Past Imperfect

‘Can we stop for a moment?’ said Je

‘Nonsense. We’re loving being here.’ But of course it wasn’t nonsense and we weren’t loving it. I was, as I have mentioned, very fond of Je

Of course you want so much to say that. Or at the very least to tell them to grow up or drop dead, or to open their eyes to the fact that the Fifties are over. But you don’t. My late mother would have said ‘they’re just jealous, darling’ and maybe they are, a bit, even when they don’t know it. But I am jealous, too. Jealous that their living never requires them to make an ass of themselves at the end of the pier at a shilling a go, which is exactly what it feels like most of the time. In any life, in any career, only people who’ve made the same journey understand each other completely. Mothers want advice from other mothers, not from childless social workers, cancer sufferers need to hear from survivors of cancer, not from the doctors who cure it, even victims of a scandal will only really want to compare notes with some other politician or celebrity who has similarly gone down in flames. This was the bond that Je

‘Is he always like this?’ I asked. I felt that her honesty in thanking me for coming merited a bit of straight talking, although, as the words left my mouth I wondered if I hadn’t overstepped the mark.

But she smiled. ‘Not when he’s asleep.’ Her expression developed into an ironic laugh. ‘I can’t decide whether he was the same when we first married and I was so young and so insecure that I mistook his pomposity for knowledge and his patronising for instruction, or whether he’s got worse.’

‘I think he must have got a bit worse,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure Helen Keller would have married him if he’d been as he is now.’

She laughed again, but still her laugh was sad. ‘I wish we’d had a child,’ she said, but then caught my look. ‘I know. Everyone thinks it would have solved everything and everyone is wrong.’

‘Don’t ask me. I’m the sad old bachelor who could never commit.’

‘I just think, with him, it would have shored him up. Allowed him that bat squeak of immortality that children bring. Or even if he’d just succeeded at something convincingly. Because he never really has.’

‘He lives very well for a failure.’

She shook her head. ‘It’s all inherited.’

This surprised me. ‘Really? I hadn’t got him down for a Trustafarian.’

She knew what I was saying and she wasn’t offended. ‘It’s not old money. All that stuff about the Montagus is bollocks. It isn’t even our real name. His father arrived from Hungary after the uprising of 1956. He started as a lorry driver, built up a transport business and sold out in the mid Nineties. Tarquin’s his only child. He was a lovely man, actually. I doted on him, but Tarquin used to keep him hidden, so none of our friends were allowed to meet him. Now he wants you to think the money is the remains of an ancient fortune, amplified by his own recent success. It’s neither. But I expect you knew that.’

I didn’t confirm this, as it seemed superior and smug. ‘It’s rather a romantic fantasy, in a way,’

‘It can’t last for much longer.’ She sighed wearily at the thought of impending collapse. ‘The whole thing costs far more than either of us realised and there’s very little coming in, now we’ve tied it all up in the house. I write my books so at least we can eat and go to the theatre, but I’m not sure how long that’ll keep us above the waterline. He’s a hopeless architect, you know. He gets taken on for particular jobs now and then, when a practice needs some extra help, but nobody ever asks him to stay.’

‘Would you?’

This time she laughed out loud. ‘Perhaps that’s it. Perhaps he’s a fabulous architect but anathema to have in the office.’

‘So what are you going to do?’

Which made her stop laughing. ‘I don’t know. Everyone says I should leave him, most of all my mother, which would have astonished her and me if anyone had predicted such a thing twenty years ago, but the odd thing is, in a fu

‘Except us.’

‘Except fools like you. And nobody wants to know us down here. I’ve seen them literally roll their eyes when we walk into a room. I somehow feel I can’t leave him open to attack, when it’s so obvious to everyone but him that he can’t protect himself.’

As often as I am reminded that love, like everything else in this world, comes in many different shapes and sizes, I can still be amazed by some of the forms it takes. ‘I don’t think you’re mad. It’s your life,’ I said.

‘I know. And it isn’t a dress rehearsal. But even if I don’t add up to much in the end, the fact is I took him on, nobody forced me, and I have to see it through. I suppose that sounds like a quote from G. A. Henty.’

‘It sounds like something only a very decent woman would say.’ She blushed and at that moment Bridget reappeared at the fence. ‘Please come. If he doesn’t stop talking about the wine we’re going to drink I swear to God I’ll break a bottle of it over his head.’ So saying, she relieved Je