The Mistake I Made (23 page)

‘Not the male kind.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I can’t stand that “This is Mummy’s new friend” crap. Or, “George, come and meet your Uncle Henry.” It’s bad for kids.’

He regarded me as if to say I was being over the top, overprotective of George, and so I told him, in a whisper-shouting kind of way, that since he was not a father, he had no real grounds to air his opinion on my parenting decisions.

For a second he appeared angry. It was fleeting, though. The kind of short-lived surge you experience when cut off in traffic, before realizing you actually know the old guy in the car in front.

‘Just five minutes,’ persisted Henry.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I can’t. Sorry.’

‘I want to see where you live.’

‘And I’d rather you didn’t.’

At that moment Celia got up from the bench seat and toddled across the front lawn, hands on hips. ‘Would you two love birds care for a glass of Pimm’s?’

‘Not for me, thanks,’ replied Henry quickly. ‘I’m driving. And Roz has just offered to treat me to one of her famous coffees.’

Celia’s face dropped. ‘Perhaps next time,’ she said, and Henry threw Celia his most charming smile, saying, ‘Definitely. Wouldn’t miss it.’

He turned back around, and his eyes were alive with mischief.

So I pushed open the door.

‘The lounge,’ I said flatly, and gestured for Henry to go on in.

I turned and saw that Celia hadn’t moved. She was still in the same spot on the lawn. ‘Sorry,’ I mouthed to her silently, ‘do you mind terribly?’, feeling bad when I saw how dejected she looked.

‘Not at all,’ she blustered, recovering herself. ‘Go! Enjoy!’ and then: ‘He’s terribly handsome, Roz,’ she whispered, her tone now girlish and conspiratorial. ‘Is he a keeper?’

Henry had wandered through to the dining room. ‘I see you’re going for the minimalist look.’

‘Listen, if you going to be critical—’

He put his finger to his lips. ‘I’m not. But Roz, you don’t have any furniture. What on earth happened?’

‘Oh, you know. Stuff.’

‘Have you just moved in?’ he asked.

‘Not exactly. I had a visit from the bailiffs. Anyway, do you still want that coffee?’

He tried to smile sympathetically but wasn’t entirely sure if I was pulling his leg. ‘Let me,’ he said, and he moved towards the kitchen. ‘You sit down’ – he cast his eyes around the room – ‘you sit down there … on that box.’

I stayed where I was. My sandals were starting to pinch, so I removed them and stood in my bare feet.

A moment later he reappeared. ‘Cups?’

I shook my head. ‘Just what’s soaking in the sink.’

‘It’s like my student days all over again,’ he said brightly. ‘Tea out of a glass, vodka out of a bowl.’

I followed him into the kitchen. The balls of my feet made a soft, thwacking sound on the linoleum as I moved. ‘What did you study?’ I asked.

‘Chemical engineering.’

‘Shouldn’t you have a job at, like, ICI, or something?’

He nodded. ‘You’re right. I should.’

‘But instead you …?’

‘Piss about in insurance two days a week.’

‘What do you do when you’re not working?’

‘Read, mostly,’ he said.

‘Why?’

He laughed. When he realized I wasn’t joking, he considered my question. ‘Do you know what,’ he said, ‘if you’d asked me that a year ago, I’m not sure I could have answered. I certainly don’t read to escape, or as some self-improvement exercise, if that’s what you were thinking.’

I shrugged. ‘I wasn’t thinking that.’

‘I’ve always enjoyed reading,’ he explained. ‘I’ve always found myself wanting to pick up a book without really questioning the reason. Except last year I read a review of a book by John Malkovich.’

‘I didn’t know he was a writer,’ I said.

‘I’m not sure that he is. The
review
was by John Malkovich, not the book.’

‘My mistake.’

‘Actually now that I come to think of it, I’m pretty sure it was a reviewer pretending to be John Malkovich. Anyway, the book was
May We Be Forgiven
by A. M. Homes.’ He paused. ‘Do you know it?’

‘I don’t.’

‘No matter. It’s not important. It’s what he says in his review that highlights the reason I read. He says everyone is so dull nowadays. Basically, everyone’s so frightened of upsetting other people, there are no characters left any more. And when he sat down to read
May We Be Forgiven
, he was at last spending time with someone
interesting
. He found the main character
so
interesting, so compelling, he couldn’t wait to get back to the book. In answer to your question, I think that’s why I read.’

‘Because people are dull?’

‘Yes. You have nice teeth by the way.’

‘Thank you.’

He realized at this point that there was not enough water in the kettle, by the sound it was making. Filling it at the sink, he said, casually, ‘So, bailiffs. That’s kind of a big deal. How did that happen?’

‘I spent more money than I had. And I was left in a bit of a mess by my ex-husband. He ran up quite a few debts in my name.’

‘Ah, yes. I remember. Shitty thing to do. You don’t seem too upset about it, if you don’t mind my saying.’

‘I was. But what’s the point? I picked him, after all. At first I spent a lot of time blaming, back in the beginning, before I realized it wasn’t going to get me out of the trouble I was in. No one was going to come along and say, “Do you know what? You are so totally right. It’s all Winston’s fault.” And besides, there are a hell of a lot of people more compromised than me. But I should have handled it better than I did. Anyway,’ I said, ‘things are easier now. The worst is over. I’ve managed to climb out of the hole I was in and things are starting to look up.’

‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘I admire you for that.’

I looked away.

‘Do you like your job?’ he asked.

‘I like parts of it. I enjoy offering relief to a person in pain, it’s just it takes up—’

‘All of your time?’

‘Yeah.’

I went on to explain how my own clinic had folded but that I still hankered after working for myself again one day.

‘So why don’t you?’ he asked. ‘Why not just go it alone again?’

‘There is an opening to do just that, but I’m scared. I made a hash of it last time and ended up working ridiculous hours because I couldn’t say no to people. And then I let them down anyway because of my irresponsibility.’

‘You’re not irresponsible,’ he said. ‘You bring up a child, alone, whilst working full time, with very little help from anyone, from what I can gather. How is that irresponsible?’

‘That’s kind of you to say,’ I replied. ‘But people take rather a different viewpoint when—’

He waved my words away with his hand as if to imply:
What do they know about anything?
He said, ‘I read recently that seventy-one per cent of people dislike their jobs. That’s a lot of dissatisfied people spending their lives doing something they don’t like.’

‘Do you like yours?’ I asked.

‘Not especially, but I only work two days out of seven. I reckon you could do pretty much anything for two days a week. Of course, we were told that, with the advent of all the labour-saving devices, everyone would be on a three-day week by now. That never quite happened, though.’

‘Why do you think that is?’

‘They need to keep us out of mischief,’ he said. ‘What would happen if we were suddenly let loose with all that free time? There could be anarchy.’ He smiled. ‘There will always be some people who want to work all day. Let them, I say, and leave the rest of us in peace. Naturally, there are
some
people who can’t seem to understand why I would choose to earn less and work less. Because wealth is the only indicator of success nowadays, and so on.’

Winston, too, went through a protracted anti-commercialism phase. Giving long speeches about autonomy, the misunderstood Luddites, the myth that a rewarding life is to be had through hard work.

The trouble was, he still kept on buying stuff.

I asked Henry who he meant when he said
some
people had a problem with his choices, and he replied, ‘Scott Elias.’

I shifted my weight to my other foot.

He said, ‘You’ve met Scott, I assume?’

‘Hmm-mm, a couple of times.’

‘Total wanker,’ he said. ‘I can’t understand why Nadine stays with him. Well, I suppose I can. The kids, and all that. But still.’

‘You don’t like him,’ I said, my tone neutral, my expression neither one thing nor the other. And he frowned, before saying, ‘What’s to like?’

‘I can see how you might not see eye to eye.’

‘I don’t see eye to eye with him,’ he said, ‘because he’s a dickhead.’

‘Not because he’s loaded? You’re not jealous of his money?’ I asked playfully.

‘That’s the thing: take away the money and look at the man. What’s left? Nothing. Has he ever said one funny or interesting thing in your company?’

I didn’t answer.

‘I mean, what does he do?’ he said. ‘What does he actually care about? Scott’s got all that wealth, and what does he do with it? Buys objects. That’s it.’

‘You’re suggesting he should save the world?’

‘I’m suggesting he could do something useful. The guy shafts everyone he comes into contact with.’

‘In what way?’ I asked.

‘In every way. He has to push everything, he can’t let go. He can’t stand to lose a penny.’

‘Really?’ I said doubtfully. ‘He seemed pretty generous to me. My sister seems to think so, anyway.’

Henry laughed. ‘Oh yeah, Scott the nice guy. Scott’ll bring the wine, he’ll pay the bill. But, I’m telling you, he doesn’t put his hand in his pocket unless it’s tax deductible. He doesn’t spend one penny of his own money. Everything comes out of his business. Every so-called generous thing he does goes down as a business expense.’

I immediately thought about billing Scott for services rendered. He’d told me he had a hard time scraping the cash together. Which had been hard to believe.

‘Hurry up with that coffee,’ I said.

‘He’s got to beat the system,’ Henry continued, unabated. ‘He’s a great example of greed gone nuts … never enough, never enough. He takes it all for himself and he puts nothing back. And he has a wicked dark temper.

‘Honestly,’ said Henry, ‘Scott Elias is never happy unless he’s screwing someone.

26

SO I WAS
a business expense.

I had no right to be bitter about this – what difference did it make how Scott funded our encounters?

And yet, oddly, I was. What Scott received from me in the way of ‘services’ was essentially free. By lying, by cooking the books in this way, he was able to fund our encounters with money he would have had to pay in tax to the Inland Revenue. So he could sleep with me as many times as he wished, and, as Henry pointed out, it wouldn’t cost him a penny.

Should I have been a little insulted by this? Probably not. But I was. And I couldn’t help but wonder how else Scott manipulated his financial statements to his own ends.

I never really bought Scott’s excuse of being unable to get enough cash together to pay me. Had he set up this invoicing arrangement so that he could in fact
delay
paying me? I was still waiting to be paid for our last encounter. Was he holding back the payment on purpose, so he had more control of the situation? Had more control of
me
?

It was now the weekend. Saturday morning. We were at George’s swimming lesson, which was kindly paid for by Dylis. He was level five, which meant he could swim three strokes, float, dive down for a brick, but not actually swim very far. Not his fault, nor the teacher’s actually, it was the result of the municipal pool closing a few years ago when it ran out of money. Now the children of South Lakeland had to learn to swim at various hotel ‘spas’. This wasn’t ideal, since the pools were generally only ten metres long and, occasionally, a disgruntled guest would object to sharing the space with the kids
when they had paid good money to be here
, and the children would have to get out. Lesson over.

Today there was just one elderly lady doing breaststroke – head out of the water, her body almost vertical, not really going anywhere but smiling all the same. She was enjoying the children as they tried their hardest to stay afloat on their backs: skinny white torsos bobbing, heads colliding.

I sat at the small café bar area with my laptop open. Though it was only ten thirty, there was the smell of chips and cooking oil rather than chlorine hanging heavy in the air. At the table next to me were two mothers. They were regulars whom I saw every other Saturday. One (Gail, I think) had ginger highlights – the hand-painted type applied with a brush; the other changed her hair colour from week to week. They spent the entire lesson hunched over, faces inches apart, eyes narrowed, discussing Gail’s divorce. Occasionally, I’d hear the tell-tale words and phrases that surrounded a break-up (Relate, co-parenting … and: ‘I made a roast dinner twice a week for that ungrateful bastard. They live on fish fingers when they’re with her. Lazy bitch’) so I knew to give them a wide berth.

I craned my neck upon hearing spluttering, a child having inhaled too much pool. When I saw it wasn’t George, I went back to punching in my bank details, having tapped into the hotel’s free Wi-Fi.

My balance was the same.

Scott’s last payment had still not arrived.

I chewed on my thumbnail. It wasn’t like I could call up the company secretary: ‘That invoice I sent you? The fake one? Yes, can you please pay it?’

And I didn’t want to call Scott.

I was hoping to avoid him for a few days. Let the dust settle after my date with Henry. Which Scott had been none too happy about, and I sensed he might want to interrogate me over it.

Henry had pressed to see me again and I had agreed. I’d said I would call him but, as yet, I hadn’t picked up the phone.

I liked him. I really liked him. But the timing was oh-so-shitty. Why couldn’t he have entered my life in a month’s time, when I was rid of Scott? When my debts were repaid?