‘What do you mean, you saw Susie earlier?’ Jack asked in a quiet voice. ‘I thought we agreed that we wouldn’t do that.’
‘It was far more important that you didn’t see her so you wouldn’t be tempted to jump her,’ Hope said venomously, as she yanked off her yoga pants and hurled them into the corner. ‘Apparently you didn’t need a whole lot of persuading to stick your tongue down her throat.’
‘It wasn’t like that,’ Jack protested, but he wasn’t shouting and Hope would have preferred shouting and maybe even a bit of door-slamming or some crockery-breakage. Something impassioned to reassure her that Susie had been lying and Jack was furious at her lies and plotting to render them asunder.
‘Then how was it?’ Hope demanded. ‘When did it start? How did it start? Who made the first move? Did you stop even for one second to think about me, or our guests who were only five feet away? Did you? DID YOU?’
‘Will you give it a rest?’ Hope had wanted Jack to shout, but now she had him roaring so loudly that Gary from upstairs banged on his floor. ‘You have no right to ask me this stuff!’
‘I have every right!’
‘No, we got this all sorted out two weeks ago so why the hell are you bringing it up now?’
They were in each other’s faces, noses almost touching, but not in a sweet Eskimo kiss. In fact, Hope felt like snapping her teeth together and biting the end of Jack’s nose off, Ozzy Osbourne-style. ‘But Susie said …’
‘“Susie said”, “Susie said” …’ Jack mocked back. ‘Susie talks utter shite, and we both agreed that we weren’t going to see her ever again.’
‘It wasn’t like I planned it. She was there at the gym, and now she’s taken my yoga class away from me too,’ Hope gabbled. She hated when Jack did this: took her attack and turned it into a counter-attack and tied her up in conversational knots at the same time. ‘What am I meant to do? Stop going to the gym altogether?’
‘Well, it would save us fifty quid a month when you only go to yoga about twice a month,’ Jack sneered, taking a step back and running a dismissive eye down Hope’s body, which was clad only in a sports bra and a pair of shiny black medium-control knickers from Primark. ‘I don’t know why you even bother.’
‘Oh my God! You think I’m fat!’ Hope wasn’t sure which was worse: Jack and Susie’s mutual throwing themselves at each other, or Jack thinking she was a lardarse. They were on a pretty level pegging.
‘Whoa! I never said that,’ Jack insisted, taking a couple of steps back to get out of range of the laser beams of death that Hope was shooting from her eye sockets. ‘But you said that you wouldn’t see her any more.’
As Hope remembered it, the main point of their verbal contract had been that Jack would never see, speak or have any other contact with Susie ever again, with an additional clause that Wilson would also join the very short list of people that Hope and Jack had solemnly vowed to cut from their lives. Just thinking of how she’d humiliated herself in front of Wilson and of all the other stand-out features of that awful night made Hope dig her heels in, both metaphorically and literally, as she ground her feet into the scratchy sisal flooring. ‘At least we both know that if I bump into Susie it’s not going to lead to both of us swapping spit within ten seconds,’ she shrieked, knowing that her face was as red as her hair and she had a stress rash mottling her chest. At that moment, she couldn’t blame Jack for falling for Susie’s obvious charms when her own were so severely lacking. ‘If I’m such a crap girlfriend then why don’t you just break up with me?’
It was a good question that demanded an honest answer and Jack looked at Hope meditatively, as if he could see the cracked heart that beat erratically under her flabby bits and sturdy underwear. Hope was dreading the words that were about to come out of his mouth but at least, finally, it would be the truth.
Her fists clenched at her sides, Hope waited and waited. Jack continued standing there, and then he turned and walked out of the room.
‘I do not need this shit,’ was all he said before she heard the front door slam shut.
SNAPPING AND SNIPING at each other was a very stressful way to get through the next week, but it felt a lot more natural to Hope than when they both tried to be on their best behaviour.
For most of that Friday night, Hope had planned to greet Jack with a thin-lipped, bitter ‘Nice of you to grace me with your presence,’ like she hadn’t cared where he’d been, but as it got later and later and then earlier and earlier so that dark became dawn and she was still wide awake and imagining that every noise she could hear on the street outside was Jack coming home, she’d had a change of heart.
Jack had to have been very angry to have stormed off for the whole night. The kind of anger that came from being falsely accused, and if anything was more likely to drive him into another woman’s arms, or more specifically Susie’s arms, it was going to be Hope herself if she kept on flying into jealous rages.
So when Jack finally reappeared just before lunch on Saturday, Hope already had his favourite coffee and walnut cake baking in the oven, four bottles of Budvar chilling in the fridge, and was full of plans to go to Waitrose to buy lemon sole so they could have posh home-made fish and chips for their tea.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, before Jack had even walked through the front door. ‘I’m so sorry that I was such a vile, jealous bitch yesterday. And I’m really glad you’ve come home so I can make it up to you.’
Jack put down his keys on the little shelf by the front door and folded his arms, which stopped Hope in her tracks because they couldn’t really hug it out if Jack’s arms were folded. ‘I am not going to keep having this argument over and over again,’ he said sharply. ‘I did a stupid thing. I said I was sorry and you forgave me. You have to get over this.’
Hope hung her head. ‘I just get so mad when I think of you and her together,’ she started to explain, but from the grim look on Jack’s face he was done with explanations, too. ‘You remember how the school-guidance counsellor made me wear an elastic band round my wrist and I had to ping it every time I started to get angry? Maybe I should start wearing one again.’
Of course, when Hope had been fourteen, her hormones and prolonged daily exposure to her mother had meant that she had a very tenuous hold on her temper. She didn’t have either of those excuses now, though she did still have a permanent mark on her right wrist from the two years that she’d pinged her elastic band at least twenty times a day. But Jack was nodding in agreement. ‘Yeah, well, maybe you should.’
Hope decided that she would seriously think about it, but in the meantime she shot Jack her best, brightest, most beguiling smile. ‘I’m baking you a coffee and walnut cake. How about I make some filter coffee and we can sit down and talk?’
‘Oh God, do we have to?’ Jack groaned, like having coffee, cake and a chat was some kind of ordeal that Hope was forcing on him. ‘I’ve just had lunch, actually, and I’ve got some freelance work to do so I’m going to hole up in the lounge.’
Jack had holed up in the lounge for the rest of the day and rejected home-made posh fish and chips in favour of a cheese sandwich, which he made himself.
Every time Hope tried to go into the lounge, he sighed and made a big show of rustling his layouts so Hope had no choice but to skulk in the kitchen and the bedroom. Even when Jack finally came to bed at nearly two in the morning and she’d stayed awake so they could have make-up sex, he’d turned out the light before she could snuggle up and rolled on to his side with his back to her. There was something to be said for being a shouter, rather than a sulker. Hope shouted and then, usually, she felt better and could get on with the rest of her life, but when Jack was having a fit of the sullens, it could last weeks.
Still, Hope was sure that Jack’s bad mood would melt away when she woke him up on Sunday morning with eggy bread and bacon and another heartfelt apology, but though he ate the eggy bread and the bacon, he cut short her apology with a terse, ‘All right, all right. I get it. You’re sorr
y. You don’t have to keep saying it.’
‘But you don’t seem very pleased that I’m sorry,’ Hope said.
‘Look, Hope, we’ve been through this before,’ Jack said wearily like he hadn’t slept for weeks. ‘You can’t just yell and scream and have temper tantrums and then think that saying sorry cancels it out. You know I don’t like confrontations. They make me tense and keyed up and that doesn’t go away just because you’re done with your snit and you want to be friends again.’
‘But it’s only ’cause I love you so much, that I get so mad at the thought of you with …’
‘Oh God! I can’t have this conversation with you again,’ Jack snapped, scrambling out of bed so he could rifle through the piles of clothes that Hope hadn’t got round to putting away. ‘Anyway, I’m meeting Marvin in Shoreditch in an hour to have a look round the galleries.’
‘I’m going to really, really try to let this whole business die a natural death.’ Hope’s best, brightest and most beguiling smile was beginning to wane. ‘You’re right, we should get some fresh air and going to Shoreditch sounds like fun. If you give me five minutes to have another cup of tea, I’ll come with you.’
‘Look, Hope, we don’t have to be joined at the hip.’
‘I know,’ she said and the effort not to snarl the words almost sapped her of all her strength. As it was, she could actually feel her blood pressure rise as the prickly heat of a stress rash travelled along her chest and down her arms. She was definitely going to hunt for an elastic band in the kitchen junk drawer. ‘It’s just I’ve hardly seen you all weekend.’
‘And you think that the minute I’m out of your sight, I’m getting up to no good,’ Jack added bitterly.
‘I don’t think that!’ Hope insisted, and she stood her ground until Jack raised his eyebrows at her. ‘Well, I’m trying really hard not to think that.’
‘Well, you have to try harder,’ Jack advised, and then he went out and she was alone in the flat and she couldn’t help it, she was torturing herself with elaborate, pornographic scenarios of Jack and Susie together and trying to think of a really good reason why she could call Marvin and subtly discover if Jack really was with him, so it was actually a relief when her mother made her weekly Sunday-afternoon call.
Mrs Delafield would have been quite happy to talk to Hope every evening and maybe even for five minutes every morning, but Hope had whittled her down to one Sunday-afternoon call. Yes, she felt guilty for keeping her mother at telephonic arm’s length, but as it was, that Sunday call usually lasted up to three hours and always featured a lengthy critique of Hope’s lesson and menu plans for the coming week.
That Sunday afternoon, Hope wasn’t in the mood to listen to a lecture on how modern primary-school education would benefit greatly from a return to the three Rs, or why soup wasn’t a main meal in itself but only a starter, or an hors d’oeuvre, as her mother insisted on calling it because she watched too many cookery programmes on the Food Network.
‘Soup, salad and maybe a couple of slices of toast is a perfectly decent evening meal,’ Hope insisted while they were clocking up their second hour on the phone. ‘The world won’t end if I forgo having meat, two veg and a starch at every meal.’
‘There’s absolutely no need to take that tone of voice with me,’ her mother said evenly. ‘No wonder you’re so snippy if you haven’t been eating properly. Skipping meals always makes you peevish.’
‘I haven’t been skipping meals,’ Hope said sulkily, except she had, because for the last two nights she hadn’t been able to face cooking and then choking down even a bowl of soup when her stomach was tied up in knots. That said, she could always manage a packet of chocolate fingers. ‘And that’s not why I’m peevish.’
‘Oh, is Auntie Flo about to visit?’ her mother asked delicately. ‘I thought she wasn’t due for at least another week.’
There was something very squicky about her mother having such an in-depth knowledge of her menstrual cycle, but Hope knew that she probably marked it out on the calendar in preparation for that happy day when Hope forgot to take her pill and found herself in the family way. She was so desperate for her first Hope-produced grandchild that she wasn’t likely to even kick up a fuss if the baby was conceived out of wedlock, though she and Jack’s mum, Marge, would march them down the aisle so fast that there’d be no conspicuous baby bump to ruin the wedding photos. During happier times, Jack and Hope had laughed themselves stupid at the very real possibility that their respective mothers had already planned their wedding and had their first-choice caterers, photographers and florists on speed dial, when they’d much prefer to go to Vegas and be married by an Elvis impersonator.
If that was the case, then they were both going to be sorely disappointed. ‘No, it’s not my special lady-time,’ Hope gritted, then she couldn’t help sighing, though the sigh was less to do with her mother being annoying and more to do with life in general.
‘Well, what’s the matter then? You know you can tell me anything. We’re more like best friends than mother and daughter, aren’t we?’
‘Yes, of course we are,’ she replied dutifully but with barely any sincerity, and her mother made a little hurt noise, which was usually a precursor to a diatribe about how desperately she’d wanted a daughter and had determinedly set about having a child every eighteen months until she had her longed-for baby girl, and now that baby girl was all grown up and wanted nothing to do with her.
‘I always thought that when I had a daughter, we’d be so close. Girls together, confiding in each other, that sort of thing,’ her mother predictably began, and as always Hope felt guilty because she wasn’t the girly, confiding daughter cum best friend that her mother wanted her to be. And she also felt guilty about taking her bad mood out on her mother, because she wasn’t allowed to take it out on Jack any more.
‘I’m sorry, I’m being a bitch …’
‘Language,’ her mother chided.
‘OK, I’m being a cow,’ said Hope, her good intentions to be more confiding and daughterly already under strain. ‘It’s not PMS and it’s not you, it’s Jack. We had a row.’
‘Oh, Hope,’ her mother sighed. ‘What have you done now?’
Obviously it would be something that Hope had done to cause the row. However much her mother had wanted a daughter, she wanted Jack as a son-in-law even more. Unlike her three older sons, who had spent most of their formative years belching and farting in each other’s faces and indulging in ferocious displays of sibling rivalry, Jack had always been smiley and charming and never broke wind in her hearing. That pretty much made him a god in her mother’s eyes, and while it would be so satisfying to tell her mother exactly why they’d had a row and pierce her Jack-worshipping bubble a little, Hope’s promise to Jack still stood and with good reason. As soon as she let slip that Jack had kissed a girl who wasn’t Hope, her mother would race next door, there’d be tears and recriminations, and then both Mrs Delafield and Mrs Benson would break the speed limit to leadfoot it down the motorway and be on Hope’s doorstep for a rousing chorus of: ‘The shock will kill your grandmothers.’ And somehow Hope would get the blame for Jack straying because she didn’t iron his shirts, even though generally Jack didn’t wear shirts, or because she thought soup constituted an adequate evening meal, or because she wasn’t making the best of herself and never blow-dried her hair straight even though it looked much better that way – so who could blame Jack for seeking comfort with another woman?
‘I didn’t do anything,’ Hope said indignantly. ‘He did something completely heinous and we’ve been kind of fighting about it, and then we made up but I was still secretly mad at him, and we had another really big fight and he walked out on Friday evening and stayed out all night and now he’s not really speaking to me.’
‘What do you mean by heinous?’ Caroline Delafield wanted to know.
‘You don’t need to know that, but he knows, and he has to understand that it’s not the kind of thing that I can simply g
et over in five minutes.’
‘Have you been shouting at him?’
‘Well, maybe a little bit, but I just get so angry and hurt when I think about the heinous thing, and I do say I’m sorry and I try to make up for the shouting by being really nice,’ Hope explained.
Her mother clicked her teeth reprovingly. ‘Look, dear, men have a tendency to be a bit thoughtless and selfish and there’s no point in fretting about it. It’s just the way they are.’
‘Yes, but …’
‘Even if Jack did do something to tick you off, we both know that when you get riled, your mouth runs away with you. It’s the red hair.’ She paused to let that revelation sink in, although Hope had sent her many links to articles that stated categorically that there was no correlation between having red hair and a bit of a temper. ‘And Lord knows you’re stubborn. You never let anything go. You’re like a dog with a bone.’
‘Wow, that’s a really attractive picture you’re painting, Mum.’ Hope had been sprawled disconsolately on the bed but she managed to rouse herself so she could look at her hair in the mirror on the inner door of her wardrobe. ‘Look, Jack did a bad, bad thing and I know he’s sorry but I can’t seem to move past it.’
‘Well, you do need to move past it, and Jack’s probably just giving you a wide berth because everyone knows you need a cooling-off period of at least two days when you’re angry,’ said her mother as if she hadn’t heard a single word Hope had said. Or she had, but had chosen to ignore them. ‘This will all blow over when you’ve properly apologised for being such a crosspatch. Why don’t you make him something nice for his tea?’
Hope wished that she’d never gone down this well-trodden path with her mother. If she hadn’t been a crosspatch before, now she was the crossest patch in Christendom. ‘I’ve said I’m sorry about a hundred times. Quite frankly, he should be making me something nice for my tea, but he’s been so …’
Nine Uses for an Ex-Boyfriend Page 11