children, cats, maybe a rabbit or two, and an adoring husband who appreciated her. This woman sewed her own cushion covers, knew how to dry lavender and could bottle fruits and vegetables instead of buying them from the supermarket. She didn’t need a safety pin to hold the top of her skirt together and she never raised her voice at the children in the morning when an entire carton of milk was spilled all over the said children’s clothes, necessitating a complete change. No. This woman wore floral perfumes that came in old-fashioned bottles, never got angry with her children and wafted around with a basket as she bought organic vegetables that still had bits of earth clinging to them. People would say things like ‘Isn’t she lovely? Wonderful mother, fantastic cook, have you tried her apple crumble? And she still manages to work…’
Yeah right. And pigs might fly. Hope patted the skirt one last time and picked up her shopping. She wasn’t Mrs Floral Skirt and she never would be. She was Mrs Tracksuit Bottom, whose two children were quite accustomed to her roaring ‘Stop that right now or I’ll kill you!’ She never wafted anywhere – difficult when you had a spare tyre and stocky legs – and she never talked to the neighbours long enough for them to have an opinion of her. Apart from the woman two doors up who let her dog do its business in Hope’s garden, resulting in an un-neighbourly stand-off one morning. And as for sewing cushion covers she still hadn’t managed to sew the button back on her work skirt and it had been held up with a safety pin for months. Although the good part of that was that the safety pin was of the big nappy variety and was more comfy than the constricting button had been. Thinking of work, she’d be terribly late back if she didn’t get a move on.
She shook her head as if to rid it of the remnants of the idyllic floral skirt fantasy and, collecting up her shopping, hurried into the men’s department and over to the ties. It took ages to find one she thought Matt would like: an expensive buttermilk yellow silk with a discreet pattern. Hope held the tie up against every shirt on the display; it looked lovely against the blue shirts and went particularly well with an azure striped one. She groaned in indecision.
Matt didn’t go in for blue shirts much. The grey tie was more versatile, definitely, and cheaper, but Matt loved expensive things. He’d adored that ugly key ring his boss had given him one Christmas, purely because of the designer logo stamped into the leather. She held both ties up and squinted at them, dithering as usual.
OK, the yellow it had to be. So, it cost more than the coat she was wearing, but what the hell.
The woman behind the counter daintily placed the tie in a box. Perfectly coifed, she had lovely cared-for nails, Hope noticed, and her lipstick looked faultlessly applied; as if she’d just that minute rushed out from primping in the ladies’. Hope was conscious of the fact that her own windswept fair hair was dragged back in a pony tail and her morning lipstick a thing of distant memory.
Sales assistants invariably made her feel like an unkempt road warrior. She remembered a time when she herself was always beautifully groomed, those far off days before the children, when giving herself a French manicure had been a prerequisite on Sunday evenings. These days, she spent Sunday evenings sweating over the ironing board, worrying about the week ahead and trying to match socks from the enormous laundry pile.
‘Is it a present?’ inquired the sales woman, her tone implying that there was no way someone like Hope would be coughing up for such an expensive tie otherwise.
‘Yes,’ said Hope, stifling a wicked urge to say, no, it was for her, she dressed up in men’s clothes at the weekends and, actually, was looking for a partner to go with her on a Harley-Davidson-Lesbian Day Out on Sunday.
Instead, she arranged her face into a polite expression. Being honest, there was no way she’d pay that much money for a tie otherwise. Even if as a fortieth birthday present, it was still ridiculously expensive. The only consolation was that Matt would love it. It would go with the very sophisticated new suit he’d just bought and with his image, also highly sophisticated. The only unsophisticated part of the Matt Parker experience was Hope herself. Was that the problem? she thought with a pang of unease.
Matt hadn’t been himself lately. Usually he was one of life’s optimists, happy, upbeat. But for the past few months, he’d been listless and moody around the house, only content if they were doing something; filling their time off with endless activities. He didn’t seem happy to sit and blob around on those rare occasions when the children weren’t murdering each other. Edgy, that was it. Matt was edgy, and in her dark, terrified moments, Hope was scared that it was something to do with their marriage. Or her.
‘Shall I gift-wrap it?’
‘No, I like wrapping things myself,’ Hope confessed. Anyway, getting the shop to wrap things was always a waste of time, she’d discovered, as she could never resist trying to open a bit of the wrapping paper when she got home so she could admire the gift. Invariably, the paper got ripped when she was trying to shove whatever it was back in, so why bother?
She added the tie to her selection of plastic bags and left the shop hurriedly.
Hope rounded the corner at Union Street and collided with a gaggle of tourists oohing and ahhing over the city’s elegant sandstone Georgian buildings. It was a beautiful place to live but after five years there, Hope was guiltily aware that she took Bath’s beauty rather for granted. For the first six months, she’d walked around with her neck craned, but now, she raced along like all the other residents, almost immune to the city and constantly cursing the tourists who straggled across the streets like wayward schoolchildren. She pushed open the glass door into Witherspoon’s Building Society, conscious of the fact that it was now twenty to three and she should have been back at half past two.
Mr Campbell, manager and assiduous time-keeper, was also conscious of the time.
‘You’re ten minutes late, Mrs Parker,’ he said mildly.
Hope gave him a flustered look, which wasn’t hard after her dash down Union Street. ‘I’m so sorry, Mr Campbell,’ she said breathily. ‘It’s my husband’s fortieth birthday and I was buying him a present…’
‘Never mind,’ Mr Campbell said soothingly. ‘Don’t let it happen in future.’
She rushed into the staff room, stowed her shopping in her locker, wriggled out of her navy woollen coat and hurried back to her counter.
‘How can you get away with being late and not get the face eaten off you by that tyrant?’ demanded Yvonne. Yvonne had worked at Witherspoon’s for five years, the same length of time as Hope, and complained she was still treated like a delinquent probationary by the manager.
‘Because I have an innocent face,’ replied Hope, managing to smile all the while at Mr Campbell, ‘and you look like a minx.’
Yvonne was placated, as Hope knew she could be. Yvonne liked the idea of looking minxy. And she was so good humoured that she never took offence; not like Betsey, Hope’s other good friend. Betsey took offence at everything and would have demanded to know what Hope had meant by calling her a minx.
Hope knew that she’d never look like a minx in a million years. Minxes did not have fawn-coloured curly hair with lots of wispy tendrils that you could do absolutely nothing with, nor did they have rounded comforting faces with large, almost surprised hazel eyes, and small delicate mouths like shy girls from 18th century French paintings.
Matt had once told her that he’d fallen in love with her ‘other worldliness’. ‘As if you’ve got lost from a historical mini-series and have stepped out of your gown to appear in the twenty-first century,’ he’d said lovingly. Matt was given to saying wildly romantic, unusual things. He was wasted in advertising, she thought fondly.
