Never knowingly try to make someone love you

Originally strangers to each other, it was not surprising that it took time for the real issues between Hannah and Justin to emerge into the open. With school fees, a mortgage, and commuting to work six days a week draining Hannah’s over-stretched pay packet, it meant they rarely went out together as a couple other than to The Carpenter’s Arms during the holidays when the children were staying with their father in Wales. For the remainder of their time together, they stayed in, cooking and drinking wine. She found it almost impossible to ask for any financial help towards their expensive pastime, afraid that it would be seen as penny-pinching, or even mean, and although he would occasionally bring a bottle of wine to her table, she supposed his lack of generosity reflected how he would have treated any woman given his spoilt and indulgent early childhood. Most of all, she wanted to avoid upsetting him – as to incur his wrath would mean bestowing his censure on her. Forever.
His small offering against my huge one, thought Hannah resentfully.
And then there were the personal hygiene issues: not cleaning his over-crowded, poorly arranged teeth at night which led to his dog breath, and picking his head until open sores appeared which he then liked to pick and eat!
‘What are you doing?’ asked Hannah sleepily one night, after the loud grinding of his teeth had awoken her.
‘I’m scratching my piles,’ he replied, rigorously rubbing his backside. ‘They’re killing me.’
‘What? With your bare fingers?’ she asked incredulously, remembering he was naked in bed.
‘Yes.’
‘Why don’t you go and wash your hands with some soap?’
‘I never use soap.’
‘What? Not even after going to the toilet?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’ve got sensitive skin and I can’t afford to get my hands messed up with allergic rashes because it’ll affect my playing.’
It wasn’t a convincing argument.
But the most annoying issue of all which emerged was how other people frequently engaged in assessing their relationship behind their backs. As Justin had lost his mother to cancer when he was still in his twenties, it was natural for him to consider Hannah as a surrogate mother: washing, ironing, cooking and nurturing. This, they cruelly decided, was the basis of Justin’s attraction towards her. The mother figure.
I wouldn’t dream of saying that to anyone, not even to a best friend, she thought, when she first heard the theory from one of her so-called female friends at work. She could only conclude they were jealous and resentful of her relationship with Justin, despite his reputation as a womanizer, but no matter how much she tried to push the concept of the mother figure to the back of her mind, she became increasingly aware of having to make up for the age gap between them. She constantly strived to keep his interest and to stop him from straying by being slimmer, cleaner, better dressed and sharper than any other woman he knew but it proved to be
exhausting. There was also no doubt in her mind Justin liked the ladies and he liked them young.
And, unfortunately for both of them, the younger the better.

‘What were you thinking of this morning?’ she asked quietly when they finally caught up with each other in the senior common room for coffee.
‘Not in here!’ he hissed angrily between his teeth, trying hard to avoid her stare. His eyes swiftly scanned room to assess whether their colleagues’ attention had been diverted their way.
‘What do you mean ‘not in here’?’ she retorted back quietly, not bothered whether others were listening or not. ‘We ran out of petrol this morning and I’m only trying to ask why you didn’t stop to pick us up!’
‘I had to get into work so that I wouldn’t be late for playing the organ at chapel,’ he replied as some sort of an offering to help explain his bizarre behaviour.
Since they rarely shared cars for the long journey between work and home, Hannah had felt an acute sense of disbelief and abandonment as she silently watched him drive past her and disappear into the distance towards Queensford, whilst she frantically waved her arms for him to stop and help.
‘But Justin, all you had to do was to stop so that I could call a recovery firm on your mobile ‘phone! As it was, I had to leave the kids on their own in the back of the car whilst I walked to the nearest village to call somebody out. We didn’t get into school until eleven o’clock!’
She instinctively knew he wasn’t going allow any further discussion on the subject in case there was a public scene in the common room. He despised being crossed. She silently pondered whether there was another reason for his unacceptable behaviour, especially as there were other colleagues who could have played the organ in his unexpected absence that morning. Had he lied to someone where he had been the previous evening and was covering up for his movements in some way? Something did not smell right. It was yet another case of the alarm bells ringing, but she could not hear them.
Because she chose not to.

Justin’s skin rash outbreak that winter term was a mystery. There was plenty of cream to be applied and plenty of screams to be heard. He was in pain as much as he was a pain, trying to blame her for his unexpected predicament.
‘Will you put some of my cream on my back, please?’ he would plead each night before they went to bed. ‘Ooh, please be careful, it hurts.’
‘Sorry. I’ll be as gentle as I can.’
‘What soap powder are you using?’ he demanded gruffly one night, ferociously scratching his inflamed arms and back. ‘Or it must be your soap. And are your sheets clean?’
‘Of course, the sheets are clean!’ she replied sharply, thinking his accusations of domestic mismanagement audacious.
‘If it’s not your washing powder or your soap then what is causing my rash?’ he persistently asked in desperation, his skin a mass of bleeding open sores.
‘I’m no expert on rashes, Justin, but you need go and see your doctor to find out,’ she
suggested benignly, beginning to feel just a little fed up with his accusations and endless moaning for sympathy.
‘And look at my bloodshot eyes!’ he noted worriedly, studying himself in the mirror. ‘What’s happening to me?’
‘Look, Justin,’ she blurted out, glowering back at him into the mirror. ‘I’ve got enough problems of my own at the moment without having to sort yours out as well!’
But as much as he liked to think his skin rash was a result of some sort of allergy, deep down Hannah recognized it was far more than that.
Justin was an emotional wreck.

There was no doubt that having missed out on so many opportunities in life as a result of his hedonistic lifestyle and lazy disposition, both in a professional sense and on the domestic front, Justin was making the effort both to better himself and to impress Hannah. He began to read books of all genres more avidly, something he rarely had made time for in the past. He also enrolled on a two-year master’s degree. Hannah was so delighted with his efforts that by the half term break in February, she had an idea on her mind.
‘Where haven’t you been in the world which you would still like to visit?’
‘Budapest,’ he replied, immediately. ‘I’ve always wanted to go to Budapest.’
‘Right, we’ll go. I’ll pay. Do you fancy it?’
‘Yes, I’d love to.’
As they sat down to their first night’s dinner in the large atrium of their Hungarian hotel, the strong local wine just beginning to kick into her emotional status quo, tears began to well up in Hannah’s eyes.
‘I don’t ever want to lose you,’ she cried uncontrollably, holding her napkin up to her face.
He smiled at her gently, seemingly unembarrassed and sympathetic to her outburst. ‘Don’t worry. You won’t.’
But when the next day dawned, an awkward silence descended between them. It was as if the closeness they had felt through the words spoken at dinner the previous evening had all but evaporated.
‘If you take any photographs, will you do me a second copy for my collection?’ he asked nonchalantly when they reached the attractive narrow streets of the old town area of the city.
His ruthless words cut through her mind like a sharpened knife. She quickly glanced at him to gauge his mood, and then silently and slowly turned her eyes away towards the distance. She knew, at that moment, she would never be a part of his life: he was incapable of such an emotional commitment. She thought of how conversation between them had already become worryingly difficult, with each needing a dose of alcohol to fuel the flow of words, even though they had been together for eight months. So paying for the holiday was her furtive way of trying to desperately hang on to him.
Was she trying too hard to make him hers?

By the Easter holiday, Justin’s wait for a more effective cream to cure his rash was finally over and, within a short space of time, it had cleared up completely. When his doctor pronounced the rash had probably been brought on by a nervous condition, Hannah sensed it had something more to do with their relationship than anything else.
‘I’ve been keeping things in for a long time,’ he explained to her gently. ‘I was so unhappy after losing Milly and then having to wait for someone else to come along that emotionally I just couldn’t cope with it anymore.’
‘Yes, I realized that. Maybe now you’ll put your memories of Milly where they belong, in the past, and live your life now and enjoy it,’ replied Hannah, trying to encourage him to be more accepting about losing the girl he had met many years before as a teenager.
With this new corner turned in their relationship, they decided to take Fat Boye out for the evening to Justin’s village pub. Of late, Justin had seen very little of his controversial housemaster friend, which was strangely symptomatic of his social behaviour when he had a new woman in tow. The conversation between the three friends that evening was mostly light and humorous until Hannah felt brave enough to ask Justin about some of the rumours she had occasionally heard about him over the previous few months. Her work colleagues had often dropped comments about his dubious past into their conversation, as if this was the limit of their interference without running the risk of getting themselves into trouble with him. Usually, she chose to ignore their warnings, partly because she was fairly naïve when it came to understanding individuals with a murky past but mostly because when she had tried to broach the subject with him in the past, he had become verbally angry and refused to fully answer any of her innocently-asked questions.
‘You’ve just got to make your own mind up about me, haven’t you?’ he had calmly replied to her, putting on a good show of hiding the agitation he felt inside against his interfering colleagues’ comments.
But that evening, whilst Fat Boye was engaged in conversation at the bar, Hannah snatched an unexpected opportunity to delve deeper into his mysterious past.
‘What’s this I hear about you having a relationship with a parent at school?’ she asked quietly, looking him straight in the eye. Justin silently returned her stare for a few short seconds, as if he was thinking carefully of his placatory answer.
‘There’s nothing wrong with that,’ he calmly replied. ‘She was separated from her husband at the time so it was all above board.’
‘But she was still a parent. That surely must involve a conflict of interest somehow or another, doesn’t it?’ she theorized, finding his answer hard to swallow. ‘And what about the pupil who’d been in the Sixth Form? Freda, I think her name was. Fat Boye told me he burst in on your lovemaking at a party and you just carried on in front of him. Is this true? And what about Phoebe?’ she quickly continued, before he had chance to answer any of her previous questions.
She remembered Judy’s scandalous comments about Phoebe at Fat Boye’s barbecue the previous summer; bizarrely, it had taken her several months to summons up the courage to ask him about his relationship with the buxom young blond. Like most people of her age group living through the swinging sixties as a young teenager, the boundaries of certain types of behaviour, especially when it came to sex, were historically very blurred but, through the eyes of common decency, Justin was in a very serious predicament if he had engaged in a sexual
relationship with one of his pupils. Although rarely reported on in the press even in the late 1990s, Hannah had known several colleagues in her teaching career who had indulged in similar relationships with their pupils. Deep down, the issue did not really bother her as if the excesses of modern life had brainwashed her into thinking that way. But in Justin’s case, it was a different matter.
‘Can’t we talk about this again when Fat Boye isn’t here?’ he spat angrily, his voice beginning to rise loudly above the general hub-hub of the crowded pub.
Hannah turned her head nervously across the small room towards his best friend who had already noticed the two lovers arguing but she persisted with her line of questioning, under her breath; it was now or never.
‘I’m sorry to bring this up but I need to know whether the things people are saying about you are true or not. After all, I am supposed to be going out with you.’
‘There isn’t any truth in any of the stories. Are you happy now?’ he hissed nastily between his ugly teeth.
‘She’s being argumentative!’ he aggressively shouted over to Fat Boye as the overweight housemaster rejoined them having finished his conversation at the bar. Hannah felt mortified. She wasn’t being argumentative at all. Far from it! She was only doing what she had the human right to do: to scotch the alarming rumours which abounded around the school that Justin was having sexual relationships with his pupils – whether they were still at school or not.
By the end of the evening, things had calmed down somewhat after her tirade of probing questions but, as soon as the front door of his cottage closed behind them, the conversation almost immediately turned towards the evening’s events.
‘I’m not happy at all about you bringing up those issues in front of Fat Boye,’ Justin shouted loudly at her, sitting down at one of the chairs in the kitchen whilst Hannah remained standing in front of him. ‘You spoiled the evening.’
‘Look, Justin. I haven’t been too happy with what I’ve been hearing about you. I don’t want to be with anybody who behaves like that. I’m going to go home.’
‘But I’ve said the rumours weren’t true!’
‘I know that but I don’t want to stay with you tonight so I’m going to go home and I’ll ring you tomorrow.’
Suddenly Justin grabbed hold of her arms, squeezing them so hard she was incapable of moving even the smallest of muscles.
‘Please don’t go!’ he pleaded pathetically, looking straight up at her from his chair.
‘No, I have to go home,’ she insisted as he continued to hold her with a vice-like grip, his pupils dark and wide, ablaze with fear.
‘Don’t leave me! Please don’t leave me!’ he screamed on the top of his shrill voice.
‘Please, Justin,’ she pleaded calmly, starting to feel a little scared. ‘Let go of me. I’ve got to go home.’
‘Please don’t leave me! Please!’
‘Let me go, Justin. Please let me go,’ she whispered, trying to keep her voice low and calm to hide the fear she felt keenly inside. She tried to struggle against the terrifying force with which he held her but she could not break free. On the verge of tears, she wondered how his new neighbours next door would respond to his loud screams. When he eventually released his grip, she quickly backed away before he could change his mind.
The next day when she rang him, he seemed more relaxed and not at all like the violent man who had screamed uncontrollably at her just a few hours before.
‘Are you OK?’ she asked as soon as he picked up the telephone.
‘Yes, thanks.’
‘You sound much better today. Why don’t you come over tonight for supper?’
‘Yes, I’d like that.’
When he arrived at her place later that evening, an air of calm and an increased level of understanding descended between them but unavoidably their thoughts soon turned to the events of the previous evening.
‘Why did you scream so loudly at me last night? I was frightened out of my skin!’ she began, realizing she was treading on thin ice in expressing her innermost feelings with him.
‘I was afraid I’d lose you,’ he explained convincingly, reflecting on how he had lost Milly by abusing her. He was afraid he would lose Hannah in the same careless way.
‘But you didn’t have to scream at me. And what’s all this about Freda and Phoebe? I need to know.’
‘Look. Freda and I were in the middle of our love-making when Fat Boye burst in on us and there was nothing I could do about it.’
‘And what did he do then?’
‘He just carried on watching us.’
A voyeur, then, she thought?
‘And was Freda still at Queensford when all of this happened?’
‘No, of course not. She’d already left. Look!’ he said, starting to get agitated once again, ‘It was very difficult to stop what we were doing when Fat Boye burst in. We were both too far in to pull out.’
‘Yes, I can understand that. But Phoebe? What about her? Judy told me Phoebe had been going out with you for two years, which means she was still at school when you started seeing her.’
‘That’s not true,’ he insisted, remaining surprisingly calm this time. ‘I started going out with her after she had left school.’
‘OK. I believe you,’ Hannah finally assented. His denial of the persistent rumours was all she wanted to hear so that she could continue her relationship with confidence.
‘Thank you,’ he replied, smiling in triumph. ‘But you must admit bringing this up in front of Fat Boye was a little poor in terms of its timing.’
‘Yes, I know and I’m sorry about that but it was Fat Boye who told me of your indiscretions one evening in The Carpenter’s Arms when you weren’t even there.’
‘Well, he had no right to do that,’ he huffed, his feathers getting ruffled once again.
To Hannah, Fat Boye’s contentious comments about Justin had clearly been intended to stir up the hornets’ nest but what she could not understand was, why? Did he have a vested interest in secretly stabbing his best friend in the back? And would he have revealed even more of Justin’s sordid past had Hannah given him the opportunity to do so? And what of Justin’s aggressive response to her challenge about his unprofessional behaviour? Did it mean he understood quite categorically that he had done something dreadfully wrong with the pupils in his care? Whatever the answers to her questions, Hannah sensed she would not only have to be very wary of the overweight housemaster’s motives but also of Justin’s mysterious hidden past.
For always.

Despite her initial reservations about Justin’s dark past, Hannah felt confident enough to tell him she loved him. At first, he seemed reluctant to reciprocate her deeply-felt thoughts but, within a short space of time, there followed a proposal of marriage. He had been eating out of her hand like a faithful puppy dog for quite some time now so his declaration came as no surprise to Hannah.
‘Marry me,’ he suddenly blurted out as she was preparing their evening meal in the kitchen. She looked at him, silently, and then smiled.
‘Let’s just do it!’ he suggested passionately.
Hannah laughed gently to give herself some time to think. Strangely, she did not crave to marry him, probably because her feminine instincts told her his rushed proposal was not the surest way of getting his woman. But how could she avoid hurting his feelings? Their relationship was very different from the ones she was accustomed to before they had met, so it was sheer common sense which held her back from completely giving in to his demands. Equally, she recognized that she could love him one moment and then question whether she wanted to remain in the relationship the next. She was also afraid what his closest friends would say, especially Fat Boye, who was noticeably absent from Justin’s life whilst he was with her. Fat Boye knew they were both getting on ‘like a house on fire’, as he had once described it to Bertie, and Hannah guessed their relationship must have secretly rankled him.
‘Look, I’m really happy at the moment, Justin. Why spoil it all by getting married? Apart from that, I haven’t been divorced for very long and I want to have some fun.’
Their visit to Hampton Court for a concert in the June of that year filled Hannah with a romantic warmth she had never experienced before. In his dark green Armani suit and her in a long black evening skirt and coat, Hannah was convinced they must have caught somebody’s admiring attention as they graced the halls and corridors of that architectural edifice of England’s glorious, if not bloody, past. By this stage, she desperately wanted him to propose to her again but, as they sat waiting patiently amongst the filled outdoor arena for the concert to begin, she sensed their relationship was on borrowed time. He always seemed so distant from her, especially when they were out together, as if he did not really care.
A few short weeks later, the idea of marriage resurfaced once again.
‘Look, Justin. I really do appreciate you asking me to marry you again but I’m just not ready for marriage, so please…don’t ask me again.’
It was yet another brutal rebuttal and she had little idea of how her uncertain, ambivalent feelings towards him were giving out the mixed messages which would ultimately be responsible for turning him away. Her secret resolve to make him love her had certainly worked but now her confusion about the relationship was getting her into deeper and more dangerous waters. In a bizarre way, Justin seemed happy and relieved to accept her refusals but the tables had now been turned and he was no longer eating out of her hand.
I’ll just have to work harder at making him mine then, she thought, recognizing the sudden change in his attitude towards her. As if it was some sort of a game.
Of emotional see-saw.

Although their relationship got surprisingly much stronger by the summer of that year, the truth of the matter was the more Justin wanted to be with her, the more she needed her personal space away from him.
‘You like the idea of me visiting you, don’t you?’ he theorised to her one evening before supper. ‘But then when I’m here, you’re not fussed.’
‘No, that’s not the case at all,’ she lied, surprised by his sharp observations of her. ‘It’s just that I like to have some time to myself now and then. Why don’t you go out with the boys more often, to the pub? After all, it would really please Fat Boye, especially as you have little or nothing to do with him these days.’
‘If that’s what you want, then OK,’ he laughed, as if he recognized he was always like this when he was in love.
‘There’s something else I need to off-load to you,’ he continued after a moment’s hesitation, as if he sensed it was safe to talk to her. ‘Just in case someone says anything to you. In fact, somebody is bound to say something because it involves Brian Tartan, the head of the sixth form.’
‘What is it?’
‘You might hear something about Brian’s daughter, so you may as well hear it from me.’
What is it this time, she thought?
‘The Christmas before you arrived at Queensford, there was a party for the sixth form girls and staff in one of the girls’ boarding houses. You know what it’s like: plenty of free booze, sixth formers tarted up to the nines and hungry for male company. We all had a lot to drink that night, including myself, and I found myself sitting next to Brian’s daughter.’
‘Which one?’
‘The attractive one. Gail.’
‘I know,’ said Hannah, realizing the girl must have been in the lower sixth form at the time, probably sixteen or even seventeen years of age.
‘Well, we got into a conversation…and then one thing led to another.’
‘What do you mean ‘one thing led to another’?’
‘Some flirting went on.’
‘Is that all?’ she asked, aware that school girls always engaged in flirtatious conversation with their teachers in a social situation, no matter what sex the teacher happened to be. She wondered what all the fuss was about. ‘So you were talking to each other and she was flirting with you?’
‘No, we were both flirting with each other.’
‘Did you kiss?’
‘No, we didn’t.’
‘Did you proposition her?’
‘Not quite.’
‘But it went along those lines,’ she concluded, intuitively. ‘So there was a sexual element to all of this?’
‘Yes.’
‘Justin! Whatever were you thinking of? The head of sixth form’s daughter of all people!’
‘But I was drunk! I couldn’t help it!’
‘That’s no excuse!’
She had known Justin for a long enough period of time to realize he was a well-seasoned drinker and could hold his beer under all circumstances. Apart from that, the amount of alcohol at the party would have been restricted by the housemistress in an attempt to prevent the sixth form girls from getting drunk and being sick later on in the evening.
‘And so what happened after that?’
‘Brian found out and I had to meet up with him and his wife to explain myself.’
‘Did anything happen to you?’ she asked, askance.
‘No, but they warned me to stay away from their daughter. That’s all.’
That’s all, thought Hannah? Surely that was enough!
Hannah quietly reflected on the school social functions she had attended when Brian, his dark-haired attractive wife, and Justin had all been present in the same room: hardly a word or even a glance or smile had ever passed between the three of them. It was true to say in his defense that Justin was trying to shield her from the malevolent gossip of their work colleagues but she was left wondering whether Gail’s parents had always been distant with her because of her involvement with him. But what really did go on that evening between the two revelers? Did Justin and Gail engage in illicit sex, despite his reassurances to the contrary? There was clearly only one certainty about the events that winter’s evening.
It must have frightened the hell out of Gail for her to tell her parents.