The Story After Us: A heartwarming tale of life and love for modern women everywhere

by Fiona Perrin

  THE STORY AFTER US

  Fiona Perrin

  Start Reading

  About this Book

  About the Author

  Table of Contents

  www.ariafiction.com

  About The Story After Us

  If she tries very hard, Ami can remember when she used to have a dynamic and exciting career and a husband who she loved more than life itself, and who was equally smitten with her…

  Now she has two children, a terrifyingly large mortgage, and no idea who she has become - or why she and her husband can't even be in the same room anymore.

  With life as she knew it in tatters around her, Ami is heartbroken, and in no way pulling off ‘consciously uncoupling’ like a celeb. But she's starting to wonder if she just might come out the other side and be….happier?

  As funny as Helen Fielding, as poignantly touching as Marian Keyes, Fiona Perrin's dazzling debut is a story that is as much about finding out who you really are again, as it is about the exhausting balancing act of motherhood. Unmissable for women everywhere.

  Contents

  Welcome Page

  About The Story After Us

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Part Two

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Part Three

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Acknowledgements

  About Fiona Perrin

  Become an Aria Addict

  Copyright

  For Alan, Elyse, Sienna, Tom, Laura, Soppy and Ducky – the whole

  lot of you.

  Prologue

  Summer 2010

  ‘Will you, Amelia, take Lars to be your partner for life? To have and to hold until death do you part?’

  I caught a wicked gleam in my nearly-husband’s pale blue eyes. When we’d been writing our vows, we’d changed that line to ‘to shag and to hold’. We’d practised this there and then, and had to come back to the vow-writing later. Much later.

  ‘I will,’ I said, snapping back to the present.

  ‘Not yet,’ whispered the registrar. ‘There’s still a bit more to go.’ Lars started to laugh and there was a smattering of giggles from the small crowd in the register office in Chelsea, most loudly from Liv, my best friend and now best woman. She was going to tease me about screwing up the service until death parted us too.

  ‘Sorry,’ I whispered.

  ‘Will you promise to talk to him, to care for him and to work towards your dreams together?’ the registrar continued. ‘For richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, in good times and in bad, forsaking all others, for the rest of your lives?’

  ‘I will,’ I said, this time at the right point. ‘Always.’

  The registrar went on to repeat the same vows for Lars, who said in perfect English, with just a hint of his sing-song Swedish accent, ‘I will. Always.’

  The registrar pronounced us husband and wife and a rowdy cheer rose from our family and friends. Lars and I snogged a little more voraciously than was normal in a marriage ceremony and Liv whispered, ‘Get a bloody room.’

  Dad and Mum came forward and hugged us both in turn.

  ‘Bloody great,’ said Dad in my ear, his hair, despite his best efforts, standing up from his head as if he’d just had one hell of an electric shock. ‘Now, marriage can be tough, but you stick together through thick and thin.’

  ‘Absolutely lovely.’ Mum wiped tears from her eyes with an actual cloth hanky.

  Lars’ widowed mother, Ulrika, stood beside them, as tall and thin as her son. She hugged me and said, ‘I will be with you, Ami, when the winds blow warm and when they blow icily.’ She had a bit of a Nordic turn of phrase sometimes.

  Lars and I went to sign the register, followed by Liv, and Lars’ best friend, Thorstein; he was like a Viking Ed Sheeran with a bright ginger beard and hair.

  ‘Fuck me, imagine being married,’ said Liv, who didn’t do commitment. ‘Seriously grown-up.’ But I didn’t feel grown-up, I felt full of hope about growing up and old with him.

  I gripped Lars’ hand as everyone threw pale pink rose petals at us on the steps in the Kings Road. Even Liv was moved, as she fussed around straightening my white vintage baby-doll dress – chosen in homage to the sixties and seventies stars who’d married here before us. We laughed and kissed as the photographer’s camera clicked.

  There were thirty of us at the Bluebird for a raucous lunch, which was way swankier than anywhere any of our friends usually went, but was on my dad. Thor made a speech where the central premise was that Lars was a lucky bastard who was batting way out of his league and made everyone down shots while shouting, ‘Skål’. Liv’s speech was full of stories about how Lars and I had met ‘in mid-winter in the most freezing cold basement’ and how we’d been keeping each other warm ever since; she finished it off with a noisy impression of her listening to us shagging through a thin wall, which made me look at my parents with horror – they were smiling though, along with everyone else.

  We drank cucumber-flavoured champagne cocktails that tasted of happiness and danced like teenagers at their first disco. When night came through the windows and the house music slowed, Lars held me close, his smart navy suit now crumpled, and whispered in my ear: ‘Älskling, you and me, forever and ever.’

  ‘Always, Lars, always.’

  Part One

  1

  2017

  Lars left me late on a Sunday afternoon in January. He threw a couple of bags into his car and drove off with a puff of smoke that could have been drawn by Walt Disney.

  I stood at the top of the steps of our north London house as he disappeared around the corner of the road. I felt as if I were looking down at a sobbing thirty-seven-year-old brunette rather than that I actually was her. There was an overwhelming sense that, after ten years, it was Just Me Again.

  But, of course, it wasn’t – now I had the kids. I rushed inside and threw cold water over my face at the kitchen sink, drying myself with a tea towel before I opened the door of the playroom. Four-year-old Finn and six-year-old Tessa were sitting on the sofa, frightened by the rowing and confused by the fact that they were allowed to watch a DVD when the rule was only an hour of screen time a day and that was when I needed to moan and drink wine.

  ‘Is everything OK, Mummy?’ Finn asked, walking over to kiss me. ‘Jemima’s coming to my party on Saturday. She’s my girlfriend and so is Tallulah. I’m going to marry both of them.’

  ‘You can only marr
y one person,’ scoffed his sister. ‘Can’t you, Mummy?’

  ‘Well,’ I said.

  ‘Except for Henry VIII,’ said Tess, whose special topic at school this term was the fat, monastery-burning Tudor. ‘When he went off his wives he chopped off their heads. You could chop off Jemima’s head and then marry Tallulah.’

  ‘But Jemima’s got lovely yellow hair,’ said Finn, clutching me.

  ‘You’d still have her hair if she was dead. You could keep her head in a corner.’

  ‘That’s enough, Tess.’ My daughter’s current favourite game was burying dolls in graves in the back garden and topping them with twigs. She also spent quite a lot of time on the floor pretending to be a corpse.

  ‘Daddy might not be back in time for your party,’ I said in a mock-cheerful voice. ‘He’s got to go away for work again.’ In fact, Lars missing his son’s birthday party had been the reason we’d had the enormous row that afternoon when he’d said he was leaving me and our marriage for good.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Finn, who was very used to his father being away for his web business.

  ‘Can we watch another DVD?’ said Tess, who could spot a weak chink in adult armour a mile off.

  I put my head into Finn’s neck so that they couldn’t see my face. ‘Yes,’ I said. How would they cope if we really were getting divorced? I worried so much about the impact all our recent rows were having on them; Tess was already really macabre and splitting with her father for good could only make that worse.

  I wanted to crawl under my duvet and stay there in the foetal position, but it was approaching Sunday evening. I needed to do what every other family was doing: find PE kits, pack lunches, move miserably towards Monday while still mourning Saturday.

  I rang Liv. ‘It’s the worst row we’ve ever had,’ I said, ‘and he says he’s divorcing me.’ She immediately said she’d come round. Then, like a robot, I made fish fingers, gave Tess and Finn a bath, packed their school bags, put them to bed and read them The Cat in the Hat, making an extra effort with my snarky Cat voice.

  ‘It’s you,’ I said. ‘Thing One and Thing Two,’ and they giggled. After that I poured myself a giant glass of red wine and waited for Liv on the sitting-room sofa, rocking back and forwards, as I relived the last few hours.

  *

  ‘That’s it. We’re getting divorced,’ Lars shouted. It was raining outside. He stuffed paperwork – bills, bank statements – from the kitchen dresser into a bag. I wanted to pull his shirt, tug him so he couldn’t move any more, but instead I just stood and cried.

  The argument started because Lars claimed that I hadn’t told him the right date of Finn’s birthday party until it was too late to reorganise his trip to Russia.

  It could, however, have been about anything – our arguments had been getting worse over the last few months, despite our going to marriage guidance counselling. They were always about one thing: how Lars spent so much time away for work and less and less time with us, his family.

  I knew I’d told him about the party being on the afternoon of Finn’s birthday on Saturday. And why was it my job to remind him of stuff like that anyway?

  ‘I thought it was on the Sunday and I was going to be back for his birthday evening on Saturday. It’s obviously a mix-up but it’s too late now,’ Lars said. ‘I’ve got to go to Russia.’

  ‘But we’ve got the Animal Man coming and we’ve sent out all the invitations.’

  ‘Who’s the Animal Man?’

  ‘Who do you think he is? He’s a man with animals. Guinea pigs, God knows. He’s the entertainer.’ I sat down at the kitchen table and put my head in my hands. Then I took a deep breath. ‘Are you going to tell Finn?’

  ‘I’ll tell him the trip’s been booked for weeks and at least he’ll understand. Which is more than you do.’

  ‘It’s your son’s fifth birthday, Lars. For once, please put your family first. Come to his birthday party.’

  ‘I’ll be there as soon as I get back from the airport. I’ll still see him on his birthday.’

  ‘The party will be over by then.’

  ‘Ami, he’ll have other birthdays, with bigger and better parties. I’ll be at those instead.’

  ‘The trouble is you know damn well you won’t. You should stop pretending you’ll ever change because we both know it’s bullshit.’

  My marriage had turned me into a person who spat out bile like rancid water from a gargoyle. Loving him so much had turned me into someone hateful.

  ‘That’s it,’ he shouted. ‘I’ve had enough. You go on and on about how bad your life is – so let’s just forget it, shall we? We’ll get divorced and you won’t have to tell me how awful I am to this family all the time.’

  We’d both used the ‘D’ word before in the heat of the moment, but still it seemed impossible to me that it would ever happen.

  ‘How can it be a family when you’re hardly here?’ I whispered. ‘Even when you’re here you’re somewhere else in your head.’

  ‘I’m thinking about a future for you and the kids. But that’s not good enough for you, is it?’

  ‘What I want is for us to be equal. I’ve got a business to run too.’ That Monday, I was booked to see the finance director of the tiny advertising agency I’d set up the previous year and I knew he was going to tell me that my balance sheet was looking decidedly unbalanced.

  I asked, ‘Lars, do you still love me?’ but he didn’t answer, just ran up the stairs two at a time and threw his clothes into suitcases. I thought I could cope with most things, but I didn’t know whether I could face the fact that he no longer loved me.

  He turned from the open wardrobe door and said very quietly, ‘It’s not about whether we love each other any more – that’s not enough.’ This was somehow worse than shouting.

  ‘Please don’t go,’ I said, following him to the bedroom doorway. I hated myself for my lack of dignity in begging him to stay.

  ‘I can’t stand it – all we ever do is argue.’

  ‘We can try…’ I couldn’t carry on with this half-a-marriage, but could I stand to see him finally go?

  ‘We’ve tried everything.’ His voice was as wintery as the day outside. ‘It’s time to stop trying. I’m leaving, Ami, and I’m leaving for good.’

  He said it firmly, as he always did when he’d made a decision.

  He carried the bags outside and into the boot of his car, light semi-frozen rain coming down on his white-blond hair so that it stuck to his face. Then he opened the car door, jumped in and drove off.

  He was gone and this time it looked as if there was no going back.

  *

  As I sat on the sofa waiting for Liv, images rushed through my brain the way they say they do when you are on your deathbed. The first time Lars and I ever met – me opening the door to him in a towel because he’d banged on the door of our rented flat when I was in the bath. The way my voice couldn’t stop going up and down as his did then, with his strong Swedish accent. Our first date, when he’d sung Lou Reed’s ‘Perfect Day’ to me in the same voice. Dancing in Tobago to reggae on our honeymoon. Later – when we’d bought the house we lived in now – dancing again, but around our new kitchen because we couldn’t believe our luck. The sense of him – clean, loving, determined – through all those years. Watching him stride around with Tessa strapped to his chest in a sling. Conceiving Finn in a four-poster in a country-house hotel…

  How had all that hope and love come to this? I hugged a cushion closer to my chest and then there was the noise of Liv arriving outside on her boneshaker of a bike.

  From the window, in the yellow of the streetlight, I could see her auburn hair flying behind her and her white skin pinked with cold. I waited at the top of the steps while she locked up her bike and pulled her bag from the basket.

  She climbed up, grabbed me in an enormous hug and said, ‘Oh, Ami. You poor baby.’

  I erupted into tears.

  She shepherded me inside, took off her coat and pulled
me down onto the sofa, where she held me against her scarlet jumper until I finally stopped crying.

  ‘Thanks for that. It’s really difficult getting snot out of lambswool,’ she said. I gave her a weak smile. ‘So, is this really it?’

  ‘I think so,’ I said – but I didn’t want to believe it and another warm tear slid down my face. I was like a thundercloud, plump with rain, which had yet to burst again, but where every so often a fat drop escaped.

  Liv pulled a bottle of what looked like very expensive Châteauneuf-du-Pape from her bag. ‘My landlord gave it to me. I think he wanted me to drink it with him. But this is an emergency.’ Liv’s landlord claimed to be a marquis, although when we’d searched online we couldn’t find any mention of his title. He’d met Liv at a party, fallen in lust and rented her his basement at a rock-bottom price. He wobbled home about teatime every day from the pub, pie-eyed.

  She went and got a corkscrew, emptied my glass of cheaper plonk and filled two new ones very generously. Then she sat down again and I told her, in between bouts of sobbing, what had happened.

  ‘He thinks working so hard is the right thing to do for all of us, and I can’t make him see that we need him here – I need him here,’ I said at the end. ‘He keeps going on about how broke we still are – but that’s because we keep having to put money back into his business. It’s a vicious circle.’

  ‘What I do know is that it’s time to stop putting up with it.’

  ‘It couldn’t have come at a worse time. I’ve got this really important meeting tomorrow. And Tess keeps going on about dying – she’s already really affected by us arguing all the time.’

  She pulled me close. I quietly sobbed into her shoulder until eventually she pushed me back, thrust tissues in my face and said, ‘Maybe it’s for the best. He’s made you so unhappy now for so long.’

  ‘But what if I could change him back into how he was? I mean, we were so fantastic in the beginning and it just seems like life and work and kids has taken over. All I want is the old Lars back.’