“How did that happen?”
“How do you think? Troy didn’t want to know, so I had an abortion.” Mum clasped her hand to her mouth, as if to contain her shock. “Then Troy turned up today with his yucky guilt gifts.” I shook my head.
Mum lurched toward the sink. “Oh my God, I think I’m going to be sick.” She bent over, heaving. “I can’t believe I gave him my best pâté! What a terrible waste.” Mum started wailing, “This is my worst nightmare for you come true. I can’t believe it. This can’t be happening.”
I went over and gently rubbed her back to stop her hyperventilating. “This is exactly why I didn’t tell you, Mum. I didn’t want to upset you. Look, it’s not your drama, it’s mine.”
Mum tried to pull herself together. She looked me squarely in the eye. “Never tell your father about this. He’d be so disappointed. Shocked.”
“Actually,” I said gingerly, “he already knows. It just came out at Thai Temptations recently. He was surprisingly cool about it.”
Suddenly we heard the loo flush—good, I had unnerved him—and then the front door shut behind him. The next thing, Troy was revving up the engine of his car. Before I knew what was happening, Mum sprinted from the kitchen and through the back door. Troy was carefully reversing his car—something black and swanky that looked as if it was fueled by testosterone alone—down our narrow driveway. Mum picked up the huge stone the postman uses for anchoring letters by the back door. With all her might, she ran forward and hurled the stone at Troy’s sports car. I screamed, not sure if from terror or elation. Fortunately her aim wasn’t that good, so it missed the windscreen and bounced off the bonnet, leaving a satisfyingly large dent in the immaculate gleaming bodywork. Troy’s eyes bulged with fear as he quickly maneuvered the car out of the driveway and up the lane.
Mum and I were doubled over with laughter. I put my arm around her, touched, as always, by how much she loved me.
It was Lucy who told me. She had come to spend a couple of days with me at Mum’s house. She wanted to escape the exhausting humdrum of running a home, a husband, and two kids. She said she needed to remind herself of who she is, as the strain of holding her life together meant that sometimes she was straining to breathe. As we lounged around in our pajamas and went for long, rambling walks, we dissected our lives. While Lucy was up for girlie gossip and a giggle, there was something fractured about her that I had never sensed before now.
One afternoon, she was painting my toenails as she ran through a list of her husband’s most infuriating characteristics. “The way he reads the newspaper, clicking his tongue against his teeth and pedantically folding back the pages instead of flicking through them. The way he’s incapable of neatly folding a towel so that the edges touch, but always flings it over the towel rail at a wonky angle. The way he stands in front of the fridge door, peering in, and says, ‘Have we got any butter?’ as if I’m expected to have a mental inventory of our dairy products running through my brain at all times.” She clenched her jaw. “Just once, I wish he’d ask me, ‘What can I do for you, darling?’ He never says, ‘Let me take the girls to the playdate, buy the party gift, collect the dry cleaning, phone the dentist, see if the car needs an inspection, stock up on rinse aid or fabric conditioner, or book you a relaxing massage.’ Oh, no, because he earns so much money, his life is deemed more important than mine.”
“But isn’t that true of all men?” I said.
Lucy sighed. “I don’t know, but I do know that the reality is that over the years, Edward and I have stopped seeing each other. We’ve become like the furniture of married life. The thing is, I don’t want to replace the furniture or reupholster it, I just want to remember why I liked it in the first place.”
I nodded. “So Edward bores you?”
“It’s not really that,” she said. “It’s more that there is a part of him that I can’t access anymore. Perhaps the problem is that I bore him.” She put down the varnish. “All I know is that I go through the motions of a good life but I’m dying of loneliness inside.” She let out an agonizing sigh. “How did this happen? One minute I was the sexy catch, dreaming of this great, fulfilling life, and a decade later I’m just a boring old wife and mother with nothing to say.” She snorted. “Oh God, I am boring, aren’t I? I mean, I even bore myself most of the time.”
Lucy was silent for a while, carefully applying the top coat. “Do you love Edward?” I asked her finally.
“Everybody loves Edward,” she said flatly.
“That’s not what I asked. What does it matter what everybody else thinks? They’re not there at two in the morning when you are sick and want Edward to hold your hair back.”
When Lucy spoke it was in slow, hushed tones, as if admitting her deepest, most filthy secrets.
“Daisy, Edward has never once held my hair back.”
“Oh,” I said, utterly shocked. “That’s terrible.”
Lucy shrugged. “You are so idealistic, it’s frightening. Do you honestly think that alpha males who earn mega bucks for their wives to spend bother to get out of bed to hold our hair back when we are puking? They don’t. No more than they would contemplate missing a work meeting when we are laid up with flu to lay flannels on our foreheads and feed us chicken broth. It doesn’t work like that.”
“So you’re saying: if he’s paying, he doesn’t have to pay attention?”
“Right. They don’t consider little nurturing things part of their remit. That’s why it would never have worked between you and Julius. Marrying Jamie was a mistake but it didn’t destroy you. If you had married a great catch like Julius, you wouldn’t have been able to stomach the disappointment. It’s the little things that would have broken you. After a while, even the flowers they send are a letdown because they never choose them themselves. You just pray their personal assistant has good taste.” Lucy paused and looked me in the eyes. “Daisy, did you know that Julius is getting married?” My heart seemed to lurch, then plunge deep into the pit of my stomach. “To Alice Randolph. She’s a young American heiress. It’s not a marriage, it’s a merger,” she concluded.
So Julius Vantonakis, my first love, was getting married. I hadn’t seen him for seven years but I felt the news as keenly as if we’d only said good-bye yesterday.
I was twenty-two when I met Julius, then twenty-nine, at a society party in London. We were introduced by one of my university friends, Natasha—a sensational looking Sloane with killer cheekbones—who had just started going out with Julius’s oldest friend, the equally eligible Perry. They had an innate sense of belonging; they knew that their birthright had given them immediate entrée into a world of unparalleled privilege. They were the eighties version of the twenties’ Bright Young Things. Glossy, rich, carefree, and enviable, they spent their lives in pedigreed packs. Weekend house parties in crumbling country piles, skiing en masse and living it up in sprawling alpine chalets, and summering in midge-ridden turreted castles. Everyone was vaguely related; all they cared about was keeping it in the family and discussing who was doing what with whom and where. Everyone was “a cousin of” or “the sister of,” as if you didn’t merit a mention unless you were part of the right clan.
As the daughter of an academic, I certainly didn’t share their aristocratic ancestry and I wasn’t a trust-fund babe, but because my parents were offbeat and old-fashioned, I was deemed suitable enough to fit in. True, I knew the form: you didn’t wear too much makeup, anything new, or anything bling. You only wore hand-me-down jewelry—I had some old pearls of Mum’s, which helped—you had to make jolly conversation with the batty great aunt over wincingly strong Bloody Marys before Sunday lunch, and you always left a good tip by the bed for the cleaner, the cook, the housekeeper, or even the mother if the family had fallen on hard times. Sure, I was a creditable enough imposter—I never looked or acted out of place—but I never felt at home. Amid the utter frivolity and endless extravagance of the black-tie dances and champagne-cocktail parties, I always felt alone.
The whiff of scandal had permeated the City almost a decade before when Julius had fought his brother, Piers, for control of the empire. Julius was only twenty, yet after a bitter, public feud, staggeringly, he had won. Most people were scared of him because he displayed brutal business acumen, as if when it came to screwing people over, he had a morality chip missing. From the moment we met I wasn’t frightened of him because I felt this strange intimacy between us.
One of the first things I said to him at that party was, “What’s it like to be so successful?”
His eyes flat, he replied, “I can’t tell you because I don’t know what it’s like to be a failure.” He paused. “I always get the deal I want because I can smell blood in the water.”
If this was meant to put me off, it didn’t. “Don’t you think sharks have feelings too?” I asked. “I mean, why shouldn’t they, when even camels cry when they’re lonely?”
He looked at me, intrigued. But all I felt from him was his unhappiness. Unlike the glossy beauties fawning all over him, I could sense his shame.
His mother, Amelia, a fragile English rose, had committed suicide when Julius was nineteen. I always thought that the reason he fought shy of love was because his mother’s death felt like a betrayal to him. If she could leave him, when he had loved her so much, then any woman could.
You never knew where you stood, emotionally speaking, with Julius, and perhaps for me, that was part of the attraction. One minute he could be so open, free, and giving; a second later he would close off. His loneliness was palpable. We were true friends—not just on/off lovers—because there was a silent knowing between us, as if we had a secret code that meant we felt the same about life, as no one else could. Because we trusted each other, it should have felt safe. But I possessed one fatal, irreversible flaw—I reminded him of his mother. Not physically speaking. Good grief, no! I may have passable hands and elegant ankles but with the wodge of fat at the top of my thighs and my bouncing persona, fragility doesn’t figure. Rather, it was my romantic optimism that touched him. He once told me that I felt familiar to him, then immediately brushed the compliment aside by saying that it was probably because his mother, like my mother, dead-headed daffodils early in spring mornings in her dressing gown, always swam in a large straw hat and sunglasses in the summer, and adored dachshunds.
Julius toyed with me for a decade. He would never fully commit to me yet he never let me stray. I always felt that he didn’t want me enough, but he didn’t want to let me go either. I’d try to move on, date other men, but the moment I thought I might be interested enough in someone else, Julius would appear and whisk me to dinner and on to romantic oblivion. Sure, it would be lavish with vintage champagne and shellfish on ice, but none of that was what sealed it. It was his intuitive knowledge of me, his ability to ferret out my secrets and toy with my dreams, his cleverness and sudden soft touch. It wasn’t even about sex for us; it was the real thing. I had fallen in love.
I had always hoped that one day he would come and claim me, and yet he never did. All those years that he was single, toying with various vacuous posh totty, I could kick up my heels in hope. He took up so much space in my head that in my heart I believed it was our destiny to be together. Even when I stood at the altar waiting for Jamie, it was Julius whom I prayed would show up.
“I’ve got to see him,” I said to Lucy.
“Are you crazy?” Lucy was aghast. “You know the first rule of life: never go back.”
“Actually I’m trying to move forward. By seeing Julius I can finally close this whole chapter once and for all and let go. The timing is perfect. I can see it all so clearly now. It’s not Jamie that’s holding me back from getting my life together, it’s Julius. What have I got to lose? If there’s one thing I know from bitter experience, it is the things that you don’t do in life that you end up regretting, more than the things you do.”
4
Emotional Contagion
I may have looked a picture of professional calm, sitting in Julius’s London offices waiting for my “interview,” but inside I was churning. I had picked up a newspaper to appear occupied, but far from reading it, my eyes were skating over words, hurrying past headlines, and briefly registering photographs in a bid to focus. I was wearing a high-necked top under my jacket as I knew that nerves would force a livid flush across my chest.
A week earlier, while Googling Julius, a small item in one of the gossip columns had caught my attention. Apparently, as part of his burgeoning property portfolio, he had acquired a boutique hotel in New York and was looking for a new publicist. I decided to apply for the job under a pseudonym. That way my cover would not be blown until we were face-to-face. I set about concocting a résumé, confident that I knew enough about the media and marketing to give good enough copy to guarantee an interview. Sure enough, not long after, I got the call. Julius’s personal assistant wanted to set up a meeting.
When I told Mum that I had faked a job application to see Julius, she crumpled into a chair. “Oh Daisy, why do you always have to swim upstream?” I looked at her blankly, so she spelled it out. “Is there some congenital fault in your makeup that means you have to make life difficult for yourself? I read in the gossip columns that Julius is engaged to an American heiress. Why on earth would you look him up now? Do you simply enjoy getting hurt?”
I wondered how Julius would view me now. I envied him his clean, as yet unmarried, slate. Divorce sullies you, with its suggestion of stupidity and recklessness. I hated to be thought of as an emotional lightweight, but that’s the implication when you ’fess up to marital failure.
I watched his secretary, a clear-skinned, tight-lipped, efficient brunette in her early thirties, answer the phone, write memos, and send e-mails. As Julius abhorred clutter, she, too, had the bare minimum work-wise on her desk but, as always, there was an impressive vase of white lilies. Julius only ever had flowers in white.
After a bell buzzed and she motioned for me to go inside his office, I realized Mum had a point. My stomach was flipping over and over. I wanted to leg it but then I saw him. He was sitting behind his desk, his head bent over paperwork. The office was just as I remembered. Sleek, modern, and swimming in sunlight. His glass desk boasted an extravagant basket of white gardenias. Behind him was an enormous canvas of a midnight blue butterfly, fanning across the white wall. French doors led out on to a rooftop patio, where box hedges in aluminium containers stood in rows. He didn’t look up immediately and I could see distinguished flecks of gray peppering his dark hair. He looked astonishingly good for forty-six. I should have slunk away before he recognized me, but I knew before it happened that it was too late. Just being in the same room as him, inhaling his air of studied concentration, was enough. I still loved him just as much as I ever had.
When he looked up and saw me standing there, he stared straight through me, his eyes completely glazed. I wasn’t sure whether to rush over and give him the kiss of life or the Heimlich maneuver. It seemed ages before he caught his breath. “My God, Daisy, what are you doing here?” He stood up and walked around the desk. He was thinner than I remembered and his olive skin more sallow, but he had an assurance that suited him. He didn’t seem to be as burdened as before.
“I’m sorry. It’s madness, I know,” I stuttered. “I wanted to see you so I pretended to apply for the
PR job you advertised.”
He let his head fall to one side, still eyeing me, amused. When he came over and brushed his lips against my cheek and I smelled his aftershave—the same Penhaligon’s Blenheim Bouquet he wore when I had first met him—it was as if time concertinaed into nothing. The past decade melted into a split second and that intense feeling of knowing was as keen as if I had made love to him that morning.
Julius shut the door and beckoned to a pale suede sofa. He sat opposite me on a chair, neatly folding one leg over another. “How are you?”
I nodded. “I’m good.”
“No,” he said, vaguely irritated. “How are you?”
So nothing had changed. We were going to cut straight to the truth and avoid the social carapace of pretense like we always did. This nod toward our former intimacy delighted me. I knew I had to keep myself in check though, as Julius hated—and feared—unruly displays of emotion.
“I feel that I have caught up with myself at last,” I said.
“You’ve been through a lot,” he said, his brown eyes boring into me.
“Question or statement?” I asked.
“Both.”
Nervously I ran my fingers through my hair in exactly the sort of weakly flirtatious gesture he hated. He raised a not-so-mock disapproving eyebrow and I laughed. “You’ve changed,” he said.
“Obviously not enough,” I joked, holding my hand theatrically to my hair.
He smiled, still appraising me. “No. You’re calmer. More grown-up.”
“Disappointment does that to you,” I said.
“Disappointment or divorce?”
So he knew all about Jamie. Natasha must have said something to him. “Sadly, they tend to be inextricably linked.”
“Did you love him?” Did I detect a shard of jealousy in his voice?
“Pathetically, I think I loved the idea of marriage more.”
“Did he hurt you?”
Daisy Dooley Does Divorce Page 8