Good Husband Material (11 page)

Now I’ve stopped the pill I’m back to the light, erratic periods I had before I started taking it. But I don’t really mind – it’s only the unpredictability that’s irritating, and I’m sure my body is enjoying a holiday from all those chemicals.

James
did
notice I wasn’t eating much lately, but thinks I am on a diet. He said if he wanted a wife who looked like a coat hanger with a dress on it, then he would have married one in the first place! I am certainly not
that
thin – I do go in and out in the appropriate places – but perhaps I have become too thin to attract James any more?

Mind you, if
I
am getting thinner,
he
is putting it on – especially round the waist! And his face seems to be losing some of its craggy good looks under a blur of padding and saggy eye pouches. He always looks worse when he’s spent the night at Howard’s, so he’d be much better off coming home and getting a good night’s sleep when he works late.

He was a bit miffed when I asked him if he’d weighed himself lately, and muttered that at least he wasn’t a hollow-eyed drug addict like my former boyfriend, which I ignored as beneath contempt. (I mean, have you
seen
Fergal Rocco? You don’t acquire a body like that through a syringe!)

With all this to occupy my mind it was some time before I began to resurface and take stock of my fellow sufferers in the waiting room – and a highly unsavoury lot they appeared to be, too, though it could have been the lighting that made everyone look terminally consumptive.

Some were talking quietly, but no one tried to exchange even a nervous smile with me, and eventually I realised that there was something that made me conspicuous from the other women – the brightness of my clothes.

I was the only one wearing anything brighter than beige, and in fact most of them looked as if they’d gone into mourning for themselves already.

James would like me to wear smart Country Casuals-type stuff and little suits, and he often says I should go and have my hair styled.

What does he mean
, styled
? It is deep gold, naturally curling, and hasn’t been cut since I was old enough to resist Mother, although the curls ravel it up like knitting. Isn’t
that
a style?

By the time I was summoned an hour later I looked more Edith Cavell than the nurse, since I’d been too afraid of missing my turn to go to the ladies.

She marched me past two men in white coats with their heads together in earnest discussion and threw open the door of a little cell.

‘In here,’ she ordered bossily. ‘Undress. Top half only.’

With the closing of the door the distant rattle of the hospital was abruptly silenced, and I turned to face the narrow room with its couch, washbasin and sliver of frosted window.

I unfastened the straps of my dungarees, took off my shirt with fingers made clumsy from cold and fear, and laid it on the end of the couch.

There was a white cellular hospital blanket folded there, clean, but marked with old stains, and I felt so cold that I draped it round my shoulders and huddled on the couch. My legs dangled, and one shoe fell off on to the chewing-gum-coloured lino. I let the other one drop too, realised my hand was pressed firmly to my Lump, and snatched it away.

After ten interminable minutes a spotty youth in a white coat breezed in. ‘Good morning! I’m a student doctor and, if you don’t mind, I’m going to examine you first,’ he said cheerfully, without looking up from the grubby clipboard he carried, and the nurse materialised from behind him and deftly removed the blanket without waiting for my reply.

He probed long and deep at both breasts like a child searching for the free plastic toy in a box of cereal. Then he straightened and let his breath go in a long sigh.

I looked fearfully at him.

‘Yes, there does seem to be the hint of a lump there, doesn’t there? I’ll just fetch Mr Thomas, the consultant, now – won’t be a tick.’

Five minutes later, while I was still visualising my deathbed scene, a small, rotund, elderly doctor with a polka-dot bow tie and an entourage of obsequious nurses swept in.

He wasted no time on polite preliminaries.

‘Lift your arm. Left arm. Higher. So?’ He probed once, fingers flat and unpleasantly warm. ‘Nothing there. You can go.’

And out he marched again.

Blankly I stared at the student doctor hovering in his wake: ‘Does that mean – does it mean I’m all right?’

‘Yes, if Mr Thomas says so. You can go.’

I exhaled deeply, and colour, warmth and movement flooded back into the world. ‘My God! I thought he was about to say I had six months to live, or something.’

‘Not this time!’ He hurried off after the Master.

The
relief
!

From not wanting to tell anyone about it I swung round to wanting to tell everyone. James just said I was an idiot, and he could have told me there was nothing wrong with me, but since he hasn’t got a medical degree it would hardly have been likely to reassure me.

Secretly, I’m still hardly convinced of my reprieve, and the lumpy tenderness is still there. But I expect I’ll live with it, since it’s got to be better than the alternative.

It’s put me right off checking my breasts, though. How can you spot one rogue marble in a bagful?

James’s reaction was such a damp squib that I cast about for someone else to tell, then I thought: why not phone Peggy? She’d understand.

Peggy Mulvaney, my friend from the Society for Women Writing Romance, writes raunchy books under a variety of unlikely pen names, Desdemona Calthrop being the best known of them.

She says she spends a lot of time on research.

I haven’t seen much of her since we moved here because it’s so difficult to get to SFWWR meetings as a non-driver, and I do miss her and my other friends in the Society. Being accepted as a member when my first book was published did wonders for my self-confidence. And, of course, since my books keep on selling, I do feel I’m a success at
something
.

Anyway, I phoned her up and we had a lovely long chat. She understood perfectly what I’d been going through, because she had a similar scare in the past and they’d told her it was some sort of benign thing and to ignore it, which she did.

She said now she’d put on so much weight it would take her a week to do a check, but Gerry, her current lover, was always willing to try.

I felt much happier after this, and thought Mother might like to know what I’d been through, too. But there was such a very long wait before the phone was picked up that I’d begun to imagine her lying in a pool of cooking sherry in the kitchen before there was a click and a cautious voice quavered, ‘She’s not in!’

‘Hello, Granny!’ I shouted. ‘It’s me – Tish.’

‘Who?’

‘Tish – your granddaughter.’

‘Why are you shouting?’

‘Sorry. Where’s Mother?’

‘Gone to the off-licence. She said the library, but when did she ever go to a library? She doesn’t fool me one bit and never has. I answered the phone.’

‘I know, I can hear you. I thought you never answered the phone?’

‘Yes, I answered the phone, and I never answer it.’

‘Then why did you answer it today, Granny?’

‘Don’t whisper, I can’t hear you. I don’t know why I bothered to answer this pesky thing. I won’t do it again.’

‘Granny, I went to the hospital today because I thought I had cancer, but I haven’t. Isn’t that wonderful?’

‘Cancer? I’m Scorpio. Not that I believe in all that nonsense. Your mother does, more fool her. What have you taken up astrology for? I don’t want my charts read!’

‘But I haven’t taken astrology up!’

‘Then why did you want to know my birth-sign?’ she demanded reasonably. I gave up.

‘How are you, Granny?’

‘Your mother is trying to kill me.’

‘Kill you? But Granny … !’

‘Yes, kill me! Brown sherry bottles left on brown carpets and green wine bottles left on green carpets. She does it on purpose. Soon I’ll be falling over your mother.’

‘She’s not that bad, surely?’

‘“My daughter-in-law drinks,” I told the doctor, and do you know what he said? “Drink is necessary to sustain human life, Mrs Norwood.” “That may be,” I told him, “but sherry isn’t!” Then I told him where to stick his stethoscope, the patronising fool!’ She cackled evilly, and I winced.

‘Oh dear – you really shouldn’t have done that, Granny! And I thought you liked Dr Reevey.’

‘Stuffed shirt. Said he wasn’t going to come and see
me
again. Good riddance!’

‘Oh dear!’ I said again, helplessly. ‘You’ll run out of doctors at this rate.’

‘No such luck. They breed like flies, and always looking for old people to experiment on. That’s what they do in geriatric wards – experiment on old folk. That’s why you never hear of them coming out again,’ she said darkly.

‘I’m sure you’re wrong, Granny!’

‘Can’t hear a word you’re saying. Why does everyone whisper at me? Here’s your mother coming – I’m off.’

And the phone went suddenly dead.

It rang again almost immediately and I picked it up thinking it would be Mother – only it was just silence.

‘That’s funny,’ I told James as he walked into the room. ‘No answer again.’

‘Wrong number.’

‘N-no … the phone wasn’t put down and I’m sure there was someone there. That makes four I’ve had like that, and they always withhold their number.’

‘Oh, come on, Tish: it’s just a fault on the line! But if it will make you feel better I’ll phone British Telecom from work tomorrow and get it checked out. OK? I mean, it wasn’t like it was a rude message, or heavy breathing, or anything, was it?’

‘No,’ I conceded, feeling silly. ‘You’re right – I’m getting in a state about nothing.’ (Mind you, it wasn’t me who was imagining they were being followed everywhere, though he does seem to have dropped that idea pretty quickly.)

I managed a smile, since he was looking a bit impatient, but later, when I was standing in the dark lane with Bess, the silent caller gnawed away in the back of my mind like a rat.

I want everything in my Eden to be perfect – no worms in this apple!

As I quietly let myself back in I heard James exclaim crossly, ‘Just stop doing it!’

‘Stop doing what?’ I demanded indignantly, sticking my head round the door, only to find him holding the telephone receiver.

‘I’ll speak to you tomorrow,’ he added, putting the phone down.

‘Sorry – I thought you were speaking to me,’ I explained. ‘Who was that?’

He stared blankly for a moment, then said: ‘Howard.’

‘What did he want? You sounded a bit terse with him. Stop doing what?’

‘Oh, you know Howard! He’s been moonlighting behind some pub bar and the Social Security have found out about it. Told him either to stop working or stop claiming benefit.’

I lost interest (except for a faint surprise that Howard’s phone wasn’t cut off as usual for non-payment of bills) and went to bed, where I had another of those dreams that made me too guilty to look my husband in the face next day. Fergal featured largely in it.

I am
not
responsible for my subconscious.

Later, I bethought myself of another person I could tell about the Lump who would enter into the spirit of the thing: Mrs Deakin.

She responded to the sordid details of my examination and reprieve with comfortingly horrific mastectomy tales and harrowing deathbed scenes she’d personally witnessed. All her relatives (female) must be either lopsided or dead. Strangely, I felt much better after this.

Then she imparted the astonishing news that wife-swapping is rife in the village on the new estate! While personally disapproving of such goings-on, as a novelist I feel that I should know all about Life, so I pumped her for more details. (I hope the rumour never reaches James’s ears – men are so strange about that sort of thing.)

Running out of wife-swapping stories at last, she changed gear and added a lengthy run of village history for good measure.

‘There was a man …’ she began, resting her elbows and bosom on a stack of sugar bags. Most of her best village stories start like that, or, ‘There was a woman …’

‘There was a man,’ she continued now, ‘lived at Rose Cottage down the other end of the village. His wife, Polly, she died two year ago. Used to teach leatherwork at the WI – a dab hand at making gloves and bags and such, she were, though a strange sort of woman.

‘Her husband, Reg, his hobby were breeding fancy guinea pigs, out in the garden shed. A farm worker, and a steady sort of man, you’d have said. Not over-bright, mind, but good-looking in a big, bullish sort of way.

‘Then Polly gets suspicious, like, that he was seeing someone else, so one night she creeps out after him when he goes down to the Dog and Duck.’

‘What made her suspicious?’

‘Clean underpants! Yes, every day he was demanding a clean pair!’

‘R-really?’

‘She was right, too – he was carrying on with a London widow what had just moved into one of they bungalows. But, as I say, Polly were a strange sort of woman and she didn’t say anything at first, thinking this smart London lady would get tired of her Reg soon, and then she could make him suffer for it at her leisure. Only one day she finds all their Post Office saving taken out, and spots the widow swanning along in a new fur jacket, and put two and two together.’

‘How awful! What did she do?’

‘Threw his traps out into the street and locked the doors against him. A fine row he made when he come back, too! But after a bit he picks his stuff up and goes over to the widow’s.

‘Next day he comes back for his guinea pigs, but Polly says she sold ’em. He was fair murderous since they was some fancy kind he’d been breeding for years, but that was that.’

Mrs Deakin paused and shifted her weight so that one bosom slid off the sugar bags into the tray of toffee apples.

‘But didn’t they ever make it up? What happened?’

‘After a bit the widow chucks old Reg out and goes off back where she come from, and he moves in with another farm worker in a tied cottage.

‘No one seen much of Polly for a long time – preoccupied, she was. Then one day she startles the whole village by appearing in a new fur jacket. Sumptuous it were, the fur all long and glossy and a mighty unusual colour. I never seen one like it. “What sort of fur would that be, Polly?” I asked her, and she give me a strange smile.