Judy Siddons looked at Castle briefly and then back to Kennedy before continuing: “Yes, I agree — why on earth should a man and a woman, after four years of ignoring each other, suddenly proceed to start up a relationship?”
She paused again.
Kennedy wondered if she was expecting a reply to her question. He stole a quick glance around her extremely tidy flat; it was softly decorated and comfortably furnished. Since they first sat down — Kennedy and Castle on armchairs with Judy between them on a matching yellow sofa facing a country-style tiled fireplace — Castle had not taken his eyes off her for a second.
Kennedy hoped Castle wouldn’t try to answer her question.
He didn’t.
“Oh, I suppose we’re all vulnerable at certain times during our lives and during those periods... well, perhaps we all do things we wouldn’t necessarily consider at other times,” Judy eventually offered, flamboyantly ending the silence. “Coincidentally, it just happened that both Adam and I were vulnerable at the same time. I’d just finished a long-term relationship with a married man I was working with. After eight years, the penny finally dropped and I realised, and accepted, that he was never going to leave his wife.”
“What kind of business are you in, Ms. Siddons?” Kennedy asked, as Castle looked extremely irritated by the interruption.
“Well, at that period in my life I was working for EuroTravel, a travel agency. Goodness, I had a sweetheart of a job — I used to travel around the continent checking out locations and hotels for holiday packages my firm was considering putting together. Sadly, though, when I split up with the married man, it was, at least according to him, ‘just too awkward for both of us to continue in the same place of employment.’ So, he said, I had to resign. Why me, indeed? I should have just stayed and shamed him into doing something, but we don’t really need to get into that now. Since then I’ve been working as a PA in a merchandising firm. We grant licences to various firms for well-known cartoon characters. My job is undemanding, it’s strictly nine to five. I never take my work home with me and I get paid well.”
Castle shifted uncomfortably in his seat. In the room above they could hear the muffled sounds of the SOCO diligently going about their work.
“Anyway, when I got my new job,” Judy continued, wide-eyed and without batting her extremely long and dark eyelashes, “I’d a bit more time on my hands and I found myself around here, my flat, a lot more. I kept bumping into Adam. He’d always been courteous — a common trait of the older man, don’t you think? He started to be very friendly towards me and over the course of the following couple of months our conversations seemed to grow and grow and one evening — I seem to remember he’d seemed particularly down — I invited him in for a drink. I prepared a light supper — nothing fancy, mind you — and we’d a couple of bottles of wine. He told me all about the woman he’d just split up with. They’d been dating for twelve years and then, out of the blue, she upped and left him for another man. Within three months of leaving Adam, she’d married this new man. Of course I told him all about my married man. I started telling him about the rat just to make him feel better. You know, taking comfort from the fact that it happens to all of us. I found myself getting something substantial from talking to someone about it for the first time.
“We laughed and joked about the worst things we’d ever done after being dumped. I admitted leaving a message on an old boyfriend’s answer phone, pretending we were still having a relationship, just because I knew his new girlfriend would hear it and he’d (hopefully) get into trouble. Adam then confessed that he sneaked around to his ex-girlfriend’s flat one night and slashed all the tires on her car. He claimed he was so drunk he was also going to put a brick through her windscreen. He admitted the only reason he didn’t was because he was disturbed before he had a chance. Anyway, I found it refreshing to find someone who was so honest about feeling wretched about being dumped.
“Although I felt we bonded that evening, nothing happened romantically, but about a week or so later he asked me out to dinner and we started a relationship that evening. It wasn’t anything very passionate, I can tell you. I love to be swept off my feet, but Adam was slightly too cosy — you know, slippers and pipe — for me to be consumed the way I like to be.”
As far as Kennedy could ascertain, Castle looked a little disappointed. Had he hoped she was going to give more specific details about how the relationship had started?
“And then?” Kennedy prompted.
“And then,” Judy continued, smiling to herself, “we continued to see each other — a couple of nights a week, at most — for the following three years. I would have to say we were both equally satisfied with the relationship. I certainly was. I had the pleasure of male company when I wanted it. At the same time, I enjoyed the solace of my own space and my own privacy. I can tell you, at that particular point in my life, I was pretty convinced I could never live with a man again. I was much too set in my ways for all that stuff that couples do, seemingly unknowing, to upset each other: you know, permanently opened toothpaste, toilet seat up or toilet seat down, dirty clothes lying around or just dumped on the bedroom floor, you know, all that cliched stuff.
“But then, about a year ago — I don’t really know what it was that sowed the seeds of discontent — Adam seemed to change. He’d get ratty quite quickly, I can tell you. He’d always complain about being down with something. He frequently cried off engagements, claiming he was ill with something or other. I mean, he’d never ever looked the picture of health, so it was difficult to tell the difference. He’d disappear for days on end, always showing up again, claiming he’d been away for some treatment. I must admit that’s when I started to look at him differently. I realised we’d just fallen into the relationship because we’d been hard done by, by our exes, and our relationship had turned into a rut because all we really had in common was how much we hated our exes.
“That’s when I started to get annoyed with him. I started to pick up on his faults and not feel bothered about showing mine. I’d never realised how vain he was — he even took to wearing wigs. Now, I have to admit, that totally threw me! There’s something disquieting about the vanity of a man, don’t you think? I mean, I don’t want to sound unfair, I know women are allowed to spend hours altering their appearance with makeup and wigs and super bras and what have you, but when you observe men doing the same thing — it just seems unnatural. You wouldn’t imagine Paul Newman or Harrison Ford doing anything other than having a long shower and wearing stylish clothes, now, would you?”
Kennedy couldn’t be entirely sure, but he thought Castle grew just the slightest bit uncomfortable at this juncture. “So you and Mr. Adams broke up?” he asked.
“Well, it wasn’t as simple as that, was it?” Judy Siddons replied, stopping again to make her somewhat rhetorical question quite unrhetorical.
Neither Castle nor Kennedy replied, so she continued: “What I mean is, it is extremely difficult when both of you live in the same house — just like it is extremely difficult when you both share the same place of work. You’d think we’d all have learned the basics of this dating malarkey by now, wouldn’t you? But no, what did I do? I ran straight from Adam’s arms into my downstairs neighbour’s arms. Darren Branson is his name and he shares his namesake’s chin beard.”