This Charming Man (30 page)

By the time Grace was covering mutilated bodies for the
Times,
Marnie had done a degree in economics, graduated with a lacklustre 2:2 and fulfilled her own prophecies by being unable to get a job: she was granted several interviews on the basis of her resumé but couldn’t convince anyone to employ her.

It was then that she discovered she hadn’t been lying when she’d said she wanted to be a wife.

Without a husband she felt small and raw. A boyfriend wouldn’t do, not even a long-term one. She wanted a ring on her finger and a different surname, because, on her own, she wasn’t enough.

Her shame was almost as corrosive as her longing – she was Olwen Gildee’s daughter; she’d been hardwired with a certain amount of independent-woman thinking and it sat uneasily with her wish to surrender.

But getting married wasn’t as easy as she’d anticipated.

There were two kinds of men: those who fell so far short of Paddy’s glittering charisma that she couldn’t bear to let them touch her, and the Good Ones. And with them, it was like the job situation all over again. They were initially enthusiastic, but once they reached a certain point in the interview process, something changed: they saw her for who she really was and they started to back away.

It was her fault. She’d get drunk and tell them the contents of her head: her horror of the world and of the human condition. She woke up one morning, hung-over and shaky, and remembered the night before, saying to Duncan, a happy-go-lucky lawyer, ‘Don’t you ever wonder why we were made with a finite capacity for pleasure but an infinite capacity for pain? Our ceiling for pleasure is low but the floor for pain is bottomless.’

He’d tried putting forward different arguments – after all he was a lawyer – but her misery proved too much for him. Eventually he’d said, close to panic, ‘You need help. I hope you sort yourself out.’ He’d paid for the dinner, he’d seen her home, but she knew he’d never get in touch again.

By her mid-twenties, she was living in London and a pattern had established itself: she scared away all the Good Ones. And she scared herself, by being unable to stop.

The thing about London was that there was a constant supply of new men. She didn’t have trouble with the initial attraction – she had a type of melancholic beauty that men responded to; she didn’t see it herself but knew it existed – but she always managed to self-destruct.

In sympathy and exasperation, Grace called her the suicide bomber.

By the age of twenty-seven, Marnie had become accustomed to waking too early in the morning, in the horrors. Slipping further and further into isolation, she had become the sum of her rejections. She was starting to give up.

Then she met Nick. Handsome (if a bit short) in a rough-diamond sort of way, he had a swaggery bantam-cock confidence which made her smile. His job required nerves of steel; he loved children; he had an optimism that was contagious. He was definitely a Good One. From the moment he saw her, he wanted her. She recognized the look, she’d seen it enough times on enough faces, but it didn’t make her hopeful. She knew what always happened next. Despite promising herself that she wouldn’t, she got drunk and got weird. But the strange thing was that Nick wasn’t scared off.

When she told him the terrible things in her head he laughed but with tenderness. ‘Tell me why you would think like that, Sweets.’

He didn’t entirely get her, but he was willing. His intentions were clear: her happiness was his project. He had never failed at anything and he didn’t intend to start now.

For her part, she found him extraordinary. He’d had little education but could survey any situation – human, political – then fillet it with efficient speed and emerge with the salient facts. An energy surrounded him, a type of forward-moving buoyancy and he was always slightly ahead of the zeitgeist in his choice of wine, holiday destinations, haircuts…

More reassuring than his coolness was his sentimentality: Nick cried at anything to do with children and animals, and although she teased him for being an over-emotional cockney, she was relieved. Coldness would have been a deal-breaker.

‘Why do you love me?’ she asked him. ‘It’s not because I’m middle class, is it? Please don’t tell me you think you’re trading up?’

‘Fuck off!’ he declared. ‘Who cares about any of that? I love you because you’re a shortarse.’ Nick was five foot eight. ‘We’re the perfect height for each other.’

‘He calls us Short and Shorter,’ she told Grace, in one of her monitoring phone calls.

‘Nicknames,’ Grace said. ‘Things are going well.’

‘Yes,’ Marnie said, but doubtfully.

‘Never mind why he loves you,’ Grace advised. ‘Why do you love him?’

‘I don’t know if I do. I fancy him, like I really… the sex, you know, it’s gorgeous, but I don’t know if I love him.’

That changed late one night when they were walking back from a restaurant to where Nick had parked his car. There was the sound of tinkling glass and the whoop of a car alarm, then Nick exclaimed, ‘That’s my motor.’ (He’d once claimed that he could always recognize his own car alarm, it was like a mother hearing her baby cry.) He did a speedy once-over of the street, to establish it was safe. ‘Got your phone, Marnie? Wait here.’

Then he began to run towards the three blokes who were breaking into his car. They saw him coming and scarpered but, to Marnie’s amazement, Nick ran after them. The three men split from each other and went in different directions but Nick kept running behind one of them – the biggest. Nick had a tight, wiry body and he was fast. They both disappeared into an alleyway which led to a local housing estate and some minutes later Nick returned, panting and disappointed.

‘Lost him.’

‘Nick, that could have been dangerous… you could have been…’

‘I know,’ he gasped. ‘Sorry, Sweets. Shouldn’t have left you here alone.’

It was the turning point for her: his courage in the pursuit of what was right was what made her fall in love with him.

She believed in him.

She wanted to be his.

It was time, she decided, to take him to Dublin to run him by her family – and it was a success.

Even though they had opposing economic ideologies, he charmed Ma and Dad. Grumpy Bid (who couldn’t give a damn about socialism) and Big Jim Larkin (the dog before Bingo) adored him. ‘How could you not like him?’ Grace said. Even Damien let himself be coaxed into admitting Nick was ‘a decent bloke.’

Nick talked incessantly, bought drinks for everyone and declared himself delighted with Ireland.

‘It’s over,’ Grace said to Marnie. ‘Your time in the wilderness.’

And so it appeared. A man had seen beyond her misleadingly pretty little exterior to the murkiness within and hadn’t run for the hills – but she kept having to check.

‘Why do you love me?’ she asked Nick again and again.

‘You’re the salt of the earth.’

‘I am?’

‘Yeah! Kindest heart of any person I know. See the way you’re always crying about people you’ve never even met.’

‘That’s not kindness, that’s… neurosis.’

‘Kindness,’ he insisted. ‘Brainy too. Plus, you’ve a great pair of pins, you cook a proper hot curry and when you’re not boo-hooing about the state of the world, you can be a bit of a laugh. That’s why I love you.’

‘I won’t ask again,’ she apologized.

‘Ask as many times as you like, Sweets, answer’ll be the same. Happy now?’

‘Yes.’ No. Almost.

Marnie tried to accept that she’d finally got what she wanted. But she couldn’t shake the fear that there was a catch.

There was always a catch.

Friday. Wen-Yi was on the prowl. ‘Marnie,’ he hissed, as soon as he saw her. ‘Mr Lee? He should have got that form yesterday. All he had to do was sign it and send it back.’

‘The post hasn’t come yet. As soon as it does, I’ll alert you.’

‘Mr Lee is a powerful man,’ Wen-Yi said. ‘He would be unhappy to lose this sale.’

She hated when he said things like that. It made her feel ill with fear.

‘Post has just arrived,’ Guy said. ‘Let’s find out.’

Striving to fake an expression of keen expectation that every envelope might contain Mr Lee’s returned form, she opened the post. About halfway through the task, she began to believe that it might actually appear.

So profound was her conviction that, when everything was opened, she was genuinely perplexed.

‘That’s weird,’ she said. ‘Not in today’s post.’

‘What? Why not?’ Wen-Yi slammed his stapler against his desk. ‘Where
is
it?’

She couldn’t stop herself glancing at her handbag. She half expected it to start pulsing and glowing.

‘It must be lost in the post,’ she said.

She’d tried that before but Guy had told her that that happens only once every ten million letters. It was as convincing an excuse as saying that the dog had eaten your homework.

Agitated and frustrated, Wen-Yi ordered, ‘Ring him. Find out what’s happening.’

‘Okay.’

But what would be the point? Instead she rang her own phone number and left an efficient-sounding message asking Mr Lee to call her asap.

Then she scribbled his address on a Post-it and announced to the office, ‘Just popping out.’ She tried to sound cheerful. ‘I need to go to the chemist.’

Guy watched her go, saying nothing, but taking it all in.

She ran to Rymans and this time managed to purchase an envelope and a stamp. Mr Lee would get the form on Monday, would sign it immediately and it would be back to Wen-Yi by Tuesday. That should be enough time.

Oh what a tangled web.

‘Lunch?’ Rico asked. ‘Help me celebrate?’

She froze, overtaken by terror and longing.

‘It’s a nice day,’ he said. ‘We could go to the park?’

Her body relaxed and she began to breathe again. Yes, she could go with him to the park.

‘I’d have to skip my Pilates,’ she said.

She’d paid in advance for ten classes but hadn’t gone for the past three weeks. She’d hoped, as she did with everything she tried, that Pilates would fix her, but the only effect it had was that – oddly – it made her want to smoke. Unlike the rest of her family, she’d only ever been a tourist smoker, but something about Pilates and its almost-nothingness made her want to rip the cellophane off a packet of twenty
and smoke one cigarette after another until the terrifying boredom left her.

‘If you’d prefer to go…’ He looked disappointed.

‘No. Pilates, the watching-paint-dry approach to fitness. I’m glad to have an excuse. What are we celebrating this time?’

‘Sale of an office block.’

‘Only a small one,’ Craig yelled.

But still. Rico, charm monster, the youngest and best-looking of Guy’s brokers, was having an astonishing year, racking up commission after commission.

It was a bright sunny day, warm for the tenth of October. They sat on a bench, their feet kicking at the drifts of crunchy leaves, in russets and purples, which carpeted the ground.

‘Autumn’s my favourite season.’ Rico gave her her sandwich.

‘Mmmm.’ She hated autumn.

Autumn rotted. It was death and putrefaction. Beneath those leaves, God-knows-what was lurking.

But she also hated summer. It was too screamy-happy and hysterical.

‘What’s your favourite season?’ he asked.

‘Spring,’ she lied. She hated spring too. It got on her nerves. All that freshness and hope that ultimately amounted to nothing. If spring was a person, it would be Pollyanna.

Winter was the only season that made any sense to her. But she kept that to herself. If you go public that your favourite season is winter, you’re obliged to wax lyrical about snowmen and egg-nog so that no one discovers how weird you are.

‘Champagne, madam?’ Rico produced a bottle and two flutes, as if from thin air.

She was horror-struck. She hadn’t been prepared for this. It took moments to find her voice. ‘No, Rico, no. Put it away. I’ve scads of work. I can’t.’

‘I thought you liked champagne.’ Already he was undoing the foil.

‘I do, of course, but don’t, Rico, please. Stop. Don’t open it.’

‘You don’t want to help me celebrate?’ His voice was over-innocent.

‘Of course, but not at lunchtime.’

‘After work?’

‘Not today.’

‘Not today. Okay. I’ll keep it for some other time.’ Without obvious rancour he returned the bottle and glasses to their carrier bag.

‘Are you angry with me?’ she asked.

‘I could never be angry with you.’

Too quick, too slick a reply, but she hadn’t the equilibrium to start delving. Now she wished she’d let him open it.

‘Any plans for the weekend?’ Rico turned sideways to give her his full attention.

‘The usual. Ferrying the girls to their different extramural activities. We’ll probably go to a movie on Sunday.’

‘What are you going to see?’

‘Some Pixar thing. You know, I literally can’t remember the last time I went to a film that wasn’t PG. How about you?’

‘Few drinks after work tonight. Dinner tomorrow night.’

‘With a girl?’

He nodded and stared across the park, not meeting her eyes.

An arrow of something painful pricked her – jealousy? – not badly enough to lodge in her flesh but it felt good. A normal response gave her hope.

‘Jealous?’ he asked.

‘A little bit.’

‘Don’t be. She’s not as good as you. No one is.’

Don’t make me feel even more guilty.

‘But until you’re available…’

He picked up her hand and played with her fingers. She let him for a moment, then wrenched them away.

In the multiplex, crowds of kids milling everywhere, the smell of rancid butter in the air, Marnie thought, I am the only person alive. Everyone else here is dead but they don’t know it. I am alive and alone and trapped. For a moment she believed it and was overtaken by horror that was almost delicious.

Daisy and her friend Genevieve hurtled into her, using her legs as a crash barrier.

‘We got sweets!’

Verity and Nick brought up the rear. Nick had bought them way too
much at the pick’n’mix but she couldn’t be bothered to berate him. Let their teeth rot. One day they were all going to be dead and it wouldn’t matter then if every tooth in their head was a black stump.