The Other Woman's Shoes (13 page)

She couldn’t even trust her own emotions.

Martha took the tea from Eliza and wrapped her hands around the mug. It was a very mild October but Martha felt permanently cold.

‘Should I ring the estate agent for you?’ asked Eliza. She lowered herself down on to the floor and sat with her back against the wall, next to Martha. ‘You have so much to sort out even if Michael does come back–’

‘What do you mean “if”? Of course he’s coming back,’insisted Martha through her gulps of tea and tears.

‘Erm, right, yeah. Well, when Michael comes back you aren’t going to be in a position to buy a new house. You’ll have to rest, and reassure one another before you’ll be in a position to galvanize your spirits to tackle a move.’

‘But the Bridleway would be the perfect fresh start,’ Martha cried.

‘It would be associated with all this confusion. You’ll find another house when the time is right,’ said Eliza. She squeezed Martha’s knee reassuringly.

‘It’s more than a house to me,’ Martha wailed.

‘I know, Babe. But you’re going to have to let it go.’

Martha felt another shriek of pain sear her body. She was clinging to the idea of the dream home because she was struggling to accept the enormous change that had been thrust upon her. Wasn’t it enough that her husband had left her? That he’d deprived the children of the stable family she’d always wanted them to have? That he’d obliterated her past and destroyed her future?

But then, put like that, what did a house matter in the grand scheme of things?

Martha took a deep breath and tried to recapture some of the self-control for which she was (historically) famous. ‘OK, pass me the telephone. I’ll call the estate agent.’ And whilst the brave smile was frail, it was genuine.

15

Eliza’s recent dates had not been much more successful than Martha’s. Her belief in the happily-ever-after with the man-with-a-pension-plan had taken a severe bruising from Martha and Michael’s split, but she wasn’t going to admit this.

Eliza had expected to arrive at Martha and Michael’s that Monday morning and be guided and helped. She’d expected them to be pleased with her adult decision to move out of a dead-end relationship and find someone who wanted a couple of kids and an endowment policy. She’d even thought that they would introduce her to some of Michael’s friends at the golf club. She was looking forward to being mopped up into their happy family environment, which she’d so often admired. She’d wanted to read the kids stories in the warm orange light of their bedrooms, bedrooms packed with toys and dreams. She’d been looking forward to doing her share of playschool and swimming-class car runs. She’d wanted to join the dinner parties, she might even have been eating chioca, for God’s sake. But this scene of domestic bliss had disappeared.

Vanished.

Gone.

If
she
felt cheated, God alone must know what Martha was feeling.

Instead of being the recipient of mugs of hot chocolate and platefuls of oatmeal cookies, Eliza found herself in the eye of a confusing, complicated marital storm. Her first thought had been to turn heel and leg it back to her parents’, or even Greg’s, but one look at Martha had wiped such thoughts entirely from her head. Eliza was needed.

Naturally, as a single thirty-and-some-months woman living in the twenty-first century, with a large number of friends in a similar position, Eliza was well practised in the ‘All men are bastards’ line. She also knew that the immediate shockwaves of a break-up could only be salved with chocolate, wine and weeping. The next stage was naming and shaming: calling the man in question everything from an arse to a reptile and listing his many, many crimes against womankind. And the final stage to recovery was shagging in a random, risqué and raunchy manner. This method to mend a broken heart had been used by Eliza and her friends after the breakdown of countless affairs. However, Martha completely rejected Eliza’s tried and tested remedy. She did accept the odd glass of wine and on one or two occasions she even drank just over half a bottle at one sitting, but she wouldn’t touch chocolate. Nor would she diss Michael. She kept insisting that he must be confused or sad. She wondered what
she’d
done wrong and insisted that this must be hurting him as much as it was hurting her.

‘I doubt that,’ Eliza yelled in frustration. Eliza had spent days watching her sister on her hands and knees mopping spills, changing nappies, picking up toys, begging the children to eat or sleep at the appropriate times. She’d
watched her clean cupboards, floors, windows and the tops of wardrobes. Eliza couldn’t decide if Martha thought these tasks essential or whether they were a ploy to keep busy. Eliza tried to help by bathing the children and reading them bedtime stories, but Mathew sensed there was something wrong and clung pathetically to his mother. Eliza often found Martha asleep in Mathew’s bed – one night she found her curled up in a tight ball in Maisie’s cot. Eliza was shocked, not only at the lengths mothers would go to to placate their children, but also by the size of Martha. Her big sister suddenly looked so tiny.

Vulnerable.

Besides her refusals to get blathered and fat or to berate her ex, Martha also contravened tradition in the third strand of the recovery program. Even Eliza could not imagine Martha shagging her way to restoration.

Eliza, on the other hand, was quite keen to get laid. She hadn’t realized how great a sex life she and Greg enjoyed until she’d abandoned it, and now she missed sex.
Not
Greg. She was sure she didn’t miss
Greg
. What was there to miss, except noise and chaos? But she did miss something, so it must be the sex. Yet getting laid wasn’t proving as easy as she’d imagined.

In the very early days, it would have been insensitive in the extreme for Eliza to mention her imperative need to access Martha’s address book. Oddly, Martha had not greeted the news of her sister’s split from Greg with quite the enthusiasm Eliza had imagined she would. She’d simply commented, ‘Poor Greg, poor you.’ Eliza reasoned that she’d caught Martha at a bad moment.

After a couple of weeks of living together, Martha
suddenly found some enthusiasm for Eliza’s plan to find a new Mr Right. The right Mr Right. ‘I know some chaps who might be what you’re looking for,’ she mentioned casually one evening as she was flicking through her address book.

Eliza thought it was quaint that Martha had an address book, not a PalmPilot. All of Eliza’s friends had Palm-Pilots. She also thought it was quaint that Martha called blokes ‘chaps’.

‘Who, who?’ asked Eliza, without bothering to disguise her enthusiasm.

‘Well, you could start with Ted.’

‘Ted?’ Eliza couldn’t help thinking of
Play School
. What sort of name for a grown man was Ted? Did this mean he would be particularly hirsute? Still, she shouldn’t allow herself to be put off at this embryonic stage, she could always think of a nickname, which was much more street.

Martha was smiling, she knew her sister well enough to guess what was running through her mind. ‘Should I go on?’ she asked playfully.

‘Yes. Yes, of course, what does he look like?’

‘Surely you ought to be asking what his prospects are if you’re so hell-bent on this scheme of finding yourself a respectable husband with a pension plan etc, etc.’

‘Well, yes, true,’ Eliza admitted reluctantly, ‘but I don’t want to date the Elephant Man, not even if he is the CEO of every blue-chip company in Britain.’

‘Oh, I see,’ said Martha smiling, and betraying the fact that she knew her sister would never settle for anything less than a beautiful man.

‘What?’

‘Nothing. I’m not saying a thing. Well, Ted is a banker, he’s tall, blond and generally considered fairly handsome.’

‘Blond?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Eliza, don’t say nothing when there is blatantly something.’

‘I prefer dark-haired men.’

‘So Ted’s a “no”, then?’

‘He’s a “maybe”. Let’s write a list.’ Eliza jumped up to find pen and paper. She thought it was a very good sign that Martha had managed about a dozen sentences without turning the conversation back to Michael. Maybe this was exactly what Martha needed – something to take her mind off her own problems.

Eliza sat down on the sofa next to Martha and drew three columns. At the top of the columns she wrote, ‘Hot’, ‘Might Do’ and ‘Not if He were the Last Man Alive’. Martha grinned. Underneath ‘Might Do’ Eliza wrote ‘Ted’.

‘There’s Tarquin. He’s dark-haired. He’s a solicitor.’

‘Is that his real name? You really know someone called Tarquin?’ asked Eliza, astonished. ‘No, I’m sorry, I couldn’t. I’d laugh every time I said it. I couldn’t imagine calling out “Yes, yes, yes, Tarquin” whilst I’m in the throws of pash. It’s simply too try-hard.’

‘Well, he’s not responsible for his name,’ laughed Martha. ‘His parents saddled him with it before he could articulate any objection.’

‘But he does have the option of changing it by deed poll.
An option he’s obviously chosen not to take advantage of.’

‘He’s very nice.’

Eliza sighed and wrote ‘Tarquin’ under ‘Ted’.

Martha went through her entire address book and tried to muster up as many eligible men as she could. Eliza always found grounds for objection: ‘sounds too posh’, ‘definitely too short’, ‘silly name’ featured frequently, as did ‘can’t dance’, ‘sounds dull’, ‘sounds selfish’, ‘divorced – too much baggage’. This last comment prompted the exchange:

‘Sorry, Martha. I didn’t mean anything by that.’

‘Why are you apologising to me?’

‘Well, I’m not saying everyone will think a divorcee has too much baggage,’ lied Eliza, embarrassed that she’d put her foot in it.

‘Why are you apologising to me?’ Martha repeated her question, stonily.

‘No reason,’ said Eliza, and returned to the list.

When they had finished, Eliza was disappointed to see that there were no names whatsoever under the ‘
Hot
’ heading, four under ‘
Might Do
’, and seven under the ‘
Not if He were the Last Man Alive
’ heading.

‘Maybe you’re being a bit too exacting,’ offered Martha. She’d thought that the eleven men she’d proffered were all reasonable candidates in answer to Eliza’s brief. In fact, she’d done some censoring as she went along, and there were three other names she hadn’t even bothered to mention. Knowing this number of single men at this particular age was a rarity, and several of Martha’s friends had benefited from the contents of her fat leather address book. None of them had ever been as picky as Eliza.
Martha didn’t actually think that any of the men in her address book would suit Eliza as well as Greg had, but then Eliza was old enough to make her own mistakes.

‘So let’s get this right.’ Martha had been taking notes as Eliza had been making her comments throughout the selection process. She had that kind of mind. She picked up the notebook and in a voice that was entirely ‘chairperson’s summary to the board’, she recapped on Eliza’s criteria. ‘So you’re looking for a tall, toned –’

‘A lean, mean, loving machine,’ interrupted Eliza, giggling. She’d drunk the lion’s share of a bottle of Chardonnay.

‘Well, obviously, Eliza, I cannot vouch for their prowess in the bedroom. These are people I have round for dinner not to –’

‘
Shag
.’ Eliza finished the sentence, as she doubted Martha could.

‘Exactly, not to “shag”,’ said Martha as though she were trying out a new word in a foreign language, which in a way she was. Both of the girls threw their heads back and laughed loudly. Eliza thought to herself that this was the first time she’d heard Martha laugh out loud for quite some time. There hadn’t been that much laughing out loud, even before Michael had left.

‘Now concentrate,’ continued Martha with mock seriousness. ‘You’re looking for a tall, toned, dark-haired thirtysomething, who earns in excess of 40K, can dance, likes Indian takeaways but also likes to throw his own dinner parties, preferably musical, reads, has a large number of his own friends, but is also keen to mix with your friends. He must not have been married before, no
children, no halitosis, and must want to get married next summer.’

‘That’s about the sum of it.’

‘This is going to be a long haul,’ said Martha, shaking her head.

‘D’you think so?’

‘I do.’

‘Oh, OK, I’ll bring the age limit down,’ conceded Eliza.

‘Oh, that should do it,’ smiled Martha as she reached for the bottle of Chardonnay. It was empty. ‘Shall we have another?’

16

He wasn’t Eliza’s usual type, that was for certain. She quickly reminded herself that not-my-usual-type was exactly what she was after. He was thin, and his shoulders had slumped and sunk to his stomach. Too many hours at a desk. Had he ever been inside a gym? He wasn’t dark (as Martha had promised) but then, nor was he fair: he was mid, nondescript. Nice smile, though, but could that be sufficient compensation for sweaty hands?

‘You must be Eliza?’ said Tarquin. He leapt to his feet to greet Eliza and as he did so he banged his chair against the next table and upset a glass of wine. It was white wine and it spilt on the floor, not on the diners, but still they made an embarrassing fuss. Tarquin generously bought them a new bottle to compensate for the lost glass. Eliza thought this was very kind. She sat down and wanted to like him.

‘You don’t look a bit like Martha.’ Tarquin’s ears were still glowing bright red from the blush that had soused him after the wine-spilling incident. Eliza wished she could stop staring at them, but she couldn’t. Tarquin turned round to see what was behind him that Eliza was finding so fascinating.

Eliza finally pulled her attention back to his eyes, which were quite nice, certainly friendly. ‘No, we don’t look alike, we’re not particularly similar at all.’

‘I’ve always thought Martha was such a smashing girl, absolutely lovely, quite perfect,’ gushed Tarquin. ‘That Michael’s a lucky bugger.’

Eliza was torn. Quite a big part of her was thrilled for Martha; it would be lovely to relay the compliment back to her that evening. Martha needed all the ego-boosting she could get at the moment. On the other hand, there was nothing more off-putting in the entire world than your date fancying your older sister.