Chapter Fourteen
ALLEN
I fell in love with Annie the first time I saw her, but she was only thirteen, so I had to back off and wait.
She was my friend’s cousin, and she rarely visited his house, only for birthdays and such.
I saw her once a year at most. Then, when she was nineteen or so, I found her in a shady corner of the garden during her uncle’s fiftieth-birthday celebrations, and I told her she looked lovely. That was the beginning.
We spent a couple of years enjoying London, enjoying each other, and then we married.
Annie was training to be a nurse, and I was on the Partner program at John Lewis.
It was early days, and I wasn’t earning enough to pay rent for us immediately, so her parents said we could live with them and, frankly, I was delighted.
A cottage on Hampstead Heath with apple trees in the garden, an easy commute to Oxford Circus, a caring mother-in-law, a kind father-in-law, and of course my beautiful wife.
Her mother, Vivienne, took care of both of us so Annie didn’t have to raise a finger, and I liked it that way.
We were treated like a prince and his princess; I had my folded newspaper, my home-cooked meal, but I also had a wife who could spend all day having her nails painted, seeing friends for lunch, paying me surprise visits at work, when I’d whisk her upstairs to the café for a slice of cake or over the road to Cavendish Square Gardens for a cigarette or two.
And then the children arrived.
Jessamine came into the world looking as though she’d been in a street fight.
Then there was Jasper, who came into the world two years later looking like a ninety-year-old man.
And although of course I loved those children very much, I can’t say they did much to improve my existence.
You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone, as they say.
No more impromptu cake in the café; Annie was always stressed, always exhausted, even though, to be entirely honest, her mother—now widowed—did most of the childcare.
But still, finding time to do all the things she used to take for granted made her tense and unhappy.
By the time I’d been promoted enough times to be able to afford a nice little house for the four of us, Annie had grown somewhat addicted to the presence of her mother, always there to catch the shortfall, and I suppose I was a little addicted to it too, all that space in the middle of London.
I knew I could never afford to find us something as good elsewhere, so I spent my income instead on spoiling my family, on nice clothes and expensive toys, on jewelry for Annie.
I think, maybe, I felt that I needed to compensate for not providing a roof over my family’s head by giving them absolutely everything else.
I didn’t want to see anyone in my family do anything grubby or unpleasant.
I liked to see my children comfortably studying or watching children’s TV or playing with a ball or jumping on the trampoline or reading books.
I did not wish to see them scraping cold food off plates or sorting socks or polishing sandals.
Annie’s mother was happy to fulfil most of those duties, and what she didn’t manage, I took care of.
I wanted to see only contentment and relaxation when I came home from work.
Tidy shelves and clean hands and happy people.
You probably think I took advantage of my mother-in-law, but I promise you that wasn’t the case.
Vivienne loved to take care of everyone.
You’re probably thinking, what is this, the 1950s?
What about feminism? What about equal rights?
What sort of old fuddy-duddy were you? And frankly, you’d be right.
I was an old fuddy-duddy, but God I was happy.
There was only one thing that didn’t quite complete the picture.
My darling wife, after the birth of our second child, decided that sex was off the table.
Something happened to her inside parts, apparently, some sort of damage, which was fixed by a wonderful surgeon, but her confidence was irreparably dented, and she was scared of another pregnancy, as well as the physical discomfort of intimacy.
Of course I understood. Of course I did.
She told me I could take a lover. But I didn’t want a lover.
There was only one woman who would ever be my lover, and that was Annie.
Who else could possibly compare? So I would pay for sex, whenever it was convenient.
I visited young women in sad rooms in mansion blocks and over shops and had rough, impersonal sex with them.
For many years I was content to live like this.
But then Vivienne got ill and was less able to take care of Annie and the children.
She tired more easily; her joints hurt. And then she had a terrible fall in her sixties and everything went rapidly downhill after that; she was more like an eighty-year-old than a sixty-three-year-old.
She died in the year 2000, when she was only seventy.
One day shortly after she died, I came home to find Annie hanging laundry in the garden and it did not sit well with me.
I mentioned it to one of my regular girls.
Her name was Tulip, or at least that was her professional name.
Her real name, it turned out, was Sandra.
She was from the Isle of Wight and had fake breasts that were fashionable at the time, and a tattoo of Betty Boop on her forearm.
She said she’d look after us. She said she was good at housework, at cooking, she could serve us meals, take care of the children. She said she would take care of me too.
She said, and I always smiled wryly at the memory, that she would be our au pair girl.