The Trouble with Single Women Read online

  He wouldn’t tell Gill yet. Not until he’d worked out his own survival plan. Otherwise, his rescue would be one more area of his life that she would commandeer.

  The last few years of his marriage had become a struggle. A struggle to resist adopting the same negative views of himself that his wife now held.

  Simon’s advancement in work had been rapid but, for Gill, not rapid enough. Their house was large but Gill had anticipated grand. They had a second home but Gill’s choice would have been a manor house, not a converted barn. They enjoyed one longish holiday abroad a year, but Gill had always assumed that, by her late thirties, they would be boasting about two.

  Simon knew that what galled his wife even more was her conviction (misplaced in Simon’s opinion) that if he had stayed at home and Gill had become the breadwinner, the fruits of her efforts in this the second decade of their marriage would have been far riper and more plentiful.

  Recently, Gill’s frustrations and Simon’s attempts to adapt to them while still salvaging some self-respect had reached a head. Even before the redundancy, it was plain to both of them that Simon had not transformed into the man Gill had assumed he would become.

  Years ago, Gill had been seduced by a magazine article in which Simon, aged thirty-one, had been named as one of the young Turks in architecture to watch. At the time, Simon himself had been philosophical about such publicity. He was more than aware that, having been branded in print as a rising star, he would be wise, in real life, to set his sights far lower in the firmament. And this he believed he had succeeded in achieving rather well.

  Simon Booth saw himself as a man of moderate talent enjoying an above-average income – married to a woman who now wanted something else.

  So why did Simon remain with Gill? If asked he would say it was because of the children. Then he would add that he admired Gill’s energy and ability and determination. Besides, if he left, Simon knew he would deny himself the pleasure of witnessing that momentous occasion – and it would come one day – when his wife was forced to concede that being one half of a moderately successful couple was infinitely preferable to being a nonentity on her own.

  All this, of course, was before Simon’s redundancy and the arrival of Imogen. The redundancy was a setback. Simon had never been out of work in his life before. Yet, here he was at nearly forty-five, dumped. Stranger still, he found the idea of being job-free hugely intoxicating. A reaction he put down to shock.

  Even being in the park mid-morning on a weekday was like entering a new world. He’d already nodded hello to a couple of other men from his street. Men whom, he assumed, must be likewise unemployed.

  Another perk of unemployment would mean more time to spend with Imogen. This unexpected courtship, although still intensely thrilling, was beginning to give Simon a vague sense of déjà vu. At least, it did when he allowed it to.

  Just like Gill in their early days, Imogen had the unnerving habit of banging on about Simon’s ‘winning aura’. Just like Gill, Imogen appeared convinced that Simon was destined to achieve hugely. He had, Imogen frequently said, ‘the smell of success’. In fact, she seemed to have a bit of a thing about smells. And, just like Gill, Imogen could be a mite, well . . . directional, even bossy.

  Simon dismissed the word from his head immediately. Bossy. It was too mundane, too run of the mill to be associated with this highly charged spiritual and sexual liaison he was enjoying – no, celebrating was the word.

  It wasn’t the sex he was celebrating, it was the fact that he was finally doing something that his wife couldn’t control, criticize or influence in any way. Simon Booth would probably have enjoyed the same sense of liberation if he’d secretly become a trainspotter or illicitly taken up ballroom dancing.

  Of course, he felt guilty. He was by nature a faithful man. Of course, he worried about the price he might have to pay – not least in forfeiting time with the children. Still, if Gill could be persuaded to modify her aspirations, if she would only value him for what he was, then he might even consider giving up Imogen.

  He found this line of reasoning reassuring, since it placed responsibility for ending the liaison not on himself but on Gill – who, of course, knew nothing about the triangle of which she was now a part. In the meantime, he would continue in his new role as a sexual lion, his conscience further eased by the awareness that, whatever the wrongs of the situation, he was feeling better about himself by the minute.

  Simon Booth gave a small growl.

  ‘Mozart and Ella Fitzgerald?’ Fee had picked up a couple of CDs. It was eleven on a Wednesday morning and Imogen Banks was driving her to a pub lunch in Marlow via three or four Buckinghamshire villages. She had explained that the most suitable might become the setting for a new comedy series which Astra TV had been commissioned to make.

  ‘My dad loved Mozart and Ella Fitzgerald,’ Fee replied. ‘Bill was quite keen on jazz too, when he wasn’t in his dark room.’

  ‘Bill?’ Imogen affected ignorance.

  ‘Bill Summers,’ Fee replied. ‘We lived together for a while and split up a couple of years ago. He married a woman who already has a couple of children, and they’ve got one between them. He still calls my mother now and then.’ Fee gave a mock-grimace. ‘Naturally, she makes a point of telling me how happy he is.’

  ‘Don’t they always?’ Imogen Banks responded enthusiastically.

  ‘Salmon and crème brûlée,’ Fee decided, running her eye over the lunch menu. The two women were sitting in the garden of a pub that Imogen had visited many times. They were both drinking Pimms.

  ‘How many units do you reckon you drink a week?’ Imogen asked. Fee began to laugh. She had spent most of the morning laughing. Imogen was self-deprecating and funny. Anything Fee had done, Imogen had tackled with an even worse record of success.

  ‘Sixteen units, maybe?’ Fee paused and glanced at Imogen. ‘If I’m honest, more like twenty-six at times. Too much anyway.’

  ‘Me too,’ Imogen used her finger to push the mint and sliced orange further down her glass. ‘I give up every Monday morning and by Monday evening, I’m telling myself a half-glass of red isn’t going to do much damage.’

  ‘Do you ever drink alone?’ Fee asked.

  ‘God, no,’ Imogen looked shocked. ‘Not because I think it’s wrong, but because I never seem to be on my own. Except’, she added hurriedly, suddenly remembering her man-free existence, ‘most nights and in the mornings.’

  The words sounded odd even as Imogen delivered them but Fee appeared not to notice.

  ‘So, what’s it to be, ladies?’ A man with a handlebar moustache stood by their table, pencil behind his ear.

  ‘Salmon and crème brûlée for two please,’ Imogen smiled. ‘And will a bottle of Sancerre do for you, Fee?’

  ‘Fine,’ the man replied. ‘And what will you be drinking, madam?’ he asked Imogen.

  It was a joke he must have cracked dozens of times before, but everyone pretended otherwise. Later, when they ordered coffee, he produced two glasses of Sambucca on the house.

  ‘I know you ladies love a bit of a flambé,’ he announced, as he ignited the coffee beans floating on the surface. Fee and Imogen avoided catching each other’s eye.

  ‘Come again, girls, if your hubbies will let you out,’ he shouted from the bar. The froth from the glass of Guinness in front of him had added a small snowdrift to the moustache and familiarity to his tone.

  In the late afternoon, driving back, Imogen Banks reflected on the day. Professionally, it had been an astute move. She knew that Fee Travers had enjoyed herself. More surprisingly for Imogen, she too had had a good time. This was, of course, a severe challenge to the Banks theory that any time spent solely in the company of a woman was time wasted.

  Fee interrupted Imogen’s thoughts.

  ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you something.’

  Imogen tensed.

  ‘The first time we met, you mentioned The Lone Ranger and Tonto. That intrigued me a bit.’
r />   ‘Did it?’ Imogen relaxed again.

  ‘Yes, you’re not a fan, are you?’ Fee asked.

  Imogen pondered the effort required to weave yet more deceit. She was tired. On this occasion, honesty, as it was less demanding, would have to do.

  Imogen smiled. ‘No, I don’t know, a blind thing about them. Except, of course, watching them on telly when I was a kid. “Hi ho—” ’

  Fee smiled, ‘Silver,’ she prompted. ‘The Lone Ranger’s horse was called Silver. Tonto called him that when he first saw him in Wild Horse Valley.’

  ‘Of course,’ Imogen replied.

  Fee laughed. ‘When I was small, I wanted to be The Lone Ranger, live like him. The unknown man who does good and rides in and out of lives. The man with no past. My mother found that all very upsetting.’

  ‘Why?’ Imogen asked, offering Fee a mint.

  ‘Her view is that only strange girls want to be cowboys or Robin Hood or Richard the Lionheart. Nice girls have heroines. She was keener on Cinderella, Wendy, Snow White – you know the kind of thing—’

  Imogen nodded.

  ‘So I kept The Lone Ranger a secret for years. My dad and Veronica, my sister, knew, and the boy next door, because he was always Tonto, but nobody else.

  ‘Then, in school, we were asked to conduct a survey for homework. I decided to ask the girls in my class who their heroines were . . . I suppose we were all about nine or so at the time—’

  ‘And?’ Imogen asked.

  ‘A lot of them didn’t have heroines either. They were just like me. They had heroes instead.’

  Imogen grinned approvingly. ‘Well, if you’d asked me, I would’ve said the Sheriff of Nottingham. Trusted by no one and unfaithful to all. It must be nice to be wicked now and then,’ she added hastily, in case her endorsement had seemed too convincing.

  Forty minutes later, the car drew up outside F.P. & D.’s offices. Fee had some papers to collect (and her conscience to salve for truanting on a work day).

  ‘Are you working tonight too?’ she asked as she opened the car door.

  Imogen hooted. ‘Me? Certainly not. I’m flopping into a bath and then straight to bed. One of the many pleasures of living alone is that you can do what you want, when you want – and there’s no one to say otherwise. Agreed?’

  ‘Agreed,’ Fee smiled.

  ‘I’ll give you a ring,’ Imogen suggested. ‘We should do this again some time—’

  ‘Look, about your film, I’m sorry . . . I . . . it’s just not me—’ Fee began hesitantly.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ Imogen replied dismissively. ‘I’m sure we’ll dig up someone else to take your place. Plenty more where you came from—’

  ‘Are there?’ Fee asked, genuinely surprised.

  Imogen Banks drove away, feeling very pleased with herself. It wouldn’t be long before Fee Travers’s no turned into yes. And then this unsavoury charade of sisterhood could thankfully come to a close.

  Imogen contemplated her immediate future – romance and ratings – who could ask for more?

  ‘Hi ho, Silver!’ she yelled into the wind.

  Two hours after saying goodbye to Fee, Imogen sat, not in her bed, but three tables to the right of the harpist in the Savoy Hotel in Piccadilly. She wore a lavender tailored suit, which exactly matched her underwear. She had also dressed in black gloves and large triangular gold ear-rings. She ordered a dry Martini and opened a copy of the Telegraph.

  She looked at her watch and smiled contentedly. Somebody’s wife would be missing a husband tonight; such a pity.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ROOM 12 of St Agatha’s Hospital, Bellington, had a peachy-pink deep-pile carpet. The colour reminded Veronica of the powder-puffs that her mother used to have lined up on her kidney-shaped dressing-table when Veronica was seven or eight.

  The curtains in the room were cream with large pink cabbage roses. The roses were exactly like those that had decorated a dress Veronica had bought at sixteen. It had taken every penny of her first three weeks’ wages from a Saturday job as a waitress in a milk bar.

  The frock was nipped in at the waist with a full skirt. The look was completed by a white waspie belt and sling-backs. Through the whole of that summer, every night before she wore her dress, Veronica would soak three net petticoats in sugar and water and hang them to dry on a line strung up in the kitchen. By the following evening, the stiffened petticoats would rub like barbed wire against Veronica’s legs, but they made the cabbage roses stand out almost at right-angles from her waist.

  Now, she lay in the large double-bed with its counterpane of cream and sheets of pink satin and tried not to think.

  She had known for a while that she wasn’t quite right – but anyone she mentioned it to in the family told her she was imagining things.

  On one occasion, Helen had given Veronica the, ‘you-don’t-know-what-suffering-is-my-girl’ speech which she used to deliver at frequent intervals when her daughters were growing up.

  Helen’s mother had had eight children, no money, no bathroom, a stove in the corridor and an old man who drank. All the children, Helen included, had had to leave school at fourteen.

  ‘We were poor and we weren’t happy,’ Helen would say grimly. ‘But we took a pride in ourselves and we had none of this nonsense in those days.’

  What exactly ‘this nonsense’ constituted, depended upon the subject in hand – it might be delinquency, the menopause, ME, single-parent families, too much self-absorption or, as in Veronica’s case, a mental instability that had the audacity to develop into more than ‘nerves’.

  The sedatives made Veronica’s thoughts bounce and bump together pleasantly. What she was less anxious to recall were the events of the previous day. Yesterday morning, she had locked the man who had come to read the gas meter down in the cellar because she knew an attack was imminent.

  If Amy hadn’t called in from next door, he would have been down there until midnight, when Les was due home. Les said that was the final straw. Veronica smiled. It was funny how similar Les had become to his mother-in-law. Helen was always announcing that something or other was the final straw.

  Veronica turned in the hospital bed. St Agatha’s was a private psychiatric hospital. Les had suggested that she have a couple of weeks’ rest and then they could think again. Samantha was coming down from Manchester at the weekend. Les had promised to tell Fee in the morning but Helen had already been instructed that visiting wasn’t allowed. That was Veronica’s idea.

  ‘You’re nothing but a nuisance—’ her mother used to tell her when she was small ‘Always on the want—’

  It’s ironic really, Veronica told herself drowsily. I want for nothing now and I’m still a nuisance . . . a fifty-one-year-old nuisance so what’s been the point of it all . . .?

  But, of course there was a point. The point was that Veronica Haslem would rather hurt herself than anybody else.

  Now that truly was mad. Or was that eminently sensible? Veronica could no longer judge.

  At just after nine in the evening, at F.P. & D., Fee leant back in her chair and put her feet up on the desk. The desk light cast gentle shadows on the perspex and turquoise décor. It was like being underwater in a swimming pool. All was silent except for the distant hum of the cleaner’s vacuum. Fee was happy.

  She’d had an enjoyable day with Imogen. She was sure she’d taken the right decision not to overload herself at work. She had good friends and no man trouble.

  Capitalize on the positive, Gerry Radcliffe always instructed his staff. So, Fee dialled Paul Denning’s office number and left a message on the machine.

  ‘Hello, Paul, it’s Fee. If you’re coming to London, it would be good to have a friendly drink. Speak to you soon.’

  Show-off, Fee told herself and smiled. Paul would know from the tone of her voice, her choice of words, that their relationship had reached the stage of R.I.P. At least it had for Fee.

  No ties, no tears.

  ‘I am defini
tely happy,’ Fee repeated – and crossed her fingers superstitiously.

  ‘Happiness is not an entitlement, it’s a reward just as easily taken away as given,’ Helen always used to warn her daughters. And then she would demonstrate just how easily it could be forfeited, by stopping their pocket money or banning Saturday pictures as punishment for some slight misdemeanour.

  ‘Bullshit,’ Fee told herself cheerily now. ‘Happiness is a state of mind for which I alone am responsible.’

  Fee pushed aside the thought of who bore responsibility for Veronica’s state of mind. She would phone her sister in the morning and together they’d organize a couple of weeks away.

  Fee unlocked her drawer. She had taken to locking her drawers at night only after Diana Woods had worked in the firm for a couple of months. Fee had come in late one night and discovered her colleague at her desk. She said she had been looking for an A-Z, and Fee had directed her to the shelf behind her head.

  Now, Fee removed a sheet of paper from the drawer. On it was the list made several days before of the pros and cons of a single life.

  On the cons side, she had written: surcharges on holidays, no one to halve the household bills, coming home to an empty flat, unreliable sex life, making up numbers at dinner parties, planning ahead for the weekend, dinner with men who relive their marriages, divorces and the traumas of being an absentee father before the second course, other people’s assumption that, because I don’t have a partner, I am definitely not normal . . .

  On the pros side, there was a blank. Fee picked up a pen and idly began to write down thoughts as they came into her head: converting the biggest room in the flat into a bathroom and nobody to complain; cheese on toast with HP sauce five times in a row and nobody to complain; no sex for a month and nobody to complain; friends to stay and nobody to complain; money spent and nobody to complain; time alone and nobody to complain; empty fridge and nobody to complain; disgusting personal habits and nobody to complain; work all night and nobody to complain. . .