Love Will Tear Us Apart

by Holly Seddon

  For the first time in a long time, I felt motherless. Acutely aware of a black spot, darker than the others on my bare family tree. While Paul had been there almost throughout at the hospital, I found it impossible to talk about it with him. He’d borne witness to it all, but it was locked inside him. I wanted it to stay there. But I needed someone, and there was only one person I could ever have called.

  I realised as the phone started to ring that she was probably at work. The burbling purr of the ring tone was strangely soothing. I could picture the same old phone ringing, the worn number three, ‘Castle Cary 50235’ carefully written in pencil under a protective window. I let it ring and ring – there was no answerphone on the line – picturing myself back on the little sofa under a lap tray with tea and toast.

  ‘Hello?’

  She sounded exhausted.

  ‘Viv?’ I said. ‘I didn’t think you were there.’

  ‘Katie? Are you alright, maid?’

  I managed to say ‘no’. That’s all I said for the next few minutes. Viv, having barely fallen asleep after a night shift at this point, listened to my sobs and soothed me wordlessly. Shushing and murmuring as decades of quiet compassion had taught her to do.

  ‘I lost my baby,’ I said, and gasped to hear that word from my mouth. Not pregnancy, not blockage. My baby. She barely said a word, cried a little with me. She told me she’d lost a baby too, many years ago, when Paul was tiny himself. I’ve carried that in silence ever since, Paul doesn’t know.

  In those moments, finding the words to describe, to fill out the situation, I allowed myself a sliver of time to grieve properly. I cried, mother to mother, to Viv. For just one day at least, I took that name. A secret name, lost again before I ever really held it.

  When I got back into the office a week later, I found out that G&L had been passed to Jenny, a new account manager triumphantly poached from Saatchi. Not only that, my newest booze accounts had been shared between the wider team and there was an email waiting from John asking me to come to see him when I arrived.

  I went to the bathroom first and checked the mirror. My face looked puffy, my eyes wired from a week of over-caffeinating and under-sleeping. I’d had to undo my jeans button to avoid rubbing my still sore skin and my top hung from my bony shoulders. I looked like shit.

  ‘How are you doing?’ John asked, without looking up, as I slid into his office uneasily.

  ‘I’m okay now, thanks,’ I replied, still unsure at that point what John had worked out about my real condition.

  ‘We missed you.’

  I didn’t reply so he carried on. ‘You’ve seen that we’ve shared some of your accounts out and I think it was long overdue. You’ve been juggling too many clients for too long. You need to focus on guiding the team and helping to raise the next generation of little Kates, yeah?’ He looked up for the first time.

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, he matey tone gone. ‘I think it makes sense for you to keep hold of the clients that are ticking over in the background and have the young blood focus on the time-consuming new ones, with you in a more advisory role. What do you think?’

  ‘I think that’s overkill, John. I think everything was fine before I had to go off sick.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry you feel that way but it’s done now.’ He paused. ‘And things weren’t fine.’

  ‘Why ask me what I think then?’ I’d felt my eyes prickle with tears but had held his gaze since he looked up.

  ‘Don’t fucking push me, Kate. I had a lot of respect for you but that only carries you so far.’

  I stormed out because I had nothing else to say and an overwhelming urge to cry. Rather than go back to my office, I went to find Paul. I had no-one else to confide in and needed to offload. When I got to Paul’s bank of desks, he wasn’t there. I asked around and was told he was in a meeting with Jenny. A meeting about G&L. I left a note on his desk. ‘Gone to Pret, come and find me.’ I sat in the Pret a Manger around the corner for over an hour, grinding my teeth and drinking yet more coffee, checking my phone for text messages. In the end, I gave up and went back to the office to find that Paul’s chair was still empty. I swept my unseen note from his desk and shoved it into my pocket. And then I hid behind the glass of my office for the rest of the day.

  10 Morrison House

  St Katharine Docks

  London

  E1W

  20th May, 2002

  Dear Viv,

  Thank you so much again for talking to me on the phone. I’m so sorry for waking you up after a shift, I can’t imagine how tired you were.

  Just chatting helped immensely and I’m so grateful. There’s no-one I can talk to about what happened and I feel quite friendless at the moment. Paul’s brilliant, of course, but that’s different. And I’m certainly out on a limb at work.

  I think this is the first time in years that I’ve felt vulnerable, to be honest. I really thought I’d made a go of things, y’know? I loved my job and my little flat. I thought that was enough but I’m starting to think that was short sighted. I don’t feel like I have anything outside of my job and now, maybe, I never will. I know what you said about conceiving after losing a tube but I don’t even have a boyfriend let alone someone to plan a family with! Maybe I lost my chance before I even knew I wanted to take it.

  I know I’m on a big mope here, but I guess now that work feels wobbly, it shows me how alone I really am. My parents are dead, I have no female friends and my work colleagues don’t even respect me any more. It feels like everyone’s just waiting for me to make a mistake. I really don’t know what to do. The only good thing in my life is my friendship with Paul. He’s been amazing, he really takes after you.

  I want to escape but there aren’t any account director jobs around at the moment (believe me, I’ve looked on Monster daily). So, I’m stuck here. I’m trying to prove my worth and regain some composure but it’s probably pointless. I think my card is marked. My boss keeps cancelling one-to-one meetings with me and doesn’t want me involved in anything. I’m just so fed up.

  I’d love to come down to see you soon. Maybe Paul and I could hire a car and drive down one weekend? I’d really like that.

  All my love,

  Katie xxx

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  November 2012 – Saturday afternoon

  Paul is driving back from the Eden Project to Mousehole in silence. He seemed agitated in the biomes but now he looks calm, despite the gloomy weather. He even takes a hand off the wheel to pat me on the knee in a rallying, matey way and flashes me an unreadable smile. It takes me by surprise but I smile back. The children are noisy in the back, the heat of the car’s radiator steaming up the windscreen and sweating them into a frenzy. They’re not being naughty, they’re just very ‘present’.

  Outside, the sky is rolling with blue and black shapes. There’s a distant grumble that could be the beginning of thunder. Every few minutes, the clouds split and short bursts of rain send the car’s windscreen wipers into a panic.

  This time ten years ago, everything was quiet. The sky was clear, just a sheet of white-blue hanging there, passive. It was very cold though, a freezing blanket of air wrapping itself around my shoulders and face as soon as I opened the door. It was a beautiful, crisp day for a wedding.

  We almost went abroad, but I like the snap of the cold and the glassiness of autumn. And I didn’t want to wear a bikini, not then. It would have hung from me as if I was some kind of ghoul.

  Izzy sometimes asks about our wedding day. She’s that kind of child, all fairy tales and princess dresses. She likes to imagine herself there on the ‘big day’, playing a part. Flowergirl or bridesmaid. Harry doesn’t care about the wedding, but he sometimes likes to hear about what we got up to when we were his age.

  The life that your parents lived before your birth is a foreign land. Like most kids, our two are keen to explore it. They ask questions about ‘before’ so freely, as if the memories are easy. But their quest
ions sound so strange to us. Paul always gets a little defensive, like they’re trying to catch him out. I get watery-eyed, and spluttery, because what should flow comfortably gets censored and reconstructed, pixel by pixel. While Paul will tell the story of our vow to a rapt dinner party, it’s very different telling the children, for whom all stories about their creation must officially start ‘When a mummy and a daddy love each other very much. . .’

  And when the kids delve further back – to the ancient times before Paul and I were friends – I’m even less comfortable. It’s foggy, I’ll claim. I’m so old that my memory is bad. They – crushingly – tend to accept my age as a defence. If I do start to pick my way through those earlier years, to find stories to tell them, I find I’m just feeling my way around a big, aching hole. It should sound so grand. I should be able to tell them staggering stories about Greenfinch Manor and the characters living between its walls. But now, as then, the truth is flat and disappointing.

  I was bored and lonely until I met Daddy. That’s not the truth that I’d like them to hear. The more they ask, the more I realise that I knew nothing about my parents. Even when I was Harry’s age, I asked nothing. My mother was so young that her life was wild and half-formed. My father’s longer life was less colourful and locked out of my view.

  I know more about Viv’s life than I do my mother’s. And still not enough about her. But the parent I know most about is Mick. Thanks to those late-night car journeys coupled with his natural need to fill a silence. And, of course, there was all the chatting and joking that I was privy to just from being in the Loxtons’ home. There were precious few truly private conversations because the house was too small. Paul and I would whisper upstairs in his bedroom and I still think Viv heard most of it from the kitchen.

  Until Viv got ill, I convinced myself that perhaps she and Mick were right to break up. They certainly fought with increasing ferocity up until the night I drunkenly blundered into him. I tried to think that I did them a favour by sparking that split second of insurmountable mistrust. That it enabled Mick – forever scrabbling at the door – to get out and run free, so he could be chasing women and answering to no-one. That it forced Viv – long-suffering but no fool – to admit what she’d suspected for so long and to no longer live in perpetual suspicion.

  But then Viv got ill. And the Loxtons had clung to each other with fierce dedication. And all those years apart seemed wasteful.

  Mick still lives at 4 Church Street. The last time we took the kids to see him, which we don’t do very often, he hadn’t changed a thing. That last visit, he’d carefully used Viv’s old egg slicer and salad spinner to make lunch and after watching him, I’d had to go to the bathroom to wipe my eyes and collect myself.

  He didn’t move a girlfriend in either. Didn’t have one and wasn’t interested. Didn’t want someone messing with Viv’s house, he said.

  It’s been about a year since that visit. As usual, he was content and chatty. He had his routines and rituals. Pub for lunch most days, throw some ‘arrows’, have a few pints and go home to watch the telly. He’s also got a computer and his friend Rod has shown him how to use it. Two grey heads bobbing about in front of the screen, carefully typing with one finger each. Mick has now started using email (he sends Harry jokes sometimes, not all of them appropriate) and he orders his Tesco shopping online because he’s given up driving now he has nowhere to go. ‘How long until he orders a Thai bride?’ Paul had asked me, semi-seriously.

  ‘He wouldn’t get married,’ I said. ‘He loved your mum too much.’

  ‘Loxtons mate for life,’ Paul said.

  2002

  I hadn’t rested on my laurels after being sidelined, sorry ‘realigned’, at TMC. I may not have been given new accounts, but I got on the phone to all of the old faithfuls I’d been allowed to keep, and put lunches in the diary with each of them. I arranged one-to-one meetings with all of the account managers in my team, and listened to them whine about the clients whose accounts I’d lovingly cultivated.

  Every day for two weeks solid, I was lunching with one client, and dining with another. Ordering their brand’s booze with the food, trying to inspire them into extra ad spend, a refreshed campaign, branching out into burgeoning online ad space. I got home past midnight every night but still needed the sleeping pills to nod off, besieged by nightmares of John and my colleagues picking over my dead body, or turning up at meetings naked and empty.

  At least I regained half a stone of the several I’d lost.

  At the end of that fortnight of frenzied schmoozing, John’s PA asked me to see him urgently, just as I was about to go to yet another client lunch.

  ‘Your expenses,’ he said when I walked in, without preamble.

  ‘What about them?’ I asked, sitting down with a straight back.

  ‘They’re off the charts, Kate.’

  ‘I’ve been re-engaging the clients you left me with, John, that’s not cheap.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Kate, I told you to focus on advising and team-building.’ He slapped his palm on the desk and glared at me.

  I glared back but kept my voice steady. ‘I’ve still got my older clients, John, and I’m getting them fired up to spend more. Isn’t that my job?’

  ‘Your job is whatever I tell you your job is. And I told you to stay away from the fucking clients and babysit the fucking team.’

  ‘You know what?’ I said, standing up. ‘That isn’t what you said. And perhaps if you had, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.’

  ‘Take a half-day, go home and cool off,’ he’d called after me as I walked out of his office.

  I wasn’t going to take a half-day. I wasn’t going to walk out of that office and let them think I’d given up.

  I had a lunch with one of my longest-running clients scheduled at Nobu for one o’clock and it was ten past already. After a frustrating taxi ride, I blustered through the doors and into the restaurant. I had just opened my mouth to give my name to the maître d’ when I saw Jenny, sitting with Graham Costa and Alan Fox from Ginseng Drinks.

  I stood and watched. Jenny was good, clean and precise. She’d been a steal from Saatchi – a real bloodied nose for our rivals. She was seen as part of the new wave of tenacious young superstars that was going to keep TMC fresh and exciting. And she was a fucking snake.

  Next to Jenny and her shiny blonde bob was Paul, smiling and laughing, effortless small talk dribbling out of his mouth in a way I’d never really seen before. He wore his dark-rimmed glasses and the same floppy Morrissey hair that he’d always had. He looked handsome and capable.

  Next to Paul was Eva, a new hire for the design team, a smart and pretty urchin of a girl, barely five foot. They were opening a deck of ideas right there on the table. The waiter was only just bringing their drinks over and they were already looking at ideas? Whose ideas? Who even knew we had this lunch planned? I pursed my lips and walked over.

  ‘Graham! Alan! Hi!’ I reached my hand out to shake each of theirs as Jenny rose to her feet in surprise.

  ‘Kate,’ she smiled glassily. ‘I’ve already made your apologies, I think we can handle this from here.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ I smiled back, ‘you know how much I value this account. I wouldn’t miss this lunch for the world.’

  ‘Well, you’ve missed quite a bit of it already,’ Graham said, grumpy bastard.

  I looked at my wrist, which didn’t have a watch on it.

  ‘The meeting was moved forward,’ Paul said softly to me, ‘I thought you knew.’

  ‘I didn’t know, Paul,’ I said in a voice that sounded more shrill than intended. ‘I wish I had known,’ I said pointedly to Jenny.

  ‘Kate, can I have a word?’ Jenny gestured back towards the foyer.

  ‘No, let’s not waste any more time,’ I said briskly and pulled a chair from a nearby table, gesturing to the waiter to take my order. He came over and I ordered a Ginseng Fizz with Grey Goose.

  ‘We’re not drinking today,’ Paul h
ad said in a low voice.

  ‘Let’s talk through these ideas then,’ I said to the table.

  ‘Well,’ Jenny looked flustered. ‘As I was saying, the new team we’ve assembled has been looking at refreshing the assets to take you into next quarter.’

  ‘Hang on,’ said Alan, ‘can you just clarify who will be leading this account?’

  ‘Me,’ Jenny and I both said at the same time.

  ‘I will,’ Jenny said, firmly.

  ‘The fuck you will,’ I growled.

  In the end it was Paul who put a stop to it, apologising to Alan and Graham and ushering me out. Bundling, really.

  ‘I get that you’re pissed off but you’re making a fool of yourself,’ he said. ‘It’s not Jenny’s fault. John gave her the account and obviously didn’t tell you.’

  ‘Who moved the fucking meeting?’ I hissed.

  ‘I don’t know, Kate. Jenny told me the new time so I guess she must have rearranged it with the client. Look, I’ll smooth things over here, you just go back to the office, okay?’

  I paced around my office for most of the afternoon, copying names, phone numbers and email addresses from my Outlook account and into my leather address book. I don’t know why, it felt like something. Safeguarding? Future-proofing? Espionage? In reality, it was nothing. I was due to have a one-to-one with a shiny new junior account exec that afternoon, but I cancelled. I didn’t trust myself not to tell her to find another career and save herself before it was too late. I didn’t fancy turning myself into the resident madwoman.

  Towards the end of the day, I watched from my office as all the senior managers trooped into the boardroom. I’d not been invited in advance or called in so I stayed rooted to my leather chair, trying to ignore what I was seeing. My colleagues had studiously avoided walking past my office, even when that was the most direct route. I sat a little longer, tapping my foot up and down so my knee vibrated and my thigh shook.

  After a few minutes, I stalked around my glass room, running my fingertips along every surface, closing, reopening and then half-closing the blinds. I saw Jenny talking to the creative team on their bank of desks near the boardroom. Colm and Paul shot looks my way then snapped their heads back when they saw my silhouette behind the semi-closed blinds. I cleaned out my email inbox, forwarding anything that incriminated John to my personal email. I noticed with a sinking heart that he’d never really said anything incriminating, it was always me. Everything had been verbal from him, untraceable. Did he plan that all along? To leave no trace? Does anyone plan anything that well? Not me, clearly.