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‘Oh, I don’t know…’ the woman’s voice sounds reluctant.
‘I’m his partner.’
‘Well…just to let him know the emerald ring he wanted tightened is ready for collection.’
‘B-b-b-b-b-but what ring?’
‘The one with the engraving in the band—“For Lola with Love”.’
‘What?!!’ Linda splutters as the line goes dead.
This is how I deal with my jealousy in my imagination: I wreak revenge. I spend hours at my desk at Dr Casey’s surgery planning the different vendettas, and imagining the shock on the lovers’ faces.
‘Rosie, did you hear what I said?’ Mrs Stevens startles me. It’s always the way: Mrs S ignores me all day, pretending I’m but a speck of dust in her beloved Dr Casey’s wood-panelled offices. Then, just as I am deep in texting Jill or in a phone conversation with the children after school, she pounces, beady eyes gleaming with dislike, and exposes me for what I am: a medical receptionist and administrative assistant desperate to swap this part-time job for a full-time one as counsellor. Kat and Freddy are old enough now, and I’ve sent in my application for a four-year course. By the fourth, I’ll be allowed to have my own ‘clients’, with a qualified counsellor monitoring our sessions.
‘Did you put Mrs Morrow’s file back?’
I start rummaging through the metal filing cabinet.
‘Should be here,’ I mutter, as I search among the alphabetically arranged manila envelopes. In fact, I suddenly remember to my horror, I have left the Botox patient’s substantial file beside my coffee in the kitchenette.
‘I don’t think you’ll find it there.’ Mrs S smiles smugly. ‘My question was purely rhetorical. I found the file by the coffee machine—you managed to get a stain on it, as well.’ An eyebrow shoots up: ‘I do wish you would concentrate on the task at hand.’
With a triumphant air, she watches me turn red. Then she slaps down the file, turns on her sensible heel, and sails away. She leaves me wondering, for the umpteenth time, if I shouldn’t hand in my resignation now, rather than wait to see whether I’ve been accepted on the counselling course. I’ve been working for Dr Hugh Casey, well-known dermatologist, since Freddy was four and I decided the children would not be traumatised if I were to step back into the work place a few days a week.
When Jonathan and I met, I was twenty-two and working at HOME, a charity for the homeless. Jonathan was a pharmacologist bent on finding new drugs to revolutionise existing treatments. He yearned for the glory of being published in the BMJ—and the profits that would come in the wake of his discovery. By the time we had been going out for about a year, Jonathan had started talking about our future family; then the family was no longer just talk but a loud and needy wail from the little pink room I grandly called the nursery. I left HOME for home and soon found my daughter so engrossing, and Freddy’s arrival so overwhelming, that work languished. Jonathan encouraged me to stay with the children, taking pride in the fact that he could provide for his family.
Five years ago, though, I decided to ease my way back into work. I wanted something not too taxing, part-time, that would allow me to do what I enjoy doing most: listening to people. ‘You certainly have a knack for getting people to open up,’ my dad’s patients would tell me when, as a teenager, I earned pocket money by helping out in his GP’s practice. I soon realised that often the men and women who filed in were distressed not so much because they were ill but because they were lonely, worried, unhappy, or just a little down. I only needed to give them an opening, and they would lean on the counter and unburden themselves about the daughter who hadn’t shown up at Christmas, or the husband who had died last spring.
When I joined Dr Casey’s practice as a part-time receptionist, I looked forward to working with his patients—or clients, as Mrs Stevens likes to remind me: they might not work the land as my father’s Somerset patients did, or have priceless stories about their barnyard animals; but they would surely be eager to share similar small triumphs and secret sorrows. Dr Casey had recently cottoned on to the way he could more than double his profits by offering cosmetic treatments such as facial peel, Botox and collagen injections to his existing clients. He soon had back-to-back appointments to freeze foreheads, plump out lines and remove age spots for long queues of elderly dowagers and their daughters and daughters-in-law. Our waiting room filled with glossy women in sunglasses deep into copies of Vogue and Tatler. Most were forty—or fifty-something, but there was also a clutch of unbelievably young girls who thought they had to act now to stop time from having its wicked way with them.
Unfortunately, Dr Casey was already sixty-plus when he discovered the riches he could make from cosmetic treatments. His plump white hands might not tremble, quite, but they are not as sure as they once were; and in the trade, and among some of the less than satisfied clients, he has been dubbed the Butcher of Belgravia.
Dr Casey’s patients believe that their money entitles them not only to a timeless face but also to unending sympathy. This is where I step in: I book their appointments, greet them when they come, and above all listen, as temporary confidante, when they tell how their husbands tease them that they’re no longer spring chickens, their careers depend on their youthful looks and friends have recommended a make-over to inject a bit of wow! into their lives.
Comforting wealthy women whose faces have turned to stone, or lips to balloons, is a far cry from the cutting-edge work among drug addicts I once dreamt of. But Dr Casey is an amiable man: ‘Top o’ the morning!’ he cries cheerily in a cod Irish accent as he steps into his elegant offices. The women who flock to him stir my protective instincts. I manage to remember their names and most of their family members’, and for this they are grateful and praise me to Dr Casey, who winks at me, pleased; and to Mrs Stevens, who sniffs, unimpressed. Despite Mrs S’s best efforts, the hours are flexible and my tasks not too onerous. Getting to Hans Crescent after the school run takes twenty-five minutes max by tube.
Only Jill, now a GP, expressed disapproval of my decision to work for Dr Casey’s practice: ‘Why be with that old fraud? What about all the good work you were going to do? All those kids you were going to help?’
‘Working here suits me right now. It’s easy.’
‘Since when is easy best?’ Jill scoffed.
‘If I have to commit full time to a demanding job, I can’t look after the children, the house and Jonathan.’
‘Jonathan shouldn’t need looking after!’ Jill shook her head crossly. ‘You’ve got a gift for listening—you shouldn’t limit yourself to hearing about botched lip jobs.’
‘Oh, Jill!’ I cried, stung. ‘It’s not like I’m a paid-up member of the ladies-who-lunch club.’
‘Don’t you think it’s a bit dangerous to dumb down? I mean, I know I shouldn’t say this, but what if you and Jonathan ever split up?’
From across the room, Mrs Stevens is watching me, so I pretend to look through Mrs Morrow’s file—she’s overdue for her Botox appointment, it’s more than four months since the last one—while steeling myself for the difficult campaign to keep my marriage from collapsing.
After work, I go to Tesco’s. I come home lugging three carrier bags that would break a donkey’s back. I’m slightly out of breath as I make my way to our large kitchen. The appliances are ancient and the wooden table scarred, but I love this room with its Aga, bay window and white tiles. Jonathan prides himself on his gourmet cooking—‘the fastest way to relax outside the bedroom’ he always tells me—and sets great store by the Magimix, the collection of Le Creuset casserole dishes and Sabatier knives, plus a whole alphabet of glass jars of exotic herbs. I enjoy watching him frown as he takes up a pinch of this, a dash of that, mixing ingredients as if they were solutions in his lab. On weekends he takes over the kitchen to produce succulent cassoulet, or Thai coconut soup, or spicy salmon tartare. Weeknights are mine, though, and I cook my hearty if less sophisticated favourites. Jonathan is usually kind about my efforts—though he can’t resist sharing a tip or two: ‘That cauliflower cheese hits the spot, Rosie. But have you tried sprinkling it with breadcrumbs before you take it out of the oven?’
‘Mu-um!’ Freddy calls out from upstairs. ‘I need you to help me glue my Viking ship!’
‘Where’s the please?’ I shoot back. Even while contemplating your husband’s adultery, manners matter. ‘Let me get supper going and then I’ll help you.’
‘Mu-um,’ Kat looks over the banister, ‘Molly’s here. She needs advice.’ Molly’s head pops up beside her. Molly Vincent lives next door but can be found here most afternoons, munching biscuits and telling us about her difficulties with her boyfriend, her teachers and her mum. ‘What should I do, Rosie?’ she always moans, picking at the chipped black polish on her nails. At twelve, she’s the same age as Kat—but mercifully my daughter seems about five years younger. Carolyn Vincent is always apologetic about her daughter ‘bending your ear,’ but I don’t mind—or rather, I didn’t. Now I wonder if I should confess that I’m in no position to advise anyone about how to lead their lives.
‘I’d love to, girls, but Molly’s mum just texted me that she wants Molly over for supper now.’
‘Oooooooooh noooooooo!’ Molly’s dramatic disappointment is followed by her sloping down the stairs, with Kat disappearing back into her room before I can ask her to give me a hand in putting away the groceries.
‘Bye bye, Kat. Bye, Rosie. Goodbye, Mr Martin!’ Molly waves over her shoulder. ‘See you tomorrow.’
‘Goodbye.’ Jonathan, sunk into his favourite armchair, doesn’t look up from his paper. Then, to me, ‘Hullo!’ The sight of my treacherous husband infuriates me: he sits there, waiting for me to cook, pour him our 6.30 glass of wine, chit-chat as if nothing was going on. I start unpacking, slamming doors, banging drawers shut.
‘A hell of a day…’ Jonathan comes into the kitchen.
When did we stop greeting each other with a kiss? He takes a bottle of Rioja from the wine rack he and Freddy built for my birthday present last year. ‘I think old Bill really is getting past it. He was practically snoring during the CostDrug presentation.’ My husband shakes his head over such a lapse. ‘What’s for supper?’
‘I’ll tell you what’s NOT for supper,’ I burst out, as I slap the haddock fillets on to a baking tin. ‘Hot volcanic sex!’
Chapter 2 (#ulink_bac380a7-bdbc-522c-863d-59ce55dafc6b)
Jonathan blinks at me, mouth open. ‘Wh-wh-wh-what…?’
‘You heard.’ I stare at him across the table where we have shared meals, card games and late-night discussions about us, the children, our friends, the world.
‘You’ve been spying on me!’
‘You’ve been cheating on me!’
I wonder if the children can hear us upstairs. But Kat is bound to be glued to her mobile, and I can hear the rhythmic thud of Freddy’s computer game. So I let rip: ‘You thought you had it all worked out, didn’t you? Me here, her there—you would have kept the whole thing going for years if I hadn’t caught you out!’ My voice breaks, but I go on: ‘How could you? Sex with someone in the office—it’s so…squalid!’
Jonathan looks as if he’s about to shout back, but then he breathes in deeply and issues a slow sigh. ‘It’s not squalid. She’s not squalid. She’s beautiful, she’s kind, she’s…clever.’
The word hits me and I jump back, as if it had been a splatter of grease from a frying pan.
Jonathan sees my reaction and looks pained. He draws nearer, and starts to put his hand out towards mine, before letting it fall. ‘I’m sorry. I know this hurts. You deserve better.’ He shakes his head. ‘We’ve been working side by side for a year. She’s been involved in the hair follicle regeneration project. It was bound to happen.’
‘Bound to happen? You’re shameless!’
‘Stop it, Rosie.’ Jonathan speaks quietly, patiently, the embarrassed husband of a fishwife from the backstreets of Naples.
‘How long has it been going on for?’
‘I…’ Jonathan looks sheepish. ‘I realised she was interested in everything I was interested in back in January. But’—here he looks proud of himself—‘it didn’t start until three months ago.’
‘You’ve lied to me!’
‘I was going to tell you,’ Jonathan replies quietly as he sits on the bar stool at the counter.
‘What? That you’ve been cheating on me?’ I’m standing, hands on hips. ‘That you don’t love me any more?’
‘Don’t pretend you love me any more,’ he snaps back.
I gasp. ‘How can you say that?!’
My husband looks at me unblinking: ‘It’s true.’
I swallow hard. I look away from the man in front of me. Do I love him? Of course I do. Don’t I? What else has kept me by his side for twelve years? I’ve given him two children and given up a job. I’ve put up with his parents’ dislike and his colleagues’ condescension. I’ve put up with his constant sharing of such riveting facts as an elephant defecates twenty kilos a day and the longest river in China is the Yangtze. I’ve reassured him when he thought his colleagues were being promoted above him, supported him when he had to work 24/7, cheered him on when he was ready to give up on his great invention, or buying this house, or building Freddy’s Lego castle. For twelve years I’ve worn pastel blue because it’s his favourite colour and Diorella because it’s his favourite scent. If that’s not love, what is?
‘Look,’ Jonathan brings his hands up to cover his face, ‘I don’t want a row.’ His voice is quiet, convinced. ‘We were both growing bored and giving less.’
Growing bored? Well, yes, it can be a bore to be shush!-ed when we’re driving back from a party, while my husband yells ‘The Congo!’ and ‘Elizabeth I!’ and ‘Tin!’ in answer to Brain of Britain. And yes, Jonathan gets on my nerves when he turns our friends’ incipient baldness into an opportunity to plug his invention—‘I think Ted’s coming along nicely. He’ll soon be asking me about Zelkin’; or ‘Sam’s grown incredibly thin on top, have you noticed? I wonder if I might not tell him about Zelkin…’ And I remember how boring he gets when he insists on updating his files with newspaper clippings on everything from ‘Chinese restaurants’ to ‘children’s museums’. But it doesn’t amount to grounds for divorce. At least, not in my book.
‘We both deserve better,’ Jonathan continues.
Do we? It’s true that when I spot our lovey-dovey neighbours, the Vincents, patting one another on the bottom or cooing at one another over a barbecue in the garden, I feel that I too deserve someone with whom I can be in tune, rather than in denial.
Our marriage, then, could be better. Yes, I do sometimes think that the elastic has given way, and what was once a support that made us the best we could be, now hangs loose, feels uncomfortable and risks dropping altogether, making us look ridiculous and shoddy.
I look down, to see whether my marriage is round my ankles.
‘You’re only cross,’ my husband is telling me, ‘because I beat you to finding the Right One.’
I know when I’m beaten. I draw up the second bar stool and perch on it, across from my husband. ‘I trusted you.’
‘You still can.’ Jonathan looks earnest. ‘I’ll look after you and the children, no matter what.’
‘What does “no matter what” mean?’ My voice trembles: I’m scared now, as well as angry. ‘You can’t seriously be saying that you’re going to risk upsetting our family for a bit of nookie with some…some…slut!’
Jonathan draws himself up, and a familiar expression, but not one I have seen him wear for years now, comes over him: ‘Take it out on me, Rosie. I understand. You’re angry and hurt. But don’t call Linda a slut.’ I breathe in sharply: Linda! The ‘L’! But Jonathan ignores my reaction and goes on: ‘She tried to fight this for months. She was ready to get out of hair and get into skin. She almost took a job in California to get away.’ He shakes his head. ‘She has been worried about you and the children from the start. She wants to meet you, you know, she wants to explain herself…Will you?’
‘Oh please, Jonathan!’ I cry. ‘You can’t expect me to be ready for a tête-à-tête with your lover.’
‘No, no, of course not.’ Jonathan looks sheepish. ‘Not yet.’ He shoots me a look. ‘But you will, won’t you, at some point? It will make everything so much easier.’
I’ve suddenly recognised the expression that has altered Jonathan’s features: love.
‘What happens now?’ I ask, defeated.
Jonathan doesn’t answer.
I bite my lip. The only way I can see him putting this behind him is if the children and I are not on tap. Once he starts missing us, I doubt Linda stands a chance. I study my husband’s dazed, faraway expression. I remember it from sunny afternoons when we lay, exhausted after lovemaking, on our bed. Jonathan doesn’t stir. I’m damned if I’m going to sit here waiting passively for him to dictate the terms of my life.
‘I think a period of separation would be sensible, don’t you?’ I don’t want a divorce. My husband may be a habit, not a soul mate; and my marriage may be tired, not thrilling: but I won’t be pushed out of either.
‘Yes, if that’s what you want.’ Jonathan doesn’t meet my eyes.
‘It’s what I need.’ I cross my arms resolutely. ‘At least this way I’ll have time to sort things out in my own mind.’
Jonathan looks up and finally meets my gaze. ‘You’ve got a lot to offer, Rosie. You’re a good-looking woman, kind, and a great mum and…and you’re still the easiest person to talk to.’
A lot to offer—but not enough for him.
The thing to remember about a separation: there is your separation, his separation, and everyone else’s view of your separation.
Jill rushes over the next day: ‘That rat! God, I want to kill him!…look, don’t worry, I’ve been there. I’ll help you.’ She stands in the doorway, a bottle of wine in hand. Beneath her glossy black fringe, green eyes shine wide with sympathy.
‘I’m actually fine,’ I try to say, but she hugs me so tight the words are crushed against her yellow shirt dress.
‘Don’t breathe in, whatever you do. I’ve sweated my own body weight. I’ve just come from my Bikram yoga session.’ Since marrying a man five years younger, Jill has been trying out anything that promises to restore her youth. She smiles: ‘Brought some vino. God knows, we both need it. Though I shouldn’t be drinking.’ Jill shakes her head disconsolately, sending the short glossy black hair swinging, left to right. ‘The latest research says three units of alcohol a day are more ageing than a week in the sun without SPF.’
Looking slim and tanned in her short dress, Jill strides past, pulling me in her wake, as if I were the visitor rather than the hostess. ‘Let’s stick two fingers up at that pig. He was chippy, an intellectual snob, and had no sense of humour.’
‘Jill, do you mind!’ I stop my ears, looking cross. But I always listen to Jill: she’s been my protector since the first day we met at University College, when a trendy third year in a black patent leather miniskirt was teasing me about my old-fashioned Laura Ashley dress. ‘At least Rosie doesn’t look like one of Nature’s little jokes,’ Jill had snarled, giving my critic a withering look.
‘You need a drink.’ Jill beckons me to follow her into the kitchen where she slides off her Prada rucksack and places it on the back of a chair. ‘Glasses,’ she murmurs and rummages through the cupboard to find two. ‘When Ross left me, wine became like a saline drip to a comatose patient.’
I watch her, a little dazed, as she twists the wine open and pours it. Jonathan used to call her terrifying: my best friend effortlessly takes over most gatherings, and most situations. ‘She makes a man feel redundant,’ my husband had complained when they’d first met. Only men like your friends, I’d felt like answering. There was Tim, capable of amazing work in the lab but only of locker-room banter outside it; and Perry, who’d left pharmacology for the City and only thought of money. Jonathan kept assuring me they were clever and kind, and when Jill and I shared a flat in Islington after uni, he’d encouraged them to chat her up. But Tim’s idea of breaking the ice had been to let out a wolf-whistle as Jill swivelled her legs out of her Mini; while Perry had spent most of their dinner at an Italian restaurant calculating on the back of his napkin what he reckoned the takings were. ‘I really appreciate your looking out for me,’ Jill had told us, ‘but Tim’s only interested in getting it on and Perry’s only interested in raking it in. There might just be more to life, don’t you agree?’
‘Now’—Jill sits at the table and motions me to sit in front of her—‘tell me all about it.’ She crosses her arms on the tabletop and looks me straight in the eyes: ‘Who is she?’
‘A colleague. But actually it’s my decision…’
‘Bastard.’ Jill kicks off her high-heeled mules, stretches her legs out. With her long, lean frame and sharp haircut my best friend always makes me feel small and floppy in comparison. ‘It’s an open-and-shut case. He’s dumped his loyal, loving wife of twelve years.’ She beams a big grin: ‘He’s cheated on you and he’s gotta pay for your heartbreak.’
‘Actually, I’m not heartbroken.’
‘That’s the spirit!’ Jill’s red-nailed hand pats mine. ‘Don’t let the bastards get you down.’
‘I mean’—I shake my head—‘it’s not how you see it. Jonathan has found another woman, but I’m not devastated. The separation is my idea.’
‘Hmmm.’ Jill shoots me a look that shows she’s not convinced. ‘A bad marriage is like two drunks fighting: it doesn’t get any better, and someone’s got to break it up.’ She pours more wine. ‘Let me give you a few tips. First: you can see a shrink, a marriage counsellor, a clairvoyant—anyone—but you MUST get yourself the best divorce lawyer in town. Mine was known as the husband beater.’ Jill winks. ‘She left Ross battered and bruised.’
I have a fleeting image of Ross Warren, the dopey and dope-smoking younger son of a wealthy Gloucestershire farmer. He was a potter, charmingly hopeless and totally unsuited to Jill. They were married for three years, until he left her for a Latvian waitress. Or was she a dog-walker?
‘This is a separation, not a divorce.’
‘Second tip’—Jill ignores my protest—‘only ring your ex during office hours.’ Here she gives a sharp mirthless laugh. ‘I can’t tell you how many nights I spent snivelling on the phone to Ross. I told him I loved him, I’d forgive him, I’d take him back and never complain about a thing again…all kinds of stuff that at three p.m. would never have crossed my lips but by midnight sounded fine. Soooooo embarrassing. Third tip: don’t, whatever you do, find out the other woman’s address, email, telephone numbers…’ Jill pauses and for a nano-second looks embarrassed. ‘Unfortunately, I had gone through Ross’s computer and had every possible contact detail for Inga.’
‘You didn’t…’
‘I did.’ Jill nods her head and can’t hide a smile. ‘She got quite a few calls from Immigration requesting she show up at their offices. Then her name and mobile number somehow ended up in the Time Out personal ads—in a box that said something along the lines of “Busty Inga is just the thinga when you’re hot to trot”.’
