thought she had already been making an effort but she swore to Nick that she’d try much much harder.

  A week later he had to ask again; confused by how she had continued to fail, she made yet another promise.

  ‘This isn’t working,’ Guy said.

  It had taken so long for him to acknowledge this manifest truth that she’d managed to half convince herself it might never happen.

  ‘You’ve been back at work for four months now,’ he said. ‘And you haven’t done a single deal.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she whispered.

  ‘Do you think that if you weren’t under such pressure you wouldn’t need to drink so much?’

  She flinched. It couldn’t have hurt more if he’d punched her.

  ‘Bea is leaving. We have a vacancy for office manager. Do you want it?’

  Anything to win back his approval. ‘If you want me to,’ she mumbled. ‘I’ll give it a go.’

  ‘You should be able to do it in your sleep. One other thing. I want you to go to an AA meeting. Alcoholics Anonymous.’

  She lifted her head, her voice suddenly restored. ‘Oh my God, Guy, I’m not that bad.’

  ‘That’s the deal. If you want to keep your job, you’ll go to the meeting.’

  ‘No, Guy…’

  ‘Yes, Marnie.’

  So she went to a meeting – it wasn’t as if Guy had left her with much choice. As she expected, it was strange and awful. The people were all over her, smothering her with niceness. A woman called Jules was almost creepily friendly, giving her her phone number and begging Marnie to ring the next time she felt like drinking.

  It was imperative that Nick never knew that she’d been. She couldn’t risk ideas being planted in his head.

&nbs
p; Guy was full of questions about how she’d got on at the meeting.

  ‘It was… Sorry, Guy, I don’t even know what to say because it was so…’ She located the exact word. ‘Inappropriate, me being there. They’re alcoholics. It was wrong that I was there spying on them.’

  ‘You should go to a few more,’ Guy said. ‘Just to get a feel for them.’

  Marnie found this utterly astonishing. ‘Admittedly, Guy,’ she said, ‘perhaps I had been going through a brief patch of heavy drinking but now that I have a new less stressful job, everything will improve.’

  ‘One more meeting,’ he said. ‘Just try one more.’

  He was stubbornly insistent – but she was even more so. Right down at her very core she knew she was blessed with superior knowledge: she was right, he was wrong.

  For over half an hour they tussled back and forth. Finally Guy conceded defeat with a murmured, ‘Let’s see how it plays out over the next few months.’ He looked quite exhausted.

  Then she brought the news of her new lowly administrative job to Nick – and he put his face in his hands and rocked back and forth. ‘Thank God, thank God, thank God,’ he moaned.

  Marnie stared at him in mute surprise. She’d expected him to be disappointed about her low salary – not that she had yet earned any broker’s commission, but there had been the expectation that when she eventually did, it would be fat and satisfying.

  ‘I’ve been so worried,’ Nick said. ‘About your drinking. But now you can stop.’

  Marnie felt like she’d had a blow to the chest: Nick was right. Her new working hours were nine to six, with no requirement to socialize. She would clock off at six on the dot and there was no reason why she shouldn’t be home twenty minutes later.

  Guy would be watching her at work, Nick would be watching her at home: she was trapped.

  It was exhausting: planning when she could buy it, when she could drink it, how she could hide the smell, how she could hide the effects and how she could dispose of the empties.

  Her life became even more boxed in when Nick let their full-time nanny go and hired a part-timer, who needed Marnie to be home each evening by seven; the expense of a full-time nanny couldn’t be justified on Marnie’s new salary.

  The problem was Rico. Almost daily he tried to tempt her for an after-work drink and sometimes she gave in – maybe once every three weeks, or once every two weeks, or once a week, and although she never intended to have more than a couple, again and again she found that she didn’t return home until she was fall-down drunk.

  She hated herself. She loved Nick. She loved the girls. Why did she do this to them?

  Nick raged and begged, and she promised she wouldn’t do it again, but Rico continued to issue his invitations and she wasn’t always able to hold out.

  Inevitably the night came when Rico lunged at her. Aghast, she sidestepped him. ‘Rico, I’m married.’

  Undeterred he tried again. And again. And eventually – why? She was never really sure – she let him. It was a scuffly, inexpert sort of snog, their tongues darting and clashing, both of them too drunk for it to be any better.

  The following morning, in the cold light of day, she was sick to her stomach. A kiss counted as cheating and even though she and Nick were having a rough time, she loved him. He deserved her loyalty.

  But the next time Rico invited her for a drink, she found herself accepting. It was peculiar, because, handsome as he was, he sometimes – often – gave her the creeps.

  But she had to like him. You couldn’t go to the pub with someone you didn’t even like; what kind of person would that make you?

  Their nanny left, after one too many evenings of having to stay late. Nick found a new one, another cut-pricer who needed Marnie to be home by six-thirty. Marnie swore she’d give this nanny no reason to leave.

  The morning came when she woke – to her unprecedented horror – naked, in Rico’s bed. She didn’t know what, if anything, had happened. And she was too appalled by her memory lapse to be able to ask him.

  All she could think of was Nick. She’d gone way too far. This time she really might lose him. And in the midst of that paralysing fear she knew how much she loved him. In the horrors, she raced home, her whole body trembling.

  When she walked in through the front door, Nick went berserk – he’d been up all night waiting for her – but she lied, lied, lied; a dry-mouthed, tight-headed, elaborate story involving a night out with Lindka (she barely knew Lindka, but nonetheless managed later that morning to extract a promise from her that she’d swear to Nick – if asked – that Marnie had spent the night in her place), disconnected phones, mobiles out of batteries, no taxis available.

  She had to make Nick believe her. She couldn’t lose him.

  As it happened, she didn’t think he did believe her but he couldn’t break her down. For every hole he found in her story, she plugged it with something even more implausible; in the end she so exhausted him that he simply surrendered.

  Later that day, she looked across the office at Rico and something inside her curdled.

  I was drunk and you took advantage of me.

  Then another voice said, No one forced me to drink those drinks…

  One thing was for sure, though, she thought: staying the night with Rico had been the biggest mistake of her life. She’d risked her marriage just because she’d had too much to drink. It would never happen again.

  Three weeks later it happened again, almost to the exact detail.

  Then again.

  The new nanny left and Marnie’s guilt felt like hot knives in her chest. She loathed herself and the unerring ability to destroy everything she touched.

  Her life felt as if it was folding ever more inwards on itself, and some mornings she felt so wretched that a mouthful of something made it easier to leave the house. And sometimes the terror of actually being out in the world was so huge that she started to take the precaution of carrying a bottle in her bag. Until Nick found it.

  He began to smell her breath; he pretended he was just doing something else, like helping her off with her coat, but she knew what he was doing. If she was ten minutes late home, he panicked, convinced she’d embarked on a bender.

  Another nanny left.

  Nick’s vigilance increased. In response, so did her subterfuge, then his watchfulness and her lies.

  But even while she was being wound tighter and tighter around alcohol, she was struggling to escape. Praying to a god she didn’t believe in for the strength to stop drinking for ever, she regularly went on raids around the house, retrieving bottles from their hiding places and pouring the contents down the sink, her head averted because it made her too sad to watch the silvery beauty gulp away from her.

  Please make me stop please make me stop please make me stop.

  At Nick’s urging, she tried acupuncture to stop the craving; she tried meditation to calm down; she dosed herself with tryptophan and chromium; she harassed her doctor for better anti-depressants; she tried generating a natural high by running.

  But if her guilt didn’t get her, the sadness she carried was too much to bear. She could manage perhaps a week without a drink, but the depression during that time was like walking on knives. Stop, start, stop, start. Start, always start again.

  She loved alcohol, a love that was fierce and hungry. Alcohol – vodka – was all she craved and there was nothing to compare to that first swallow. The taste so clean; icy cold and fiery warm, coursing down her throat, spreading heat through her chest, burning off all fear and anxiety in her stomach. It was as if stardust had been sprinkled from her head to her toes, and she was suddenly alert, yet calm, hopeful but accepting. Then giddy, giddy and free, soaring with relief.

  ‘I’ve to go back to Dublin,’ Grace said. ‘I’ve got to work the weekend shift to make up for missing days earlier this week.’

  ‘I know, I understand. You’re good to come, very good.’

  ‘Now listen, pep talk before I go. I’m not trying t
o scare you, but Nick won’t put up with this for much longer. He’s a really good man.’

  ‘I know,’ Marnie muttered.

  ‘I always liked him but… I suppose I thought he was a bit of a lightweight. I think I judged him on his clothes. Anyway I don’t any more. He’s fantastic. Oh, and you didn’t tell me that the reason he didn’t get this year’s bonus is because he had to miss so much time at work because of you.’

  Marnie buried her face in her pillow, the shame too much.

  ‘He had to keep leaving work early so your nanny could go to her next job, right? Because you were hardly ever home in time? And he had to stay late in the mornings to take the girls to school when you were too hung-over to do it? And yes, Marnie, I know that parenting should be a shared responsibility, but in all fairness, Nick earns fifteen times as much as you do.’

  Marnie knew. She agreed.

  ‘Listen to me, Marnie, this is important. If it came to it, Nick would get custody of the kids.’

  Nick will leave you.

  You will lose custody of your children.

  I want a drink.

  ‘The way you’re drinking, no court in the country – what? Is that the doorbell?’ Grace pounded down the stairs and pounded back up a few moments later. ‘It’s your boss.’

  ‘Guy?’

  ‘Lanky posh bloke? Yeah.’

  ‘What? Here?’

  ‘In the sitting room. Put on your dressing gown. Brush your hair.’

  ∗

  ‘I’ve got a proposition for you,’ Guy said.

  Marnie’s heartbeat accelerated and suddenly the room was far too hot.

  ‘I care about you, Marnie.’

  Mutely she watched him. Was this really happening? What would be the price for keeping her job? Just a one-off? Or a regular three-bonka-week arrangement?

  Whatever, he could so forget it.

  ‘Even though you are at times – frankly – a nightmare,’ he said.

  She nodded. She knew. It still didn’t mean she was going to sleep with him.

  ‘I’ve never told anyone at work this,’ he said. ‘But… my mother was like you.’

  ‘… What do you mean?’ Oedipus with floppy hair. Christ, that was all she needed.