The Trouble with Single Women Page 9

  The menopause had come early but without undue discomfort when she was forty-seven. She hadn’t told anyone because who would want to know?

  She prided herself that sexually she was the woman whom Les had first married. But if her heart was still in it, something had happened to her soul. How could she enjoy making love when she had all these deaths on her conscience?

  Children gone, husband preoccupied; it was time to do. But what? Especially when most people simply looked through you.

  ‘You’re needed here, at home,’ Les would say firmly if she brought the subject up. But there was no evidence that she was.

  A swing door banged. Veronica jumped. If she saw someone now, had eye contact, she was bound to do harm. She picked up her bag and coat and locked herself into the first lavatory, sliding the bolt so fast she nipped the skin on her finger.

  She heard the door open with a slam and something that sounded like a pram being pushed in. Several taps were turned on; the metal holder for the handtowel was banged; a lavatory flushed. Curious, Veronica went down on her hands and knees and peered under the door.

  What peered back caused her to squeak in alarm. What she could see was Cleopatra’s eyes. Black eyebrow pencil had drawn two arcs; blue the colour of a peacock’s chest coloured the lids; mascara was clumped like miniature furballs on the lashes.

  ‘Are you OK?’ asked a voice with a light Scottish accent. ‘Only an awful lot of people recently have gone in there and not come out—’

  Veronica looked with alarm at the lavatory pan as if some hand might shoot out and grab her round the neck.

  ‘Not without a lot of help,’ the voice added.

  ‘I’m fine, thank you,’ Veronica answered. She pulled the bolt. It wouldn’t shift. She pulled again, then pushed, then shook it.

  ‘It’s a knack,’ said the voice on the other side of the door. ‘You have to sort of lift the door a wee bit, then pull the bolt back. I’ve told them they should leave instructions. One poor lamb was in there all night. Another woman had left her baby outside and nearly went mental. She was in there for half a hour before anyone realized. Take this duster,’ the voice instructed. A hand appeared under the lavatory door holding a yellow duster.

  ‘Give the bolt a bang with this wrapped around your hand.’

  Veronica peered under the door again. This time she saw an extraordinary pair of very high-heeled electric-blue suede shoes, with peep toes and a small bow: 1940s rather than 1990s judging by the battered condition of some of the suede.

  The voice continued, its owner having stopped to pull deeply on a cigarette. Smoke came over the door.

  ‘So,’ the voice continued. ‘Are you ready? Bang and pull.’

  Veronica did as she was told. Suddenly, the bolt shot free and the door swung towards her.

  Outside was a woman, the like of which Veronica had never seen before, definitely decayed but defiantly dressed as if the flesh was still young. This woman would never consider herself invisible.

  ‘OK are you, pet?’ the woman asked.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ Veronica replied. ‘I don’t know what I’d have done, if you hadn’t been here. Are you one of the cleaners?’

  A cleaning trolley now held the door to the corridor half open.

  ‘Cleaning?’ the woman looked horrified. She wore a white coat over her clothes.

  ‘No, that was in the corridor,’ she indicated with her head towards the trolley. ‘I thought it would let a bit of air in because I fancied a fag. Don’t mind, do you?’ She waved the lit cigarette in her hand.

  ‘Have a seat,’ she suggested to Veronica as if the lavatory was her personal domain. ‘Want a ciggy?’

  Veronica shook her head and sat down.

  ‘I’m a radiographer,’ the woman explained, checking her reflection and licking the pale-apricot lipstick off her teeth with her tongue.

  ‘I’m on the late shift. Come up here to see my friend in my break but she’s already gone home. She’s the one who told me all about people being locked in the lavatory and that. She’s very nice. You’d like her,’ the woman added. Veronica felt flattered.

  ‘Everybody loves Emma. She’s that kind of person. Mind you, I’m a bit that way myself. Important to enjoy yourself. Let people know you’re here, hey?’

  Words poured out of the woman like water from a punctured rain barrel. Lonely or lively? Veronica wasn’t sure. Periodically, the woman reanchored her very thin french pleat more firmly to her head with kirby grips, talking all the time.

  Under the white coat, she was dressed in blue and white check capri pants, a white jumper decorated with seed pearls and what looked like fading tea stains, and she carried a blue suede handbag which matched her shoes.

  An aroma reminded Veronica of childhood. At first, she couldn’t identify it, then she recognized it as a mixture of lily of the valley and Velouté, a foundation in a tube which her grandmother had favoured.

  Veronica judged the woman to be in her early fifties, but the cruelly flat black hair dye distracted the eye so much it was difficult to tell.

  Veronica never described anyone as ‘plain’. Not when she herself had been so lucky in her looks. It didn’t seem fair. But in all honesty, nobody could be plainer than this woman. Only the very widest of smiles, which revealed a set of unreal white teeth, offered compensation. But what fascinated Veronica most was the woman’s apparent belief that she was someone worth looking at.

  ‘Can’t put a pound on,’ the woman was saying with pride, hands on a tiny waist. ‘No matter how much I eat. Are you all right?’ she added, scarcely drawing breath. ‘You look sort of . . . sleepy?’

  Veronica had half closed her eyes for the woman’s own protection. Sometimes the technique saved a person from one of her more lethal looks.

  ‘Oh I’m really fine,’ Veronica answered, wide-eyed again. ‘Sort of—’

  ‘Sort of?’ the woman said, settling herself more comfortably in the chair, in anticipation of a lengthy story.

  ‘I’m dangerous,’ Veronica surprised herself by saying. ‘I look at people and then they die.’ She watched carefully for a reaction. ‘Everyone else tells me that I’m imagining it. But I’m not. I’m really not.’

  Veronica waited. The woman blew a couple of smoke rings and stretched her legs. ‘My auntie used to do that,’ she replied nonchalantly. ‘Got through virtually the entire population of Wolverhampton.’

  ‘What happened?’ Veronica asked.

  ‘Her husband divorced her. He said it was more than he’d bargained for. And, next minute, she’s as right as rain. You got a husband?’

  Veronica smiled. ‘He’s a nice man,’ she answered truthfully. ‘He just thinks everything can be fixed by a cup of tea and a sandwich. Well, in his case, I suppose it was . . . What I mean is, he makes sandwiches for a living and he does quite well. Les is fine. He’s all right, it’s me who’s the problem.’

  The two women sat in silence for a few minutes.

  The woman lit up her second cigarette. ‘My name is Rita, as in Heywood,’ she offered. ‘But my surname’s Mason. My mother was mad about Rita. Mum’s dead now. Died a cruel death – cancer, a couple of years back. What’s your name?’

  ‘Veronica. If I’d been a boy, my dad wanted me named Roy as in Rogers. He was Wild West mad. He died here,’ Veronica suddenly added. Then, it happened.

  One minute, she was composed, the next it was as if her very being had dissolved in grief.

  ‘Oh God, what am I going to do? What am I going to do?’ she wept. She put her face in her hands and cried and cried. She cried so long and so hard that the sound and effort eventually began to give its own strange hypnotic comfort.

  Rita sat silent. Then, when Veronica had calmed a little, she gave her a box of tissues pillaged from the cleaning trolley.

  She eventually spoke. ‘Haven’t got a car, have you? No, I thought not. Nor me. Look, my shift finishes in an hour. I’ll take you down to the coffee shop, you have a nice hot drink, the
n I can take you home. I can get them to call a cab at reception. That’s best, isn’t it? Have you got some coins? Why don’t you give your old man a ring, tell him you’re all right?’

  Rita offered Veronica a cheap plastic tube of lipstick. ‘Here, love, try this. You could do with a bit of colour.’

  ‘I’m all right, I really am,’ Veronica protested, in the ridiculous way that the profoundly upset often do. ‘I can find my own way home.’

  Rita Mason was adamant.

  ‘I wouldn’t sleep in my bed soundly if I didn’t know you’d got safely back,’ she insisted. ‘You and me together, we’ll soon sort you out. Just watch.’

  For some reason Veronica experienced a fleeting sense of alarm. Then she told herself not to be so silly, the woman wasn’t commandeering her life, just offering a helping hand. She watched as Rita produced a pen and notebook.

  ‘Give us your address, Veronica Rogers,’ Rita Mason commanded. ‘Then I can order a cab.’

  Veronica was about to correct the woman and say, ‘It’s not Rogers,’ but then she asked herself, why bother? They’d never meet again. Instead, she gave Fee’s address. She couldn’t bear the thought of returning to her own empty house.

  Two hours later, just after midnight, the taxi bearing Rita Mason and Veronica Haslem stopped outside Fiona Travers’ flat. Rita insisted on paying the fare.

  ‘I’ll be fine now, I really will,’ Veronica insisted, her original fears about Rita dissolving in the face of the woman’s obvious concern.

  ‘You don’t get rid of me as easily as that, young lady. First, let’s make sure someone’s in,’ Rita replied firmly, teetering down the garden path on the ridiculously high blue-suede heels.

  ‘What do you think of this?’ Claire held up a page torn out of a magazine. At the same time as Rita and Veronica were making their introductions, Claire, Gill and Fee were finishing supper in a wine bar close to Gill’s house. They had gathered to celebrate the news of Claire’s impending marriage.

  Claire had brought a stack of wedding magazines and had already elicited a promise from a reluctant Fee to come with her to choose a dress.

  Gill and Fee had to concede that the turnaround in Claire was impressive. All her adult life she had been scathing about various friends and relatives who had trotted up the aisle in an excess of white satin and tulle. Her wedding, she said, would be minimalist, in a Register Office, no fuss.

  Now, suddenly, she had become a zealot for nuptials. The list was endless: a horse and carriage; bridesmaids; one pageboy; a trousseau; a honeymoon outfit; veil; gloves; shoes; marquee; flowers – on and on. For three hours now, Fee had been experiencing bridal white-out – and Claire hadn’t even begun to flag.

  ‘Funny to think that soon I’ll be a wife, just like you, Gill.’ Claire beamed. Gill gave a wobbly smile back.

  ‘You loved your wedding day, didn’t you, Gill? And you and Simon are still going strong?’

  ‘Well . . . yes, I suppose you might say that. I mean you . . . we . . . one has doubts now and then – who doesn’t? But, you know, on the—’ Gill stumbled on but Claire wasn’t in the mood for nuances.

  ‘Oh, come off it,’ Claire interrupted, hockey captain to the fore. ‘Everyone knows you two are the perfect couple. Isn’t that right, Fee?’

  Fee didn’t have an opportunity to reply. Claire had turned towards her and seized her by the shoulders.

  ‘Now,’ she boomed. Alcohol always made her loud. ‘How are we going to get you sorted out, my old sausage? Gill says you and Adam are almost there—’

  Gill interrupted. ‘She changed her mind,’ she told Claire crossly. ‘She let us get all het up and then she changed her mind. Was that how it was, Fee? You know at times I’ve got no idea how your mind works.’ Gill made it sound as if Fee was depriving her of a major civil right.

  Claire moved into bossy mode. ‘Right, Fee,’ she directed. ‘It’s time to take you in hand. It’s time you became proactive. Why don’t you try a dating agency, for instance? Or go to one of those social clubs . . . They organize all sorts of events . . . or you could advertise in a lonely-hearts thingummy—’

  ‘Claire,’ Fee said, struggling to keep the lightness in her voice, ‘what kind of a person do you think I am? Do I look as if I’m in need of a trainspotter? Do I look as if I’m only half alive without a man? Do I? I mean, do I really?’

  She glanced at the faces of Gill and Claire. What she saw was pity. Pity?

  She was incredulous. Claire with her highly suspect husband-to-be; Gill with a marriage suffering from a couple of flat tyres, and they felt pity for her?

  Claire was speaking again. ‘Go on, why don’t you put a lonely-hearts ad in the paper, Fee? Isn’t that a smashing idea, Gill? Wouldn’t you do it if you were single? I’ve read about it. If you’re older and you’ve got a career and your friends are all married, it’s a perfectly respectable way of going about things—’

  ‘Oh, come off it, Claire,’ Gill snorted. ‘We’re talking about other people’s rejects here. Emotional seconds. And let’s make no bones about it. I mean, you wouldn’t take a man like that if he came wrapped up in a free annual holiday in Bali, now would you? Be honest? So why suggest it to Fee?’

  ‘I’m fine as I am, I really am,’ Fee interrupted. This was plainly not the time to announce that she had rejected romance in all its forms.

  ‘Of course you are.’ Claire patted Fee’s hand condescendingly. ‘But don’t worry, someone will come along. Nobody in their right mind wants to be on their own for life, now do they?’

  Later, Claire and Gill shared a taxi home.

  ‘What are we going to do about Fee?’ Claire asked. ‘When I’m married, she’ll have an awfully big gap in her life.’

  Gill considered the prospect with alarm. ‘Claire,’ she tried to sound as casual as possible. ‘Could you ever steal another woman’s man? I mean, a friend’s husband, for instance? Especially if you thought it was your last chance. You know, this man or nothing, kind of thing?’

  ‘Probably,’ Claire answered flippantly. ‘In fact, almost certainly. But that’s me, Gill. If you’re asking, do I think Fee would behave in the same underhand way, the answer is – never. You know that she has a thing about the sisterhood. Loyalty to women, all that stuff. Totally misguided, of course.’ Claire turned to smile at Gill. ‘If anyone’s not to be trusted, it’s me.’

  Gill smiled briefly, unconvinced.

  ‘Fee? It’s Les.’

  Fee was on her car phone. It had been almost two weeks since saying goodbye to Paul, and the chances of him resuming communication had become more remote by the day. So her heart no longer bounced when she heard the phone ring.

  Adam, in contrast, called often. Just for a chat, see how you are. He dropped frequent hints about the midwife he was seeing. Did Fee know she had a lemon MGB? Did Fee realize quite how much he was enjoying himself?

  Occasionally Adam would suggest that they meet for a friendly drink. So far Fee had managed to end the conversation without confirming a time or a place.

  ‘Hello, Les,’ Fee replied. Her brother-in-law sounded panicked.

  ‘Have you seen Veronica?’ he asked. ‘I can’t find her. She’s not home. She’s not next door. She’s not with Helen. Fee, I’m really worried.’ He was almost shouting.

  Fee looked at her watch. Past midnight.

  ‘I’m sorry, Les,’ she answered, trying to keep anxiety out of her voice. ‘I’ve been out myself all evening. When did you last see her?’

  ‘She always leaves a note when she goes somewhere. I can’t find it,’ Les replied. ‘She always leaves a note. No matter what she does, she always lets us know. You don’t think she’s done anything silly, do you?’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ Fee replied firmly, trying to sound as if she meant it. ‘It’s probably something simple like the car breaking down or—’

  ‘Her car’s here,’ Les said abruptly.

  ‘Perhaps a friend called and she went out on the spur of the mome
nt. Or—’

  ‘If she turns up at your place, will you give me a ring?’ Les interrupted. ‘I’m calling the police. It’s not safe for her to be out . . . Not in the state she’s in. I knew I shouldn’t have left her on her own. It’s all my fault.’

  Then he was gone. As Fee pulled up at her house, she immediately saw the note pinned to her front door.

  Ten minutes later, Fee arrived at the booth on wheels that called itself a café, parked alongside a bridge half a mile from her flat.

  A handwritten sign announced, ‘Open All Nite’. An ambulance was just pulling away. A policewoman was about to get behind the wheel of a car parked on the pavement.

  ‘Wait!’ Fee shouted. ‘Please, wait—’ A couple of taxi drivers propped up against a cab and drinking tea turned to watch her as she ran.

  ‘Excuse me.’ Fee had slowed down. The policewoman, constructed from the same rectangular mould from which so many figures in uniform appear to be made, waited for her.

  ‘I’m looking for my sister.’ She waved the note in the policewoman’s face. ‘She said she’d be here . . . The ambulance . . .?’

  ‘Is she dark, getting on a bit, tight pants, high heels?’ The man behind the counter in the van was anxious to share his information.

  Fee shook her head. Relief overwhelmed her.

  ‘Oh, well, she’ll be the small, blonde one then, well turned out like, pretty in her day?’ the man offered, satisfied that he hadn’t after all been cheated of the thrill of informing a relative.

  Fee’s internal organs reacted as if they were being given sixty seconds in a blender.

  ‘What’s happened? Is she all right? Where have they gone . . .?’

  The policewoman put up her hand to the café owner, as if stopping traffice. Obediently, he fell silent.

  ‘It’s fine, madam, the two ladies are perfectly OK . . . You didn’t know the victim . . .?’ The policewoman spoke soothingly.

  ‘What victim?’ Fee asked.

  ‘I’ll tell you what happened.’ The man behind the counter could restrain himself no longer.

  ‘The ladies were standing behind him in the queue. Nicely spoken middle-aged man, well dressed. The blonde one is right behind him. He suddenly falls down, she starts yelling. She’s saying, “Oh God, no, oh God, no,” . . . summat like that . . . “I’ve done it again . . . Help him, do something, I’ve killed him . . . all that palaver . . . We’re all panicking like, thinking she’s stuck him with a knife and all that. Then, that fella over there, the one wiv the mug, suddenly twigs, don’t’e?