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

by Fiona Perrin

  ‘Look.’ I tried to be as calm as possible. ‘I’ve always really liked and respected you, but… there is no way I am going to become your… mistress.’ I started to pull at my handbag, trying to get my credit card. What I wanted to say was, ‘For God’s sake, you’re supposed to be my friend. Do you have any idea what I feel like right now and then you go and say this?’

  ‘I didn’t mean it like that… just thought I might look after you, you know, a bit.’ All trace of the confident mogul was gone. I wanted to cry at what was happening – this man I’d always admired was reduced to saying, ‘I’m lonely, Ami, just a silly old, lonely old man. I just thought…’

  How could he do this? Now? With everything else going on that I had to deal with? Didn’t he understand how broken I was?

  I managed to pull a Mastercard from my bag. ‘Did you really want my help with your pitch?’

  Marti started grabbing at my hand again. ‘Dammit, woman, you know I think you’re the best brain that the bloody company has ever had. Don’t start getting all insecure on me.’

  I waved wildly in the direction of the waiter, who’d been pretending he wasn’t listening to the minor fracas at our table; other diners had looked up though and some would undoubtedly recognise Marti. ‘The bill, please.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Marti looked woebegone. ‘I’ve meant everything I’ve ever said. I also didn’t mean to be… you know… disrespectful. And don’t be silly about the bill – this is on me, you know that.’

  I stood up and tried to smile at him and around me to indicate that everything was fine at Marti Goldwyn’s table. ‘Look, I think it’s best if I go and we don’t talk about this again. You know how much I think of you.’

  ‘Ami, I just made a mistake. We’ll forget all about it.’

  ‘Goodbye,’ I whispered, tears coming now as I sped through the restaurant, rushed along the street and waved down a black cab. As I sank down into the safety of the leather seat, I speed-dialled Liv.

  She, distressingly, didn’t seem to see the issue. ‘Of course he was going to make a pass at you the moment you got divorced,’ Liv said as if I were sixteen and terribly naive. ‘He’s been mad about you forever.’

  ‘I just thought he was being charming,’ I said.

  ‘I know he’s an old goat but don’t let it get to you. You’re going to have to get used to people propositioning you. Soon you’ll be annoyed when they don’t.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I keep telling you that I’m not interested in other men.’

  ‘Well, they seem to be interested in you.’

  I sobbed then, loudly, and the driver pretended that he couldn’t hear me through the glass window. Liv told me to calm down, repeatedly. As the cab slid round the corner at Tufnell Park, I said over and over again, ‘How can this all be happening to me, Liv? How?’

  *

  The next morning Marti sent me a huge bunch of cabbage roses and a note saying that he was very sorry. I immediately gave the roses to Bridget, thanking her for her support, and was relieved when I heard he’d left to go to Paris.

  I tried to focus, working for as many hours a day as possible when I didn’t need to sleep, take the children to school, bath them or do the basics of showering myself or eating. Lars called the kids when I was at work, according to Luba, but he didn’t call me. She went out every evening, dressed up and smiling, with Guy Gates. I was glad to have the house to myself.

  It was late one night – while I was bent over a spreadsheet at the kitchen table, drinking my way through a bottle of red – that the realisation came: I wasn’t fighting for my marriage in the same way I was fighting to win an advertising account. I pushed the mouse away and sat back in my chair, wine glass in my hand.

  ‘You want to save your family but you’re not begging him to stay,’ pointed out the devil of doubt from my left shoulder.

  ‘But how much more humiliation can he put you through?’ asked the angel of angst from my right. I thought about Marti making a pass at me, about having to explain to people I’d been dumped; how rejected I felt all the time; how he’d left me after everything we’d promised each other and been through. How he could make me feel even more humiliated if he rejected me again. ‘Where’s your feminist pride?’

  I shook my head. In asking him to come back, I’d be saying that this lonely life with him travelling and me at home, trying to hold everything together, was acceptable to me. He’d promised so many times to change. Even in the last few months at Relate, we’d made timetables and agreements – how many days he would be away, how he’d look for someone else to take on the foreign travel, how he’d slow down the expansion into new countries to make time for our family. He’d promise sincerely and then for one or two days he’d be more than present, whistling away in the kitchen or playing with the kids before bed; then just as quickly, every time, he was gone again, responding to an ‘emergency’ at work but leaving behind the crisis in his marriage.

  ‘It’s worth one more try,’ said the devil.

  ‘Think about your dignity,’ said the angel.

  ‘Who cares about dignity when there are the kids to think about? And this is the man you love.’

  ‘The man who walked out and told you to file for divorce.’

  ‘Aarggh, shut up,’ I told them both, out loud. Then, before I could reason with myself any more, and with the assistance of two large glasses of wine, I sat down again and picked up my phone, pressing Lars’ name.

  As it rang in a foreign ringtone, I took a deep breath. He would probably look at the screen, see it was me and press the equivalent of ‘no, thanks very much’. But there was his voice with a slight delay: ‘Ami? Is everything OK with the kids?’ He sounded slightly sleepy.

  ‘Yes, yes, they’re fine… I just wanted to talk to you.’

  ‘OK… is it about the divorce?’

  ‘Isn’t everything about that?’ I said, then paused. ‘Look, I think we need to talk now that… well, now that the dust has settled.’

  ‘Now we’ve calmed down?’ It was hard to read anything into his tone.

  ‘Could we talk on FaceTime?’ I asked. ‘I’d like to have a proper chat.’

  ‘OK,’ he said, matter-of-factly. ‘I’ll call you back.’

  I pressed off and then panicked about how awful I must look with all my make-up worn off and lank hair from days of working so hard that dry shampoo was all I had energy for. But I had no time to do anything about it as the trill, trill of FaceTime on my laptop started up. I pressed accept and gradually an image of Lars, sitting at a desk in a beige hotel room, appeared on the screen; he looked as knackered as I felt.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, in what I hoped was a voice with a little endearment in it.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘So, what’s up?’

  ‘What’s up is that my marriage is on the rocks,’ I said, close to a whisper, ‘and I can’t help thinking that maybe we haven’t really tried everything and… Lars, I don’t want to get divorced.’

  There. I’d said it. The devil of doubt had won.

  Lars sighed and shook his head from the screen. ‘Look—’ he started.

  I interrupted him. ‘We said horrible things when we were really angry and I wondered… well, I keep thinking. I look at the kids and all I can think is how much better it’s got to be for them to have parents who are married and I…’

  ‘I know all that,’ Lars said. ‘But we’re parents at war. It’s been like this for years now and I can’t see it getting any better. We argue all the time, make each other unhappy. We can’t spend twenty-four hours together without one of us losing the plot.’ His words came out slowly and his face was sad. ‘That isn’t good for them. This death thing with Tess might be the result of that.’

  My heart swelled at the guilt. ‘That’s why we need to… We’ve got to fix this for them.’ I carried on desperately. ‘We could try to be more… we could try to be better…’

  He shook his head. ‘We’ve tried so much: I mean,
think of all the talking we’ve done.’ He meant the hours on the sofa after our rows in the old days and, more recently, the marriage guidance counselling, which became, in the impasse of our marriage, the only time we talked about our feelings any more; the rest of the time was shouting. Then I thought back to all the sessions at Relate where he just didn’t turn up; when I just cried on our counsellor, Sasha, her handing me tissues. ‘And,’ he went on, ‘you’re not going to become happy suddenly. You’re not going to change into someone who smiles at me when I walk through the door.’

  Oh, that hurt. ‘I smile when you arrive. It’s the leaving I can’t stand.’

  ‘It just wears me out,’ he said.

  ‘It wears you out?’ I said. What about me, home alone with the kids or working my arse off to try and save my company? But I’d blown it; his face curled into one I knew so well. It was a mirror back to me: he wished I could be the old laughing Ami, instead of this harridan who couldn’t see his point of view and demanded so much more.

  ‘The business means we could’ve had a better future together, but you just can’t see that.’ He was stiff and cold.

  The irony was that I could see what I wanted so clearly – he and I walking, holding hands with nothing to hurry us away from each other; it came in that kind of picture, the kind where we had time together as us and as a family with Tess and Finn. His future, though, now seemed to be all the stuff that went with that old dream of the wisteria house, except that we had no fluffy flowers and he wasn’t actually there. Instead he was in a foreign hotel room while I was alone with the kids.

  I stopped myself from saying that. Instead I said, ‘We could try again, make some rules and stick to them…’

  ‘Look, I’m tired and you’re tired and we’re not getting anywhere,’ said Lars more kindly, but then, ‘You told me you couldn’t live like this any more, remember? You told me you’d leave if I didn’t?’ A flashback to an argument a few weeks ago when I’d tried to give him an ultimatum. Yes, I’d said that. Was that the moment when he’d decided he would leave me?

  ‘But…’ I said, and tears came again. I’d been as bad as he was. But I couldn’t help saying, ‘If you wanted to be here, you would.’

  ‘See?’ Lars said. ‘Here we go again.’

  ‘All I wanted was to have a husband who gave a fuck about me,’ I said, crying now. I couldn’t stop – I knew I was probably hammering the last nail into the coffin of our marriage even as I tried to bring it back to life.

  ‘It’s 1 a.m. here,’ said Lars.

  ‘And here is…?’ I asked.

  ‘I think I’m in Frankfurt,’ he said and was a little bit rueful before he returned to his point. ‘It’s the same old argument and I’m tired… It must be midnight back there. We need to go to bed.’

  I looked straight at the screen where my husband stared back from another country and thought only about how we should be going to bed together.

  ‘You’re really, really hurting me,’ I told him as the tears streaked down my face.

  ‘Go to bed, Amelia,’ he said and the screen went blank.

  My shoulders shook as I got up and wobbled to bed.

  Love had made us cruel in ways that shocked me, but the end of it was brutal.

  When I woke up in the morning with a wine ache across my forehead, I knew I had to accept the grim realisation that it was over.

  *

  The next day Lars made it clear he thought it was, emailing me the ‘without prejudice’ spreadsheet with a note that just said: ‘As discussed the other day’.

  I instantly picked up the phone and made another appointment with Cathy. Then I gave up on the campaign for one evening and instead spent it scribbling the reasons why I couldn’t live with him so hard that I made marks in the kitchen table. I was so angry and hurt that I couldn’t cry.

  ‘You’re sure?’ Cathy asked when I arrived in her office.

  ‘Absolutely sure,’ I said from the other side of the desk.

  ‘First of all, I hope to help you keep your home. Our homes are our castles, after all.’

  I wondered what her house was like, with Jeremy. ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘A little place in Bromley.’ She smiled away.

  ‘Do you think he’s trying to pull a fast one?’ I said, indicating the spreadsheet about our money, which was in front of her.

  ‘It’s difficult without complete financial disclosure,’ Cathy said. ‘We’ll need to get his company accounts – all of them – and have a proper dig through.’

  ‘I don’t want to be unnecessarily adversarial,’ I said, imagining a long drawn-out court battle over our unimpressive terraced house.

  ‘Of course not.’ Cathy winked. ‘But we should never underestimate the other side. From what I can see, if you want to keep that house, you need a lump sum from your husband and to keep on working as hard as you can. That’ll be the court view.’

  ‘My largest customer went under.’

  Cathy smiled sympathetically and then a gleam appeared in her eye. She was like one of those big cats on David Attenborough that loll in the sun until it’s time to begin the brutal chase. ‘All the more reason to get a good settlement from the other side.’

  Lars was now ‘the other side’. Given the way he was behaving, that felt appropriate. ‘So, what happens now?’

  ‘Have you thought of your reasons?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘I just adore an efficient client,’ said Cathy, twirling her fountain pen.

  ‘Firstly, I would like to say that he spends less than three fourteenths of his week in my and the children’s company and that includes sleeping.’

  ‘Three fourteenths?’

  ‘I worked it out.’

  ‘Hmm, you poor darling. However, I suggest we write that he is absent from the marital home for a significant proportion of time, leaving you lonely,’ said Cathy. ‘The judge might understand that better than fractions.’

  ‘Sounds dull, though, doesn’t it?’ I’d spent a lot of time adding half-hours with hours to come up with a precise truth.

  ‘What’s the next one?’

  ‘He takes no responsibility for childcare or household management.’

  ‘How would “my husband makes no contribution to running our house and little contribution as a parent” sound?’

  ‘It’s certainly succinct.’

  ‘And accurate?’

  I was bleak. ‘Well, when he’s with the kids he’s fantastic, but it’s just less and less often so, yes, accurate.’

  ‘Number three?’

  ‘His career is more important than mine even though I have continually worked extremely hard for our joint benefit.’

  ‘But you don’t earn as much as him? Some women earn more, you know.’ A brief cloud seemed to pass in her eyes. Was that what she’d done? Kept Jeremy from the distribution centre in a style to which he’d become accustomed?

  I concentrated on the question. ‘Well, no, but I did in the early days while he built his company. I supported us both and before all this I wasn’t really doing badly…’

  ‘And then it’s their wives who apparently affect their manhood, emasculate them and suffer wholeheartedly as a consequence,’ continued Cathy as if I hadn’t spoken. Ah, all was not rosy in the little place in Bromley.

  ‘Well, that isn’t really the case in our marriage,’ I said.

  Cathy took a deep breath then and shook her head as if she was coming back to reality as I spoke.

  I looked down at my lap. ‘Number four? We’re no longer lovers or even friends.’

  12

  2008

  Lars and I were crammed into a corner of Balthazar, the teeming bistro in Soho, New York, with a silver plate of crushed ice between us, trying to decide whether meaty West Coast oysters tasted better than skinny East Coast ones.

  ‘These take more than one gulp to get down,’ I said. ‘The other ones just slide.’

  Lars tipped shallot vinegar onto another o
ne; his smile was as big as mine. ‘I don’t need any aphrodisiacs but if this is what they taste like let’s have them every day.’

  Around us New Yorkers were talking a thousand to the dozen. Round tables of boisterous families jostled for attention with each other. Vast mirrors, silvered with age, hung from the walls.

  ‘Oysters are much better with lots of chips.’ I scooped several pencil-thin fries from the paper cone in front of me. Then I raised my champagne glass to him – we’d bought the cheapest bottle on the menu and it didn’t come from France – and cocked my head to the side. ‘Here’s to you.’ That morning, high up in a glass tower on Avenue of the Americas, Lars had finally signed contracts with investors that would mean i-patent could turn from a struggling idea to a potential business – given several thousand hours of hard work from him.

  I’d waited downstairs in the art deco lobby, watching striding New Yorkers go to meetings clutching coffee. I’d crossed fingers on both hands as I’d prayed that the deal would go through. I’d made Lars practise his final pitch all night in a tiny, dingy, but still barely affordable hotel room deep in the East Village, but it seemed impossible that our fortunes were really about to change.

  At that time, my career was going pretty well, but Lars was still doing a bunch of part-time jobs to pay for his share of the rent while he worked on getting i-patent going. We would unravel ourselves from each other every morning in bed – by then we lived together in a shared room in another flat in our building, Liv having gone travelling – and I would put on office clothes and Lars would put on whatever logo-ed polo shirt went with the van-driving job he was currently doing. He refused to try to get anything else, saying that he needed all his mental energy to get the funding he needed.

  Meanwhile, I’d just been appointed Senior Account Manager at Goldwyn. I went to meetings where I waited for colleagues and potential clients to tell me that I didn’t know what I was talking about. Instead, they listened. I’d recently made it into the back pages of Campaign as ‘one who should be watched’ and the big boss, Marti, had started to take some notice of me.