Love Will Tear Us Apart

by Holly Seddon

  He reached for the doorknob.

  ‘Maybe I should have told your wife,’ I spat. ‘Maybe I should have told HR. They wouldn’t have dismissed me so easily if they’d known my boss had taken advantage of me and I nearly died as a result.’ I watched his shoulders tighten as he held the knob. His jaw clenched.

  ‘Maybe I should tell your wife now,’ I hissed.

  Suddenly he was on me, dragging me by my hair into the dim bathroom and shoving my face up to the mirror. ‘Stop, please,’ I cried.

  ‘Look at yourself,’ he shouted. ‘Look at who you are. A washed-up, jealous bitch!’

  I tried to turn around but he forced my head to stay where it was until I kicked wildly to get free, bashing my knees and toes. He let go suddenly and I lost my balance, cracking my forehead on the sink as I slumped.

  ‘Fuck you,’ I whispered up at him from a dizzy pile on the floor.

  ‘Fuck me? Fuck you. And if you ever so much as use my wife’s name, I will fucking finish you. Do you understand?’

  ‘You already finished me,’ I said.

  ‘If you think I’ve already done all I can, then you really are a naïve little tart.’

  The door snapped shut behind him. I lay on the floor, touching my head and staring at the blood on my fingertips. I pulled myself up to sit on the loo. I picked up the phone by the toilet, eyes swimming, and dialled the number for my own flat.

  I needed a friend.

  I wanted Paul.

  I woke up to someone hammering on the door of a room I didn’t recognise, viewed from the bathroom floor where I lay.

  ‘Come in!’ I shouted, sitting myself up and touching my fingers to the dried blood on my head. A hotel manager in a badly fitting suit came into view, with Paul behind her.

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  ‘Are you okay, madam?’ she asked, her voice sounding like a child’s.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said, ‘I just had a fall.’

  I realised then, as she flushed pink and Paul rushed forward with the eiderdown from the bed, that I was naked. The towel I’d been wearing was wrinkled next to me on the tiled floor.

  ‘Fuck,’ I said.

  ‘It’s okay, it’s okay,’ Paul said, studiously avoiding looking at my body as he covered it in puffed pastel fabric.

  ‘Thank you so much for coming,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t thank me,’ he shook his head.

  ‘I drank too much,’ I added.

  ‘Stop,’ he said.

  The taxi ride back to the flat was a blur. Closing my eyes made me feel sick, opening them made me feel worse. I went to bed wearing the jumper and knickers that Paul had helped wrestle me back into. I slept fitfully, writhing all night. When I finally dragged myself out and gagged my way through a mug of coffee, Paul had been at work for hours.

  I took a long bath. Topping the water up with bursts from the hot tap, lying with a flannel over my eyes and trying to sort the order of the scenes playing through my head from the night before. Whichever way I shuffled them, the ending was the same.

  I scrubbed myself clean, wrapped my hair in a towel and dwarfed my body in a dressing gown. I was still swathed when the front door opened and Paul walked in.

  ‘Hey,’ I said quietly. ‘You’re early.’

  He nodded and clasped his hands together. He slipped off his shoes and trod carefully to the sofa and stood staring at me. I squirmed under his gaze.

  ‘I’m mortified about last night,’ I said.

  He shook his head. ‘I couldn’t stay at work so I said I was ill.’ He clenched his fists into tight balls. ‘I had a meeting with that bastard,’ he spat the word out.

  ‘John?’ I asked, my stomach churning. ‘You had a meeting with John?’

  ‘I hate him, I fucking hate him. He was there doing his greasy act, loudly laughing and pointing his crotch at some new account exec.’ Paul stopped and I stood up gingerly and wrapped my arms around him. He hugged me back.

  ‘Don’t you dare let this fuck things up for you too,’ I said.

  He shook his head angrily. ‘I can’t stay after this, not after the way they treated you. I’m going to look for something else. I can’t—’

  I hugged him tighter, smelling a new aftershave over the same old scent of his skin that I used to wake up to as a kid in his tiny room.

  ‘Please,’ I said, ‘I really don’t want you to do that. I made my own bed, you shouldn’t suffer for it. Seriously, please stay there. Okay?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘Anyway,’ I said with faux gusto, ‘I’ve done enough moping. I have a difficult call to make now but I think it’ll be worth it.’

  We broke away a little embarrassed. Paul went out to buy some food for dinner and I flipped open my phone and scrolled to M for Miller.

  Stephen Miller hadn’t seemed surprised to hear from me, which should have been a red flag. He agreed to meet the following week but when I’d suggested the Elliot & Finch office, he’d suggested Quaglino’s. I’d suggested mid-afternoon and he’d said eight o’clock.

  I spent the run-up to the interview bagging up old clothes for charity while I tried to find something to wear. Everything I tried was ill-fitting and ugly. I’d been living in loungewear and pyjamas, I hadn’t seen a tailored waist in months and I no longer had much of a tailored waist myself – more like a shapeless tube. I spent hundreds in Selfridges, buying three different outfit options for the amount I used to spend on one dress.

  On the night, I opted for a loosely fitted light grey Joseph dress, black LK Bennett shoes and a Louis Vuitton make-up bag that I used as a handbag and found myself gripping like a handrail without thinking.

  Stephen looked good. He looked the same as the last time I’d seen him, after which I just stopped calling or replying to emails. I breathed deeply, counting in ‘one, two, three’ counting out ‘one, two, three, four’, a method that Paul had shown me. He’d read about it in GQ, it was a technique used by marines or something. I didn’t really listen at the time but I found myself clinging to the memory on the Tube ride over. In the seconds before Stephen turned and noticed me, I dropped my shoulders back, lifted my chest and strode in.

  ‘Hey, Red,’ he said, standing and leaning to kiss both of my cheeks as I offered my hand. ‘You look smart,’ he said, ‘have you come straight from work?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m not working right now. I thought you might have heard.’ It was a question but he didn’t answer it. ‘You know I’m, y’know, trying to find the right position now. One where I can grow and—’

  He cut me off, his eyebrows dipping for a second. ‘I’m not interviewing you!’ he laughed. ‘It’s not a test. I just thought you’d be on a contract somewhere. I know you left TMC.’

  I sat down and tried to smile. ‘So you’re not interviewing?’

  ‘Nah, Red. I’m not interviewing.’ He smiled broadly and picked up a menu, fingering it for a minute and then putting it back down. He opened a pack of Marlboro and tapped one on the table like he was some kind of cowboy. Lighting it in a quick, practised move.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Want one?’

  ‘I don’t smoke.’ The flimsy smile had already faded from my lips.

  ‘So, you wanna eat?’

  ‘I guess so. I mean, I mostly wanted to catch up and see how things are going at Elliot & Finch. I’m not going to lie, I’ve often wondered if I made the right decision and now that I’m a free agent, I thought perhaps—’

  ‘You thought you’d tap me up for a job again, and then use it to get something better?’

  ‘No, I—’

  ‘Look, let’s not talk shop, okay? Let’s just have a nice night and catch up. Old friends, yeah?’

  ‘Old friends.’

  I wanted to cry. I wanted to excuse myself, go to the Ladies and cry. Sit on a toilet seat, ball up two handfuls of tissue and weep into them.

  Instead I sat there, with a rictus smile, and I made small talk. I made small talk with this man who did not want to make
small talk with me. He wanted to make me squirm. And obviously, he did ‘talk shop’. He talked shop all night as he dolloped his thick grey ash into the Q-shaped ashtray. I hated Quaglino’s.

  Stephen asked me all the questions I did not want to be asked about TMC and I answered them. He asked me for information that I was still contractually not allowed to share, and I shared it. He asked me things about John and other managers that I should not have even known and I just opened myself up like a carcass. And he’d told me there was no job and I did it anyway because I was already on the ropes when I arrived. All he needed to do was step into the ring.

  I remember looking up and seeing the mirrored ceiling reflecting my scrappy white arms slapped to my side and my dull, faded hair. I looked up at that mirror image and I knew right then. That was it, it really was over.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  November 2012 – Saturday evening

  Ordinarily, it’s me who pushes to go out to dinner while Paul will always opt to cook ‘something special’ at home. For him, eating in fancy restaurants is a busman’s holiday. Except if he’s taking our family rather than clients, he has to pay from our bank account rather than put it on his TMC card.

  Tonight, I’d planned to give the kids an early tea, hustle them into bed, and then cook ‘something special’ together, in the beautiful white kitchen. I figured a little bit of small talk, maybe some quiet concentration while we chopped, would help me build up to it: The Conversation.

  I’ve fretted all week about what we’ll have, and agonised so much that I’ve managed to put Paul off. This afternoon he declared that we would go to a restaurant instead.

  ‘Somewhere romantic, with kids?’ I said, wrinkling up my nose.

  ‘I’m sure we can find somewhere nice.’

  I hadn’t banked on the kids eating our ten-year anniversary meal with us, studying our faces and bickering over who could have the last bread roll. I spent the last half an hour of the journey back from the Eden Project begrudgingly searching the internet for restaurants. The signal was patchy, so it took three times as long and I barely managed to stop myself from lobbing the phone out of the window and listening for its innards popping as the tyres crunched over it. Of course, I didn’t do anything like that. I kept my face as neutral as possible and diligently searched for somewhere that Paul would appreciate.

  Back at the cottage I got ready slowly, looking at my scrubbed face in the mirror as I dried my hair. Studying it and trying to remember how it looked ten years ago. Wondering what Paul thought he was taking on.

  Although we’ve had to drive half an hour to get here, the restaurant is idyllic. Under normal circumstances, I’d have been delighted. The front windows are lit by storm lanterns, candles dribble wax onto the weathered tables and an amazing chandelier hangs over the diners like great mythical feathers.

  I nudge Paul. ‘It looks like Bowie’s hair in Labyrinth.’

  He smiles. ‘We should show that film to the kids,’ he says.

  I wonder if I can really do what I plan to do tonight.

  After a salmon starter, the waiter brings over our chateaubriand with pearly oyster mushrooms, glazed bone marrow and fondant potatoes. We’ve let the kids have a bowl of chips each, fuck it. ‘Are you sure I can’t tempt you with the wine list, madam?’ the smiling waiter asks, all twenty years and floppy surfer hair of him.

  ‘You know what?’ I say, ‘he’s driving but I’m not. Bring me a bottle of your best Argentinian red.’

  ‘Yay!’ says Izzy, not understanding any of it but seeing some potential spoils in the excitement.

  Paul smiles thinly. ‘I guess I can have one glass.’

  My heart races.

  We were raised to drink, to toast or commiserate, to open a bottle of something for no reason at all. Paul can put it away far more than me, but tonight he’s driving back to Mousehole so he makes his glass last. He eyes me carefully, I know I’m a little off kilter, a little loud maybe.

  Izzy is transfixed; I rarely drink anything stronger than Appletiser when they’re still up but she’s just about old enough to know that wine makes adults ‘silly’.

  We finish our main and the kids are droopy and fidgety.

  ‘Let’s get them back,’ Paul says, and something twists in my gut.

  ‘Maybe we should get pudding?’ I say.

  ‘You never have pudding,’ Harry says, wrinkling his nose.

  ‘I don’t never have pudding,’ I say. I hate that he’s started monitoring my food too, just like his father.

  I eat a big slice of cheesecake, even though I was full ages ago. The kids eat bowls of ice cream and now Paul picks at a cheese board, pulling at his hair with one hand like he does when he’s looking over campaign plans he’s not happy with.

  I feel swollen and hot as we walk to the car. The black November night buffeting me, my brain whistling like an old kettle.

  ‘Let’s do gifts when we get this lot in bed?’ I shout into the wind as we unlock the car.

  ‘Okay,’ Paul says, his unease clear even in the dark.

  2002

  I started to notice when Paul got home from work, then I started to wait for him. If it got past seven o’clock and he hadn’t mentioned that he would be late, I’d feel a nervous twist in my gut. He got promoted just before our thirtieth birthdays, and without telling me he was going to do it, he upped the rent that he paid into my account.

  Unfairly, his kindness infuriated me. I called it passive-aggressive, like he was dangling his good fortune in front of me, whistling nonchalantly and swinging his legs while he waited for me to notice and collapse in gratitude.

  ‘I didn’t ask you for extra money,’ I barked, the second he came through the door after I opened my monthly bank statement.

  ‘I know you didn’t,’ he said, frowning at me as I stood, hip cocked in my grey joggers, conscious of my bare breasts under an old Ginseng Drinks T-shirt. ‘Why are you cross?’

  ‘You’re rubbing my nose in it,’ I said, weakly.

  ‘Were you rubbing my nose in it when you helped me?’ he asked. I had no answer so I went for a bath.

  He’d started to dress smarter, dressing for the job he wanted, not the job he had and all that guff you’re told. He wore brogues and Ralph Lauren jeans, nice shirts.

  He walked taller and prouder, the latent confidence he’d been nursing coming to the fore. He was senior copywriter by then, trusted and respected. He was good at what he did. He is good at what he does. He’s earned it all.

  ‘Look,’ he said that night, pulling things out of the fridge and swirling olive oil into a pan as I watched dumbly with a towel still on my head. ‘When I first came here I didn’t have anything, I couldn’t pay you any rent and I couldn’t help you out and all I could do was leech off you.’

  ‘You weren’t a leech,’ I said, bristling that now I was the one in apology mode when I’d been so fired up with irritation.

  ‘And I vowed that as soon as I could pay you back, I would. And now it’s you who needs a bit of help and I can help you. So that’s what I’m trying to do.’

  He was used to me being aggravated and twitchy when he came home and he’d learned how to diffuse it, even though that often wound me tighter initially. I could never be bothered to make lunch, so my blood sugar was generally argumentatively low by dinner. I spent the days watching television and making plans for things that never happened.

  I drank too much caffeine still, making a pot of coffee as soon as I got up and then another when that one had drained away. These rituals that used to be for the weekend, now filling my weekdays because nothing else did.

  I had registered with a few recruitment consultants who were all wildly optimistic about my chances by phone, but after calling around their contacts, stopped phoning me back.

  ‘I like looking after you,’ Paul had said one night while I was brushing my teeth while I paced around the flat. I stopped brushing for a second, and then carried on. I didn’t acknowledge it but I co
uldn’t stop thinking about it. The next day, he left for work without leaving me a coffee, and I cried. I missed that coffee, that moment of waking and seeing his hand placing it down in my room, next to my bed. That quick chat before he left. God, I missed it like a limb, carrying my stump around all day and waiting for him to come back. It was a Friday in September. As I was waiting for him to get home, watching the clock and checking my text messages, the buzzer to the flat shook through me.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Delivery!’

  Two tin foil cartons from my favourite Chinese take-away. I texted Paul, ‘Thank you! Are you coming home to share it?’

  Seconds later: ‘It’s a little apology. Mum called and asked me to go down to Somerset tonight and I knew we didn’t have anything in the flat. Hope you enjoy it.’

  ‘Give Viv my love, Paul,’ I replied.

  ‘I will.’

  I had no right to be cross or sad, but I felt so left out that I nearly tipped the food in the bin. I wasn’t even upset with Paul, I was upset that Viv hadn’t asked for me to go with him. But I didn’t tip the food away. I was hungry and lonely so I washed it down with three-quarters of a bottle of cooking wine that had been left in the fridge. And then I texted Paul.

  ‘I miss you,’ I wrote.

  ‘Have you been drinking?’ he replied.

  ‘Only a couple of glasses,’ I lied.

  He got a taxi home that Sunday. I watched it pull up to the road outside our flat and I watched him climb out backwards, with a smart holdall he hadn’t had when he left on Friday. ‘I went and got some clothes to take down after Mum called,’ he explained later.

  ‘Rather than come home?’ I asked but he ignored me.

  ‘Paul,’ I said when he came through the door.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I meant it. I missed you.’

  He placed his holdall down and took his brogues off, taking care over his shoelaces and not meeting my eye.

  ‘Did you really?’ he asked, his cheeks looking flushed.

  ‘Really,’ I said. He didn’t say anything for a while.