She tugged at Matt’s arm, indicating it was time they moved on. “Right, Ted,” she said. “I’ll leave you with your somewhat gnarled floozy.” And again, before Carole had time to react to such an overt insult, Sylvia went on, “Don’t envy you, love. Dealing with the drinking, apart from anything else. Still, it’s not my problem, thank God.” And she led away her massive fiancé like a docile dog.
Ted Crisp seemed to have caught some of Matt’s dumbness. He had shrunk into himself. This time Carole didn’t curb her instinct to reach across the table and put her hand on his. Ted made no attempt to resist the gesture, but there was no answering pressure from his hand. Carole wanted to wrap her arms around him, just to protect him from any future blows. In a sudden memory of the kind she usually tried to repress, she recalled the surprising softness and vulnerability of his naked flesh.
“That talk of solicitors…” she began gently, “that’s about a divorce, is it?” He gave the briefest of nods. “But, Ted, I thought you were already divorced. You always talked as if you were, even made lots of jokes about what divorce was like for a man.”
“Old rule of stand-up,” he said with a sigh. “If something really upsets you, put it in the act. Other old rule of stand-up: never let the truth get in the way of a good line.”
“So what happened? That is, if you don’t mind telling me…”
He shrugged. “I don’t mind. Not much to tell. I dropped out of university to do the stand-up stuff. Met Sylvia at a gig – she was there for a hen night. I was in my late twenties by then. She was about nineteen, working for a building society. We got together. I took her out a few times…and the sex, well…” He was embarrassed to be discussing the subject with a former lover. “Anyway, it all seemed to come together. It was quite fun. I was working late so many nights that we didn’t see that much of each other, really, which made the times we did see each other feel more important, more precious, I don’t know…”
He ran his hand through his sweat-damp hair. He wasn’t enjoying the effort of recollection. “Then, after a few months, Sylvia thought she was pregnant…”
“You mean she trapped you into marriage?”
“No, no, I wouldn’t say that. But it made me kind of think that I should may be show a bit of responsibility, you know, if there was a nipper on the way, so I asked her to marry me. Pretty soon it turned out there wasn’t a nipper on the way, but the idea of marriage stuck. And yes, there was a bit of pressure from her parents, but not that much. Don’t think they ever really approved of me. But at the time I really thought it was a good idea. Very nomadic life doing the stand-up circuit, I needed to have a base somewhere. And the idea of kids later, I didn’t mind the thought of that. No, I wasn’t trapped into the marriage.”
“But it didn’t work out?”
“It was all right for a couple of years, but then…And I have to take some responsibility for things going wrong. You know, you’re out late every night, you want to lie in in the mornings, but you’ve got a wife who’s got to check in nine o’clock sharp at the building society. It puts a lot of stress on a relationship.”
“As did your drinking?” asked Carole rather beadily.
“Yes, OK, I’ll own up to that. Stand-up, you’re always in bars and pubs. And it’s scary stuff. You never know what the audience is going to be like, what they’re going to throw at you. And I don’t mean just heckling – in some of the rougher clubs it was bottles and glasses too. So you have a couple of bevvies to calm your nerves before you go on, and then you have a couple more to wind down after you’ve finished. And then you have a couple more for the road, and a long drive home. And you’re still wide awake when you get back home, but of course your wife’s fast asleep and…Well, it’s not conducive to a great relationship.”
“Did you have affairs?” asked Carole, uncharacteristically direct, given the intimate nature of the question.
He blushed. “Nothing major, but you know, away from home so much…a lot of booze flowing…there’s bound to be the odd skirmish…only human nature.”
“Really?” said Carole coldly.
“So all right, there were faults on both sides. Perhaps more on my side, I don’t know. But when things started to go wrong, Sylvia just clammed up on me. Shut me out, wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t discuss anything. It was never going to go the distance.”
“But when it did end, she was the one who left you?”
“Yes.”
“You once said she went off with a double-glazing salesman, but I never knew whether that was one of your jokes or – ”
“Bloody true. My wife went off with a double-glazing salesman. Didn’t seem much of a big deal at the time. We’d made a mistake. I wasn’t making her happy, she’d found someone who did – fine. We didn’t really have any possessions, lived in a rented flat. After a few months I hardly noticed Sylvia had moved out. Not having her around didn’t make much difference to ninety per cent of my life. I was still doing as many gigs – though that did begin to drop off after a while – but Sylvia had never gone to my gigs, anyway. She’d heard it all before.”
“One question, Ted?”
“Hm.”
“Had Sylvia met Dan Poke before last Sunday?”
“I’m not sure. As I say, she didn’t go to any of my gigs. Though, actually, now I come to think of it, she must’ve met him. When. Dan finished the gig on Sunday, she was all over him, saying how good it was to see him again, introducing him to Neanderthal Man.”
“Neander – ?”
“Her fiancé.”
“Matt, the biker.”
“Don’t know whether he’s a biker or not. I do know that he’s a delivery driver.”
“Ah. Sorry, go on. You were talking about your marriage…”
“Or the Third World War, as it was affectionately known.”
“But why has Sylvia suddenly reappeared in your life?”
“Money. It always was money with Sylvia. Maybe working in the building society all day made her obsessed with the stuff. That’s what a lot of our arguments were about when we were married. She said I was off every night, boozing away anything I made from the bloody gigs – which wasn’t a million miles from the truth – and we ought to be saving a deposit for a house and getting a foot on the property ladder…Oh, it went on and on…”
“But had the double-glazing salesman got money?”
“You betcha. He was a very successful double-glazing salesman – got a big spread out near Chelmsford. Sylvia liked that, liked being the lady of the manor, liked giving up work, liked spending his money. So she wasn’t bothered about getting a divorce. I was as poor as a church mouse. She wouldn’t get anything out of me, just be a waste of solicitor’s fees.”
“So what’s changed?”
“Two things have changed. One, Mr Double-Glazing Salesman suddenly took a look at the woman who’d been sharing his bed for the last however many years and decided she was beginning to show signs of wear and tear. And since they weren’t married, there was nothing to stop him replacing her with a younger model. Which he did with remarkable alacrity and gave Sylvia the old heave-ho. So she’s out in the cold cruel world the wrong side of forty, and she hasn’t got anything, not even the tiniest toehold on the bottom rung of the old property ladder.” He spoke almost with satisfaction, and took a sip of the coffee which must have gone cold long before.