It could have turned my head as a young impressionable student, but instead I went into a form of revolt. One too many evenings fixated on bowls of garden-grown sweet pea, the gleaming silver, and listening to inane banter and braying hoots of derision twisted my gut. Why are the upper classes unable to discuss anything real? God forbid anyone should discuss anything as prosaic as a feeling. It’s all about external heroics and nothing remotely internal. Some have no greater ambition than to bolt down the icy Cresta run in Switzerland on a tray or drive across Africa in a Ferrari. Elephant polo, anyone? Far too busy checking out their artfully floppy fringes, they never stop for a second to look within. I wrote them off as suppressed twits and consoled myself that I may have cocked it up when it came to men but at least I was able to access authentic feeling.
Sitting at Natasha’s table, two decades on, I thought about how mistaken I had been. Perry Sackville had turned out to be an exceptionally decent chap with a cracking career in the City. They have two gorgeous, glossy, hair-flicking girls in their early teens and live in a rambling, fiendishly cold manor house with topiary hedges and those posh chickens with fluffy feet. When it was suggested that we “freshen up” before dinner, unable to face the icy bath, I sat at the kidney-shaped dressing table in the spare room and stared at my reflection in the mirror. I didn’t see the feisty, uncompromising chick I’d set out to be in my twenties, crusading for love, emotional compatibility, and an intellectual challenge. I saw an unmarried, lonely woman who could barely keep it together on a good day. Where had my ambition, my angst, and my anger gotten me? Had it gotten me a rock-steady marriage, a decent house without a mortgage, some seriously enviable antique furniture, well-mannered children, and a considerate partner who loved me because my wrinkles were proof that we had gone the distance? It had not.
In my trance-like state I reflected that even their home was devoid of anguish. Sure, it was bolstered by quiet money, but why hadn’t I pushed for a life in that calm, untroubled air? Their home hadn’t witnessed the door-slamming, roof-raising rows of my marital abode nor had it been privy to the vindictive verbal volleys that Jamie and I hurled low when we lived as husband and wife. Clearly Perry and Natasha never shouted things like, “You really are a spoiled bitch, Daisy. Sometimes I hate you.” To which I would counter, “No you don’t. Relationships are mirrors, Jamie. You hate yourself.”
Now I sat down to supper and watched through a haze of regret as the Sackvilles interacted in an enviably interdependent way. Natasha didn’t oscillate between knee-cringing neediness and isolating independence as I do in relationships. She learned early on that the fastest way to happiness is to accept and appreciate her lot.
It was a shock for me to realize that weekend that actually I was a fully paid-up member of the sneering metropolitan elite. I used to mock the basic goodness of people like the Sackvilles because they say grace before mealtimes and go to church every Sunday. However, as I sat in my pew beside them and watched the sun stream through the stained-glass windows, I felt ashamed of myself. It was as if the things I once held dear had slid through my fingers and smashed to the floor. My past values had been horribly conceited and corrupt. What was the good of acid wit if it did just what acid does—corroded the skin of another? What was so superior about cleverness over kindness? The errant rogue male as opposed to the loyal, steady mate? Maybe I was finally maturing, maybe I was just tired of trying too hard, but I could see that I was in danger of becoming a caricature of myself. While it’s expected that you’ll make a mess of your twenties and acceptable to stumble in your thirties, it is plain pathetic not to prioritize in your forties.Hankering after funny but flighty Miles was just a tried and tested way of sabotaging my future.
Max rang me when I got back. “Daisy, I don’t want to upset you, but I can’t wait any longer for you to make up your mind. I need to know: are we an item or not?”
Though I was caught off guard by the question, I told him the truth: I didn’t know because I was afraid to commit too far down the line. If being an item meant lazing on my bed, talking to him as I was then with absolute hand-on-heart honesty, then I was happy to be itemized. If it meant inching further down the dating path and slowly unearthing intimacies about each other, I would sign my name on his calling card. But if it meant the sort of unspoken yet implied contract that could lead to something more serious, then it was best he left well enough alone.
“Don’t you want to get married again?” he asked.
“I honestly don’t know anymore,” I sighed. “I know it sounds awfully Buddhist but I’ve been so disappointed by love and had my hopes dashed so many times that I only believe in the power of now. We have to live in the moment because we can’t change our past nor predict our future. I try not to hold on to anything anymore, and that includes expectation, so that I won’t get disillusioned.”
“It sounds rather dreary,” Max observed wryly. “Do you allow yourself to hope for anything?”
“Oh yes,” I shot back. “My Buddhist better nature goes to sleep early and then I lie awake and sift through my dreams. Of course I pray that I’ll grow old with a man who is more at home with being a man than any man I’ve ever known. A man who shoulders responsibility with deceptive ease yet could be moved to tears by the grace of ordinary everyday people.”
“Oh, so it’s a demigod you’re after?”
“Yes,” I said, “because he needs to be good at DIY—that is, he can replace a washer on a tap and reposition the ballcock in the loo but also be able to pick the perfect-sized, non-tarty lingerie.”
“That begs the question: thong or French knickers?”
“Chiffon boy pants.”
“No wonder you live in the present,” chided Max. “You’re impossibly hard to please.”
“Well, the difference between men and women is that a man wouldn’t be put off by what underwear a woman was wearing, his main aim would still be to get them off. Whereas the minute I’ve kissed a guy, I go into a flap about whether he’s wearing boxers or not because if he was wearing Y fronts, I’d be immediately and irrevocably repulsed.”
“That’s not very Buddhist, is it?” said Max. “I thought it was what was inside that counted. And I mean the size of his soul, not his lunchbox.”
Suddenly his voice sounded amazing—dark and throaty, hinting at something naughty. “Okay, Buddhist babe, so quote me some more of your life lessons,” continued Max. “They’re so strange, I find them quite a turn-on.”
“Do you want the practical: nothing valuable can truly be destroyed because nothing you learn is ever lost and no act of kindness is forgotten or wasted? Or do you want the Daisy Dooley: I’ll know it’s real love when the man I’m with asks, ‘What are you thinking?’ and genuinely wants to know the answer?”
“I’ll go for your personal peccadilloes as opposed to pious preaching any day. Give me three more.”
“Only if you give me four of yours afterwards.”
“It’s a deal.”
“Okay.” I paused for thought. “I can’t stand the way some people save a teabag for a second use and it sits like a little dried-up brown sack by the kettle. I loathe tepid, so I find it enraging if tea, coffee, and soup isn’t tongue-burningly hot. And I love autumn so much that sometimes the glorious burnt-red and orange colors make my heart leap.”
Max gave a soft snort of appreciation. “Okay, my turn. Here goes. I love light bouncing off a great glass building. I hate tattoos on women. I love jazz. And I hate the fact that you are the most original woman I’ve ever met yet it’s impossible to get to grips with you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look, Daisy, I get it that you’ve been burned by men, but don’t keep us all at arm’s length. Let me in.”
“I don’t know how to anymore.”
“Come away with me next weekend and I’ll show you, step-by-step.”
Jess was waiting for me in the flat on Sunday evening after my weekend away with Max. She even rushed out and got
takeaway fish and chips, which we ate at the kitchen table, washed down by strong cups of coffee. “So? How did it go? I’ve been thinking of you all weekend.”
“Not at all as I expected.” I grimaced.
I explained that by the time Max came to collect me to drive me to the hotel in the Cotswolds, I was almost dizzy with desire. Spending the week fantasizing about being in bed with him meant that I couldn’t wait to get there and rip off my born-again celibate skin. In my mind, I had fully embraced the perks of having a fling with a younger man—mind-blowing sex with an energetic toy boy was bound to take me out of myself, wasn’t it?
As soon as we entered the hotel bedroom, I checked out the freebies in the bathroom—lovely lavender L’Occitane—then fingered the toweling robes to see how thick and soft they were—eight out of ten—and after a quick snoop in the minibar—they had those trendy vitamin water drinks—I stroked the cozy chenille throw as I lay back as alluringly as possible on the bed. Max smiled and sat beside me. “God, you’re really quite attractive,” he said.
“Don’t sound so surprised,” I teased.
He slowly traced the outline of my lips with his fingers and when I thought I was going to expire, he leaned forward and kissed me.
“It was one of those perfectly charged moments,” I told Jess, “because as he started to undress me, I felt sexy and safe and thin.” (I had given up wheat for the previous five days, so my stomach was unusually concave and I had splashed out on La Perla matching bra and pants. Not in overstated black but in statement dusty pink.) I closed my eyes and wallowed in the bliss of it all, waiting for it to happen. The kissing and cuddling continued . . . and continued. It was some time before I cottoned on that the whole thing had fallen rather flat, so to speak.
“You mean he couldn’t perform?” shrieked Jess, half laughing, half horrified.
“Yup,” I said. “After a while he sat up and copped to the fact that it wasn’t happening for him.”
“I hope you were sympathetic. Men get awfully oversensitive about erectile dysfunction.”
“Actually, I was furious. It wasn’t exactly a confidence boost, I can tell you. Although I tried not to show it, I thought, ‘Typical! Finally I feel ready for some serious action and not a (solid) sausage.’”
“Poor Max, what did he do?”
“Actually he redeemed himself because he was pretty cool about the whole thing. He went straight to the minibar and opened an expensive bottle of champagne. He then came back to bed with two glasses and told me that it was precisely because he was so keen on me that he couldn’t do it. He managed to laugh about the irony of wanting the weekend to be so perfect that he had ruined it. He said it had never happened to him before and I believed him. In the end, we really bonded, giggling about our completely chaste dirty weekend.”
“Most men would have gone into a terrible huff and you’d have had to spend the whole time placating them,” said Jess.
“The weird thing was that it made me find Max more attractive because he was able to laugh so openly at his shortcomings. I thought that was pretty sexy and mature.”
“So did you get there in the end?” asked Jess, banging her fist on the table.
“Yes, early the next morning. We were both half asleep and devoid of expectation. I think he was pretty relieved afterwards. And as it had been so long for me, I felt like I was losing my virginity all over again.”
“How was it?”
“Bloody fantastic,” I said.
9
Hook Ups
Not Hold Ups
Since I hadn’t seen Lucy for a while and felt guilty about living with Jess during this impasse in their friendship, I decided to surprise her with a visit. She hadn’t been answering my calls and I wondered if she saw my closeness to Jess as some sort of betrayal. I knew she was usually at home between three and four in the afternoon as that was her quiet time before the school run. I bought a large bouquet of white roses with green foliage and a box of sugary pink cupcakes for her girls and told Miles I’d be back in the bookshop in over an hour.
Lucy opened the door and seemed genuinely relieved to see me. We gave each other a warm, heartfelt hug. She took the flowers and said, “Thank you, but what’s all this in aid of?”
“Friendship,” I said. “I’ve missed you.” I went inside and the house felt different. Calmer. Things seemed to have changed. I didn’t remember seeing some of the modern art in the hall before.
Lucy led me to the kitchen and put the kettle on. Every where looked exceptionally tidy, as if everything was newly ordered and in control. The house felt emptier, yet less lonely than the last time I was there.
“Have you been redecorating?” I asked.
“More like major clutter-clearing.” Lucy came and sat opposite me at the kitchen table. She twiddled the diamond stud in one earlobe. “Daisy, Edward has finally left me. It’s over. For good.”
“Edward has left you? When?”
“A month ago.”
“A month ago?!” I repeated, shocked. “Why didn’t you tell me? Is this why you didn’t answer my calls?”
She looked around the room, as if buying time. When she spoke it was slow and deliberate, as if she had rehearsed herself many times. “I didn’t tell you because I needed time to digest it myself. Because I feared that you were getting compassion fatigue about my marriage ever since Edward’s affair. Because I am ashamed to admit that I am a single mother as it sounds so flaky. Because when he left, I was so ready for him to go that I’m not as upset as people expect me to be, and because I like the stillness in the house of the phone not ringing and of no one having to worry about me. It feels like I am living this private life and for the first time in years, after I’ve dealt with the children, I can fully concentrate on me.
“It’s funny, apart from hating the ‘single mother’ label and loathing the instant, slightly patronizing sympathy it elicits from my family, as if ‘poor thing, now she has to cope with all this on her own,’ there’s not one thing about Edward’s leaving that devastates me. Maybe I’m in a fog of denial or maybe it is because his moods had gotten so much worse than I allowed myself to register, but when he left, this time I felt nothing but overwhelming relief.”
I listened, barely able to move, as she went on. “He went after we had a row at four thirty in the morning because I had developed this nervous cough. I coughed in my sleep and he said I was deliberately trying to wake him. Suddenly it was like Vesuvius erupting. All this terrible pent-up pain and rage exploded and he leaped out of bed and said he ‘couldn’t do family anymore’ and that he wanted to leave. I told him to pack his stuff then and there, which he did. I threw black bin liners at him and while he hurled his stuff in them, I unloaded the dishwasher and then put up a load of white washing.”
When Lucy told me this, I thought about how it is the tiny, aching details of people’s lives that unite us and make us so frail and yet so strong, so human. Her husband was leaving her with two small children, and not knowing what else to do, she did the laundry.
“After he had gone,” she continued, “I lay down on the bed and felt this incredible calm. I didn’t cry, I just stared at the clock until it was time to wake the girls and take them to school. Then I went to a yoga class and my day continued as usual.
“The thing that I’ll never forget about Edward’s leaving is that once he had packed up the car, he came back into the house and went upstairs. I thought he was going to go and look at the girls sleeping and that then he would feel remorse or something—anything—so I followed him. But he went into the bathroom and put gel in his hair. Somehow that finished it for me. It was as if a portal to my heart closed and I looked at this man whom I once adored and thought, ‘You are nothing but a vain, spineless buffoon.’”
“Do you think Edward has someone else, since Susie, I mean?”
“I expect so,” said Lucy blandly. “Men usually leave because they do.”
I nodded. “Yes, women tend to tough it
out and learn to accept being alone, mainly because we are too hurt to contemplate getting close to anyone else, but men, driven by a terror they barely understand, always boomerang into someone else’s arms or into some grateful bint’s warm bed.”
Lucy smiled. “I should have told you before. I knew you’d understand.”
“Understand? I could write the screenplay.” I gave Lucy’s arm a reassuring squeeze. “I’ve never seen you more certain, Lucy, and I’m so proud of you. There’ll be moments of panic but I promise you, hope will far outweigh regret.”
I decided to take Lucy to a party to cheer her up. Due to the success of my self-help list at the bookshop, my popularity was ripe among alternative publishing types. I dragged Lucy to the talk and launch party of a new American author, Chad Peace, whose book, The Alchemy of Fate and Attraction, was riding high on the U.S. bestseller list. Lucy and I sat near the back and listened as Chad, a thin, remarkably suave, and attractive author clad in Gucci shoes and chunky oatmeal cashmere, spoke of the inner ache of loneliness that intermittently plagues us all. As he spoke, I kept nudging Lucy and whispering, “See, this is exactly what we needed to hear.” Ever skeptical, Lucy remained unmoved, but I couldn’t soak up his message fast enough.
Daisy Dooley Does Divorce Page 19