The Foster Husband (17 page)

I select all and delete the lot. I have come to Lyme for a fresh start. It will do me no good at all to wallow in the past.

When Ben gets back from work, he stands with the front door open, his jaw hanging and the key still held in his extended hand. The hall floor is hidden underneath a patchwork
of Granny Gilbert’s old floral bed-sheets, in one corner of which Millie has made herself a nest to sleep in. The fringed lampshade has disappeared and a bare bulb swings from the ceiling
like in a prison cell. From my vantage point at the top of a stepladder, Ben’s face is a comical sight. It’s good to know that he is capable of expressing an emotion other than just
hearty affability.

‘Hi, Ben,’ I wave from near the ceiling, and he looks up at me with wide eyes.

‘Wow, Kate, what have you done?’ he asks.

‘What does it look like?’ I say, chirpily, brandishing the wallpaper stripper I’ve hired from the DIY shop in Axminster. ‘Time to make some changes here, don’t you
think?’

Ben’s forehead wrinkles. ‘Do you know how to use that thing?’ he asks, nodding at the machine in my hand.

‘Oh yes,’ I lie, pressing it against the wall so that clouds of steam obscure me from view. I can hear a violent bubbling inside the machine, but it’s okay. I checked with the
man at the shop and he told me it won’t burn me; but it might sound quite bad if I use it wrongly. Which is perfect.

Ben drops his bag to the floor and takes off his coat, shutting the door behind him. ‘Ah, Kate, I’m not sure you’re meant to just hold it in one place like that,’ he
says.

‘No?’ I ask, innocently, turning around so that the steam billows towards him.

‘No,’ he says, holding his hands up in front of his face. ‘Seriously, have you done this before?’

‘Well, not exactly,’ I admit, pushing my damp hair off my forehead with the back of my hand. I’m sure I look convincingly hardworking. ‘But I’m learning. See,
I’ve done loads already.’

I indicate a small pile of peeled wallpaper on the floor. In truth, I have been toiling away for approximately fifteen minutes, having timed my efforts precisely to coincide with Ben’s
arrival home.

‘Look, ah, Kate, let me—’ he begins, and I know I’ve got him already.

‘Mmm?’ I say distractedly, turning away as if I’m eager to get back to work. I half drop the steamer as I wobble on the ladder. I have choreographed this beautifully. Come on,
Ben, I think. I’m not sure how much longer I can keep this up.

Out of the corner of my eye I can see Ben rolling up his shirt-sleeves.

‘What you need to do,’ says Ben, and I keep my face turned to the wall so he doesn’t see me smile. ‘What you need to do, Kate, is move the steamer slowly up the wall and
then scrape the paper off immediately afterwards, while it’s still damp.’

‘Like this?’ I ask, scraping at a dry piece of paper until a tiny fragment peels away. The steamer belches in my other hand, miles from the wall.

‘Steamer first,’ explains Ben, standing close up against the stepladder to look at my work. ‘Use the steamer.’

I can tell he is itching to take it out of my hands and show me how it should be done.

‘Mmm?’ I say, waving the steamer around again while I continue to scrape elsewhere. I can hear Ben sigh in exasperation at my incompetence. Any moment now . . .

‘Look, Kate, why don’t you let me show you how to use it properly?’ he says at last.

‘Oh
would
you?’ I ask, turning to him gratefully. ‘I think I’m just quite hopeless at this.’

Ben chuckles as he takes the steamer out of my hand. ‘Come on, off the ladder,’ he says, looking far more comfortable now that he’s in charge. ‘Let me show you how
it’s done.’

He presses the steamer against the wall and follows it with the scraper, peeling away a thick, satisfying strip of Granny Gilbert’s textured apricot wallpaper.

‘See?’ he says, with a triumphant note in his voice. ‘It’s not so hard – steamer first, then, like this, the scraper. Steamer, scraper. Just like that.’

‘Wow, Ben. I didn’t know you were so good at this sort of thing,’ I say, admiringly.

I didn’t – this is a total stroke of luck. Having pledged myself as the dedicated bungalow decorator, it occurred to me while choosing paint colours that the circumstances presented
another excellent opportunity for training my foster husband. And it’s already working better than I could have imagined.

‘Well, I’ve done a bit of decorating for my mum,’ says Ben, pulling away another sheet of wallpaper and depositing it on the floor next to the stepladder. ‘Actually
pretty good at it. Mum says I do a better job than the Polish decorator she paid for last year.’

‘Gosh, isn’t Prue lucky? I wish Matt had been a bit more handy around the house. It’s such an attractive thing in a man.’

I can see a flush on the back of Ben’s neck, and he coughs embarrassedly. Perhaps I am laying it on a bit thick. He might, oh God, he might think I’m actually coming on to him. Rein
it in, Kate, rein it in.

‘I think Prue will be really impressed when she sees you like this,’ I say briskly, stepping back away from the step-ladder and crossing my arms. Textbook ‘I do not fancy
you’ body language. ‘It’s a whole other side to the businessman she already knows. Every woman hopes her husband will be practical around the house.’

Ben chuckles again. ‘I’d have thought she’d just tell me off for making a mess,’ he says.

‘Oh no,’ I reassure him. ‘Prue will be grateful. I know she will. I certainly am.’

Although I am a little concerned that, not seeing the bigger picture here, not knowing that Ben is in pre-husband training, Prue might mistakenly think that I am just getting him to do my dirty
work for me. Which would be all wrong. Obviously there is a benefit to having Ben help with the decoration, but my motives are purely altruistic.

He seems to have got into a rhythm with the wallpaper steamer, running it up the wall methodically, and following it with the scraper. I can see he’s actually enjoying himself.

‘Shall I take it back now you’ve shown me how to do it?’ I ask.

Ben pulls the steamer towards him like a child whose sole possession of a toy has been threatened.

‘Tell you what,’ he says. ‘Why don’t you let me get on with this for now? Quite like a bit of manual labour, you know. Using the old muscles after being in the office all
day.’

I demur politely, insisting several times that he needn’t bother, but I time it carefully to capitulate just as he’s about to give up. I’ve managed to make him beg to do it,
and he seems as pleased when I agree, as if it was all his idea in the first place.

‘Well, if you insist, Ben,’ I say, when we’ve finally established that the steamer is his and his alone. ‘I feel bad that you’re doing all this work for
me.’

‘Oh, not a problem,’ says Ben. ‘Least I could do.’

‘Well, in that case let me make you supper,’ I say. I’ve actually already made supper – a beef stew that cooked for hours this afternoon. It is all part of the plan, but
he needn’t know that.

‘Right, well, right,’ says Ben, looking delighted. ‘Jolly decent of you.’

I pick up his bag and coat and take them through to the kitchen. Let Ben see that there are rewards for good behaviour. It’s just like training Minnie – a matter of rewarding the
good behaviour and ignoring the bad. And setting firm boundaries.

All the things I wish I’d done much, much earlier.

London

You know I’d really like to tell you all about our wedding. I really would. Because, despite everything that happened afterwards, I still think of it as one of the
best days of my life. But listening to Prue’s wedding talk has reminded me that even those closest to you really couldn’t care less about the colour composition of the flower
arrangements, or the menu tastings or the difficulty you had finding underwear that wouldn’t show through your silk and chiffon dress. Let alone mentioning the speeches, which are bad enough
to sit through at the time, and twice as bad second hand (sorry, Dad).

So I will spare you the details, and simply say that Matt and I got married, and it was everything I had ever hoped for. More than that, really, since I had never hoped for marriage at all.

What can I say? It turned out I did believe in true love.

Or maybe it was just the way he asked me.

We had been house-hunting for months without success. As much as we may have still been in the first flush of living-together love, it could no longer be denied that my flat was too small for
both of us. The galley kitchen was so narrow that we couldn’t pass in it without squashing ourselves up against either the counter or each other. Initially this was a charming novelty, an
excuse for cheeky kitchen fumbles and misbehaviour. But early in the morning, with hangovers and slept-through alarms and disagreements about who had stacked the dishwasher like that (I am sure I
don’t need to tell you it was Matt), the charm quickly wore off.

They say that moving house is one of the most stressful events in one’s life, and on the basis of our experience, I’d say they’re right. First we argued about where to live;
nothing was dragging me out East, not even Matt’s promises that we could own a vast mansion in Mile End for the price of a Chalk Farm bedsit. I was too old to relocate to an edgy area –
I didn’t care about being cool, I cared about not being mugged when I walked home from the tube. And I knew exactly where I wanted to live. Matt’s exasperation with my refusal to look
anywhere else finally gave way to resignation.

Winner: me.

Then there was the garden or no garden discussion, which forced me into an indefensible corner from which I attempted to argue the passionately green-fingered case for, while Matt held in front
of me the case against: the dust-covered remnants of a long-ignored African violet from a shelf in the bathroom, and the desiccated, leafless skeleton of something that had once been a fern. Not
having remembered to water either for months somewhat weakened my argument that I’d be tilling the earth and growing vegetables in our new home.

Winner: Matt.

Flat-roof-gate was bad enough that the estate agent excused himself to make some phone calls outside, one of which was probably to a counsellor at Relate to see if they made emergency house
calls. Matt, whose knowledge of DIY barely extended to changing a light bulb, claimed with all the blustering confidence of a building trade veteran that any home with a flat roof was guaranteed to
leak and refused even to consider any property that had one. I wouldn’t have minded so much if it wasn’t obvious that he’d just heard something negative about flat roofs from a
man down the pub and taken it to heart without having any knowledge to back it up. In addition to this his rigorous stance ruled out all the houses with lovely glass-fronted modernist extensions
that I’d set my heart on. So who could blame me for resorting to hiding the particulars from him, and arranging to meet at a mystery house without revealing its dark flat-roof secret? I had
hoped he’d fall in love with it – everything else was
perfect
– and overlook this one tiny flaw.

Only it turned out that this was typical of me, trying to get my own way through manipulation instead of respecting Matt’s decisions. Which was typical of him, taking a unilateral position
on something and refusing to budge, no matter how wrong he was. Which was typical of me, making out it was all his fault when I was the one who refused to contemplate moving outside a mile-wide
radius. Which was typical of
him
because . . .

Winner: a surprise entrant, the estate agent.

It turned out he hadn’t actually gone to call Relate. In sheer desperation he had called back to the office to be reminded of the absolute pointiest roofed homes they had on their books.
And a property had been added that very day, only one street away. A tiny Victorian terrace with an undeniably slanting tiled roof and absolutely no extension on the back. It had a garden, but only
a tiny patio, big enough for a table – Matt agreed this was acceptable. Okay, so if you stretched out your arms you could touch the walls in the second bedroom, and damp bubbled up the base
of the kitchen walls, but it was a house, a whole house. And four months later it was ours.

The day we moved in it poured with rain, which I tried not to take as an omen. A box of crockery got smashed when the sodden cardboard gave way in the middle of the hall. The removal men somehow
lost a kitchen chair, and it turned out – oh irony – that the pointed roof leaked into the second bedroom.

But Matt and I couldn’t stop smiling. When we’d paid the removers we ran around the house, from room to room, up and down our stairs, into the garden and back again at great speed
because of the rain. We sat on the sofa – our wet hair dripping onto the thick plastic wrap that we hadn’t yet removed – and just grinned at each other. It was ours; we owned it
together.

That night we sat on the living room floor eating fish and chips straight out of the paper since all the plates were smashed. It turned out that the former owner had mean-spiritedly taken out
all the light bulbs when he left and, as we hadn’t noticed until it was dark, we had to eat by the light of a hastily unpacked scented candle. Matt produced a bottle of champagne, and we
drank it from plastic cups that he’d bought from the corner shop. I couldn’t have been happier.

Or so I thought.

Matt got up to throw away the fish and chip papers and I could hear him rustling in the boxes we’d left in the kitchen.

‘What are you looking for?’ I called out. Surely there was no point in trying to unpack in the dark?

‘Nothing,’ he answered, but he carried on shifting boxes around. It started to annoy me. He’d only go putting everything in the wrong place. Why didn’t he just sit down
and enjoy our first night in our new home?

When he came back he held a book in his hand, which was odd, because I’d told the removals men to put all the boxes of books in the living room.

‘This is for you,’ he said, handing it to me. ‘Present.’

‘
Morality: An Introduction to Ethics
,’ I looked up at him quizzically. ‘Wow. Thanks, Matt. It’s just what I’ve always wanted, you total fruit
loop.’