Trio - [44]

She groaned. And she certainly couldn’t imagine him letting her tie him up and tease him or shagging her in the shower. Crikey, even saying shag to Malcolm would be a challenge.

She glanced up at the mirror and wondered whether to try blue mascara to bring out the blue in her eyes.

The last time she had tried to vary the routine, waiting till he was as excited as he ever got then whispering that she wanted to get on top, she had felt his body stiffen and his penis soften. She’d tried to salvage things by staying where she was and saying yes, more, yes, Malcolm lots of times until he got back into his stride. Then Friday night they’d been back at The Steak House facing the same old evening and she’d had to stop it. She had watched him walk back from the gents, straightening his tie. She had waited until they were in the car before she told him.

‘Malcolm, I’m sorry, I don’t want to carry on seeing you.’

There was a clumsy silence and she heard him exhale loudly.

‘Is there any particular reason?’ He retreated into formal tones.

‘Not really.’ She could not be ruthlessly honest and hurt him. Why be so unkind?

‘I just don’t think we’re right for each other.’

‘Oh.’ Pause. ‘Is there someone else?’

‘No.’ Not yet.

‘I’ll drive you back.’

He didn’t speak again. He drove her home and sat staring out at the road while she thanked him and got out. She felt lousy. She watched him drive off and stood on the pavement for a moment. She breathed in and smelt freedom. She had escaped.

And tonight she would celebrate. With good friends and probably too much to drink and some new outfit from the shop where she was headed as soon as her hair was done.

Two years later Pamela was on a training course at a conference centre near Rhyll. On the Friday night she spent much of the evening chatting to a trainee from Somerset, a man called Will. On the Saturday evening she slept with him and again on the Sunday morning. That afternoon they said good-bye. She went home exhausted and exhilarated. It seemed like the perfect arrangement – excitement, physical attraction, the mystery of strangers, the delicious opportunity to present herself however she wished. No boredom, no commitment, no complications.

Lilian

‘Mum, Mum?’ Pamela Gough raced through the house, dropped her keys and bag on the table. ‘Where are you?’

‘Out here.’ The voice came from the back of the house.

Pamela hurried through the kitchen and into the tiny stone-flagged back yard, ducking to avoid banging her head on the low door. Her mother was sitting on the old director’s chair reading the Manchester Evening News. The headlines were all about the riots at Orgreave Colliery, there’d been a pitched battle between the police and the miners and their supporters. Lilian’s father had been a miner and she was glad he wasn’t alive to see what was going on now.

She turned to her daughter, reading glasses perched on the end of her nose.

‘I got it, Mum, I got it!’ She beamed with delight and thrust the piece of paper forward. ‘I can’t believe it!’

‘Oh, wonderful! Oh, Pam, well done!’ Lilian read the letter, speaking the final sentences aloud. ‘And have great pleasure in confirming your appointment as Manager at our Bradford Westgate Branch. I will be sending you details of our relocation package in the near future. Oh, Pam.’ She smiled up at her daughter, narrowing her eyes against the brightness of the sky.

‘Bank manager,’ Pamela said, catching her lip between her teeth and widening her eyes in an exaggerated fashion.

‘Not before time,’ Lilian pointed out. It was Pamela’s fourth shot at a branch of her own. Each time the disappointment of rejection had dealt a severe blow to her confidence. She couldn’t do it. She was a woman and women never got the jobs. She wasn’t good enough. She kept a bright functional front up at the bank but was unable to sustain it at home and Lilian was witness to the silences, the weary defeat in her posture, the lack of appetite and the inability to sleep.

Lilian suspected that losing Peter had hurt the child irreparably; she had adored Peter. She remembered the pair of them building castles from wooden bricks, sprawled on the floor, conferring, two heads of black hair. And racing along the sands at Criccieth, Lilian at the finishing line or judging the long jump. How on earth had he learnt to be a father like that when his own had been so remote?

Lilian also worried that her own deep unhappiness had been transmitted to Pamela. No matter how hard she had tried to continue to provide a warm, happy home for the two of them, in the quiet times of the night, in the privacy of her prayers and in the stock-taking of birthdays and New Years, she acknowledged that life had dealt her a cruel hand and that she was not happy. The best she could summon was contentment; that she was well, that Pamela and she were so close.

Endlessly she wondered how different it would have been if Peter had lived. A silly game. They would have stayed in the old house instead of moving to this little terraced house in Fallowfield, though it was a godsend for Lilian’s work, only a stone’s throw from the postal sorting office. There might have been more children, a brother or sister for Pamela… She shouldn’t think like this, always wanting too much. That’d been her trouble all along. Not that she had wanted frivolous things; just a husband, a family, a nice home, close friends. But what was normal for others obviously wasn’t in God’s plan for Lilian. So she had lost one baby, then another, and a third. Then Peter. Pamela remained the light of her life, she could literally feel her heart grow warm each time she saw her, but even that love couldn’t erase the sadness she carried within her.