by Fiona Perrin
‘Darling, we’ve so had that conversation,’ she said, but gently. ‘And you know what we decide every time? There’s no way that the Lars you married is coming back.’
She got up and paced up and down in front of the fireplace. Behind her was a row of silver frames showing pictures of Lars and me through the last ten years – first just the two of us, then our wedding photos surrounded by family and friends, then with Tessa and Finn.
‘Look.’ Liv came back and sat on the sofa and held my hands. ‘This is a bloke who sometimes doesn’t even turn up for bloody marriage counselling. You know what I think every time you tell me that?’
I nodded and the familiar feelings of rage started to course through my veins, followed by a crushing sadness. ‘I vowed we’d stick together forever and I really wanted to make sure my children had a happy home.’
She nodded, her pale blue eyes unusually serious. ‘I know, but you can’t be the only one trying. He has to try too.’
I smiled weakly.
‘You’re going to be OK,’ said Liv. ‘Very OK. It’s very fashionable to get divorced, you know, what with all this conscious uncoupling. Clebs do it all the time. Then they take pictures of themselves being “aren’t we civilised even though we’re divorced?”, going out for breakfast with the kids. There’s a feature I read recently: decree nisi-ly or something like that.’
I shuddered. ‘There’s nothing nice about this. You’d better go or you won’t get up for work.’ Liv quite often didn’t get up for work. She was a contributing editor at a low-print-run style mag whose mission was to celebrate everything original. It was called Pas Faux and she’d gone to work there the previous year in an effort to save her breadline writing career before it became toast. Unfortunately, her overactive social life – mostly shagging boys who’d just passed their A levels – got in the way.
‘I can stay the night?’ Liv said, but I knew she hated the idea of being woken up by children in the morning.
‘I’ll be fine,’ I said and eventually, after a little more crying and hugging, she wobbled off down the road on her bike.
I poured myself another glass of posh wine and rang my mother.
‘Oh, God,’ said Mum from her Gloucestershire kitchen. ‘Oh, poor darling. Surely it’s just an argument. He’ll come back.’
‘It’s beyond that.’
‘Do you want to come and stay? I would come to you, but, you know, your father…’
Dad suffered from a black dog that he refused to even acknowledge barked, let alone get treatment for. When he was in one of his depressions, he drank too much and stomped around the woods outside my parents’ cottage, his hair white and wild in the wind, with his spaniels, Liver and Bacon, behind him.
Did it surprise me that she didn’t come rushing to London to support me when I was about to become a single mother? Not really. My parents had an almost symbiotic bond – or at least, he needed her like one of those male monkeys that rely on their female partner to pick off bugs. When he was miserable – and he could get to a low mood in a moment and it could last for months – it would not occur to her to leave his side. She was there suffering alongside him, picking off the flies of his depression, as if only she could save him. Caring for me had come second ever since his low moods had become longer and more malign in my teenage years. I knew this and thought I’d come to terms with it, but it still hurt.
‘Maybe don’t tell him about this,’ I said, not wanting to bring on another dark mood.
‘I have to, but he’ll be devastated. You know how much he thinks people should stay together, put the children first.’
I shouted, ‘Well, he should tell Lars that, then.’ I took a deep breath and a sob came out. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Darling, don’t worry, you’re in shock,’ said Mum. ‘Will you be OK?’
Tessa and Finn were asleep upstairs. ‘I have to be.’
Eventually I went to bed, lying just on my own side of it, rigid as a ruler, wearing two pairs of pyjamas but failing to keep out my freezing fear. I cried some more and my tears were warm.
It’s not hearts that break, Lars. It’s whole people, and I’m broken.
2
In the half-consciousness of troubled sleep, I dreamt that my marriage was a black amorphous beast running away from me, pausing at corners to cackle, before running on. I never caught it.
At 7 a.m., feeling as if I’d hardly slept, I showered and dressed for work as if my life were going to continue as normal.
Dad rang the house phone as I was trying to paint away the purple shadows under my eyes with thick foundation. ‘Good God, girl, what a bloody mess,’ he boomed down the line. ‘But the important part is you’re all right?’
I was so far from all right I didn’t know what was left but I said, ‘Of course I am, and you mustn’t let it upset you.’ I’d do anything to stop my father falling into one of his depressions, dragging my mother down with him.
‘Upset me? Of course not. Just want to knock his block off. Can’t stop thinking about those kiddies.’
Had he been up all night drinking whisky? His voice had a slight slur – it was either anger or alcohol.
‘Now I’m going to find you a lawyer. You need to know where you stand.’
‘I’m sure there’s no hurry.’ It seemed so official and final. ‘Are you all right, Dad, really?’
‘For God’s sake, girl, stop asking about me and start looking after yourself. Now, let me know how it goes.’
In the kitchen our beautiful but sulky Slovakian au pair, Luba, was giving the children breakfast in an uninterested fashion. Luba had joined our household two months back and, aside from always looking bored and cheesed off, had been dutiful, since she’d moved into the room in the loft. The kids seemed fond of her but she ignored all my overtures of friendship.
‘Please can you take the children to school this morning, Luba?’ I said, trying not to meet her eyes with my red ones. I knew she wouldn’t think there was anything unusual about Lars not being there – he was so frequently absent.
She tossed her long, almost albino, silky hair. ‘Yes.’
‘Have you remembered the talk at the school tonight, and I need you to babysit for an hour?’ As I’d tossed and turned in the night, I’d thought about how I was going to a talk on how to ‘bring up good world citizens’ at the kids’ school and that I should probably take the chance to let the headteacher know what was happening. ‘I’m so grateful, Luba. Thanks so much.’
‘I here to help,’ she said, but there was no smile on her gorgeous face.
I kissed the children and set off out into the world, all the time on the bus and Tube feeling as if I were one step from my soul.
When I entered my tiny Soho office, my only employee, account executive Bridget, was seated behind my desk, punching away at my computer.
I wanted to shout, ‘Would you like to suck out my red blood cells till I die? Wear my knickers? Climb in my grave?’ but instead I said, ‘Bridget, what’re you doing at my desk?’
Bridget always got to the office at 6 a.m. to prove how efficient she was. She looked up and her round face shone with excitement. ‘I thought I’d demonstrate some initiative, Amelia, by trying to win us some more business.’ She moved across the room, her pink hand clutching a yellow sticky note; her white shirt was buttoned to her neck.
I wished I didn’t secretly dislike Bridget – she was very useful, but because she was so overtly corporate and had no sense of humour, I had to force myself to be nice to her in the name of the sisterhood. ‘We could certainly do with some new clients,’ I said, and went to make myself a cup of strong coffee, breathing in its beany steam as if it would give me strength.
Then I went upstairs to meet Stephen Frost, FD of Goldwyn & Co, which co-owned Brand New, my tiny advertising agency. Last year, after seven years with Goldwyn – a massive agency – I’d persuaded my maverick boss, Marti Goldwyn, to let me set up my own sub-agency. It’d been time to prove I could do it on
my own.
Marti let me take my favourite account with me – Land the Bootmaker. I’d been lucky enough a few years back, when I was just working my way up through the ranks at Goldwyn, to be able to pitch Land some ideas on how to turn their dying boot business into something fit for the twenty-first century. I persuaded them to bring back the male brogues that had made them famous in the Second World War, call them LandGirls and market them at women, and it’d worked. Now every black-clad goth in the UK wore LandGirls.
‘You’ll need some bloody money coming in and Land won’t stay at Goldwyn without you,’ Marti said when he signed the paperwork. ‘If I have to lose you, it might as well be to a business I have a part in.’
The trouble was that after the first eight months of relying on LandGirls’ income while I won smaller accounts, the shoe company had gradually stopped placing advertising with us.
Stephen, round-faced with a large snub nose, was usually cheerful and optimistic with me despite being an accountant, but today he didn’t smile. He waited for me to sit down opposite him, and said, ‘You look tired, Ami, but that’s no real surprise – you must be up all night worrying about the business.’
If only he knew that that came second to worrying about my marriage. I nodded and said, ‘How bad is it?’
Stephen tapped the end of his Mont Blanc pen onto the wood of the meeting-room table. ‘There’s no point beating around the bush – not having any Land revenue for the last few months has had a real effect.’
‘The profit and loss is basically loss?’ I tried to make him smile but it was a futile attempt to head off the worst.
‘It was always going to be in the first year of business, but our plan said we’d rely on their income while you won some other clients.’
‘Land is concentrating on overseas expansion,’ I said. ‘It’s all about conquering the US. There’s nothing I can do to change their minds.’ I’d spent quite a bit of time telling the marketing director how neglecting the UK would have a real impact on sales, but she’d just nodded and said that the ‘strategy was coming from the board’. I’d then got in touch with the Land CEO to try and get a meeting but he hadn’t returned my calls.
I told Stephen this and then went on, ‘And I’ve been winning lots of others but they take time to spend – I have that mail-order firm, Think Inside the Box; a new fashion label, Boring Clothes…’
Stephen mopped his brow and said, ‘That’s supposed to be ironic, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, it is.’ I smiled and rushed on. ‘We’ve got Fat Pig too…’
‘Don’t tell me – exercise clothes?’
‘For stick-thin women,’ I agreed.
Stephen stopped smiling and took a deep breath. ‘It’s all very well, Ami,’ he said. ‘But Land owe us £50,000.’
I gasped. ‘That much?’
‘It’s getting serious – the credit-control people aren’t getting through to anyone. I’m worried.’
‘Shall I go to Wakefield?’ I was talking about the LandGirls factory-turned-HQ in Yorkshire. As I said it, I immediately started worrying about who was going to look after the kids while I went up north – I couldn’t leave them with Luba overnight.
‘I’ll let you know.’ Stephen shut the manila folder in front of him. ‘Frankly, the best use of your time is to get out and win some more business and fast.’
‘And what happens if…?’
Stephen took a breath through his over-large nostrils. ‘You’ve got a couple of months left at best without some new work and that’s assuming Land starts advertising again.’
There. He’d said it. I shivered despite the heat of the meeting room. I needed my business. I was going to be a single mother and I had no idea how I was going to pay the bills or feed the kids. Was Lars going to be OK about money? He ploughed all the profits of his business back into expansion and, after the mortgage and bills, we managed month to month as it was.
‘I’m working on lots of different leads,’ I said to Stephen although it wasn’t true. In fact, the last few weeks with Lars had been so full of anger and arguments that I’d had trouble concentrating on work. Still, it was important that Stephen told Marti that I was working my balls off when he came back from whatever globe-trotting jaunt he was currently on.
‘Look, it’s all up to Marti,’ Stephen said with all the resignation of a man who’d spent the last twenty years working for a brilliant, exhausting boss. ‘And he’s got a soft spot for you.’ He said this without looking at me and I immediately started to worry. I was well aware that water-cooler folklore at Goldwyn had it that I was shagging Marti – because why else would he have invested in my new business? – but did Stephen – sensible Stephen – believe the rumours too?
‘You do know…’ I said.
‘Of course, I know,’ said Stephen. ‘He likes you because you don’t report him to HR every time he says something borderline un-PC…’
He was trying to make me feel better so I smiled. Right now, all I wanted was for Marti to fly in and tell me it was all going to be OK.
‘…and because you’re good at your job.’
Or used to be. As I said goodbye and went down the stairs to my little basement office I wondered what the rumours would be the moment all the agency staff knew I was getting a divorce. They’d probably say it was so I had more time to get jiggy with the boss.
*
‘So, you’re going to be down and out as well as divorced,’ said Liv, summing up the situation as only she knew how.
I’d called Liv to an emergency lunchtime summit at Ivan’s – the Soho café we christened Suicide Café many years back. It was exactly halfway between our offices. The walls were nicotine-yellow; the pictures on the walls were women weeping following scenes of Cossack desecration; there were three stuffed yellow canaries in a dusty bell jar on the counter. We were very fond of the place, which never changed however much Soho gentrified.
Liv ordered me a white wine but I was crying so much again it was rapidly turning into a spritzer. I knew my face was ghostly pale against the brown curls on my head.
An aged, melancholy waiter had shuffled from the shadows and plonked mountains of risotto in front of us. There was no menu; people came to this café to drink and talk about serious subjects like how to top themselves, so the café just churned out a single cheap dish whose sole purpose was to soak up alcohol. Occasionally – just occasionally – there was also a schnitzel option.
I kept saying over and over again, ‘But what am I going to do? How am I going to feed Tess and Finn?’ Liv finished her own risotto so I instinctively pushed my plate in her direction and she started to eat that too. We’d established right from the start of our friendship – back on a French exchange when we were fourteen, when we’d learned to smoke Gauloises and tried to look existential – that it was her job to be the light in my life and mine to make sure she never really starved. Through the last few years I’d been grateful for Liv never being serious. Most of the mothers I knew – aside from my small group of school-gate mates – spent all their time banging on about breast pumps and Boden; the women I met through work just talked management bollocks. As Liv put it, ‘When they talk about the bottom line, it isn’t because you can see their knickers through their trousers.’ In contrast, she could still make me laugh as if I’d just smoked an enormous bong.
‘Lars is doing well though, isn’t he?’ Liv said. ‘I mean, I have no idea what he’s talking about most of the time, but isn’t he trying to be the next Bill Gates?’
‘He keeps going on about cashflow. And I’m really scared, Liv.’
‘You need to take your mind off it. Want to come out with me tonight? I’m going to some accessories launch under the arches in London Bridge.’ All the staff at Pas Faux relied on parties to eat because they were paid so badly. Liv always chose the ones that looked as if they might do decent canapés because she reckoned if you devoured enough they added up to the equivalent of a decent meal.
‘Do I l
ook in a fit state to go to a party?’ I said. ‘Anyway, I’ve got a thing at the school.’
‘You always look very beautiful, even if you’re a bit knackered,’ Liv said. I knew she was just being sweet. Even though we were the same age, Liv did not have a crow’s foot on her face. ‘It’s because you’ve had children,’ she always said when I complained about it. ‘Stitches in your whatsit and burp juice all over your clothes. Who’d want to be up the duff?’
‘And I really have to get on with getting some more work.’
‘Look, something will turn up,’ said Liv. ‘The planets will be in alignment.’
‘You always think it’s about Jupiter circling Uranus,’ I said. Liv believed in fate because great stuff happened to her when she didn’t deserve it. There were the just-out-of-adolescence boys who asked her out all the time. Or when she’d about as much chance of buying a flat in London as every other single, gainfully employed person in London – absolutely none – she bumped into a fake marquis who rented her a flat. ‘Still, I could do with some of your luck.’
‘It’s my mission now to help you move on. I will set my mind to finding you a new man and getting you laid.’
‘I don’t want to go near anyone else.’ I put £20 on the old Formica table and stood up. I was as closed up as a mussel that’s gone bad but still finds itself floating round in a marinière.
‘But you will soon,’ said Liv and the spattering of Jackson Pollock freckles on her nose seemed to dance a little. ‘It’s my job to help.’
I shuddered. ‘I didn’t know how much of a failure I’d feel. I’ve let down my children.’
‘No,’ said Liv. ‘Lars failed the children. He’s the one who left. No word from him, then?’
‘No, nothing,’ I said.
Liv put down her fork and got to her feet and held me as I shook into her shoulder. ‘Oh, poor Ami. I do love you so much, you know.’
*
That evening I sat on a pint-sized chair in a freezing classroom while the headmaster of my children’s school told me lots of negative things about them in a really positive way. I’d asked to have a private word with him.