Penny Smith - Summer Holiday

Miranda knew, as she opened her mouth, that it was going to be a hopeless conversation. The man had no imagination, the verbal dexterity of a Clanger and she honestly couldn’t be bothered to try to explain what she found amusing about rhyming words. And of course she couldn’t articulate the words she’d come up with to describe him, so she had to make up two more. ‘Numpty and flumpty,’ she said, off the top of her head.

‘Which means?’

‘Nothing. It’s the rhyme that amuses me.’ Oh, God. Now she was going to have to explain. Or feign partial death and get out of this place.

‘What – so Humpty Dumpty’s funny?’ He wrinkled his nose.

As if I’d done a trouser cough, she thought, and smirked.

‘Is it?’ he asked, mistaking – again – her expression.

‘I think you either find words funny or you don’t. Have you finished? Shall we get the bill?’ He looked at his very expensive watch, clearly hoping she’d clocked its exclusivity. ‘I know it’s a bit early,’ she added, ‘but I’ve suddenly remembered I have a five o’clock start tomorrow, and perhaps tonight wasn’t the best for organising a long dinner.’

‘A five o’clock start? What for?’ he asked.

‘Erm. Flight. Early flight. Late booking. I needed to get away. Going to …’ her eyes fell on the tablecloth ‘… the Czech Republic,’ she said brightly. Like I care whether or not you believe me. She tried to look innocent and apologetic at the same time.

To give him his due, he asked promptly for the bill, then insisted on paying. That was the one good thing about the blind dates: they hadn’t cost her anything. But they were all bankers or company directors, so she felt guilt free. In fact, with the bankers, she was practically doing the country a service.

She was barely home and through the door before she was entirely disrobed and in front of the television. What a waste of an evening. What a waste of a lot of evenings.

Miranda realised she was accidentally watching the news and it was all too depressing. She clicked it off and wandered up to the bathroom to wash her face and moisturise. After she’d cleaned her teeth, she looked at herself in the mirror. Put her hands to either side of her face and pulled them back to see how she’d look with a face lift. Would she have the guts to let someone literally take off her face, trim the edges and hem it again to smooth out the wrinkles? At least her eyesight was starting to go a bit. It was a relief not to be able to see the crow’s feet quite so clearly.

She sighed and padded through to the bedroom. Odd, she still couldn’t get used to sleeping alone. For almost a quarter of a century, another body had slumbered beside hers, getting larger, taking up more space, and snoring louder as the years passed. It was such a luxury to do a starfish impression and not touch flesh.

Tomorrow is the day I take control, she thought. Life has got to perk up, big-time. She lay between the cotton sheets trying to decide what control needed to be taken.

Her friends would have described Miranda Blake first and foremost as a laugh. Pressed to expand, they would have said she was attractive, with a penchant for extremely high heels. Her parents would have described their daughter as wayward but tamed by a decent man, whom she had divorced for no good reason (after all, everyone has a little dalliance on the side). Miranda herself would have said she was all right, considering the alternatives. Everything was heading south and hairs were starting to sprout in strange places, but it could have been a lot worse. She had friends with prolapses, fallen arches, bad backs or bunions.

Early in their relationship, Nigel would have described her as a cracking bit of totty. The two had met at a party in Fulham where neither knew the host. Miranda was dressed for success in a little blue dress and very high black heels, which she found surprisingly easy to walk in. Nigel was wearing what she later came to describe as his out-of-hours uniform – a Pink’s shirt and corduroy trousers with Gucci loafers. His thick brown hair fell in messy abandon to his shirt collar and his amber eyes looked admiringly into her sparkling blue ones as they shared the bottle of Château Latour he had brought, having mistakenly thought it was a dinner party.

He had looked around for a corkscrew and she had handed him one wordlessly – she’d been on the lookout for a semi-decent bottle since she’d arrived ten minutes earlier with a girlfriend. He had walked her home afterwards and they had kissed fervently on the doorstep of her minuscule studio flat. Within a year, they had married in a picturesque church in the Cotswolds and Miranda got pregnant on honeymoon. Lucy’s birth was followed two years later by the arrival of Jack.

It wasn’t until the children were on the verge of leaving home that Miranda realised she categorically loathed her husband. The sound of his key in the front door of the smart stuccoed building in fashionable Kensington filled her with a horrible ennui. It didn’t help that he now resembled an overstuffed pork sausage. Maybe he had actually absorbed a whole other person. Watching him tie his shoelaces was a lesson in physics: how did he bend in the middle when the middle was so much bigger than either end?

When she’d brought up the subject of divorce he had been stunned. ‘On what grounds?’ he had demanded.

‘My unreasonable behaviour? Your unreasonable behaviour? Bird molestation? Giraffe bothering? I don’t really mind, but I do want a divorce,’ she had said, in a reasonable tone.

‘Are you having an affair?’ His eyebrows had come together.

‘No. And I assume you aren’t?’ she asked, her eyes on his paunch. When a paunch got that big, did it become a super-paunch?

He went pink around the ears, and it dawned on her, with a shock, that he was. And as the conversation (now a shouting conversation) continued, she discovered that it was of long standing and with his secretary. She remembered yelling at some stage that he was a cliché. It was strange that even though she wanted a divorce, wanted never to see Nigel step out of his trousers ever again, it was still awful.

It was the division of the spoils that did it. There were days when she had cried over the toaster for her lost dreams. The things they had bought together when she had imagined herself in love. But now she could see that that had been youthful folly, a combination of lust and laziness. Marrying Nigel had relieved her of the need to get a proper job.

Lucy blamed Miranda for breaking up a happy family. Jack had been upset but understanding.

After the decree absolute, Miranda had bought herself a house in Notting Hill and put the rest of the money in the bank. It wasn’t a huge amount, but she had reckoned that, if she was careful, she could have a lovely break before she found employment.

The time had come. But what job?

I need a change of direction, Miranda thought, putting her toes out from under the duvet and wiggling them. Tomorrow I’ll do something to facilitate finding a job. At least it’ll be a change from thinking about sodding dates.

Eventually, as her mind wandered off to variations on a theme of sheep, she drifted into sleep.

The next morning she arose full of purpose. She had a shower, washed her hair and put on a conditioning treatment, then vigorously applied a body scrub, which smelt slightly off. Wrapped in a fluffy new towel – she had thrown out all those that might have touched Nigel – she plucked her eyebrows and moisturised, using industrial quantities of cream. She applied blow-drying serum to her mid-length red-gold hair, then hung upside down to do the roots, leaving the rest to curl naturally.

‘Right,’ she said, as she strode to the wardrobe. She took out a thin pink shirt and a pair of jeans cut off to the knee. Looking critically in the mirror, she was in two minds about whether she was mutton dressed as lamb since she could see her bra through the shirt. But without a husband or children to declare either way, she decided to go with it.