Know Nowt Nigel

My football mates are all beefy types so I don't normally have to bother with opening the door for them. There was probably a technique to opening it which my mates had learned through necessity which I hadn't bothered to acquire. My Mum wouldn't be seen dead in my heap of a vehicle, so it hadn't been an issue until that point. I profusely apologised to Pat for my heap of a car and for my unrestrained outburst of profanity. Pat, god bless her cotton jimjams, just smiled sweetly.

"Le Clipper" was a swanky restaurant on the London Road that used to be just off the bypass. It has long since gone, replaced by a hideous modern square steel and glass motel, which is usually busy thanks to the power of national advertising. While it was still a restaurant it had changed hands quite a few times over the years since it started out as a coaching inn one-and-a-half centuries ago. At the time I was describing it, the restaurant had been recently renamed and served up a mostly Anglicised-French menu.

We were escorted to our table by a snooty-nosed penguin who recognised that my ill-fitting suit was off-the-peg in Burton's last-but-one January sales, while Pat's heavenly chiffon creation was this season's from a High Street boutique in a smart city many miles from this deader-than-alive industrial town.

He seated Pat with a flourish, at our slightly less than intimate table for two out in the middle of the restaurant, flashing an ingratiatingly smooth smile at her. Then he pulled the chair out for me to step inside and I swear he shoved that chair into the back of my legs so I flopped down into my seat like a rag doll. If I had false teeth they would have rattled. What could I say? I was on an important date with a very classy bird and had to be on my best behaviour. If this was the Pig & Whistle I'd've decked the greasy bastard.

To be honest though, I was more than a bit intimidated by the surroundings. This may have been only the first time I felt out of my depth in the company of Patricia Bellows, it wasn't going to be the last but I wasn't aware of that at the time.

The waiter for our table was summoned by the penguin and he brought over the menus, handing one to the lady first, naturally. Then a separate bloody waiter brought over the wine list and handed it to me. The first waiter lit the candle in the middle of the table and retreated to allow us to make our choices. The wine waiter, however, hovered about at my shoulder. I resisted the temptation to order a pint of lager, especially after I saw the price of a half pint was one-a-half times more expensive than a full pint down my local.

Pat was still perusing the menu when I asked her politely if a carafe of the house wine was acceptable, she looked up and smiled, saying yes. Then, after further prompting she selected white, so I was able to get rid of the wine waiter. No wonder they charge so much for everything in these places, they were way overstaffed. I can't remember what we ordered all those years ago, but I expect Pat had the roast chicken with loads of creamy herby French sauce dribbled all over it and I guess I would have had the crisply well-done steak as naked as nature intended, except for a dollop of Colman's on the side, thank you very much!

What I do remember though is that while I was holding up that menu, all written in fancy French words that I struggled to interpret, I inadvertently held the top of it over the central candle flame. I didn't notice this, as I was studying the fine bloody print at the bottom, trying to find a side order of chips and beans, probably, until the menu was well alight.

Pat shouted first, I think she said "Fire!" but she might have sworn something fairly obscene, her finishing school aimed to send their girls out armed with a comprehensive vocabulary.

I definitely swore, those laminated plastics go up like flaming Roman candles. Then I dropped the blessed thing like a hot potato, which knocked the candle over and set the lace doily resting on the tablecloth alight. The wine waiter turned up at that point with our carafe of wine. I grabbed it and poured half of it over the flames.

What a bloody palaver that caused. The first penguin, who already had a low opinion of my taste in dark blue worsted whilst at the same time openly admiring my date's cleavage, looked down his aquiline nose as if I had come in on the bottom of some tramp's boots, while he cleared the detritus from the table. He returned with fresh linen, cutlery, glasses, and new menus. No candle, though.

I was too embarrassed to add any smart remark, which was a first for me, I told you I felt intimidated. Most of the diners round and about all thought the episode was amusing and a couple of guys were sympathetic enough to tell me just how close they had come to doing exactly the same thing, which helped.

Meanwhile, Pat thought the whole thing was absolutely hilarious and it certainly broke the ice between us. She was trying not to laugh too much and not making a very good job of it. She looked gorgeous when she laughed, though. I just hoped I'd get a few opportunities to make her laugh around me again, only intentionally next time.

The meal went ok, actually, we both enjoyed it and I took her on to a pub with a nice lounge bar afterwards for another drink. It was too packed with the Friday night crowd for comfort in there although we did squeeze into a bench seat in a corner, where I put my arm around her, more for protection than anything else. By that time I think she had lost that shyness that she had with me earlier in the day and she kept collapsing into giggles every time someone lit a cigarette with a lighter or matches. I didn't mind, the crowded bar meant we were squeezed together and lots of giggling meant she jiggled up against me even more, so I wasn't complaining any.

When we left the pub, we walked arm in arm back to the car which I had left in a free car park near the end of New Street. It was a little out of the way so it was unusually quiet and rather dark. I opened her door with a really sharp yank and let her in. Then I got in my side and as soon as I sat down Pat virtually attacked me. She had her arms around my neck and behind my head, her lips clamped over mine and her tongue trying to lick the enamel off my back teeth.

When she stopped momentarily to catch her breath, I panted, "Hold something back for the honeymoon, Pat!"

That stopped her in her tracks. It took a couple of moments before she said very quietly, uncertainly, "Pretty sure of yourself, aren't you, Nigel?"

"Anything but sure of where we'll end up Pat but I want to be around for the long haul rather than just a quick hello-goodbye."

"What makes you think you're going to get that lucky?"

"Well, we seem to be hitting it off alright, only I sort of expected that over the next few weeks it would be you that would be fending me off. I was gonna take it really slowly. So I find myself in unfamiliar territory."

"So you want us to go slow?"

"Well at least get to know each other better, you know ... before."

"Oh ... I'm not a virgin, if that's what you're worried about."

"Neither am I." I regarded her pretty moon-lit face in that gloomy spot, "I'd still like to see a lot more of you and get to know you really well though. Are you OK with that?"

"OK, Nige, I'm fine with that."

She still had her arms around my neck and now she moved her lips back slowly to meet mine and we kissed comparatively sedately for quite a while with her stroking the back of my head while I stroked the small of her back and the outside of her thigh. When she'd had enough kissing she relaxed against me and buried her head into my chest and sighed. We sat there comfortably for a few minutes not saying anything. I continued to stroke her back and her thigh, she had dropped her hands down to my shoulders.

Then Pat sighed again and stirred. "Tomorrow?" she said.

"What about tomorrow?"

"What we doing tomorrow?"

"I've had a pretty full day planned for most Saturdays up to now."

"Well, what had you got planned before you met me today?"

"Working in the morning 8 to 12, home to get lunch and changed for football in the afternoon, get home again about 6 and then up the football social club for the evening, they usually have evening entertainment like a comedian and a band on a Saturday night. Want to come?"

"I don't get up on a Saturday 'til about 12 anyway. Then I need to wash my hair. What time you picking me up for the evening?"

"Say 7.30?"

"Works for me, Nige. Guess you better get me home now, I expect my mum is waiting up for me."

"OK." We had another relaxed kiss, with me happily squeezing her thigh, before we broke it off and I got the old banger started. I had to wipe all the condensation off the inside of the windows before I could see where we were going, and I drove her home.

I popped out of the car and yanked that door open and handed her out of the car. The porch light was on when we got to the house, so we stopped and had a very quick kiss and another delightful squeeze. I ventured placing a hand on her nice arse and she didn't object. Pat was not the shy girl I had thought she was that morning.

"See you tomorrow, Nige."

"See you then, Pat."

Tea break at work on Saturday morning saw me in the car park with Old Gerry, the maintenance guy. Between us we removed the door catches and greased them up, made a few adjustments and the door worked a treat. I made sure I went round afterwards with some degreaser to make sure Pat didn't ruin her dress. That Gerry's definitely old school, loves grease. He slaps in on like a clown putting on face-paint.

Well, I couldn't afford to take Pat out many nights like that first date without dipping deeply into my savings. So Saturday night was a relatively cheap night down the rather rough football social club. I suppose Pat was slumming it by going there, she was used to the Conservative Club and fancy city night clubs.

We pretended to ignore each other at work on Monday. On Monday nights she went out with the girls from the office. Tuesday we went to the pictures together at the new multiplex and went Dutch, holding hands and sharing a bag of toffee popcorn. Pat was paid monthly in arrears and wasn't due to get any money for another three weeks, so she was also dipping into her savings for now. Wednesday I went to football training and Thursday night was pay night and my night out with the boys. Then it was Friday and Saturday nights, which were our main nights out, eating out, dancing or going to a show.

We continued going out together regularly, our relationship developing day by day. It was almost three weeks that I managed to hold out before she jumped me again and this time we made love for the first time on the back seat of my car. She was a tiger and pursued me relentlessly, I was the one trying to keep our feet on the ground not wanting to use her, in the end she used me!

I honestly felt that now she had got me that she would disappear on me but to my surprise she didn't and we went on from strength to strength. We were from different worlds, middle class and blue collar, they were much clearer defined classes nearly 30 years ago.

I stayed on the shop floor all my working life. I was comfortable there. I moved off the printing presses eventually, when an opportunity came to move over to platemaking, which paid me a significant premium. Therefore I was actually earning pretty good money for a shop floor worker and had a lot of respect from my fellows for doing a prestigious and important job very well, though I say so myself.

Pat on the other hand had got an excellent basic education at school and secretarial college and was ambitious in the business world. So she carried on taking management courses and went for better and better jobs before we had the children, which we had spread over six years during her early to mid-twenties. With me on shift work most of the time and, with help from both our mums, Pat was able to work all the time with just a minimum few months off for each child. So her career continued to flourish. She joined the Spinner Group about six years ago and she and her boss Reggie Nicholson formed a good team and had been promoted together several times until Nicholson was the sales director and Pat was the senior one of three sales managers.

Pat was also quite a party animal. She was into dancing and dinner parties and wine drinking, occasionally to excess, loved meeting lots of different people and she had a wide variety of who I thought were quite superficial friends. Her best friends were a very wild crowd and were often getting into trouble. Most of her friends and sister Evie had marital problems, divorces and affairs. Her job in sales meant lots of dinners out, wining and dining clients or taking them to concerts, ballet, and sporting events. It meant I had to trust her to behave when she was without my company and I had never had any reason to be suspicious of her. She made it a rule never to drink when she was not out with me, so she was always in control. I had always trusted her, just as she trusted me.

I was a much quieter person than Pat, I couldn't dance well and didn't enjoy clubbing at all, and particularly hated dinner parties mainly because the people that attended them tended to look down their noses at me because I worked on a factory floor. I preferred beer to wine anyway and rarely drank to excess. My friends were few in number but they had been friends for life, I hadn't really added many new ones over the years.

How Pat and I managed to get together and marry two years into our relationship was always considered surprising to me; the fact that we were still a couple after 28 years of marriage was a constant source of amazement to me. I constantly reminded myself that I was in a place where I didn't deserve to be, and I was grateful for it all the while it lasted.

^^^***^^^

That brought us to the night of the leaking factory roof and I arrived home to see a possible, probable rival for my wife's affections, pull away from my house and disappear around the corner.

I pulled into our short drive, where there was only room for two cars, and parked behind Pat's car, a smart new black BMW executive saloon owned by the company. It was only a week old and a top-of-range model, full of the latest motoring gadgets, a reflection of her undoubted value to the company. I parked my eight-year-old entry-level Ford hatchback, in which the only gadget was a heated rear screen. I turned the engine and lights off and sat there for a moment or two trying to marshal my thoughts before going in. I had half a mind to follow Nicholson, but he may have had some innocent reason for being there, perhaps just dropping Pat off after a meeting with clients. The bonnet of Pat's car was cool, the rain had eased off now, but the car hadn't been anywhere for a couple of hours at least.

I took the chocolate, wine and flowers into the house, opening the front door quietly. The downstairs lights were out, the rooms empty. I left my shoes at the front entrance, Pat would never allow outdoor shoes to walk through the house, she had a preference for cream-coloured carpets and I was always getting it in the neck for dropping coffee drips or bringing in any debris from the back garden. I tiptoed into the kitchen and left the three items I'd bought in there for safe keeping before I crept up the stairs. The main bedroom light was on and I could hear the shower going in the en-suite.

The bed was a mess, duvet on the floor at the bottom of the bed, pillows thrown all over the place. Her dress, blouse, tights and underwear were scattered around the bedroom floor. I examined the bottom sheet and a couple of pillows, which had several damp patches of what smelt exactly like fresh semen, so it looked like my loving wife had enjoyed at least a couple of hours of extra-marital unprotected loving in our bed. They certainly weren't my emissions, we last made love on Sunday morning and the sheets were changed immediately after.

Pat was oblivious to my presence, her joyous post-coital singing was just audible above the sound of spraying water in the en suite shower room.

The layout of the en suite was such that there wasn't enough room for a bath, just the shower, wash basin and toilet. Also it was impossible to have the door opening inwards into the en suite, so it opened outwards into the bedroom. As quietly as I could, I moved the bed over until it blocked the shower door from opening. It meant that I wouldn't be able to close the bedroom door, so I left it open, jamming the bed in at an angle so the en suite door was held fast.

Then I removed all the bed-linen, including the duvet cover and put them into a couple of black refuse sacks fetched up from the cupboard under the sink in the kitchen. I took them down to the car and locked them in the boot as evidence, I thought, for the divorce.

It was fortunate, I thought, that we didn't have any of the kids at home. Charley and June were at University: Charley in her second bachelor year at Newcastle and June starting her post-grad masters at Manchester. Robert had moved out three years earlier and was living with his girlfriend across town. With me out of the way until virtual one o'clock in the morning, Pat had the freedom to do just what she wanted in the evening. How long she had been doing, what she had clearly just been doing, I had no clue.

I foraged around in the garage and gathered a few things I thought I would need and put those into the boot of my car. Just for a fleeting moment I was tempted to set fire to the house, especially knowing that two of the fire engines were probably still occupied on the other side of the town at the factory. The other idea that crossed my mind was to drag Pat wringing wet out of the shower by her hair and throw her out on the front lawn, naked. I didn't like what either option would do to the kids.

I knew where Nicholson lived, we had been over there in April that year. I didn't know if he parked his lovely car outside his house, on his drive or in a garage. I drove past his house and there it was on the drive. I parked around the next corner some 50 metres away and opened my boot, extracting the half-full five litres of white spirit and about half a litre of methylated spirits plus a box of matches that I kept in the garage for barbecues. It was about a quarter past eleven by this time and most of the houses in the street had lights on in bedrooms as well as downstairs. I comforted myself thinking that at least I wasn't going to wake too many adults up and it wasn't a school night for the children.

The sports car was parked on a bit of a slope, with another car, presumably his wife's, parked ahead of it. I poured meths over each of the Porsche's tyres, then the white spirit over the roof and sides of the car. I struck two matches and dropped one by the front wheel on the driver's side and the other on the rear wheel. The flames started up straight away, licking at the tyres and paintwork and going up the car to the roof, by the time I got round the other side and dropped the next two matches the car was well alight.

I walked calmly away back to my car and started it up and drove back home. On the drive back I called Toby on the mobile, and said I needed a favour. OK, he said doubtfully, what? I asked him if the fire service were there. No, just gone in the last minute, another emergency. I told him about my wife and Nicholson's car. I didn't have to ask, he just said I'd been there all night and told me to get my arse back as soon as, to prove it.

I dropped the bottles, still containing some liquid in each, back in the garage, and looked out an old one gallon container of spent engine oil from the last couple of engine oil changes that I had meant to take down to the recycling dump at some stage. Then I let myself back into the house. I could hear the loud banging and hysterical muffled shouting of "Let me out!" from the shower room as I climbed the stairs, leaving on my outdoor shoes and walking about on her pristine cream carpet.