A Most Desirable Marriage (3 page)

30 July 2013

‘I’m worried about you.’ Donna had her concerned frown on, one she wore a lot these days with Jo.

‘Yeah, so you keep saying. I’m just not sure what you expect me to do that would stop you worrying.’

Donna lay on the grass outside the hut, her head on an ancient patchwork cushion, steadying a glass of red wine with her right hand. Jo sat on a folded tartan rug, leaning against the wooden wall of the hut. It was late, after nine and still not quite dark, warm enough for them not to move inside.

Donna pulled herself up, crossed her legs in the navy crumpled-linen trousers, making Max – snuggled next to her – stir in his sleep and open one eye. ‘Not sure either. But you seem so calm. As if Lawrence has just gone on an extended trip to China or somewhere, not actually left you . . . perhaps for ever.’ Donna held up her hand as Jo was about to protest. ‘I’m saying it how it is – or at least how it might be – darling, because you don’t seem to get it. Sorry to sound cruel, but you do understand that Lawrence . . . well he might not come back.’

Jo didn’t answer, just rubbed her eyes, as if she was having trouble seeing clearly in the half light.

‘You’ve got to face it one day. Otherwise you’ll just stay in this limbo for God knows how long . . . waiting.’

‘And this facing it? How exactly does that work? Sounds like you won’t be satisfied until I’ve had a nervous breakdown and been carted off to the bin.’

‘Don’t get upset. Of course I don’t want you to have a breakdown. It’s just your life seems to be going along as usual. I can’t see that anything’s changed.’

Which was true. It was six weeks since he’d left, and the time had plodded past in a determined effort on Jo’s part to Keep Occupied. She’d got into a rhythm each day: reading, gardening, walking and the gym, even making bread – which she hadn’t done for years, though the loaf turned out leaden and sour – dropping in for coffee or wine with Donna. Her husband called every few days but she didn’t answer the phone, and she hadn’t told a single person about the separation. Lawrence had occasionally taught a Human Rights course at Columbia University’s summer school. He would be away in New York for nearly three weeks in August. Now felt like then to her, Donna was right.

‘You should get back on the horse,’ her friend was saying, ‘before it’s too late. It’ll help you move past Lawrence.’

Jo stared at her in amazement. ‘You mean . . . men?’

Donna giggled. ‘Well, women if you like . . . on the principle that if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.’

‘You are joking.’

‘Of course I am . . . sort of.’ Donna leaned forward earnestly, her hands cradling her wine glass. ‘OK, I’m going to be blunt—’

‘That’d be a first.’

‘Yeah, yeah. But seriously, darling. I reckon you’re still hanging in there on the shaggable index. Sure, you’re sixty, but you don’t look it: tall, slim, legs up to your armpits, those stunning grey eyes . . . you’ve even got muscles in your arms. Your hair could do with some attention, but I’d fancy you if I was that way inclined.’

Joanna brought her hand up to her hair, self-consciously aware that the thick, layered, light-brown – tinged with grey – mop her friend referred to was long overdue for a cut and colour.

‘But the horrible truth is that you’re on the cusp. Another few years and your choices’ll be limited to the drooping willies, paunches and bad teeth of the ageing British male. Not a pretty sight.’

‘Thanks. So encouraging.’ Jo held out her glass for a refill. ‘Anyway, aren’t you forgetting something? You didn’t go out at all, not for months after you and Walter split.’

‘That was different. I was in love with someone who wasn’t in love with me. That bastard Julian broke my heart. Walter’s departure had nothing to do with any of it.’

‘And my heart’s not broken?’ Jo heard the tremor in her voice.

Donna didn’t reply, just got up and came to sit next to Jo, wedging herself on to the rug and clasping Jo’s hand tightly. ‘I know it must be, darling. But I think I’m glad to hear you say it.’

*

Jo got off the two-coach train at Barnstaple and looked around for her daughter. The platform was normally deserted, but today there was a crowd of over-fifties backpackers milling around the small station. Cassie’s tall figure hurried towards her, long, golden hair flying behind her in the wind as it had when she was a child. Jo was always taken aback by her beauty. Cassie had her father’s aquiline nose, her mother’s large, grey eyes and thick, dark eyelashes, a clear complexion now enhanced by a light summer tan, the whole put together in a robust, charismatic beauty that drew the eye of every man she passed, despite the plain T-shirt, jeans and sandals she wore.

Cassie squeezed her mother tight. ‘So glad you came, Mum.’

‘Me too,’ Jo replied, although she had her usual reservations about the visit. It wasn’t Cassie – she loved being with her daughter, and missed her terribly since she’d moved to Devon. Even earnest, humourless Matt (such an odd choice for her extrovert daughter) was bearable for short periods. The challenge was their eco-house.

Matt had built it himself entirely from recycled materials. It had taken him years of painstaking work – he lived in a prehistoric canvas army tent on site throughout – and it was still unfinished when he’d met Cassie. She’d helped him out, driven him on, mainly out of self-preservation, and it was now habitable – to Cassie and Matt at least. Sitting on the edge of Muddiford Wood, north of Barnstaple, no other house in sight, a stream running alongside the extensive vegetable patch, it looked like a large woodsman’s cottage from a fairytale, except for the solar panels taking up most of the south side of the pitched roof. And although two eco-magazines had dubbed it ‘idyllic’, Jo preferred ‘primitive’.

It was freezing in winter (despite the state-of-the-art Swedish wood-burning stove), boiling in summer, full of spiders, recycling bins and coir matting that skinned your feet if you were stupid enough to go barefoot. And if that weren’t enough, it was also noisy with the endless clucking of the chickens and grunting of Moby, the pig, in the run outside. But she could just about put up with all that. It was the composting loo that proved the last straw. Not only did it stink in all seasons, attract flies in summer and wobble alarmingly when she sat on it, but she was constantly aware of sitting above the collected poo of weeks. That it was covered in a thin layer of sawdust and aerated by some mysterious method that Matt had unsuccessfully explained about fifty times, was no consolation.

Jo could tell that Cassie was nervous about seeing her for the first time since Lawrence’s news.

‘Do you and Dad talk?’ her daughter asked in a low whisper, as soon as they were seated at the back of the Ilfracombe bus.

‘Not for weeks. I asked him not to ring. Although he keeps leaving messages.’

‘He’s sent me loads. Texts
and
voicemail. But I haven’t called him since he told me.’

‘You should, darling.’

‘Mum! Dad has left you – and us – so he can shag a bloke. Why should any of us speak to him again,
ever
?’

Jo wished everyone would stop pointing this out. Did they think the horrible fact had somehow escaped her?

Cassie’s voice had risen, but the three other people on the bus didn’t even twitch, they seemed to take no interest whatsoever. Perhaps it was standard practice in north Devon.

‘Whatever he’s done he’s still your father. You don’t want to lose touch.’

Cassie was silent for a moment. Jo knew how hurt she must be. She idolized Lawrence.

‘That’s what Matt keeps telling me, but I don’t know how to talk to him . . . what to say. And the longer I leave it, the worse it gets.’ Jo heard the stubborn note in her daughter’s voice.

‘Believe me, I understand, darling. But it’s almost harder for you and Nicky than it is for me.’

Cassie shot her a bewildered glance. ‘Uh,
no
, Mum. I don’t think so.
Your
life has been turned upside down.’ She sighed. ‘I’m just embarrassed . . . for him as much as myself.’

‘My life hasn’t really changed.’

Now her daughter’s look was astonished. ‘How can you say that?’

She shrugged. ‘Well it hasn’t. The only difference is that your dad doesn’t come home any more.’

‘And that’s not relevant?’ Cassie grabbed Jo’s bag. ‘This is our stop.’

*

Joanna was up early the next morning. The day was cloudy and still. It wasn’t the chickens or the thin futon that had kept her awake this time. Still dressed in pyjamas, she put on her daughter’s wellington boots and wandered outside, taking long, deep breaths of the clean air, heavy with impending rain. She missed the country, but Lawrence had a horror of anywhere without people and a pavement and they’d rarely spent much time out of cities, except on a beach, which didn’t seem to panic him in the same way as green rolling hills.

Jo went over to lean on the fence that supported Moby’s pen. The pig was an Oxford Sandy and Black, a breed which even had its own pig society – set up, according to Matt, to get it recognized as a true rare breed. Moby was pretty, with his light sandy coat and black blotches, his lop ears almost covering his eyes. He snuffled over to Jo and stared up at her with his buried black eyes. ‘They’ll never eat you, will they?’ she asked softly. But the pig was clearly unconcerned by her question and wandered off, riffling the mud with his snout as he went.

She looked round for Matt. She’d heard him get up and go out hours ago. Matt was always happier outside. After a short while in the house, he would just wander over to the hooks on the wall by the door and collect his anorak, pull on his battered striped beanie without a word, as if he’d been programmed. Cassie would ask ‘Where are you going?’ but his answer was always vague. Jo thought he’d probably gone for a ride now – bikes were his only hobby outside his eco-obsession – and she was glad she didn’t have to face him yet.

There had been an argument the night before. Nothing serious, but they’d all had quite a lot to drink – Jo had brought a good supply of wine with her – and she knew she was doing it, pushing Matt’s buttons. She found herself almost enjoying it. But it was Cassie, of course, who’d been upset and the guilt had stopped Jo sleeping. There was something about her situation at the moment – a sort of pity badge – that seemed to give her licence to behave badly. And with her son-in-law it was all too easy.

It had started with him retrieving the camomile teabag Jo had dropped, after some thought, into the recycling bin labelled ‘Paper and Card’. It was one of five, the others bearing the respective tags: Plastics; Glass; Aluminium Foil/Tins; Electronic (including things like printer cartridges, batteries). Matt had then pointedly placed it in the stainless steel compost bucket behind the sink.

‘It’s confusing. Can’t you just have two bins? Biodegradable and non-biodegradable?’ Jo asked.

Matt’s look was careful, clearly controlled. ‘It’s not that simple. Have you seen the inside of a recycling plant?’

She confessed she hadn’t. ‘But honestly, does any of all this have an impact on Global Warming? Are you really saving the planet by putting the teabag in the compost and not in the bin?’

‘I think we’ve had this conversation before, Joanna. I’ve told you why I do it,’ Matt said, a trifle pompously. He was a small man, shorter by a couple of inches than Cassie, and wiry, lean, his dark hair floppy and long, his complexion permanently weathered. But his potential good looks – she reminded him of Neil Oliver, the Scottish historian – were marred, in Jo’s opinion, by the almost fanatical light in his grey eyes, which seemed to bore into her, monitor her actions, find fault. He had been a banker in his previous life, a successful one by all accounts, and the single-minded, relentless pursuit of profits had now transferred itself to his current alarming eco-fervour.

‘Look, I’m the first one to hate waste, I get why you want to recycle as much as possible; your dedication is commendable. But I don’t see why you have to be so obsessed about it. Never buying anything, not having a TV, no car . . . not even a fridge.’

Fridges consumed more energy than any other household appliance according to Matt. So they kept milk and butter in a lidded bucket in the stream when the weather was hot, the rest in a larder built on the back of the house with cool, slate shelves. ‘It just seems spartan . . . punishing. And it takes up so much time.’ Jo could tell her daughter had become tense, but she pushed on. ‘Or do you really enjoy it?’

Jo realized she’d been wanting to say all these things for the whole of the three years Cassie and Matt had been together. Until now she’d been careful, respectful of his lifestyle choices for Cassie’s sake. And there were aspects of Matt she liked, not least his clear love for her daughter. But her son-in-law seemed to have got worse of late: more fanatical, more obsessive, as if he were trying to reduce their lives to something almost nineteenth century. And in the light of Lawrence’s departure, she seemed to have lost the will to control herself.

Matt’s face had gone solid. ‘Of course we enjoy it, don’t we, Cass? It’s the perfect life. I mean, how lucky are we not to have to do a dreary, crowded commute and sit in front of a toxic computer screen for nine hours every day? Most people are jealous, Joanna. They say they wish they were brave enough to do the same.’

‘It certainly takes bravery,’ Jo commented. She turned to her daughter. ‘But don’t you sometimes wish you could buy a new pair of trainers, not wear shoes someone else’s smelly foot’s been sweating into? Or just open the fridge to take the milk out? Grind some fresh coffee? I mean how much energy does a grinder really use?’

Neither of them spoke, Cassie gave her husband a tight-lipped smile which seemed to say ‘Please humour her, she’s in pain.’

‘I am looking into the coffee thing,’ Matt conceded. ‘There might be a rationale for using a cafetière. It seems that because instant is brewed, then freeze-dried, then brewed again by us, it probably uses more energy than fresh.’

Jo threw her hands up in the air. ‘Some sense at last.’