Rosie Meadows Regrets... Read online

  We’d met in Ireland, also at a house party, but this time it was very much a legitimate working weekend for me, as the cook, the hired help. It wasn’t the sort of thing I usually did, I mostly cooked in London, working with a friend who had her own catering business, but an agency had rung at the last minute and begged me to take the job because some other girl had dropped out and the clients were apoplectic with rage. This, in itself, should have been enough to set alarm bells ringing, but instead I said, ‘Oh all right, I’ll do it,’ and the following morning saw me setting off across the Irish Sea singlehandedly to cook breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner for fifteen guns and their wives.

  Now under normal circumstances I wouldn’t be nearly such a mug, but the truth was I was dying to get away from London and any excuse would do. I badly needed to bolt. You see, I’d just come to the end of a very one-sided relationship – heavy on my side and feather-light on his – with an extremely attractive landscape gardener called Rupert, who for the last nine months I’d considered to be the most delectable thing in faded corduroy trousers. Twinkly-eyed, tousled-haired, fatal sexy grin – he was the whole delicious package and I was smitten. True, I only managed to see him on Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday nights but that was because pressing tree surgery business took up the other evenings. He was a very busy man. Wednesday evenings therefore found me at a comparatively loose end, and if there was nothing on the telly, I tended to while away the hours pumping iron in the local gym.

  One particular Wednesday I was down at my club as usual, keeping one eye out for royalty and another on the rampant cellulite, pounding away on my immobile bike, when the girl on the adjacent bicycle, with whom I’d previously only been on smiling terms, suddenly struck up a conversation.

  ‘Fancy a break?’ she puffed, pink leotard dark with perspiration.

  ‘Oh – yes!’ I gasped back piteously.

  Needing no further prompting, we shot off to the cafe together. As we sat there in a window seat, basking in the beams of hazy evening sunshine which bounced off our sweaty heads, happily guzzling our high-calorie hot chocolates, we naturally, as strangers do, swapped our most intimate details. Fat, of course, was first and foremost on the agenda. Fat on thighs, fat on bottoms, fat on tummies and amid cries of ‘Oh, don’t be silly, my bottom’s much bigger than yours!’ we struck up a cosy camaraderie. Hair removal came next – waxing on my part, electrocution on hers – and then, of course, men. And, strangely, it transpired she had a similar problem. You see, it turned out that my new friend was also in love with a man she could only pin down to certain nights of the week, namely Monday, Friday and Saturday. Coincidentally, this man was also a tree surgeon and funnily enough … he was also called Rupert. I remember us staring at each other incredulously, skins forming on our cooling hot chocolates as slowly the respective pennies dropped with a resounding ‘clunk’. Leg warmers tightened, trainers creaked, headbands shrank with horror until at last we found our voices and shrieked –

  ‘No!’

  ‘I don’t believe it!’

  ‘How could he!’

  ‘He couldn’t !’

  ‘He bloody has!’

  ‘The BASTARD!’

  Quite a lot more outraged screaming and shouting took place before we stood up as one, threw our coats over our damp leotards and strode out into the night.

  Tight-lipped we hailed a taxi and trundled round to Draycott Terrace where, of course, being Wednesday, we found him in, having his one night of the week off games. His bemused flatmate let us in and there was Rupert, stretched out on a sofa, watching EastEnders, eating an Indian takeaway and quietly picking his nose. Together we stood over his astonished form and told him, in graphic detail, exactly where he could put his trees and what sort of surgery we thought he really needed. Pink Leotard even went so far as to tip his Vindaloo into his corduroy crotch, which I thought was a nice touch.

  That was the Wednesday. On Thursday I was still incensed, but by Friday the misery had well and truly set in. It was the end of me and Rupert and it was also, I determined, the end of my flirtation with the main squeeze of the species. You see, up until now I’d always eschewed these fast, glamorous men as being far too dangerous for me, my predilection always being for the sidekicks of life. Why, even at school, whilst other girls lusted after Napoleon Solo, I went for Ilya Kuryakin, while some screamed for Le Bon, I guitared with Taylor, and whilst some yearned for Bodie, I dreamed of Doyle. I’d felt happier that way, more comfortable, more at ease with my ever so slightly upper hand, and that’s how it should have stayed. Until Rupert. The main attraction, the sublime tree surgeon who’d felled me at the knees.

  Well, never again, I told myself firmly as I sobbed into the sofa in my flat that Friday night. Never, never again. It was back to the bargain basement for me, back to riffling through the rails hoping to find something more suitable, something someone else had cast aside maybe. Something a little bald, a little short, a little fat, a little thin – something I could do something with. And that’s where I found Harry.

  The agency had telephoned as I sobbed out my resolve into my cushion and I took the job out of sheer desperation.

  ‘It’s in Ireland,’ they pointed out.

  ‘I don’t care!’ I sobbed.

  ‘You’d have to leave tonight.’

  ‘Even better!’

  ‘You’ll be rushed off your feet.’

  ‘It’ll numb the pain!’

  And that was how it came to pass that the following day I found myself on the west coast of Ireland, standing at a vast wooden table in the middle of a huge old kitchen that looked like something out of Mrs Beeton, staring miserably at a dozen woodcock that all needed plucking, gutting and cooking, and with the firm promise of a dozen more to follow shortly.

  An hour and a half later with only three birds plucked, covered in feathers, guts and blood, and feeling decidedly ill and close to tears, I heard the crunch of tyres on the gravel outside. Glancing up, I saw a dirty old Land Rover draw up alongside the window. I remember thinking with horror – and a certain amount of mutiny – that if this was the other dozen birds appearing I’d either burst into tears or take the first ferry home, when out of the cab jumped Harry. He was wearing a rather smart lovat green shooting ensemble and bearing not six brace of woodcock but a bottle of champagne.

  He was a huge blond man, six foot five at least and very broad, but without the weight he’s carrying now. As he strode into the kitchen brandishing his bottle, it seemed to me the whole room went dark. I paused in mid-pluck, gazing up at this giant, waiting for yet more orders from on high. Instead, he took one look at my wobbly face and the feather-strewn kitchen, told me to go and wash my hands and face and he’d do the rest. True to his word, he sat down on a stool, dragged a bin between his knees and set about expertly de-fluffing the smelly beasts while I sat beside him sniffing and sipping my chilled champagne. I could have kissed him. And of course that’s all I should have done. Instead, I married him. Not just like that, of course, it was a few more months before I actually became Mrs Harry Meadows, but it was a fairly snap decision for such a momentous one.

  Looking back, I’m not at all sure it didn’t have a lot to do with my condition at the time of that very first meeting. I was so emotionally exhausted and pathetically grateful to this enormous, kindly – or so I thought – bear of a man, that I think I decided there and then that I’d been treated too shabbily for too long by too many smooth-talking handsome bastards – one, actually, for all of nine months – and that this straightforward, capable, decent man would do very nicely, thank you. Let’s face it, I was rebounding like a cannon ball and I was flying faster than the speed of light. Someone had to catch me; it happened to be Harry.

  I told myself I liked his eyes – blue, can’t go wrong, Rosie – and his reassuring broad shoulders, and as far as I remember he made me laugh, which is strange, because he hasn’t since. If I’m honest, I also liked the fact that I was better looking than he was, which was
saying something actually, because at the time I was a good stone overweight and had just had an ambitiously short ‘elfin’ haircut which, considering I have neither the ‘elfin’ face nor the figure to back it up, resulted in me looking like a fat little pixie. But Harry saw none of this. I was blonde, I had beautiful green eyes – his words, not mine – my skin was peachy (ditto), I was voluptuous (the less said about that the better) and I was all his heart desired. Well. What could I say? If he was smitten then I could be too, and I sank back into the whole cosy relationship with a monumental sigh of relief. I didn’t have to try too hard, didn’t have to be too witty, too amusing, too beautiful, didn’t have to jump through any more hoops. It was like landing on a feather mattress after all those years of being Out There.

  He was older than I was (by about ten years), taller than me (by about a foot) and yes, okay, maybe he was a bit pompous, a bit pleased with himself and a teensy bit on the dull side, particularly when he’d drunk too much, which was more than occasionally, but my goodness who didn’t have their faults and he was, after all, a basically nice man, wasn’t he?

  I bit my lip and shifted angrily down to third as I took the bend too sharply at the Wandsworth roundabout. Harry lolled sleepily to one side, his head propped up against the window, mouth wide open, a tiny trace of dribble appearing at the side of it.

  Mummy, of course, had been delighted. She’d opened the front door, taken one look at the whopping great sapphire on my left hand and almost gone down on her knees and kissed the hem of his Barbour, she was so excited. Beaming widely, she’d taken him firmly by the arm and marched him straight into the sitting room to draw up a guest list for the wedding, and from then on it was like a bobsleigh ride to the altar. Mummy was at the helm and the telephone was rarely out of her hand.

  ‘He’s some sort of relation of Lord Something-or-other-of-Somewhere!’ I heard her squeak excitedly down the phone to her friend, Marjorie Burdett. ‘Imagine, if he dies, and then his cousin dies and then someone a bit further down the line dies, Rosie might even end up being a lady! She might end up doing even better than Philippa!’ This was almost too orgasmic for words and she dropped the telephone with a clatter on the reproduction hall table, because Philippa’s marriage, frankly, was hard to beat.

  Philippa was my elder sister. She was not only a beautiful, willowy, swan-like creature but also highly intelligent to boot. Some years back she’d taken time out from her hectic schedule at a London teaching hospital where she worked as an anaesthetist – oh yes, seriously intelligent – to come home for a local dance. It was here that she’d met, captivated, and consequently married – or ‘bagged’ as my mother so tastefully put it – an extremely rich local landowner who, according to Mummy, lived in ‘the only house in Gloucestershire really worth having, Marjorie!’

  Harry then, with his pretensions to nobility, summoned up all the latent suburban snobbery in my mother’s heart, and she went into overdrive the minute the engagement was announced. One day I was being whisked around Peter Jones to assemble my wedding list, the next she had me scrambling in and out of wedding dresses in Harrods, bullying the staff, reducing assistants – and sometimes me – to tears, dragging me into travel agents to check out the arrangements for the honeymoon, so that for one awful moment I was so confused I thought I was marrying my mother. All of this enthusiasm is perfectly normal in the mother of the bride, of course, but I couldn’t help thinking there was an element of about-bloody-time about it too, for as she never failed to remind me, I was in my late twenties. As late as you can get, in fact.

  The more the plans rolled on, the more she and Harry got on famously, with Mummy dribbling into her soup as snippets of well-connected friends and family fell from his lips. It didn’t seem to matter that Harry didn’t actually have a job, that he didn’t have much money, and that all he owned was a couple of small houses in Wandsworth and some mythical stocks and shares; the fact that he could mention Michael Heseltine in the same breath as the Duchess of Devonshire had my mother practically writhing on the carpet, kicking her heels and begging for more. I remember going upstairs with her one night after supper when Harry had regaled us with yet another close encounter with the late Laurens van der Post – so much easier for Harry if these friends were ‘late’, incidentally – and she actually squeezed my waist on the landing as she said goodnight.

  ‘You’ve done it, Rosie,’ she breathed, ‘you’ve really done it!’

  I stared at her in amazement, and I remember thinking, how odd. After all those years of disapproval, all those years of scruffy clothes and unsuitable friends and no ambition, of giving her nothing but disappointment, in one fell stroke I’d pulled it off. I’d won her approval and maybe even her love. And by what? By bringing home a complete stranger. I blinked at her and, funnily enough, I didn’t recoil, I didn’t scoff, I didn’t bolt in horror. I just looked into her excited shining eyes and basked contentedly in their glow. It was so easy, you see, and it made such a change not to be fighting her, not to be the rebel. I never thought it had bothered me that I hadn’t managed to please her as much as Philly had, or my brother, Tom, Philly’s twin, but that night I went to bed feeling ridiculously, some would say pathetically, happy.

  My father of course was another matter. His love had always been strong, upfront and unconditional and when he heard the news, he went very quiet.

  ‘Well, if you’re happy, love, then that’s all that matters,’ he said at length.

  ‘But you do like him, don’t you, Daddy?’ I asked anxiously.

  ‘Of course I do. Of course.’

  We’d been sitting together on the old bench by the greenhouse and I remember sensing the tone of his voice, turning quickly, guiltily almost, for more reassurance. But he’d already stood up. He gathered up his gardening gloves, his secateurs, tapped his battered old hat smartly down on his head and moved on, down to the vegetable patch at the bottom of the garden. His tall frame moved as quickly and deliberately as ever, but was it my imagination or was there a slight droop to those shoulders, a drag in his step?

  That was the first time I can recall being uncertain. The second time was just before I walked down the aisle. As I stood at the door of our village church on my father’s arm, I suddenly had this overwhelming urge to rip my headdress off and run like crazy for the nearest number 9 bus. I gritted my teeth and told myself it was just pre-match nerves, and a second later ‘The Queen of Sheba’ struck up and I raised my chin and swept down the aisle. The third wave of uncertainty came an hour or so later, at our wedding reception in my parents’ garden. It was the charmless Charlotte actually, who, incredibly tight and looking flushed and hot in a God-awful pink hat, had swayed up to me and brayed, ‘Gosh, I do think you’re marvellous to take on dear old Humpty, Rosie! How incredibly brave of you! Lord only knows what you’re in for!’

  ‘H-Humpty?’ I stuttered.

  ‘Yes,’ she laughed gaily. ‘An old nursery name. I expect you had one, didn’t you?’

  I didn’t, and I was tempted to add I hadn’t had a nursery either, but something more galling than this deprivation struck me smack between the eyes with all the force of a runaway truck. Good God. I’d married Humpty Dumpty. I’d married the stooge, the fat boy of the gang, and not only that, I’d been brave, selfless, done something no one else in their right mind had wanted to do. I remember standing there in my cream silk gown, staring blankly after Charlotte as she sauntered away, gripping my glass, the champagne already feeling flat in my hand.

  After that my world went slowly darker as little by little the truth emerged. I’d married a man who, at thirty-nine, was desperate to marry. I was the fourth cook in a row he’d come back to help pluck the woodcock. It was the fourth bottle of champagne, the fourth mop-up-your-tears-Cinderella routine. It was a standing joke, how Humpty tried to get his leg over. But this time – get this – this time, not only had he got it over, I’d actually married him too! Cue raucous laughter, howling mirth, hysteria, and – cut. Because,
wait a minute. How were they to know that I didn’t love him? How were they to know that it wasn’t a marriage made in heaven, eh?

  Sadly, though, I didn’t, and it wasn’t, so the joke was firmly on me. Because no sooner had I shaken the confetti from my hair than it became clear that Harry was not the man I’d imagined him to be. He wasn’t just harmless, he was foolish. He wasn’t solid, he was stationary – mostly lengthwise on a sofa with his eyes shut – and he wasn’t just a heavy drinker, he was – well, the less said the better. Instead, let’s move smartly on to the good news. My son, Ivo, precisely two years, two months old now, conceived on our honeymoon in India and born, funnily enough, nine months later. My darling boy – I smiled fondly over the steering wheel as I thought of him. My bright, blond, shining light who got me through my days, my marriage. The very epicentre of my world. For him, Harry – I glanced at him sideways – I thank you from the bottom of my heart. For him, I should be able to forgive you anything.

  As we drew up alongside our house in Meryton Road, I sat there in the dark, willing myself to feel something, to bring back, if not the love, at least the tenderness. Quietly I slipped my seat belt off and turned sideways in my seat. I gazed upon my sleeping husband. Try, Rosie. Try to summon up something. For Ivo. There must have been something there in the beginning, surely, some sort of magic. I reached out and stroked his hand.

  ‘Darling?’ I whispered.

  Not a flicker. On he snored.

  ‘Harry, darling, we’re home.’

  He smacked his huge chops and turned his face the other way.

  ‘Harry.’ I shook him. ‘Come on, it’s cold out here, wake up.’ I shook him a bit harder. ‘Come on, my love.’

  ‘Bugger off,’ he muttered.

  My hand froze on his.

  ‘Well, bugger you too, you stupid fat git!’ I roared.

  I slumped back in my seat. Yes, well, that had really brought back the magic, hadn’t it? Really summoned up the tenderness. I sighed. God, if only I’d married Mel Gibson, I’m sure I wouldn’t have had all this trouble. I looked at Harry, biting my thumbnail. I was sorely tempted to leave him there, to let him fight his own way out of the car at four in the morning, let him stagger up the frosty path, search hopelessly for his door key, wrestle with the latch, but I knew it was counterproductive. I’d only have to leap out of bed in the middle of the night to intercept him, to stop him crashing around and waking Ivo. I leaned over and found his ear.