How to Break Your Own Heart

by Maggie Alderson

  And with that, he stalked out of the room, slamming the door behind him. I heard another slam as he went into his bedroom, and decided to leave him to it. He’d never spoken to me like that before, or slammed a door, not once in fifteen years of marriage, and I was so stunned I didn’t know if I was more angry, hurt or surprised by his reaction.

  I smiled bitterly as I remembered how stupidly nervous I had been about telling him I’d left my job. That had turned out to be no problem, and it had never occurred to me that my new-found profession would be. I had naively thought Ed would be delighted for me to have discovered my vocation at last.

  Focusing on how much I enjoyed doing it, how lucrative it might be – and the not insignificant fact that it seemed to help people feel much better about themselves – the déclassé implications of clutter-clearing had never crossed my mind. Sometimes, I thought, Ed’s eccentricity verged on the irrational.

  For a moment I considered going to try and talk it through with him, but then something hardened deep inside me. He could sit and stew with his stupid snobby hang-ups, I decided.

  I glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece and saw it was already 12.10, so I grabbed my bag and headed for Sloane Square.

  11

  My lunch was a disaster. It was clear from the moment I sat down that Charles – I could never call him Charlie – Dowdent saw me entirely as an opportunity for him to make money. It was pretty insulting, but at least I was spared from him flirting with me, which really would have been unbearable.

  I could see, though, that even with his tinted hair and overtanned, over-Botoxed skin, he would have appeal for certain women of a certain age. He did have the remnants of a good face and the dyed hair was quite luxuriant.

  Plus, he had the Chelsea Eurotrash look that those women loved down to an art form. He was Mr Sardinia from the slightly curling toes of his Tods loafers, through his ironed jeans, navy blazer and white shirt – open at least two buttons too low – to the sunglasses on the top of his head. I wouldn’t have been remotely surprised if he’d produced a man bag.

  Fortunately for me, he knew I was not only married, but married to someone potentially useful, and it was quickly apparent that Ed was an appealing part of the package Charles thought I could deliver to him.

  ‘When Kiki told me what you were doing, I immediately saw how we could work together,’ he said, picking bits of salad off his plate with hairy fingers and stuffing them into his mouth. ‘Your clients and mine are the same people, Amelia,’ he was saying, as he chewed. Not attractive. ‘You sort their places out – they need new furniture, you call me in. Simple. I’ll cut you 10 per cent of any sales I make and you can do the same for me, if I pass any clients your way. Sweet, yah?’

  He sucked his middle finger in a way I was sure he had developed as a flirtation technique, but which had subsequently become a habit. I hoped he wasn’t going to shake hands with me at the end of the lunch.

  ‘Then there are all your husband’s customers, of course,’ he said, looking beadily at the Gruyère soufflé which had just been put down in front of me. ‘ They’re a perfect fit for both of us, as well. Between us, it’s a dream three-way.’ He paused with his fork in mid-air. ‘Can I try that?’ he said and, before I could even answer, he had plunged his fork into the unbroken top of my soufflé and scooped a large forkful out of the centre. ‘Mmmm, that’s good…’ he said and when I saw the fork was about to return for another visit, I lost all my appetite.

  I pushed the soufflé towards him and gathered up my bag.

  ‘Actually, Charles,’ I said. ‘You have it, I’m not very hungry today. And as for your proposal, I think I am still too much at the early stages of building up my client list to start sharing them with other people. So thank you so much for thinking of me, but I’ll just carry on solo for the time being.’ I looked at my watch. ‘And I’m afraid I have a dentist’s appointment I forgot about when we made this date, so I’ll have to dash.’

  Then I got up and walked out. I had for a millisecond thought about handing him a tenner towards my half of the bill – which is what the deputy headmaster’s daughter normally would have done, fair play and all that – but I decided against it. He’d invited me for lunch, he was eating it, he could pay for it.

  I glanced back just as I was about to walk out of the café door and he was bent over the soufflé, stuffing it in.

  I powerwalked towards home, furious with myself for being so keen to kickstart my new career that I’d jumped at his presumptive demand that I meet up with him immediately. Not to mention having my first ever proper, big, door-slamming row with my husband over it. But I was still very cross with Ed as well.

  He had been right about Charles Dowdent being dreadful, and I should have cancelled the stupid lunch, but I still thought he had been really unfair and rude about my new career. I knew it might have been different if I had explained it all to him a little more tactfully, perhaps in one of his favourite restaurants, over something complicated involving foie gras and a glass of Château d’Yquem, but sometimes I just wanted to get on with things.

  I felt I spent rather a lot of my life tiptoeing around Ed’s sensitivities and, this time, just for once, I felt it was about me, not him. I wanted things on my terms for a change, and the result had been slammed doors as if he were a spoilt teenager. Not right, not fair.

  I stomped along Sloane Street and Cadogan Place feeling seriously grumpy, but after I turned into Pont Street, my attention was distracted by the gorgeous bags in Anya Hindmarch’s boutique. As I gazed through the window at them I remembered what Kiki had said about my wardrobe. I adjusted my focus so I was looking at my own reflection. Did I really look that bad?

  I was wearing my favourite old jeans. I’d had them a few years and I had no idea what label they were, but jeans were still the thing to wear, weren’t they? Kiki often wore them. Hers mostly had straight legs, but surely it didn’t matter if mine were bootleg, did it?

  I looked down at them, and then noticed I was wearing loafers on my feet. I hated having anything in common with Charles Dowdent, so maybe I did need some new shoes, as well.

  But my top was lovely. It was my new one. Sort of Indian-y and sparkly. It was a bit ‘floaty’, as Kiki had said, so I had one of my little cardies from Jigsaw over it and then just a normal navy jacket. But that was a bit like Charles Dowdent’s too, now I thought about it. Maybe Kiki was right. Maybe I did need a wardrobe overhaul.

  My eyes shifted back to the bags. They were absolutely glorious, and I could see they were a lot more fun than the one I was carrying. It was a simple black shoulder thing by Ferragamo that Ed had bought for me in Duty Free one time. I’d had it for ages, and it worked perfectly well for everyday, but now I looked at it again I had to admit it wasn’t very exciting, certainly not compared to the kind of bags Kiki carried.

  On a sudden impulse, I pushed open the door of the shop and went in. I came out again ten minutes later carrying a brand-new handbag. In leopard-print ponyskin.

  I had tried to buy another plain black bag, as I thought it would go with more things, but the very glamorous young woman who served me convinced me to get something more fun. A ‘statement’, she’d said, and as I swung along the road with it, I was delighted I’d listened to her. Buying it had used up the rest of my Janelle money and then some, but I didn’t care; it had really cheered me up.

  I was just walking under the Wellington Arch, wondering whether to go straight home or detour into Green Park to try and clear my head, when my phone rang. It was Ed.

  ‘Melia?’ he said, in a very small voice.

  ‘Hello, Ed,’ I said, coldly. I wasn’t quite ready to forgive him yet. That door-slamming really had been a step too far.

  ‘Don’t be cross, Melia,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. Really, really sorry. I was horrible to you. I was wrong. Please forgive me.’

  ‘Oh, OK,’ I said, still irritated, but starting to soften as I heard the sincere regret in his voice. ‘You were horrib
le and unkind to me – and I think door-slamming is pathetic – but I will give you another chance, if you promise never to slam doors again.’

  ‘I promise,’ said Ed. ‘Scout’s honour.’

  ‘You weren’t in the Scouts!’

  ‘I’ll join…’

  I had to laugh.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘You are forgiven, and I have to admit you were absolutely right about Charles Dowdent. He is completely hideous. He was so awful, I didn’t even stay to finish my food.’

  Ed chuckled. ‘I told you he was a creep,’ he said. ‘And I do really promise I won’t slam any more doors. It was pathetic. I was jealous, OK? But listen – I’d better be quick, I’m just about to go under the Channel. I’m not even in France yet, but I’m already miserable without you. Will you come and join me, Melia? There’s a ticket for the 16.45 waiting for you at St Pancras. I’ve got a table at L’Ambroisie. Please come. We’ll always have Paris…’

  It was one of our little repertoire of tension breakers. How could I resist him?

  I was delighted I’d gone to Paris, from the moment I arrived at the glorious Crillon – and we even had sex again, right after I got there. I didn’t know when we had last had sex twice on the same day, and I liked it. A lot. There was another condom involved, of course, but at that point I wasn’t complaining.

  On top of that, I got my chance to talk to Ed about my career plans in the setting of one of his favourite restaurants, after all – his very favourite, in fact. But while he clearly was making a big effort to be nice about it, I could see he still wasn’t entirely thrilled by the prospect of me being a professional clutter-clearer.

  I tried to explain that it was more of an executive role and that I wouldn’t actually be doing any cleaning or any of the grubby stuff, but I was making it up as I went along – I really didn’t have any properly formed plan and, as I talked, I realized I needed one. If I could get him on side, that was something Ed could really help me with.

  ‘It’s more like interior decorating,’ I said, in a moment of inspiration. That was a profession his mother had once dabbled in – or at least she had persuaded Ed to pay for her to go on a very expensive residential course about it in Florence – so I thought it might be more acceptable. It seemed to work.

  ‘Oh,’ said Ed, relaxing back in his chair and practically purring with pleasure as he looked around the candle-lit dining room. ‘Well, put like that, maybe it’s not such a bad idea, and I have to agree the money is astonishingly good.’

  He had the warmth back in his eyes as he looked at me, over his glass of La Mission Haut-Brion ’75.

  ‘I just don’t ever want to see you leaving the flat with any rubber gloves in your tarty handbag.’

  My new bag was the only cause of slight tension on that trip. He hadn’t said anything until we were about to leave for the restaurant, clearly keen to make amends for the earlier unpleasantness, although I’d clocked the way he looked at it when I’d first arrived.

  ‘You look absolutely beautiful,’ he’d said, when I emerged from the bathroom. ‘I’ve always loved you in a little black dress – it sets off your hair so wonderfully – but are you really going to take that awful bag?’

  ‘Why not?’ I asked, picking it up and checking out my reflection in the full-length mirror, and deliberately ignoring the word ‘awful’. I thought it went perfectly. I had my Louboutin shoes on too and felt, for once, like une vraie Parisienne.

  ‘Well, it looks like something Diana Dors might have carried, and with those shoes as well, don’t you think it’s all a bit much?’ He frowned a little. ‘Did Kiki give you the bag too?’

  ‘No, she did not!’ I said, a little louder than necessary, but just managing to hold back from sounding fully cross; I wasn’t ready for another row. ‘I bought it myself with the money from my first client and I love it. I think it’s really fun, and it’s the only bag I have with me, so you’re stuck with it, but I’ll change my shoes, if it’s going to spoil your entire night.’

  Considering I was still hoping to get him onside about my new career at that point, I thought it was worth the compromise and judging by the way things had gone at dinner, I was right. By the time we were on our way back to the hotel, snuggled up together in the back of a taxi, he was being quite funny about it, asking me if the bag needed a bowl of milk, how often it would need worming and things like that. By the time we pulled up in front of the Crillon, he had named it Pussy Galore.

  On the way home the next day, half-dozing on Eurostar, as it rattled through the bleak flat fields of northern France, I was wondering what to do about Kiki’s proposed shopping trip and wardrobe makeover, which was in my diary for the following week.

  In the light of Ed’s reaction to one new handbag – and his earlier one to the shoes Kiki had given me – a radical new look really didn’t seem such a good idea just then. Not because I was prepared to have my entire life dictated by his little quirks and prejudices, but in these crucial early stages I desperately wanted Ed’s active support for my new work venture. I wanted the benefit of all his years of business experience to help me build mine up, so there was no point getting him offside now over irrelevant issues – especially as it seemed to be getting off to a most brilliant start. Even while we were on the train my phone kept ringing with people wanting to book consultations with me, which all helped to impress Ed that it was a serious proposition.

  ‘What a lot of untidy people there must be in London,’ he said, smiling fondly at me. ‘With lots of lovely spare money.’ He looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘You’re going to need a bigger diary for all those appointments,’ he said. ‘Or actually, maybe you should go space age with it, have it all on your Batphone. I tell you what, when we get back I’m going to go out and get us each one of those iPhone thingies. It’s about time I got into the twenty-first century. I’m so out of date I’m practically using a quill and a tom tom. I’ve been meaning to do it for ages, so let’s get digital together, shall we?’

  Half standing up, I leaned across the table, put my hands around his cheeks and gave him a big snog, right there on Eurostar.

  ‘I say, Heady Bouquet,’ he said, as I pulled away, his cheeks adorably pink. ‘I am most awfully glad you left your job.’

  12

  The days after we got back from Paris, as I darted around London visiting all my new clients, were like a crash course in the many and various kinds of chaos people manage to mire themselves in.

  My first appointment was with the wife of the untidy banker, who I had met at Kiki’s party. That was a bit tricky, as I didn’t really feel I could start going through someone’s private possessions without their permission. So I suggested we got the rest of the house into a state of exquisite perfection, in an attempt to inspire him to want to be tidy himself – and kept it that way with the help of a daily housekeeper, which she could easily afford and which I also reckoned she really needed.

  I’d sussed out early on in that appointment that she was actually very disorganized herself – and not a little lazy – and was using her husband’s mess as an excuse to hire me. I went along with her. As long as we got results, it didn’t matter how we did it.

  The next day I encountered my second shopping addict, although in this case her purchases were not bags and shoes but works of art, which she was unbelievably precious about. Monica – another pal of Kiki’s – lived in a one-bedroom flat in Regent’s Park, but the limited space clearly didn’t stop her seeing herself as a female Charles Saatchi.

  There were paintings hanging floor to ceiling in every room, loads more propped against the walls, with sculpture and more conceptual pieces on every other surface. You could hardly walk about for mini-installations by artists I had never heard of, although she talked about them with great reverence, and I was terrified to put my mug down in case what appeared to be a coaster was actually the work of some rising art-world star.

  I suggested we should hire a qualified curator to do a complete inve
ntory and, during that process, she could choose the ones she wanted to live with for the next six months and all the others would be put in a secure art-storage unit. Then she could change the display twice a year and open the flat as a by-appointment museum, I suggested, which went down very well – as I had known it would.

  I hadn’t been a professional clutter-clearer for much over a week yet, but I had already figured out that sizing up your clients and understanding exactly what would appeal to their particular variety of vulnerable self-esteem was a large part of being successful at it.

  And after so many years of manoeuvring around the Zeppelin-sized egos in my own personal and professional lives, this way of working came very easily to me. I was pandering entirely to my clients’ weaknesses and vanities, but I was also helping them, which made me feel good – and being paid for it. Double kerching! As Ed liked to say.

  After that appointment I headed over to Bayswater to see Rosalyn, the actress. It was a lovely, spacious flat and, as she showed me round, I got more and more puzzled.It didn’t seem cluttered at all. A bit untidy in places but nothing out of the ordinary, and I couldn’t really understand why she had called me – until I asked her to show me the one room we hadn’t been into.

  Her stricken face said it all.

  ‘The study?’ she said, sounding as if I had brought up an unmentionable taboo, and then out it all came.

  Her problem was focused entirely on financial admin – and it was all crammed into that one room. So crammed in, the only way I could get the door open was to hold a mirror through the gap and use a broom to shift the piles of paper that were jamming it shut.

  ‘OK,’ I said, surveying the devastation within. ‘Let’s go back to the sitting room and have a chat.’

  She admitted her study was like that because for months she had just been opening the door and throwing in anything that looked like a bill, a bank statement or a letter from the Inland Revenue. The tears finally flowed as she confessed she hadn’t done a tax return for five years. She didn’t even have an accountant and couldn’t sleep at night for worrying what was going to happen when the taxman eventually caught up with her.