The door next door

This was published 11 years ago

The door next door

Surrounded by the sounds of other lives, a woman remembers the men who might have been and the self she lost along the way. By Emily Perkins.

MORE than 20 years and she's still got unrealistic expectations. That's the sort of thing a self-help book suggests you do, she thinks, examine your expectations and ask whether they are realistic, but it's true. The way she looks at Michael, the way his constant importance makes her bristle, is unfair. It's not his fault. It's something else that she misses, some — doubt about the world, his place in it — that's gone. You should hear his tone of voice with waiters. On a bad day she has to go into the ladies' room and blow her nose. At her age.

Saying anything makes him infinitely worse. She's a smart, successful woman who talks like a self-help book "for smart, successful women". She can't understand it. And when she thinks about it she has no idea what realistic expectations are.


They married in 1985, in her family village church near Bristol. The reception was held in a dripping marquee on her parents' lawn, the roof of the awning filling with rain like a great pregnant skin, until one side of the sac collapsed under the pressure and sloshed water all over the long table of wine bottles, knocking the spare glasses over, breaking one or two. She hadn't known it was the weekend of the Glastonbury Festival when she set the date. She hadn't known it was going to rain. She wore a drop-waisted pale blue cotton dress with leg-of-mutton sleeves and a lace Peter Pan collar. Her hair was puffed and streaked blonde, up in a bun with a fluffy fringe. There was too much going on. There was always too much going on. Her husband wore a pale suit with baggy trousers pleated at the front. Since the promotion from law clerk he no longer put gel in his hair; it sat flatly forward on his forehead in soft little spikes that made him look like someone you might easily take advantage of. That wasn't the case, she knew, and when she had kissed him in the back of the car on the way from the church to her parents' house, the ring more rubbingly present and alien on her finger than it ever would be again, she had mussed up his hair so its scrappy cross-hatch would more accurately represent his character. When the kiss finished he had deliberately, slowly, smoothed his fringe back into place.

After the roof fell and raspberry-coloured wine stains crept through the white linen tablecloths, tablecloths that were clipped down at the corners with metal attachments so that nobody would see the length of plain chipboard underneath, chipboard that now smelled acidly of red wine and wet canvas — and after Susan was pulled away from her useless mopping of the table by her head bridesmaid, and pushed towards a waiting umbrella, the guests abandoned the soggy marquee and crammed themselves into her parents' living room. In the kitchen, caterers panicked. This unexpected setting made Susan surprisingly self-conscious. Here was the green-and-gold-striped sofa she had grown up with, pushed back against the wall. Here were the photographs of the family through all the stages of her life. It was too intimate suddenly, not in the new exciting way that it would have been in the anonymous white marquee, she and Michael separate from everyone together, the shining circle of her wedding band looped tight around them, the two of them looking only at each other. No — this was her life, not theirs, pressing in on her, the goldy curtains, the frames around her parents' generic watercolours, the ageing faces of relatives and family friends, the covered button at the back of the Peter Pan lace constricting her throat.

She wanted to make Michael look at her but he wouldn't. He was looking at her father the way she'd seen him look in client meetings, as though he already knew what the person speaking was going to say. Now he looks like that whenever anyone speaks. He knows what everyone, everywhere, is going to say, from now on, forever. Susan, the children, his colleagues, his clients, newsreaders, the waiters listing the specials of the day. It's hard for him. He has to go through the motions of listening, which is an essentially motionless act. He has to be still and keep his own mouth shut.

Her father was in the middle of his speech — not near tears, Susan's parents were not the demonstrative sort — when there came the rolling crunch of gravel and a fervent honking from the drive. Nobody really knew what to do. In the small silence that followed they could hear someone shouting "Stop it! Shut up!" Susan went cold. She had a very deep pain in her belly, like nothing she had felt before. Right across the front of that dress that made her legs look short. She ran outside. It was the old A40, the blue one, Paul's car ever since they were at school.

He was standing in front of the car covered in mud. Head to toe — the car was streaked with mud and rain and it was raining on him, he was wearing completely muddy overalls and a little cap and his bleached hair sticking out the front of it. He had a girl with him, her name was Gloria but she might have made that up. It turned out they'd been at Glastonbury and left halfway through because of the rain and they were still fighting over missing Style Council. The back of the car was full of their muddy tent and ruined clothes. Paul told Susan later that they'd wanted to call in on her parents to use their bathroom, clean up before driving on, but then he'd seen the marquee as he'd come down the drive through the dripping rhododendrons and he had that terrible feeling about what had happened and he'd just started banging his hand on the horn again and again, not even thinking he was summoning them all outside, just making the sound because that was how he felt and what he needed to hear surrounding him in the world.

This was a long time later. Ten years, perhaps. She saw him at their old classics teacher's funeral. His wife was pregnant. They had a glass of wine together after she went back to their hotel. He and his wife were very much in love. That was the phrase Susan used on herself. It made her suffer but made it like a story book at the same time.

She was mortified at the sight of him covered in mud on her parents' semi-circular drive. Why hadn't she invited him? She and Michael had agreed no exes, because she was helplessly jealous, and now there was this awful scene. The rain was so heavy. She didn't dare step forward out of the shelter of the front doorway. Gloria said, "Sorry, we only wanted to wash up." Susan's mother tried to get them to come in, she'd got an umbrella from the hallway and was standing near them saying, "Come on, don't be so silly, come and join us." And she made a dash for it — Gloria — and when she was standing next to Susan outside the front door, panting and soaked through and muddy, Paul got back in the car and turned it around and drove away.

Gloria stayed. Suddenly everything was all right again. Paul had gone and Susan wouldn't have to talk to him for a long time, and the speeches would pass and everyone could eat and it wouldn't matter if she drank and the next day they were going to Italy on honeymoon and it was fine now. All of that tension when they moved indoors, all the tightness, the room like a stretched balloon, had gone. She didn't love Paul. No. And back in the living room while her father struggled to draw everyone in to focus again on his speech she looked at her husband and knew he would never love her in the same way Paul loved her. She didn't need to be loved like that, she never has. She just wants to feel for someone the way she felt about Michael that day. All sort of hot and worshippy.

THE night of their old teacher's funeral, after Paul had gone back to his wife, Susan stayed on in the hotel bar. She was 36 now. It was the mid-'90s. She had never been to Glastonbury.

Five times a week she visited the gym near work just to keep looking like she used to look without even having to try. She could see 40 from where she sat in the inoffensively striped armchair, another vodka and tonic on the low table by her knees. Her good knees. The vodka was failing to get her drunk. She looked up at the giant metal sculpture on the opposite wall — a sort of horizontal bronze curlicue that was perhaps meant to impart a feeling of funkiness to this cavernous foyer bar — and laughed. Forty used to mean letting everything go, not caring about your weight or your hair or your clothes. Now she understood there was no end to this being presentable in the world, not until she was as old as her classics teacher's widow could she fade away, become grey and shapeless. She pretended to read a book but the arm of the chair kept drawing her gaze. Its greeny, goldy stripes.

The barman had brushed-forward hair and although he was at least 10 years younger than her he kept looking over to her chair. She shifted her knees up and down together.

Later she asked the barman what time his shift finished. Later than that she walked across the tipping expanse of floor towards the lifts.

It reminded her of crossing the playground at her school. She wanted to shield her head from flying tennis balls. Paul would remember.

In her room she searched the phone directory for the name of the hotel Paul and his wife were staying at. She picked the directory up by the corners to take it across to the phone beside the bed and it slipped from her fingers and crashed to the ground. She had lost her place and couldn't be bothered to find it again. The bed was vast and everything in the room very squared off, angular, the decor a sombre yellow and green, to reassure the masculine traveller. She laughed to herself for the second time that night and pressed her knuckles into her mouth.

The knock on the door woke her. Perhaps it was the door to the next room. She waited. There it was again. Nobody had ever been able to see through those microscopic viewing holes they insert in hotel room doors, she thought. The barman hadn't really looked like a younger version of Michael. Downstairs she had told herself that he did and that when he came to her room and kissed her and pushed her onto the hotel bed it would be Michael who was kissing her, Michael lying on top of her in the shadows. Now she shuddered with the closeness of the call, the flimsy door that had been between her and another actual human being, the barman with his brushed-forward Britpop hair and his nauseating warm-skinned realness. Now, when she woke in the morning alone and untouched and pulled back the curtains, the white light of relief would pour over her.

But she didn't wake into a sunny West Country morning. When she woke it was dark still and her face was jammed into the overly fat hotel room pillow and she was wearing her tights, itchy, hot, and her bra, which was cutting up under her breasts in a painful way. Something had woken her. A realisation. It hadn't been the barman knocking on the door. Not a young Michael. Not her Michael either, a Michael who would never in a million years leave the children with a friend and drive through the night to her from London. The person on the other side of the door was Paul. She reached for the air-conditioner and turned off its steady hum and there it was still, the knocking, softly now, insistent, refusing to go away.

She crossed the room in the darkness and opened the door onto the lighted hotel corridor. He was there, at the corner where the corridor turned and beyond that were the lifts. His back was to her; he leaned against the corner wall.


The bartender turned and began to walk towards her. He was dripping, his hair was plastered forward on his head, and he was covered in mud. Down the long hotel corridor he walked. The bartender. Michael. Paul. She stiffened and gripped the doorframe. He kept walking towards her. He kept on walking towards her.

NOW, at nearly 50, Susan looks younger than she did that night in Bristol. It costs a lot of money but she and Michael make a lot of money. Last month she was hospitalised with septicaemia from a facial abrasion that went wrong. She woke in the night with her skin tight and burning and felt it pulpy with water beneath her fingers, the whole of her face a giant blister. They fixed it. She's fine. She wears eyelash implants and has the very good fillers, the subtle Botox, the softest ash-blonde tint. Michael accepts the way time has frozen on her with calm presumption, although his bald spot is taking over his head. Sometimes she wonders what Paul would think if he saw her now, her wonderful approximation of youth.

Once every few weeks she looks like a peeled prawn but when that happens she does not leave the house. When she doesn't leave the house she sits in her back garden, sheltering in its deep gold lights and green shadows, and listens to the shouting and drumming and teenage crying and laughing book club nights and music and televised cricket and rummaging and whistling and putting away of dishes and ghosts knocking on the walls and all of the life next door.

Emily Perkins' latest book, Novel About My Wife is published by Bloomsbury.

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