The Foster Husband (15 page)

It’s impossible to know if I would have developed this kind of confidence without Tim, or if he was just the conduit for something that would have happened anyway. Years later I would read
the famous Sophia Loren quote that sex appeal is 50 per cent what you’ve got and 50 per cent what other people think you’ve got. And I’d think that for me it was 50 per cent what
Tim Cooper gave me.

And yet I haven’t even spoken his name out loud for nearly fifteen years. Whenever Mum or Dad has tried I’ve changed the subject. I’ve always thought it’s better to just
move on, leave things behind, not dwell on them. What good does it do to rehash things over and over? It just makes people upset, brings up emotions that are better off buried. Last time it was
easier though; I guess things are when you’re younger. School was ending, everyone was moving on, it looked less like running away when I left Lyme for London.

No one questioned the fact that I left for university early – who wouldn’t want to get to the big city as soon as possible? What eighteen-year-old wouldn’t prefer to be in the
middle of London than hanging out in Lyme for yet another tourist-filled summer working with their parents? When I wrote home, which was rarely in those days before everyone had an email address, I
was sure to make my holiday job in a Covent Garden sandwich bar sound far more exciting than it was. I sent Prue a postcard especially to tell her about the time I’d made Liam Gallagher a
bacon roll, brown sauce no butter, and he’d said it was ‘sound’. I hoped the postman might read it and tell other people about my new big-city life.

By the time I started my university course in October, no one would have known I wasn’t born within the sound of the Bow Bells. I’d dropped my provincial ways like I’d dropped
my Dorset burr. Now I spoke the same chirpy Mockney as everyone else; I knew about cool bars in Brixton and went clubbing at Fabric. I used my Travelcard on night buses and tutted at tourists
standing on the wrong side of the escalator. When people asked where I was from, I said Tufnell Park.

And as for the fact that I liked a party and wasn’t too particular about the boys I took home, well, wasn’t everyone the same in London? That was practically the definition of a
student. It wasn’t cause for gossip or disapproval. If anything it just consolidated my reputation at college. Who wanted to be one of those drippy wallflowers in the union bar, shyly sipping
a single Bacardi Breezer and holding hands with your boyfriend, when you could be dancing on a table at the Bug Bar with a tequila in your hand? None of those shy girls got spotted by a TV talent
scout; none of them got a screen test for Hitz Music Television, or became a VJ, and then turned that into a production career. Being a party girl worked out better for me than I’d ever
dreamed. And even though by then I’d forgotten all about Lyme, even though none of it mattered any more, not at all, it felt like a massive two fingers to the lot of them.

It’s harder to feel that sense of triumph this time; harder to disguise the running away. I’m not the triumphant winner, returning to show off the spoils of my exciting London life.
It feels like everyone can see that I’m no better than they thought I was; that it was bound to all go wrong in the end. That the girl who had the great job and the husband and the big house
was just play-acting; it was an illusion she couldn’t maintain. And who is surprised that it’s all come crashing down around her ears?

I hear barking in the undergrowth where Minnie is chasing rabbits; she whines with excitement, though she has never even come close to catching one. The Undercliff is a strange place –
Prue won’t walk here alone; she thinks it’s too isolated, but I love it. I have done ever since I used to lead the Baileys’ French Lieutenant’s Woman tourist walk when I was
in the sixth form, from the Cobb, up the hill into the Undercliff and back through the town to the museum where John Fowles’s shabby old office chair, foam coming out of a rip in the seat, is
preserved like a holy relic. The book was an A-level set text back then, so the groups of walkers swelled with students every summer, but it never felt like school work to me.

Inside the woodland, between the trees, time seems to slip away; with no visible buildings or roads or cars it could be centuries ago. Only the dim shadow of a tanker out at sea, interrupting
the horizon, anchors me to the present. I read once that walking amongst trees was meant to calm you; psychiatrists recommend it to the depressed. Back in London I took Minnie for relentlessly long
walks on the Heath, as if I was dosing myself up with medicine, downing the healing landscape one tree at a time. Maybe they were the wrong sorts of trees up there; either way it didn’t seem
to make much difference.

But here, in the quiet solitude, I feel as if I might believe it, as if the trees of the Undercliff are a benevolent presence, their mossy arms ready to embrace me, their unchanging stillness
reminding me that everything passes in the end. These trees stood here before I was born, they were here when I was growing up, and they’ll be here when I’m gone. I can allow myself to
think about Tim and Matt without that feeling of dread and horror that threatens to overwhelm me most of the time. The mistakes that feel so enormous to me become somehow smaller here.

Though this stability is an illusion, too, of course. In reality the Undercliff is one of the least stable parts of the Dorset coastline. It owes its rugged wildness to the fact that nothing can
be built on it for fear of landslips. Only a few years ago a huge chunk of the Black Ven, further down the coast, collapsed onto the beach below. The last landslip at this spot was back in
Victorian times – an enormous piece of the cliff slid out to sea, the seemingly solid land buckling and sliding away. Farmland was destroyed, fields fell into the sea, and yet parts of the
cliff stayed just as they were. Beyond the chasm, crops continued to ripen on fragments of land that were now isolated out in the water, like living fossils. Everything that seemed permanent
disappeared without warning.

I suppose, though, that however it seemed, the landslip didn’t happen in a moment. As shocking as it must have been, underneath the surface things must have been changing for some time.
Little cracks and fissures opening wider, hidden tensions in the bedrock. After the landslip people knew what to look out for – the odd way a patch of grass seemed to have sunk, a bubbling
spring where there hadn’t been one before, the fence posts that had fallen for no reason. There were warning signs if only you knew what to look for. And now I do.

Minnie bounds back to me, her tongue lolling out of her mouth, eyes wild as if she hopes I’ll share in her excitement, but I can see she’s starting to tire. It’s time we went
back.

As my footsteps turn back towards home, I start to think again about Ben, and the mess I will have to face at the bungalow. It makes me shudder to think of it, but I know I am doing the right
thing by refusing to clean up. And not just for me. As I follow the path back to Lyme I realize that, unbeknownst to him, I am doing Ben a huge favour here. There may be a few difficult months
while I break him in, but it needs to be done for the sake of his relationship with Prue. He will thank me later, I am sure of it. It is as if he is a foster child that I’ve adopted in order
to teach him, by example, a few important lessons about the co-habiting dynamic. No, a foster
husband
, that’s better.

Wouldn’t that be the perfect wedding gift to my sister and her future husband? A husband who is already housetrained, his annoying edges knocked off. Who needs a full set of champagne
glasses, or teak-handled barbecue tongs engraved with Mr and Mrs, when they could have something truly useful? Something that will actually make a real difference to married life? I cannot wrap
this gift, but surely it is far more valuable than anything I could buy?

If you know the warning signs in advance, you can do something about it. Fill in the cracks, move the livestock to safer ground. Not build your house on the fault line. Matt and I are like the
crops still growing out at sea, too far away to be harvested, all that effort wasted. There’s still time for Prue and Ben; I am going to save them both, even if they don’t know it
yet.

London

Matt truly believed that eight years of living in Bethnal Green had somehow made him more authentically urban than me, simply because my flat was within ten minutes’
walk of Hampstead Heath. Even though he was the one who’d owned an entire house, while my flat was a minuscule one bedroom on the third floor of a purpose-built block. It was as if the very
presence of grass, trees and open vistas on my doorstep, instead of abandoned mattresses and fried chicken shops on his, stripped me of my status as a true blue Londoner. As if the pair of us,
white, university educated and working in television, weren’t already stuffed into every middle-class pigeonhole imaginable, no matter what postcodes we inhabited.

It hadn’t exactly been my intention to make Matt move to Belsize Park. In truth, I had been against us moving in together at all, but to say so directly sounded unnecessarily harsh, and
I’d just delayed and hesitated and hedged my bets until he asked me outright if I just hated the idea of moving to East London. It was easier to agree that this was my worry than to admit to
the churning sense of anxiety that filled me up every time I thought about where this was going. And when he offered to move in with me instead, my excuses ran out.

It wasn’t that I didn’t love him. Of course I did, though he was the one who said it every five minutes. Of course, that was why it was terrifying. It meant so much, you see. So much
that I couldn’t stand the idea of what would happen if it didn’t work out.

But when he’d moved in to my flat, ruthlessly casting out the girly cushions in my living room, and cluttering up the hall with a ton of sports equipment that he never seemed to use, I
wondered why I’d ever worried about it. Everything felt so easy. Even boring things, like trips to Ikea or the supermarket, felt fresh and new because we were doing them together. As if by
choosing a curtain rail together we were investing in some sort of shared future. Though obviously I never said so to him; no need to tell him he was right, I’d never hear the end of it. But
I was surprised by how this shared life, which I had thought would be all compromise and difficulty, turned out to give me far more than I had to give up. Matt always said I was an all-or-nothing
girl; either entirely against something or entirely for it, with no in between. And slowly, slowly, I was coming round to being entirely for a future that had Matt in it.

However. The ointment always has a fly in it, and ours was Matt’s continued belief that he was somehow too ‘street’ for Belsize Park. Even though he was now a signed-up member
of the Hampstead Heath massive, with a council tax bill and a parking permit, he couldn’t resist reaffirming his bogus urban authenticity every time we went to the Heath.

It was one of those late September Sundays when the sun puts on one spectacular last show, as if trying to remind you that it will soon be gone. Even with the best efforts of the sunshine, there
was an autumnal chill in the air that practically pulled the covers off you and begged you to get outside before winter came. Well, okay, the chill didn’t do that, I did. But Matt, for all
his urban warrior act, could always be persuaded out of bed by the promise of lunch at the Holly Bush.

On our walk across the Heath he insisted on playing the game that he called Hummus Bingo and that I, refusing to join in, called Class War. He racked up the points according to rules that seemed
to be devised purely to afford him a maximum score.

‘Regular, shop-bought hummus in a plastic tub – one point. Too easy,’ he said, striding dismissively past the picnic of a young couple whose entire lunch appeared to consist of
hummus, Doritos and White Lightning Cider. Ah, sweet youth, and sweet youthful metabolic rate that permits such appalling dietary habits.

Matt granted himself two points for spotting any variation on classic hummus – roasted red pepper, lemon and coriander, that sort of thing – three if purchased from a deli rather
than a supermarket. But the true bonus points were earned by those picnickers who had expended a little more effort on their Middle Eastern dips.

‘Now wait, wait.’ Holding my hand, Matt led me on a determined detour towards a family seemingly dressed straight out of the Boden catalogue. ‘Signs are good, very good. Yup,
yup, here we go. Proper wicker picnic hamper, tick. Assortment of tartan rugs, tick. Kilner jars and proper cutlery – I feel some serious points coming on.’

We slowed our pace once we neared them, the better to spy on their lunchtime spread. Matt pretended to be looking for something on the ground, and I helped him. Half crouched in the grass, we
crept closer, like ineffective and highly visible reconnaissance spies on Operation Hors d’Oeuvre.

‘Linus, hummus!’ called the mother, holding out a pitta bread to a small boy who was far more interested in shovelling handfuls of crisps into his mouth.

‘Not hummus,’ he sulked, pushing her hand away.

‘Come on, darling,’ she said, her face falling. She waved the pitta bread as if that would make it more tempting. ‘Mummy made it especially.’

‘Bingo!’ hissed Matt, clutching at my hand for emphasis. ‘Double points for homemade.’

‘Not like it,’ insisted the little boy, his lower lip stuck out rebelliously.

‘Just try it, darling. Just a taste.’ She tried to catch him with her free hand.

Linus had other ideas and wriggled away from her, grabbing another handful of crisps as he went.

His mother sighed and turned to her husband, her shoulders slumping in defeat. She looked tired. ‘I don’t even know why I bother. You shouldn’t’ve let him at the crisps
so early.’

Her husband grunted, not looking at her, his attention held by the sports pages of his newspaper.

‘Charles, are you listening? I made this from the Ottolenghi book especially. I suppose you wouldn’t have cared if I’d just gone to Nando’s, would you?’