Let’s face it, there were very few males I’d have let into my house to keep an eye on me while Mike was in Australia, doing his best – sometimes, I thought, single-handedly – to retrieve the Ashes for England. But Ivo was one of them. He sat – young, elegant, handsome, radiating maleness – on my kitchen table. He selected a peanut, hitched himself into a more comfortable position, and regarded me with his big brown eyes while he listened to my woes. It was a miserable November day – I don’t think it had ever got light before it started to get dark. And I was finding a Master’s course in Education at the University of the West Midlands far less satisfying than I’d hoped. Which was tough, as I’d taken a year’s sabbatical from lecturing at William Murdock College of Further Education to put myself through it.
‘I don’t know whether my expectations were too high,’ I said. ‘Maybe the teaching’s not all that good. I can’t even follow the books. Either they aren’t very clear or more likely I’m out of practice at reading academic material. Oh, Ivo, why am I stuck in Birmingham while Mike’s out there in Australia?’
Ivo finished the peanut and started on another.
His silence said, quite clearly, that if he was a substitute for Mike, then I was also a substitute for the man in his life. Who was, as it happens, Dave, one of Mike’s England colleagues. Dave was a fast bowler: a man with shoulders that wouldn’t disgrace a carthorse, a fascinating capacity for beer and a tender spot for small mammals. I’d been sworn to secrecy: on no account must I let anyone know that Ivo was living with me. It wouldn’t have done Dave’s street cred any good at all if anyone had known about that. No one had bothered to work out what effect it might have on mine, should I still have any, after announcing to my nearest and dearest that I was preparing to abandon the world of singletons to marry Mike. Not that there were many near or dear to announce it to. Most of my family had popped their clogs, and my absentee father was too busy playing the field in the naffest corner of Spain’s Costa Geriatrica to give a damn either way. Three people – plus the spouses of two of them – were in on the secret: Aggie, my next-door neighbour, who uttered occasional Cassandra-like moans when I was least expecting them; Shahida, a fellow William Murdock College lecturer; and a man who fancied he might have been an old flame, Afzal. Others might have suspected, not least my policeman friend, Superintendent Chris Groom, battling with the accents and his limited budgets in the fastnesses of Black Country Smethwick. I’m sure Ian Dale guessed too. He’d once been Chris’s closest colleague, but had now left the force, and was currently pursuing ways of augmenting his police pension.
I twirled the big emerald on the ring finger of my right hand. ‘Not the left, you see, Ivo. I’m not announcing my impending change of status to my fellow students. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I want a farewell fling. Absolutely not. But can you imagine what the press would make of it? Here’s the team in the midst of another series of débâcles and the papers would love to blame it on – well, love. Oh, I know Mike’s not failing. Any more than your guy is. But the others … In any case, we’ve agreed that one day, when we feel like it, we’ll simply go and get married. OK, a party afterwards. But in the meantime, shtoom. What d’you think?’
Ivo Baggins agreed. He was the latest, Dave had said, in a long line of gerbils called Baggins. There’d been Bilbo and there’d been Frodo, named after other creatures who liked to live in round holes in the depths of the earth and who definitely preferred two breakfasts. I wondered how many more names there were ending in ‘O’. There was always Tommo, the nickname of one of the most distinguished Australian fast bowlers, but I didn’t, in the circumstances, see that ever being used.
Ivo agreed that I deserved a swig of something celebratory now my ticket for Australia lay in my hand. I was going to join Mike for Christmas before we slotted back into our respective struggles, mine for an M.Ed., his for the Ashes.
After the swig, I’d better return to my books: there was another assignment coming up all too quickly.
I laid my ticket on the table and fished a half-bottle of champagne from the fridge. OK, it was an extravagance when I wasn’t earning a salary this year, but what was a ticket to Australia if not an extravagance? And at least my sabbatical from William Murdock College had so far proved stress-free enough to give my perennially dodgy turn time to heal: it no longer exploded when I downed fizzy acid.
But it did now! I leapt across the kitchen with more speed than was wise, given the amount of bubbly still left in my glass: Ivo had abandoned the nutrition of his peanut for the roughage of my airline ticket. There was already an inch semi-circle gone from the top copy.
He was so engrossed that he didn’t notice my hands, ready to scoop him up. Fortunately. While not being the most venturesome of explorers – something, according to his owner, to do with trying to nibble the pilot light of a central heating boiler when he was young – he emphatically did not like being returned to his residence. No, not a cage. Ivo lived in an aquarium, half-full of a mixture of peat and sawdust, through which he excavated labyrinthine tunnels. At one end hung his water bottle. At the other lay a little dish in which I was supposed to tip his food, but which he regularly filled with peat, so vigorous was his digging. But he sustained himself on little nibbles found in his tunnels, some of them already sprouting. If an animal had to live in captivity, this was surely the kindest of environments – even if he did try to escape from it the moment I left the wire-mesh lid even slightly loose. I adjusted the label Dave had written in perfect italic script: IVO BAGGINS. And left him to it.
There was a tiny new safe in my airing cupboard: Mike liked to give me jewellery but he also liked to know it was hidden away from Burglar Bill. I stowed the tickets in that. No doubt when I presented them someone would think I’d got bored and hungry in the check-in queue.
It was a good job I hadn’t sunk all that champagne. I was just settling down to work when Steph – my long-lost son – phoned me, and suggested we meet up for one of our occasional baltis. He tended to assume I could always drop everything the moment he phoned; the problem was, given the state of my social life and the enthusiasm I felt for my course, I usually could. And did. So there I was, eyeing up the most enormous naan I’d ever tackled. Steph didn’t think it merited more than a twitch of an eyebrow, and tore in.
I hoped he’d invited me to tell me that he’d told his adoptive parents that he’d gone hunting for his birth mother and found her – me, that is. But he seemed perfectly happy to sit in silence munching the naan and plunging it into a balti hotter than the incandescent bowl it was served in. I’m not of the purgatorial school of curry-eaters, and dipped more circumspectly into a milder dish that for some inexplicable reason contained not only bananas but also glacé cherries.
It was never easy to find something we could really talk about. College education should have been a possible: he was halfway through a course. But he never wanted to talk about it. Perhaps he was skiving. But if I tried to press, his jaw tightened. On bad days, he’d flounce off. On good ones, like today, he’d deflect the conversation by asking about mine.
‘It’s not very exciting,’ I admitted. ‘They suggested developing some project work I did for the city colleges a couple of years back. But the whole thing’s a lot tougher. You need proper theoretical bases and better research methods …’ I shook my head, longing for someone to listen with interest and to ask the right questions.
His eyes were glazing. ‘What about money?’ he asked. That was one thing he was always interested in. To look at him, swathed in onion-like layers of T-shirts, most of them tatty, you’d never guess his adoptive parents were rolling in money and made him what sounded to me like an incredibly generous allowance. I presumed a fair proportion went on pot. A faint aroma always hung around him, though he’d never smoked in front of me. And from the stains on his fingers and the smell of his breath he didn’t just confine himself to spliffs. Oh dear. Smoking that heavily at his age … Why didn’t his parents do something?
Except who could do anything with teenagers? I’d seen enough of them to know they went their own ways.
‘Money? Oh, that’s better than I thought it would be.’
He didn’t quite sigh with relief – for an awful moment he must have been afraid he’d have to pay for himself.
‘My tutor—’
‘That’s the new one, right? While the other one’s pregnant?’
‘Right. He discovered that I can teach English to overseas students, so he’s roped me into that—’
‘English! How come they need English lessons? They’re supposed to be university students!’
‘Oh, they are. Just because their English isn’t brilliant doesn’t mean they’re not very bright indeed. They’ve just never had to speak or write English except in school. Or at university overseas. So they’re not used to hearing it spoken under normal conditions.’ I inserted quotation marks with my fingers.
‘And not with a West Bromwich accent, either,’ Steph agreed. He spoke Estuary English, which irritated me, and must have his posh Sutton Coldfield parents pulling their hair out.
‘Quite. So they have to practise – preferably before their course starts. But there are always some students who join late, and others who need an extra bit of help.’
‘So you’re being paid for this.’
‘Absolutely.’ At much better rates than I’d have got for similar work at William Murdock. ‘And they’ve also asked me to be personal tutor to some of them, even when they’ve embarked on their courses – for continuity.’ And an even better hourly rate than the English teaching. ‘Which means,’ I started, for some reason embarrassed at my new-found affluence, ‘I’ve decided to fly out to see Mike for Christmas.’ Oh, I should be with him in a matter of weeks!
‘Great,’ he said absently, removing a couple of layers of T-shirt in deference to the heat of the curry.
‘The thing is,’ I said, paying exaggerated attention to an errant piece of chicken, ‘Mike and I have decided to get married.’ Why I should be overcome with maidenly coyness goodness knows, but I was, every time I told anyone. And, of course, the complication here was that Steph knew Mike wasn’t his father but didn’t know who the real one was. Nor, strangely enough, had he ever asked. All in all, he was dealing with our relationship far more phlegmatically than I was.
‘Wicked!’ he said. The highest praise. And then the grin slipped off his face. ‘Hey, you won’t be needing me to make any speeches or anything?’
‘Not unless you want to,’ I said as lightly as anyone chomping naan rather tougher than it looked could hope for. Not that I felt as insouciant as I hoped I sounded. He could scarcely play such a prominent role without telling his parents first. Could he?
‘Nah,’ he said, looking hopefully at the vegetable curry we were supposed to be sharing. ‘Not if it means monkey suits and that.’
I shook my head firmly. ‘Mike and I are just going to have a couple of witnesses for the actual marriage.’ I pushed the vegetables across to him.
He dug deep. ‘No monkey suits?’ He peeled off another T-shirt.
‘No monkey suits. But we’re going to have a wild party a bit later.’ What if he’d consent to be a witness? That would be wonderful. But I didn’t know whether he’d feel overwhelmed if I suggested that now. And asking him would upset a lot of people who’d known and loved me for years. Hell, this new relationship was making me go through all sorts of manoeuvres I wasn’t sure of. Well, both these new relationships, to be honest. And to pussyfoot over things I’d normally have asked outright. Perhaps it was doing the same to Steph. But I felt too shy to ask.
‘Wild? With your mates there!’ He grinned derisively.
‘Mike’s too,’ I pointed out. ‘So there’ll be a few people without Zimmer frames.’
‘Not if they’re England cricketers,’ he said. ‘D’you see the latest score?’
I nodded glumly. Not only did I listen to as much of the overnight Radio Four commentary as I could, I also looked at the report on Ceefax. I’d always thought only sad people without lives read Ceefax. And here I was glued to it every day.
‘I suppose you’ll have to have that policeman who looks as if he’s got a lemon in his mouth. Or up his backside.’
‘Chris? As a witness? No. I don’t think he’d like that. On the other hand, he’d probably prefer the high seriousness of a wedding ceremony to any amount of revelry,’ I observed, parodying Chris-speak.
Steph rolled his eyes in appreciation. ‘Tell you what, I could fix the music for you – got this mate who’s a DJ.’
‘Sounds good. I suppose he can organise the St Bernard’s Waltz and the veleta?’
Steph’s mouth twitched. ‘No probs. And what about the Gay Gordons? Or would Chris prefer them straight?’