Robert claims the need for a lie-in in the morning so I leave him to it. I strap on Georgia’s trainers and walk around the block, buying two coffees on the home stretch as an alibi. Robert always used to sneak out and get me a latte if he got up first at the weekends. I can’t remember when he stopped.
Back home I have a shower (nb: if walking four hundred metres makes you sweat, you should probably do something about it) and then potter about trying to decide what I can suggest we do with the rest of the day. Shopping? Too much like hard work. Robert is enough of a face now that he gets stopped for photos every few minutes by people who then want to engage him in their life stories. Art gallery? Ditto. We could drive out to a reclamation yard, or some kind of non-posh antiques place. We used to spend hours pottering around, picking up curios. At first fantasizing about what we would buy if we had any money to spare and, later, once Robert’s career started to take off, purchasing the odd thing. A carved wooden box, a pair of vintage green glass bottles, an old variety poster. It was one of our favourite things to do.
‘Fancy heading out to the Swan?’ I say as I hand him his warmed-up latte when he surfaces.
‘God, no. I intend to have a lazy day, doing nothing. The last thing I want to do is sit in the car for hours.’
So that’s that then.
Later, I Google frozen shoulders. It seems London is awash with physios who claim to have the answer. There’s just no way to work out who is telling the truth and who isn’t. I send a quick text to Myra: ‘Know anyone who’s had a frozen shoulder who could rec a good physio?’ As a second thought, I add: ‘Round here ideally?’ Myra knows everyone locally and all their business. She discusses it all loudly with them in front of the other customers. Their divorces, their wayward children, their haemorroids.
Three minutes later I get a reply: ‘Are you OK? What did you do?’ So I have to fire off another message telling her I’m not asking for myself.
‘Do you want to run lines later?’ I ask when I take Robert in a chicken salad at lunchtime. He’s propped up on the sofa in front of Sky Sports, watching the pre-match build-up. I’ve killed time clearing out cupboards in the kitchen. We are the embodiment of a 1960s gender-typical couple.
‘I haven’t had a chance to look at them yet.’
‘OK, well, if you do …’
‘Thanks, though.’
He turns his attention to his salad. This is hopeless.
‘FA Cup today, isn’t it?’ I nod at the TV. Watching sport together used to be one of our ‘things’. Any sport, it didn’t matter what, so long as we could pick a side to back.
I fetch my own salad – forgoing the new potatoes and big slice of bread I would usually have with it – and join him on the sofa. But not before I Google who’s playing and check out a couple of forums to see what the contentious issues of the day are. I feel him tense up as if he thinks I’ve come to rain on his parade. So I keep quiet. Make the odd – I think insightful – comment once the match starts, and by ten minutes into the first half he’s relaxed and we’re discussing the team selection, as if either of us knows what we’re talking about. At half-time he goes off and makes us both a cup of tea and brings in two biscuits on a plate, which I take as a friendly gesture. I take one and put it on the arm of the sofa beside me, although I have no intention of eating it (my body is also a temple, don’cha know). I know he won’t eat the other one because he never does, but it’s the thought that counts. When he’s absorbed in the second half I stuff mine into the pocket of my cardigan. If he thought I was refusing a sweet treat he would definitely know something was up. It sits there, burning a sugary hole in my pocket, just demanding to be eaten, but I crush it between my fingers so I can’t give in to temptation.
By the end of the match I’m feeling like we’ve had a pretty successful afternoon. And, actually, I’d forgotten just how much I used to enjoy mindlessly watching anything competitive.
‘Second one tomorrow,’ I say, clearing away the tea things.
‘It’s a date,’ he says, and I think yes, I’ve made a breakthrough. And then his phone buzzes to tell him he has a message and I remember the reason I’m doing this. I wonder if it’s Saskia. If she’s texted him to tell him she spent fifteen minutes shut in a toilet with me last night. That’ll scare the crap out of him. I can’t help but watch his face as he looks at the message. Then he holds his phone up to me as if to show me what it says.
‘Mart,’ the name of the sender says, one of the first assistants. ‘They’ve changed the schedule for Monday. Just as well we didn’t do lines.’
‘Right,’ I say, remembering to smile. Everything’s normal. You don’t suspect a thing.
By Monday afternoon Myra has a name for me. I know that when I call Saskia to give her the info I need to seize the moment. There’s no point just giving her the physio’s details, saying goodbye and hoping that’s enough. It’s completely outside my personality to try to force my friendship on to someone but on this occasion that’s exactly what I need to do. Hopefully, Saskia will be curious enough about her rival to take me up on my offer.
Thanks to the internet, I now know the main number for the production offices. My heart is pounding in my chest as I dial.
‘Hello, Farmer Giles,’ a woman’s voice trills at me.
‘Um …’ I almost hang up. Tell myself to breathe. ‘Could I speak to Saskia Sherbourne, please?’
There’s a pause. Of course, it hadn’t even occurred to me that they probably get all manner of crazies calling night and day to try to talk to the actors. I know that people send wreaths and condolence cards if a character dies. I curse myself for not having taken Saskia’s mobile number.
‘It’s Paula Westmore, Robert’s wife.’ I wait for an intake of breath that tells me my name is infamous as the scorned wife, but there’s nothing.
‘Of course. Hi, Paula. Let me just see if she’s in her dressing room.’
I hear the tone as it rings through. Then a click.
‘Paula! Hey!’
I jump and almost drop my phone. ‘Hi. I just … how was your weekend?’
‘Great, thanks. Up to my eyes in lines to learn, you know how it is. Or you probably don’t, lucky for you. Did you enjoy Friday? You didn’t stay long.’
Bitch.
‘Robert had a migraine. But, yes, it was fun. I want to apologize again for drenching you. I don’t usually go around throwing drinks on people!’
‘You should. It’s very therapeutic. Anyway, the top came out fine. Good as new. No problem.’
‘So …’ I say. ‘I have the name of the shoulder guy for you.’
‘You’re a lifesaver. It’s got so bad I can hardly even undo my own bra at the moment.’ She laughs. Well, she doesn’t, she says, ‘Haha.’ I try to block out the image that her comment has created in my head and rattle off the details.
‘I’m going to ring him now.’
‘He’s near where I work,’ I say, which is, strictly speaking, true, although not that near. A five-minute bus ride rather than a walk. But she doesn’t have to know that. ‘Let me know when you’re seeing him and we could meet up for a coffee or something. If you fancy it …’
I feel like an adolescent boy asking a girl out on a date for the first time. Why on earth would she say yes? What’s in it for her? She hesitates for a moment. Probably trying to answer that question herself.
‘OK … great. What’s your number?’
There’s no way of telling if she’s just being polite. I leave it with her. There’s nothing else I can do.
I’m late for work. Robert is away for a couple of nights shooting locations, as he is pretty much every other week. Episodes shoot over two weeks, ten days a pop, of which two are spent in Oxfordshire doing the exterior scenes. Depending on whether Robert’s character is in any of those scenes, and how many, he can be away one or both of those nights.
I’ve always rather enjoyed those evenings when it’s just me and Georgia, or even me on my own. Now I have mixed feelings. It’s a relief to have time off from my new relentlessly upbeat and interested self (example: this morning over breakfast: Me (after some frantic Googling): ‘Did you hear about that guy who’s developing a head transplant?’ Robert loves crazy science stories), but it’s also agony to imagine what might be happening in the country hotel they all call home for the duration. Georgia was out last night, revising at Eliza’s, so I tried to distract myself with the new series of House of Cards that had just popped up on Netflix, and ended up watching four episodes back to back, going to bed far too late and oversleeping.
I hear the bus rumbling along behind me as I head for the stop. I have no choice but to run for it as it overtakes me. I huff along in Georgia’s trainers, flapping my arms at the people waiting in the hope one of them might hold it up for me. Of course, they just assume I’m the local lunatic and all make a point of looking away. I’m still trotting along as the last person climbs aboard and the door closes. Bugger.
I sit down heavily on one of the narrow, sheltered seats, trying to get my breath back. And then it hits me. I have just run further than I can ever remember running in my adult life. OK, so it was probably only a hundred metres, a hundred and fifty at the outside. And I am panting way more heavily than I have ever seen Paula Radcliffe pant after twenty-six miles. But I did it. A week of walking part of my journey has resulted in this gargantuan achievement.
Actually, it’s not strictly true that I haven’t run as an adult. A couple of years ago, shamed by a shopping trip to buy an outfit for a friend’s wedding, I decided I needed to take myself in hand. I borrowed yet another pair of George’s trainers and announced that I was going to go for a jog. Robert’s reaction (‘What? You??’) didn’t put me off. I left the house, walking at first. As I turned the corner into Prince of Wales Road I broke into some kind of shuffling trot. I was exhausted immediately. My lungs felt as if they were going to explode. I didn’t own a sports bra (why would I?) so my boobs were flinging themselves up and down like they might detach from my chest altogether. But that wasn’t what put me off. It was the shouts of ‘Earthquake warning!’ from a gang of lads and the peals of laughter afterwards. I saw a passer-by snigger as one of the boys mimicked my undulating gait. I turned the first corner I came to and walked home, tail between my legs. Robert didn’t ask me what had happened and I was grateful.
It occurs to me that this morning that no one gave me a second glance. In fact, they all did their best not to look at me, in case that would result in them having to engage in my plight. I wasn’t a fat woman attempting to get fit, and therefore an object of ridicule. I was a fat woman running for a bus, something that is apparently much more socially acceptable.
It’s a revelation.