Invisible Women Read online

  ‘Here’s another joke for you, Felicity,’ he said, as he stood up to leave. ‘Or rather, a maxim, from the good old days of how we used to do things. What’s the first rule for running a successful business? Sack the personnel department.’

  By the time he got down to the car park, Matt was starting to feel better. The sight of his Maserati, parked in a prime spot reserved for directors, reminded him that things could be worse. That woman Felicity cycled to work, he had seen her arriving in her fluorescent-green jacket and hair-flattening helmet. She probably went home to her cat and her sustainably farmed soya bean supper, prepared with equal division of labour between her and her partner, poor sod. Whereas he could look forward to one of Tessa’s indulgent dinners and not even think about washing up.

  There were definite advantages to having a stay-at-home wife, though it was a pity she didn’t bring in any money. Moving up through the gears on the Marylebone Road, Matt made a mental list of them. Not having to do the boring stuff like put out the bins or shop for food. Someone to deal with electricians, etc. A sympathetic ear for his trials at work. Sex on demand, if you felt like it. Not much point having a wife who went off on her own business trips, where was the fun in that? He had a female colleague who travelled a lot, and was always complaining she needed a wife. ‘Like you’ve got, Matt,’ she’d said. He wondered if it had been a bit of dig, suggesting he was old school.

  He parked a few doors down from his house and walked back past a flashy line-up of cars to his own front steps. At his age he should be able to park outside his own home, damn it, but everyone seemed to have two cars these days: an armoured tank for the lithe young wives to take their kids to school and a sports car for the hedgies to get into the office and make more millions, the bastards. He often flicked through the property magazines that came through the door in spite of their ‘no junk mail’ sticker – and looked at what they could get in the country. A proper house with room to park a fleet of cars in the in-and-out drive. He’d go for it in a heartbeat – with a pied-à-terre in London of course – but Tessa was reluctant. She was worried about being lonely, though you could hardly say she led a giddy social life here in the city. It was unclear how she filled her time but, as far as he could tell, she was usually on her own.

  Throwing his keys on to the hall table, he could smell she’d been at it again. Middle-Eastern spices, saffron, a tang of ginger, it must be Ottolenghi. He wasn’t complaining, he liked those big flavours, bringing the warmth of the souk incongruously into the sleek modernism of their kitchen-dining room.

  ‘Smells good!’

  He picked his way carefully down the cantilevered stairs that stuck out from the wall with no apparent means of support. You wouldn’t want to slip on those, with the perilous open spaces between the treads and only thin wires for banisters.

  Tessa was standing behind the huge granite-topped island, not so much an island as a continent, as the builders had pointed out, eight of them staggering beneath its weight when they brought it in from the garden through the tall glass doors.

  ‘Hi!’ Smiling up at him, she wiped her hands on her apron, its olde worlde rose pattern at odds with the cutting-edge interior design. ‘Red or white?’

  ‘What are we having?’

  ‘Chicken with saffron and hazelnuts, with mackerel and raisin salsa to start.’

  ‘White in that case.’

  She pulled a bottle out from the chiller beneath the hob and poured two generous glasses.

  ‘That’s what I thought. Here you go, mineral overtones. From northern Italy.’

  ‘Chin-chin,’ said Matt. ‘Tell you what, I really need this after the day I’ve had.’

  He picked up his drink and went to stretch out on the Italian sofa, bought at vast expense, after months of deliberation, to make an impact in the glass box of their extension. He kicked off his shoes and admired the evening light streaming in through the high windows. He looked back at Tessa, absorbed in her preparations, her dark hair messily pushed back, the swell of her breasts and tummy clearly visible from this angle.

  ‘Ready!’ Tessa whipped off the apron and beckoned him to the table. ‘Now, come and tell me about your horrible day.’

  He sat down facing her, just two places laid at one end of the large table. When the children were at home, the conversation would always focus on the mini dramas of their lives, with Tessa fostering their self-centredness, eager to know every detail, greedy for involvement while it was still on offer. Now they had gone, Matt had Tessa’s full attention, which was really rather nice. He told her about his outrageous treatment at the hands of the PC brigade, how you couldn’t say anything these days, how the fun had gone out of it all. As he spoke, she made sympathetic noises, laughing at po-faced Felicity’s disapproval, and he felt the tension drain away. By this time they were on to the second bottle and everything seemed alright.

  ‘So, that’s enough about me,’ he said. ‘How was your day?’

  Tessa got up to clear the table.

  ‘Oh, you know . . .’

  She picked up their plates and bustled over to the sink.

  ‘No, I don’t know. Come on, fill me in.’

  ‘It’s not interesting.’

  She was rinsing the dishes now, ready to go in one of the dishwashers. They had installed a pair of them, so you could put dirty plates into one while the other would always hold clean crockery. Or that was the idea, the reality was more chaotic.

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘Alright then. Random household tasks, unpacked our bags, accepted a fiftieth birthday party invitation from Ben and Eva. Sorry, make that a hundredth birthday party. Fifty years each, so a hundred altogether, geddit?’

  ‘Nauseating. I really can’t bear fiftieth birthday parties, it’s all about people showing off how well they’ve done.’

  ‘Don’t be miserable just because you didn’t want one. Anyway, to continue the precis of my interesting day, I renewed the car insurance and cut back the wisteria. Then I had coffee with Sandra and Harriet.’

  ‘Ah, what’s naughty Sandra up to these days?’

  ‘Nothing! I wish I’d never told you about that.’

  He was glad she had, they’d had a good laugh about it. Shagging the builder in broad daylight while her husband was at work, it was straight out of Readers’ Wives, you couldn’t make it up. She was pretty hot, too, Sandra, always had been. And she’d kept her figure.

  ‘What about Harriet, still playing the martyr?’

  ‘She has a lot on her plate, poor thing, with the live-in mother-in-law, she spent a whole day on the phone trying to rearrange her hospital appointments. We don’t how lucky we are, having healthy parents who can look after themselves. My parents, I mean, but at least yours were healthy right up until the end.’

  That was Tessa all over, counting her blessings, constantly reminding him of their good fortune. Her good fortune, actually, he wasn’t sure his own life was the breezy pleasurefest that hers seemed to be.

  She was taking something out of the freezer.

  ‘Aha! Do I sense pudding?’

  ‘Blackberry ice cream parfait. But made with yoghurt so it’s really healthy.’

  ‘Give me a big slice then.’

  She cut two generous portions and brought them over to the table.

  ‘And how about a glass of vin santo to wash it down?’ said Tessa.

  ‘Why ever not?’

  Several reasons why not, he thought as she poured out the sweet liquor. They both drank way above the guidelines and neither of them needed the extra calories. On the other hand, what the hell. You had to have some compensation to tide you over the hell of early middle age.

  ‘What do you think of my face?’ Tessa asked, wiping away the crumbs.

  ‘Funny question. I’ve grown accustomed to it.’

  ‘I had a facial today, Sandra had a voucher so I got it half price. Look, smooth as a baby’s bottom.’

  She traced her fingers over her cheeks, as thou
gh gauging the quality of a fine fabric. He looked at her critically. She still had a good complexion, lightly tanned from the memory of summer, but the lines had deepened, brackets etched around her mouth, a downward line between her eyebrows that could make her look severe.

  ‘Not bad for your age. Though of course you can’t polish a turd.’

  ‘You certainly know how to make me feel good about myself.’

  She felt her self-esteem lurch down another notch. Make your own dinner, she thought.

  ‘It’s big business, beauty for the ageing lady. I wish I’d got into that, licence to print money.’

  He glanced at his watch. ‘So, should I depress myself by watching Newsnight, or take a look at the match highlights?’

  It wasn’t a question that required an answer. He made his way back up the precarious staircase and into the through lounge, or double reception room as the estate agents called it, settling himself into his favourite chair, placed at optimum distance from a large TV screen mounted above the mantelpiece. Barcelona by Mies van der Rohe, an original, not the cheap fake, upholstered in tan leather, which made him think happily of a gentlemen’s club. A far cry from the neat Barratt home in a cul-de-sac where he’d grown up, whose only advantage was that it was cheap to heat, as his mother would tartly remind him when he asked why they didn’t live in one of the old houses he passed on the way to school, which looked such fun with their ramshackle front gardens. All he needed now was a cigar but that was something else that had been outlawed by the health police. He flicked on the TV and sat back to enjoy the sight of muscled men in much better shape than him chasing each other round the high-definition pitch.

  Downstairs, Tessa cleared up the plates. She couldn’t finish the pudding tomorrow as she’d planned a fast day. When the children were at home, there were never any leftovers; everything she put on the table would be cheerfully dispatched by Max and Lola and any random friends they brought in for dinner. Still, not long now, they’d be home for the Christmas holidays before she knew it, cluttering the house with all their stuff, clothes and toasted sandwich-makers piled up in the corners of their bedrooms, bringing in the bright chaos of their complicated social lives. She stopped herself right there. It was weeks off. Don’t wish your life away.

  She took her laptop and went over to lie on the sofa. The garden was softly illuminated by uplighters, the newly pruned wisteria covering the back wall, ready for another season. She must get the bulbs in tomorrow, fritillaries and lambada tulips that had been delivered from the nursery. They usually had a party in May, when the garden was at its best, for Matt’s birthday – apart from when he turned fifty, which he had preferred to keep quiet about.

  She opened her computer and went straight into Facebook. No further update from Lola on the possible boyfriend, so she scrolled back through the photos of the Freshers’ fancy-dress bar crawl. Just as she was about to log out, she noticed there was one friend request and one message. She opened the message first.

  Oh. My. God.

  OMG.

  Bugger me sideways and fuck my old boots.

  There he was. John Ormonde.

  After all these years.

  *

  Sandra pulled the pillow up around her ears in an attempt to block the sound of Nigel snoring. She had tried earplugs but they made her feel claustrophobic, as if she were drowning. Some women made their partners wear snore guards, but she thought that was mean. As if Nigel didn’t have enough on his plate, without shoving a bit of plastic into his mouth every time he went to bed. He was really going for it now, though, thunderous noises echoing round the room. He’d wake Poppy at this rate, even one floor up it was hard to see how that racket wouldn’t be heard through the dead quiet of the night.

  She reached across with one hand and squeezed his nose, blocking out the air. Two seconds of silence, a small and welcome death, then a sudden violent snort as he spasmed back into life, greedily sucking the oxygen back in and humping away from her, pulling the duvet protectively around him.

  It did the trick, his breathing was quiet now. She stroked his head gratefully, her fingers running over the smooth forehead to the spiky hairline. It had been a godsend to him, this fashion for bald heads. Even young men with a full head of hair were shaving it off in order to appear macho. So if you were fifty and receding you’d be silly not to, even if it did make you look like a bit of a skull-face. She continued to stroke him, listening to his steady breathing, matching his slow pulse.

  He was proud of his low pulse rate. Before they bought the house, a nurse had come round to check him over, to make sure he was wasn’t going to fall sick and default on the repayments. He had to give a urine sample on the spot – to prove it was really his – and the nurse weighed and assessed him, as if buying a horse at the market. ‘Aren’t you going to inspect his teeth?’ Sandra had joked as she came in with the coffee, an accessory before the fact, colluding in the need to keep the old beast working. Nurse Adams had laughed, hand on the restraining rubber arm wrap, as she took the reading. ‘Lovely low pulse,’ she said, ‘you’re lucky, you’ve got a strong heart.’ And Nigel had looked really chuffed.

  She snuggled up to him, folding her body into his back, feeling the strong heart beating. She liked him most when he was sleeping, as long as he wasn’t snoring of course. She could imagine him then as he used to be, before he went mad and started finding fault with everything. Before he lost the appetite for life and forced her to sleep with the builder. Oh God, the shame. In spite of her bravado she still couldn’t really believe she’d done it. And now Mariusz was making it very clear he wanted more. As if reading her thoughts, Nigel shuddered, and she smoothed his head again. Steady boy. Good dog. Good Boy Choc Drops, she should get some for him, along with the blueberries and muesli with low-fat milk which ensured that his arteries remained unfurred, enabling him to continue to function as a top-drawer breadwinner.

  She was wide awake now, but it wouldn’t be fair to put the light on to read. She thought of creeping downstairs to the computer, but dismissed it as a bad idea, it would only lead to compulsive surfing of medical websites speaking in resolutely positive terms that fooled no one about terrible diseases crouching in the shadows and ready to pounce on the over-fifties.

  Instead, she stared into the darkness and smoothed her hands over the linen sheets. She was glad she’d insisted on one-thousand-thread count from Josephine Home, you should always get the best you could afford, that was her mantra. She remembered the cheap nylon sheets of her childhood, supposed to save on ironing, and how she had sweated into them during hot summer nights and promised that she would get a better life for herself, one with crystal glasses and Caribbean holidays and the fine bed linen she used to run her fingers over in Liberty during her dreamy window shopping expeditions up West. She’d finally got what she wanted, the house was a complete triumph. My finest achievement to date, she thought. When a celebrity was asked what their finest achievement was, they always said ‘my children’, but you could only get away with that if you were famous. If a normal person said ‘my children’, everyone would yawn and roll their eyes. Far better to say, ‘my beautiful home’. Mind you, if someone had told her in her twenties that one day she’d spend all her time running a home, she’d have laughed in their faces. Homes ran themselves, unless you had nothing better to do. Which she didn’t.

  Her reverie was interrupted by the shrill ringtone of her phone. She quickly reached for it in the darkness, anxious not to wake Nigel. It was Tessa, what the hell did she want?

  ‘What’s up?’ she whispered, hunching away from her sleeping husband.

  ‘Sorry, did I wake you? Listen, you’ll never guess who’s just messaged me on Facebook!’

  ‘I have no idea, and frankly I couldn’t care less,’ Sandra hissed. ‘You know what Nigel’s like about sleeping. Why don’t you tell me tomorrow!’

  ‘Sorry, sorry, really thoughtless of me. I’ll tell you tomorrow, go back to sleep.’

  ‘H
ang on, you might as well tell me now! The damage is done.’

  Nigel was still snoring, she was safe.

  ‘Alright then! John Ormonde!’

  ‘DONNY ORMONDE!’

  ‘The same! Can you believe it?’

  Sandra was thrown straight back to their girlhood. John Ormonde, or Donny Ormonde as they called him, because he looked a bit like the heart-throb pop singer Donny Osmond with his wavy dark hair and American white smile. They all adored The Osmonds: hunky squeaky-clean Mormon brothers who were rumoured to wear all-in-one chastity suits beneath their blingy stage outfits, what could be sexier to teenage virgin girls? Everyone fancied John but he only ever had eyes for Tessa.

  ‘No way!’ said Sandra, remembering the aftermath of his great betrayal.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ she said. ‘What brought him crawling out of the woodwork? Did he say why he walked out on you all those years ago?’

  ‘He didn’t walk out on me!’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that.’

  ‘OK, whatever. Tell you what, let’s discuss it in the morning at the rink.’

  ‘Yes. Sorry to wake you, I just needed to tell someone.’

  ‘I know. Goodnight.’

  ‘’Night. Thanks for listening.’

  Sandra settled back on to her pillows. She could tell from the rigid silence across the bed that Nigel was awake.

  ‘Who the fuck was that?’ he grumbled.

  ‘Tessa.’

  ‘Christ sake, couldn’t it wait? It’s not as if you don’t live in each other’s pockets.’

  ‘Never mind. Go back to sleep.’

  Easier said than done for her highly strung husband. She waited until his breathing became slower, heavier. Good, no need to recourse to the sleeping tablets; you could become addicted to them if you weren’t careful. Time to go to sleep herself, Poppy was preparing for a skating competition and Sandra had promised to take her up to the rink tomorrow. She was trying to be supportive even though she couldn’t tell the difference between an axel and a Salkow. Tessa was planning to join them, she liked spending time with Poppy now her own children weren’t around. At least they’d have plenty to talk about. You really never knew what was round the corner.