Unsuitable Men (2 page)

It had taken me years to learn how to deal with the names that appeared on the
Country House
masthead. Who would have guessed that the seemingly innocuous last name Featherstone was not
said as spelled, but rather ‘Fanshawe’? Or that Amanda’s PA, Catherine, insisted her name should be pronounced ‘Katrina’, just to fool plebs like me (everyone called
her Hurricane anyway, obviously, since she was prone to dramatics). Felix Appleby was known as Flickers. Natalia von Humboldt would answer to nothing but Noonoo, and it took me several months to
realize that my office-mate Ticky had actually been christened Victoria. There was always some apparently hilarious story behind such nicknames, usually unexplained as most of the staff had known
each other socially since infancy. If you escaped a nickname, it would be only because you exulted in a moniker so grand that no one would dare shorten it, literary editor Lysander Honeywell being
the prime example.

I had always suspected I’d got my first job here, straight out of university, because the former editor, Old Mr Betterton, whose family had owned the magazine for 150 years, mistakenly
believed my unusual name marked me out as one of them. He would never have imagined that my mother chose to call me Aurora after the princess in
Sleeping Beauty.
And not the Grimm’s
fairy tale either; Mum was strictly Disney-inspired. Since Mr Betterton was always quite happy to take people on surface appearance, he didn’t dig especially deep in our twenty-minute
interview – much of which I suspected he couldn’t actually hear, as his hearing aid whistled alarmingly throughout. Nor did he, I surmised, actually read the CV which revealed that my
education came courtesy of the state rather than a trust fund. It was only when I’d been working at the office for a year that I overheard him tell another member of staff that it was his
belief Rory Carmichael might not be, after all, one of the Norfolk Carmichaels.

By the time Ticky returned to our shared office my computer was on and I didn’t even need to pretend to be buried in work to avoid her questions; there were 167 emails piled up from
yesterday and Ticky, true to form, although cc’d on most, had not dealt with a single one of them. Technically, as features assistant, Ticky reported to me. But she spent much of her time
‘networking’ with Amanda’s tacit approval, taking long lunches, skipping off at five to meet ‘contacts’ (aka old schoolfriends) for cocktails, leaving the office every
Friday lunchtime to head out to the country for the weekend or breakfasting at Simpson’s-in-the-Strand with aged and wealthy godfathers who Amanda believed might be useful to
Country
House
if they might be persuaded to give us access to their rural residences. Ticky claimed this hectic schedule left her too exhausted to deal with the more mundane demands of her job and
somehow, despite my being deputy features editor, most of these landed in my in tray.

I knew it wasn’t worth telling tales on Ticky’s workshy ways; she would be here at the magazine only until she found a chinless husband to whisk her off to her own country house.
I’d seen it happen to both of her predecessors. The job was nothing but an interesting diversion for her, with a salary that just bumped up her generous monthly allowance from the bank of
Mummy and Daddy.

I must have been looking in her direction because Ticky’s head suddenly twisted away from her computer screen.

‘Ready to talk yet, Roars?’ she asked. ‘Maybe a drink after work?’

‘No thanks,’ I said, turning back to my work.

‘Is it because you’re skint?’ asked Ticky. ‘Because I am, like, totes happy to stand you a drink. I mean, February’s depressing enough without not being able to
afford to drown your sorrows.’

‘I can afford a glass of wine, thanks very much, Ticky,’ I said crossly.

I supposed I should have been grateful to her for offering, but the not-so-subtle implication that I was an impoverished prole was hard to take. Sometimes I felt like most of the staff at
Country House
regarded me as some kind of a charity project, like an African orphan they’d all adopted to give a chance at a better life. Meaning a life like theirs, of course; none of
them could imagine that I might be perfectly contented with my own non-posh existence. Noonoo never understood that I turned down her offers of cast-off pashminas not out of pride, but because I
wouldn’t be caught dead in one.

The truth was, while I was desperate for a glass of wine – even right now, first thing in the morning – I wasn’t ready to talk to anyone about Martin. I hadn’t even
called my mum yet. I knew in the sitcom version of my life I should have been sitting on a pub sofa surrounded by my girlfriends, having the ‘All men are bastards’ conversation, but was
it worth gathering together my far-flung university friends for what was probably a false alarm? It wasn’t like we were all as close as we had been when we were living in each others’
pockets in our mouse-infested student house in Warwick. I knew we were all still there for each other even if our meeting up had become a twice-yearly affair, but I hadn’t spoken to any of
them in months. And, if I was completely honest, I’d always felt that the girls hadn’t quite taken Martin to their hearts. Telling them about our fight now might just prejudice them
against him later.

Ticky interrupted, refusing to give up. ‘You, like, can’t keep it all inside for ever, Roars.’ Her facial expression suggested a selfless altruism that was belied by the
impatient rapping of her pen on the desktop, as if she was marking out the seconds until I cracked.

‘You’ll be absolutely the first to know when I’m ready to talk about it, Ticky,’ I lied. She nodded in satisfaction. Right, I thought. It will be a cold hard day in hell
when I find myself so short of friends that I need to confide in you, Ticky Lytton-Finch, you over-entitled emotional parasite.

But that was before the email arrived from Martin. My heart leapt into my throat. Had he reconsidered so soon? Did he want me to come home? My overnight bag sat, zipped and packed, in my room at
Auntie Lyd’s, ready to return the moment he gave the word.

Dear Rory, the email said:

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

‘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.