The Perfect Widow. A.M. Castle
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friendless and invisible.
So I was surprised, one night, to see her in stacked heels with chunky ankle straps, far from the pure lines and vertiginous height of the stilettos she normally favoured. Perhaps I wasn’t the only chameleon in town.
I’d worried about her, once she’d got the sack, but of course she’d found a job within seconds of leaving. Who wouldn’t snap her up? She was with an ad agency now, and her clothes seemed to be edging out to match. Nothing crazy, just a zing of colour, a bag by a bad-boy designer. It disconcerted me. I understood why it was imperative that I reinvent myself, but Jen? She’d been perfect as she was. I’d seen her as the fixed star in my firmament, an ideal to aspire to, a goal I was – sometimes – close to reaching. But if Jen herself had to change, what did that mean for less perfect mortals like me? Was there nothing but constant messing and fixing ahead? Would I never really know what I was aiming for, let alone attain it?
It turned out, of course, that she’d fallen for one of the account directors, all flash car and expense account lunches. Perfection wasn’t enough; now she had to be trendy with it. We were all just lumps of clay when it came to getting our man. My mother had been the same, bending over backwards for whatever lowlife had had her that week.
I didn’t know it then, but the germ of a resolve was forming, as I sat at the bar with Jen, sluicing my week away with white wine spritzers. I’d always have more work to do than anyone else to fit in, make the grade. That I accepted. It was my fault, the price I’d be paying in perpetuity for being my mother’s daughter, and for daring to try to escape that life sentence. And though I was willing to tweak the externals as far as they needed to go, I now promised myself that, inside, I’d be true to myself. Whoever that was.
I came to love those evenings, chucking Chardonnay on my own troubles, sighing along with Jen’s non-existent worries, pretending to take them seriously. She dithered endlessly about which dishes to cook for her dinner parties, stressed about the nuances of who’d said what to whom at the agency. I knew that these things didn’t matter, they were tiny glitches in an otherwise perfect life.
Sometimes it amused me to enter into them with Jen, pretend that I cared whether she served watercress soup or rhubarb fool. But part of me was always leaning back from the table, chair tilted on two legs in the way people used to warn me about at school, as if toppling was the thing I had to fear. I couldn’t help but be angry that I was forever shut out of feeling such mundane concerns. How could I care about gravadlax, when I knew that I was worthless? And how could Jen be hanging on for my opinion? If she cared what I thought, that meant she was worthless too. It was a spiral of nihilism that no one wanted to know about or go down, least of all me. So I’d push it away, lean forward, and debate liver pâté versus smoked duck starters as though my life depended on it.
Jen knew, of course, about my passion for Patrick. How could she not? Twice a day, more often if he went out for lunch, I’d been transformed right in front of her eyes from the reasonably together, elegant young woman I’d fashioned in her likeness, into a tongue-tied, beetroot-blushing idiot. She didn’t need to be Hercule Poirot to realise something was afoot.
‘Made your move yet?’ she’d josh me every time we met, knowing the answer would be a mumbled negative. ‘Come on, Lou. You’ll be old and grey by this rate. Or he’ll get snared by someone else.’
This was my dread. That, during the many hours of the day when Patrick wasn’t under what I thought of as my roof, he’d wander into the clutches of another. I couldn’t bear the thought.
Jen was patient, talking through strategies with me, week after week. We were like chess grandmasters, trying to outwit Deep Blue. Would that scenario work, or was this the way forward? It was much more time-consuming than our actual jobs.
I was the one who came up with the idea. I’d move off the desk, into Patrick’s department. It was a measure of how desperate I was at this point. The desk was, without a doubt, the best part of my life – apart from these sessions with Jen – and I wanted to hang on to it like a wino clutching their last can of Special Brew. On the other hand, I was getting nowhere with Patrick; if I was more colleague than underling, and in his own space instead of marooned out in reception, surely something would give?
Jen was unconvinced. Did this reflect doubt in my abilities to hold my own in the inner office? I’d like to think not. But then, she’d never dared try it herself. As we both knew, she was less flexible than me. I seriously doubted she’d ever have been as much of a whizz with our current comms package as I now was, even if that manual hadn’t gone walkabout. And she had that very ordinary failing, of believing that if she couldn’t do something, no one else could. Least of all her erstwhile junior.
Sometimes I thought she might still have a soft spot for Patrick herself. She’d sat up straighter when he was around. But then, of course I could see why. Her own boyfriends – she always had one on the go – were generally so wet, I felt like handing them a towel. Nothing wrong with them, they just didn’t measure up to Patrick. Then along came Tim from the ad agency, the one she’d become trendy for.
On paper, Tim was great. Tall, solvent. An account director. He was, she whispered, ‘so artistic’. I assumed that meant he did strange stuff in bed. He certainly looked a bit more edgy than her previous numbers. Enough to get her reconsidering her wardrobe, at least. But at my age, I felt I was looking for a lot more than he could offer. Even Jen, after the initial thrill wore off, started treated him like a mildly disappointing pet she’d somehow got lumbered with, at least in our chats. I couldn’t understand it. She was only five years older than me. Surely she should be living a little, before she settled?
But it cut me to the quick when she turned up to All Bar One with an extra glow about her. I was just wondering what it was, and how I could get it – new moisturiser, special eye shadow? – when she flashed her left hand at me. There it was, a rock of a ring. I’d thought she was wasting her time with Tim, and hoped I was the one getting it right, wanting more. But the sight of Jen’s diamond cluster made me realise I wanted one too.
Obviously I didn’t want Tim. And I didn’t envy Jen at all, being stuck with him for life. But I did immediately buy into all that wedding stuff. Well, it’s inevitable, isn’t it? Every little girl is brought up on a solid pink diet of handsome princes, ballgowns, fairy godmothers and, crowning it all, the massive fuck-off wedding at the end. I hadn’t had a lot, growing up, but my mother had always been willing to stick a DVD on, keep me occupied while she got up to … whatever. I’d more or less taught myself to read, freeze-framing the credits of Cinderella.
Part of me knew the whole idea was seriously flawed. Relationships didn’t last. I only needed to look at my mother to see that writ large. But the fact that her own romantic quest had been never-ending, despite the pitiful results, showed me how hard-wired the desire for a happy-ever-after was. As a young girl, I’d sneaked books of fairy tales out of the school library and read them under the covers at night, Matilda-style. And I still loved a bit of chick lit. Who doesn’t? From Sophie Kinsella all the way back to Jane Eyre, the idea was the same. Man equals happiness. Once you’ve got rid of the madwoman in the attic.
I would have questioned it more if every cell in my body weren’t crying out for Patrick. If I had him, oh, if I did, my troubles would be over. I knew that, and no one could tell me any different. I’d seen the kindness behind his confidence, you see. He had the most beautiful manners, the way he always held the big glass doors open for colleagues. He had charm, at ease with everyone from the chairman of the company to the security guard. And he was fun. He told the best jokes, he set the tone.
And, on the rare occasions when he was alone, he changed the energy in the building as soon as he set foot in the door. I knew, before looking up, when he’d arrived in the mornings. Something changed in the very air of the place. There was a new feeling of urgency, full of promise. He usually stayed much later than I did – he was hard-working as well! – but if he ever left before me, the life went out of the building the moment the door swung closed on his sharp suit.
There were other men around who were confident, some who were good-looking too. But there was no one who combined it all like