Unsuitable Men Read online

  Dear Rory, the email said:

  I will be at my golf class on Saturday morning between 10 a.m. and 12 p.m. I suggest you come to collect your belongings then, as I do not believe either of us wants a repeat of your hysterics yesterday. A clean break will be simpler for both of us.

  Best wishes,

  Martin

  Thirty seconds later I found myself sobbing on Ticky’s shoulder as if she was my only friend in the world.

  2

  ‘Like I said,’ sniffed my Auntie Lyd, as she steered her ancient Ford Escort across two lanes of the South Circular with a blithe unconcern for nearby drivers, ‘he’s got another woman.’

  A small wave of rubbish in the footwell crested and broke over my boots as the car lurched to the left. Mum and I had always called Auntie Lyd’s car the Travelling Skip, since she seemed to be blind to the assortment of empty water bottles, cigarette packets and dusty mints that littered the floor, not to mention the layer of cigarette ash that coated every surface, as if the rusting Ford Escort had been recently excavated from Pompeii.

  I decided to ignore her insulting speculations. Auntie Lyd had never liked Martin and she had made that still more evident ever since I’d turned up on her doorstep in heartbroken tears. It seemed to me like risky behaviour on her part: I’d seen too many people verbally annihilate a friend’s recent ex, only to have the seemingly dead relationship lurch back into life like the villain in a horror movie. Wouldn’t it be embarrassing for Auntie Lyd, with her wild speculations about other women, if Martin and I got back together? Although his asking me to move out wasn’t exactly encouraging, it was early days. I hadn’t given up yet.

  ‘Darling,’ said Auntie Lyd, taking my silence as encouragement to continue. ‘Surely you can see it yourself? A man who, at the age of thirty, is incapable of ironing his own shirt is not going to get rid of one woman without having another lined up behind the ironing board.’

  I sighed and sank down into the seat. I wished I had never confessed that the row that broke up my relationship had hinged on my burning a hole in Martin’s favourite shirt. Auntie Lyd’s feminist principles had been outraged by the very idea that I might offer to do the ironing in the first place, as if I had done so each morning in high heels and a Playboy bunny outfit instead of my ancient dressing gown and slippers. Her tolerance of other people’s domestic idiosyncrasies had been worn down, rather than mellowed, by running her large Clapham townhouse as a boarding house for the last twenty years. As far as I knew she’d never even lived with a man, unless it was one of her paying guests, the PGs as she called them. It was useless to expect her to appreciate Martin’s needs.

  ‘He’s not incapable, Auntie Lyd. It’s not like that,’ I said. ‘You don’t understand.’

  ‘What don’t I understand?’ she demanded. ‘I didn’t spend the late seventies stomping around in unflattering hessian dungarees to see my niece, thirty years later, getting dumped for failing to do the ironing properly.’

  ‘You wore hessian dungarees?’ I said doubtfully. I’d seen photographs of Auntie Lyd in the seventies. Although the evidence of several family albums suggested that she had indeed burned her bra for most of the decade, her polished look owed far more to Joan Collins than to Greenham Common. Her bob had been darker then, almost black, and if she’d gone without a slash of fierce red lipstick between the years of 1977 to 1983 then there was certainly no photographic evidence of it.

  ‘Well, only for a few weeks, I admit,’ huffed Auntie Lyd, annoyed at being doubted. ‘How were casting directors supposed to get an idea of my figure in that loose-fitting rubbish? But stop distracting me, Rory. The point remains, what kind of man expects his girlfriend to do the ironing in this day and age? Is feminism entirely dead?’

  ‘It’s not anti-feminist to do the ironing,’ I protested. ‘It’s just that Martin’s job is much more demanding and stressful than mine. So we agreed – well, we never actually agreed it, it was more of an unspoken thing, an understanding – that he’d take care of all the finances and I’d look after the housework.’

  Auntie Lyd sniffed her disapproval. I half expected her to whip out a copy of The Feminine Mystique from the glove compartment and hit me over the head with it.

  ‘And it wasn’t just the ironing,’ I confessed, feeling tears beginning to well up. ‘He – he said I should make more of an effort with my appearance. I didn’t listen to him. I haven’t even had a haircut in months,’ I wailed, grabbing at a handful of my unruly red curls. I had thought they were charmingly tousled, but now I looked more closely I could see they were bristling with split ends. ‘Do you think that’s it, Auntie Lyd? Do you think he dumped me because I’d let myself go?’

  Her head snapped round towards me. Auntie Lyd’s face was already permanently scrunched up, courtesy of the stream of smoke that rose from her ever-present cigarette, but it puckered even further into a fierce frown.

  ‘It is quite impossible to have let yourself go at the age of twenty-nine, Rory, don’t be ridiculous,’ she snapped. ‘You’re still a baby. Never heard anything so stupid. Wait till you’re sixty-two and the staff at Waterstone’s in Battersea mistake you for Beryl Bainbridge and ask you to sign eight copies of Master Georgie. Then you can talk to me about letting yourself go.’

  I sniffed, looking up. I knew Auntie Lyd. ‘Did you sign them?’

  ‘’Course I did. Their stupid mistake.’

  ‘You do know she’s dead, don’t you?’ I asked.

  ‘I know that, Aurora. It’s not my problem if they didn’t. Anyway, dear Beryl would have loved it.’

  I squinted at her through her shroud of smoke. It was entirely feasible that Auntie Lyd had known Beryl Bainbridge personally, they both having been actresses in their long-ago youth; you never could tell with my aunt, whose conversation was powered by hints and allusions that she rarely explained. But then again it was equally feasible that she was claiming kinship out of nothing more than a shared similarity of appearance. It was probably the heavy-fringed bob that had confused the Waterstone’s staff, but it could have been those cheekbones, so high and rounded they made you think of Inuit tribes in the snowy North. Then again, and less flatteringly, it could also have been the strong smell of stale cigarettes that surrounded her at all times. She fired up another cigarette and inhaled deeply. Then she blew two fierce streams of smoke from her nostrils.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ said Auntie Lyd. Brakes screeched behind us as she fiddled with the lighter on the dashboard. ‘You’re thinking this is just temporary. You’re thinking he’s going to miss you and take you back.’

  I pressed my lips together tightly and didn’t answer.

  ‘Aurora, he signed his last email to you “Best wishes”. That is not the behaviour of a man who regrets his decision. It’s the behaviour of a man who’s already moved on.’

  She didn’t understand. Martin had always taken refuge in formality, especially at times of high emotion. Hadn’t he presented me with a spreadsheet of projected costs saved by living together when he’d suggested I move in with him? It’s not that he wasn’t romantic – he had sweet little reminders set up on his phone to buy me flowers on my birthday and on our anniversary – but that his feelings for me were expressed in other ways. He provided for me, he took care of the finances, he changed the oil in the car. I didn’t need declarations of passion – passion doesn’t last. Just look at my mother’s four marriages if you want proof of that. It’s stability that counts.

  ‘Which lane, Rory?’ bellowed Auntie Lyd, nudging me with her elbow to get my attention over the rattling engine.

  ‘What? Oh, left – it’s the left lane,’ I said. She swung the car into the lane without looking and ignored the cacophony of angry horns behind us.

  ‘North Sheen, of all the places,’ she huffed. ‘What sane person wants to live in North Sheen, I ask you?’

  I knew it wasn’t a particular prejudice against North Sheen that was annoying Auntie Lyd; it was being forced to
drive the car, which usually sat, immobile and gently rusting, outside her house. Auntie Lyd preferred to travel everywhere by taxi – for convenience, she said, but I think also because most of the drivers fondly remembered her star turn as Destiny Devereux in the eighties mini-series Those Devereux Girls, and often refused to charge her. The fact she had suggested driving the Travelling Skip at all showed how seriously she was taking my break-up with Martin.

  ‘That’s not fair,’ I said, determined not to let her get to me. ‘North Sheen’s lovely, Auntie Lyd – you never even came and visited us there. It’s so close to the river, and to Kew Gardens and—’

  ‘I don’t need to go there to know what I think of it,’ said Auntie Lyd. ‘Suburban. In London, but not on the tube. Puh, it’s neither fish nor fowl. What is the point of living in this glorious city’ – Auntie Lyd waved her cigarette for emphasis, but we were still inching past Wandsworth’s distinctly inglorious Southside shopping mall, which didn’t really serve her argument – ‘if you don’t take advantage of it?

  ‘And a new build, too,’ she sneered, curling her lip.

  ‘Auntie Lyd, don’t be such a snob,’ I protested hotly. Our spartan, new, fully insulated and double-glazed house may not have been the romantic tumbledown cottage of my impractical dreams, but it was ours. Mine and Martin’s. It was home. People were what made a house a home. Probably Auntie Lyd had forgotten that, running her own home as a business for so long.

  ‘Martin doesn’t have time to keep up with the maintenance an old house would need, he’s too busy at work. And so am I, actually.’

  In truth busyness had very little to do with it. Martin didn’t agree with me that architectural quirks gave a place character. Where I saw the patina of the years, he saw the need for a bottle of Cillit Bang. Where I saw original sash windows, he saw draughts and high heating bills. It had taken just one viewing of a Victorian terrace in Putney, with Martin whistling disapproval through his teeth as he tapped walls and rattled window frames, to realize he would never be happy in an older house. I knew I could have tried harder to persuade him, but I also knew that if I succeeded, every roof leak or plumbing issue that came up would be laid at my feet for ever more. It didn’t seem worth it. And when Martin found out there was an early-bird discount for buying our home off-plan from the developers, my half-expressed arguments crumbled to dust.

  The Travelling Skip lurched around the corner into the Marchmont estate. I know it sounds like something you might find on the pages of Country House, with stables and outbuildings and perhaps even a tennis court, but in fact it was a curving cul-de-sac of self-contained three-bedroomed houses, each staring blankly at the others through its PVC windows. And since the closest I’d ever been to owning a horse was riding a donkey on Salcombe Sands as a toddler, I can’t say I had ever found myself lamenting the lack of stabling options.

  ‘It’s this one here,’ I said. Our house was distinguished from the others by the pot of geraniums I’d put outside the front door, still just alive even in the depths of winter. I convinced myself it was a sign. The geraniums had survived against the odds: there was still hope for our relationship. Auntie Lyd swung into the driveway and slammed on the brakes, making us both lurch alarmingly towards the windscreen before being thrown back against the seats as the car came to a halt. She switched off the engine and released her seatbelt so she could turn to face me.

  ‘These are perfectly nice houses,’ she said. ‘I’m not being a snob. But they’re perfectly nice houses for someone else. Not for Rory Carmichael.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, who are you? Have you entirely forgotten?’

  ‘I’m – I’m . . .’ I wasn’t sure how to answer. I was Martin’s girlfriend, that’s who I was. I was half of MartinandRory. Without that to define me, who was I?

  ‘I’ll tell you. You’re the niece who used to beg me to take her to the Victoria and Albert Museum when she visited London aged six. You’re the girl who preferred touring the cathedral at Rouen to queuing up for ice creams with all the other thirteen-year-olds on the school French trip. You’re the girl who asked for membership to the National Trust for her sixteenth birthday – I’m not saying I didn’t think it was strange, Rory, frankly I’d rather have bought you a crate of alcopops; but it was you.’

  I sat silently biting my lip like a sulky teenager while Auntie Lyd ranted on. It was true that I’d always had a passion for old houses and history, even from when I was tiny. While other girls were happy with the ersatz castles sold to them in cartoons, I longed for the real thing, poring over National Trust catalogues as if I might find the meaning of life hidden in the heavy stone fireplace of a medieval manor. Being dragged across the country by my mother as she sought a fresh start with the end of every marriage – until she gave up on England entirely and moved to Spain for love – had made me fascinated to the point of obsession with families who had lived in the same place for generations. I envied that certainty, that absolute knowledge of who you were and where you belonged.

  ‘You’re the girl who got a first-class degree in History of Art and an offer for an MA at the Courtauld Institute – which I still think you were idiotic to turn down. You’re the girl who spends her working life at Country House magazine writing about art and houses that are hundreds of years old—’

  ‘So I suppose you think we should have moved into a medieval castle?’ I muttered crossly, sinking lower into my seat as if I might be able to slip down and hide amongst the detritus in the footwell.

  ‘Don’t be facetious, Rory,’ she said dismissively. ‘I am trying to ask why you – Rory Carmichael, who loves everything old, everything historic – why you ever imagined you would be happy here?’

  I looked at my hands in my lap. And then up to the bare new brick of the front porch. I’d been planning to grow ivy over it to soften the harsh, just-built corners. So it wasn’t the house of my dreams aesthetically, but it represented so much more to me than architecture. We were putting down roots. In years to come we’d be saying, ‘We’re the Peters family, from North Sheen,’ instead of ‘I’m Rory from – well, all over really, it’s complicated.’ That seemed worth a little sacrifice to me. I didn’t feel like explaining all of this to Auntie Lyd – while Mum lurched from marriage to marriage, Aunty Lyd had never had a proper relationship for as long as I’d known her. She wouldn’t get it.

  ‘I moved here because Martin wanted to,’ I said. ‘Because Martin wanted to and I love him, and because you have to compromise in a relationship. That’s how it works.’

  Auntie Lyd shook her head as she ground out her cigarette in the overflowing ashtray. She blew a stream of smoke towards the windscreen; it broke on the glass, spreading out tendrils that obscured the house from view.

  ‘Compromise means meeting in the middle, Rory,’ she said, reaching to the back seat to pick up her handbag. ‘It doesn’t mean giving up your own identity so as to fit into someone else’s life.’

  She opened her door and brushed ash off her skirt on to the driveway. ‘In any case, they’ll only despise you for it in the end. Believe me.’

  When I let us into the house, pushing open the insulation seal on the front door with a pop, it felt like my vision had shifted in the short time that I’d been staying at my aunt’s. Instead of feeling welcomed by the home that I had shared with Martin for the last year, I saw everything as if through Auntie Lydia’s eyes. The posters in the hallway of classic Ducati motorbikes (though a poster was the closest Martin had ever got to owning one; apparently the insurance premiums were prohibitively high). The expensive Gaggia espresso machine that took up half the kitchen worktop – even though Auntie Lyd knew I didn’t drink coffee and never had. There was hardly a sign that I’d lived there until very recently. It wasn’t that Martin had cleared away any indication that I had lived there; it was, I realized, that I had hardly allowed my presence to be felt in our home.

  ‘It’s freezing in here,’ said Auntie Lyd, wrapping her a
rms around herself and rubbing her hands up and down to warm up.

  ‘Martin doesn’t like having the heating on for more than an hour in the morning and an hour at night to take the chill off,’ I said, looking over to the hall thermostat, which showed a chilly four degrees. ‘He says anything more is a waste of money. A jumper’s already paid for.’

  ‘How cosy,’ said Auntie Lyd, rolling her eyes. ‘Like a lovely welcoming fridge-freezer. Well, let’s get on with it then. Where shall we start?’

  ‘Er, the bedroom?’ I suggested. I thought starting with the most painful room would make the rest of it seem easier; like jumping straight into an icy pool rather than shivering hesitantly on the edges.

  ‘Lead the way,’ she said, gesturing up the stairs.

  As we climbed to the first floor I steeled myself for the task ahead. The bed that we’d shared. The book I’d been reading, and left face down on the bedside table. The wardrobe, full of not just clothes but memories – the dress I was wearing when Martin had first spoken to me in the university library, the cardigan I’d had on when he asked me to move in with him, the dressing gown in which I’d been dumped. I wasn’t sure how I was going to get through it without hysterics.

  Pushing open the bedroom door, I clenched my teeth together. My heart fluttered in my ribcage as if I expected to see Martin kneeling on the carpet, contrite and begging for forgiveness. Possibly offering marriage. Instead four cardboard boxes sat at the foot of the bed, sealed with brown tape and neatly labelled in Martin’s careful handwriting.

  Clothing. Linen. Toiletries. Miscellaneous.

  Auntie Lyd and I stared at them. The sum total of more than a decade, packed into just four boxes.

  ‘Well,’ Auntie Lyd said. ‘That makes things easier, I suppose.’ She rubbed my arm carefully, as if afraid I might drop to the beige carpet keening and wailing in grief. To be honest, I thought I might. As much as I’d been dreading packing, somehow the sight of those boxes made me feel as if I’d been cheated of the whole experience of saying goodbye to the life we’d had together. Although I couldn’t prove that he hadn’t shed a tear while sorting through my possessions, from here it seemed that Martin had packed everything up with all the emotion and pathos of a paid-by-the-hour removals firm.