Raking the Ashes (2 page)

‘Where? At the dock office?’

‘On the beach.’

‘What were you doing
there
?’ he asked, rather as if I’d said I’d met the man down some sewer. (In my experience, Jews aren’t outside-y people.)

‘I was taking a walk.’

‘Where?’

‘Nowhere.’ I tried to explain again. ‘It was a
walk
.’

And that was that. Sol didn’t even ask, ‘What was he like?’ or ‘Who was he?’ So, what with not getting to say the name Geoffrey aloud, I quickly forgot it, and for the next couple of years simply thought of him from time to time as ‘the man with the frozen children’.

Then I bumped into him again at some old flame’s party. He was in the corner, alone and almost hidden by two tall leafy plants standing sentry on either side of him. ‘How are the kids?’ I asked.

‘Fine,’ he said, cheerfully enough. And then, because he didn’t press on with something as general as, ‘The older one’s in nursery now,’ or, ‘The baby’s finally grown some hair,’ I realized he didn’t have a clue where he had met me. Perhaps the last time I’d seen his kids was at the younger one’s christening. On the other hand, maybe I’d stuck a needle in one of them at the Health Centre that morning.

‘We met on the beach,’ I reminded him. ‘About three years ago. I gave you my phone number and you never rang.’

I waited, but nothing was forthcoming. So, as a bit of a flirt, I asked, ‘Why didn’t you ring? Didn’t you fancy me?’

I knew he remembered me now. He was staring. ‘You look completely different.’

‘I’m wearing a whole lot fewer clothes, and my hair isn’t sticking out sideways in the wind.’

And after that we danced, and I went home with him. (It wasn’t one of his nights with the children.) We had a good time. In the morning I gave him my number again, and this time he rang it.

It turned out the party-going wasn’t typical. He was a real home-bird. It wasn’t long before he got in a stew about me still sleeping with Jerry (or Stefan or whoever – Sol was long gone by then) and started nagging me to take up properly with him.

I didn’t mind. We got on really well. The weeks flew by. I met the children again. (Harry wasn’t nearly so whiny, and Minna was sweet.) I thought I went down rather well with them, and so did Geoffrey. All the green lights were flashing. I think the end of it was quite inevitable. I can’t remember ever being more content. One night, when maybe both of us had drunk a little too much, he asked me to move in. I made the effort of rolling over in the bed to look at him, so nice and rumpled and warm and friendly.

And I was mad enough to think, Why not?

* * *

In the end it was Geoffrey who moved in with me, because Bill had moved out and my place was much nicer. Ending my marriage turned out to be a hundred times more easy than I’d feared. I stalled for a month or two, then made a point of altering my schedule so Bill and I had three days in the house at the same time. I fed him home-made lasagne to weigh him down, then raised the subject of my ‘recent straying’. (I was trying to be tactful.) But it turned out, to my astonishment, that Bill had had a mistress for seven years.

Seven years! In Kettering, of all places. (And us in Northumberland.) ‘When did you even
see
each other?’

‘Oh, you know,’ Bill said rather sheepishly. ‘We managed every now and again. She did a lot of the travelling.’

I was amazed. But, I must say, it made things so much easier. I took the house. Bill took the savings – rigs pay well – and he swanned off. He sent back the finished paperwork for both the house and the divorce in double-quick time (his Janet was a solicitor) and within weeks he was effectively out of my life. We had a phone call one or two months later. I had the strongest feeling Janet was listening. She’d called to him, waited till he’d picked up, then made such a clatter of putting down her extension that it was clear
she
’d lifted it again and was sitting, scarcely breathing, checking up on the level of emotion between us.

It must have been a very reassuring call. ‘Bill,’ I said, torturing him only a little for starters, ‘I’m in real trouble and I need your help.’

Could a man sound more wary? ‘What’s the matter, Tilly?’

Off I went with my problem: a real one, all about fits and starts in the pressure chain, and problems with the new QXII valve, and knock-on disasters. Bill did a pretty poor job of hiding his relief, but he was helpful, remembering exactly what Tom (who’d retired and vanished) had always said would prove the trouble with the QXII, and suggesting a good way of getting round the problem.

Then he said, ‘Hang on, Tilly. Just a minute,’ and he was silent, breathing heavily. (I don’t know what
she
thought.) After that, he was off again. ‘No, Tilly. I’m completely wrong. Try tackling it from the gatehouse. Take down the pressure on the lower hose and …’

Brilliant! A small reminder of why we got so close in the first place. He’d solved my problem, so I made a point of not creating one for him. As soon as he’d finished I said to him, ‘Bill, you’re a gem! If I’d only had the sense to stick with consulting you rather than marrying you, both of us would have been a whole lot happier.’

Before he could blow it and queer the pitch between himself and the eavesdropping Janet, I hung up. ‘Sorry. Got to go!’

That’s how it is when you’re childless. People like us can simply walk away. When it’s over, it really and truly can be over.

Not like for poor Geoffrey. He might have tried to draw a veil over his big mistake, but, by God, the old fist kept punching through. Lost socks. Forgotten trysts at nursery school. Changes in payment schedules. Dates for holidays. It just went on and on.

At the start, his ex-wife was quite rude to me. I’d lift the ringing phone and say hello, and there she’d be, distant, dismissive: ‘May I please talk to Geoffrey?’

The first two times, I handed him the phone, or called to him to pick up somewhere in the house. The third time, I was tougher. ‘Listen, Frances,’ I told her, ‘this is my phone line and, as you know, my name is Tilly. So, when you ring, at least have the manners to say, “Hello, Tilly,” before you ask to speak to Geoff. It’ll make all the difference.’

Then I called Geoffrey and left the receiver lying on the kitchen counter.

Next time, she tried it on again. ‘I need to speak to Geoff.’

I put the phone down and she rang back at once. ‘Did you hang up on me?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You forgot the “Hello, Tilly” bit.’ And I hung up again.

She rang a third time. ‘Just give me Geoffrey, please. It’s quite important.’

Here is another thing about the childless. We don’t spend every hour God sends imagining urgent messages about our precious offspring coming in, unheard, from Accident and Emergency.

I pulled the phone plug out of the wall.

A few days later, Frances rang again. Things went quite well. The moment she heard my voice, she let out that little annoyed noise you make when you reach a recording. Then, with the restrained impatience with which people offer their security password for the third time in a row, she rattled off, ‘Good morning, Tilly. Can I talk to Geoff, please?’

‘Certainly,’ I said. ‘I’ll get him at once.’

And that was that. From time to time, she would forget. I’d let it ride unless it happened twice in a row, in which case I’d say carelessly, ‘Hello? Hello? I’m sorry, I can’t hear you,’ and hang up.

‘What is her problem with me?’ I asked Geoff. ‘It’s not as if I’m the other woman, after all. You’ve been divorced for ages.’

‘It’s nothing personal,’ he assured me. ‘She’s just a woman who thinks in stereotypes. Her mother’s the same.’

‘And you,’ I said, because he’d just come back from London with a present for each of his children. For Harry he’d bought a puzzle. It was a complicated, three-dimensional affair, tremendously clever in design. (I have to think that, since I spent a good deal of time over the following weeks trying to solve it.)

For Minna, he had bought two pretty hair slides.

‘I see,’ I told him. ‘“Man does, but woman is”?’

He didn’t get it. ‘Minna
likes
pretty things.’

‘Minna likes presents,’ I told him. ‘All children do. And Minna especially likes getting presents from you. But what you give her shows her what you think of her. And pretty hair slides send a very unaffirming and sexist message.’ I twisted the puzzle round one last time before reluctantly surrendering it for wrapping. ‘Especially when you give a teaser as fiendish as that to your boy.’

I never expected something like that to lead to a quarrel. (It was our first.) He had the nerve to
argue
. I pointed out that what I’d said was no more than the truth. He still kept at it, wittering on about how Minna actually
collected
pretty things, and liked doing stuff with her hair. ‘That’s not the point,’ I kept telling him. ‘She could like licking poisonous
toads
, but you wouldn’t offer her one as a present.’

I can’t believe how long I kept trying. ‘It would be fine,’ I tried to explain, ‘if you’d bought Harry something equally pretty and pointless.’

‘Like
what
?’ he crowed, as if the fact he couldn’t think of anything equally vapid to give a boy proved his point, not mine. When I pointed this out, he fell in a giant sulk (manifesting itself as a hoity-toity claim to have ‘far too much work to do to spend any more time on this futile discussion’).

I should have ended things right then. I look back now and realize that was the moment. That was the first step down the slippery slope of mere accommodation, whereby a pair of rolling eyes foretells the death rattle. He might as well have cut the crap and come straight out with that grim marital hostility, ‘Well, if you say so, dear!’ At least then I would have had the sense to go after him with a pipe wrench. ‘Discuss this properly, or leave right now!’

No, it is all my fault. I take the blame. I should never have let all the pleasant and easy things about living with Geoffrey outweigh the fact that right from the start we were incapable of coming to a shared understanding of any single problem, however trivial, let alone make any progress on the way to a solution. I wish I’d had the sense to face the truth back then: ‘This will unpeel. I’d better get out now.’ But he was
very
nice in bed. Clean. Pleasant-smelling. Attentive. He never spoiled the mood by lapsing into lectures on thrifty asset-management, like Sol, or trying to cadge money, like Stefan. And he was wonderful when we went out, never panicking when I reached across to take my turn at picking up the bill, and brilliant at getting taxis for exactly the right time, with no rushing or waiting. So I ignored the bad signs and just kept taking pleasure in his company – shilly-shallying, my mother would have called it – until one day, before I knew it, he had rented out his flat behind him. ‘Well, it seemed sensible. After all, I can’t afford to leave it sitting there doing pretty well nothing for ever.’

I took up the cudgels. ‘How could you
do
that? Without even
asking
me?’

‘Oh, come on, Tilly!’ (He was actually trying to pre-empt me by acting more put out than I was.) ‘We must have discussed this a dozen times. You’ve always agreed that it’s plain stupid to leave the place for weeks on end, and get no rent for it.’

‘Maybe I have. That’s not the same as saying, “Oh, yes. Go ahead. Let someone else move in and come and live here for a year.”’

‘It’s not a year. He’s signed a six-month lease.’

‘That’s not the point.’

‘What is the point, then?’

‘That you didn’t ask. You didn’t even phone and check!’

‘You weren’t here, Tilly. You were up in Aberdeen.’

‘Well, there are phones.’

‘This man was in a hurry. It seemed the sensible thing. I had to decide and I didn’t want to bother you.’

‘How thoughtful of you,’ I said bitterly. (Halfway to ‘If you say so.’)

Geoff played the counter-move. ‘All right, I’m sorry. Clearly I misunderstood. I’ll phone the man right now and tell him the deal’s off and I need the place back for myself.’

‘That isn’t what I said.’

‘It’s what you mean, though, isn’t it?’

And, since it wasn’t, I had lost the argument. Within a couple of days, it had become so official that Frances was even told about the change. And I will have to admit it worked quite well. I bought bunk beds, and painted the spare room yellow. It was a treat to go in parts of shops I’d never even seen before to buy things like novelty wallpaper borders and pillow cases sporting favourite telly characters. In a stepmotherly fit, I even lashed out on a moody-looking rocking horse that stood in the corner, reminding me of Bill, till I finally had the sense to turn it to the window.

Only my brother expressed concern at the speed
things
were going. ‘Moved in? But Bill’s side of the bed is scarcely cold!’

‘Ed, Bill left
months
ago.’

‘Still – to have moved in already! What about his children?’

‘They’ve moved in too – well, you know, Wednesday tea times and alternate weekends.’

‘Oh, really, Til!’ And I got quite a lecture about how long it used to take the two of us to come to terms with change, and how these things should be done gradually. ‘Suppose it doesn’t work out?’ he kept saying. ‘What then? Another upheaval?’ And then he asked me what their mother thought.

‘I don’t know,’ I remember saying petulantly. ‘No one’s invited me to meet her properly yet.’

That set Ed off again; and I must say, when I put down the phone I did feel part of something rather low and irresponsible, as if Geoff and I had simply gone ahead and done what suited us, assuming the kids didn’t mind. Since they weren’t there to listen, I tackled Geoff straight away on the subject – though, not wanting to queer the pitch between him and my brother before they’d even had a chance to meet, I didn’t quote Ed directly. I simply asked Geoff, as though snatching the idea out of the air, ‘Do you ever worry we might be moving things along too fast?’

‘Why? Don’t you
want
me here?’

I made an effort not to roll my eyes. ‘That isn’t what I
said
. I just thought things might possibly be changing a little too quickly for Harry and Minna.’