Throughout my course, I came to know these youths well, found that, if you looked beyond the initial awkwardness, they had good hearts and grounded personalities. They wanted what we all want, love and mutual support. They were the type of men who would hold their beloved in high esteem and would never cheat. Or so I thought…
I remember the first time I knew that something wasn’t right. I’d been dating Jack for six months, and we were in love, when he went on one of his regular works nights out. By then, I’d met and socialized with most of his colleagues. Indeed, I often picked him up from the pub at the end of these evenings, sometimes joining him for the final round. But, on this particular evening, he was vague about exactly where they were going and said that he’d get a lift back from a mate.
The following day, I asked him which of the usual suspects were there. He reeled off a few names, hesitated, said “Becky”, then added another few male names.
“Becky?” I asked. I mean, women in engineering are rarer than hen’s teeth or at least they were when I was at uni.
“Mmm, she joined us about a month ago.”
“Any good?” There had been one female engineer on my sister’s boyfriend’s course and she’d only survived by getting various blokes to help her with her course work. She was beauty without the brains. Her father had persuaded her to try engineering as she was his only child and he needed someone to take over the family firm.
“Yeah, she’s okay.”
We were curled up on the settee and I’d just switched on the television and was about to leaf through the TV magazine. All of a sudden he was staring intently at the screen, yet it was showing EastEnders, a programme we both despised.
“There’s a documentary just starting on BBC4,” I muttered, picking up the remote control but still watching him out of the corner of my eye.
“I’ll make us a cuppa,” he said, and catapulted off the couch.
I felt a growing unease as I waited for him to return. He’d always told me that he was a one-woman man and had given me no reason to doubt him. But the way he’d hesitated before mentioning her name…
“So, what does Becky do?” I asked when he returned with two overfilled mugs.
“She works for me.”
“Did she come from Ashton’s?” I knew that another engineering firm had recently paid off their staff and that several of them had been taken on by the company which employed Jack.
“No, she’s straight out of university.’”
“A mere foetus!” I laughed, and waited for him to say that she was hopelessly callow.
Instead, he merely muttered another, “She’s okay.”
It would be a month before I saw them together but I knew that she was my rival long before that. Put bluntly, he changed, became more distant. He stopped holding my hand when we were out walking and he went from greeting me with a “Hi, gorgeous” to a mere “Hi”. He also started to find fault with my appearance, pinching my waistline and asking if I’d gained weight. Ironically, I’d lost a few pounds as I was terrified of losing him, was often too upset to eat.
I decided to go to the gym and tone up, though it was a horrible thought after a day spent dealing with overwrought teachers, pushy parents and hormonal pupils. But I was suddenly competing with a girl of twenty-two.
What with skipping meals and working out on the ski machine after school, I went from a size fourteen to a twelve in a fortnight. Then I waited outside Jack’s work one day and saw him leave, laughing, with Becky and she must have been a perfect ten. She had long blonde tresses which caught the light and danced around in the summer breeze – mine’s a brunette pixie cut and I have my share of bad hair days. She also had the straight white teeth of an American actress, whereas I have molars courtesy of the NHS.
It hurts to get your teeth straightened. It really does. They play that part down when you go for a private consultation. Instead, they take your photo and show you what you’re going to look like after your pegs are realigned. I signed up there and then and spent the next four months in pain, and still have ongoing discomfort. But they did look better, they really did. Even Jack said so, but he still didn’t want me to pick him up from his works nights out.
I was getting slimmer, prettier, fitter, yet it wasn’t enough. “It’s surprising that you still get spots at your age,” he said one day. In the bathroom a moment later, I looked in the mirror at the small red bump next to my gloss-enhanced lips and marvelled that my future happiness could depend on it. Dermabrasion helped, as did a lighter foundation, but I began to dread the run-up to my period when my complexion would be at its worst.
If you’re a feminist, I bet that by now you’re urging me to leave. And I should have done, I know, but he’d been so wonderful to me at the beginning. I kept thinking that if I tried hard enough, I could get the man who had loved me back. I mean, it’s not as if he was nasty all the time – he still took me out three times a week and made love to me as if he really meant it. And he still made future plans.
So, for the first eight months after Becky arrived, I convinced myself that he merely had a crush on her, that it wasn’t reciprocated. After all, what would a twenty-two-year-old blonde beauty see in a forty-two-year-old man who was beginning to lose his hair?
She saw something, the bitch – maybe it was the thought of his pension or maybe she had a thing about father figures. Who knows? All I can say for sure is that I followed them from work one night and saw them go into an Italian restaurant. No boss. No colleagues. Just him and her, with their arms around each other’s waists as they walked along the road and disappeared into the Venetian. I stood outside for a moment, feeling ill and afraid.
At first, I resolved not to mention it. I mean, what if he wanted to finish with me but just didn’t have the guts? I’d be making it so easy for him to bring things to a swift conclusion. Instead, I decided just to hang on in there in the hope that she would find a guy of her own age and he’d return all of his affection to me.
My resolve lasted for two whole days, then I burst into tears.
“What’s wrong? You’re usually so calm,” he said, taking his hand from my left breast where he’d been sending thrill after thrill through my nipple.
“I saw you holding hands with a blonde girl.”
“Christ,” he said, looking shocked, “I never wanted you to know.”
I took a deep breath. “I thought that we promised to be exclusive?”
He swallowed visibly. “We did.”
“So?” Don’t end it, don’t end it, don’t end it.
“She… she’s just so young and lively. She really gets under my skin. But at the same time, she can be overwhelming. I love being with you, it’s so nice and restful here.”
He made me sound like a day spa, but it was a start.
“At her age, her hormones must be all over the place?” I hoped against hope that she had wicked PMS.
“Tell me about it. For one week out of every month she snaps my head off and sometimes throws things at me!”
“And is that what you want?”
He shook his head. “It’s exhausting. But the rest of the time, she’s…” He seemed to realize belatedly who he was talking to. “I’m sorry, but she’s really got to me.”
“It’s probably just lust,” I said, trying to keep my voice from breaking again.
He shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe I’m having an early mid-life crisis.”
I tensed every sinew in my body. “I’d like you to give her up.”
“I can’t.”
“But we were so good together!”
“We still are. I don’t want to lose either of you.”
I took the deepest of breaths. “And if I issued an ultimatum?”
He looked down and played absently with my pubic hair. “I’d choose her.”
So, there it was.