LITMIR.BIZ

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Just A. I remember that’s how she’d sign off her notes when we were at uni. Assumptive and intimate all at once. The twenty-second. Thursday. Just three days away. Wow, I’m flattered and excited. She’s coming to see me more or less straight away. A pit-stop in London and then up to see me. I can hardly believe it. Thursday isn’t an ideal evening to have guests – the girls have ballet. Oh well, I suppose they can skip a week. My eyes dart around the hallway where I happened to be standing when I checked my phone for emails. There is a jumble of boots, shoes, sandals and wellingtons tumbling out of an over-full wicker basket in the corner; they look as though they’re making a bid for freedom. We have five coat hooks on the wall, one each. There are about five coats hung and slung on and over each hook. The light grey carpet was a mistake. Who chooses light anything for a family hallway? Well, I did because I saw it in a lifestyle mag and it looked amazing. In all the time we’ve lived here, we’ve never had the carpets cleaned. That’s probably a mistake, too. The paintwork could also do with a freshen up. We’ve got cats – they rub against the walls which, over time, leaves grubby marks. In fact, because of grimy handprints or general wear and tear, most of our rooms look like they’ve been stippled, an effect that hasn’t been popular since the 1980s – and with good reason.

      I’d better get to work.

4

       Abigail

      Abigail was always honest with herself. She’d had enough life experience and counselling to understand and appreciate the value of developing a high level of self-awareness. It was essential to be completely truthful with herself because there was no one else with whom she could ever be completely so. She found people were less enamoured with the truth than they believed themselves to be.

      So, as she packed her suitcases, she had to admit he had never lied to her or misled her. Not about the baby thing. He’d always been very clear, laid out his stall. No babies. Not then, not ever. She’d accepted as much, even told herself it was what she wanted, too. She decided to work hard at her career instead. That was fulfilling. Very much so. For a time. Quite some time. But that hadn’t panned out exactly as she’d thought it would. How she deserved it to. A gap had opened up in her life.

      She caught sight of her reflection in the mirror, puffy eyed, gaunt. She really needed to pull herself together, put some make-up on. She was likely to be recognised at the airport. She was a face. Someone.

      Maybe not a name – people didn’t always remember her name – but certainly a face.

      People were forever saying, ‘I know you from somewhere. No, don’t tell me.’ She’d smile, wait a beat and then she would tell them because it got awkward if they really couldn’t place her or, worse still, mistook her for someone who worked in their hair salon, or whatever. That had happened once or twice. So, she’d smartly say, ‘Oh, you’ve probably seen me on TV.’ Although she’d say it in a way that suggested nonchalance, as though she couldn’t think of anything more obvious, more dull, than the fact she worked in TV. Then they’d whoop, or hug her, squirm, self-conscious about their own ordinariness and her extraordinariness. They’d invariably ask for a selfie.

      People would kill for a job as a chat-show host, a TV presenter. Admittedly, it was only state-wide TV, not nationwide. Abigail’s show ran in the afternoons, rather than at primetime – breakfast or evenings – but still, people would do anything for that job.

      You had to, in fact. Do anything.

      And she had. Anything and everything Rob had asked of her.

      When Abi arrived in the US, she was seen as nothing more than Rob’s wife: a young, extremely attractive, clever-enough wife. Even if she’d had the combined IQs of all the CEOs of the FTSE 100 she probably wouldn’t have been noticed for anything other than her looks – Rob and Abigail didn’t mix with the sort of people who wanted anything more from women than beauty. They thought she was charming. That’s what they said, often: ‘she’s so cute’, ‘so charming’, ‘so sweet’. It was a good thing that the Americans had always loved British accents. It gave her an edge. Stopped her falling into obscurity. Rob’s colleagues and their wives lapped it up. Say, ‘vite-a-min,’ they’d demand. ‘Say sked-ual – no, say tuh-may-toe.’ And she would. She was doing her job. Cute, charming, sweet corporate wife. Even though it wasn’t the 1950s.

      ‘Vitamin, schedule, tomato.’

      ‘Isn’t she just adorable? She should be on TV. Rob, put her on TV,’ they’d say.

      They never asked Rob to perform like that, yet they hung on his every word. So, he wrote the scripts, she read them. She didn’t resent that. She loved it. She was grateful when he did as they suggested, when he put her on TV. The higher he rose, the higher she did. It was a mutually beneficial relationship. She was always telling herself as much.

      He wrote the script for their private lives with the same autocratic approach, and she regurgitated it. Now, with hindsight, as she scrabbled around his desk drawer to retrieve her passport, she wondered whether she was overly willing to be repressed.

      It worked, for quite some time. But then it stopped working because her time ran out. To have had a chance at longevity she would have had to secure an anchor job with one of the five major US broadcast television networks by the time she was thirty. She didn’t manage that. There were younger, thinner, leggier, keener women waiting in the wings. Always. She couldn’t resent it; it was a system she’d played. She’d given it her best shot. It hadn’t panned out. Suck it up.

      Rob was doing very well for himself. He was not subject to a time limit; men could get old and stay successful, interesting. At that point, he was concentrating on syndicating out his shows, although her particular show was never picked up. On occasion, she privately wondered how much effort he put into selling it. He often reminded her that it didn’t really matter whether her show got picked up or not – they didn’t need the money and he did need her at home.

      Or at least, she liked to think he did.

      She’d have had to have been way bigger for the chance to grow old gracefully in front of a TV audience. Katie Couric, Barbara Walters, and Diane Sawyer had been allowed. That was about it. It was her own fault. Sometimes she’d lie awake at night, alone, even though he was sleeping next to her, and she’d admit that she’d never had the necessary commitment to her career. Not one hundred per cent. She’d drawn lines. She had principles. She wouldn’t, for example, appear on TV shows that were solely designed to humiliate people. She hadn’t gone to university to rip the shit out of those with less education, money or fewer chances than she had. She played fairer than that. And although she did watch her weight (that was just common sense, right?), she wasn’t prepared to starve herself. Eating tissues was not her idea of fun, and while she’d had Botox, that was to help with her migraines (mostly). She’d resisted plastic surgery (at least on her face), and had only had a little augmentation to her breasts. She was not prepared to sleep with anyone other than Rob, because she loved him and respected herself. But it limited her career options in a business where the casting couch was still being bounced upon. In the past couple of years, she’d found she was not even willing to go to absolutely every party she was invited to, to make small talk with strangers, on the off-chance one of them (out of, say, fifty thousand) might offer her an opportunity. It was exhausting. Soul destroying. She found that neither the canapés nor the conversation ever quite filled her up. She used to do that sort of eternal mingling and mixing willingly, hopefully. She couldn’t really explain it, but more and more, she found she preferred to stay at home and snuggle up with a good book (which was handy really because there was rarely the option of snuggling up with Rob – he still seemed to like the parties).

      Now, as she pulled the door of her luxurious LA home shut behind her and clumped down the path towards the waiting taxi, she wondered whether maybe she should have gone to the parties. Dragged herself there.

      The question of other women had raised its ugly head time and again throughout their relationship. As

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