Copycat (2 page)

Did I resent my role at that time? Since she accused me of this I have asked myself the question, but the only answer I can come up with is, if I did resent it I wasn’t aware.

I must be honest, I suppose: I did resent Martha going back to work even though she gave me fair warning. So I wasn’t enough for Martha? Why not? We had good times, didn’t we? Why did she need more in her life? I understood that staying at home was threatening her sanity, especially given the high-handed way she allowed herself to be treated by Sam. She needed more independence and I could sympathize with that. I babysat for her during interviews although most of the jobs were inappropriate – agony aunt for
Marie
magazine – and I meanly rejoiced when she got turned down.

‘But, Martha, you haven’t got time for a job,’ I used to say to make her feel better after another rejection.

‘I need other people to reflect who I am. Without their approval I feel that I’m drowning. You’re lucky, Jennie, you’re far more self-sufficient than me. You don’t need anyone.’

But she knew how much I needed her and that was part of the trouble.

We used to be honest together. There was no rivalry between us.

But Martha was right in that I was contented with just a few close relationships. Awkward with strangers, hopeless at parties; those meaningless, superficial friendships you pick up and put down at whim leave me cold. It takes me years to make a friend, and then Graham calls me loyal to a fault.

This remark annoys me, and the grudging way he says it. ‘How can anyone be loyal to a fault? You’re either loyal or disloyal, surely?’ I’d ask.

‘But you don’t have to make such a song and dance about it.’ And I’d be hurt, shocked by that, because when did I make a song and dance? And I wasn’t used to Graham being critical. We were united in our disapproval of the way Sam used scorn and criticism in his treatment of Martha. In my eyes she was a martyr the way she put up with Sam, but then she adored him, worshipped him and their relationship was seriously physical.

Sometimes I looked at Sam’s hands – active, roving hands, all muscle and bone – and compared them to Graham’s…

And now I am betrayed.

Undone.
That formal classical stuff should never have gone out of fashion. Woe is me for I am undone. Cursed be the day I was born. Undone, unravelled, ravished, cut into pieces to make little labels, like Christmas cards turned into gift tags.

There are some things so precious they shouldn’t be shared, secrets which should never be written down. To betray the confidence of a friend in exchange for fleeting popularity – that heart-squeezing sense of self-disgust the moment you close your mouth. You instantly know what you’ve done. But when you betray yourself, you don’t realize it until later.

I used to think the ultimate betrayal must be that of a man who has left his wife for another woman. A bodily betrayal, those bedroom/bathroom secrets, secretions, tingles and squirms.

Sex.

But I was wrong.

Martha and I had a meeting of minds and that was exciting and sweet, not so much striking a chord as composing a whole concerto, and the only person who can know the pain I’m feeling now is Martha. Martha with the flashing laughter.

Who won’t speak to me.

Who puts the phone down when I call.

Who refuses to answer my notes.

And who is breaking my heart.

There’s a drifting of spirit from our house since Martha stopped whisking in carrying hysteria like a cloak about her shoulders, melodramatic, full of ideas, life swishing in velvet around her.

But it is worse than that.

The way it began was worse than that, watching Poppy and Josh being hurt, really, truly, deep down hurt for the first time in their lives. Ten and seven is too young to feel those pangs of anguish and I thought Martha was bigger than that. We might not be friends any more but we should have tried to prevent the feud from touching our vulnerable children.

‘You’re splendid at catastrophes, Jennie, so go away quietly and indulge.’

Those were the last unkind words she said. A crumbling Ayesha… that was me. I felt that I had suddenly aged and was quite unable to cope.

I tried to explain exactly what happened but Martha refused to listen.

I was awed by her fearful anger, blinded, groping towards the truth.

I would have preferred an older house and Martha said, nastily, that was so I could empathize with its pain. But the Mulberry Estate wasn’t bad as they go. The architect had made an effort; every house was that little bit different and the gardens were a decent size. They were called executive lodges and Graham and I, being the first ones in, were presented with a bouquet and a beribboned bottle of bubbly. The first three lodges were only just finished when we moved into ours through the muddy wastelands of Mulberry Close, and we lived with strips of thick brown paper over a mustard wall-to-wall carpet provided by the company.

Inducements indeed – built-in Scandinavian hob, fridge freezer, Bosch dishwasher and washing machine. We had put our name down for the first house on the day Graham and I got engaged, but because it wasn’t ready in time we had to move in with Graham’s mum.

A lawn brittle from over-mowing. A bungalow neat and gloomily solid. A pirate head from Majorca, glass-fronted cabinets, G-plan Sixties furniture, and pot plants, a timid green in the passionless air, sitting sadly in spindly wicker stands.

‘What do you two get up to all evening, hiding away in your bedroom like this? You can’t possibly be comfortable. For goodness sake, come in and join Howard and me in the lounge. We won’t eat you,’ said Graham’s mum, Ruth, aggrieved.

But Graham and I, cuddled up on the bed watching telly, were just happy to be together, at one, married, a front to the world.

Graham said, ‘Leave us alone, Mum. We’ll come through if we want to. We’re fine.’

‘Well, excuse me for interfering.’

Because I worked I didn’t have time to help with stuff like laundry, shopping or housework but I knew Ruth expected more of me, and sitting with her and Howard in the evening seemed to be part of the deal. We ate with Graham’s parents even though we had made it clear we would rather eat alone. Gravy with everything. Stewed fruit in various guises in shell-shaped dishes of watery green. On the day after we moved in I came home to find the table set for four.

‘Ruth, you should have left that,’ I said. ‘I’d have done it.’ But my voice trailed away as I undid the buttons on my mac while she tied on her apron.

‘You can do the potatoes, dear, if you really want to help. Let Graham and his dad watch the news in peace.’

Oddly, as if she resented me, Ruth seemed deliberately to do her chores in an order which made it impossible for me to help. I simply was not there to do my duty, so her irritation was self-induced.

The dishes could never be left to drain. ‘We don’t want smeary china,’ she told me. She eyed me through a stiffening distaste. ‘In this household, Jennie, we have always dried up.’ And then she watched me carefully. ‘One plate at a time, dear, please. I’ve kept these plates for twenty-five years and I don’t want chips in them now.’

Clean sheets would be folded and pointedly left on the end of the bed every week, as if she guessed ours would be stained. Every Friday, top sheet to bottom and a fresh one on top. I said, ‘Please don’t bother to iron our sheets, Ruth. They really don’t need ironing.’

And Ruth smiled staunchly.

I don’t think Ruth disliked me, but maybe she was trying to tell me something I had failed to grasp about marriage. Graham and I were married now and so the romance was over. As a wife, self-sacrifice came next on the list and this was a mild initiation.

I would look at Graham reproachfully but all he could do was shrug his shoulders.

When we drank wine it was secretly and in the morning Graham smuggled the bottles out of the house in his briefcase, rolled up in serious newspapers.

Another couple would have made a fuss but not me and Graham, oh no. We hated to argue, we dreaded scenes and we felt so grateful to have found each other. Neither of us had imagined we were special enough to be chosen, neither of us had had a best friend; we were so similar in that kind of way. Middle of the road, fifteenth in a class of thirty, sixth in a team of twelve, friends with everyone but special to no-one.

Fair to middling. Could do better.

One of the best things about being married was sharing somebody else’s name. There was strength to be had in this pooling together; a name was a stout wooden fence and meant we could peer at the world through the knots. And Gordon, a good strong name, was near the front of the alphabet whereas my maiden name, Young, had kept me last in life, near the back.

Every day during that first summer we went to look at our sprouting house, pacing round it and imagining what our new furniture would look like inside. I would walk up and down the stairs, running my hand along the smooth wooden banister. Graham planned out the garden. Unsure of the house to begin with, I came to start loving it then. It signified such a great escape and I whispered to it, ‘Oh hurry, house, hurry up, please hurry.’

Heaven. We could breathe again. Truly together for the first time ever and he carried me over the threshold. We were proprietorial, understandably I suppose, and kept an eye on the couples who came to see over the show lodge, the last house to be sold in the frying-pan-shaped close.

We weren’t in longer than a month before the red
SOLD
sign went up on numbers two, three and four, even though the men were still working inside. We saw this as a good sign: we’d be able to sell quite quickly when we came to move on, we believed. I was already pregnant. Poppy was due the following spring and I had already resigned from the bank, having no real interest in the job.

‘I know him,’ said Graham, shamelessly spying on the couple coming up next door’s path with the keys to number two in their hands.

‘Oh?’ I stared as rudely as he, fascinated by the blowzy woman with the wild mane of hair, more pregnant than anyone I’d ever seen and wrapped in an emerald curtain. She was big. No shame. She flapped along penguin style in large ethnic sandals, her hands kneading her back as if she was about to give birth. Her coarse guffaws of laughter were unreasonably disturbing; after all, she was the stranger, I already lived here – me, Graham and a few sick saplings.

‘Sam Frazer, he runs his own advertising company and goes to the Painted Lady for lunch. I’ve seen him in there with his mates.’

‘What’s he like?’ I felt uneasy but didn’t know why.

‘Seems like a decent kind of guy.’

‘Perhaps we should make them a cup of tea… and go round… be friendly, you know.’

Sensing my tension, Graham held my hand. We stood together warily in our house of brand-new wood, breathing sawdust and turpentine, paint and putty. ‘Jennie, no more “shoulds” for us, this is our house, we don’t do anything we don’t want to and we can be as unsociable here as we damn well like.’

Martha would have been the first to echo this sentiment. She might even have raised a smeary glass in a toast, had she heard it.

Dear God, how I wish that I’d never met her.

D
EAR GOD, HOW I
wish that I’d never met her.

So there we were, in our superior executive lodge. I must say I never expected to end up on a half-finished estate in bloody Essex.

But then I had never expected to get married or have my own baby. Nor did I think I would ever reach twenty, or grow breasts, menstruate, throw away my black leather skirt, die, or stop watching
Neighbours.

Unlike the co-ordinated house next door ours was a jumbled mixture: tumbledown sofa strewn with throws, assorted chairs with various cushions, lamps and pieces of twisted oak, because we’d been meaning to buy an old cottage over the border in Hertfordshire.

Piglets Patch was my dream house. Honeysuckle, thatch and roses.

It fell through when I was eight months pregnant. We had sold our flats and we needed a home, we had buggered about long enough. So we bought the house and its dandelion lawn in a state of panic. We hadn’t intended to stay for long, but life is full of little surprises.

I didn’t expect to settle down here round a fading mulberry bush but, dear God Almighty, far more extraordinary than that was being knifed in the back by the woman I came to call my friend.

It was a wet and blustery March when Jennie and I entered the dark world of breeding.

All night long the women in our ward were kept awake by pitiful cries from the adjoining delivery suite.

Sam rushed me to St Margaret’s when the pains came every five minutes and within an hour Scarlett was born.

Nature’s disgusting.

Nature hurts.

That animal smell, blood and Johnson’s and the visitors’ freesias.

Sam stayed and watched and afterwards we stuffed down chicken sandwiches, holding Scarlett in our arms and getting used to the words ‘our daughter’. Oh, the glory! Kissing her black, bloody hair. I had to use half a box of tissues to wipe Sam’s proud tears away.

Perversely I had the natural birth while Jennie endured the forceps.

I recognized her in the morning when they wheeled her into the ward with the teas, drooping like a dunked digestive. I had caught sight of her only once, yesterday, when we moved in. I had made the sandwiches to tide us over until the cooker could be wired up. We never imagined we’d have no time to eat them.

‘I know you, don’t I? You live next door to me.’

Jennie’s matching slippers sat waiting on the floor by her bed. White with rosebuds, signifying innocence, same as the nightdress she changed into. All that whiteness made her waif-like. She lifted her head from the pillow and eyed me, unaware of where she was or what she was supposed to be doing.

Nosing into the pink blanket in the perspex cot beside her I said, ‘Great, a girl. They’ll be neighbours, they’ll be best mates.’

Jennie’s moan of distress was tragic.

‘Leave Mrs Gordon alone,’ said the nurse. ‘She’s had an exhausting time.’