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

by Fiona Perrin

  Grabbing the phone, I punched in Stephen Frost’s extension number.

  ‘Yes, I was just going to call you,’ he said without saying hello.

  ‘Does Marti know?’

  ‘I’ve left a message for him for when he touches down at Heathrow,’ Stephen said.

  ‘I knew there was trouble but I didn’t know it was this bad,’ I said. ‘I’ve rung the CEO but he hasn’t been contactable…’

  ‘That was because he was having his balls cut off at the top of Barclays tower.’

  ‘I should have known.’ I avoided looking at Bridget, who was pacing up and down the little office. ‘I know we won’t get any more work but will we get our money back?’

  ‘Most definitely not. But I’ve got the team on it – they’re calling the receivers now.’

  ‘Is there anything I can do?’ I was almost whispering now. I knew that Bridget would be under no illusion any more that Brand New was a going concern, but at the same time I was almost ashamed to speak out loud in front of myself: my old self, the one who was in control of stuff; who threw the dice in the right way, climbing the career ladder instead of landing on snake squares that sent me slipping right back to the bottom of the board.

  ‘I told you – win some more business and quick. And then wait for Marti to get back.’

  ‘Will he pull the plug?’ I whispered again. Bridget was pacing so fast now that she looked like a cartoon character who’d wear a hole in the ground.

  Stephen paused. ‘Ami, I just don’t know.’

  Bridget disappeared out of the door then, iPhone in hand, probably to ring headhunters and beg them for a job somewhere where the boss hadn’t lost her grip.

  I let my head sink for a moment after I had put down the phone. Then I looked up and around the office with its big blow-up posters of the covers of Campaign and Marketing Week from just a year ago, triumphantly announcing the birth of my tiny agency. I had painted this little basement room in the bowels of Goldwyn myself. How magnificent my dreams had been then.

  *

  Bridget came back eventually, sat down at her desk and sniffed until I asked her to get on with researching Campury. ‘It’ll be fine,’ I said as breezily as I could when all I could feel were the cold winds of failure around me. ‘We’ll win Campury.’ Secretly, all I wanted was for Marti to come back and tell me what the options were.

  It felt like several years of pain that were really only hours before the door swung open and he strode in in all his stripey-shirted glory. He had a suntan and his sixty-year-old face looked a little younger for it. I thought about all the times he’d helped me over the years.

  ‘Afternoon,’ his voice resounded around the room.

  ‘Oh, thank God.’ I stood up. I wanted to run at him, ask him to open his worldly arms, pull me into his chest. I didn’t though, because he was the boss – and I could never be seen to have physical contact with Marti because agency folklore would soon have it that I was up the duff with several of his illegitimate children. No one ever let the truth stand in the way of a juicy rumour. Bridget took her phone and went out of the room, probably to tell everyone that Marti had come to see me again.

  ‘Bloody shenanigans, all this LandGirls business, isn’t it?’ he said.

  ‘We’ve been trying to call you about it.’

  ‘I know, I know. Got the message as I was getting off the plane. But I’m here now.’ Marti sat down at the little meeting table and sighed.

  I tried to reassure him. ‘We’ve got all the other clients…’

  Marti looked awkward. ‘It’ll probably be OK,’ he said. ‘But you’re going to have to be focused and…’

  My face blushed the colour of damson jam.

  Marti’s over-padded face coloured too. ‘Little birdie tells me that your young husband has turned out to be… well, possibly, your first husband… Just wanted you to know, well, that you’ve our full support.’

  I wasn’t surprised that he knew: my industry leaked like a bucket without a bottom. Someone – maybe Bridget – must have overheard me talking to Liv on the phone.

  ‘He wants a divorce,’ I said in as balanced a voice as I could manage, sitting down opposite him. ‘But you know I’ll always work hard.’

  Marti put his large hand over mine. ‘Not doubting your commitment but it is a distraction. But… anyway, got to pick yourself up, chin up and all that. You need to get on with getting some new clients.’

  ‘I think I’m onto something. We’re going to pitch for Campury.’ I was desperate to impress him.

  ‘You sure? Folks upstairs have been trying to get hold of this new brand director for a while now.’

  ‘His name is Ben Jones and I spoke to him this morning. We go to meet him on Wednesday.’

  Marti grinned and glaciers would have melted in the force of his charm. ‘Now, that’s more like it. Would love to get that account.’

  ‘I know. What a challenge.’

  ‘Listen,’ Marti went on. ‘I don’t suppose you’d be free to talk about it some time? Plan of attack and all that? Plus, I could really do with your help with the Loosey underwear people. I need some good ideas to throw at the b’stards.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Can’t do it now, girl,’ said Marti. ‘People like me have schedules, you know. All right for you, doing all sorts of things on the hoof…’ He winked at me. ‘No, I was thinking, you know, you might be free for supper one evening, Wednesday maybe – get someone to look after the kiddies and I could take you somewhere and we could have a bit of a natter.’

  ‘All right, you can pick my brains for the price of a dinner.’

  ‘I’ll send my driver for you at 8. Where do you want to go?’

  ‘The Ivy?’ I said, knowing how much he liked their fish and chips and how it was stumbling distance from the club he slept at. It would also be a big treat for me.

  Bridget came back into the room just as he said, ‘Now, Ami, get your grey cells working. I need to be able to talk intelligently about ladies’ knickers.’

  I already knew that Bridget would report this to the rest of the building so that they could cackle, ‘Come on – he already knows just how to get hers round her ankles.’

  *

  How can you be so small and perfect? I could see Finn through the pattern of the stained-glass windows as I ran up the steps to the front door of our house. He was sitting at the bottom of the stairs, his stubby little legs exactly the same length below the knees as the depth of the bottom step. He heard my key and started shouting, ‘Mummy’s home! Mummy!’ As I opened the door his blue eyes shone; his cheeks were ruddy and shining with raw health.

  I slammed the door shut, dropped my bag, ran to him and covered him in kisses.

  After Marti had gone, I hadn’t been able to escape the seeping panic that crawled around my bones. Eventually I’d locked myself in the corner cubicle of the office loo and sat down on the cold plastic lid. Should I call Lars and tell him the trouble my company was in? Would that make him come back? Once he would have been the first person I would’ve asked for help and he would have given it.

  But then I’d remembered what he’d said on that last Sunday as he’d stalked around the kitchen. ‘It’s all this going on about you, you, you that has torn our marriage apart.’ I couldn’t call Lars. Instead I’d stayed in the loo for a while just to escape having to face anyone else from the agency who would already know that I was a borderline bankrupt.

  ‘At school, Jemima said my party was the best ever but, Mummy, why weren’t there tigers?’ Finn said now.

  ‘I think we had enough trouble with ferrets, don’t you?’

  ‘Mrs Wragley says that she saw something in her garden.’ Finn was referring to my elderly neighbour. I sometimes got shopping for her since her hip operation but she always complained I’d forgotten something when she’d actually forgotten to tell me to get it.

  ‘Whatever you do, don’t tell her about the ferrets,’ I said, putting my finger in front of my m
outh to signify a secret.

  Finn nodded gravely. ‘Yes, because she said we would need to rent to kill it,’ he whispered.

  ‘We can’t have that, can we?’ I said. ‘Where’s Tess?’

  ‘Playroom.’ Finn shrugged, gesturing at the door at the back of the hall. He put his hands over his ears. I marched towards the closed door, throwing it open to discover Tess – exactly as I knew she would be – stretched out on the stained blue sofa, her eyes eating up Sleeping Beauty, shuddering with exquisite fear at the wicked fairy.

  I punched the power button on the old white portable and Tess came back to the real world with a thud.

  ‘Arrgah…’ she wailed. ‘Mummy. Ten minutes. Pleeeeease!’ and I wanted to fall onto the sofa with her, hold her tight and tell her it would be all right. Instead, I had to argue about how many hours of TV-watching a day were healthy for a six-year-old.

  ‘It’s not fair. Daddy would’ve let me.’

  ‘When will Daddy come back?’ said Finn.

  “Nikita’s daddy didn’t come back,’ said Tess. She was talking about the father of one of her classmates who had unfortunately keeled over from a heart attack a few months ago in the North Stand at the Emirates. ‘He died. But you said daddies don’t die.’

  ‘Nikita’s father was very ill. Nikita’s daddy died and it was very, very sad, but we talked about that then – and do you remember? I said to you that your daddy and your mummy were very strong and they weren’t going to die. Daddy has just gone away for a little while – like he goes away all the time – and he’ll be coming back to see you soon.’ I dropped to my knees and looked at them both closely, drawing them to me. ‘Listen to me. Tess! Listen.’ The little girl’s attention was already wandering. ‘No one is going to die.’

  ‘Why are you home early?’ Tess changed the subject.

  ‘Mummy’s got the crying type of poorly,’ said Finn. ‘And she was sick in the toilet this morning. It was real sick. I’ll show you where she did it if you like.’

  ‘We could play being sick,’ said Tess, her face lighting up. She started making retching noises and using her hands in a parody of vomit splurging from her mouth. ‘Carrots come out and everything.’

  ‘We don’t play in toilets and Mummy is better now so we don’t need to think about sick any more,’ I said and went out to the hall to call for Luba.

  Finally, there was the thud of Converse on the hall stairs and her body appeared, followed by her sleek head of hair. Even from this angle, she was spectacular-looking. ‘I thought you still at work, Amelia. I put washing away upstairs,’ she said.

  ‘Please can you babysit on Wednesday?’ I asked. ‘I need to go to a work dinner with my boss.’

  ‘I help yes.’

  I wondered whether Luba was too sullen to be around the children, but she hadn’t done anything wrong and I’d committed to a year; she probably just needed to make some more friends.

  *

  After the kids had gone to bed, I rang Mum. ‘Oh, Ami, I feel so useless,’ she said. ‘I know your father can look after himself but I’d just worry so much.’

  There it was again: the feeling I’d known from childhood of being the third element in a perfect balance of two. I tried hard not to mind.

  Dad had a career in shipping insurance before he started writing detective novels and they moved to Gloucestershire. Out there in the country his blues could be off the paint chart. But his mood could also lift suddenly. He’d start typing again and sit down at the dinner table as if nothing had happened without ever acknowledging to Mum and me how absent he’d been to us over the previous few months. We’d learned, too, to pretend in front of him that it hadn’t happened and everything went on as usual. As I grew older, I resented him for all those times when I’d climbed off the train to see my mum’s exhausted face and known I was in for a holiday from uni worried about her and being suffocated by his wall of silence.

  ‘He won’t go to the doctor’s,’ she’d said every time I’d begged her to get help. It was only in recent years that she’d opened up at all about the tremendous toll it took on her, but when I’d got really angry, following a difficult Christmas a couple of years back, she’d shouted back, ‘We know what we are dealing with here, Ami, and we don’t need any help.’ The ‘we’ was she and him.

  It was the pretence that they were always happy, and had such a marriage of togetherness, that made them vocal about other marriages, especially when there were children involved. It was as if they went on the attack: they’d managed to stay together for my benefit and why couldn’t others – including Lars and me – manage to do the same? My dad was the most vocal, but Mum was complicit.

  Had she thought about leaving him before I surprised them by coming along when she was already forty-two? I didn’t know; it was a different generation. But it was as if because they’d made one choice they were disapproving of others who made a different one. I’d grown up with the doctrine that you ‘stick together’ and right now I felt a failure in their eyes for not managing it.

  Still, I adored my dad – when he was upbeat, he was funny, kind, generous and very old-fashioned really. He was a brilliant storyteller, a great companion and very loving to me and the kids – I knew his first urge would now be to protect us.

  ‘He’s just worried about you and the children,’ Mum continued. ‘He’s found you a lawyer and wants to talk to you about it.’

  Dad came on the phone and, after asking how the children and I were getting on, said, ‘I’ve pulled some strings for you to see a woman called Cathy Murdoch, who’s apparently quite good. I’ll cover the costs of the first appointments so you don’t have to worry about it. I’m going to say goodbye, darling. I need a whisky.’

  I half-heartedly protested about the money and thanked him, really very grateful, before I put down the phone. Then I hugged a pillow to my knees on the sofa. How fast it was – the process of disintegrating all those years of love.

  8

  2007

  At the beginning, our relationship developed far faster than Lars’ English. He would pick up a phrase from a taxi driver or someone he met in class and use it obsessively until he moved on to the next one. In March, he discovered ‘mate’, and used it whether it was appropriate or not. In May, he found to his delight that women in English were also referred to as ‘birds’, and used it to tease us feminists. In August, he was always ‘discombobulated’ even when I knew that he was completely calm. September was all about ‘doggerel’, which he refused to believe was not a word in common use among the young in London at that time, having heard it on Radio 4.

  On our first date, though, the evening of the day we met, the word was ‘outrageous’. We went to a Spanish bistro with pavement tables round the corner from our flats and sat under the chequered canopy where outside heaters blasted down at us. As the liquid heat met the frozen February night, the air seemed to melt into droplets of rain. We ate tapas – patatas bravas, squid and tortillas - and every bite tasted new, grown-up and exotic to me. Although we were jammed in with other couples knee-to-knee round rickety tables covered in colourful oilskins, it was as if I’d stepped into a bubble, which contained just the two of us; I hoped it would never burst.

  He talked about his dreams and his past. He was an only child like me; his father had died suddenly of a stroke, the previous year, he told me with tears in his eyes; he’d been an engineer, designing viaducts that crossed fjords and withstood temperatures of minus forty. He wanted to be successful in his father’s memory, he said, to give his mother something to be proud of. His mother was a schoolteacher – who now, following his father’s death, was withdrawn like ‘bear in a cave’ and he worried about her all the time.

  I held his warm hand briefly but wanted to wrap my arms around him. He smiled though and went on.

  He’d discovered that he was good with computers at school and taken a degree in engineering in Malmö – he told me some funny stories about sharing a flat with his great friend Th
orstein, who’d gone off to the US for work now, while Lars had come to the UK. I told him about my life before him too – my marketing degree at Queen Mary’s, living with Liv as I tried to get my career off the ground.

  ‘It’s outrageous how much I like you already,’ Lars told me. He was still wearing the big puffa jacket and talked much too fast for his limited English. I was wrapped up in my winter coat. We drank rough Rioja tipped into cheap tumblers.

  ‘I feel like I know you,’ I said, because it was true. It wasn’t very usual among the boys I knew to say out loud how they felt at all – aside from an appreciative grunt at the height of sexual excitement – so this conversation was novel.

  ‘This boyfriend you have,’ Lars said. ‘Will you not have him any more?’

  ‘He’s not really my boyfriend,’ I said. ‘Just, you know…’

  ‘A hook-up?’ said Lars. ‘I have been learning this word. He is a shag buddy? I have been learning that too.’

  I blushed and looked away. I had to try to do everything I could not to get off with this man with his high cheekbones and huge hopes on our first date in case he never wanted to go out with me or talk like this to me again.

  When all the other couples had gone and the waiter had slammed down our bill in a chipped white saucer, I took a biro from my bag and picked up Lars’ arm. He looked at me quizzically but let me write on his wrist: ‘IOU one night out’. I wondered if he could feel my pulse beating twice as fast as it should have.

  ‘What is this IOU?’ he asked and tried to keep hold of my hand.

  ‘It says “I owe you” – it means that I promise to give you one night out in return for tonight.’

  ‘I promise you much more than one.’ Lars was fierce and my tummy did a few more gymnastics moves.

  The waiter came out then and ostentatiously turned off all the heaters. Lars pulled me to my feet and, with his arm around me to protect me from the bitterness of the night, we walked the short journey home.