by Claire Allan
“I didn’t have sex with anyone else,” he said.
“Did it not get that far?” I asked. “Was it only, you know, third base or whatever?”
“Kitty, you have lost the run of yourself.”
“You are one to talk, Mark!”
“I didn’t sleep with anyone else. I didn’t get to third base with anyone else, or second base, or first base for that matter. There is no ‘someone else’. I haven’t the first notion what you are talking about.”
“James told me. He told me you told him.”
“James? What?” He looked genuinely confused – genuinely thrown. There was not a hint of guilt, of back-peddling, of covering up in his demeanour.
“James told me. He said you had spoken when you came back from wherever it was you had run off to.”
Mark shook his head. “He told you that? Why would he tell you that? I didn’t . . . I never did . . .”
“He told me. He told me that there was someone and that you always had your doubts about me.” Saying the words brought the tears I had been hiding flooding forward.
“He wouldn’t do that. He’s my best friend. Why would he lie?”
I felt my stomach lurch. I thought of the big mistake I had made myself – the mistake I’d made with James who, if Mark was to believed, had been lying to me. James who, just a short while before I had been feeling so very sorry for. James who had made me feel guilty – but who had reacted with such anger when I told him I didn’t love him. Had we been pawns in his game? The thought winded me. I needed air – the room was starting to spin around me – so I got up and walked to the garden, not sure if Mark would follow me and not sure if I wanted him to. Where on earth did we go from here? It had been shattered – everything we had. If only he had told me – if only I had known. If only I hadn’t been so quick to trust James – to let him in. Christ, this was unbearable. If he was telling me the truth, it was me who had cheated. And if that was the case how on earth did I tell him?
I felt him behind me and felt him gingerly put his arms around me, clasping my hands and pulling me close.
“I messed up,” he repeated. “But I never stopped loving you. I’m sorry I said I did. I thought if I put enough distance between us, it would be okay – that I could move away. But I realised I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t just let you go. I don’t know what James is playing at – I just don’t understand, but please believe me.”
My heart, which I thought had been bruised and battered enough, lurched again.
“You shouldn’t have,” I said, still staring away from him. “You should have told me. Oh Mark . . .you don’t realise. I thought you were gone. I thought you had never really loved me – that you had been sleeping with someone in work – that you had been lying to me for months, for years even. And James . . . he was there. He was pushing his way in, filling my head with stories of how you didn’t care. I slept with him, Mark. Just once and I regretted it the minute it happened and I don’t want anything to do with him – even before now, even before knowing he was lying and I’m so sorry, so very sorry.”
His grip loosened and he turned and walked away. I stood in the garden and heard him storm through the house.
He turned to look at me just before he left, his eyes blazing: “I never, ever had doubts about you. Never for one second. And I swear to you on my life that I never so much as looked at another woman, never mind kissed another woman. I just messed up, Kit. I just couldn’t bear to let you down – and I was stupid and in some weird, horrible place and I needed space and some stupid part of me thought it would make it easier if I said I just had to go. If I had known, what would happen, what he was doing . . . The bastard.”
I listened as the front door slammed and his car door slammed, his engine turned on and he sped away and then I sat down, numb and exhausted. I sat there in the garden for a long time –I’m not sure how long exactly but the sun was starting to fade when I went in, and then resumed my sitting position on the sofa, staring into space and not knowing what the hell had just happened.I lifted my phone and texted James. Why did you lie about Mark? I typed and hit send, even though I already knew the answer.
Because I needed you more than he did, he replied and it all felt so horribly real and horribly wrong.
I woke on the sofa just as the sun was starting to rise. I noticed Mark was sitting beside me and my heart leapt and then it sank. He was awake, looking at me, watching me. I was suddenly concerned that, God forbid,I might have been drooling or otherwise making a god-awful eejit of myself by snoring or the likes.
“Mark,” I stated, as if he didn’t know his own name.
“You look so peaceful when you sleep,” he said, “I used to love to watch you. I know you might think that is a little, you know, mental . . . but, God, when I watched you sleep I fell in love with you time and time and time again.”
My heart sank with the words ‘I used to’.
I sat up and looked at him. My eyes were still heavy with sleep. My heart still heavy with longing and with regret.
“I did this,” he said, “All of this. I should have known . . . I should have thought. James, he was always in love with you. I knew that. I just thought we were so strong that it never would be an issue. It never crossed my mind . . . That bastard.”
He looked away and I didn’t know where to put myself.James was at fault but maybe I was too. Maybe it was down to Mark. Poor, messed-up Mark. Poor messed-up me. Poor messed-up us.
“I loved you,” I said “I love you. I just thought you had given up on us.”
“I’m sorry,” he said again and I found myself reaching for his hands, revelling in feeling the warmth of his skin on mine. God, I had missed his touch. I missed how we fitted. And we were here, holding onto each other by the very tips of our fingers but wanting more.
“I’m so sorry too,” I said and pulled him into a hug – a hug that felt so right, but also felt sovery bittersweet.Where would we go, where could we go, from here?
Chapter thirty-six
Erin
What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?
I typed the title five times . . . and deleted it five times.
There clearly was not going to be any further ‘Countdown to the Big Day’ articles. Nope, they, like me, were on the scrap heap.But we couldn’t just leave it hanging there, Sinéadhad said. We needed to give our readers closure, she said. I had smiled weakly and nodded, noting the sympathetic expression from Grace who had come with me when I broke the bad news to Sinéad that her proposed advertising revenue was about to go down the pan.
“I know it would easy to walk away from it all now, Erin,” Sinéad said. “But you never know, you might find it cathartic and it might help others going through this to cope better.”
I wasn’t overly concerned about helping others cope better. I just wanted to get through this myself.
In the end he hadn’t taken a week to get his affairs in order. He had just gone, back to his mother’s house, picking up his belongings – or most of them – while I was at work. Two days after the big departure I had received an email from crazy Fiona the wedding planner to say she was very sorry to hear our wedding would not be going ahead and that she had enjoyed working with us – and of course she was there to meet any other grand big-function demands but that sadly our deposit was non-refundable.
That made it real. If he had been joking or messing or being a hysterical diva he would not have gone ahead and cancelled the wedding. I had forwarded the email to Jules, who had emailed back with a mixed, confused message about how he was a bollocks (a bad choice of words, I thought) and how she was so, so sorry and she had hoped it wouldn’t come to this and that her heart was breaking for me, and for Paddy.
Thus followed a series of emails from suppliers. The car hire company, the photographer, the florist. The cake-maker asked, bizarrely, if I still wanted the layer of cake which was traditional wedding cake as it had been made anyway. “It would be a shame to see it go to was
te,” she said but I could think of nothing less appealing that sitting at home staring at the cake that should have been. And besides, I didn’t even like wedding cake.
Each email was a jolt. Sometimes I cursed at the screen and clicked delete as soon as I could. Sometimes I read the messages over and over, trying to get reality to sink in.
Two days had passed when Paddy had got in touch himself, also by email. I sat shaking at my desk, acutely aware that all around me things were going on as normal and I had, workwise at least, pretty much been burying my head in the sand and talking to no one.The great wedding-dress fashion shoot was looming and I couldn’t bring myself to tell anyone how awful that would be – until he sent me the email.
It was short and to the point.
I’ve done as much as I can. You need to sort out your wedding dress and all. I can’t believe it has ended like this but perhaps it is for the best, before either of us got hurt anymore.
I read the last sentence over and over and looked atthe engagement ring still on my finger and I couldn’t believe what I had thrown away . . . what we had thrown away.
Telling Grace had been easier than I thought. She allowed me to cry. She even offered to drive me back to the beach. She listened and soothed and never once said it was for the best, or that time would heal or any such cliché. She just allowed me to feel what I needed to feel in that moment without trying to make it better or rationalise it in some way. She did say we had been tested more in the last year than many couples are tested in a lifetime. I simply wondered if we had fallen at the first hurdle.
Telling Sinéad, well – that was an experience and I left with the instructions to write a final article. I didn’t absolutely one hundred per cent have to do it, she said, but I knew that what that really meant was I did absolutely and entirely have to do it. If I wanted to stay in her good books.
“Go home. Take the rest of the day off,” she said. “Think about it. You might grow to like the idea.”
Grace smiled sympathetically in my direction and also nodded at me to go on home. Given that I felt about as fragile as a china doll, I did not need telling again. I just went to my desk – closed down my computer to stop the arrival of any further gut-wrenching emails – and walked out to the car park. But before I could go home, there was one more thing I had to do.
The Dressing Room looked as stunning as it ever did. The sun was shining brightly, a gentle breeze causing the wisteria to sway. The brass door handles were gleaming, the sash windows sparkling. I thought of all the brides who walked in, filled with expectation, giddy with excitement or nerves or both. I wondered how many came back to fulfil the task I was about to. How many wedding dresses were left on the shelves, how many dreams came crashing down? Pushing open the door I saw Kitty standing at the cash desk, diligently filling in paperwork and singing along quietly to a song on the radio.
At the sight of Kitty, in the shop where I had faced my wedding-dress demons and found a dress I loved and which I knew Paddy would love me in, I felt any modicum of resolve not to cry again weaken.
She looked up to me and smiled, just in time for my façade to crumble entirely.
“I’m so sorry,” I mumbled. “It’s off. And I don’t need the dress. And I’m so sorry.”
Before my sentence was finished she was beside me, hugging me and ushering me upstairs,away from the public shop floor, and into the privacy of her office and workroom. Rose was there, but as soon as she saw me she nodded to Kitty and said she would go downstairs and keep an eye on things.
“It’s okay,” Kitty said.
“I’m so sorry,” I repeated – feeling that sorry was the only thing I needed to or could say. “I’m just so sorry.”
Kitty was wonderful. She assured me that I wasn’t the only bride who ever came to her with this sorry task. “It’s harder for you than it is for me,” she smiled. “Please feel no need to apologise to me.”
I thanked her and took her offer of a cup of tea, which I drank while trying to regain my composure. As I drank and she sat close to me, chatting idly, I noticed two tourists walk along the city walls. An elderly couple – American, I would guess by the baseball caps, rain coats and chinos – they stopped periodically to look from the ramparts over the city and each time they stopped, they stood side by side. He would place his arm around her shoulder and she would wrap her own arm around his waist and they would stand and chat for a while, before kissing each other gently, laughing and moving on.
“Do you think that’s the exception?” I asked her, nodding towards the Americans on the wall.
“What?” she asked.
“The happy ending? The happy ever after? The growing old with someone you love? You see a lot of romance here, Kitty – what do you think?”
She looked wistfully at the couple as they continued on their way, walking up towards St Columb’s Cathedral.
“Honestly? I think we don’t know anyone’s back story. We don’t know what they have been through to get to this point. We don’t know how any of our stories will turn out – but we have to trust our gut.”
“Do you trust your gut?”
She laughed. “My gut has led me up a few wrong paths lately. I think it was on the blink, but it’s telling me to give things a go – to try and make my own relationship work. I’m going to give my gut one last chance. What does your gut tell you?”
“That I don’t want this to be over,” I said, simply.
“Then give it one last throw of the dice,” she said.
What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?
Did you ever hear the story of the woman who was scared? The woman who was so scared of getting hurt that she ended up hurting herself more than she could have imagined.
It’s a pretty sad story. It doesn’t end well. It started with a kiss, and a relationship and a proposal which I knocked back. And another proposal that I knocked back. Because I was scared, you see. Of being hurt. Because I had been hurt before and even though I knew he was different – this new man in my life – I was afraid a wedding would break us.
In the end though – cancer broke us. Or I broke us. Or maybe a combination of both – or maybe a whole host of things.But as I write this, we are broken. The man I love and I have parted. Parted is such a nice word for what, essentially, is ahorrendous situation.
You see the man I love, he’s on this page, in this picture looking at me and smiling. I’m smiling, a wee bit gormlessly it has to be said, back at him. I see that picture, taken just weeks before everything went wrong and I can’t believe I’m even writing this. We are in love. You don’t look at someone like that if you are not head over heels in love with them.
So where did it go wrong? Was it the cancer diagnosis? Probably not. I think maybe it was because we assumed it wouldn’t change us. We decided early on we would be one of those sickeningly twee couples who were made so much stronger by the experience. I agreed, finally, to get married. I knew I couldn’t personally cure his cancer but I could do something to help. For a lot of people that would have been making chicken soup and reminding their loved one to take their meds – for me it was agreeing to the biggest, grandest day of our lives.
And we kept up this façade. Laughing in the face of cancer – mocking it in the way it had mocked us. We pretended we were fine. We adopted a keep calm and carryon mentality – showing no fear. We marched forward with our wedding plans, a big day, a big dress – champagne, party, tearful vows.
We stopped talking to each other about how we really felt. The relationship we had, where we could share every fear, every worry, every foible in each other’s life disappeared. We walked on eggshells. Afraid to talk, afraid to argue. At times we were afraid to touch each other – to laugh with each other. We were afraid to be honest with each other. The fear just won, every single day. And we thought we were okay because what was so wrong became what we were and we didn’t know how to get out of it.
In the end – if this is the end – we broke up. We parted (
that awful word again). Did the fear win? Did the cancer win?
There are people out there, I know, who think putting your life out there for everyone to see is asking for trouble. But I’m here – and I have trouble anyway. My heart is broken – broken in a way that it never has been before. Because, despite all we have been through, all that we have been put through, I still love him. I love him so much that I’m prepared to take this chance knowing that I may fall flat on my face. Knowing that there might not be enough glue in the entire world to piece us back together again. But I can’t stop trying. Just because it gets hard. You can’t walk away. I’m done with being scared and I’m done with walking on eggshells. I am in love with a man I want to spend the rest of my days with. A man I want – need – to marry. A man who I know can make me laugh for the rest of our days, however long that may be.I want to walk the city walls with him – holding hands, smiling and chatting. I want to walk with him forever.
I’ve titled this article ‘What Becomes ofthe Broken Hearted?’ – I don’t have an answer yet. I don’t know what will become of us – but this is it. A throw of the dice – and a hope that things will work out.
I hit the save key, and then the print key. I walked to the printer, lifted out two copies of the article and walked into Grace’s office, placing one on her desk and then walking into Sinéad’s office and placing one on her desk. The cards were dealt now. I would just have to see how they fell.
Chapter thirty-seven
Kitty
Wedding season was all but done but we still had enough to keep us busy. Mostly, things had gone smoothly for us that summer – there had been relatively few crises (for the business, that is).
Today had the potential to be the biggest crisis of all though. My mother was marrying her beloved Charles. She was already near-hysterical with nerves when I arrived at her hotel room that morning with her dress and flowers.