The Ex-Wife

by Jess Ryder

  ‘Sunday trains are hopeless,’ she pointed out while Nick refilled her glass. ‘There are always engineering works and replacement buses; it’ll take you all day to get there. And the church is in the middle of nowhere, miles from the nearest station.’

  Maybe we won’t go, then, I thought, a wave of relief washing over me. But Jen was a step ahead.

  ‘I could give you a lift,’ she said. ‘I can’t see how else you’re going to get there. What do you say, Nicky?’

  ‘It would be incredibly kind of you, Jen.’ Then he caught the stony look on my face. ‘But I don’t want to tie you down. You might want to stay overnight … catch up with some old friends. We’d be a bother and …’ He faded, lamely.

  ‘Don’t be silly, it’ll be fun to go together,’ Jen said. ‘And you know I hate driving long distances on my own.’

  ‘Well, if you really don’t mind …’

  ‘Look, I’m only too happy to help. That’s sorted then. Cheers!’ She raised her glass in a solitary toast.

  She left not long after that. Nick showed her out and they spent a couple of minutes whispering at the front door. I squirted washing-up liquid into her wine glass and scrubbed at the pink lipstick mark on the rim. I rinsed it clean and dried it until it squeaked, putting it back into the cupboard. If only I could get rid of Jen herself as easily, I thought, instantly reprimanding myself for my mean thoughts.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ Nick said as soon as he came back into the kitchen. ‘We were fixing a time for her to pick us up. I said nine thirty. Is that okay?’

  ‘Yes, fine.’ I went to the fridge and pulled out the pizzas. My fingers fumbled with the packaging and I had to take a knife to the cellophane wrapping.

  Nick poured himself another glass of wine. ‘You don’t sound fine. It took a lot for Jen to make that offer. She asked me if you were upset about the godmother thing. She appreciates that it puts you in a tricky position; she feels bad about that.’

  ‘Yes, I know. Honestly, Nick, it’s okay.’ I opened the oven door and a blast of heat rushed over my face.

  ‘It’s all incredibly painful for her.’ He made a move towards me, glass swinging. ‘Imagine what it’s like to visit her old house and see me here, so happy, with my gorgeous young wife and my beautiful daughter. I’ve got everything I ever wanted, and she’s got nothing. And nobody.’ He kissed me on the mouth, and I tried to fight the tingling feeling his lips always gave me. ‘We have to pity her,’ he said into my hair.

  After our very ordinary dinner, Nick went upstairs to his office for a conference call with Canada and I retreated to the sitting room. Working across different time zones meant he was often at his desk in the evenings. I was used to watching television on my own while he battled with North America, or waking up in an empty bed while he charmed the Far East in his pyjamas. We may have been together for three years, but in some respects, we were still worlds apart.

  Under normal circumstances, we would never have met. No, that’s not true – I suppose I might have been his receptionist, or some backroom admin assistant. We might have brushed shoulders in the corridor or mumbled ‘Merry Christmas’ at the office party. I might have noticed that he was attractive for his age but would have left it at that. According to his parents, Nick wasn’t the unfaithful type, implying that I was the evil seductress who had led an innocent man astray. But it wasn’t like that at all. I absolutely wasn’t the kind of woman that went around breaking up relationships. For a start, he did all the chasing.

  He sent me a text the day after the bike incident, apologising again and checking that I was okay. Two days later, he sent me another text, saying he was feeling awful about the accident and wanted to invite me to dinner – ‘to say sorry’. My first instinct was to refuse, but a part of me was vaguely excited at the thought of meeting him again. I’d been catapulted – almost literally – into this strange new world where houses were worth millions of pounds and businessmen walked around with five hundred quid in their wallet. And yet Nick didn’t seem anything like the stereotype of the evil capitalist I’d been brought up to despise. He’d been so upset when he ran me over, taken me to his home, given me first aid and made me tea. And he’d been incredibly generous when it was obvious my bike was only worth a few bob. Now he wanted to treat me to dinner – what was wrong with that?

  I knew Mum would say he was trying to bribe me so that I didn’t go to the police, but I didn’t see it that way. He seemed like a genuinely good guy. If my attraction to him was sexual, it was hidden deep in my subconscious. I didn’t go out with older men, and I didn’t approve of cheating. Nick’s interest in me felt paternal, if anything.

  So I accepted the invitation, then panicked. We were bound to be eating in a posh restaurant – at least, a lot posher than I was used to. If I turned up wearing clothes from Primark, would they even let me in? The five hundred pounds from Nick had gone straight into the bank to pay off some of my credit card debt, and I couldn’t afford to buy anything new. After spending several hours trying on everything in my wardrobe, I chose a dress I’d worn to my uncle’s funeral and borrowed a pair of silver party shoes from my housemate.

  Over the next few days, my anxieties quickly spread to other areas. I probably wouldn’t recognise half the stuff on the menu, and how would I know which cutlery to use? Then there was the conversation. We had nothing in common, and our politics were certain to be at opposite ends of the spectrum. I hadn’t been to any exotic places, and I didn’t know anyone famous, unless you counted Colin Firth (or someone who looked a lot like him) buying a chai latte from me a few months ago. By the time the evening arrived, I was a heap of stress and nearly bailed out, but my housemates persuaded me to go – for a laugh, if nothing else.

  Nick took me to a small French brasserie in Covent Garden – later it became ‘our restaurant’ and we went there for anniversaries and Valentine’s Day. Maybe it was the two champagne cocktails that put me at ease, or maybe it was just his effortless charm. I don’t remember what we ate that first evening, or whether I enjoyed the food, because all our senses were trained on each other. There were no awkward silences, no embarrassing moments when we both started sentences at the same time. Just a lot of easy chatter and laughter. Oh, and a lot of drinking.

  ‘So, what is it you do?’ I asked over our starter, unable to hold my curiosity in any longer. I was guessing financial services, merchant banking and hedge funds – not that I knew what they were exactly.

  ‘Media distribution,’ he said, adding as he saw my blank expression, ‘Basically I sell TV programmes to international broadcasters. I also set up development deals, broker co-productions, that kind of thing. I consult for some of the big players. The industry’s global, so I travel a lot, although that’s not as glamorous as it sounds. We live in interesting times,’ he said, screwing up his napkin. ‘There are loads of new opportunities out there with emerging platforms, but nobody’s really cracked how to monetise them. Not yet. But they will.’ It all sounded like a foreign language to me, but I nodded and tried to look intelligent.

  As the evening wore on, we found ourselves constantly staring into each other’s eyes, unable to break away. At one point, he accidentally brushed my arm and an electric current ran right through me. I’d never experienced such an instant attraction to another human being and I couldn’t comprehend how this could be happening. But I tried to push my feelings away, blaming them on the alcohol. This wasn’t a date, it was an apology. Nick was almost old enough to be my father, for God’s sake. And married, I reminded myself, his wedding ring glinting in the candlelight as he leaned over to recharge my glass.

  He didn’t hit on me that night; there were no suggestive remarks or questions about whether I had a boyfriend, no wandering hands beneath the table. If he had made a move, I don’t know what I would have done. Accepted, probably, then regretted it. But he behaved like a complete gentleman, ordering a separate taxi for me, even though we were both going in the same direction.

&
nbsp; I sat in the cab as it trailed through the back streets of Soho, heading north, my head reeling with wine and well-being as I went over the evening, recapturing Nick’s fine, sculpted features and the warm sound of his voice. But as we drew up outside my grubby front door, I came thudding back down to earth. This had been an adventure, a one-off. I’d had a fascinating glimpse of another world where all the rich, beautiful people lived, but I would never go there again.

  Once indoors, I kicked my borrowed heels off my aching feet and climbed the creaking stairs, noticing even in my drunken state that the carpet was worn and dirty from thousands of trudging steps. This was where I belonged. In a shared, rented house. Part of the Just About Managing tribe. I’d enjoyed going on Nick’s guilt trip, but I would never hear from him again.

  How wrong I was …

  I was so lost in my memories, I didn’t notice him entering the room. ‘Why are you watching this?’ he asked, staring at shots of soldiers clambering across a desert terrain.

  ‘What? Oh … er, I’m not,’ I replied, shaking myself into the present. He picked up the remote control and switched off the television, then sat down next to me, enveloping me in his arms.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said for the second time that evening. ‘I know this isn’t fair on you – you’re amazing for putting up with it. I wish I could tell Jen not to keep coming round, but I can’t. She’s so unhappy, and I feel responsible.’

  ‘She wants you back, Nick.’ I picked at the edge of my jumper.

  ‘That’s absurd.’

  ‘I mean it. I feel like she’s on a mission to get rid of me.’

  ‘Well, she won’t succeed.’ He hugged me tightly, squeezing the breath out of my lungs. ‘I love you, Natasha, and I won’t let anyone come between us.’

  5

  Then

  Natasha

  * * *

  Jen turned up early on Sunday morning to take us to the christening. Nick sat in the front passenger seat ‘because of my long legs’, leaving me to sit in the back with Emily. It felt like they were the parents and I was the kid. Jen put on a CD of nineties hits – their era – and engaged Nick in conversation at a volume just too low for me to hear properly. I wondered if she was doing it deliberately. Determined not to be put off, I poked my head between their seats for the first half-hour and tried to join in as best I could. Nick kept looking over his shoulder to reply, but then he started to feel carsick and had to look straight ahead. When we hit the motorway, Jen turned the music up and started singing along loudly to the lyrics. She had a surprisingly good voice.

  Defeated, I sat back and stared out of the window. Every so often, she would break off and say, ‘You know what this song makes me think of, Nicky?’ Or, ‘Remember when we …?’ He didn’t encourage her reminiscences, but he didn’t stop her either. I guess there was nothing he could do about it – she was doing us a favour, after all.

  As we progressed down the M4, I resolved to discuss the matter properly with Nick as soon as we got back from the christening. If Jen offered us lifts in future, we’d just have to politely refuse. And I wanted to do something about her random popping round to the house. It couldn’t be doing her any good to keep coming back to her old home, and it made me squirm with guilt.

  Everyone had been surprised when I told them that Nick’s wife had voluntarily moved out. Normally it’s the offending partner that leaves. But Nick loved the house and wanted to stay. We had it completely redecorated and a new kitchen and bathrooms fitted, even though everything was in top condition. It was a terrible extravagance, but Nick said it was important for me to stamp my own taste on the place. I tried hard to make it homely, but I could still detect Jen’s presence, particularly in the bedroom. When I opened the wardrobe doors, heady notes of her perfume wafted out.

  * * *

  The christening was taking place in Nick and Jen’s home village, just outside Bristol. His parents, sister and brother all lived within a few miles of each other, but their closeness wasn’t just geographical. They were in constantly in touch – popping over for coffee, going on shopping expeditions, hosting gatherings, even taking holidays together. Although Nick and Jen had moved to London many years earlier, they’d kept up many of the family rituals. Then I came on the scene and ruined everything.

  ‘You haven’t just destroyed a happy marriage,’ Nick’s sister railed at me. ‘You’ve destroyed an entire family.’

  But it wasn’t all my fault. Really it wasn’t.

  I let the dull motorway landscape wash over me as I revisited the first intoxicating months of our relationship. After the initial dinner, there had been flowers and chocolates, more dinners, lunches (some extravagant and boozy, others no more than a sandwich and coffee), evening cocktails, afternoon tea at Fortnum & Mason, champagne on the London Eye, speedboat trips down the Thames, culminating in a stuttering declaration of love at the top of the Shard. At first I tried to resist him, reminding him that he was married, but he claimed the relationship had been on life support for years.

  ‘We were kids, way too young,’ he said. ‘She was always round our house, seeing my sister; it was like she was already part of the family. She had this huge crush on me. Hayley encouraged it, so did my parents, and I didn’t want to disappoint them. It was just laziness, really. I let her become my girlfriend, and before I knew it we were walking up the aisle.’

  I felt sorry for Nick; it was as if he’d been pushed into an arranged marriage. He’d tried his best to make it work, but there was no spark there. I respected him for staying with Jen for so long, but he had a right to be happy, surely? Of course, I felt sorry for her too, and guilty for taking him away. But there was no denying we’d fallen ‘truly madly deeply’ in love. It felt like the first time for both of us, and we couldn’t stop it, even though we knew it was dangerous and would upset a lot of people. This was our chance to be with the person we really wanted – why should we deny ourselves?

  Nick’s work patterns made getting together very easy. He often went away on business, travelling to other countries and awkward time zones, so Jen was used to him not being around. While she thought he was in the States or China, he was only a few miles away, with me, in a luxury boutique hotel, sometimes in the honeymoon suite. He bought me beautiful new clothes and designer shoes, sent me to top hairdressers and beauty stylists. Every time we met he gave me ‘a little something’: jewellery, perfume or lingerie. Gradually I was transforming, adapting myself chameleon-like to my new surroundings. I still felt awkward dining in Michelin-starred restaurants, but Nick taught me to swallow oysters and to eat my steak almost raw. He told me not to keep thanking waiters and to stop making our bed in the mornings. I was really embarrassed at the thought of hotel staff wondering about our age difference and thinking he was my boss or even my ‘client’, but he couldn’t have cared less. He was worried about Jen finding out, though, but only because he knew it would devastate her.

  ‘I’ll find a way to break it to her, I promise,’ he kept saying. I didn’t give him a hard time over it, even though it wasn’t great knowing that most nights he went home to Jen. I had a major wobble when he took her to Rome for her birthday, but kept it to myself. I never asked if they still had sex, but Nick hinted that they didn’t.

  ‘We’re like brother and sister,’ he said. ‘Or old friends.’ I had no reason not to believe him.

  I was so hopelessly in love, and so convinced of the rightness of it, it didn’t occur to me to keep my news a secret from my friends. Their judgemental attitude shocked me.

  ‘You’re betraying the sisterhood,’ they said.

  ‘He’ll never leave his wife.’

  ‘You’ll get hurt.’

  ‘It’ll end in tears.’

  Nobody listened when I told them they were wrong; that Nick’s situation was different, that he loved me and I loved him, that our relationship was solid and real.

  * * *

  ‘I’ll call Mike tomorrow,’ Jen was saying. ‘With a bit of luck,
this guy can start straight away.’

  I shrugged myself out of the past and leaned forward. ‘What are you talking about?’

  Nick turned his head briefly. ‘An old friend of ours is moving to the States, so he’s letting go of his driver. Jen thinks he might come and work for me instead.’

  I frowned. ‘Why do you need a driver? Can’t you just take cabs?’

  ‘Having a driver would be much more convenient,’ said Nick, ‘and it probably wouldn’t cost that much more.’

  ‘More impressive than turning up to meetings in an Uber,’ Jen added.

  ‘And when I don’t need him, he can take you shopping or pick Emily up from nursery. No more battles on the Tube with the buggy, eh?’

  ‘Well, it’s something to think about, I guess.’ I felt instinctively hostile to the idea.

  ‘Don’t think for too long. If I were you, I’d snap him up as fast as you can,’ said Jen.

  Nick shifted in his seat excitedly. ‘Yes, I think we should just go for it.’

  I didn’t want to argue in front of Jen, so I kept my mouth shut, but inside I was worried. A driver felt like an extravagance too far. I’d only just got used to having a cleaner, although I never mentioned it to Mum because she was a cleaner herself. We already had a part-time gardener and employed specialist companies to clean the windows, sofas and carpets and polish the granite worktops. Nick never picked up a paintbrush or a screwdriver – if anything around the house needed doing, we called someone in. But this would be like having a full-time servant.

  I pictured arriving at Mum’s council house, the disgusted expression on her face as my chauffeur got out to open the rear passenger door. I hoped Nick wouldn’t make him wear a cap. Mum and I had only recently got back on speaking terms, and if she saw me flaunting my wealth, as she called it, we could easily fall out again.