Marriage and Other Games (10 page)
She took in a shaky breath.
‘Ok,’ she said. ‘I’ll do it.’
Four
‘P
lease, Daddy. Pleeease.’
lease, Daddy. Pleeease.’
Jade was always the spokeswoman. Amber stood behind her, eyes wide. They both looked similar, with their long brown plaits and their skinny legs stuck into lurid pink Crocs smothered in badges, but their personalities were poles apart. Jade was the negotiator, the manipulator, despite being the younger by eighteen months. Amber bobbed along in her sister’s wake, more cautious, but it was the look in her eyes that made Fitch capitulate. He was putty in their hands. He always gave in eventually, which Jade knew perfectly well and exploited mercilessly.
‘OK,’ he relented, and he smiled as the two girls grinned at each other triumphantly and rushed off to the DVD player. He prided himself on not having to resort to television when they were with him, but they were shattered and starting to whine because they sensed that Hayley’s non-appearance was making their father not so much annoyed as worried.
Once Fitch knew that she was all right, then he would be annoyed, because it would inevitably be lack of consideration that was delaying Hayley, not one of the hideous eventualities he was imagining as he took the lunch things out of the dishwasher and put them away. Fitch hadn’t always been house proud, but now he was on his own again he was determined not to become a slob. It would be so easy not to bother and live in fetid bachelordom, with washing-up, take-away cartons and empty bottles piling up. Every time she came round, he could see Hayley mocking the fact that the house was spotless, the eyes that had once laughed with him now laughing at him as they swept their gaze over the gleaming surfaces and the neatly folded pile of tea towels. OK, so when they’d been together there had been better things to do than housework. Now, each evening stretched interminably, the hours between six and half eleven, when he usually went to bed, seeming to take up as much time as his nine-hour working day. Half an hour’s cleaning and tidying each night urged the hands of the clock forward more quickly, and that, it seemed, was all it needed to make the house ready for the approval of the most pernickety household inspector.
She was supposed to be back by three. It was written in stone. It wasn’t that he minded looking after his daughters - he never resented a moment with them - but the agreement was Hayley would take them back to her parents’ farm, where the three of them were living, early on a Sunday afternoon so the girls had plenty of time to sort out their things for the week, wash and condition their long, brown curls, have their nails cut, check through their homework, sort out their ballet things, their gym kit, their reading bags. All the things Fitch had helped with until eight months ago. Without complaining. His speciality had been nits. He was so much more patient with the nit-comb. Hayley went at their hair like a bull at a gate, while Fitch was gentle. He didn’t mind how long it took. He told them funny stories while he did it.
Sometimes, he wondered how on earth he had got here. Fitch, the Jack the Lad, the rough diamond, with his devil-may-care attitude, had found himself a family man and was surprised to find it was a role he relished.
Until it all went pear-shaped . . .
Fitch had always been a square peg in a round hole. As a child, he had suffered the ignominy of an itinerant lifestyle without the glamour of actually being a gypsy. His father was a glorified farmhand, and they went wherever the work was - fruit and vegetable picking, mostly - peas, plums, strawberries, mangles, sugar-beet. In the winter they picked holly and made wreaths to sell in the market. They lived in whatever accommodation was on offer; more often than not a ramshackle mobile home or a tumbledown cottage adjoining whichever farm they were working on. Fitch knew his father had other ways of procuring money, and that he had light fingers, which was why they were so often moved on. When he was fourteen, it seemed as if they might have settled at last when they got a council house outside Pershore, and his dad took to driving an unlicensed taxi.
Fitch didn’t remember his mother ever lifting a finger to help the situation. Once a ravishing beauty, the drink had raddled her completely by the time she was forty. Her skin was a map of red broken veins, her teeth were rotting, her eyes bloodshot; but she still laboured under the delusion that she was magnetically attractive to men, because she still had her figure despite her alcohol consumption: slender legs, a trim waist and an impressive embonpoint, which she flashed to great effect in all the local pubs. She was a laughing stock, but that didn’t stop the more unscrupulous taking advantage of her need to be the centre of attention.
Ironically and miraculously, Fitch was bright, very bright, at school but he did disastrously, because teachers rarely bothered to engage with him, or encourage him, largely because he didn’t make it easy. He had an impregnable defence mechanism that made it difficult to communicate with him. He constantly skived and wagged off, undermining the teaching staff (whom he was often cleverer than), and narrowly escaped expulsion. All the time he was looking for a way out, but there weren’t many opportunities in this rural ghetto if you had no qualifications.
At sixteen, when he was legally entitled to escape, he read and reread the local college prospectus looking for inspiration, but would have needed a gun at his head to do any of the courses on offer. Something inside him told him he needed to get away: from Pershore, from his parents, from the drinking and the disappointment. He was convinced there was more to life; that one didn’t have to be downtrodden and eke out a mean existence while playing the system. He had no respect for his parents. He had never received any encouragement or guidance from either of them. They’d given him no ambition, no sense that he could in any way better himself. They were happy to accept their lot, were resigned to packing up their things every three, six, nine months and moving on. They never seemed to learn by their mistakes, just repeated the pattern.
Fitch was determined to make it on his own. And as luck would have it, he fell into a trade that suited him down to the ground. He got a job helping out a local stonemason, initially just as an extra pair of hands, but found he had stumbled upon a world he felt he belonged in. He fell in love with stone - smooth, white marble; harsh, black granite; soft, crumbling limestone - and threw himself into learning everything he could about the craft. It was hard, unforgiving work, arduous and at the mercy of the elements, as he shivered in the icy workshop or fixed headstones into the frost-hard ground in the local cemeteries. But eventually his boss saw his potential, and he was weaned off the donkey work and taught the skill. Soon, with a simple chisel he could carve the most exquisite and intricate patterns into the stone. He rented a small flat from his boss in the stonemason’s yard. He didn’t miss his parents, and he was pretty sure they didn’t miss him, except possibly for his erstwhile financial contributions. For the first time in his life he was if not ecstatically happy, then at least content.
After three years’ hard graft, he had enough money saved to put a deposit down on a tiny one-bedroom cottage in the picturesque village of Chipping Campden. He loved having his own roof over his head, four solid walls around him that no one could take away. He worked hard and he partied hard. He bought himself a hatchback Subaru, a wolf in sheep’s clothing that went like shit off a shovel. He instinctively went for good-time girls and made it clear that all he wanted was no-strings sex. He appreciated beautiful women, but there wasn’t room in his life for anything serious. His rugged, dark features, his impressive physique and his bad-boy aura made him an attractive proposition and he had no shortage of admirers. But no one cracked the façade, or found their way to the real Fitch. How could they, when he wasn’t sure who he was himself?
Eventually, he realised that he had gone as far as he could for the firm he was with, and that there was nothing his boss could do that he couldn’t. It was time for him to strike out on his own. He sold his house and gave his boss two weeks’ notice. He’d searched the West Country for the right premises, and eventually bought an old bakery with an adjoining workshop in the Exmoor village of Withybrook. Then he set up in business, putting an advert in the church magazine and leaving flyers in builders’ merchants.
The bread and butter of his work was headstones and memorials, but he could also turn his hand to restoration work, fireplaces and kitchen tops. He repaired façades, cornices, canopies, mullion windows, chimneys, staircases, fire surrounds, balustrading and pillars. He could produce garden ornaments, plaques, sculptures and sundials. There were often pretty women to be found in his yard, after bird baths and house signs and pastry boards. They loved to watch him work, painstakingly carving an elaborate Celtic knot with the edge of his chisel, slicing away the stone like butter. He had been pleasantly surprised to find himself inundated with work. There were, it seemed, a lot of restoration projects in the area.
His workshop was freezing, but Fitch didn’t mind the cold. Besides, he worked so hard he didn’t notice it. He was often seen manhandling lumps of stone off the back of his truck, with a carelessness that would make any health and safety inspector shudder. He was always covered in a layer of fine stone dust.
He quickly earned the respect of the locals, because he worked with his hands. He wasn’t a typical incomer. He hadn’t come down with a dream of getting away from it all, to set up some airy-fairy internet business, pushing up the local house prices. He spent all of his money locally; didn’t dash off to London at the drop of a hat for social engagements or business meetings. He soon had a network of local builders and craftsmen who put work his way, and vice versa.
All in all, Fitch felt comfortable in Withybrook. It was down-to-earth, unpretentious, unspoiled, with stunning scenery and a pub that sold decent beer. He knew he would always be an outsider, but Fitch was used to not quite fitting in, not belonging. It didn’t bother him in the least. He found it liberating, not having to put on a false front and pretend to be pleased to see people. He ticked over quite nicely all by himself for the first six months, grafting, doing up his house, and training Dido, the Border terrier puppy he’d been seduced into buying from a local farmer in the pub. The little dog dozed with him by the wood-burning stove he kept in his workshop, jumped in his pick-up whenever he went out on a job, then slept on his feet at night, and Fitch had to admit that it was nice to have the company, to have something else to worry about so he didn’t become too introspective. Not that he was desperate for company. He felt confident that the right girl would appear eventually.
Which she did.
And now he could hear her key in the lock. He took a gulp of wine, tensed for the confrontation that was so sadly inevitable. Maybe this time it would be different . . .
But no. He could feel his hackles rise as she strode into the kitchen in her four-inch ankle boots, her white jeans impossibly tight, the leather and diamanté belt digging into her flesh. She smelled toxic, of booze and fags and hairspray and too much perfume.
‘Traffic was a nightmare,’ she offered by way of a perfunctory explanation, shoving her handbag on the island. ‘Got stuck outside Bristol.’
She shouldn’t have elaborated. It proved she was lying. Fitch had checked the traffic on the internet and there had been no problems at all on the M5.
‘God, I’m knackered.’ She perched on a stool and propped her head in her hands. ‘Are the girls ready to go?’
Fitch peered at her. She looked appalling. He wouldn’t be surprised if she was still drunk.
‘You shouldn’t drive back in that state,’ he told her. ‘Are you still over the limit?’
‘You wouldn’t want them for another night, would you?’ she snarled back. ‘You wouldn’t be able to get them to school. You have to be at work by half seven. Remember?’
She didn’t forgive or forget easily. Fitch always liked to start work early, to get a couple of hours in before the phone started ringing. Somehow she had misconstrued that as him not wanting to be part of the family, seemingly forgetting that he was the breadwinner.
He sighed. ‘I’d have them with pleasure if it stopped you having an accident.’
She looked at him, over-plucked eyebrows archly raised.
‘I thought you’d be glad if I ended up under an articulated lorry.’
‘God, no!’ Fitch was horrified she should think that.
‘You hate me, don’t you?’
He shook his head sadly. ‘No, I don’t hate you. If anything, I feel sorry for you.’
She laughed at that. ‘You don’t need to feel sorry for me,’ she crowed. ‘I’ve been treated like a princess all weekend. Anyway,’ she went on, ‘Kirk gave me something to keep me awake.’
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