egg and chips.
Chapter 3
Liza might have envied Dulcie her marriage but as far as Dulcie was concerned, marriage sucked.
Anyway, she had made her New Year’s resolution now. And she was jolly well going to keep it.
Yes, it was a shame, especially when everyone was forever telling you how lucky you were to be married to someone as dishy and wonderful as Patrick Ross in the first place, but they didn’t know what it was really like. Because what was the point of having a dishy and wonderful husband when you hardly ever got the chance to experience his dishyness because all he ever did was bloody work work work?
It was particularly annoying, Dulcie mused, when you had been so sure you’d hit the marital jackpot. After years of falling for the wrongest men imaginable – and boy, had she had a talent for sniffing them out – meeting Patrick had come as such a shock to the system she’d barely known how to handle him. It had taken her months to learn to trust him, to realise she didn’t need to know how to handle Patrick, because he wasn’t playing an elaborate trick on her, he actually was as nice as he seemed.
Weird. It took some getting used to, especially when you were as addicted to bastards as she had been. HHB, Liza had called it, as in: ‘Oh, Dulcie’s HHB. Hopelessly Hooked on Bastards.’
She hadn’t meant to be, but somehow that was always the way Dulcie’s relationships had managed to turn out. Something to do with the adrenalin rush that went hand in hand with chronic insecurity, or some such crap. Reading about it once in a magazine, Dulcie had recognised herself at once. Any man who was nice to you clearly didn’t deserve you and had to be a complete wimp. If, on the other hand, he lied, cheated and treated you like dirt, you obviously didn’t deserve someone as fantastic as he was and were promptly desperate to hang on to him at all costs.
Except Patrick Ross hadn’t been awful to her, nor was he a wimp. He had obviously never studied the rule book. Confusion all round. Patrick was witty, he was smart, he had girls drooling over him everywhere he went. Even Dulcie’s parents had approved of him, which was a startling new experience for all concerned.
Patrick had carried on being charming, phoning when he said he’d phone and turning up when he said he’d turn up. He brought Dulcie presents, made her laugh and never embarrassed her at parties. Other girls, pea green with envy, continued to swoon. Dulcie’s mother even looked once or twice as if she might swoon too.
It took time, but in the end Dulcie couldn’t fight it any more. She resigned her membership of the HHB club and allowed herself to fall in love with Patrick Ross. She was twenty-five, he was thirty-three. She was lazy, he was ambitious. She liked chicken breast, he liked leg. She enjoyed a drink, Patrick ‘Better keep a clear head, big meeting tomorrow’ preferred to drive.
It was a match made in heaven. It was perfect.
For the first four years at least.
Things had only started to go really wrong when Patrick, tired of making money for the computer company for which he was working, decided to take the plunge and set up in business on his own. The hours he put in were ridiculous. He made junior doctors look like part-timers.
He would leave the house before Dulcie was awake and return home just as she was crawling back into bed.
‘I never see you,’ she wailed one night when it all got toomuch. ‘You never see me with make-up on. It’s not fair ...’
‘I’m sorry.’ Patrick sat down on the bed and hugged her, getting moisturiser all over the lapels of his best suit. ‘I know it isn’t fair, but I’m doing it for us. From now on things will be better, I promise. I’ll do more work from home.’
He had been as good as his word and the result had been as disastrous as Dulcie had known it would be. She’d have got more conversation out of a Madame Tussaud’s waxwork. Patrick’s body might be there but his mind was so occupied with work it may as well have disappeared on a round-theworld cruise.
Like a small child desperate for attention, Dulcie found herself putting three sugars in the cups of tea she took him, just to provoke a reaction. One evening, frustrated beyond endurance and having read in Cosmopolitan that the element of surprise could pep up a marriage no end, she danced naked into Patrick’s study, threw herself on to his lap and uncorked a bottle of champagne with her teeth. Children, don’t try this at home. All it achieved was foam everywhere, a chipped upper molar and a fused disk drive. All the work Patrick had been about to save was lost and he had needed to stay up all night replacing it.
Dulcie considered suing Cosmopolitan. Her marriage had been pepped down.
‘Get a job,’ Liza had suggested when Dulcie had moaned to her about how bored she was.
‘Are you mad?’ Dulcie looked appalled. ‘The whole point of Patrick working these stupid hours is to make money. The last thing we need is me slogging my guts out as well, earning more of the stuff. That really would defeat the object.’
‘You might enjoy it.’
‘No I wouldn’t.’ Honestly, Liza had the oddest ideas sometimes.
‘Okay, what about charity work? Just a few hours a week.’
‘For heaven’s sake,’ cried Dulcie, ‘aren’t I already suffering enough?’
Happily, another of Liza’s suggestions met with greater success.
‘Why don’t you come along to Brunton Manor? Give it a try?’
Brunton Manor Country Club, situated three miles outside Bath, was where Liza went to play tennis and squash. Pru, also a member, swam there two or three times a week.
Dulcie, who was to sport what Scooby Doo was to astrophysics, wrinkled her nose.
‘Don’t give me that look. You might enjoy it,’ Liza argued.
‘People say that when they try and make you eat frogs’ legs.’
‘And you don’t have to do anything sporty if you don’t want to. Brunton’s a country club, not the Foreign Legion. During the day it’s full of pampered housewives drinking gin and ogling the musclemen in the gym.’
