Page 43 of Lessons in Love at the Seaside Salon
Trying one’s best. It implies a lot, doesn’t it? But not that the person is enjoying the experience. They’retrying. They’retrying their best. They’re making a special effort not because they want to but because they have to. Evie wants more than someone trying their best for her, no matter how well-intentioned that is. She wants someone who believes sheisthe best. And she’s aware that she may want this because she doesn’t believe it about herself, but what are loved ones for if not to boost you? It’s what she wants to do for someone else. She wants to be the champion for the man who loves her, and she wants him to be that for her.
Sam is the person she wants to champion. If only she could get him to see it. If only Josie would stop talking about how gentlemanly Brett is.
‘I had fish. With a lemon sauce,’ Josie is saying as Evie tunes back in. ‘Have you ever had it? I’d never heard of it before!’
Fish in lemon sauce? Maybe she means lemon butter sauce. The restaurant sounds classy. Not that Evie would know because she hasn’t eaten there. It’s not the sort of place she’d go on her own.
‘No, I’ve never had it,’ Evie says. She’s heard of it because she reads theWomen’s Weeklyand it’s the sort of recipe they have from time to time. Dinner-party classics. Margaret Fulton’s best recipes. That sort of thing.
‘It was yummy!’
Josie is almost breathless and there’s something about her joy – the lack of smugness in it, the purity of it – that makes Evie think she’s been a bitch, even it’s just been internal. Josie deserves to be happy. They all do.
‘Did you …’ Evie swallows her bitchiness. ‘Did you have dessert?’
‘Chocolate mousse!’ More glee from Josie as she pulls the teabag out of her mug.
‘So have you, um … Have you heard from him again?’
‘Well, he can’t call me at home.’ Josie looks from left to right as if they’ll be overheard even though there’s no one else there. ‘My parents don’t know about him.’
‘Oh.’ Evie nods. She understands: once upon a time she was a teenage girl living at home.
‘So he waited for me before work this morning.’ She grins.
Evie arrived later than Josie so she missed this.
‘That’s nice,’ she says. ‘So you’ll go out with him again?’
‘I guess!’
‘Hello, lovely ladies,’ Sam says as he walks in.
It’s one of his late-starting days and Evie has been looking forward to seeing him for hours. Now she tries to control the hammer in her heart as she smiles at him.
‘Hi, Sam,’ she says, keeping her voice light. Casual. In that weird way a person does when they have a crush and don’t want the object of the crush to know unless the crush is returned, in which case one of them is going to have to admit it or it’ll go nowhere. She doesn’t want it to have to be her to admit it. There’s too much at stake.
‘How was your date, darl?’ he says to Josie.
‘So good!’ Josie almost squeals.
Evie picks up her mug, ready to depart. She doesn’t need to hear this again. Not with Sam there.
‘Tell me all about it,’ he says, pulling out a chair at their tiny lunch table. He catches Evie’s eye as she turns to go and winks at her.
It’s enough, that wink. Enough to power her through the day. He’s seen her. He’sseenher. She matters to him.
It’s pathetic to cling on to these sorts of signs, but she can’t help it. She’ll spend the rest of the day looking for more signs, then go home and analyse them, and wish there was someone else she could tell. But instead she’ll wait until Billy goes to bed, and read her Jackie Collins, and wonder when her life is going to change.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
As much as she doesn’t want to, Anna has to admit that Gary has made an effort. For once.
Now she’s being mean.Nowshe’s being mean … ha! If she’s honest with herself – and it’s hard to be that, isn’t it, a lot of the time – she’s been mean to him in the past. But only over things that have mattered to her. Like time. And effort.
In the early years of their marriage he made an effort. With her, with the kids, with himself. He had hobbies back then. Interests, rather. ‘Hobbies’ makes it sound like he built model-train sets or balsa-wood miniatures. Hisinterestsincluded swimming and tennis. Things that kept him fit, kept him lean – kept him attractive, to her, because he still looked like the Gary she first met. It showed her that he cared, especially that he cared about her opinion. In a marriage – in any long-term relationship, and she includes friendship and family in that – if you stop caring about the opinion of those you love the most, you can’t then be bewildered when they stop caring about your opinion. If they then, indeed, disconnect from you, believing you’re no longer interested in preserving the relationship. It may be that to be is to do – was it Aristotle who wrote that? – but for Anna, to be is to care. The whole human enterprise falls apart if we stop caring about other people.
So she cared about Gary, and that meant she made an effort too. While she doesn’t have her mother’s quasi-obsession with appearances – to the point where she’s not sure she’s ever seen Ingrid’s face completely bare – Anna has never believed thatmarriage is an opportunity to let oneself go. One of her friends, Jeanette, likes to crow about the fact she can slob around the house in a tracksuit and no make-up and hair that hasn’t been brushed since Ronald Reagan became President and how her husband ‘loves me just the way I am’. But that same friend also says her husband hasn’t touched her in years. Anna wants to – but doesn’t – say that if you behave as if your husband is your brother, with the tracksuit and the unkempt hair and so on, you can’t be surprised if he treats you like his sister.
