Out of My Depth (16 page)

She overate compulsively. It was her dirty little secret. She spent all her money on cheap alcohol and cheap food, but during the course of her first year she had managed to get down below eight stone, thanks to bulimia. There was a ritual. She patronised fifteen different newsagents, so nobody who worked there would ever realise how gross she was. She’d go to each in turn, buying a couple of chocolate bars at each. It took an hour. Back in her room, she would line up her stash, lock the door, and devour every morsel. For five minutes, timed exactly on her watch, she would sit with it in her stomach, despising herself and panicking as she visualised the fat melting into her body, becoming a part of her. Often she thought about leaving it there and letting herself get fat, but she couldn’t do it. The moment the second hand reached the twelve for the fifth time, she rushed to the musty bathroom and emptied everything into the loo. She generally had to flush three or four times to get the bubbly scum of her stomach acid off the surface of the water. She washed her hands meticulously, to banish the sick smell. She scrubbed her nails. She brushed her teeth twice. She cleaned the toilet with the loo brush, and put bleach down it to take the smell away (in a student house, this part of the routine, at least, was a blessing). Then, and only then, was she allowed to feel good. For an hour, she walked on air.

It was after one of these sessions that she met Patrick. None of her flatmates were around, so she went to the union by herself, thinking that she’d pick up a paper on the way and see if she could find someone to talk to. The Epi was almost empty. Amanda sat alone in a sticky corner, her pint of lager in its plastic cup on the table in front of her, and smiled around the room, just so the few drinkers would see that she was nice.

Patrick was there, complete with full head of hair and cricket jumper. He looked like a public school boy, with good reason. He was chatting to two friends, and they ignored her.

When she was halfway down her 90p drink, a middle-aged man lurched into the bar. He was sozzled. Amanda looked up, saw him, and looked back down. People like him turned up from time to time, and she liked it best when the bar staff evicted them straightaway. She glanced at the barman, but he wasn’t there.

The man made his wobbly way directly to her table. She cursed herself for accidentally smiling at him. Having a ‘please like me’ reflex got her into trouble surprisingly often.

‘Mind if I join you?’ he slurred. His voice was cultured. Amanda wrinkled her nose in distaste.

‘I do mind, actually,’ she told him bravely.

‘Smashing.’ He sat down. Amanda tried a withering look, but she felt tears springing to her eyes and she knew it was going to take more than a stare or a sniffle to move this man on. He was dressed in a shabby suit, and his nose was bulbous and pitted. But he looked as if he had once been respectable. He didn’t smell like a homeless person. He just looked like a down-at-heel alcoholic; and he was staring at her.

Amanda was reasonably good at fending off unwanted attention in the street, or at parties. Now, though, she looked at her companion and squirmed.

‘You’re posh, aren’t you?’ he said, leaning forward. ‘I used to be posh.’

Amanda looked away. She knew she should get up and walk off, but something was stopping her. Mainly, she thought, the fact that the man might grab her if she tried.

‘Would you get me a drink?’ he asked. ‘I seem to have left my wallet in the taxi. I’d be very grateful.’

Amanda sighed. ‘What do you want?’

‘Whisky.’

She didn’t know what else to do, so she looked in her purse.

‘Or just the price of a drink would be fine,’ he interjected hopefully. ‘I can see you’ve got a fiver there. That would cover it nicely.’

At that point Amanda started to cry. ‘I need that fiver,’ she told him. She felt as if she were being politely mugged, and she loathed herself for not being able to tell him to F-off.

At that point — rather belatedly, when she looked back on it, but like an angel from heaven at the time — Patrick appeared.

‘Excuse me,’ he said. He put a hand on the man’s shoulder and borrowed a phrase from a thousand soap operas. ‘Is he bothering you?’ She watched Patrick registering her for the first time. He took in her hair and her face and her cheekbones, and his manner changed, subtly. He thrust his chest back, lifted his chin, and dealt with the situation in a manly fashion. Within three minutes the drunk had been ejected, celebratory drinks had been bought, and Patrick had asked Amanda to dinner at Brown’s.

Three blissful weeks passed before she discovered that Patrick had a girlfriend, or, more accurately, before Patrick’s girlfriend discovered that he was sleeping with Amanda. There was a showdown. To Amanda’s astonishment, Patrick chose her over the bossy Melanie. They officially became a couple. Once she had him, nothing was going to induce Amanda to let Patrick go. She did not hesitate to choose safety over passion.

‘. . . And so Jakey was born,’ Amanda continued, smiling. ‘I was only twenty-four. We hadn’t intended to start a family so soon, but it turned out to be the best thing that could have happened. We had Freya eighteen months later to get it all out of the way. When Freya leaves home, we’ll only be forty-four!’ She looked round the table, waiting for the approbation that normally followed this revelation. Everybody nodded, without enthusiasm. Amanda pursed her lips, and told herself they were all jealous.

‘But what about vow, Amanda?’ Tamsin asked. ‘What did you do with your history degree? I know you had your babies young, but you must have worked before that. Did you go back to work when they were both at school? What are you going to do when you’re forty-four?’

Amanda cast around for the right answer. Typical of Tamsin to hone in on her Achilles heel and leave her feeling stupid.

‘Yeah,’ she said, noticing that her glass was empty and twiddling its stem to alert Roman to that fact. ‘Yeah, of course I worked till I had the kids. Did admin for a PR firm. I was planning to work my way up, but then life got in the way. Now I’m rushed off my feet looking after everyone, to be honest. Sometimes I think I should get a job just for a bit of rest.’

Izzy laughed. ‘That kind of work expands to fit the time available, doesn’t it? I know I only have Sam, and I live in a teeny flat that definitely wouldn’t compare to your house, but I do the minimum of housework when Sammy’s with his dad, and leave it at that. Whereas if I had the whole day to do it, I’d be busy all day.’

Patrick leaned forward. ‘Guess what, Izzy?’ he said, slightly too drunk. ‘Amanda has a cleaner who comes three times a week.’

Amanda glared. ‘Twice!’

‘Twice, then. And an ironing lady, who believe it or not is not the same person. All Amanda does is drive the kids to school and pick them up again. I’m not sure what else she gets up to.’

‘What the hell do you mean by that?’

Patrick shook his head. ‘Nothing, nothing. Nothing untoward.’

‘I go to the gym.’

Amanda heard Roman almost sniggering. She narrowed her eyes at him.

‘Do you really?’ Susie asked, blandly. The phone rang. Roman headed out of the room to answer it, and, Amanda felt sure, to laugh at her.

‘And I wash and iron all your clothes, all the kids’ uniforms. I cook and I make the beds and I sort out all the crappy boring admin that you don’t even know exists.' Amanda caught her breath and tried to control herself. She could not have a public row with Patrick. She would continue this later, in private. Anyway,’ she said, icily. ‘I’m done. Who’s next?

Izzy cleared her throat and toyed with her spoon.

‘OK, well, I should start off by admitting that Amanda’s made me feel very inadequate with her house in Clapham and her lovely family life and everything.’ She instantly realised that she sounded as if she were being ironic and she hoped that Amanda would know that she didn’t do irony very well. She hurried on. ‘I went to university, too, as you all know. I went to Sheffield to read English. I was just talking to Patrick about how different youth looks after the event. I was insecure and nervous when I went, even though I was still doing that Pre-Raphaelite thing of wearing tight bodices and flowing skirts and having my hair long. But it was exciting. I settled in and got used to having new friends and new ways of studying, and I enjoyed it. Had a lovely time, in the end.’ She swallowed. It was hard to know how much detail to give.

‘When I graduated, I moved to London and started working in a publishing house. It was brilliant. I liked the women I worked with, I loved being young in London with endless possibilities before me, and I was really extremely happy. I moved into a shared house in Archway with a friend from university. And . . . well, to cut a long story short, I started going out with one of the flatmates. His name was Martin.’

She looked around the table and made eye contact with each of her old friends. They all smiled, knowing the way the story was going to go. Izzy took a sip of white wine. She had missed her friends, so she was going to tell them everything.

‘Martin was ten years older than me, which, yes, meant that he was living in a shabby shared house at the age of thirty-two, the age we all are now. Which at least makes me think my life could be worse. He’d been in a long-term relationship which had ended, and he’d moved into the box room as a temporary measure. He had a daughter from that relationship, by the way, Caitlin, and he used to bring her to the house on Saturdays. He was desperately looking for a bedsit or something so he could have her to stay. She was only one when I first met her.’

Izzy smiled at the memory of the chubby toddler who used to empty the kitchen cupboards and bemuse most of the housemates when she visited. Nobody had quite known what to do with a baby, but they had mainly found her sweet, if alien.

‘Anyway, Martin was keen on me from the very beginning. I wasn’t sure. I was young, and I found the idea that he was a father completely amazing. He seemed far, far too grownup to be interested in me. But the more I pretended not to notice that he liked me, the keener he became. I didn’t see it at the time, but he’s a very controlling person, and when he decided he wanted me, nothing was going to stop him. My saying no all the time was a red rag to a bull. In fact, if I’d given in sooner I probably woudn’t have had to marry him.

‘So it was very flattering. He was a good-looking guy, and he had a reasonably good job with an insurance company. Most of all, though, he was funny. He talked and talked and talked, and he told me things he said he’d never told anyone else before. He loved my hair and my clothes. He said I was unique and he’d never met a girl like me. Anything I said would be fascinating and perceptive and taken as further evidence of my wonderfulness. He was always asking me out for drinks, and normally I said no because I didn’t want to owe him anything.

‘But then, one evening, I said yes.’ Izzy clearly remembered the day it had all changed. It was February, and the rain was coming down in sheets. She stumbled in from work, clutching her Oxfam mac around herself, holding her beaten-up leather bag in her arms like a sack of potatoes. Her hair was sodden, and it stuck to the sides of her face. It took fifteen minutes to walk home from the tube, and she was drenched.

She had had a terrible day. She’d forgotten that she was supposed to be checking numbers for the sales conference and confirming with the hotel. She had been procrastinating over checking the special requirements for weeks. She’d vaguely had it in the back of her mind that she needed to do these things, but it had entirely escaped her notice that the deadline, for the hotel and for the caterers, was that particular day. Trouble had descended at 3 p.m.

Martin arrived home as Izzy was drying her hair with a tea towel, standing in front of the oven, which was turned up high with the door open, as the most efficient piece of heating the house possessed. Their three flatmates were either out or shut firmly inside their rooms.

He stood in the doorway, tall, broad and slightly ginger.

‘Jesus Christ, Isabelle,’ he said, his eyes crinkling in amusement as he took her in. ‘You look like I feel! And I don’t feel good.’

She laughed. ‘Mmm. Bad day. Bad weather.’ She looked at the tea towel in her hands. ‘Bad hair. But I’m home now.’

Martin, who was a lot taller than she was, came and stood next to her. He looked down, and she craned her neck to look up at him. And in that instant, something happened. At the time, she thought she had fallen in love. Looking back on it, she thought she had made a decision to take the path of least resistance. Her body suddenly came alive and she saw that she and Martin might have unimagined potential. He adored her. No one had ever adored her, like that, before. At the age of twenty-one, Izzy decided to say yes to his next question, and to see what happened. Martin seemed to be able to read her thoughts. He put a hand on her shoulder, his thumb resting on the side of her neck, and he left it there.

‘Come back out in the rain with me,’ he said, ‘and let me get you drunk.’

‘He totally swept me off my feet,’ she told everybody. ‘Once I started going out with him, it happened so quickly. I was in a haze. I was so happy. He was a real romantic hero. He’d whisk me away for weekends in the country. He took me out for meals all the time, and he was always waiting with some fabulous wine or champagne when I got home from work. It seems like a million years ago now. He stroked my hair, which sounds creepy but it wasn’t, somehow. He appeared to worship me.