The Trouble with Single Women Page 5

  Two minutes later, standing alone in the hotel corridor, Fee couldn’t stop the tears.

  ‘Grief and pain is inevitable and temporary,’ she told herself firmly. ‘That’s all it is. For once, you’ve taken a considered decision. Do what they tell you in books. Congratulate yourself.’

  Still, the tears kept coming. Somewhere deep inside her, in a place that she rarely risked visiting, she had already begun to create a future for herself and Paul: companionship, support, intimacy, shared goals, friends, achievements. All interwoven with lace hearts and pink ribbons and never a cross word.

  Fantasy, pure fantasy.

  ‘You stupid woman.’ She said the words out loud as she rested against the corridor wall. ‘You stupid, stupid, woman—’

  She fumbled for the lift button, and as she did so a crumpled envelope caught her eye. It lay by the fake art-nouveau wastepaper basket. Fee picked it up and some instinct made her smooth it flat. One word stood out.

  It might as well have read, ‘Fool.’

  In his hotel room, Paul Denning was left feeling – what? Upset? Peeved? Disorientated?

  That was it. He felt disorientated. This hadn’t happened to him in a very long time. Perhaps he was losing his touch? He gave himself a quick once-over in the mirror. Seemed OK.

  Paul felt his annoyance grow. Fee would be back. Making up was part of the female game. Of course, she’d be back.

  This evening still presented a problem. He hated his own company. And he felt niggled, very niggled. He knew that he had allowed himself to be outmanoeuvred. For a man who prided himself on his manipulation of female sensitivities, this was a disturbing development.

  He reassured himself. Hadn’t a former lover once called him feline, so instinctive was his understanding of the female psyche?

  He poured himself a whisky from the fridge. He’d leave an interval of time – several weeks – then take careful steps to prove to Fee how much she needed him.

  After that, he’d dump her.

  ‘Do her good, to know she can’t always be in charge,’ he told himself with almost infantile savagery.

  For now, he knew exactly where to find reassurance, how to regain control.

  He picked up the phone, dialled a number and waited. Satisfyingly, he did not have to wait very long. His wife answered almost immediately.

  On the journey in the taxi back to her flat, Fee ran through what she had read in magazine after magazine on the subject of how to bail out from a bastard successfully.

  She knew the theory inside out; it was the practice at which she always faltered.

  For the first time in years, she had weighed up the situation and taken the sensible decision to save herself from the pain that she knew would be bound to come further down the line. Very grown up. So why no sense of triumph?

  What she felt was – flat.

  ‘The Lone Ranger rides again,’ she told herself wryly. ‘Masked – and miserable.’

  Gareth had been Fee’s first boyfriend. She had been fourteen. Fee calculated quickly, if she excluded five years living with Bill and a couple of years with other lovers, that meant that she had been on the hunt for well over a dozen years.

  Twelve whole years.

  In the last couple of months alone, for instance, she had been ‘matched’ at dinner parties with a former white mercenary with three ex-wives, a fox-hunting army captain and a twenty-five-year-old DJ from Seaford, and somebody’s ex-brother-in-law who had rubbed so much fake tan into himself he was almost the same colour as the walnut sideboard. Is that any way for a girl to live?

  ‘Got any kids have you, miss?’ the taxi driver interrupted Fee’s thoughts.

  ‘They’re mine.’ He nodded to a photograph of two small boys jammed into the visor.

  ‘Little devils,’ he added affectionately. ‘How about you?’

  ‘I’m not married,’ Fee replied. ‘Never felt the urge.’ She knew she sounded defensive.

  ‘Single? You lucky beggar,’ the taxi driver laughed. ‘If you take my advice, you’ll stay that way. I’d love to be free again. No nagging, a duty only to yourself—’

  Fee smiled briefly, remembering her father. He had been fond of talking about duty. He’d dutifully stuck with a marriage he hated, meeting the demands of a job he loathed. He’d lived dutifully, uncomplaining, dreaming of what might have been. And once he was dead, his sacrifices were forgotten.

  Vera, on the other hand, had managed to balance a duty to herself with a duty to others. She’d cared for husband and children, then moved on literally to please herself. Her critics would say that she had caused her husband grief, embarrassed her children and appalled the family, but she had died content. And she was certainly remembered.

  ‘What’s that, miss?’ the taxi driver asked.

  ‘Duty,’ Fee replied. ‘I was just wondering how you balance it – a duty to yourself with a duty to others?’

  The taxi driver chuckled. ‘Once you’re married love,’ he smiled. ‘You can’t even afford to ask the question. Take my advice, stay well out of it.’

  But Fee could tell from his smile that he didn’t mean a word.

  That night, Fee Travers weighed the two possible futures ahead of her. She attempted to assess her own sticking power. And, finally, she came to a decision.

  Fee was certain about only one aspect of what she had decided: her mother was bound to take it personally.

  Chapter Four

  NELSON CHARLES WOLFF, aged eleven weeks, appeared to be enjoying his christening party. The rain, which had bucketed down throughout the church service, now made an interesting drumming sound on the kitchen roof. At the same time, his mother, Emily, was making lots of funny faces entirely for his benefit.

  Emily Wolff was, in truth, registering her dismay. Two stains, each the size of a toy saucer, now decorated the front of her crème-de-menthe pure-wool dress. Fee, making sympathetic noises, would have called the colour green but Emily insisted it was crème de menthe. Something that cost £178 could not be called green.

  Emily was annoyed with herself. She had inserted pads in her breast-feeding brassiere, each cup the size of a Boy Scout’s tent, but when Nelson had been baptized, the milk had absolutely gushed through. Fee, Emily’s aunt, but only ten years older, had offered the loan of her navy jacket.

  Emily had refused without much grace. Navy and crème de menthe looked, well, so common; like a flight attendant’s uniform. Instead, she had borrowed a white angora cardigan with pearl buttons from one of the other guests. Fee considered the combination of angora and Emily’s buck teeth an unfortunate marriage, but she kept her silence. Why stoop to Emily’s bitchy level?

  Emily didn’t give a toss what Fee thought. She was a wife, a mother (twice over) and not even thirty. And she’d had a Caesarean. Fee was a thirty-eight-year-old spinster, so what did she know about anything?

  ‘A toast! A toast!’ said Charlie Jackson, the proud grandfather. He was tall with sandy hair and a face deeply carved by squinting at the sun on too many golf courses. Fee liked Charlie; he was uncomplicated and amiable. But she also reckoned that, as a husband, his unflagging chirpiness might trigger murder. It would be like living with a mechanical, permanently wound-up Tommy Steele.

  Fee made herself comfortable in the window seat of Veronica’s and Les’s spacious sitting room. She emptied her glass of champagne and immediately found it refilled. Good. She needed something to dull the memory of the better parts of Paul.

  ‘Any luck?’ the dispenser of booze asked, indicating his own wedding ring and pointing at Fee’s left hand. Fee offered her lockjaw smile.

  ‘Doesn’t pay to be too fussy now, does it?’ The man, the husband of a second cousin on her father’s side, winked.

  Older, unmarried women and the pregnant share a unique position in society, Fee had come to realize. Both are considered public property. Both are prodded and pummelled and asked deeply intimate questions by near strangers. And offered unwanted pieces of advice.

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nbsp; ‘Carrying a lot of weight, aren’t you?’ Fee had heard a woman, a stranger, in a department store tell Emily when she was seven months pregnant. ‘Husband a big man, is he?’

  Likewise, at all family events, christenings, funerals, weddings, Fee could expect the obligatory series of questions. ‘Courting, are you?’ ‘Found Mr Right yet?’ ‘Career girl, are we?’

  ‘Mind your own damn business,’ were the words that came readily to Fee’s lips as a response. Once, she had actually said them out loud. The reaction had been predictable.

  ‘No need to get funny about it,’ Emily’s twice-married sister, Stephanie, had snapped back. ‘It’s not my fault you’re on your own.’

  So, now, Fee just gave this lockjaw smile. And stayed silent.

  ‘Satay?’ Veronica asked in what Fee recognized as her hostess voice. ‘Or miniature pitta pockets stuffed with feta cheese, roasted red peppers and rocket? Les says that goes down very well with champagne. Oh, it’s you, Fee,’ she said, recognition restoring her voice to normal. Then she added warmly, ‘Are you all right?’

  Fee took a good look at her sister. The last year or so, they’d only met two or three times. They phoned each other weekly, but recently the calls had been brief, slamming over gossip that didn’t personally involve either woman. Fee recognized that this slow disconnection of their lives had been her fault.

  In the time when they had been closer, the impression conveyed by Veronica was that all was well in her life, if uneventful. For Fee, love, career and friendships had dictated a much more irregular, unpredictable rhythm.

  Fee sometimes envied Veronica; Veronica had never expressed similar feelings about Fee’s life. So Fee assumed that her sister was untroubled. Helen had mentioned ‘a small problem’ but Fee had avoided considering what her mother’s euphemism actually meant.

  Looking at Veronica now, she was frightened by what she saw.

  ‘Am I all right?’ she answered awkwardly. Spontaneously, she wrapped both her arms around her sister, and avoiding the hors-d’oeuvres, tried to squeeze some optimism back into Veronica’s lost, grey figure.

  Veronica was almost fifteen when Fee was born. She had become Fee’s minder and heroine.

  At school, she had been tough and intelligent and spiky, a tomboy. She was a natural blonde, small in stature and with a repartee that made her feared and admired by both the girls and the lads. Everyone said that Veronica had a Personality.

  At eighteen, something happened to her. She met Les. She toned down the cheek, became much more feminine. She grew her nails and took to wearing ginghams and pastels. Les was tall, good-looking in a rough-and-ready way, large in gesture and voice, amusing if moody, and described by some as ‘a difficult man’. He had always been almost obsessed with Veronica.

  He was her fourth boyfriend and the first to promise to keep her safe and care for her for ever. So when he proposed, she’d said yes. He’d wanted a woman to protect and pamper; Veronica had grown into the role.

  Les had joined the army at seventeen and became a chef. On leaving the forces, he’d opened up a sandwich shop and taken evening courses in business management and marketing.

  Ahead of the pack, he had moved on from corned beef and Branston pickle to walnut bread and pesto, and suddenly, in the 1980s, he was not at all surprised to find that he had a success on his hands.

  Now, he owned a chain of seemingly recession-proof ‘sandwich brasseries’, plus an outside catering company. It provided quaint nostalgia items such as chip butties with HP sauce for record-company promotions and TV companies’ jamborees.

  Soon after Les and Veronica had married, Les had insisted that his wife give up her work in a bank. She had briefly done the books for Les in the sandwich business but it had made him uneasy. People, he said, would think he couldn’t afford a proper accountant. So, to keep her hand in, Veronica had studied at home for accountancy exams.

  She hadn’t told her husband since it wasn’t worth the upset. She had qualified, but had backed away from the battle that would have been necessary to persuade Les that she could go back to work.

  Now, at almost fifty-two, Veronica was constantly told what a lucky woman she was. She had a doting husband, two lovely children – Les Junior, eighteen, was in Zimbabwe, teaching for a year before university; Samantha, twenty-one, was in her final year at Manchester, reading law – lots of money, plenty of free time . . . what more could a woman want, for goodness’ sake?

  Unexpectedly, a couple of months ago, Veronica had provided the answer. What she appeared to want – or rather, what she couldn’t help herself from causing – was a record number of deaths.

  ‘I think I’m a killer,’ Veronica had blurted out to Les one Friday night, in their local Indian restaurant. (Les was preoccupied with his attempt to create a new concept in sandwiches, a chapatti filled with a curry that didn’t run down your fingers when you tried to eat it.)

  ‘I’m a killer,’ Veronica had repeated, as her husband, seemingly oblivious, experimentally folded and refolded the chappati on his plate.

  ‘And if I don’t go home now, I may do something terrible to that man who’s walking towards us with mango chutney. I want to go home NOW, Les,’ she had shouted, suddenly rising.

  The only other time Les had heard Veronica raise her voice was in labour, twenty-one years before.

  ‘It was a terrible shock,’ he told his mother-in-law, later that night on the phone, after Veronica had been put to bed with a sedative. ‘It wasn’t even as if I’d finished my dinner.’

  The next morning, Veronica had tried to elaborate further to her husband and mother. She explained that she had developed a drop-dead look in her eye; when she looked, people dropped dead. This didn’t happen all the time but often enough to bring her to a point of deep despair.

  ‘It’s nerves,’ Helen said, the spectre of Vera hovering over her shoulder. ‘Take no notice.’

  Les had tried to follow Helen’s advice but over the weeks he found himself spending more and more time retracing his wife’s steps, at her request, in search of mythical dead bodies. He found himself spending hours enquiring into the health of perfect strangers.

  Veronica would phone her husband at work, distraught. Could he please call in at the hairdressers? She was sure she had done something terrible to the junior who had washed her hair.

  Had Les seen the milkman that morning? Veronica swore she’d exterminated him early the previous day. And what about the nice young girl who delivers the papers? Veronica just knew she had caught her eye from the bedroom window.

  ‘It’s her age,’ Helen reassured her son-in-law. ‘It’s the Change. It does funny things to some women. It will pass.’

  Les tried to coax Veronica out of what he called her ‘fixation’. ‘This isn’t like you,’ he’d say gently from time to time. ‘This really isn’t like you, Veronica.’

  ‘Oh yes it is,’ she’d answer with more ferocity than he’d ever seen her display before.

  ‘This is the real me, all right.’

  The only two places where Veronica felt she was less of a danger to the public were her own home and the food hall of her local Marks & Spencer. There, everyone was so busy buying, nobody bothered to meet her eye.

  After three months with no signs of improvement, Les decided that Helen was wrong. Whatever it was showed no signs of passing. He took his wife to a psychiatrist, whose diagnosis was that it was not the menopause. Instead, he implied that the difficulty might have its roots not in the Change but the lack of it; the lack of variety, challenge, stimulation in Veronica’s life.

  ‘She’s a very bright girl, after all,’ said the psychiatrist of his fifty-one-year-old client.

  He also tactfully suggested that over the years, Les’s inability to allow his wife to lead a life of her own might not have had an entirely positive effect on her confidence.

  ‘She wants to please you, no doubt about that,’ the psychiatrist explained. ‘But she also wants to please herself. And to cut a
long story extremely short, that results in her feeling she is highly damaging. You should give her permission to get out and about more. Be herself. You know the kind of thing I mean.’

  Les didn’t have a clue. He puzzled over these words, ‘Be herself.’ Who else was Veronica, if she wasn’t already herself? And he grew sadder and sadder. All he’d tried to do was look after the woman he’d never stopped loving and protecting, not once, in thirty years of marriage.

  Still Veronica’s body count continued to rise – at least it did in a corner of her mind which was the only part of herself that she could genuinely call her own.

  ‘Did you go into the local shop on your way here?’ Veronica asked as she steered Fee into a vacant space near the doors to the conservatory. Out of habit, Veronica picked up a plate of M&S spring rolls to offer to whomsoever she passed.

  ‘No,’ Fee replied. ‘Why, should I have done?’

  ‘Could you pop there for me, now?’ Veronica whispered anxiously.

  ‘If you’ve run out of cigarettes, why don’t we go and get some together?’ Fee suggested. Perhaps regular doses of freedom might be her sister’s best chance of a cure?

  ‘You and me go out?’ Veronica patted her pale-pink suit jacket, and adjusted the neck of her cream and pink blouse, as if to check that she was still in the here and now.

  ‘If we go, I’ll have to keep my eyes down. You know, so I don’t—’ She gestured vaguely in the air, as if to conjure up the carnage of recent times.

  Fee smiled encouragingly.

  ‘You know I kill people, don’t you?’ Veronica said, bluntly, her eyes filling with tears. ‘I just look at people . . . and wham—’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Fee replied, but she hadn’t known at all.

  ‘If we go to the shop, Les won’t like it,’ Veronica glanced around the room for sight of her husband. ‘He gets nervous now when I go out. Doesn’t know what to expect. Prefers me to stay in, quietly.’

  Distractedly she put the plate of spring rolls down on the plush carpet. Josh, her three-year-old nephew, Emily’s first child, promptly began to stamp bean sprouts into the carpet as if they were engorged worms.