Blast from the Past. Cathy Hopkins

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СКАЧАТЬ the bracelet, then again a month later to tell me that the gift had been a great success and to ask if I’d like to go for dinner. I said yes.

      Richard and I dated for a year before he moved in with me and I was impressed by his taste and initial generosity. With his army background, immaculate clothes and thin frame, he wasn’t my usual type, but I was ready for someone different. Richard was quite posh and I liked that about him – his impeccable manners, the way he spoke, the way he dressed in suits and shirts from Jermyn Street in Piccadilly, and wore handmade shoes. He always smelt wonderful, too, of Czech and Speake No.88 cologne. The typical English gentleman. He showed me another side of life. We ate in acclaimed restaurants in Mayfair, he got tickets to Glyndebourne, best seats at the theatre, taught me a lot about fine wines; we had weekends in France with his sister and a fabulous safari holiday to the Masai Mara in Kenya. It was a lifestyle I could get used to, I thought, and I did at first. I wasn’t used to being looked after so well and told friends that it was nice to have a father figure. Another plus had been that he didn’t come with any baggage or children. Richard’s first wife had died in her early twenties, a fact he’d grieved over and moved on from. ‘Life is for the living,’ he used to say. He didn’t drink to excess, didn’t take drugs, wasn’t moody and said what he meant. It was exhilarating after some of the men I’d known or thought I could change or stayed with because they appeared to need me. I wasn’t after a grand love affair. At that time, I wanted stability: a man I liked, loved even, but not too much because that way, there was less chance of getting hurt. He’d rented out his flat in Kensington and moved in with me in what was supposed to be a temporary measure. We even talked about marriage, though neither of us wanted to rush into it. We discussed buying a place in the country. We planned a future.

      The first years were good but an adjustment. Richard had his way of doing things, I had mine. Slowly, over the years, it became more his way of doing things, and I felt I’d begun to lose myself in wanting to live up to his high standards, rigid routines and expectations. Even sex was like a military operation: you put this bit here, then that there, twiddle a bit, oo, ah, then done and into the shower. Hardly passionate, and it soon faded to less and less frequent. I did wonder sometimes if Richard’s first wife had died from boredom.

      The final straw was when he became controlling over money and too possessive of my time. I wanted a relationship but never to be joined at the hip. Richard resented me being away too long if I was abroad on shopping trips, and even suggested that I give up my work and let him support both of us. When I refused to do that, his already thin lips became pinched as he insisted that I use my money to pay off as much of my mortgage as I could every month. He would pay for everything else. I agreed to it because I could see that he was the kind of man who needed to see himself as the breadwinner, but that was the beginning of all the trouble. Richard earned plenty of money as a barrister but, as the months went by, I realized he was rather tight. He’d question if I really needed an item if I’d splashed out on a pair of shoes or expensive make-up. I felt I had to defend any extra purchases, so I took to hiding things in the back of the wardrobe then, when I wore something new, would say I’d had it for years. Lying like that never felt right. He made a budget for our household expenditure and went through it with a fine-tooth comb at the end of the month. He told me to fire Stuart because he could do my accounts for me instead. I refused and, when I confided in Stuart about the suggestion, he asked if I was truly happy with Richard. It was probably then that I began to really question if I was. Richard sulked if I wanted to go away with a friend and argued that I should be using the extra money to pay off the mortgage. He even tried to control what I ate, frowning if I chose to have a dessert, banning chocolate from the house.

      I began to feel hemmed in, that I was losing my independence and my space. Richard didn’t want to do Christmas at Pete and Marcia’s. He wouldn’t wear the antlers’ horn headband they gave him; he couldn’t let go of maintaining the proper image. He never accepted any of my friends, and soon I was reluctant to have them round for fear of him criticizing them later. Although I thought Marcia had some whacky ideas, I didn’t like hearing Richard call her and Pete a couple of old hippies. He just didn’t get them, and was jealous of anyone who took my attention away from him. He even thought something was going on with Stuart, and watched him like a hawk if he ever dropped by the house. As if. I realized that what Richard really wanted was a stay-at-home wife who was there to cook his meals, keep his (my) house tidy and sweet-scented, plan his social diary, be there for him and him alone. I got bored with the predictability of our life – a G and T at seven, supper at seven thirty, a concert midweek, a theatre outing on Fridays, a proper roast lunch and walk on Sundays. The stability I had craved was suffocating me, and I began to feel like rebelling, not that I ever did. I toed the line and, with it, shrank inside from my true self.

      When Richard sipped at his one, and only one, glass of fine wine with supper, I started to feel as if I’d like to polish off the whole bottle, then dance on the table. Anything to evoke a reaction. He disapproved of smokers, which made me want to go out and buy a pack of Marlboro and smoke the lot. He insisted on regular exercise and a long walk on Sundays, which made me want to slob about in my pj’s, watching trash TV, instead of one of his high-minded documentaries. I wanted to eat crisps and marshmallows instead of his only allowed TV snack, which was a bowl of olives from a deli in Kensington. And I was pretty sure his mother disapproved of me. She never thought I was good enough for her golden boy, though helping myself to the potpourri – thinking it was a bowl of crisps – when we first met, didn’t help improve her view of me. In the last year we were together, the cracks had begun to show in our relationship, and I was slipping down and through them. When Richard started telling me what to wear and advised me to cut up my credit card, I’d decided that was enough. I wanted my life back.

      Was he the one I’d let go? Definitely not. He was a decent man, kind when he wanted to be, but we were done. Saranya Ji had said a true soulmate might bring challenges, but I’d breathed a sigh of relief when Richard had moved out and I never looked back.

      *

      After lunch, Ben, Freya and Ruby disappeared up to their rooms; others settled on sofas to snooze, others helped with the washing up.

      ‘Pete’s been online,’ said Marcia, as we cleared plates from the table and stacked them in the dishwasher.

      ‘What for?’ I asked, as if I didn’t already know.

      ‘Billy and Grace.’

      ‘Ah. I thought he said it was going to be impossible to find them.’

      ‘True. It’s not easy but there’s so much information online now, we have made some headway.’

      ‘And how many people with those names have you found?’

      ‘Loads. You were right, Bea, both are common names, but I did find a whole family with the surname Harris who lived in Ireland then Manchester then in Cambridge. Pete’s going to get on to it in the New Year. When he has time, he’s going to do some more research for us. Is there anything else you can remember from what Saranya Ji told you that might be helpful?’

      ‘I told you everything.’

      ‘OK. Any places you’ve ever felt a feeling of déjà vu when you’ve visited them?’

      ‘Can’t say I have.’

      ‘Maybe you should try and contact Saranya Ji, see if she had anything else to add?’

      ‘She was on tour in India, wasn’t she? She’s probably gone from Udaipur by now. How did you find her, Marcia? Was it online or did someone recommend her? Has she got a website?’

      ‘Not that I know of. It really was coincidence, as if meant to be. Someone at work told me about her ages ago and then, when we got to India, I saw a leaflet in one of the hotels СКАЧАТЬ