The Perfect Girl

TESSA

When the door has shut behind Tom Barlow and his wife, I don’t hang around for long. I put the bus into gear and trundle off down their road, but I park again when I’m round the corner, out of their sight, because I want to think.

Once I’ve turned the headlights off, I notice that the darkness is musky and thick with humidity. I can smell barbecue smells from somebody’s garden, and a cyclist whizzes past me on a road bike, making me jump.

My phone’s in my back pocket and I squirm to get it out. Richard has tried to ring me again so I phone him back. He takes about half a second to answer.

‘Tess!’ He knows it’s me because nobody else phones our landline.

‘Hi.’

‘Where are you?’

I try to judge the level of his intoxication from the extent to which he’s slurring his words. I figure that he’s close to being blotto, and he’s clearly feeling paranoid.

‘I was at Zoe’s concert,’ I tell him. ‘And then I went back to Maria’s house. I had to give Chris and Lucas a lift.’

I don’t tell him anything more about the evening. Richard’s not good at absorbing other people’s problems when his own have swelled up enough to fill his mind entirely. His response to what I’ve said will tell me precisely what his mood is like.

Richard is either a self-hating drunk or an overambitious drunk, but I’m never sure which I’m going to get when he hits the bottle. Neither option thrills me. The self-hating is profoundly tedious because it’s a circular, defeatist state of mind, but then the overambitious is bad because it’s simply delusional, consisting as it usually does of a series of promises that Richard will never keep.

‘I’ve let you down again,’ he says, and I get my answer right there: tonight, Richard is suffering from a drunken case of self-hatred, and he would like me to shore him up in this.

‘It’s all I ever do,’ he says. ‘Why don’t you leave me, Tessa? Just leave me.’

It’s a good question, that, and it’s one I’ve asked myself on numerous occasions, and in fact Sam has asked me that question too. ‘Why don’t you leave him?’

The answer is that I like Richard, even now. We’ve been together for many, many years, and I loved the man I married.

We first met when I was doing my large animal placement as part of my training, and Richard was doing his PhD at the university Engineering Department. It was the gentlest, easiest start to a relationship you could imagine. We just got on as if we’d always been friends. We laughed together; we discovered we liked doing the same things. I loved his gentle intelligence, the way he thought before he spoke and was never mocking or snobbish.

We moved in together into a tiny attic flat, which nearly had a view of the Clifton Suspension Bridge, only four months after meeting, and we both studied like mad and made each other cups of instant coffee and lived on vats of chilli con carne and baked potatoes that we took it in turns to make.

Our flat was an unfurnished place, and we slept together on a cramped futon and sat on deckchairs to watch TV because we didn’t have enough money to buy a sofa. It was good practice for the travelling we did after we’d finished studying. Richard and I went around the world with backpacks for a year, and then lived for a time in Kenya, where we both managed to get work.

We married when we got back to the UK, and had our reception in the Clifton Pavilion at Bristol Zoo. It was still a happy time for us then, because it wasn’t until a few years after that, after we’d got ourselves properly established back in Bristol, with new jobs and a new house, that things began to slip and slide, almost imperceptibly slowly, into something much less than what we had dreamed of.

So now we find ourselves a somewhat sourer version of the couple we imagined we would become. Richard has no work, and we have no children, and the resulting bitter disappointment has mostly turned him into a depressed, drunken, foolish version of my beloved bridegroom. However, there are hours, days, weeks, when the man that I loved re-emerges, and I find that these are enough to keep me with him. To part would be to acknowledge that alcohol has managed to destroy us, and I’m just not ready to do that yet.

To Sam, I just say, ‘I can’t, not yet,’ and as I say it I feel like a clichéd cheating spouse. But it’s not to do with wanting to keep the status quo; it’s to do with not being able to let go of what Richard and I had, the perfect idea of us, even though our reality has fallen so far from that.

To Richard, on the phone, I muster all my reserves in an effort not to lose my temper, and I just say, ‘Did you find the lasagne? Because you should eat. I’ll be back later.’ Then, before he can suck me further into his misery, I hang up and start the engine.