How to Break Your Own Heart

by Maggie Alderson

  What would Ed have done if I had? I wondered, as I ran myself a bath one morning, having woken up yet again with the bright-red reminder in the loo that I still wasn’t a mother.

  Maybe it would have changed his mind, having fatherhood presented to him as an implacable fact – but then, maybe it wouldn’t have. Either way, now I would never know. And to remind myself why I had left him and why our marriage had to end, after I finished my bath, I printed out the last sentence from the cons list and stuck it up on the wall in every room in my flat.

  My plan was that, every time I had a wobble and was tempted to call him, just to get away from the gut-tearing sadness of being on my own after so many years with him – and my brief, ill-fated romance with Joseph – I could make myself read it. I had to remind myself that I was better off alone than with the wrong man. I wasn’t going to go back to Ed on his brutal terms.

  I still hadn’t finally told him that though. I just couldn’t. He had been ringing me every few days – ostensibly to see how I was, but clearly really to see if I was ready to go back yet – until in the end I’d had to ask him, nicely, to leave me be until I contacted him. He took it pretty well, considering.

  ‘Barkis is still willin’,’ he’d said. ‘Maybe not for ever, but he’s still willing at the moment.’

  I felt a bit guilty stringing him along like that, but although my mind was now made up, I just wasn’t quite ready to make it official by telling him that. I couldn’t quite understand what was making me hold back until a visit to a new client spelled it out for me.

  Celia lived in a tiny Kensington flat and, as with so many of my first visits, there was a problem even opening the front door. In her case it was because the place was stacked up with furniture piled to the ceiling like some kind of storage depot.

  I didn’t say anything as we picked our way via a circuitous – and probably quite dangerous – route through bookcases piled on top of sideboards, to a corner of the sitting room where there was a small table and two accessible chairs. Then I accepted her offer of a cup of tea, so I could have a think and suss it out.

  She seemed to be taking an awfully long time making it, so I peeped through the serving hatch into the kitchen to check she was all right, and saw what appeared to be several sets of china piled up around her on every work surface. One of them had a special Christmas pattern, I noticed. There was also an inordinate amount of general kitchen equipment in there, including a whole set of copper pans, and a fish kettle big enough for a whole salmon.

  Then, on my way back to my seat, I spotted a photograph in a large silver frame, which gave me the clue I needed. It was a family group, with a younger version of Celia – she was now in her early sixties – and three young children. There was a man in the centre of the photograph next to her, but his face had been carefully cut out. Other frames contained pictures of the same people in different parts of what looked like a lovely house and garden. The man’s head was missing in all of them.

  She eventually appeared, carrying an enormous tray laden with a silver teapot, matching milk jug and sugar bowl, tongs, strainer, two beautiful teacups and saucers and a plate of biscuits. The tray was actually bigger than the table and we had to be careful not to tip it over. What an impossible way for anyone to live, I thought.

  Having checked my tissue situation – I had plenty – I decided to use my shock-tactics method. If I played the middle-class English game of pretending everything was lovely with this lady, I would get nowhere. I knew that because she reminded me keenly of my own mother.

  I took a sip of tea and launched in. ‘So who did your husband leave you for?’ I asked her. Bingo! Her teacup clattered back on to the saucer and she looked at me, horrified, her mouth hanging open. ‘It will be better if you tell me the whole story,’ I said, words I was rather regretting an hour later, when she was still – between sobs, sniffs and nose blows – relating the entire sorry scenario of her divorce.

  Her husband, an accountant by profession, had left her for his secretary, who was some thirty-five years younger, and they were now living together in Australia, with a new baby. Having set things up carefully in advance, with most of his money hidden offshore, he had managed to settle Celia with the bare minimum.

  All she’d really come away from forty years of marriage with were the contents of the family house. She only had the flat because she had recently inherited it from an aunt.

  ‘The children want me to sell it all,’ she said, dabbing her eyes. ‘But I just can’t. It’s all I have of my life since I was twenty-one. All I ever did was devote myself to my house and my family.’

  I noted that she had put the house first, which told me a lot about her priorities. It wasn’t going to be easy to persuade her, but it was obvious her children were right. It was either sell most of it or move to a larger place in a much less prestigious part of London. There were no other solutions.

  From what she’d told me about her financial situation, she’d have to sell something even to pay me, which made me feel very uncomfortable, but I really believed letting some of it go and staying in the nice area was the healthier option for Celia. Being surrounded by reminders of her former gracious home was actually the last thing she needed.

  Relating the details of the court case – which sounded gruesome – had left her very shaky, and I didn’t want to put her through too much on the first visit, so I decided to concentrate on the kitchen. By the end of the afternoon, I had persuaded her to reduce it to just two out of the five sets of china and had also convinced her that, with the splendid Marks & Spencer food department on Kensington High Street, she really didn’t need the fish kettle. It was a start.

  When I left, feeling desperately sorry for Celia, so cruelly abandoned, battered and bewildered, I decided to walk home through Hyde Park in the afternoon sun to clear my head. She was clearly so traumatized by the experience of her divorce it made me think properly for the first time about what might be in store for me once I told Ed my decision.

  I certainly wasn’t interested in forcing some kind of huge revenge settlement from him – really I just wanted the cottage. I just hoped that hurt and bitterness didn’t make him turn on me and try and block me having it out of spite. He could bring up the affair with Joseph, I realized, and paint me as a shocking slut, if he really wanted to be nasty.

  Of course, now he was going to be so wealthy, I could hold out for half of it, like so many of the dumped first wives of his clients seemed to do – the men were always moaning on about it, as though they were the wronged parties – and I’d be a very rich woman. And I could certainly claim in all honesty that I’d helped him build up the business over the years we had been together. I had all the evidence of Heady Bouquet in the journals to prove that – but going all out for what I could get was not my style.

  It would have been different if I’d still been working at Mecklin’s, I thought, breathing deeply as I walked along the tree-lined path near the Serpentine Gallery. I would have needed a decent payout just to continue living in London at all, let alone in the style I was used to, but now I was earning very good money of my own and it felt great. I didn’t need Ed’s cash as well.

  With that in mind, when I got home, I went straight into the kitchen, took out my wallet and cut up all Ed’s credit cards. I hesitated for a moment over the black Amex – I had so enjoyed plonking that down in front of snotty waiters and shop assistants – but then, snip, it was done.

  In that instant I became a financially independent woman – and my split from Ed finally felt official. I just had to tell him.

  In the meantime, without him, or Kiki, to turn to, and Hermione available only on the phone for the time being, the person I came to rely on in those first dismal weeks as a single woman in her late mid-thirties was my brother.

  ‘How do you not get desperately lonely, Dick?’ I asked him one Wednesday night when we were having a curry in Charlotte Street, his choice of restaurant.

  ‘Oh, that’s eas
y, sis,’ said Dick, raising his bottle of Kingfisher beer to me, ‘I drink.’

  ‘Are you serious?’ I said. ‘I know you have always been fond of a pint, as you put it, but do you really consciously drink to block out your feelings?’

  ‘What other reason is there?’ said Dick, looking deadly serious. As if to prove his point, he drained his bottle and signalled to the waiter for another.

  ‘To have fun?’ I said, thinking of all the hilarious nights I’d had with Kiki after drinking way too much champagne. We’d laughed and laughed, which had felt great at the time, but perhaps there was something slightly desperate about the way Kiki determinedly had an alcohol-fuelled good time. I wasn’t sure whether she could really have one without the bubbles to get it going.

  ‘Or,’ I said, still pondering, ‘how about for the experience of the drink itself. Like Ed with his wine.’

  Dick laughed very loudly. Not a pretty sight with a mouth full of lamb vindaloo.

  ‘You are joking, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘Do you really think Ed drinks for the taste of his precious wine?’

  I nodded. ‘Of course. He’s widely considered to have one of the finest palates in the world…’

  ‘He’s also one of the finest pissheads in the world,’ said Dick. ‘I like your ex-husband, or whatever he is these days, but he is a bit of a wino, Amelia, you must admit that. I’ve known him since we started college together, remember, and he was bad enough back then. Whenever I got up myself about being a rugby Blue, he always used to joke he was a drinking Blue.’

  I thought about it. Ed did drink too much, but it was such a part of our life together I had just accepted it as normal. Ed drinking every day – or ‘tasting’, as he called it – had seemed part of his job, the same way other women’s husbands worked long hours in the City or travelled all the time. I didn’t think he was a full-blown alcoholic, but he definitely drank over the healthy limit.

  I had another point for my cons list, I realized. And it tipped the balance, so there were now officially more cons than pros. I tried to tell myself that was a good thing.

  ‘Anyway,’ Dick was saying. ‘ Tell me what’s going on with all that. Are you actually getting a divorce? Are you really single, like me, or just playing at it? Because if you have got the chance to go back to Ed, I would, if I were you. It’s pretty bleak here in outer space where I live.’

  ‘I’m supposed to be having this time away from him to make my mind up,’ I said, ‘but really, I have decided. I’m not quite ready to raise the “D” word with Ed yet, but it is over. Definitely. I’m not going back to him.’

  It made my stomach churn to say it out loud like that, but at the same time, I knew I had to start thinking in those terms.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ said Dick.

  ‘He doesn’t want to have children,’ I said.

  Dick laughed wryly. ‘I think Dad could have told you that,’ he said. ‘Have you only just found out after fifteen years? Well, I agree that is a valid reason to leave him, but have you got someone else lined up to have them with?’

  I smiled at him sarcastically. ‘Oh yeah,’ I said. ‘I had a T-shirt printed saying: “Desperate woman, nearly 37, seeks perfect man to have child with immediately.” I had to fight them off. Of course I haven’t got anyone. That’s the problem. I could be leaving Ed because he won’t have kids and then not find anyone else to have them with and die alone, eating cat food in a basement bedsit…’

  Those were the images that haunted me in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep.

  Dick was shaking his head and sighing. ‘We really have fucked it up, the lot of us, haven’t we?’ he said. ‘We are like a whole generation of retards when it comes to having a normal family life. Here’s me, nearly forty, nearly fat and no hope of finding a decent woman, because I just don’t know how to do it. I seem to have a bit missing where all that’s concerned. Then there’s you, married to a charming but selfish rich git who won’t have children. Then there’s poor old JR, who thought he had a family and then found out the hard way that he actually didn’t.’

  ‘Joseph?’ I said, my stomach churning all over again.

  ‘Yes,’ said Dick. ‘It would have saved a lot of heartache for all of us if you two had just got together back in the day and got on with the breeding thing.’

  ‘But what did you mean about Joseph finding out the hard way?’

  ‘Didn’t he tell you why he left his wife?’

  ‘He told me about not being allowed to see his stepchildren…’

  Dick looked really surprised. ‘He didn’t tell you about the other child?’

  I shook my head and dropped the piece of naan bread I had been eating. Suddenly I had no appetite whatsoever. Finally, the mysterious third child.

  ‘Oh, well, I’d better tell you then,’ continued Dick. ‘As you know, JR’s wife had two small kids when they met.

  He took them on, and he loves them like his own, but he really wanted one or two that were his own as well, to complete their family. Pretty normal. So the year before last, she got pregnant, and he was ecstatic – but when she was seven months gone and they’d been for all the scans and all that, she told him it wasn’t his baby. She’d been having an affair for nearly two years, and she was leaving him for the other guy and taking all three kids with her. Nice, huh?’

  I was appalled. ‘Oh, poor Joseph,’ I said. ‘No wonder he didn’t want to talk about it. That’s horrendous.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dick, draining his beer and raising his hand to the waiter for another. ‘Pretty humiliating for a macho man, eh?’ He paused for a moment and looked at me with narrowed eyes, then he stuffed in a large piece of chapatti and crunched it loudly while still talking. ‘It’s amazing, really, when you think about it,’ he said, between crunches. ‘ There’s the two of you idiots, my sister and my best mate, both single for the want of a baby. How bloody ironic is that? So tell me again – why did you and JR split up? You never told me why, and you looked so happy together I was quite nauseated.’

  ‘He was shagging Kiki as well as me,’ I said. There was no nice way to put it.

  Dick was nodding slowly. ‘So that was what he was going on about then,’ he said. ‘ The last time I saw him he kept droning on about how you’d got it all wrong about him and Kiki. I wasn’t really listening actually. It was late and we were watching the cricket live from the West Indies. I had to tell him to shut up and watch the bloody game in the end.’

  He chuckled to himself. I felt a bit sick. His casual chat was making me picture Joseph all too clearly, an image I had spent the past few weeks doggedly putting out of my mind.

  ‘Oh, well,’ said Dick, picking some bits of stray food out of his teeth. ‘JR the cockmeister strikes again – that is disappointing, I must say. Especially with my own sister. I should knock him down really, except he’s fitter than me, so forgive me if I don’t. But I am surprised. I mean, he never could keep it zipped when we were young, but I thought he’d grown out of all that. He told me he’d always been faithful to his wife.’

  I rolled my eyes. Joseph never had been able to do any wrong as far as Dick was concerned.

  ‘And it was Kiki he was shagging you say?’ he said.

  I nodded irritably.

  ‘Well, there’s another sad story for you,’ said Dick. ‘She can’t even have children, can she, poor thing?’

  I stared at him. ‘What do you mean?’ I said.

  ‘Don’t you know that either?’ said Dick, frowning like a confused dog. ‘I thought you were friends with these people. She was born with some kind of abnormality in the woman-y bits and she’s known since she was very young that she can’t have kids. No chance. I assumed you knew.’

  I shook my head in amazement. Poor Kiki.

  ‘Whoever told you that?’ I asked him.

  ‘JR,’ said Dick, shrugging.

  I said nothing. It was almost too much to take in on top of everything else, and I felt rather hurt all over again that s
he hadn’t confided in me about it when we were talking about my baby issues.

  I couldn’t believe she had told Joseph about it and not me – but even as I had that naïve thought, I realized how stupid it was. Of course Kiki would have confided in Joseph about such things. She’d probably told him when they were in bed one Saturday afternoon while I was weeding with Hermione in blissful ignorance.

  I was trying to think of something else to talk about, anything to take my mind off all that, but Dick had other ideas. He took a deep drink from his bottle and nearly choked on it, trying to speak at the same time.

  ‘I’ve just remembered something,’ he said, spluttering, as he pulled his dreadful old attaché case on to his lap and scrabbled through the contents. ‘JR gave me something for you. Now where is it… ah…’

  He pulled a bent and grubby envelope out of the case and handed it to me. ‘Sorry it’s a bit of a mess. I’ve had it a while. I forgot about it. Sorry.’

  I looked down at the writing, which simply said ‘Amelia’ in a very familiar bold script. My stomach did a triple somersault with pike, but my hands were already tearing the letter up.

  ‘Bloody hell, sis,’ said Dick, looking quite shocked. ‘ That’s a bit harsh, isn’t it? Aren’t you going to see what the poor heartbroken bugger wants to say to you?’

  ‘Nope,’ I said, shredding the last pieces and dumping it on top of the remains of the chicken tikka masala on my plate. I glanced down and saw what looked like a corner of the word ‘loved’ on one of the scraps. I put some rice over it quickly. ‘Not interested.’

  ‘God, you’re stubborn,’ said Dick, appalled. He leaned across the table towards me. ‘Don’t go getting all twisted and bitter on us, Meals,’ he said, in a quiet voice. ‘Because right now you’ve got an expression on your face that is all too familiar to me.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I said tersely. He was beginning to annoy me.

  ‘You look just like Dad,’ he said.