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  Contents

  Yvonne Roberts

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Yvonne Roberts

  THE TROUBLE

  WITH SINGLE

  WOMEN

  Yvonne Roberts

  Yvonne is an award winning writer and journalist. She began her career on the Northampton Chronicle & Echo then moved to television current affairs and further print journalism. She has written for every broadsheet including the Guardian, the Observer and The Sunday Times, covering social policy, politics, investigations, features and comment. She has been a columnist for the New Statesman and Community Care and is now a regular contributor to the Guardian’s blog, Comment is Free.

  She has written four novels: Every Woman Deserves an Adventure, The Trouble With Single Women, Shake and A History of Insects which was described as ‘pure magic’ on publication. She has also written three non-fiction books on gender and family policy: Where Did Our Love Go?, Mad About Women and Man Enough.

  Dedication

  To Meg and Rob Evans, Valerie, Margaret and Gaynor

  It is always incomprehensible to a man that a woman should ever refuse an offer of marriage.

  Jane Austen

  ‘I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid sir, because I am not myself, you see.’

  Lewis Carroll,

  Alice in Wonderland

  Chapter One

  ADAM WILLIAMS’S sock drawer told Fiona Travers all she needed to know about her possible future. It would offer no wicked little deviations, no sudden bursts of romantic whimsy or clashes of passion; just the unremitting certainty that as it was today, so it would be tomorrow; safe and orderly and unsurprising.

  Still, Fee told herself, shouldn’t that hold its own attractions for an unattached woman of thirty-seven like herself?

  Adam pulled his drawer open a little further, hunting for the small box he had hidden earlier. Fee’s gaze continued to take in thirty-one pairs of identical dark-blue socks, lying in rows, each pair folded into an identical ball, each a giant navy marble.

  ‘No odd socks?’ Fee asked, knowing the answer.

  ‘If you lost a sock now and then,’ Adam replied, smiling in a way that frankly, turned Fee’s stomach, ‘I wouldn’t mind at all.’

  ‘So, how about it then?’ he pushed. ‘I think you’d agree we tick along nicely. And it’s all right, isn’t it? You know . . .’ he glanced towards the bed.

  Fee nodded vigorously in agreement. ‘All right’ was exactly the right assessment; no more, no less.

  Intercourse with Adam was the equivalent of a Janet and John book; simple, with a lot of repetition. Just like his socks.

  In the several months since they had first met, only once had Fee attempted to inject a little variation in bed.

  ‘Are you trying to tell me something?’ Adam had immediately asked. At least give him marks for astuteness, Fee had thought to herself. He had then, disconcertingly, rummaged under the bed and produced a spiral-bound notebook and pencil.

  ‘Start talking,’ he had instructed, pencil poised.

  ‘Let me read what the others have said first,’ Fee teased.

  ‘If you can’t say it, draw it,’ Adam demanded, his engineering background coming to the fore. He had shoved the notebook into her hands.

  Fee stared at the page. Draw it? How do you draw subtlety, sensuousness, sensitivity? Come to that, how do you draw disappointment and boredom? And how do you sketch the unease at realizing that while virtually everyone else of your years is married with two children and a mortgage you are hurtling towards middle age, on your own.

  Some people assumed that Fee’s solitary state was the consequence of rejection: an unwanted woman. In truth, it wasn’t so much rejection that had been the pattern of her love life so far – as mismatch.

  Those who fancied Fee Travers she actively despised (not least for their poor taste). Those for whom she yearned treated her . . . Fee searched for the appropriate word. It didn’t require much thought.

  ‘Shabbily’ probably summed it up, she told herself cheerfully. And still she came back for more.

  The notebook that Adam had given her was already decorated with a frieze of his doodles. A series of boxes, each identical. Box after box after empty box.

  It was at this point, surrounded by navy-blue socks and courted by a man who was too eager to please, that Fee finally acknowledged what she had been trying to avoid for several months: the time had finally come to grow up.

  ‘So, what do you say?’ Adam had closed the sock drawer, and now held something clenched in his left fist. At the same time, he was using his right hand to pat strands of Fee’s hair back into place. He preferred his women reasonably tidy.

  He continued, ‘We could make an announcement on your birthday. It’s soon, isn’t it? We’ve still got time to get it into the paper.’

  ‘Why on earth would we want to make an announcement?’ Fee thought to herself. Who would give a damn? Apart, of course, from her mother. And, of course, Claire.

  Claire was nearly forty – not the ideal age to be abandoned to bob about on a sea of circumstance, waiting for someone, anyone, to throw the lifebelt of love.

  Didn’t she and Claire rely on each other? Single, together?

  How would Claire react? Fee already knew the answer. She would smile, say congratulations, wonderful, so happy for you. All the words you’re supposed to shower on a best friend in such a moment of triumph. Then, out would come the truth.

  ‘How could you do this to me, Fee? How could you be so selfish? So unthinking? So treacherous? Don’t you think of anyone apart from yourself?’

  Fee smiled.

  ‘Why are you smiling?’ Adam asked seriously. ‘Is it my socks?’

  Adam had pale-brown hair, hazel eye
s, a slightly bulging forehead and very good teeth. In fact, it was Helen, Fee’s mother, who had pointed out the state of his teeth. Probably because she couldn’t think of much else to say about him. Adam was not as attractive as he imagined.

  He was thirty-seven. He had his own house, car and a well-paid job as an executive in an oil company. He could cook, sew, clean. He wanted a wife now, Fee suspected, not to make his life complete but to prove to himself that he was no longer a little boy; not so much romance as rites of passage.

  On their second meeting, Adam had announced to Fee that he was ready for Commitment. He had made it sound as attractive as an indefinite stay in Broadmoor. Since then, Fee had found Adam’s quirks increasingly difficult to overlook.

  For instance, he placed little muslin caps over his open jam and honey jars and became quite cross if Fee forgot to do likewise. The surfaces in his kitchen had to be bare; no knick-knacks, milk bottles or stray cornflakes packets allowed. All his boxer shorts were folded in the same manner by the woman who cleaned and ironed. And Adam occasionally had a certain way of talking to Fee that irritated her profoundly.

  ‘I can see my little girl is getting tired,’ Adam had been known to remark in company. ‘It’s time to take her home.’

  Fee would take him to one side and point out that she was not ‘his’; she was not ‘little’, she was not tired and she was certainly not going home.

  Adam would then apologize profusely and that to her shame made her feel even more – well, she had to admit, even more contemptuous.

  Adam’s problem was that he made himself too available. He was too decent, too willing. Fee preferred more of a challenge.

  Still, she was fond of him. Fond enough to keep seeing him; fond enough to remain vigilant in case her heart might suddenly leap or her skin might register an electric shock or she might receive some other signal that Adam Williams had miraculously become The One.

  So far, love had proved elusive. And just before Adam’s proposal, Fee had begun to wonder whether the fondness she felt for him was not, in fact, desperation – heavily disguised, of course.

  ‘So what’s it to be?’ Adam demanded again, agitated, peering into Fee’s face. During the most intimate moments, he frequently talked as if he was propped up in the pub. (‘Fancy another?’ he’d occasionally ask after a brief raid on Fee’s anatomy.)

  ‘Marriage? Yes or no?’

  Fee said nothing but reopened the drawer and scooped up an armful of socks. She threw them in the air and, as they fell like confetti, she whooped loudly.

  Adam, unsettled by the sudden disorder, nevertheless smiled, relieved.

  ‘So I take it that’s a yes?’ he asked.

  ‘You know something?’ he continued, now on his hands and knees, crawling around anxiously in search of wayward socks, ‘I only want what’s best for you . . . And I’m sure I can make you happy. Can’t I?’ he added, unnerved by Fee’s continuing silence.

  He stopped sock-hunting and looked at Fee. She was now sitting on the bed, smiling distractedly into the distance. He told himself there was still time to back out. He reappraised the situation. Fee wasn’t pretty but she had well, something, in a quiet, quite classy kind of way. Something that wouldn’t date too rapidly.

  But why hadn’t she spoken? Why hadn’t she shrieked, thrown her arms around his neck and said yes, Adam, yes and thank you, thank you, thank you? Perhaps relief and gratitude had sent her into a state of shock?

  The previous three women he had taken out had been voracious to marry him – and they hadn’t even hit thirty. Quite honestly, Adam told himself, even if he hadn’t been eligible, which he clearly was, could Fee afford to bloody well play about like this?

  Choice, after all, is a young woman’s game – always has been, always will be.

  ‘See here,’ Adam said, pointedly looking at his watch and trying a different tack. ‘Can we get this over? I’m a bit pushed for time—’

  Fee smiled on as if, well, as if she could see something on that bloody blank wall. Adam took a long second look at his intended wife. Perhaps he’d been too hasty after all. Perhaps she was a little bit, well, unstable? A little bit too career-minded, for his taste. Even, at times, a touch too opinionated?

  ‘Dreaming of a white wedding?’ Adam asked, nervousness making his voice a good deal higher than usual.

  Fee examined the man who had suggested that they spend the rest of their lives together. Or, at least, a respectable length of time. Her mother would love him as a son-in-law. To be frank, she would love anyone as a son-in-law for Fee, this late in the day.

  Fee’s sisters had already remarked on Adam’s finer virtues. And Fee? She knew Adam could probably grow on her. She knew that it probably made sense to say yes.

  The man under surveillance cleared his throat, nervously. ‘Perhaps, there’s something you haven’t told me?’

  ‘Not in the way that you mean,’ Fee answered obliquely.

  ‘Is there someone else? Someone I know?’ Adam persisted, unsettled by her continuing evasiveness.

  He mentally cursed the fact that he would have to begin the hunt for a companion all over again – unless, of course, he could revive interest in that midwife with the red hair and legs that felt like a baby’s woollen blanket?

  Fee belatedly noticed the small jeweller’s box in Adam’s hand.

  ‘Tell me,’ Fee asked cryptically. ‘Have you ever come across the man they call The Lone Ranger?’

  ‘Of course I have,’ Adam replied crossly. ‘But what’s he got to do with us?’

  ‘A lot more than you might imagine,’ Fee replied, giving to Adam what appeared to be a very odd smile. ‘A whole lot more.’

  ‘You lived in Manchester, didn’t you, Fee?’ interrogated Gill Booth, sitting at the top of her dining-room table, two nights later.

  The walls were avocado green and decorated with menus of restaurants that Gill and her husband, Simon, had visited during the course of their ten-year marriage. As the anniversaries passed, and children arrived, so the venues had become noticeably less exotic. A menu from the Pizza Express was the latest addition.

  Gill turned to Philip Cross, a pixie of a man sitting on her left. An excess of energy made him constantly fidget as if he had a hotplate fitted to his chair.

  Philip was also clearly the kind of man who charmed with his personality since his features looked as if they had been ordered at random from several different mail-order catalogues; nothing quite fitted or matched.

  Fee had known at 8.15 p.m., as soon as she met Philip, that even if she had been looking, it was not going to happen. Gill always said Fee ought to suspend this ‘instant-judgement lark’.

  ‘At your age, you have to start giving the six-out-of-ten men a chance,’ Gill constantly warned. ‘Or you’ll pay the price.’

  ‘Look at Simon and me,’ Gill would say by means of encouragement. ‘Nobody thought we would get on—’

  Fee was too considerate to point out that ‘Nobody’ had increasingly been proven right.

  In Fee’s view, attraction for another human being was as irrational as looking for a house to buy. As soon as you crossed the threshold, you knew: this wasn’t the one. So why bother to examine the plumbing, the wiring and the knocked through lounge?

  ‘You know Manchester, don’t you, Fee?’ Gill continued, determined to spoonfeed conversation to her guests.

  ‘Well,’ Fee replied equably, ‘I ought to. As you know, I was born there—’

  On the phone earlier, Gill had sworn that this time she wasn’t trying to fix Fee up. It just so happened that Simon had wanted Philip to come to supper as they’d just begun to work together. It was pure coincidence that it was the same Tuesday that Gill had organized with Fee.

  ‘By chance,’ Gill had discovered that Philip was forty-four, divorced for three years, he had one adopted teenage son and he was solvent. But, according to Simon, only just.

  He had no anti-social diseases, perversions or latent tendencies of which
Gill knew. She wasn’t entirely sure because this had come secondhand from Simon and, ‘Men don’t discuss the nitty-gritty about themselves, do they?’

  ‘Well now,’ Gill continued doggedly, as she passed around bread rolls, ‘Fee lived in Manchester for a long time, and you, Philip, lived in Dumfries, so haven’t you got a lot in common?’

  ‘Such as what?’ asked Fee, smiling. Gill looked surprised. Normally, Fee played the game.

  ‘What have we got in common?’ Fee repeated mildly.

  ‘Well,’ said Gill, drawing a map in the air with her soup spoon. ‘Well, you’ve got the North for a start. I mean, you both lived in the North . . . And Simon tells me you adore cooking, Philip? Fee loves it too –’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ Fee smiled again.

  What was wrong with the woman, Gill thought crossly.

  When Fee was living with Bill, Gill had been relatively content. The couple split up after five years, and from that moment, Gill had found herself increasingly obsessed with ‘getting Fee sorted’.

  Two years on, the woman needed to be tied up, or down, for everybody’s peace of mind. Especially Gill’s.

  Gill read the Daily Mail. She knew what happened when you invited single career women to sup at your table. They stole your husband.

  Although, to be fair, Fee had always appeared extremely reluctant to spend any time with Simon at all, let alone run off with him.

  Gill fluctuated between concern as to precisely why Fee didn’t fancy her husband – was there something wrong with him? And a conviction that all this indifference was a cover for some torrid affair between the two that she had so far failed to expose. A third possibility, of course, was that there was something seriously amiss with Fee.

  Over nearly fifteen years of close observation, since Gill and Fee and Claire had first shared a flat, Gill had yet to uncover in Fee any trace of the sexual abuse, frigidity, shyness, lesbianism or physical abnormalities that might explain why Fee had always been so damned, well, contrary when it came to men. Or why – infuriatingly – Gill always seemed compelled to weigh up her own lot in life by what was happening to Fee.

  They couldn’t be more different, for God’s sake.