How to Break Your Own Heart

by Maggie Alderson

  Then, quite irrationally, what made me become incandescent with fury was the mention of my school in the ‘Con’ column. I was very proud of my school, but it didn’t matter how many times I had told him about the Kent grammar-school phenomenon, as far as he was concerned it was a state school and therefore beyond the pale.

  In Ed’s view, anyone who hadn’t been to one of a small list of public schools he considered acceptable – which did not include the very minor one my father worked at – had been to a ‘ghastly comprehensive’. And so what if I had? Why would that have been so terrible, if I had turned out OK?

  All these years I’d told myself Ed wasn’t really a snob, that he just had his own quaintly fixed ideas about certain things. He wouldn’t drive a Japanese car, or drink wine that had been produced anywhere but France. He wouldn’t have instant coffee or tea bags in the house, and he hated pubs, of course, and glass-clinking. And the words ‘toilet’, ‘couch’ and ‘pardon’.

  I’d always told myself these were just his funny little ways, endearingly eccentric, but I hadn’t realized that something as petty as where I’d been to school might actually have stopped him marrying me. They weren’t ‘quirks’, I understood in that moment, they were outrageous and ignorant prejudices. He was a snob. A horrendous bloody snob, like his cow of a mother.

  And that was it. I couldn’t see any way I could spend another night under the same roof as him – especially not with her there.

  Had Dervla not been in residence, there was a small chance I could have thrashed things out with Ed, I thought, but as well as being maddening in her own right, she brought out the worst in him. Even in normal circumstances, things were always strained while she was there, and with everything that had gone on between me and Ed already in the past few weeks, she was just one stress too many.

  Trembling slightly, I put the pros and cons list back in the drawer and kicked it shut. Then I rang Kiki and asked her if I could come and stay for a while.

  Toilets to the pair of them.

  21

  Kiki certainly knew how to make leaving your husband – or having a break from him, as I preferred to think of it – seem like fun. She was delighted to have me as a ‘flattie’, as she called it, and started planning our joint social life from the moment I arrived in her spare room that afternoon.

  ‘I’m really sorry things aren’t great between you and Ed,’ she said, sitting on my bed sifting through a pile of invitations, while I unpacked. I was feeling a bit wobbly, to put it mildly, and it was a very welcome distraction to have her there twittering merrily, as she did. She had a bright-green facepack on. ‘I’m sure you will be able to work things out,’ she was saying. ‘Once you give him a chance to see how much he misses you. Then he won’t take you for granted so much.’

  I stopped in the middle of the room, holding a shoe in one hand and a T-shirt in the other.

  ‘Do you really think he takes me for granted?’ I asked.

  ‘Shit, yeah,’ said Kiki. ‘I’ve always thought that. You just need to remind him how much he needs you – how much you do for him. Make him appreciate you a bit more. You’re his bloody housekeeper and social secretary and everything else. You’ve been his live-in clutter-clearer for years.’

  I smiled weakly. It was true. Ed was immaculate in his personal appearance and incredibly organized with regard to his work, but actually pretty untidy in every other regard. I didn’t think he knew how to put a cup in the dishwasher, and he certainly couldn’t turn it on. I’d been doing it all for him for so many years I cleared up after him on autopilot.

  It was quite comforting to know that someone else thought Ed took all that for granted but, on the other hand, talking about it so casually made the problems between us a bit too real. I sighed deeply, put the shoe in the wardrobe with its partner and folded the T-shirt on the bed.

  ‘And being entirely selfish,’ said Kiki. ‘I must say it’s perfect timing for me.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked, hanging my dressing gown on the back of the door. I was glad I had put that hook there.

  ‘Because now Ollie is so nauseatingly loved up with Sonny and really incredibly boring, you can be my official PIC,’ she said, tossing any invites that didn’t thrill her on to the floor.

  ‘What’s a PIC?’ I asked, picking them up and putting them in the bin.

  ‘Partner in crime. Ooh look, there’s a party at Shore-ditch House tonight, which sounds good. I always like a safari to the East. So we can go to that and then…’

  It all seemed terribly edgy and exciting after my glamorous yet rather staid life with Ed but, of course, I couldn’t have chosen a worse place to stay as far as his reaction went.

  I had wondered for a moment, after I had impulsively rung Kiki, whether I wouldn’t have been better staying with someone more neutral, like an old schoolfriend, but quickly decided against it.

  They all had young children and, even apart from the associated issues of not having spare rooms and living in places like Forest Hill and Ealing – or in Louise’s case, Cornwall – cosy family life was the last thing I needed to be around at that moment. Kiki’s hectic and hilarious whirl was the perfect distraction.

  So I’d left a cowardly little note on Ed’s pillow saying I ‘needed some space to think about all the issues which have recently come up between us’ and that I was going to stay with ‘a friend’ for a while.

  He got on the phone to me the minute he found it that night, when he and Dervla got back from post-Chelsea Flower Show drinks, dinner and more drinks. She always milked the last possible jolly out of an outing – as long as someone else was paying, of course.

  ‘Is this all because of how I reacted to your haircut this morning?’ he said, sounding truly bewildered. ‘I know I was upset and maybe I did go over the top, but I had a really terrible hangover after doing all the deliveries, and with Dervla turning up unannounced as well, it was just the end. I’ll get used to your hair, Melia, and I promise I won’t say another word about it while it grows back, so stop being silly and come home. Please?’

  ‘It’s not just the hair, Ed,’ I said.

  My heart had softened – or rather, weakened – a little when I heard the sincere distress in his voice, but then I remembered that horrible list and it hardened right up again. And his continued arrogant assumption that I would be growing my hair back made it harder still.

  ‘Look, I know Mummy’s a pain…’ he continued.

  ‘It’s not about her either,’ I snapped, ‘although she doesn’t help. I just need some time to think about how things stand between us these days, and if you can’t figure out what the issues might be, Ed, then I suggest you need to do some thinking too.’

  He was silent for a moment.

  ‘You will come back, won’t you, Melia?’ he said eventually, in a tiny little terrified voice I’d never heard before – although it did occur to me that his bitch of a mother might have heard it when she had dropped him off at boarding school, aged six.

  ‘I don’t know, Ed,’ I said, realizing in that moment that I really didn’t know the answer to that question. ‘I’m too confused to know anything right now. Like I said, I need to do some thinking and, when I have, I’ll be in touch.’

  ‘Where can I get hold of you, in the time being, if I need you?’ he asked, sounding shattered.

  ‘On my mobile,’ I said firmly. ‘But please don’t hassle me. I really do need some space. Goodbye, Ed.’

  And I hung up. My phone rang about two minutes later and several times after that, but each time I saw it was him and didn’t answer. Shortly after the last call it bleeped that I had a text.

  It said: ‘He you are staying with lili foot bother coming back.’

  I puzzled over it for a moment and then figured it out. What he was trying to say was, ‘If you are staying with Kiki don’t bother coming back.’

  Ed never had mastered predictive text.

  *

  Living with Kiki was a bit like being in a student fla
t, I decided, but cleaner. The place was spotless now she had her housekeeper and very nice to be in. Apart from some scary moments of near panic when I was in the bath – there was something about being alone in there that made the anxiety well up – I seemed to spend most of my time laughing.

  Kiki made me go out with her practically every night, which was exactly the distraction I needed – not to mention great for business – and on the few evenings we did stay in she usually ended up inviting people over.

  But jolly fun though it all was, between going out every night and working long and taxing hours every day with the needy neurotics who were my clients, it was pretty exhausting and, by the weekend, I was always happy to head down to the cottage for a break.

  Communicating only by text, at his behest – he was now officially too angry to speak to me – Ed and I had established that for the time being Winchelsea would be mine to use. As he had put it: ‘I am going to France. You are welcome to it.’

  It’s hard to tell the tone of a text, but I had a strong feeling that one wasn’t very warm.

  Kiki had threatened to come down there with me a couple of times, but I think she could see it made sense for us to have regular breaks from each other, now we were together five days and nights a week.

  I also suspected she didn’t want to come without Ollie – and he spent every possible weekend at home in London with Sonny these days, holed up in his flat for the entire forty-eight hours, according to Kiki, who was monitoring their relationship like Jane Goodall with some mating chimps. He had even taken to flying Sonny out to meet him if he had to travel over a weekend for work, she reported.

  The funny thing was, though, that while even being alone in the bath could undo me in London, I actually started to enjoy being on my own in Winchelsea. On my first solo weekend there, I had made the strange discovery that you can feel less lonely when you are entirely alone than when you are sitting on your own while someone else is nearby in a room with the door closed.

  And if I did start to feel isolated, I would go and see Hermione. As the weeks after I’d walked out on Ed went by, her friendship became as important to me down there as Kiki’s was in London.

  ‘Ah, you are beginning to appreciate the difference between loneliness and solitude,’ she said, when I told her my discovery one evening, when we were enjoying Campari and sodas on my new terrace – old stone slabs beautifully laid by Sonny, who still worked for us when his new travel schedule allowed.

  ‘That’s a very good thing to understand,’ she continued. ‘I’ve had nearly twenty years to study it, since my last husband died, and while having it forced upon you like that is hard, I have learned to relish it in a strange way. I really wouldn’t like to live with anyone now, even if it were offered.’

  ‘How many husbands have you had so far?’ I asked, feeling a bit cheeky, but really wanting to know.

  It was the most personal question I had ever asked her, but we’d spent the whole afternoon together weeding her garden and I felt I could.

  ‘Four,’ she said, her blue eyes shining. ‘Or five. I married one of them twice.’

  I raised my glass to her. ‘Good going, Hermione,’ I said, grinning.

  ‘And how many husbands do you think you might have, Amelia?’ she asked me.

  I laughed with surprise. She really had me there. I hadn’t told her anything that had been going on with me and Ed, but she’d clearly worked it out. ‘So you’ve guessed that Ed and I are having a little time apart, then?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And I wasn’t surprised really, after that time your amusing friends came down. You didn’t seem like a married woman that afternoon. So was it your decision?’

  I nodded, a long sigh escaping unconsciously.

  ‘Do you want to talk about it?’ she said. ‘Is there a particular reason?’

  ‘There are lots of small reasons,’ I said. ‘Ed is very eccentric, as you’ve probably worked out, and that is a large part of what I have always loved about him, but recently it’s all got much more extreme. He leaves me on my own too much. He works too much. He drinks too much. He’s a snob. And he can be very, very selfish.’

  As I listed Ed’s failings, I felt myself welling up. Hermione reached over and took my hand. I turned and looked at her.

  ‘He made us have separate bedrooms,’ I said.

  ‘That’s no good,’ said Hermione, patting my hand.

  ‘Separate bedrooms are very bad for a marriage unless it’s really essential – one of my chaps snored like a dinosaur – and too much spent time apart can unglue even a good marriage very quickly. I lost at least two of my husbands that way.’

  Although I was fighting tears, I had to smile. Then something about her sharing such confidences made me want to tell her more about my own situation.

  ‘There was something else, with Ed,’ I said tentatively. I was embarrassed to tell anyone about it, but it was so weird I needed another opinion.

  ‘I found a list in his study,’ I continued, slowly. ‘I wasn’t prying, I was looking for something I needed for the accountant, and in the back of a filing cabinet I came across a list of pros and cons he’d made fifteen years ago about whether to marry me or not.’

  Once I’d told her about the devastating discovery it all came tumbling out. ‘I was so hurt, Hermione,’ I said. ‘I thought he asked me to marry him because he loved me, I didn’t realize it was some kind of business deal to weigh up, like an employment contract. It was horrible.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Hermione. ‘That was an unfortunate thing to find. Very hurtful.’

  ‘He said I was “suburban”, that I had “dreadful parents”,’ I said, my indignation rising as I ticked the insults off on my fingers. ‘And you should meet his mother – she’s a real piece of work. He’d even asked her opinion about me – “not keen” apparently – and she hadn’t even met me then! Probably because of “no family money”, which was another reason not to marry me. He said I’d been to a rubbish school, that I was unsophisticated…’

  ‘That does all seem unkind,’ said Hermione, stopping me in mid-flow, ‘but what did he say in the pros column?’

  I looked at her. I wasn’t sure she was reacting with the outrage I was expecting.

  ‘Well, yes, he did say some nice things in that… He said I had a good head for alcohol and beautiful hair,’ I snorted with contempt, holding up the ends of my chopped-off bob and pulling a face.

  ‘But I take it the pros list was the longer one?’ said Hermione.

  I looked at her. She really didn’t seem to be as entirely horrified by the whole thing as I had assumed. I was a bit put out.

  ‘Well, yes,’ I said. ‘But it was still a terrible thing to do…’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hermione, nodding like an old sage. ‘ Terrible. Men can be very crass when they are overwhelmed by emotion. Especially those who have had to learn to control their feelings at brutal English boarding schools. Now, we need to talk about your raspberry canes…’

  The deep and meaningful part of the conversation was clearly over – and after her slightly disappointing reaction to my revelation about the list, I realized I was ready for a break from it too. I nipped inside to get a shawl for Hermione and to make a plate of cheese, apples and grapes for us to share.

  We stayed outside until quite late that night, grazing on the food, chatting companionably about nothing more personal than our gardens and those of the people who lived near us, and enjoying the late-evening light. It was getting towards the longest day and neither of us wanted to miss a moment of it.

  After my earlier outburst I was relieved to keep things breezy and general, but underneath I was acutely aware that while she was the only person who knew about the pros and cons list, I hadn’t told Hermione the underlying reason I had left Ed.

  The stupid list was just the trigger really, I understood that now; the fundamental cause, I had come to accept on all my nights sitting alone in the cottage, was his intransigent attitude
to my desire to have children. And I hadn’t told anyone that. Not even Ed. Not even my own mother. As far as she was concerned, I was just staying with Kiki ‘for fun’, while Ed was on a particularly long trip to France.

  Kiki knew more than anyone, but I hadn’t been specific to her, and if she suspected the baby issue was the real reason I had left Ed, she had been sensitive enough not to bring it up, which I was very grateful for. It was such a raw subject I could hardly bear to acknowledge it to myself, let alone talk about it with someone else.

  Finally, after it had fallen properly dark, Hermione announced she was going to go in.

  ‘Don’t be sad down here, Amelia,’ she said, patting my hand again, ‘unless you want to be, of course. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of sadness now and again, it’s necessary really – bonjour tristesse and all that – but if you ever need someone to talk to, you know I’m next door.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘That means a lot – but before you go, Hermione, can I ask you a question?’

  She nodded and I took a deep breath. ‘I don’t want to be rude, but do you know you have some rather long white hairs on your chin? I could pluck them out for you, if you would like me to…’

  I was a bit nervous how she might react, but I needn’t have been. She roared with laughter.

  ‘Oh, you lovely brave girl. Please! Take them out. I know they’re there and it’s mortifying, but when I try to pull them out I just can’t make the tweezers work. My fingers aren’t up to that kind of fine movement any more, and I don’t have anyone I can ask to do it. I refuse to have one of those humiliating carers they’re always trying to send me…’

  ‘Stay there,’ I said, and ran inside to get my tweezers.

  Within a few moments I had the lot out and Hermione was admiring herself in the magnifying side of my mirror.

  She gave me a very warm hug and I walked her home through Checkpoint Charlie.