Lydia
Lydia
Lydia couldn’t remember the last time she’d enjoyed herself so much. She doubted anyone would describe her as “the life and soul,” but she was definitely holding her own. For years, she’d felt horribly inadequate at dinner parties. She could always picture the hostess frowning over the seating plan, saying, Where on earth are we going to put the dull wife?
Lydia’s only topics of conversation revolved around houses and children—morphing over the decades from how to toddler-proof your plug sockets and which were the best primary schools in the area, to the horrors of basement conversions and persuading teenagers to revise for their GCSEs.
She was often sure she could see the eyes of her dinner companions glazing over within minutes of asking her “what she did.” On one memorable occasion, she’d been certain she’d heard the man on her left mutter, “Beam me up, Scotty,” halfway through her recollections of being a parent helper on a school trip to the zoo.
This evening, however, was proving different. She’d been reading a book called Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway for work, and had decided to step outside her comfort zone by telling a few anecdotes about the challenges she faced with her unruly senior citizens. To the entire table.
As she grew in confidence, aided by the rather fine Chablis Jeremy had brought from his extensive wine cellar, which Lydia suspected he loved more than her, her audience had laughed louder and louder. And they were, she was fairly certain, laughing with her, not at her.
Lydia had even been able to forget, for a while, the text that Jeremy had sent her last week. The one that read: I’ll be at the restaurant at 7. I’ve missed you xxx. They hadn’t arranged to meet at a restaurant that evening. They hadn’t, in fact, been out to a restaurant together for months. Not since her birthday, back in February. Jeremy had told her he’d be working late that evening.
That text had been swiftly followed by a second one: Sorry, darling. Sent you that text by mistake. It was for a colleague. Work dinner.
A colleague? A work dinner? So why I’ve missed you ? And the three kisses?
Lydia had managed not to fall apart in front of her senior citizens, who luckily hadn’t noticed anything was wrong, but those words had been circulating round her head ever since, while she examined them from every angle, searching for an explanation, a major plot twist, so the story didn’t end with her husband being a miserable cheat and a liar.
Jeremy stood up to go to the loo, and as he passed by her seat he leaned down to whisper in her ear. Was he proud of her for feeling the fear and doing it anyway? For entertaining his friends and colleagues with such aplomb?
“WIC,” he hissed, his breath heavy with brandy fumes. Lydia shrank back in her seat, her mood deflating like a sponge cake taken out of the oven too soon. WIC. Jeremy code for “Words in Car.” And those words, in her experience, were never good ones.
···
“What were you thinking, drinking so much?” Jeremy asked her from the darkness in the back of their black cab as they sped along the Embankment, the lights of Albert Bridge reflected in the river beside them like drowning stars. “It was utterly embarrassing.”
“ Everyone was drinking, Jeremy. Including you,” she replied. “I was just having fun. Letting my hair down for once. The last couple of weeks have been really stressful, you know, with all this council business. My job’s on the line, not to mention the well-being of all my seniors.” She could hear herself slurring a little. Perhaps she had had a bit too much to drink.
“Your job ?” said Jeremy, loading the noun with derision. “It’s hardly a job, Lydia. Your wages are lower than my expenses claim each month. They wouldn’t even cover the amount we spend on sauvignon blanc. Let alone Chateauneuf-du-Pape.”
“Surely that’s a reflection on how much you spend on wine, rather than my salary,” said Lydia, but Jeremy carried on as if she hadn’t spoken. Perhaps she hadn’t.
“And you’ve been so busy with your bunch of parasitic pensioners that you’ve let everything else go. We had pasta for dinner three times last week, and the house is a mess,” he said.
“Well, since we’re both working now,” said Lydia, determined to stand her ground, “perhaps you could help out with the cooking and the housework a little bit.”
Lydia couldn’t make out Jeremy’s expression as he stared resolutely ahead in the dark, but she could see his tense jawline and feel the indignation radiating from him in waves.
The cab pulled up outside their house, and Jeremy got out to pay the driver. Lydia waited in the warm, dark cocoon of the back seat, pulling her coat tight around her, putting off the inevitable ratcheting-up of the argument for as long as possible. As Jeremy walked toward the house, not even checking that she was following, she reached for the cab door handle.
“Don’t let him push you around, love,” said the driver in a comforting cockney accent, winking at her in the rearview mirror.
Buoyed on a sea of white wine and the kindness of a stranger, Lydia followed Jeremy into the cold, unwelcoming house, looked him dead in the eye, and said the words that had been hovering on the tip of her tongue for weeks: “Jeremy. Are you having an affair?”
Jeremy’s eyes slid away from hers, and he ran his hand through his hair, the way he always did when he was feeling on edge. Lydia absorbed every small detail of the scene in front of her, thinking perhaps she’d always look back at it as the moment her life had imploded.
Lydia wondered if Jeremy would crumple. Collapse into fits of tears and beg her forgiveness. Urge her not to break up their family. Promise to spend the rest of his life making it up to her.
He didn’t.
“Lydia,” he said, as he turned away from her and made his way up the stairs. “You’re drunk, hormonal, and delusional. Hopefully by the morning you’ll have pulled yourself together.”
Lydia stared at Jeremy’s retreating back, then at the magnetic knife rack on the wall, holding the gleaming steel Japanese kitchen knives Jeremy was so proud of. For a fleeting second, she pictured herself hurling one of those knives up the stairs, where it would lodge, up to the hilt, between Jeremy’s vertebrae.
Then she poured herself a glass of water, turned on the dishwasher, and went to bed. Jeremy lay facing away from her, eye mask on and earplugs in to protect himself from any further unwanted communication from his wife.
···
The “job” that Jeremy had dismissed so cruelly the night before was proving a great distraction. They weren’t discussing the elephant in the room—their threatened demolition. Nor were they doing any of Lydia’s carefully planned, council-approved activities. Instead, Art had introduced a new game called “Truth or Dare Jenga,” which, needless to say, didn’t tally at all with the instructions on the Jenga box. Whenever anyone knocked down the Jenga tower—which, given the number of arthritic fingers involved, happened remarkably frequently—they’d have to answer a question or do a forfeit. Some really quite shocking details about her club members had emerged over the past few sessions.
“Bugger! Balls! Bollocks!” said Ruby, as the tower of bricks crashed over the table, one landing in Lydia’s not-quite-empty teacup. Ruby looked so demure that it gave her liberal use of swear words much more impact.
“Truth or dare?” shouted Art, gleefully.
“Truth,” said Ruby, which was probably wise. Anna had chosen “dare” and they’d given her an orange plastic toy gun and a cowboy hat, pilfered from the nursery next door, then made her charge up to a pedestrian on her mobility scooter shouting, “Hands up! It’s daylight robbery!” They’d all watched from the window, giggling like schoolchildren.
“Where’s the most daring place you’ve had sex?” asked Art.
“Mmmm,” said Ruby, not showing the slightest embarrassment or reticence. “That would be my mother-in-law’s larder.”
“That doesn’t sound particularly dangerous,” said Daphne, dismissively. “Certainly not life-threatening.”
“You say that because you’ve never met my mother-in-law,” said Ruby. “For a start, it was filled with dead pheasant and grouse, hanging from the ceiling, covered in feathers and bleeding. And she never believed in use-by dates, so it was riddled with salmonella and E. coli. She was ferocious. She hated me for seducing her perfect only child, and never forgave him for marrying someone brown from Bangladesh, rather than a blonde from the local pony club. That was scandalous in the early nineteen-seventies, in the Home Counties. She was, apparently, the talk of the Women’s Institute.”
Ruby put her knitting needles down and covered her face with her hands, as if to block out the memory. Her dark, shoulder-length hair, streaked with silver, fell forward like a curtain. Her lap was filled with a nearly finished red-and-white hat. It was beautifully made, with intricate, neat stitches, but the proportions were entirely wrong. It could easily have covered four adult heads. Lydia wondered if she should point this out, but decided that now was not the time. Maybe Ruby just found the act of knitting therapeutic, and the end result hardly mattered at all.
“I’m sorry you had to deal with that, Ruby,” said William, reaching over to pat her arm. “Were you happy, though? You and your husband? Despite all the prejudice?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “We were married for nearly fifty years, and I always felt so loved. You know, every Monday he bought me flowers. Even when he was in the hospice, he asked one of the nurses to pick me a bunch from the garden. I still miss him every day.”
Lydia tried to remember the last time Jeremy had bought her flowers. Or made her feel loved. Was he buying flowers for someone else? The thought hit her like a punch in the stomach, making it hard for her to breathe.
“What’s the matter, Lydia?” said Art. And, as if he’d pulled her finger from a hole in the dam wall, all the words came gushing out in a confessional torrent.
“I think my husband’s having an affair, but he tells me I’m just being paranoid. ‘Delusional’ was the word he used. He says it’s the menopause. I’m hormonal and irrational. But hormones don’t send texts with love and kisses and restaurant invitations, do they? Perhaps I am going crazy? I just don’t know what to think anymore. I still don’t trust him, but now I can’t trust myself, either,” said Lydia.
The words stopped, replaced by a deluge of tears. This was awful. Humiliating. She was supposed to be in charge. A leader. Yet, here she was, falling to pieces in front of her seniors. Pauline had been right; she had no natural authority. She was totally unsuited to this job.
The thought made her cry even harder.
“Mmm. What you need is someone who can find out if he really is up to anything,” said Art, putting a scrawny arm around her heaving shoulders. “Someone who’s used to following people secretly. Perhaps someone with a few telephoto lenses. Do we know anyone like that?”
Lydia felt a second arm hugging her from the other side, as a voice said, “William Jenkins, retired paparazzo, at your service.”
“And me! Don’t forget me! I’m coming, too!” said Art. “Where William goes, I go.”