Swimming Upstream (19 page)

The beginning of 1993 was marked by the inauguration of
William Jefferson Blythe III, now President Clinton, and we both began our new
jobs on the same day. I sat in the newsroom and watched the ceremony on Sky
with my new producer, Kim, Clive Cullen, the breakfast show presenter, who had
just finished his shift and the programme editor, Sandy, who was also my new
boss. I looked around happily at my new environment, and my new colleagues and
listened to the President while he announced the arrival of spring “in the
depth of winter” and pledged a time of dramatic change, hope and renewal. I was
inspired, and gave myself a little message of hope about the year ahead. It had
to be better than the last one, I thought.

Martin crept back slowly into our lives. I couldn’t
understand how this could have happened but he seemed to be on his best
behaviour and slowly I came to accept that this was what Catherine wanted and
it wasn’t my decision to make. The balance of power had shifted noticeably
between them, though; Catherine was living with me, she was happy and she had
no intention of moving back in with him, or of giving up her new life.

“It’s like the beginning all over again,” she told
me happily one morning as she got ready to go out for rehearsals for a fringe
theatre adaptation of an Ibsen play that she was staging with a group of drama
students she had met on a theatre workshop. “And I want to keep it that way. This
is the real Martin. I don’t know what happened to us, before, you know. But
he’s back to who he was again.”

I chopped up lettuce and tomatoes and fetched
cheese from the fridge. I was going for a walk and a picnic with Zara. “You
really think people change just like that?” I said, trying to mask the
irritation in my voice.

“Yes. Sometimes they do,” she told me,
authoritatively.“It doesn’t always have to be an unhappy ending you know.”

“What, domestic violence?”

A cloud crossed Catherine’s face, and she cringed,
visibly. “It was only once or twice that actually happened. I know he could be
moody and stuff, but that never happened before…”

“He was controlling you, Catherine. In some ways
that was worse.”

“He didn’t mean to. There’s stuff from his past
that he hasn’t yet resolved. And it makes him unhappy, some- times. And
insecure, about us. The problem was that I didn’t know how to deal with that, before,
or how to handle his moods.”

“Catherine, you said it yourself, that day
remember, up on the heath? That you didn’t know who you were anymore. That you
were lost.”

“Well, now I’m found.” She grinned at me. To her
credit she wasn’t defensive, just highly persuasive, like a saleswoman selling
me some useless item that I didn’t need or want, and trying to convince me that
I did. “Look Lizzie, he loves me, he really does. He’s so sorry about what
happened, you wouldn’t believe. He’s promised to make it up to me. You’ve seen
what he’s like now. He nearly lost me for good, and he knows it.”

“Oh he’s trying really hard, I’ll give him that.”
I turned and elbowed a cup off the kitchen counter. It bounced on the floor and
cracked in half. I swore loudly and bent down to pick it up.

“Look,” she said. “Just give him a chance. Please
Lizzie. For me. If things go wrong again you can say “I told you so.” But he
isn’t the only one who’s changed. I’ve changed too. I’m stronger, and he knows
that. If he gets in a mood, I don’t have to react the way I used to. I’ll tell
him straight, any more of this and I’m out the door. I was part of the reason
he behaved the way he did. I was too weak, too much of a victim.”

“Oh please,” I sighed. “You’ll be telling me you
walked into doors next.”

“It’s true!” Catherine stopped loading the
dishwasher and grabbed my arm. “It takes two to tango, Lizzie. If I had been
less of a doormat, less of a pushover, it may have all happened differently. Next
time he gets into a mood, I will stand up to him, fight back.”

“Yeah, good luck with that,” I muttered and went
off to my room.

A moment later, Catherine appeared in the doorway.
“Can you honestly say, with your hand on your heart that you don’t like him at
all?”

I sat on my bed and thought about how happy the
last couple of months had been, Catherine and I both busy all day pursuing our
careers, Martin turning up in the evenings with Chinese takeaways for all three
of us, bringing flowers for us both, tenderly re-potting an orchid that I had
knocked off the windowsill one evening. I remembered him on his hands and
knees, carefully clearing up all the scattered soil from Lynne’s cream carpet,
scooping it up in his hands so that it wouldn’t get ground in. Martin popping
round after work with a bottle of wine, asking both me and Catherine about our
day, showing real interest in the people I worked with, laughing at our jokes. Martin
fixing the plumbing in the bathroom when the toilet stopped flushing, without
having to be asked.

It was true that he was making an effort. And not
just with Catherine. He included me in everything, asked if I wanted to come
too when they went out for a drink or a meal. Things had definitely changed and
not just for Catherine, but for me, also. I was no longer the enemy, the one
that might take Catherine away from him, or help her see the light. He acted as
if I was his friend now and it was hard, very hard to hate him.

“A man hits you once, he’ll hit you again,” I
warned her.

“That’s just a cliché,” Catherine said.

“Well, clichés are clichés for a reason.”

“That’s a cliché too,” said Catherine. “It’s like ‘All
men are potential rapists.’”

“No it’s not. And what was said was actually ‘All
men are rapists.’ That’s a feminist doctrine. What I am saying is statistics. I’m
not trying to be Germaine Greer here, I just don’t want to see you hurt.”

“I won’t be,” pleaded Catherine. “Things are
different now. I can see now where I’ve been going wrong. It’s almost as if I
was...” she tailed off.

“Asking for it?” I suggested.

“Well, sort of.”

“Are you serious? You’re saying you wanted him to
hit you?”

“Not consciously, no. But maybe on some level,
yes, I did. There was a part of me that thought that it proved how much he
loved me, that he would get that passionate, that jealous.”

“But, that’s absurd!”

“And maybe there is another part of me that
thought that was all I deserved.” Without warning, Catherine’s face started to
crumple. I patted the bed beside me. Catherine came and sat down and I put my
arms around her.

“Why on earth would you think that?”

Catherine shrugged and wiped at her eyes. “I don’t
know. I suppose my dad was quite moody too. Not like yours, not violent or
anything. But I grew up watching the way my mum tiptoed around him and deferred
to him...” She paused. “Then I meet Martin and… it’s like that’s how I expect
it to be. It’s like a dance, and we both know the steps. When he gets moody, I
cower and shrink inside myself, instead of standing up for myself. And he disrespects
me for that. And so it goes on.”

“So how do you change that?”

“You both have to learn new ways of being, of
dealing with things.”

“But what if he doesn’t want to? What if he
doesn’t know any other way to be? What if he’s just one of these men who like
to be in control? Like the sort of blokes that whistle and leer at you in the
street; they do it to unbalance you, to show they’ve got all the power.”

“Martin’s not like that.”

“I hope you’re right.”

Neither of us spoke for a while. There was
something else. I was thinking about the time that Martin had kissed me, but I
couldn’t tell Catherine about that. Seven years of friendship with Marion and
Julia had taught me that that kind of honesty never comes out well for the
woman. And what if I’d got it wrong? I ran over it again in my mind. All he’d
done was kiss me on the cheek. Maybe it was genuine compassion; he was just
feeling sorry for me, because I’d woken up screaming. Maybe he was just trying
to be a friend. Maybe that’s all he was ever trying to be. It was a long time
ago. Maybe I’d read it all wrong.

“I love him Lizzie,” Catherine said, eventually. “I’ve
never loved anyone else. It’s always been him, for me. Just like it was always
Larsen for you.”

“Yeah, well, look how that ended up,” I reminded
her.

“Oh Lizzie, that was your doing. It was always you
he wanted, you know that. But he knew he was going to lose you and he feathered
his nest. Blokes like Larsen, they’ll make sure they’re never on their own for
long. But you … you’ve gone to the opposite extreme. Because you’re looking for
perfection. And you’re not going to find it, Lizzie. It doesn’t exist. We’re
humans; we’re all flawed.   Maybe you just need to accept that and get on with
letting someone love you too.”

 I sighed. “I haven’t gone through all the pain of
breaking up with Larsen just to go out and make the same mistakes all over
again,” I told her. “I want to get it right this time.”

“I know. And I understand that. But if you don’t
get your nose out of the map soon and start driving, you’re never going to know
if you’re getting it right or not.”

 I smiled. “I will. When I find what I’m looking
for.”

“Plenty of fish in the sea,” she added, smiling
too.

“Yes. But most of them are either mackerel or herring.”

Catherine looked confused.

“D.H. Lawrence,” I admitted. “If you’re not a
mackerel or a herring then there are not that many good fish in the sea. Look…
I’m not looking for perfection, but I just know what I want. I need someone who
is going to love me in the right way, someone who knows who he is and is happy
with that, and doesn’t need a mirror-image to know he exists. Someone who can
respect who
I
am, and is happy with that too; a man who would do
anything for me, but who wouldn’t suffocate me either; someone who would wait
for me if I needed to go away, and not have to replace me with someone else
because he couldn’t be alone; he’d laugh when I broke things, and hold me when
I cried, and he would always be there if I needed him.”

“Honey,” said Catherine. “You want your
dad
.”

It was my turn to cry. Catherine put her arms
round me and held me tight.

A few minutes later there was a knock at the door.

“Okay,” I conceded. I wiped my eyes and stood up. “I
give in. Maybe you’re right about Martin. What do I know? But I swear,
Catherine, if he lays a finger on you again…”

“I know. Absolutely. Believe me, he’ll be gone.”

I opened the front door. Zara was on the doorstep,
wearing a new cashmere coat, a pair of Jimmy Choos and a new tea-cosy hat.

“Blimey Zara, where did you get all the gear?”

“Harvey Nicks,” said Zara, beaming. She lifted up
one foot and twirled her gold strappy ankle. “You like?”

“Wow. Yes. I do. But how much did they set you
back?”

Zara sniggered into her hand and whispered in my
ear.

“What! £400? Where did you get that kind of money?”

“Oh, relax,” said Zara. “I put it on my card.”

“And the coat?”

“Come on, Lizzie, a girl’s got to look good,” said
Zara. “James absolutely loves them.”

“I bet he does,” I said. “You look stunning. But I
thought we were going for a walk?”

“I know,” said Zara. “But I didn’t go home last
night. I was with James.”

“Do you want to borrow some trainers?”

“Hey,” said Zara. “Shall we go shopping instead? I
saw this really gorgeous Prada handbag in Beauty and Accessories, that would really
go with my new dress.” She opened her coat. She was wearing a beautiful red and
black mini dress. “Let’s go back there,” she chattered excitedly. “They’ve got
jewellery to die for. And we can get our makeup done!”

I eyed Zara suspiciously. “How can you afford a
Prada handbag? You don’t earn that sort of money. I mean, how much did that
dress cost?”

“Oh come on, Lizzie, stop being such a killjoy,”
laughed Zara. “You only live once.”

“That’s right,” said Catherine from behind me.

“The Universe will provide,” said Zara. “Isn’t
that right, Catherine?”

“It’s true,” I heard Catherine say again from
behind me.

“Oh, all right, then,” I agreed, feeling like a
bit of a spoilsport. “I guess we could.”

We took the tube to Knightsbridge. I would
normally have enjoyed the walk, across Hyde Park, but it was clear that Zara
wasn’t going to be able to do that in six inch heels and that she wasn’t going
to swap them for my old trainers.

The tube was packed and we had to stand. Zara
chattered incessantly about James, as the train bumped and twisted, and threw
us around. I clung onto the hand strap rail and tried to keep up.

“It’s amazing,” said Zara, who looked like she was
suspended from the ceiling. “The sex is just amazing!”

A woman in the seat opposite looked up abruptly
from her magazine.

“You seem really happy,” I observed.

“Oh, God, Lizzie, he just does it for me,” she whispered
loudly, whilst dangling seductively from the handrail. “I feel like, well…
invincible!”

“You’re not…”

“What?”

“Taking drugs or anything?”

“What?” Zara threw back her head and started
laughing. “Of course not!”

“It’s just…you seem different. Really… well,
confident.” I sounded jealous. I didn’t want to be.

“I know,” said Zara. “I feel like I can do
anything. And it’s all because of James. I’ve got so much energy. We barely
slept last night.”

“Shhh,” I laughed, looking around the busy
carriage. “Enough about the sex, Zara. So, come on then, tell me about him. Where
does he live?”

“Kilburn. In a house.”

“In a house,” I repeated. “What kind of house? Who
does he live with?”

“I don’t know. It’s just sort of an address he
uses. There are several people there. He’s from Ireland.”