Unfaithfully Yours (17 page)

Gerald, as you probably do not know, since you and he never really got beyond the stage of you ogling him, is a very dark character indeed. I believe him to be, possibly, a murderer and he is certainly violent towards women – and to me in particular. I have also been attacked by someone I think may have been his wife – hence the bruising commented on by you, which was not in any way part of my makeup but the product of several frightening and potentially life-threatening attacks perpetrated on me during the autumn, which are being investigated, as I write, by a fully trained and qualified private eye, who was the one in the jodhpurs playing Horatio.

Sneer away, Barbara. He is the man I love. Roland O. Gibbons. It is an anagram of Orlando Gibbons, the Jacobean composer, after whom he was named and he changed it because he felt embarrassed by the
soubriquette
, if that is the right word, and if it isn’t, I am sure you will let me know by return post. He is multi-talented but not musical. Yes. The man I love – although you do not seem to know the meaning of the word.

Sam does not know yet but I am being completely open with everyone else so he will find out very soon. I don’t think he would pay much attention even if he walked in on me and Roland actually doing it. All Sam can talk about these days is his new ‘pal’ Micky Larner, whom he is teaching to sail. He says he is a very willing and talented pupil.

Roland (or Orlando, as I like to call him) is inclined to corpulence, too, and our relationship began when we both discovered we had been to WeightWatchers. I first got to know him when he came to our surgery. You find out a lot about people when they are sitting in the dentist’s chair. I am not talking about their susceptibility to pain, though that may be part of it, but – it is what interests me about the job – you have the chance to watch someone very intensely, at close quarters, without their being aware of you. A good dental nurse is like a good waiter – almost invisible. The moment I like is when Sam is busying himself about the surgery and the patient is sitting back, staring at the ceiling, waiting for him to start work.

At first I didn’t really like Orlando. When he was sitting in the chair his eyes never stopped moving. Most people waiting for the dentist to begin do not seem to be looking or, at least, do not seem to be seeing what they are looking at. Mr Gibbons, as, of course, I called him then, flicked his gaze this way and that, like a bird looking for worms. It was as if he was expecting some predator to leap out at him from behind one of the gleaming white cupboards, but he did not seem to be afraid. He just looked as if there was some secret in our rather ordinary little room, and he wanted to uncover it, even if there were people determined to stop him doing so.

I found it very unsettling. There was one occasion, when I had sex with Gerald while Sam was watching the Sailing Channel, during which I could have sworn Orlando had crept into the waiting room and was listening. Now, of course, I know that was not the case, but at the time I thought he might be an undercover policeman investigating the murder of Pamela Larner. As I am sure you know, Babs, being a real gossip, many people are now saying that Pamela Larner was murdered. Yes, murdered. I can’t say whom we suspect, of course, but it is almost certainly Gerald Price. He was having an affair with her as well! Really, it seems you were about the only person on those villa parties that he didn’t ‘pork’. Too classy, I suspect. Old slappers like me and Pam were a snack before dinner for him. Excuse the vulgarity of my turn of phrase but I have become a much freer person of late, due to the open-air sex, I think.

Orlando will shoot me for saying all this. The murder business is supposed to be totally confidential. But people do talk, don’t they? You cannot stop them. And I’ve said it, so there. And, really, after working with and sleeping with Gerald Price for two or three months I have to say I think he is a really unpleasant person. He is constantly moving downstage of you when you have a big speech and waggling his bottom at the audience in order to get the attention. He is more than capable of murder. The German accent – something to do with Hamlet having been at university in Wittenberg, I think – was frankly ludicrous, wasn’t it?

Where was I? Oh, yes, Orlando, as I now know him.

Well, I think on his third visit Sam said to him something about Twix bars. It was a dental point. As it is usually is with Sam. And Orlando said, in a tone I recognized, ‘Ah – I save my points!’ To which I responded, in a flash, ‘Four Plus Points in a finger of Twix!’ Anyone who has ever been to a WeightWatchers’ meeting and spent a few happy hours debating how many calories there are in a slice of lean bacon will understand. He shot me a quick look of sympathy (Sam was totally oblivious, of course) and later, as I was sorting out his bill, he suggested we meet for lunch in a very ‘points friendly’ spot called the Fish and Grill in the Lower Richmond Road.

That was quite a lunch, Babs.

‘Shall we start with a few langoustines?’ he said. We were sitting out on the pavement in the late-autumn sunshine and it felt as if we were in France. Quite a few of the lorries that roared past us up the Putney Bridge Road were actually French; and although the waiter was Polish, he had recently worked in France. So I felt quite
sur le tapis
(if that is the right phrase). We discussed, at some length, the amount of Plus Points there were in the average langoustine (they do vary in size quite a lot), and when the waiter insisted on offering us both mayonnaise, we smiled very politely and told him we were on a diet. After we had finished the langoustines, Orlando said, ‘Will that be all we’re having?’ I must have looked a bit doubtful because he went on to say, ‘Oysters?’ I said I loved oysters, which I do, and we discussed whether to have them raw or cooked. We both agreed that if they were cooked they were sometimes wrapped in batter as opposed to Oysters Rockefeller, which is when they are fried with spinach, which is delicious but not as delicious as with batter, like the Chinese do, and that batter obviously made them more fattening but we both agreed that we much preferred oysters deep fried in batter and the Chinese are not a particularly fat people, so we ordered twelve. And then we ordered another twelve.

I think the moment when we first realized we had bonded in a really intense and serious way was when we had finished the oysters and decided to order just a small crab – well, two, actually – and Orlando said, ‘Shall we have some mayonnaise with that?’ I laughed in a manner I am sure you might have thought offensive, Babs, and said, ‘Mayonnaise! Why not?’

We both realized we had broken through to yet another level when we agreed we needed a bottle of Sancerre with the crab. We had, up to that point, been drinking mineral water. Sancerre is a very variable wine, isn’t it? Like Chablis, the name covers a multitude of sins. Saying you’ve just drunk a glass of Sancerre is like saying you’ve just met a girl. What kind of girl? Where is she from? What kind of Sancerre? Who made it and how? We ordered a bottle of Sancerre from a producer called Guy Louis who, Orlando said, was a very fine maker of very fine wines. That made us both laugh and we drank it very quickly. We then had a bottle of Macon Villages to finish off the crab, and then I said, ‘Do you like turbot?’ It turned out Orlando
loves
turbot. So we each had a grilled turbot, and, although we had decided not to order chips, we ordered chips.

Spinach and chips are a good combination, aren’t they? We polished off the turbot fairly quickly and found we were ordering a
fritto misto di mare
with some fennel as a side dish, which we thought would be enough but seemed to provoke a need for a meat course and it turned out they did meat as well so we had two T-bone steaks with some mashed potatoes and buttered cabbage, which we washed down with a really very good Malbec.

Orlando had been writing something as we got through the steak and when I asked him what it was he said he had been working out the Plus Points for the meal so far. He said he thought it came to over half a million, and I said that couldn’t be right so I added it up and it came to over two thousand, which just set us both laughing like idiots. So we had to have pudding, of course, which we did, and when we had each had our puddings (two each) and a bottle of Beaumes de Venise we went back to Orlando’s flat in Keswick Road and had sex. We had a lot of sex but I don’t want to talk about it, as it was private and personal and very beautiful. I will say, though, that he is a better-endowed man than the Butch Barrister – as I know you all called Gerry – and he brought me to a pitch of ecstasy that I had never previously experienced. In fact, at one point his neighbour started banging on the wall. Stupid woman! She is Vietnamese apparently.

Yes, Babs, things are changing in Putney. I am going to tell Sam about me and Orlando very soon and we will probably separate. I think Elaine will understand. What I am writing to say is that I do not think you and John have reached the point yet where you should part. I think if you were nicer to him, indeed, if you were a nicer person, Babs, which seems unlikely but must be possible, you could have quite a decent marriage.

I do wish you all the best,

from the Fat Woman with the Annoying Laugh

Mary Dimmock-Weston

From:

Dr John Goldsmith MRCGP, DRCOG

101 Fellen Road

Putney

30 October

To:

His Bitch of a Wife

At the Same Address

Unfortunately

Dear Barbara,

I always knew the end for us would come when we started writing notes to each other. So, I suppose this is the end. You’ve added an extra twist by publicizing our marital difficulties to a group of people I had rather hoped never to see again. The friends you make when your children are small have a special quality, don’t you think? And they go sour so painfully. They remind you of the time when parenthood was such a passionate, simple joy. A time I am reliving with Jas and Josh’s beautiful children, to whose names I am now almost accustomed.

We will get on to Jas and Josh. Oh, you bitch, Barbara – you absolutely hateful bitch!

But I suppose you wanted to trash that, along with everything else we have shared over the last thirty or forty years. You have always liked parading your opinions and have made a habit of publishing novels in order to do so. They certainly weren’t about the story, were they? It was always the same story. Woman shags man and gets bored. Enough to get you talked of for the Orange Prize several times, I’m sure, but not, for me, a really satisfying reworking of the world in which we live. I don’t think I ever quite forgave you for the character called Gordon, a stressed GP with ‘a fine profile and limited intelligence’, who cropped up in
The Day Kate Walked Out
. You could have changed the colour of his fucking hair. I remember asking you if he
had
to have ‘late-flowering blond curls that made him look a little like Grabber, the Head Prefect and Star Athlete in the Molesworth books’.

‘That,’ you replied, ‘is just the way the character is!’

Is it, Barbara? It is roughly the way
I
am, on superficial inspection anyway. It certainly allowed our friends to ask, coyly, whether the novel was autobiographical and for you to answer airily, ‘Oh, no – fiction isn’t like that!’ Well, your kind of fiction is, darling. It certainly isn’t
Anna
fucking
Karenina
, is it? It is, like most of those other novels you like or don’t like, simply a chunk of Higher Gossip for the Middle Classes. Or your particular bit of them.

You did it because it made you feel superior. You like feeling superior to people. It is why you write novels and appear on television and get your name in the papers. Oh, the horrible sham modesty you put on when they mention your birthday in
The Times
. I really thought I would throw up when you bothered to pretend it irritated you last year. I live with you, Barbara. I could see the smirk on your cat-like face.

What makes it all the more horrible, of course, is the fact that I love you. I have always loved you. Ever since I first saw you at that party of Gerry Price’s all those years ago, before any of our children were born. When Gerald was a halfway decent human being. Do you remember? We had a small flat in Heathland Avenue and I had met Gerald in a pub up near there. We talked about sport. We talked, enthusiastically, about our wives. I think I thought I liked him. And then there you were, across the other side of the room, and you had known him since Oxford, it seemed. Back in those days, before we had all blended into the suburb of our choice, you both seemed to me impossibly glamorous. You talked about parties on the river and the wonderful light in the quad at Christchurch. The only quads at the hospital where I trained were associated with the obstetrics department.

I thought, at first, that the differences between us were political. You got very excited about the women at Greenham Common. Excited enough to go there for a day. Not excited enough to live in one of those
yurt
s or whatever it was they built to show the power of ordinary lesbians to influence the largest military nation on the planet. But excited enough to go for a day and make me feel guilty about it. When the kids were born you were one of those women who stood outside Mothercare (remember Mothercare, Barbara?) and shouted, ‘Mothercare out! Fathercare in!’ A little later you graduated quickly from mother-and-baby groups to what I called disenchanted mothers’ groups but which weren’t that at all. They were actually celebrations of female power; as if, among the English suburban middle classes there had ever been any doubt that women were in control of everything. They were all about empowering women, letting women ramble on about how terrible their husbands were – something you’re still good at – and how your feelings were constantly being thwarted by our refusal to communicate. Well, Barbara, I was a little bit busy. I was sitting at a desk, trying to help people with cancer and heart disease. It wasn’t all tennis, although, from the way you carried on, you would have thought it was.

I don’t think, though, that politics was the real quarrel between us. I think it was that you never thought I was good enough for you. A feeling made even more intense when you started to become a novelist and a TV personality – but one that had begun a long way back. Do you know? I often thought you had always been in love with someone else. God knows who. Yourself most likely. You do say in your letter that there was one person with whom you ‘managed to forget yourself’ but, you do not mention his (or her) name. Perhaps you were talking about your adolescence, when sexual attraction made almost all of us feel like that. Or perhaps – the thought has only just occurred to me but I have a horrible feeling it may be true – that was a lie. Just another fiction you made up to hurt me. Because you can’t really feel anything at all, can you? You can’t even love your children.