She accepted his explanation, but still, she wondered about it, after he’d slid his phone into his briefcase, kissed her fleetingly on the lips and left the house. He had a very important meeting that day: he was high up in oil. They’d met when he’d been further down in oil and Grace had worked in the millinery department at John Lewis in Oxford Street.
The photo wasn’t especially porn-y. The breast wasn’t edged in black lace or peeping out of red PVC. It didn’t look sensational enough to be something shared over and over, however pervy and childish the men were. It looked like a real woman’s breast, on a real woman’s bed; it looked personal. But, she’d really wanted to believe him. She liked a quiet life. Her, James and Daniel. The three of them. She was desperate to believe him and for life to carry on as normal.
So it had. For four days she’d bought it.
Until this morning. Way before her alarm was supposed to go off so she could wake Daniel for football, Grace had been woken by a random truck clattering down the road. She couldn’t get back to sleep so lay there for a while. James was sound-o. Over his sleeping body she could see his phone on his bedside table. He’d been a bit funny with that phone since the breast episode – protective. He’d even started taking it into the bathroom with him.
She’d got up and, careful to avoid all the annoying creaks in their new-build floorboards, had tiptoed round to his side of the bed and picked it up. She knew his password, tapped it in and swiped. There was a message on the screen.
Bleach!
Bleach? How strange. What did that mean? And who would send that? His mother? Why? James didn’t clean – and neither did his mother, actually. Was it a random message sent by mistake?
Then she saw it was from ‘Work’.
Her heart pounding, she clicked open the message thread. From the top of the screen, in their jaunty speech bubbles, the messages went like this:
Great night on Thursday!
Mmm. Great, great night! Thank u
Did you get that gravy off your blouse?
Blouse? When was I wearing a blouse? ;-)
At dinner, sexy!
Oh yes I remember! Briefly. Yes, I managed to get it off.
With a lot of scrubbing? Friction?
Funny. Ha.
Then in the same grey reply bubbles:
No.
Bleach!
James stirred in his sleep, made one of his little noises. Grace carefully placed his phone back on the bedside table, walked into the en-suite bathroom and quietly threw up.
When she’d staggered back into the bedroom, her face red, her eyes bloodshot, her hands shaking and an awful taste in her mouth, she’d paced, left to right, right to left. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. This couldn’t be happening. This couldn’t be happening.
This was happening.
She’d sat on the bed, on James’s feet.
‘Ow!’
‘Wake up.’
He harrumphed, turned over and pulled the duvet over his head.
‘Wake up!’
‘What?!’
‘Wake up, NOW!’ She was hissing; she didn’t want to wake Daniel.
Reluctantly, James sat up. Grace shoved the phone and the messages in his face.
‘You’re having an affair.’
He actually snorted! It turned into a cough. He ran the back of his hand across his mouth.
‘What! You’ve well got the wrong end of the stick! That’s just a client I went out for dinner with. Just a random client.’
‘A random client you call sexy?’
‘For God’s sake. That’s just a turn of phrase! Business speak.’
‘Sexy is not a turn of phrase!’ she snarled, in a terrified whisper. ‘Come on, James! I’m not a bloody idiot! I suppose rubbing and friction is some business jargon, too! Was it an all-hands meeting? Did you have an ideas shower? She said her blouse was off! You’re shagging her!’
His head was lowered. He wouldn’t look at her.
‘That was her breast,’ she said quietly.
‘What breast?’
‘You’re unbelievable, James. The breast on your phone.’
‘Oh, that.’
‘Yes, that!’
He shrugged. ‘A tit’s a tit,’ he said. His hair was all sticking up and he had a five o’clock shadow. She used to find it endearing. Now she just hated him.
It was typical of the sort of thing he always said, with that cheeky, handsome smile of his. Tits are just tits; there’s no harm in looking; more than a handful is a waste (although considering the size of Work’s, he didn’t stand by this sentiment). She was appalled to realise that she actually used to find it funny when he spoke about women like that. Everyone did. He was a good bloke was James, a laugh. If he said things like that, people just shrugged and smiled. He could get away with it. He was a top man. The best.
Grace had had a lot of boyfriends; she was one of those girls who always had a boy waiting in the wings. They were all okay, nothing special. Not quite good enough for her. Then James had come along. He was special. Tall and dark blond and ridiculously handsome. Funny and brilliant and surrounded by adoring people – his mum, his brothers and sisters, his work colleagues. Everyone she met when she was with him told her what a great guy he was: she was surprised he didn’t receive applause just for walking down the street. She had thought, yes, at last. James was special. James deserved her; at last there was somebody who did.
That was all gone now.
‘A tit – God I hate that word – is not just a tit! I want you to admit it, James.’ James was ruffling his sticky-up hair like Stan Laurel, but he still looked unruffled, unaffected. ‘So I can kick you out. Have you been sleeping with someone: yes or no?’
‘What?’ He turned his baby blues directly towards hers. Those eyes with the eyelashes that were longer than hers. Those eyes she had stared into on their wedding day and seen everything in.
‘Yes or no? Tell the truth. I’ll respect you more.’
Another hair ruffle. Was he about to do the Stan Laurel whimper? Unlikely. He wasn’t the whimpering kind. He tried to turn on his age-old charm. He smiled his slow, sexy smile and narrowed his eyes. ‘If I tell you the truth would there be a chance I don’t have to go?’
‘Yes.’
He paused, then said, ‘Okay, then it’s true. I’m bang to rights. Sorry, Grace.’ And his winning smile became a pleading smirk, one that always made her stomach flip and made her forgive him anything. Not now. She felt like she’d been punched in the gut. She would have collapsed onto the bed next to him if she could bear to be that close. She would never put her body that close to his again.
‘I lied,’ she said. ‘You have to go. Now.’
She knew he would have loved to slam the back door as he left, but he chose not to let the entire neighbourhood know he was highly displeased. He was all about appearances, our James. And Grace had to keep up hers.
She’d had to swallow down the tears she wanted to cry her heart out with and take Daniel to Sunday football.
That evening, after the football kit had been washed and tumble-dried and Daniel had gone to bed with his iPad, Grace put love in the bin. Large cream, wooden letters that spelt L.O.V.E. to be exact. They used to sit on the mantelpiece in the living room, when love had meant something. Along with them she dumped a wooden plaque that said LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE and a slate heart that had hung in the kitchen on the wall by the fridge that said MR and MRS. It left a lighter, heart-shaped space on the paintwork. She frowned; she’d have to touch that up.
The lid of her posh, soft-close bin settled back into place and she opened the fridge and took out a bottle of wine. She wasn’t much of a drinker, but tonight she needed wine. She’d stopped off at the Co-op on the way home from football to get some while Daniel had waited in the car. A glimpse of herself in the reflection of the shop’s chiller door had horrified her. It was a catastrophic hair day. Really bad. The wind on the football pitch had whipped her thick,
blonde curls into an unruly bush. A cowlick bounced on her forehead. James liked her hair; he always said it was cute. Bastard. Maybe she’d straighten it now; maybe she’d iron out everything James had ever liked about it.
She stood by the fridge and poured some of the bottle into the glass ready and waiting on the worktop, and her eye caught her calendar. It had three columns, one for James, one for her, one for Daniel. She used three different coloured pens for each of them, perfect and precise.
She quite liked it when her friends called her ‘Princess Grace’. They didn’t mean it nastily; she wasn’t princess-y: she didn’t have pouting hissy fits and expect people to bring her cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off, on velvet cushions or anything, nor was she a J-Lo style demanding diva. But she did like kitten heels and pale pink nail varnish, cashmere cardis and pretty ballerina flats. She never overdid her make-up or wore tarty clothes. She liked small, delicate stud earrings. She would be horrified at anything remotely Pat Butcher. She was a princess but not princess-y: if she had the perfect life she had worked hard to get it.
She believed in morals. She believed people got what they deserved. Her favourite book, as a child, was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and she knew exactly what Roald Dahl was saying. Good children were given chocolate factories; awful children got what was coming to them. Follow the path; toe the line.
She took a pair of scissors from the kitchen drawer, carefully cut off James’s column from the calendar and threw it in the bin. The calendar was now lopsided so she took some Blu-Tack and glued the drooping corner to the back of the kitchen door. Then she took the green pen from her neat pen pot and threw that into the bin as well.
She was done. With James. With men. If James, the very best man of all, had turned out to be a traitor, a hurter, a destroyer, then there would be no more men for her. H.O.M.E as declared in big letters on the wall of her living room was now just about her and Daniel.
Men were a mistake. A big mistake.
And no man would ever hurt her again.
Chapter Four: Imogen
Imogen fastened the buckles of her favourite, perilously high ankle boots and admired her legs in the mirror. She had dressed carefully for tonight. Okay, she was only having Frankie and Grace over for drinks and nibbles, but she liked to make an effort at all times. She liked skirt-ready legs, shiny hair and foxy make-up; it was just the way she’d always been. She smoothed down her black pencil skirt, flicked a silver cuff high up on her toned, bare arm and made her way downstairs.
She’d been looking forward to this night for days. Ever since the Dave Holgate incident. And especially now her friends were manless, too. She’d been really surprised, when she’d phoned up Frankie to tell her about Paris, with lots of exaggeration thrown in she knew would make her laugh, to learn that Frankie’s Rob had just moved out.
‘Really?’ Imogen had said. ‘I know he’s a lazy git, but I didn’t think you’d ever do anything about it.’
‘Yep,’ Frankie had replied. ‘He’s gone. I kicked him out on Tuesday night. And I feel amazing.’ Indeed, Imogen noted, there was a lightness to Frankie’s voice she had not heard for a long time.
Frankie was one of Imogen’s oldest friends. They’d grown up together just a few streets from where they both lived now, Chelmsford in Essex, a surprisingly pretty place to live and not too stereotypically Essex… People didn’t go round in orange tans and inflated lips shouting ‘ream!’ and ‘I ain’t done nuffin!’ at each other. They’d gone to the same town-centre primary school and remained friends despite going to different secondary schools – Frankie to a St Philomena’s, an all girls’ school that sounded like St Trinian’s and which she travelled to on a riotous bus, in a rolled-up skirt; Imogen to the dull and grey local comprehensive, which she walked to in sensible buckled shoes. Frankie had run amok and not got a lot done. Imogen had been a right little swot and excelled. But throughout it all, they remained thick as thieves.
They reminisced all the time about their teenage years. The things Frankie got up to at school. The way Imogen would refuse to open the door to her when she was revising. The summer nights they spent in a tent in Frankie’s garden, scoffing still-warm cakes dripping with melted butter icing that they’d baked super quietly at midnight.
After school Imogen had gone off to London to fly high in an exciting career and Frankie had packed away her hitched-up skirt to muddle along as a secretary at the local technical college, before marrying local guy Rob, who’d been in the sixth form at Imogen’s school.
Imogen had reluctantly moved back to Chelmsford two years ago, when her mum got ill. There was a new build for sale a few doors from Frankie’s 1930s semi and walking distance from her mum, who had never moved. Encouraged by Frankie, Imogen bought it. She was momentarily worried when she found out Frankie already had a really good friend in the street, Grace, who dared to be younger than them, but thankfully Grace turned out to be absolutely lovely and really great company.
They became the three of them, and they talked about everything. So when Frankie told Imogen on the phone that Grace was also now single, having kicked her husband out for being unfaithful, Imogen had called a summit meeting – in other words, a huge gossip, with loads of wine.
‘I’d love that,’ Grace had said, in a wobbly voice, when Imogen had knocked on her door before work one morning to invite her. ‘It’s ages since we’ve had a night together.’
‘Far too long,’ Imogen had replied. ‘Bring a bottle. I’m going to get loads of snacks in. Let’s see if we can’t cheer you up.’
Female company was all Imogen craved at the moment. She’d avoided men, as an entire species, since she’d dropped Dave off at the Gatwick Express and sent him on his way without so much as a peck on the cheek. She’d have booted him up the backside, if she could. What an absolute loser he was. She was literally glad to see the back of him, as he trundled his stupid suitcase up the pavement away from her to the taxi rank, in his stupid slightly too-short jeans and his stupid try-hard navy blazer, with his stupid thinning hair flapping in the breeze. He’d even been so thick-skinned as to say, ‘Call you later, babes,’ before he’d ambled off, despite her telling him it was over and she didn’t want to see him again. Honestly, some men were so thick!
Indeed, he’d called her, at work the next day, as though nothing had happened.
‘Oh, Dave,’ she’d said. ‘I’m going to have to be blunt. It was fun – well, some of it – but frankly, you’re a bit of a tosser. Don’t phone me again. Goodbye.’
And that was the last man she’d spoken to all week. She usually chatted to men at work – there weren’t many, admittedly; she was currently temping for a small TV production company and most of the people in the office in West London were women – but any she came into contact with, she now avoided. If someone approached her at the water dispenser, say, Tom the IT guy, or Robin, the new runner, she smiled politely and walked away. Did not engage in conversation. Did not compute. Her flirt button, usually highly active, was switched off. She stopped browsing LinkedIn for eligible bachelors who worked in the city. And she became aloof and full of disdain towards the builders on the street outside her office.
She usually loved the attention; she was forty, she lapped up wolf whistles where she could get them. Now she crossed the street and kept her head down. They could all sod off. She’d had enough of all of them. She was done with men; down with men, the works.
‘Heels?’ Frankie was at the door, looking bemused. She was wearing skinny jeans, knee-high boots and a longish floaty, cream top under her coat that Imogen recognised as All Saints. Frankie had had it for years, though it hadn’t had an outing for several. ‘We’re not going out anywhere, are we?’
‘Nope,’ said Imogen. ‘I just wanted to wear them. You know I get depressed if I’m not in heels.’
‘I know.’ Frankie smiled. ‘Well, can I come in? I’ve got the password.’ She held up a bottle of White Zinfandel.
They’d lov
ed the Secret Seven as kids. They particularly loved the whole secret password thing. They’d always had them, especially for getting in the tent. Silly ones like ‘bottoms’ and ‘Andrew Grant’, an annoying boy at school, were hilariously employed as one of them ‘knocked’ and the other had control of the zip. Now, the passwords were in the form of wine or chocolate.
‘Of course! Seeing as it’s you. Come on, Grace!’ yelled Imogen, suddenly. Grace was coming out of the modern house opposite and walking down her drive. Imogen had seen her there earlier, saying goodbye to Daniel when James had come to collect him for the weekend. She had looked inconsolable.
‘I’ve got gin,’ said Grace, brandishing a bottle as she approached. Imogen knew she was trying her best to sound cheery.
‘Good girl!’ said Imogen. ‘I’ve got the ice and a slice.’
Grace joined Frankie on the doorstep. Style-wise, she looked great. Perfect. Pretty. White skinny jeans, a fluffy, faux-fur jacket, and jewelled ballet flats. Her face told a different story. Her eyes were dull and hollow-looking and her expression was haunted.
In contrast, Frankie’s face looked open; her eyes bright, her complexion clear. Rob had all four children tonight and for the first time ever he had them for the whole weekend, Frankie had told Imogen with excited delight, when she’d invited her over. She had laughed merrily and trilled, ‘I’m free! Free as a bloody bird!’
Imogen was glad. Frankie had been so damn angry recently, but now the frown line ‘11’ at the top of her nose had gone. Imogen hugged both her friends fiercely.
‘Okay, my love?’ she said to Frankie, after releasing herself from Frankie’s enthusiastic embrace. ‘Missing the children?’
‘Not yet!’ Frankie replied, breezily. ‘Let’s get this party started!’ she sang, in an American accent, and she headed into Imogen’s hall, holding the wine aloft like a bayonet.
‘And are you okay?’ Imogen asked Grace, who was still hovering uncertainly on the doorstep.
‘I’m getting there, sweetie,’ said Grace, with a brave smile. Imogen linked her arm through hers.
Year of Being Single Page 3