Husbands Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Husbands

  Praise for Adele Parks’s previous bestsellers:

  ‘Compelling and guaranteed to keep you turning the pages till the end’Company

  ‘Parks depicts the nitty-gritty of relationships with authentic detail and there’s a hugely optimistic feel to the story that makes it a satisfying read’ Sunday Mirror

  ‘Still Thinking of You is guaranteed to keep chick-lit and romance readers engrossed’ Big Issue

  ‘Set against an intoxicatingly romantic background, this is another beautifully constructed multi-layered story with fine characterization’ Daily Record

  ‘Parks has scored another sure-fire hit with Larger than Life’ Heat

  ‘An entertaining and sophisticated version of the girl-meets-boy story’ Marie Claire

  ‘An engaging read’ Independent

  ‘Compulsively addictive and involved with sexual passion and bad decisions’ Elle

  ‘A touching look at infidelity, love, and all the crap that goes with it’ New Woman

  ‘A modern fairy tale in the classic sense of the word: a story of wanting what you can’t have, filled with perils and beasts, with a moralizing punch to the inevitably doe-eyed ending’ Daily Mail

  ‘Down-to-earth and very, very funny’ OK!

  ‘Perfectly encapsulating the zeitgeist… a very entertaining read’ Heat

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Adele Parks was born in Teesside, North-East England. She read English Language and Literature at Leicester University. Since graduating she has lived in Italy and Africa but has spent most of her adult life in London. She lives in Chiswick, with her husband and son. Her earlier novels, Playing Away, Game Over, Larger than Life, The Other Woman’s Shoes and Still Thinking of You, were all bestsellers and are published in over twenty different countries.

  www.adeleparks.com

  Husbands

  ADELE PARKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland

  (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road,

  Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre,

  Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany,

  Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,

  Rosebank 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published 2005

  1

  Copyright © Adele Parks, 2005

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

  to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

  re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s

  prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

  which it is published and without a similar condition including this

  condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  EISBN: 978–0–141–90229–6

  For my husband and my sister

  Contents

  1. Tomorrow is a Long Time

  2. One Broken Heart for Sale

  3. I Need Somebody to Lean On

  4. Money Honey

  5. How’s the World Treating You?

  6. Guitar Man

  7. All Shook Up

  8. If I Can Dream

  9. I Really Don’t Want to Know

  10. His Latest Flame

  11. You Don’t Know Me

  12. I Got Lucky

  13. Girl of Mine

  14. I Just Can’t Help Believin’

  15. Baby, Let’s Play House

  16. Is It So Strange?

  17. It’s Now Or Never

  18. Tonight is So Right for Love

  19. Baby, I Don’t Care

  20. You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling

  21. Trying to Get to You

  22. Love Me Tender

  23. How the Web was Woven

  24. That’s All Right, Mama

  25. Trouble

  26. I Forgot to Remember to Forget

  27. Viva Las Vegas

  28. Can’t Help Falling in Love

  29. The Wonder of You

  30. Good Rocking Tonight

  31. My Happiness

  32. Treat Me Nice

  33. Hard Headed Woman

  34. Shake, Rattle and Roll

  35. Always On My Mind

  36. Any Day Now

  37. Memories

  38. Devil in Disguise

  39. Stuck On You

  40. Suspicious Minds

  41. One Night

  42. I’ll Remember You

  43. That’s When Your Heartaches Begin

  44. Heartbreak Hotel

  45. My Baby Left Me

  46. I’m Leavin’

  47. Stranger in My Hometown

  48. It Hurts Me

  49. Reconsider Baby

  50. You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me

  Epilogue

  Glossary of Australian Terms

  Acknowledgements

  1. Tomorrow is a Long Time

  Sunday 9th May 2004

  Bella

  ‘OK? I’ll call you tomorrow, Amelie. You’re OK, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Amelie with a sigh. Her tone isn’t reassuring.

  I press the red button on the handset and disconnect my lovely friend. I’m left with an overwhelming sense of inadequacy and grief. Grief is so lonely. It stains everything it touches and builds huge divisive walls. I should know, my mother died of cancer when I was nine. I will never stop feeling cheated. I’d wanted to say something meaningful, calming, consoling and true to Amelie but I couldn’t. I’ve tried to find those words for nearly ten months now but they don’t exist. Sighing with frustration I push my fists into the sockets of my eyes and rub hard. When Amelie called, I’d just finished my night-time round of pelvic-floor exercises and I’d gritted my teeth through eight reps of stomach crunches. I was mid my cleanse, tone and moisturize routine but now I can’t find the emotional energy to continue. All that vanity stuff seems so pointless in the face of Amelie’s pain.

  Loving is such a risk.

  I look at my husband, Philip, who has fallen asleep while I was on the phone. He’s clasping a copy of The Economist. I turn on the bedside lamp and turn off the bright overhead light, ease the magazine out of his hand and kiss his forehead. I always love him even more after talking to my widowed friend; grief makes us selfish. I wish that every time I spoke to Amelie I didn’t think, ‘There but for the grace of God,’ but I do. Which probably means I’m not as nice a person as I’d like to be.

  I nip around to my side of the bed, climb in next to Phil and hold tight to his strong, bulky body. My breathing slows down and I can’t feel my heart thud quite as furiously inside my chest. During my conversation with Amelie it raced so violently that I was convinced it was attempting an escape bid.

  I often think my heart would like to escape.

  Philip m
akes me feel safe. He’s nine years older than me, which is undoubtedly part of it. He is kind, respectful and thoughtful, even after sex. The men that I dated before Philip had not often been these things, even before sex. We met not quite two and a half years ago – I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar, which makes me a tribute to a Human League song that I can barely remember but Philip enthuses about. An interesting dinner-party anecdote maybe, but working as a waitress in a cocktail bar is in fact a fairly grim existence. Philip is a highly successful City trader and while I’m not sure exactly what City traders do, I know that they get paid an awful lot of money to do it. So Philip charged into my life armed with the traditional gifts of dinners in fancy restaurants, flirty lingerie (wrapped in tissue paper and hidden in thick cardboard bags) and even the occasional meaningful CD and book. He also brought with him a new array of courtship tools. He was a grown-up. Philip talked about ISAs, pension plans and stocks and shares with the same passion as other men talk about football league tables, PlayStation and bottled beer. He remembered stuff I found difficult to retain, like when the hunk of junk I called a car needed to be squeezed through its MOT, or if my household insurance needed renewing, and his DIY knowledge actively turned me on.

  When I met Philip I was, I suppose, a bit of a mess. The most substantial thing about me was my overdraft and my most meaningful relationship was with my bank manager. In fact, thinking about it, I hadn’t actually met my bank manager, so my most meaningful relationship was with the girl at the call centre (probably in Delhi) who I rang regularly to explain my latest embarrassment.

  It wasn’t as though I squandered money on designer labels and expensive lotions and potions. I didn’t own much; not a flash car or a property. Not even a shoe collection; hard to believe, when you consider that most women who have been brought up on a diet of Sex and the City and Friends think that a to-die-for shoe collection and wardrobe is, well… to die for.

  It wasn’t as though I’d been idle. I’d worked pretty much every day of my life since I graduated with my middle-of-the-road degree. The problem was I hadn’t been consistent in my career progression. I had been on the bottom rung of several career ladders but had never clambered to the top of any of them. The thing is, I don’t know what I want to do or be. I try to view it positively that, after several years, I can confirm that I don’t want to be an accountant (too many exams), a banker (I don’t like wearing suits), a calligrapher (anyway there isn’t much calling), a dental hygienist (other people’s mouths – yuk), something in PR or anything in the music industry. I still think being a chocolate buyer for Selfridges might be good but the opportunity has never arisen.

  In fact fewer opportunities arise as the years pass. On leaving university starting and failing to complete one graduate trainee programme is acceptable but after several years of failing to finish any trainee programmes, potential employers became wary of what they (rightly) identify as my inability to commit.

  I’d been seeing Phil for nineteen months when he popped the question. I like to round up and say two years; it sounds more… appropriate. Actually, he sort of blurted it rather than popped, in a very un-Philip moment. If I was a betting woman I’d have put money on Phil being the type of man to propose in a controlled environment, like a restaurant or in front of some significant building or beautiful sunset. I’d have guessed that he’d buy a ring in advance, go down on one knee and recite a rehearsed speech asking me to do him the honour etc etc. In fact he yelled over gushing water (he was wearing Marigold rubber gloves at the time). I think his exact words were, ‘We’d better get married before you cause any more trouble.’ How could a girl resist?

  At the time I was flat-sitting for a flamboyant and wealthy fashion designer friend of Amelie’s, while she flittered around the globe to be inspired by spices in Morocco and sunsets in Cape Town, or similar. She had exactly the sort of job I could see myself being good at, even though I wasn’t sure what she did, it didn’t even sound like work to me (undoubtedly part of the attraction). Real work, as far as I am concerned, is a series of dull temp jobs and late-night shifts serving cocktails to wanker bankers.

  I found the fashion designer’s Clerkenwell ‘space’ horribly intimidating. It was too trendy to be described as anything as mundane as a flat, which says it all. There were acres of glossy wooden floors and I thought the place would have benefited from a couple of cosy rugs. There were impressive skirting-board-to-ceiling windows which let in plenty of uplifting light but left me with as much privacy as a goldfish. And while stripping the palette to a single colour – white – apparently achieved ‘monochrome drama on a grand scale’, it was almost impossible to live with. Of course, I was grateful to be staying in such a stunning and stylized ‘space’ for a next-to-nothing rent but my gratitude was all about the rate not the stylized nature of the gaff. I’d never say so; it would be regarded as the epitome of crassness.

  While my responsibilities were hardly tasking I did, disappointingly but somewhat predictably, manage to muck things up. I was charged with switching lights on and off, drawing blinds and setting alarms when I went out. I just had to live there, but all the same I found my position arduous. I was surrounded by white walls, white sheets, white settees, white crockery and white towels. All of them waiting for me to stain, spoil, scuff or spot. I lived in a state of perpetual nervousness for three months. Inevitably, the horror I imagined became a reality; I blocked the state-of-the-art waste disposal unit with the remnants of a very average Chinese takeaway and I left a tap running as I rushed out to work. I returned to find a blocked sink and a flooded kitchen.

  Philip arrived thirty minutes after I called him. He unblocked the sink, mopped up the spill and assured me that he’d source, buy and refit the water-damaged kick boards and tiles. I agreed to marry him that instant.

  Besides, while Philip was being photographed by speed cameras as he dashed to East London to help me, I took a call from Amelie, who with an eerie calmness – that I later identified as shock – told me that Ben, her partner for eleven years, had been knocked over by a bus.

  What are the chances of that? You hear people say, ‘Go on then, I’ll have a second piece of cake. Sod the cholesterol, I might walk out of here and get knocked over by a bus.’ But no one expects to, do they? No more than we expect to be abducted by aliens or win the lottery. But he was. Dear, dear Ben. Exuberant, amusing, vibrant Ben was buying a copy of Esquire and a packet of chewing gum one moment and the next, he was dead.

  It was the bus, not the blocked U-bend, that most encouraged me to accept Philip’s proposal but I never, ever acknowledge as much. Sadness and fear seem inappropriate reasons to accept a marriage proposal.

  2. One Broken Heart for Sale

  Laura

  Although it is 10.45 p.m. I consider this a perfectly acceptable time to call my bezzie mate, Bella. She knows it takes me until about now to find space in my day to talk. It’s not that my friends are a low priority; it’s just that Eddie, my son, is four years old and while he appears more than moderately intelligent, he seems to have a deaf spot where certain phrases are concerned. ‘Can’t you amuse yourself for a moment? Mummy has to make a telephone call,’ and, ‘Time for bed,’ being the ones that spring most readily to mind.

  I have tried to hold conversations while he’s still up and about, but my friends (particularly the child-free ones) find it infuriating that I never finish a sentence without having to break off to yell, ‘Don’t touch that!’ Or, ‘No, you can’t have a lollipop, eat an apple,’ which I say for the benefit of the person on the other end of the phone while I feed Eddie kilos of sweets in an effort to buy time for adult chatter. Even when Eddie does fall asleep the next couple of hours are lost in a blur of household duties.

  Not that I am a domestic goddess. I wouldn’t like to mislead and give the impression that I am the sort of woman who pre-packs her kid’s lunch for kindie the night before it is actually needed. A lunch full of home-made goodies, organic whatsits and fru
it and veggie thingies. I am (sadly) far more of a seat-of-my-pants type of girl. The chores that gobble up my time are scraping tomato sauce and leftover fish fingers from plastic plates into the bin, scraping yogurt from any and every surface that Eddie can reach in the flat, sticking a load of washing on, maybe doing a bit of ironing (if I can’t smooth the crinkles out by hand) and drinking at least half a bottle of wine. By the time the washing is on the spin cycle the wine has usually taken effect and I feel sufficiently cleansed of the day’s grime to call Bella.

  We never run out of things to say. For quite some time we talked about my divorce and my bastard ex-husband, Oscar. Then we discussed Bella’s wedding and now, as neither of us is facing any particular life-changing event, we talk about what colour I should paint my bathroom and what colour she should paint her toenails.

  It really doesn’t matter if I put a late call in, keep Bella up into the small hours of the morning, as she doesn’t have to get up for work or a demanding child. I won’t even try to pretend that I’m not jealous.

  When I met Bella, over three years ago, things were very different. In those days she didn’t visit beauticians, expensive hairdressers, food nutritionists or the gym to fill her day. Between approximately 8.30 a.m. and 7.45 p.m. she was a lackey in some PR company because she had a vague notion that she wanted to ‘get into PR’. People kept telling her she’d be good at it. Not that she is a particularly good communicator but she is pretty and a disproportionate amount of pretty girls are advised that PR is the career for them. As these girls often labour under the mistaken belief that a career in PR means attending lots of swanky parties, they try it out for a while, despite having little genuine interest in the industry. This is the category Bella fell into.

  Some evenings she did a bit of waitressing in a seedy cocktail bar and other evenings she did an IT course because someone had told her she needed to improve her PC skills. Once she cleared up the misunderstanding that PC stood for ‘personal computer’ and not ‘politically correct’ she enrolled for evening classes. She used to joke that she might as well be an IT girl if not an ‘it’ girl. At weekends she worked as a waitress in a café, which is where I met her.