Page 1 of A Midlife Marriage

PART I

1

Jet-lagged and jowly, Helen stood in front of the mirror in her bathroom. Two hours until she was supposed to be meeting Caro and Kay, and she could barely get moving. By her reckoning it was three am in the morning. If she were to listen to her body, it would tell her to go back to bed.Come on, Helen,she said, slapping at her face. If she were tolisten to her heart it would tell her to get back on the plane.

In the kitchen she found a packet of teabags, but no milk. In her toilet bag, her toothbrush, but no toothpaste. She used a travel sized all-in-one for her hair and her body, and a squeeze of sunscreen as moisturiser. She found a clean-enough pair of jeans, but not a clean-enough t-shirt. And twenty minutes later, after sorting through a mountain of dirty washing, she settled on what was supposed to be a gift for Jack, her son.Never mind,she thought as she pulled the t-shirt over her head. Jack, heading into his last year at university, was finishing a summer jaunt in the states. She’d wear the t-shirt wash it, then fold it back into the packaging and he would never know.

She locked the door of her new flat and headed out into a July morning heavy with latent rain. The sky was grey as socks,the road full of potholes and the station facade weathered and beaten.

‘Twenty-four fifty,’ the ticket clerk muttered, from behind glass thick enough to contain a serial killer.

‘Twenty-four fifty?’ She wasn’t sure, because he hadn’t bothered to look up as he spoke.

Twenty-four fifty.’

‘Thank you,’she said pointedly, as without any further attempt at civility, the tickets were slid towards her.

The train was fast but full and for nearly an hour Helen negotiated a personal space marked on one side by a large man with body odour, and on the other by a foul-smelling toilet with a permanently open door.

Kings Cross was even busier, everyone and his dog on their way to London. By the time she found a grubby tube seat and collapsed into it, she was exhausted. Three stops to Oxford Circus. Just about enough time for a micro-nap. Arms crossed over the strap of her handbag, she closed her eyes and let her head drop and the rumble of the track and the black of the tunnel were a lullaby, rocking her back to the summit of Pikes Peak, Colorado. The spruce forests and crisp clean air, the pristine snow-caps of the Rocky Mountains, the space … so much space.

The train jerked to a halt, a screeching percussion of brakes waking her up. She stood up and on wobbly legs, joined a moving river of human bodies through the open doors of the carriage, along the narrow platform, up a steep escalator and out into a marginally brighter, but no less crowded, Oxford Street.

2

Well,Kay thought,this has never happened before.Twice now, in a little over two years she was looking at beachwear. Like buses, she was thinking, you wait for ages and then they all come at once. Because before that last-minute week in Cyprus a couple of years back, with her two best friends, Helen and Caro, she hadn’t bought a swimsuit in over twenty years. Maybe even longer. Cyprus had been her first holiday in who knew how long, and the memory of preparing for it made her smile now. She’d been a fox in a chicken coop! Dashing into Tesco the evening before, picking up frozen dinners, throwing in a cheap scarlet sarong along on the way.

And here she was again, with more time and a lot more choice, literally walled in by bikinis and swimsuits, tankinis and … monokinis? Kay frowned. Styles had certainly changed since she was last in the market for a two-piece, which she wasn’t. Not with her waistline. Leaving the monokinis behind, she moved on to a display of more modest looking one-pieces. But they were prudish-looking things, navy and black, high-cut on the top, low-cut on the bottom. The beach equivalent of a viscose blouse, and more suitable for aqua-fit on a Monday night at thelocal swimming pool, than white-sand beaches. No. Kay shook her head. If there was one thing she didn’t want to be anymore, it was sensible. The sarong was past its best, that much had been obvious on the long weekend she’d taken to Cyprus back in April, supposedly to plan Caro’s wedding (although in the end Caro had gone ahead and done what she always did, made an executive decision, so the venue was now a town hall in North London).

She paused. On the other hand, a high cut would cover the scars. Scars that she didn’t have when she’d grabbed that sarong. Scars from a successful lymph-node dissection, which had been followed by months of radiotherapy and infusions. All in all, nearly a year of treatment that had proved more successful than anyone had dared hope. So now she was officially a survivor of stage-four skin cancer, standing on the right side of those hopeful fifty percent, the lucky ones praying to live beyond five years. To live! Oh, to live! Yes, she was lucky, and she knew it. Four months since her last scan, another two until the next. And those gaps might only get longer.

Thinking this, she moved on, pausing to stop in front of a leopard-print bikini that had a mercifully large bottom. It was a beautiful thing, tawny colours, gold hoops and much ruching. Beachwear to imagine yourself in, tanned, windswept and carefree. Beachwear that said, ‘look at me!’ Beachwear that was anything but sensible.

But the price-tag had her moving again. Two hundred and fifty pounds? For something she would probably wear no more than … As if she had come face to face with a brick wall, she stopped walking, hitched her handbag over her shoulder and looked up. In less than a week she would be retiring. Leaving her role as head of the maths department at the secondary school where she had worked for thirty years and relocating to Cyprus. Flying out on a flight she had yet to book, where – for cryingout loud Kay! – she could wear a leopard-print bikini every day of the week. She could wear it until the vivid feline colours had washed out to the pastels of her knickers. And frankly if it lasted as long as her knickers had, most of which had been purchased in the last century, then two hundred and fifty was a bargain.

Without hesitating, she whipped the hanger off the rail and marched herself to the nearest cash-desk, declining a suggestion that she might like to try it on. That, she knew, would break the spell and anyway she was due to meet Helen in less than ten minutes. She watched instead, mesmerized, as with paper as thin as her dreams, the assistant folded the bikini into a small square.

‘What a wonderful idea,’ her consultant had said. ‘All that sunshine and Mediterranean diet.’

‘We’ll be visiting all the time,’ Helen kept saying.

‘Once you get used to the travel, you won’t even notice,’ Caro promised.

‘I’ll be fine, Mum.’ Alex her twenty-four-year-old son had told her. Alex, whose special needs had left him unable to cope with mainstream education, whose career would probably never extend beyond the garden centre in which he worked, who had never left home, who really wasn’t like other twenty-four-year-olds and therefore might not be fine.

‘It’s time you lived your life for yourself,’from her father, a widower of less than twelve months, after her mother had finally succumbed to the dementia that had held her these last years.

‘It’s gorgeous,’ the assistant said, handing Kay the package. ‘Are you going anywhere nice to wear it?’

‘Cyprus.’

‘How wonderful.’ The assistant smiled. You’ll get plenty of opportunity out there.’

Kay returned the smile. She did, it seemed, have plenty of opportunities, to live, to wear a bikini for the first time indecades. But what would have happened if Caro hadn’t invited her on that holiday to Cyprus? And what would have happened if she hadn’t got sick? What opportunities would she be facing in that parallel universe?

They were questions she couldn’t answer, but as she stepped onto the escalator there was one thing she knew in her bones to be true. If these things hadn’t happened, she would have gone through the rest of her life never even thinking about splashing out two-hundred-and-fifty-pounds on a leopard-print bikini.

3

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