Fly in the Ointment (3 page)

The shame of it! I sat on the bed and watched my face go beetroot in the mirror. To have a husband leave, and not even notice! When had the bloody man gone? It couldn't have been that morning. There hadn't been the time. The day before, while I was working? Or could it even have been the day before that? I was so used to paying no attention to Stuart's comings and goings, his calls to say that things were running late, his talk of cancelled trains and nights in the city. No doubt before he bought that microwave oven (for my birthday!) I might have had some vested interest in actually listening to his excuses and his explanations. These days I tended only to mutter
‘What a shame' and ‘How annoying for you' and hope that the call would be over before
The Archers
.

I finally worked it out. It must have been the day before, because when I'd come home from work there'd been a note from Stuart on the table letting me know that Martin Tallentire from next door had come round to borrow our ladder yet again.

But since then, nothing.

I wondered if I should phone him at the office. Then irritation rose. Why bloody should I? If the man proved to be such a mean pig that he could choose to do a flit without the courtesy of a single word, then let him. I was so furious I strode around the house picking up droppings from our eighteen-year marriage and putting them in bin bags. Then I sat at the table and ate the cheese and celery sandwich (I'd thought the girl might be a vegetarian), and thought things over.

Try as I might to suffer the flood of worries I thought a person ought to feel in circumstances like mine, only two thoughts kept surfacing. The first was that I couldn't stay at the dry-cleaner's. Much as I liked the job, I knew I couldn't depend on Stuart to fund me for much longer. Even if he changed his mind and came back tomorrow, I couldn't be sure he'd stay. If I was going to keep a roof over my head,
I'd have to brush up my accounting skills and get a proper job.

The second thought was how very stupid the two of us had been not to split years ago.

My only actual
feeling
was relief.

THE FEELING LASTED.
Not just for the rest of the afternoon (and through the next sandwich) but through the long quiet evening. In a symbolic gesture of ‘good riddance' I put fresh sheets on the bed and took off the downie Stuart had hogged so often, leaving me shivering. Instead, I put on the cotton blankets that I preferred, and could peel off and pull back over again, as my own body demanded.

Spread like a starfish, I fell asleep in moments. At twelve I jack-knifed upright, fearful that Stuart might have lain awake in his hotel room (or in his lover's bed – who was to guess?) and changed his mind. I pictured him sliding out from under the covers, pulling his clothes on and getting some taxi-driver to drop him at the end of our street. I even imagined his
footsteps coming up the path, his key scraping the lock.

And then I thought, ‘No, damn it! You can't walk out without a word and come back just as you choose.' I hurried down the stairs to run the bolt across the front door. (The back is always bolted.) ‘Just try to get in now!' I warned him as I went back to bed and then, astonishingly, slept through till morning.

I woke with the sense that this was all some unimagined gift. I had been given a second chance to live my own life, not the one I'd twisted out of shape trying to fit in with Stuart. The light shone brighter on the walls. The birdsong sounded merrier. Even my tea tasted better. I dressed with care in case Stuart popped into the dry-cleaner's to tell me he was in love, or off to Thailand, or whatever. I got in early enough to warn Soraya I would soon be handing in my notice, but not so early that she had time to prise much out of me before we were engulfed by the first rush of customers dropping things off on the way to their own jobs.

I kept hearing singing all day. Yes, it was really like that. I'd hear a voice cheerfully carolling through some upbeat song and look up, startled beyond belief to find it was my own. I swapped sandwiches with Brenda at lunch time even though I hate tuna. I think that I was on a perfect cloud of happiness.

Till I saw Malachy. He was hanging around in a
doorway across the street, obviously hoping to catch me. I felt the usual shaft of irritation that my son's days were so empty he could start loitering at three for something that wasn't going to happen before five-thirty. But that is druggies for you. And watching him shuffle round aimlessly did at least remind me why Mrs Kuperschmidt and I had finally toughened up. I saw the stains on his jacket and thought of the countless times I'd had to kneel to clean up his dribbles and vomit. I looked at his filthy haystack hair and my head swam with memories of those perpetual arguments about bathing and changing. I looked at his hands rooting nervously in the depths of his pockets and thought of how often they'd filched money from mine.

But the longer he stood there, the harder it would be to deny him whatever he wanted. And maybe he had brought a message from his father. So in the end I left Soraya holding fort, and crossed the street. ‘Hello, Malachy.'

‘Hi, Mum.'

‘Feeling all right?'

‘Bit groggy,' he admitted. He trawled through what little was left of his brain for proper manners. ‘How are you?'

‘I'm fine,' I told him brightly. ‘Have you seen your father?'

‘No,' he said, looking behind him anxiously. ‘Why? Is he here?'

‘Not just this minute,' I assured him. ‘I was just wondering if he had looked you up at all in the last couple of days.'

I couldn't tell from Malachy's blank look if he was even trying to remember. I pushed a little harder. ‘So you haven't seen him recently? No news? No notes or letters?'

‘No.' Out of sheer habit he started to forge excuses for failing to live up to what he took to be some expectation of mine. ‘But I've been moving about a bit . . .'

‘Oh, yes?' I recalled Mrs Kuperschmidt warning me not to appear too curious about his life on the streets. (‘It shades all too easily into seeming to sympathize with a choice that he's making for himself.') But I did try one question. ‘What, with that nice girl?'

‘Which nice girl?'

‘You know.' I touched the side of my nose. ‘The one with the red jewel here.'

‘Oh, her.' He shrugged. ‘No, she's gone now.'

‘What, home?' (More fool me.)

‘London.'

‘Oh, dear.' I felt the old heart-sinking chill. There is no fighting this demon. Certainly no winning, even
for girls who mean well. Unwisely pushing Mrs Kuperschmidt's strictures aside, I asked my son, ‘And what about you?'

Down came the scowl like a shutter. ‘What
about
me?'

It all came back in force. The screaming and the tears. The hammering on doors at two in the morning. The brazen deceit and petty thievery. The angry phone calls from other parents. The visits from police and meetings with social workers.

Never again. Mrs Kuperschmidt was right to have helped me make the decision crystal clear to him: stay clean, or stay out. I nodded back towards the dry-cleaner's. ‘I'd better be getting back.'

He shook his head like a dog scrambling out of water. I wondered if he was trying to rattle his brain into some different pattern in which his reason for showing up would become clear to him again. If so, it worked. ‘Mum, can you lend me some money?'

It was another of Mrs Kuperschmidt's rules, but still I broke it. While I was rooting in my purse, I told him reproachfully, ‘I bought you and that girl two really nice sandwiches yesterday, but by the time I came out of the supermarket, you had already gone.'

‘Yesterday?'

He clearly hadn't the faintest memory. I tipped
more money into his grubby hand than he expected and, while he was still hunched over, greedily counting it, I hurried off back to my own life.

WHO WOULD HAVE
thought a husband of nearly twenty years could vanish with so little fuss? For days on end I went round waiting for the phone to ring. Nothing. I have my pride. I didn't want to be the one to make the call. I would have scoured his letters for clues but not a single envelope that bore his name fell on the mat.

That set alarm bells ringing. He'd left the paperwork to do with the house, the mortgage loan and the utilities. But I defy any woman to sit alone night after night, however contentedly, and not think about her future. After a week I borrowed Soraya's mobile to ring his. I had intended to break off the call as soon as he answered, but all I heard was a recorded voice: ‘This number is no longer in service.'

Furious with myself for even wanting to know
about a man who was behaving so badly, I rang his office number. A strange voice answered. I didn't say who I was. ‘I think I might have the wrong extension number,' I said. ‘I'm looking for Stuart Henderson.'

‘Stuart? He's left.'

‘Left? You mean, for the day? Or left the job?'

‘No longer with the firm. He left over a month ago now.' The voice sharpened professionally. ‘Is it a matter I can deal with for you?'

‘No, no. Can you just tell me where he's gone?'

‘I've no idea. You could try the people upstairs. Extension 317. They might be able to help you.'

They might, but wouldn't, of course. ‘Data Protection Act . . . previous employee's privacy . . . blah, blah . . . blah, blah.' And, to be fair, I didn't humiliate myself by saying who I was, just asked, ‘Well, is the last address you have for him the one that I have here? 12 Rosslyn Road?'

There was a pause, and then the man said, ‘Well, since you know it already I suppose there's no harm in saying that's where we've sent on a few things, and nothing's come back yet.'

But nothing had come to me. So. No precipitous decision. No sudden brainstorm. No rush of despair. Stuart had clearly planned his bunk far enough ahead to get his mail successfully redirected. All that evening I raged and fretted. How
dare
he? How dare
he take it upon himself alone to call time on a marriage as lengthy as ours – slide off without a word, leaving me with a house I only half owned, accounts under his name, and all the rest of the legalities to do with living?

Next day, a Power of Attorney came.

It was a stiff fat thing. I had to read it twice before I realized Stuart had legally deputed me to deal with everything to do with the house and all we owned. Clutching it as carefully as if it were my own reprieve, I took it in to work and when one of the solicitors on the corner came in to collect her blouses, shoved it towards her.

‘Can I do
anything
? Even sell the house?'

She ran her fingers over some of the chunks of lardy legal prose and settled on others. Then she raised her head. ‘Your husband ought to find himself a far more careful legal adviser. The way this thing's been drawn up, you can sell anything you like, including the house. And there's nothing to stop you from keeping every penny.'

Old habits die so hard. I actually heard myself defending my louse of a husband. ‘Oh, I'm sure that's what he wanted. Just for convenience.' And I was sure it was. Just for a moment I'd wondered if he planned to go abroad for ever, or even walk into the sea. But it was far more likely that Stuart – careful
and fastidious as he was – had weighed up the relative merits of leaving me with a legally stalled life, or with the endless tangles of a fair division, or with everything, and chosen the last. In some men, generosity would have been the spur. In Stuart it would be selfishness, pure and simple. He'd find it less of a bother to go to Ikea and buy a new bed and chairs and towels than face me over a table and explain.

The next few weeks were happy, happy, happy. It is
exhilarating
to be shot of a man whose every word or look drags down your spirits. I painted the bathroom the yellow he'd thought was ‘probably too yellow'. I threw out the monstrous chest of drawers his mother left us and he felt we ought to keep ‘out of respect'. I stopped even thinking in terms of what Stuart always used to call ‘a proper meal' and took to eating exactly what I fancied when I was hungry. (And I lost six pounds.) I moved the television upstairs, and took to my bed as early as I chose, eating crackers and cheese with lime pickle and not thinking twice about stains on my nightie. If true contentment is living free from irritation, then I was content.

Everyone at work put my good spirits down to the fact that I was leaving. ‘But, Lois, what are you going to
do
? You can't stop work at your age!' I didn't like to tell them that way back in early youth I'd taken the
trouble to qualify myself for a far better job than standing behind a counter tutting over stains. On my last day, I brought in a lavish cake. They had good-luck cards to give me. And though there'd been much talk of the four of us going out for a celebratory drink together after SwiftClean closed, Soraya avoided bars, Brenda was off, and Ravij felt he really ought to stay on the premises a few minutes longer in case the repairman he'd been waiting for all day finally showed up.

At twenty to six, I kissed Soraya and Ravij goodbye and strolled to the bus stop. Two drunks were sitting on the bench and one was spitting. Repelled, I walked on past. I wasn't in a hurry. By the next bus stop I was in my stride, so kept on walking. It was a lovely soft evening. I went through Queen's Park, along the canalside walk the council had smartened up at huge expense, and up on to the old stone bridge.

Hearing a barney starting up somewhere below me, I rested my arms on the cool gritty parapet and leaned over to look. On the towpath beneath, a tartylooking young woman was ripping into some unfortunate still out of sight under the arch. Her face was twisted with temper. Her arms kept lashing out towards whoever it was who'd sparked her fury. The accusations ricocheted up. ‘Stupid! . . . Already
warned
you.' Each time she hurled herself forward I'd hear her choked and incoherent shrieks echoing over and again under the archway. ‘Offering crap like that to Wilbur! . . . Wilbur! . . . Wilbur! . . . Want to get us
mashed
. . .
mashed
. . .
mashed
. . .? You fool! . . . fool! . . . fool!'