Behaving Like Adults (3 page)

It was painful to see my mother wriggle to excuse Leila. She didn't give a damn about the meanness; it was the lack of respect that got her. ‘Well,' she said, ‘money's tight for Leila. And you know Leila, she's a batty old thing.' Even though we both knew that ‘batty' didn't cut it. Unless you're clinically insane, you know Tissue Holder As Gift is unacceptable. But I kept quiet. It's easier to forgive than to confront. If you've been slapped in the face, you don't need people saying, ‘Gosh, you've been slapped in the face'. ‘Why didn't she just give you a pooh wrapped up in a hankerchief?' cried Nick.

Yea, behold the miracle. My parents adored Nick. He could say, do anything, cheeky as you like; they were in awe, treated him like a prince. That meant a lot. I'm uncool, parental approval matters to me. In fact,
any
parental approval matters to me, probably to the extent of weirdness. Once, Nick and I saw a brilliant new band play their first big gig, and the frontman kept saying, in a croak of disbelief, ‘This is incredible for us, thank you so much for coming.' All I could think was, ‘His parents must be so proud.' That's my first thought, every time I see talented people on stage, ‘Their parents must be so proud'. (My second thought is, I wish
I
could do that.)

The mindset, I suppose, of a woman resisting adulthood. I fell in love with Nick
and
his parents. I cherished the fact that he came from a glamorous family. His mother and
father, Lavinia and Michael Mortimer, were a revelation. Rich, sparkly, magical, mysterious, like the parents in
Peter Pan
. They travelled endlessly, collecting art. They campaigned for their favourite charities. They owned a villa in Italy, which they'd renovated from ruin a decade before Umbria became fashionable. They both spoke fluent Italian. I was so bedazzled, the first time I went there, that when Nick's mother offered me a dish of olives I went blind with fright. I reached for the brightest item on the plate, and she said kindly, ‘No dear, that's a lemon.'

Nick's parents indulged him, like we all did. He entertained us. The first two years of our relationship I had a blast. I'd never been naughty – I was content, I hadn't felt the need. But it was liberating, to play. I thought it wild that I had a boyfriend whose job was to dress as Mr Elephant at children's parties. It endeared me that his small Islington flat was a shrine to grime, and that when his mother visited she would sigh, in her silvery voice, ‘Oh
Nick
.'
I
didn't comment. If my man chose to live on hygiene's edge, I wouldn't interfere. I was proud of not trying to change him. So very modern of me. Nick and I spent a great many months in his king-sized bed screwing, drinking vodka, or both. Only twice was I bitten by a flea.

We bought a candyfloss maker from the Shopping Channel and ate pink candyfloss for breakfast. We got drunk and ran along the road swapping people's doormats and then, because I felt bad about it, we ran along the road swapping them back. We bought twenty squirty bottles of chocolate sauce and had a food fight in the garden until we and the grass were brown. I was thinking to myself, ‘This is what couples do in films.' Then Nick stood up and said, ‘I don't like this. It's like we're covered in pooh.'

I thought I was a secure person till I met Nick. Then I saw what it was to be heart and soul at peace with yourself. I do believe that people treat you as you present yourself, and Nick presented as a gift from God. Luck followed him
around like a puppy. Nick's parents owned a big white boat, and Nick blew it up.

He'd filled it with fuel after a day on the river, turned on the ignition and
BANG!
The wooden deck splintered under his feet, flames shooting high everywhere. He grabbed my hand, and we jumped into the Thames. The boat sank. Or, as Nick told his father on the phone, ‘Was lying low in the water.' A pipe had come loose and fuel had slopped into the engine. The firefighters said we
could
have had fifty foot flames. We were lucky it didn't explode. Lucky Nick.

It was his idea to buy a house together.

I was flattered. I don't mean that in a gee, lil ole me kind of way. I mean that I loved Nick so fiercely I wanted to eat him up. If I could have crawled inside his skin, I would have. I could almost understand the cannibalistic lust of Jeffrey Dahmer, my desire was so violent – some nights I'd sob aloud because one day we'd die and then what would I do if we weren't together for eternity? He felt the same about me. ‘I worship you,' he said. ‘Marry me.'

We found a house and bought it with less thought than some people buy a newspaper. (Islington flats, even small dirty ones, scrub up well and sell for silly money. Even my
non
-Islington flat, bought four years earlier when property was affordable, had in those four years earned more than I had.)

It was a riot, flying by the seat of our pants, cheating death. When you live apart, and meet for the good times, you can pretty much edit out the worst bits of yourself. The cold slap of joint property ownership put an end to
that
. Often, Nick would lie in bed till midday. He ignored bills, claiming an allergy to paperwork. He left a trail of crap behind him like a snail. I'd considered myself easy-going. Now, to my embarrassment, I found I wasn't.

‘Let Nick face the consequences of his actions,' bossed my sister Isabella, a psychologist. ‘If he doesn't water the plants, let them die. He'll learn.'

I didn't let the plants die. You don't nurture something, then let it die. Anyhow, I knew they'd die and he wouldn't notice. I consoled myself that Isabella counselled couples on how to argue effectively – be specific in your complaint, employ the pronoun ‘I' not ‘you', keep your voice calm and level – but when I enquired how
she
argued effectively with her husband Frank, she replied, ‘I scream at him.'

I screamed at Nick. What next, cutting out recipes? Before I'd been proud that I didn't want to change him. Now I did, I discovered that I couldn't.

It hit me with a shock, that Nick wasn't playing hard before he embarked on forty years of working hard. This was
it
, for him. He'd continue to live like a student till he was sixty-five. There was no grand plan, no passion to make a success of his life. His idea of making a success of his life was to live in the moment, be happy. But, I thought, you need
things
to be happy. We didn't set a date for the wedding.

I
was ambitious. I wasn't going to end up like my parents – meek, humble, grateful for crumbs. Nick, it struck me,
was
like them in that he accepted whatever happened to him. His fatality bordered on Australian. He had an end of the rainbow approach to finances. He was pleased for me to earn the cash. My career became a sanctuary. At the office I could blank out the rage that pulsed through me when my metal hairpins jabbed my scalp because Nick had absent-mindedly picked off their smooth plastic ends. Because he refused to behave even the teeniest bit like an adult,
I
was forced to grow up and I resented it.

I was an imposter. Do adults think, ‘This book I'm reading matches my pyjamas'? Blush when a shop assistant calls them ‘Madam'? Feel heartless when trading in their rusty old car for a new shiny one? Fold a black and white checked dishcloth onto the cat's head and proclaim her Yasser Alleycat? Eat all the chocolate off a KitKat first? Lie on the floor and wish they lived on the ceiling? Stroke their childhood toy (not that Fluffy is real, but just in
case
)? Jab
a knife into the toaster while it's still on? No? Well then. I was an adult at work, taking care of others, but I refused to be that at home. Inside, I was still a little girl. Because you're not truly grown up until you're what, fifty?

Our relationship dropped sheer off a cliff. I kept more and more of me to myself. Nick didn't offer to make me a coffee, so why should I leave him any cherries? He never wrote down my phone messages, so why should I tell him he was missing
Larry Sanders
? I was a hypocrite. I had endless goodwill for the world and none for Nick. I'd watch the RSPCA's TV appeal and phone them £500 to repent for the human race. Same for the NSPCC, guilt by association. But I'd spit and boil when Nick begged a fiver. So much for our eternal love. It couldn't survive a broken dishwasher.

Yet, when I thought about ending our engagement, I felt panicked, sodden with dread, my insides heavier than I could carry. But then I didn't want to be fifty-eight, married, miserable and marooned, looking back on a shadow of a life. Girl Meets Boy was a joy for me, but I needed something separate, outside it. I didn't blame Nick wholesale. He hadn't changed, I had. He was the love of my life. But he was also, undeniably, the catalyst that turned me into a person I didn't much like.

I told him it was over on what must have been the prettiest night of the summer. A fat moon lay low, heavy and golden, in the sky. Earlier, the setting sun had tinted the streets and houses pink. I chose to take all this as a cosmic sign: it's not the end of the world. But, fuck, it felt like it.

I FELT THAT
my resolve might snap like a bread stick. I was always a breath away from begging him to stay. I had to chant in my head, over and over,
he doesn't love you enough, you don't love him enough
or I'd weaken. Our families were aghast and distraught, which made it even harder. And when Nick wept, I wanted to wail my remorse at his feet. It would have been easy to be nice to him,
now
. So I focused on his flaws, I magnified them ten times over. He didn't want
me
, he just objected to rejection on principle. I made myself despise him for not having the honesty to walk away.

Scratch what I said earlier, about the Febreze leading me to Stuart. I could pretend Nick and his smelly feet drove me to it – to that stupid juvenile plan to humiliate him via some stranger plucked from a pile. I could maintain that Claudia and Nige were so persuasive that I had no choice. But no. Even if my colleague made the call, I made the decision. I'll stand up and say it. It was my fault.

When – two months after I'd told him it was over – Nick discovered I had a date with some guy from Girl Meets Boy, he went bananas. As he slammed the kitchen door, again, it occurred to me that our grand plan wasn't foolproof. My date with Stuart Marshall – who'd swallowed the bait, as Nige said, ‘like a carp biting on a maggot' – was as likely to make Nick want me more, as less. I told myself this had nothing to do with me as a person. Nick would battle Stuart over a cardboard box. Which made it easier
to tell him just what I thought of his behaviour. When you're angry at yourself, there's always the option of taking it out on a loved one.

‘Nick,' I said. ‘This doesn't endear you to me. Stop acting like a three-year-old. As of two months ago, it's none of your business who I see. I'm going out with this guy tomorrow and if you can't deal with that it's your problem. And stop banging doors. You're frightening Emily. Look. Her ears are flattened to the back of her head. And her tail's gone like a toilet brush.'

I heard myself make this righteous little speech and knew I'd made the right decision. See? This man turned me into someone I disliked even when we were no longer a couple.

Nick swivelled round from the side, where he was making himself a cheese sandwich, and glanced guiltily at the cat. To be divorcey about it, Emily is technically
his
– he was passing the vet surgery and saw a notice in the window about ‘the most affectionate' ten-year-old cat who was to be ‘PTS' (put to sleep) unless she was found a new home, because she had diabetes and her owner ‘couldn't cope emotionally'. Nick yup yup yupped the vet's warning about commitment and returned to the flat a hero, with a handful of syringes and a small black furrball. A month later,
I
was giving Emily her insulin injections.

What a bastard, no?

To my surprise, Nick looked meek. ‘Sorry, darling,' he said, sweetly contrite.

I realised he was speaking to the cat. Emily forgave him and arched her back to be stroked. Much as I love her, she sets a terrible example. Nick grinned, and glanced at me. ‘You're right,' he said. ‘I'm being a prat. I'm sorry. Let me make it up to you. You're seeing this guy, when?'

‘Tomorrow. Saturday. Daytime.' I hoped I didn't sound defensive.

‘Right. Okay. Cool. What you doing?'

‘No idea.'

I'll say here that office politics bore me to tears, and I
think that one of the meanest methods of mental warfare is to cut an employee out of the informational loop. The dawning sense of isolation nibbles away at their confidence, feeds their paranoia,
confirms
it, until they're reduced to a miserable twitching wreck, their superiors' lack of faith becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and they resign for fear of being sacked, thus saving the bullies a wad in redundancy pay. In any hierarchy, it's a practice perpetuated by cowards and I despise it – like cruelty to animals and waiters – but when the power balance is theoretically equal, I waive my morals.

In other words, I
did
have a vague idea of what Stuart had planned for our date (a surprise which involved the A40 and glamorous kit which to me suggested a champagne picnic – how quaint) but I thought if I wilfully froze out Nick it would send the right message. I looked him straight in the eye, and he gazed back. He's gaunt, but with a slight puffiness under his brown eyes, which are so dark they're almost black. Once I told him that he reminded me of Johnny Depp's dress sense. It did his ego no good at all. Now I wished I hadn't.

‘Alright,' he said. ‘How about I make you dinner tonight? You know, to say sorry.'

I couldn't think of an excuse fast enough. ‘Well. Yes. If you want to. You don't have to. Rachel's coming round at some point to lend me a dress.' I meant this to sound how it sounded. Threatening. Don't take another step. Back away from your ex-fiancée with your hands up, etc. I didn't trust him and he knew it. He chose his reaction with care. ‘You're taking a risk, aren't you? You don't know where that dress has been. Or, worse, you do know where it's been. On Rachel.
Urrgh
.'