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

by Fiona Perrin

  ‘We’re going to the beach, we’re going to the beach,’ sang Tessa, her eyes bright with excitement.

  ‘Beach, beach, beach,’ her brother joined in.

  I sat down next to them. ‘We’ll need armbands and a spade,’ Tessa pointed out. She was wearing shorts and a T-shirt and under that I could see the bright dots of her new bikini.

  ‘She had her armbands on in bed this morning,’ Lars told me, ‘but we took them off to have breakfast.’

  ‘And we can have pasty for lunch,’ Tess went on. ‘You’re allowed to eat it from the bag without a knife and fork and you don’t have to have manners.’

  Finn looked up with interest. ‘Please, thank you,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll go and see if I can find us a Sunday paper,’ said Lars. ‘There was a shop on the harbour that might be open.’

  I smiled at him in anticipation of the week ahead but as he went out of the stable door I saw him push his phone into his pocket.

  *

  By midday he’d given up pretending. We were sat on towels on the beach, the kids digging beside us. Finn kept putting his red bucket on his head instead of his hat. The sun was weak but present; clouds scuttled across the sky pushed by the breeze.

  Lars was still trying to get a signal. He’d been doing this most of the morning, getting up every now and again and walking off with his phone in the air as if, if it was marginally closer to a satellite, it might help him connect with the world.

  ‘What’s so urgent on a Sunday?’ I said as he sighed in frustration again.

  ‘New software release,’ he muttered. ‘Just want to know how it’s going.’

  I bit the inside of my cheek as I forced my smile wider. ‘I’m sure it’s all fine.’

  ‘When you rented the cottage, didn’t you check it had Wi-Fi?’

  ‘I was a bit more worried about a high chair, frankly,’ I said as calmly as I could. If it’d been so important, why couldn’t he have checked? ‘Can’t you try the pub?’

  ‘Good idea.’ Lars jumped to his feet. ‘This won’t take much time. I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

  I made a sandcastle with the children.

  *

  He came back about an hour later, preceded by the smell of freshly cooked pasties and carrying four paper bags. By this time our sandcastle was a significant structure, complete with some rickety turrets and a moat. The kids were trekking back and forth from a small stream with their buckets trying to fill it up, Finn wobbling uncertainly on his tiny legs.

  ‘Pasty,’ Tessa shouted. I took a bag from Lars and pulled off a chunk of the crust so that I could try and cool it for Finn by blowing on it.

  Seagulls squawked as they circled above us.

  ‘That was a schlep,’ Lars said, sitting down too. ‘The only decent Wi-Fi in the village is in the other pub up on the cliff.’ He pointed towards the edge of the bay where there was a white building in the distance.

  ‘All OK?’ I said, although I dreaded the answer.

  ‘Hmmm, the guys are a bit worried about one bug they can’t seem to fix,’ Lars said, and shook his head from side to side. ‘I’ll have to check in with them again later.’

  I smiled on resolutely and handed Finn the crust. It was in his hand for less than a second before a seagull swooped and, in a frenzy of flapping wings, claimed it for its own lunch.

  *

  That second evening Lars jumped in the car and drove up to the cliff-top pub. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can,’ Lars said.

  The kids were exhausted and fell asleep as soon as their pyjamas were on. I smiled as I thought about the evening ahead, curled up together on the deep orange sofa in the cottage sitting room, watching a movie maybe, talking or even making love. I had a long shower, put on what I hoped was a remotely seductive pair of pyjamas and lit the log burner. I poured a glass of wine, chuckling to myself about Finn’s screaming indignation about the seagull. I would read for a while until Lars came back.

  Half an hour later I put another log on the fire and put my book down to get some more wine from the fridge. An hour after that, I realised I’d drunk half the bottle and read a good hundred pages. I picked up my phone to text Lars but there was not a single bar in the top left corner. An hour after that, I poured yet more wine and tried not to let disappointment sear into my soul.

  *

  Lars finally returned at 11.15 p.m., when, I assumed, the pub shut and with it his Wi-Fi access. I was lying on the sofa, kept awake, despite the sea air and wine, by an anger I couldn’t control.

  ‘älskling? You’re not in bed?’ said Lars.

  ‘No, I’m bloody not,’ I said and sat up.

  ‘They can’t fix the bug.’ Lars ignored my tone and sat down on the sofa, his hand to his head.

  ‘We’re supposed to be on holiday.’

  ‘I’m going to have to go back,’ he said, as if there were no other option.

  ‘For fuck’s sake – I knew it. You couldn’t just come away with us for a week without panicking about bloody work.’

  ‘Look, I know what the holiday means to you, but it’s a major disaster,’ Lars said coldly. ‘I’m sorry, but everything I’ve worked for could go down the drain.’ He stood up. ‘There’s a train at 7 a.m. tomorrow from Redruth. I’ve already booked a cab to get there.’

  I found a blanket and stayed where I was on the sofa; in the morning, I heard the door click as he left.

  *

  ‘Table for four?’ said the waiter, who saw me struggling through the door with the pushchair. We had two large beach bags slung over its handles and Tessa was holding onto the side. The bottoms of our legs and feet were covered in sand. It was clear that the waiter expected me to be followed by a husband.

  ‘No, just us,’ I muttered. I’d thought I’d give myself a break from cooking for the kids and feed them in the pub on the way back from the beach. The waiter looked embarrassed at his gaffe and immediately made up for it by grabbing the pushchair from me and leading the way towards a corner table.

  ‘Daddy had to go back to London because of his work,’ Tessa told him.

  ‘He must be really important, your daddy,’ said the waiter, going off to get a high chair for Finn.

  I took my place with our children at our table for three.

  *

  The week passed slowly with no adult company. Lars called and we had stiff, short conversations about the children. In the daytime, we explored other beaches, spent a day at a theme park, ate ice cream and learned to put the jam on a scone first for a proper Cornish cream tea.

  It was the evenings when I let myself feel my sadness. I sat on the orange sofa and looked out at the pretty harbour lights while the children slept, and thought again and again about how lonely it could be, being with someone.

  21

  2017

  The disconcerting part after the pitch was that nothing actually happened.

  No Marti stalking into the office in a rage to ask me what I was doing shouting at a prospective client and breaking down in front of him. No sarcastic texts from Ben. No gossip in the hallways of the agency, as far as I was aware, about how I’d blown all my chances by being terminally unprofessional in the most important pitch of my career.

  I rolled around in my bed over the next few nights, unable to bear the hot mortification that invaded my head every time I thought about what had happened; my cerebral hemispheres were now overtaken by abject humiliation.

  I emailed Marti although I knew it was hopeless.

  Ben Jones might ring you. He’s worried about Brand New’s finances and wants some reassurance.

  I also tried to manage Bridget’s expectations of the outcome of the pitch, blaming the size of our little agency. ‘Do you think that’s what will stand in our way?’ asked Bridget. ‘I mean, I was there. They loved every second of what we were saying. But then when I saw you running out of the building I knew something was wrong.’

  ‘But as I explained to you, Bridget,’ I said, ‘as soon as
you left he said he was worried about our financial status – then I got that call saying Tessa was ill.’ At this point, I crossed my fingers behind my back to protect myself from the lie.

  ‘Claudia rang and said she and he were going away to think about it.’

  ‘Probably taking her on a dirty weekend,’ I said.

  Campaign ran a story about how Campury was still trying to appoint an agency. ‘We were really impressed with all the ideas,’ Ben was quoted as saying. He looked scruffy but relaxed in the accompanying photograph, shot outside the Hanover Square office.

  When I thought about the upcoming weekend without the kids my metaphorical umbilical cord stretched. Every night I rushed home from work but now found the children in the cheerful care of Jenny, eating plates of vegetables while they learned their times tables. I was incredibly grateful to her; still I watched the children obsessively and, with Parminder’s help, set out to try and find a counsellor for Tessa.

  Lars called the children nearly every night that week and as I passed the phone over one evening, he went back to the burying incident.

  ‘It was a real shock and I can’t seem to get it out of my mind,’ he said. ‘All that time waiting in Moscow, I was really, really worried. We could nearly have lost them.’

  I gritted my teeth because it had taken an episode as traumatic as this to make him see what I’d been telling him for ages. A sense of injustice overwhelmed me but, still, I tried not to argue. ‘We’ve just got to make sure that we don’t upset them any further.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know.’

  He asked whether I’d heard from Campury yet.

  ‘No, not yet,’ I said. If only he knew how drastically I’d failed.

  Still, every day I got up, put on the armour of my business suit, went to the office and waited to hear that my career was over – and then came home to love my babies. I let the children come into my bed and we all snuggled down together most nights. If this was the shape of my family of the future, then it was calmer and full of love.

  The children asked sometimes after Luba, who, Jenny said, emerged from the house a couple of doors up the road well after midday, looking ‘polished and shiny’ as she climbed into Guy’s Ferrari. Jenny had supervised her collecting her few belongings.

  ‘Luba said I could go to a bloody football match,’ Finn said when he and I were having a warm evening bath together.

  ‘You can stop swearing now she’s gone,’ I said. ‘And I will take you to a football match, the moment you’re old enough.’

  ‘At least Jenny lets us eat broccoli,’ Finn said. After I told him off for taking a mouthful of soapy bath water and spitting it out again all over me, he went on, ‘Do you know what I like best now?’

  ‘No, what’s that, darling?’

  ‘I like the way you’re here more,’ and he planted a sloppy kiss on my mouth. I was there more, as I waited for my future to be decided; I also vowed that, however much I needed to earn money, I would try and work as flexibly as possible in the future to be there for him and his sister.

  Nadine, having found out about my divorce, kept leaving hushed messages on the answer machine recommending valerian for staying calm. ‘You poor, poor thing,’ she said when she saw me in the playground. ‘Of course, the children will recover but it will take some time. I advocate giving them your total attention, Amelia, but it’s difficult when you are always working. And, of course, avoiding them seeing confrontation at all costs.’ I’d glued the fixed smile of fortitude on my face and then sat in my car banging my head against the steering wheel and crying tears of rage.

  ‘Her passive aggressive is becoming proper aggressive,’ Parminder said when I told her. ‘How dare she?’

  She told me how Tess had told Priti that they were ‘going to stay with Daddy for the weekend’ and how they were excited about it. Then she went on to tell me that I had to stop blaming myself – which was easier said than done – and thinking of ways to get back at Nadine.

  ‘I just can’t stand her pity,’ I said. ‘“Staying married while Amelia doesn’t” just adds to her smugness.’

  ‘You know that Priti came home from the school trip and said that everyone else had tiny little boxes of Tupperware full of little salads and cut-up fruit and that they stacked into a bigger box,’ she said in outrage. ‘Apparently, a sandwich, fruit and a bag of crisps isn’t good enough. I have deficient packed lunch receptacles.’

  *

  Cathy insisted on seeing all Lars’ business accounts, took apart his spreadsheets and investment plans and informed me, over another meeting in her study, that we were very ‘illiquid’. ‘It means that all the money you have as a couple is tied up in the house and in working capital for Lars’ business. It’s not ideal at all when we need to keep you in your house.’

  ‘What can we do?’

  ‘I can only encourage you to spend very little and earn as much as possible while I try and reach a resolution with the other side,’ she said, but crinkled her brow. ‘In the meantime, shall we firm up what we’re going to file as your reasons you can’t live with each other?’

  ‘What sort of thing do other people put down?’ I asked.

  ‘Someone last week wrote that his wife had seventy pairs of shoes.’ Cathy chuckled to herself.

  ‘Only seventy?’

  ‘I don’t think seventy is that many,’ said Cathy. Today she was wearing patent leather pixie boots with a bright shine at the bottom of an otherwise unremarkable trouser suit. ‘His point was that they had needed a bigger house to keep them all in.’

  Leaning forward, I said, ‘What’s the worst one you’ve ever heard?’

  ‘I really couldn’t betray client confidence,’ Cathy said, but she looked as if she was dying to.

  ‘Oh, go on. I promise it won’t go any further than these four walls. Just don’t mention any names.’

  ‘Well. It must not go any further, but anyway… The worst one I ever heard…’ her voice sank to a whisper ‘… was when I was just a clerk – let’s just say he was from the north, very rich, whose poor, poor wife…’ her voice got louder with indignation ‘… wrote down that he used to get drunk and mistake the baby’s cot for the toilet.’

  ‘You mean he pissed on his sleeping child?’

  ‘Shush!’ But Cathy was laughing like a hyena. ‘That poor woman. What an animal. I really shouldn’t have told you that.’

  ‘I promise I won’t tell a soul,’ I said, thinking how much this story would appeal to Liv.

  *

  Despite me saying I really wasn’t in the mood to go anywhere, Liv was working hard on preparing me – and herself – for the forthcoming weekend. She rang and told me that this was the upside of divorce: ‘whole weekends without having to look after bloody kids’.

  ‘I’m really going to miss them. It’ll be so strange them not being there.’

  She insisted, ‘Even more reason why we have to go out on the razz.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think… and I can’t spend any money.’

  ‘No discussion. It’s free. We’re going to Berkeley House. I’ve got us on the guest list and free dinner. I said I was going to do a review but we can think of a couple of things to write and then get shit-faced.’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  She wasn’t having any of it. ‘It’s the place du jour for le beau monde. The waiters’ uniforms were designed by Christopher Kane.’

  She went on to tell me about all the freebies she’d bagged by offering coverage in Pas Faux, including a facial and some samples from up-and-coming designers.

  ‘Do you ever do any work?’ I asked. ‘Perhaps you should write a feature or something sometimes.’

  ‘Too busy,’ she said. ‘And, so that I can join in while you hunt for a new man, I’ve finished with Matthew.’

  ‘I’m not hunting for a new man, but which one was Matthew again?’

  ‘Tall, early twenties, photographer…’

  ‘The one with the goatee beard – in
fact, generally quite goatie all round?’

  ‘Yes, beard. He’d started to tell me he loved me while we were having sex, which was really boring of him.’

  ‘Very dull indeed,’ I said.

  ‘And I’ve no time for men. My job this weekend is to make you have such a good time that you forget about the fact that you probably have no job and no husband.’

  *

  On Wednesday evening Mum rang.

  ‘I’ve booked you and a friend – Liv, I imagine – into Champneys for the day on Sunday. Your father is paying. I told him it was just what you needed.’

  ‘Thank you!’ I knew she felt guilty about not being in London by my side, and was touched. ‘How is he?’

  ‘Miserable, just miserable,’ she said. ‘He refuses to eat anything other than bread and ham.’

  ‘Is it really all about me getting divorced?’

  ‘It doesn’t really matter what starts it, does it?’ My mother was bleak and unusually frank. ‘But it just goes on and on.’

  *

  Ulrika returned from her American trip. She came to our house so that I didn’t have to see how Lars had set up home with her. As she climbed out of her car, so thin and tall she looked like a stalk of wheat that would bend in the wind, she hugged me hard. She’d bought the kids a bunch of new clothes and a pair of trainers each from California, thoughtful as always given our financial situation. They gave her big kisses.

  ‘I hear you’re coming to stay with your daddy at my house,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, we’re going to teach him how to look after us properly,’ Tessa said.

  ‘Doesn’t he know how to do that?’ she said with a broad grin. Being her, she didn’t meet my eyes to laugh at her son; Ulrika wasn’t going to take sides.

  ‘And you’re not allowed to tell him, Grandie,’ said Finn. Tess and he shared a conspiratorial glance and I imagined they’d cooked up some great wheeze where they planned to tell their dad they went to bed at midnight every night and were allowed ice cream for breakfast.

  The kids went to play and Ulrika and I sat in the kitchen. ‘You are separated like the banks of the fjord, but I’m here for you, Ami,’ she said, wrapping her rug-like cardigan around her.