How to Break Your Own Heart

by Maggie Alderson

‘Well, now Pandora’s box is finally open,’ said Joseph. ‘I suppose I have to ask you – what is the situation between you two? I have been wondering…’

  ‘Until Friday night it was a stand-off. Full radio silence. I left him nearly three months ago, telling myself it was just a break, because there were a lot of issues in our relationship that he wouldn’t even acknowledge, let alone address, and I wanted to shock him into facing up to them. But he has a major problem with Kiki, for some reason, so when I moved in with her, he refused to speak to me at all.’

  ‘That’s weird,’ said Joseph, frowning. ‘How could anyone have a problem with Kiki? She’s a one-woman task force for world happiness. What’s not to like?’

  ‘I really don’t know. I think perhaps he’s jealous and sees her as a threat.’

  ‘Bizarre, but tell me, why did he suddenly show up on Friday?’

  ‘He’d just come home from one of his work trips to

  France and arriving back at the empty flat had made him realize how much he missed me. He came down to the cottage on the spur of the moment to try and thrash it out.’

  Joseph looked very serious. I could imagine this was the expression his students saw if they handed in a shoddy piece of work. It was a very grown-up face, and I wanted naughty teenage Joseph back.

  I kicked off my shoe and ran my foot along his thigh, nestling it firmly between his legs and wiggling my toes. The corners of his mouth lifted, but his eyes were still grave.

  ‘So how did his effort at a rapprochement go?’ he said, reaching down and taking hold of my foot gently with his hand so I couldn’t do any more wiggling. Now I knew he really was serious.

  ‘It was a disaster,’ I said, slumping in my seat. ‘I was so tired from being with you – not to mention somewhat woozey – and it was such terrible timing, because he figured out from the state of me that I’d been seeing someone else and he left in a fury. It felt very final.’

  Now I couldn’t read Joseph’s expression at all. I hoped mine wasn’t giving me away.

  ‘How did he figure out you’d been seeing someone else?’

  My blush answered for me. Joseph laughed.

  ‘Oh, the blush,’ he said. ‘I love that blush of yours. I used to do everything I could to make you do it when we were young.’

  ‘Yes, I do remember,’ I said, managing to get a last little poke in with my toe before taking my foot away. ‘Well, that’s what gave me away to Ed too.’

  That was enough of an explanation. It wasn’t a lie. It wasn’t the whole truth, but it was a big part of it.

  Joseph leaned across the table towards me. ‘Do you know that when you are in bed with me that blush covers a large part of your upper body?’

  I felt it spreading down my chest as he spoke and believed him.

  ‘But tell me,’ he said, looking serious again, ‘how do you feel about things being “very final”, as you put it, with Ed – with your husband?’

  I put my face in my hands. ‘ That’s what I am finding it really hard to work out,’ I said. ‘I honestly don’t know how I feel about it.’

  Joseph nodded. ‘I can understand that,’ he said.

  I saw my opening. ‘Can you?’ I said. ‘So tell me more. What is your situation?’

  He flopped back in the banquette and grabbed his head with his hands, as if shielding himself from blows.

  ‘Hideous,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to go into all the gory details, because I just can’t bear it. Suffice to say there are two little children back in Washington, who are very dear to me, but who I am unlikely ever to see again.’

  ‘But don’t you have legal rights to see your own children?’ I asked, mystified.

  ‘That’s the problem,’ said Joseph. ‘They’re not my children. Not my biological children, anyway. My wife already had them when I met her. They were two and four then, and now they are nine and eleven, so they feel like my children, but they aren’t. And because the famous bloody law academic never actually got round to legally adopting them, I have no rights to see them ever again.’

  He looked so sad, I felt tears fill my eyes. Once again I remembered that strange thing he’d said about his children that night at Kiki’s party. Finally it made sense, but hadn’t he said ‘ Two, maybe three…’ when I’d asked him how many children he had? What did that mean in this context?

  I desperately wanted to ask him, but something about the way he was looking, all crumpled and defeated, stopped me. It wasn’t the moment to push him on that subject.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Joseph,’ I said. ‘I had no idea.’

  ‘Why would you?’ he said, shrugging. ‘I don’t talk about it. She even took out an injunction that I wasn’t allowed to go near the house, or the kids’ schools – she claimed I had threatened to kidnap them. It was all absolute nonsense, of course, but for someone who teaches law for a living, that kind of thing is not a good look. I had to get away from there before my professional reputation was ruined as well as my personal life. That’s why I came home.’

  He laughed bitterly. ‘I still pay their school fees though. She doesn’t have a problem with that kind of contact…’

  ‘But why did you split up in the first place?’ I asked.

  This time Joseph’s expression completely closed up. ‘Now that, I really don’t want to talk about,’ he said. He signalled at the waiter to bring our bill, and I knew the discussion was closed.

  We were both unusually quiet as we walked back towards Kiki’s flat. Joseph had his arm around my shoulders, and I was leaning into him, my arm around his waist under his jacket, finding comfort in his manly bulk, but the sweet dizziness had completely gone out of the evening.

  When we got to Kiki’s gate, Joseph took my hands and pulled me to his chest. I felt like the wagons were safely enclosed around me and when he kissed me, long and deep, reality disappeared again in a most delightful way.

  Eventually, we broke apart and I looked up at him. It was after ten, but there was still a bit of light left. I could see his eyes behind his glasses, dark blue and sexy as ever, but sadness was there now too.

  ‘Goodnight, my lovely Meals,’ he said. ‘I hope you don’t mind but I’m not going to come in tonight. Talking about that stuff really pulls me down, and I wouldn’t be good company. I need to go off to my bear cave and listen to boy music and find the place in my head where I file all that away so it can’t hurt me again. Do you understand? It’s not because I don’t want to be with you, I just don’t want to expose you to this side of me. It might put you off, and I really don’t want that.’

  I nodded. I understood, but I was still disappointed. Part of me felt the same – but a larger part wanted to jump on his bones. That kiss had got me going.

  ‘Lucky I’ve got Mr Rabbit to keep me company,’ I said, trying to lighten things up.

  ‘Hmmm,’ said Joseph. ‘Competition from a rubber rodent – not sure I’m happy about that, but I think it’s best this way. Can I see you again soon?’

  I nodded and kissed him one more time before running inside.

  Kiki was out when I got into the flat, so I made myself a cup of camomile tea and went to bed to read. My attention was wandering from my book to thoughts of Joseph – and his shoulders in particular – and I was just considering whether to get Mr Bunny out of his box when my mobile rang.

  It was him.

  ‘Meals?’ he said. ‘I’m halfway home in a cab and I’ve been thinking – I’m not sure rabbits are rodents, you know. But I’m not certain, so I think I’d better come over to your place after all and check. Is that OK?’

  26

  Over the next couple of weeks Joseph and I saw each other practically every night. I still went down to the cottage on my own for the weekends – I wasn’t ready to take him back there yet – but most other nights we had dinner, went to the movies, or just stayed in and went to bed early, if not to sleep. All the things loved-up people do.

  Whatever we did together, it was blissfully easy and normal-fe
eling. I felt completely relaxed with him and was really able to enjoy getting to know the adult man as well as I had known the teenager. And I liked him even more, I discovered. Over the years in Washington – and several in New York before that – he had acquired a level of sophistication that I felt matched my own – unlike my dear brother, who was still an unreconstructed rugger-bugger, pub-drinking, politically incorrect, minor-public-school throwback, as I was reminded the evening we had drinks with him. That was a big moment for me. It made my relationship – or whatever it was – with Joseph seem scarily official.

  At Dick’s request, we met at the Lamb, a lovely old pub in Bloomsbury. He was keen to check out a ‘boozer’, as he called them, outside his normal patch.

  ‘So you two have finally got it together, have you?’ he said, coming back out to where we were standing on Lambs Conduit Street, with all three drinks in his mighty hands. ‘And about bloody time too. It’s only taken you twenty years.’

  He downed most of his pint in one go and smiled at us.

  ‘Of course, I do feel a bit sorry for old Ed,’ he continued. ‘He is a good Magdalene man after all, and I will miss having a brother-in-law who’s a wine merchant, I don’t mind telling you, but you two always belonged together. I never understood what you were playing at, marrying out like that.’

  ‘Well, how about you, Sherbet?’ said Joseph, putting his arm comfortably around my waist and squeezing me, as though agreeing with what Dick had just said. ‘When are you going to introduce us to a nice girl of your own?’

  Dick’s face clouded. His single state was one of the many things that wasn’t discussed in our family. He was forty and he had never even lived with anyone. He’d had a few girlfriends, but nothing you could really call serious.

  ‘Ah, well, that’s the problem, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘ There don’t seem to be any nice girls left in London. They’re all hard-nosed career women or lezzers.’

  I looked around the pavement where we were standing outside the pub. There were girls everywhere. Lovely fresh-faced, bright-looking young women, many of them in groups with no men attached. They didn’t look particularly hard-nosed, or gay, to me. In fact, I had noticed one or two of them checking Joseph out. It didn’t make any sense.

  And Kiki seemed to have thousands of single girlfriends, all desperate to meet a straight, solvent, reasonably civilized bloke like Dick. Then there was Kiki herself, also inexplicably unattached, something I found increasingly odd, considering how attractive, social, eligible and sexually rampant she was.

  I was about to point all this out to Dick – and not for the first time – but Joseph got in first.

  ‘Are you sure you’re not just gay, Sherbet?’ he said. It was an ongoing joke between them.

  ‘Not last time I looked at a copy of Penthouse,’ said Dick, finishing his pint.

  ‘And when was that?’ said Joseph.

  Dick chuckled, his deep laugh resonating from his chest.

  ‘Lunchtime.’

  Kiki seemed delighted that Joseph and I were ‘getting all boring’, as she called it; her general term for happy couples.

  ‘I mean, it’s good boring,’ she said one Friday morning, when we had found each other at home by chance and she was painting my toenails scarlet while I lay on the chaise in Planet Kiki. ‘But you are getting boring with Joseph incredibly fast,’ she continued, sitting cross-legged in her lime-green bra and knickers, black-rimmed glasses balanced on the end of her nose – it turned out she actually did need them. ‘You’re as bad as Ollie and Sonny these days. So tell me, are you madly in love with him?’

  ‘Gosh,’ I said, blowing my breath out between my lips. ‘I don’t think of it like that. I certainly love being with him, it feels so easy – I have known him most of my life, after all – and I do think he is utterly gorgeous.’ I felt a familiar flutter as an image of Joseph naked in the shower that morning flashed across my mind. ‘So yes,’ I continued. ‘I am pretty keen on him, but I just try and take each moment as it comes, because I am still married to someone else, remember, Kiki. I still haven’t really officially split up from Ed.’

  ‘Surely that draggy old saga is over?’ she said, incredulously. ‘You’ve been here for four months. I thought you would have started divorce proceedings by now. I’m already planning to wear my vintage Azzaro dress to your next wedding.’

  I threw a small evening bag at her.

  ‘Stop it, Kiki! I am not getting married to Joseph. We are both separated from our spouses, but neither of us is divorced and we are just enjoying each other’s company right now. We certainly aren’t making any plans for the future.’

  ‘Well, maybe you should be,’ said Kiki. ‘Remember that graph I showed you? You don’t want to find yourself on the black ski run and still married to Christopher Robin.’

  That was her latest name for Ed. And as so often with Kiki’s apparently light-hearted teasing, she had a serious point. He might have been Mr Suave Mayfair, with his custom-made shirts and Savile Row suits, but right down to the attachment to a cuddly toy, Ed was still a child in many ways. Rather a spoilt one.

  ‘What about your love life?’ I asked her, to take the focus off me.

  ‘Well,’ she said, instantly perking up. ‘Do you remember that gorgeous Imran Khan-look-a-like poshistani bloke I met at the Ivy Club? Well, I saw him again last night at Tim Jeffries’ gallery, and it looks like being a happening thing. I’m seeing him on Monday – at his place. Do you reckon he will be skilled in the eastern love arts? Mmmm, chicken tikka cunnilingus…’

  ‘But what about something beyond sex, Kiki?’ I said.

  ‘Like what?’ she said, shrugging.

  ‘A relationship? Motherhood?’

  Kiki scowled. ‘I’ve told you,’ she said. ‘Not interested.’

  ‘Not in either of them? I thought you were a bit interested in the husband part. That was one of the reasons you wanted to sort this flat out, you told me.’

  Kiki’s mouth hardened. ‘Nope,’ she said, standing up. ‘I can’t be arsed.’

  She sighed and looked up at me, pushing the glasses up her nose. The momentary hardness had gone, and her eyes were sad.

  ‘Look, Amelia,’ she said. ‘When everyone knows you’ve got money, it’s hard to trust anyone romantically. He might seem like he’s mad keen on you, then it turns out he’s more interested in how much is sitting in your Coutts account. That’s what happened with that last bloke – the one who took me off to Babington while you were shagging Joseph, remember? Well, at the end of our lovely stay he stood by the reception desk staring into space waiting for me to pay the bill – after he’d ordered vintage champagne on room service every night. I wouldn’t have minded splitting it, but the whole trip was his idea, and then he just assumed I’d pay. I’m sick of trying to filter out the bullion bandits so, here on Planet Kiki, girls just wanna have fun, OK?’

  ‘That’s terrible,’ I said. ‘I had no idea.’

  She shrugged and her eyes toughened up again. ‘And he was not by any means the first. So I’m just sticking to good times.’

  ‘But aren’t you a tiny bit interested in having kids, Kiki? You’d be such a wonderful mother…’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘Spare me!’ she said. ‘How many times have I heard that? Based on what? My immaturity? This is where I live – glamour central, Planet Kiki – and I’m not interested in introducing shitty nappies and snotty noses into it.’

  ‘But there’s more to having children than that,’ I said. ‘You sound like Ed…’

  ‘Not interested, OK?’ she snapped and flounced out of the room.

  I’d clearly hit a sore spot. Oops. I’d had no idea.

  The reason Kiki had been painting my toenails was to get me what she called ‘red-carpet ready’ for Janelle’s charity auction, which was in a few days’ time. I was really excited about it – and not a little nervous. The event had turned into something of a media feeding frenzy, especially now that the Honeypots reunion tour was off
icial.

  Newspapers, magazines and TV shows were calling me so often it had become a serious distraction from work, until one day – after watching me get all hopeless and flustered in the kitchen when I had You magazine on one line and a researcher from Richard and Judy on the other – Kiki had volunteered to be my official PR agent.

  Since then, all media requests had gone through her, and she was brilliant at dealing with them, setting one magazine against another to get me and my business the best possible coverage. She also had a very clear view of where I needed to be ‘placed in the market’, as she put it.

  ‘You’ve got to strike the perfect balance between snob and celeb,’ she’d explained to me one day after turning down a rather generously paid interview request from a trashy weekly and agreeing to one with no payment which would take a lot of my time for the Telegraph magazine.

  ‘Perfect spot for you,’ she’d said, going on to remind me I had to be equally picky about my clients.

  ‘You can do Janelle,’ she said, ‘because of the charity context, and the media payback is huge – but I wouldn’t let you take a footballer’s wife below Posh. Even Colleen would be pushing it. You’re top end, Amelia, aspirational, like Ed’s business, but more fun.’

  In just a couple of weeks she had made an enormous difference to me, taking over all the adjacent aspects of the business that I found so alien, so I could get on with my strong point – clearing people’s clutter and streamlining their lives for maximum customer satisfaction.

  I could already see we were a great team, but I was embarrassed right from the start about how to handle the money side of things. I’d already had to fight to pay her any rent for my room in her flat, and I knew she hadn’t cashed any of the cheques I had given her towards bills.

  ‘You’ve got to let me pay you for doing this work, Kiki,’ I said to her one day when we were sitting together in the dining room, which we had converted into ABCC’s official HQ. ‘Otherwise I won’t feel able to ask you to do things for me.’

  ‘But I’m just so happy to have a purpose in life beyond dressing up and chasing dopey men,’ she said, speed-reading the Times feature section.