How to Break Your Own Heart

by Maggie Alderson

  ‘That creep was attacking Amelia,’ said Joseph. ‘Can you throw him out please, before I do him some serious damage?’

  I turned my head just enough to see Kiki give Charles a sharp kick in the backside with her Louboutin-clad foot. ‘Get up and get out,’ she said and, once he was standing, she literally pushed him out of the kitchen.

  ‘Goodbye and good riddance!’ I heard her shout, and then the front door slammed. I buried my face in Joseph’s warm shoulder again, while he stroked my hair and made soothing noises.

  Kiki’s shoes click-clacked back into the kitchen, but she didn’t speak and neither did Joseph. I felt him move his head – it seemed like he was nodding – and her shoes click-clacked off again down the hall parquet. Then I heard her bedroom door close, and Joseph and I were alone.

  I just stood there taking shaky breaths and holding on to him as though he were a life-raft, then I realized I needed some water – and fast. I pulled away and went to the sink, turning the tap on full, washing my face – and ear – in the running water.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said to Joseph. ‘I had to wash him off me…’

  He nodded and handed me a tea towel. I dried my face and realized that I really wanted his arms around me again, as soon as possible. I moved towards him.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said.

  He led me into the drawing room and, without speaking, we just lay down together on one of the sofas. And somehow it seemed completely natural for us to lie there quietly with our arms wrapped around each other. It flashed through my head that I was still a married woman and what I was doing amounted to something close to adultery, but I didn’t care.

  I was still in such a state of shock about what had just happened in the kitchen – and not forgetting my embarrassing revelation during the game earlier – that petty reality and all its rules seemed to be on hold. I existed only in that moment and didn’t want to be anywhere but safe in Joseph’s muscular arms.

  That state of suspended time continued when, after a while, Joseph put his hands around my face and gazed deep into my eyes. He traced the outline of my mouth delicately with his forefinger, then ran the tip of it back and forth along my lips.

  ‘I really want to kiss you,’ he said, ‘but I feel I should ask first.’

  I replied by pulling his head towards mine, placing my lips on his and sliding my tongue slowly into his mouth. He kissed me back, softly at first and then harder, until I felt like nothing existed except his tongue entwining with mine.

  It was just as good as it had been twenty years before, I thought, that night behind the rugby club at my brother’s eighteenth-birthday party. And just like then, as Joseph kissed me, so tenderly, so deliciously, I felt something fire up inside me. It was like the gas lighting on the stove.

  Whatever it was had clearly ignited in him too, and very quickly that gentle kiss turned into a wild thing. We were grabbing each other, rolling over so I was on top of him and then he was on top of me again, as our bodies bucked and pressed against one another.

  Then he suddenly stopped and pushed himself up on his arms, looking down at me. I smiled when I realized he was still wearing his glasses and reached up to pull him down to me again, but he stopped me.

  ‘I want to stay with you, Amelia,’ he said. ‘Can we go to your bedroom?’

  From the moment he pulled my dress over my head and lowered me tenderly on to the bed, I felt as though every nerve ending in my body was on maximum alert.

  As he smiled down at me, slowly pulling his polo shirt over his head and then unzipping his jeans, that knowing grin I had seen more than half my life suddenly made complete sense. In that moment I understood that above and beyond everything else – the intellect, the sporting prowess, the social confidence – Joseph Renwick was a profoundly sexual creature. And in his arms, I began to believe maybe I was too.

  He took off his glasses and lay down beside me, kissing me luxuriously as his hands stroked lightly down my body as though he were surfing my curves, until one of them landed firmly between my legs.

  ‘Well, you don’t seem frigid to me,’ he said, smiling wickedly into my eyes as he stroked his fingers along my smooth wetness.

  Fixing his mouth on one of my nipples he carried on stroking me there, alternating the firm rhythm with dipping his fingers inside me and pushing hard, until my hips were rising from the bed and I was groaning quite loudly. Seeming satisfied with that result, he kissed me for a while longer, in that dizzying slow way of his, and then pulled away, winked at me and disappeared down the bed.

  He teased me gently with the point of his tongue, then started to press more firmly, never breaking his rhythm, and it was as though he were gathering together all the elusive feelings that were humming away down there.

  Losing all awareness of anything else, I began to feel them insistently rising up and, just at the point where they normally slipped away from me, Joseph put two fingers inside and started stroking me firmly in there at the same tempo his tongue was working on the outside.

  That was when it happened. The tickly feelings which had been growing stronger gradually knitted together into a rope of deeper, more intense pressure which seemed to grow and grow, until suddenly it all exploded.

  I heard myself let out a mighty groan, and I was thrashing around on the bed, my hips bucking up as I grabbed hold of his hair. Then I felt like I’d lost consciousness and was only aware of clamping my legs together and squeezing to capture the very last of those heavenly spasms.

  As I returned to awareness, Joseph’s head appeared next to mine and kissed me tenderly on the lips. I opened my eyes and let out a wobbly sigh.

  ‘You owe me a match,’ he said.

  24

  The next morning I sent a text to everyone I had an appointment with that day saying I would have to postpone it; Joseph rang in sick to LSE; and we spent the whole day in bed. I hardly left the bedroom, except to make cups of coffee – and to gather all the matches that were still scattered across the dining table and put them on Kiki’s pillow.

  I hadn’t heard her get up or go out, let alone come back in and go out again, but she must have done, because around 3 p.m. she sent me a text: ‘Gone away back Friday arvo. Housekeeper cancelled. Have a matchless time. Love you K xxx.’ Moments later another one arrived: ‘BTW present for you in Planet Kiki.’

  I went in there and found a rectangular box, wrapped in her signature shade of bright pink, tied up with a big pink and white spotted bow.

  I took it into the bedroom and found Joseph leaning back against the headboard with his arms behind his head, smiling at me. He had the broad shoulders and muscular chest of a man who had played rugby from the age of eight and hadn’t stopped exercising since. It was a mighty fine sight. My stomach – and parts lower – fluttered at the sight of him.

  ‘I hope it’s chocolates,’ he said. ‘I need to keep my energy up.’

  I climbed back into bed and opened the present. I wasn’t sure what it was at first. It looked like some weird kind of toy rabbit, made of bright-pink latex, with a clear bit in the middle full of what looked like jelly beans. Joseph started laughing.

  ‘Oh, that Kiki,’ he said. ‘She’s such a funny girl. I hope she’s put some bloody batteries in it…’

  ‘What is it?’ I said, checking it from all angles and realizing it was decidedly phallic.

  ‘Do you really not know?’ said Joseph.

  ‘I’m not sure…’ I said, suspicions growing that I had just been given my first sex toy.

  ‘Give it to me,’ said Joseph, with a look in his eye I had come to know well, ‘and I will be very happy to show you.’

  The next morning we both cancelled our lives again. Kiki had clearly gone away specially to give us this space – putting off the housekeeper was a masterly touch – and we seized it. I had discovered, in the thirty-six hours I had spent in Joseph’s arms, that there was a whole slice of life I had been missing out on, and now I’d had a taste of it I was hungry
for more – a lot more.

  Joseph was hungry for some actual food.

  ‘Feed me!’ he said in a growly voice when I came back into the bedroom around midday with a plate of toast and Marmite. We’d finished off the dinner-party leftovers the day before, and there wasn’t really anything else. Kiki and I didn’t keep much in the fridge, apart from champagne, vodka and her facepacks.

  ‘I feel like I’ve run the Grand National,’ he said, ‘several times, actually, and this thoroughbred needs more than a bit of manky old toast to keep him going.’

  Without need for discussion it was clear neither of us wanted to burst our magic bubble by going out into the real world together, so I threw on some clothes and nipped out to the butcher’s by myself. Steak – that was what he needed: man food.

  We also needed some more condoms. We’d used the one Joseph had produced from his wallet, I’d found three lurking in the bottom of my washbag – no doubt left over from a trip to France with Ed, but I pushed that thought right out of my head – and I’d unearthed another two on a raid of Kiki’s bathroom, but we had no more.

  The irony of using the hated things with Joseph was not lost on me, but when he’d asked me, at the crucial first moment, if I would prefer it, I’d said yes. I had to. I’d stopped taking the Pill the day I walked out on Ed, as part of my general rebellion against his rules.

  ‘I’m not on the Pill,’ I told him, ‘so much as I loathe those horrible stinky things, you’d better use one to be on the safe side.’

  Joseph had looked at me with a strange expression on his face, a bit sad, combined with a hint of his more usual mischief. ‘It’s hell being a grown-up sometimes, isn’t it?’ he said, as he rolled the wretched thing on. ‘If only we were foolish teenagers, we’d chuck the bloody condoms in the bin, I’d get you gloriously up the duff without another thought and we’d worry about the consequences later.’

  I was so surprised I just stared at him, but before I could say anything, he was very much out of his head and back into his physical self, and after a couple of moments so, blissfully, was I.

  *

  As I practically skipped along Holland Park Avenue to Lidgate’s – and the chemist’s – that afternoon, I felt reborn, as though I had just discovered that the earth was round, water was wet and if you let go of something it generally fell to the floor.

  I was sure I looked different and wondered if I had a giveaway Ready Brek glow. I was sure that anyone looking at me must know immediately I had recently been seriously rogered. Yes! I wanted to shout out to the world. Yes! Yes! Yes! And it was Joseph James Renwick what done it.

  ‘Why did no one tell me?’ I asked him thirty-five minutes later as we sat at Kiki’s garden table eating medium rare fillet steaks, with a nice rocket salad, some sourdough bread and a bottle of very superior Australian shiraz.

  Buying that wine had been another act of pure rebellion but, in the circumstances, it had felt like the only thing to do. I was officially a brazen adulterous hussy, so I might as well drink forbidden New World wine as well.

  The strange thing was that I didn’t feel remotely guilty about either betrayal. Every time a thought along those lines drifted into my head, I just batted it away again. I felt drunk on sex, with the equivalent loss of responsibility.

  ‘Tell you what?’ said Joseph, chewing happily.

  ‘All of it. Cunnilingus, G-spots, vibrators, how great orgasms are…’

  ‘Don’t you read women’s magazines?’ he said.

  ‘Not that kind.’

  ‘Well, aren’t those the kind of things women talk to each other about? I thought vibrators and G-spots were major topics of girl talk.’

  I thought for a while and realized that, until Kiki, I’d just never really had that kind of girlfriend. I’d grown up in such a supremely male household it was as though I hadn’t ever learned how to be properly girlie. My one experience of student flat-sharing had been with an equally swotty and uncool girl and two blokes, and then I’d married Ed, who wasn’t exactly in touch with his feminine side – or mine, I increasingly understood.

  I did have my female friends, from school mostly, but we had never had that kind of intimate conversation. Even with Louise, I’d never talked about things like that. She was a bit of an old-fashioned goody-goody, like me, really. Or maybe they were all like that with other people, it occurred to me, but something inherently prudish about me made them hold back in my company. Probably the same vibe that had made Oliver call me frigid.

  I hadn’t known how to do any of that stuff until Kiki had given me a crash course in frou-frou. She was, I suddenly realized, my first proper girlfriend – which explained something else too. I had always wondered, when Ed’s increasing dislike of Kiki first began to make itself apparent, why I liked her so much and he was so anti, because normally we agreed about people. Now I understood: a close girlfriend of strong character could be a married man’s biggest rival, more dangerous almost than another man. He had felt threatened by her – and he’d been right, really.

  I looked across at Joseph, leaning back in his chair, steak consumed, holding his glass of wine, a smile of complete satisfaction on his handsome face. Even with two days of beard growth, he was a fine-looking specimen. Not as exquisitely boned as Ed, whose profile always made me think of First World War poets, but with the even features and square jaw that have universal appeal to women.

  Sighing deeply, I pushed Ed firmly out of my mind again. He had no place in the erotic never-never land Joseph and I were inhabiting. Real life of any kind could not be allowed to intrude or I might finally start thinking of me and Joseph as the shameless fornicators we were.

  I was still married to Ed, after all – and, as far as I knew, Joseph was still married to his wife – whoever she was. But enclosed in our sexual cocoon, we had pointedly shut all that out. We hadn’t talked about anything at all to do with his former life in Washington, or mine with Ed. And it was incredibly easy for us to do that, because we already had such a well-established shared history. We didn’t need to get to know each other with tentative little questions and discoveries the way new lovers normally do.

  I already knew that Joseph had been born in London and moved to Kent with his parents and his two older sisters when he was four. I knew he was an Aries; liked his steaks medium rare; thought The Young Ones was the funniest show that had ever been on television; weirdly, didn’t like ice cream; and could put a dangerous spin on a cricket ball. And I strongly suspected that he still had a penchant for the music of U2 and the books of Ernest Hemingway.

  So, somehow, it didn’t matter that I didn’t even know his wife’s name, let alone why they had split up, or what he had meant by that strange answer he had given me months before at Kiki’s drinks party, when I’d asked him if he had children. What was it he’d said? ‘ Two, or three. Maybe…’

  It had been most odd, but at that moment I didn’t want to know what he’d meant by it. All I wanted to know on a sunny Thursday afternoon in Kiki’s garden was how soon I could get back into bed with him again. Which turned out not to be very long at all.

  The next morning we both knew our stolen idyll had to end; we couldn’t postpone real life any longer, but still it was hard to let go. We stood by the front door for ages with our arms locked around each other, trying to say goodbye. At one point the hug turned into a kiss and it seemed dangerously like we might end up back in bed, until I broke away and took some deep breaths to recover myself.

  He put his finger under my chin and lifted it up, so I had to look at him.

  ‘That was close,’ he said, smiling broadly. ‘I really don’t want to leave you, Amelia, but this is not the last time we’ll be together like this. I’ve waited twenty years to kiss you again and I’m not going to let you get away so easily this time.’

  I gazed back at him. What he’d just said seemed significant in so many ways, I couldn’t quite process it. I had been so determinedly living in the present in our sex bubble, it had neve
r occurred to me to wonder how it might relate to the past or have an impact on the future.

  His remark vaulted me so suddenly into a different mindset, I nearly invited him down to Winchelsea for the weekend, but immediately thought better of it.

  Kiki’s flat was neutral territory, but the cottage was somewhere I had once shared with Ed; indeed, he still owned it. Way too real. For the time being I absolutely needed to keep things suspended in this bubble of unreality, or it would all get impossibly confusing.

  ‘When can I see you again?’ he asked me.

  ‘Next week?’ I said vaguely, not ready to commit to anything beyond the next breath.

  Joseph’s eyes crinkled behind his glasses, and he started chuckling. ‘Well, you better give me your phone number then…’ he said.

  I started laughing too. It seemed so mad. I was so at ease with this man who I’d known since I was eleven years old and had just spent the best part of two days in bed with, but we didn’t even have each other’s phone numbers.

  Kiki called me when I was on the train down to the cottage that afternoon.

  ‘Mmmmm,’ she said. ‘A whole box of matches, was it?’

  I giggled down the phone at her.

  ‘So you had a good time with Mr Trouser Snake, then?’ she continued.

  ‘Yes, thanks,’ I sighed. Just thinking about him made my newly discovered G-spot quiver. ‘Quite marvellous, actually. And with Mr Love Bunny – thank you so much for him. But why did you call Joseph… what you just said?’ I didn’t want everyone on the train to hear me say ‘ Trouser Snake’.

  ‘Well, Joseph’s obviously a serious pants man,’ said Kiki blithely. ‘You just have to look at him to know that. Any man that confident has got to have it seriously going on down there. Am I not wrong?’

  ‘You are most definitely not wrong.’

  ‘Well, there you are then…’

  And then she continued to tell me the explicit details of her own latest romantic adventure, a subject into which I felt I now had a much deeper insight.

  Hermione was pleased to see me, as always, when I got to the cottage, and we spent a very pleasant time walking around our gardens, her arm companionably linked through mine, admiring developments. A great bush of honeysuckle I didn’t even know I had was in full bloom over my back wall, and it smelled heavenly.