The Break

by Marian Keyes

  ‘Sounds so simple, but –’

  ‘– it’s the hardest thing ever. As for Kiara, she should be President of the World. Then I worry that everyone’s expectations might send her off the rails.’ I lapse into silent thought, while the wind gets up a bit. I’d like to go inside but Druzie is outdoorsy and doesn’t feel the cold. ‘Now I feel pitiful that my only goals are around my children. That’s nearly as bad as simply wanting Hugh to come back. I’m living through other people.’

  ‘You don’t want to be that woman. C’mon, Amy, put some thought into this.’

  I go down a couple of exploratory avenues and the best I can come up with is ‘I’d like to feel safe.’

  ‘And be thin?’ Druzie thinks wanting to be thin is utterly pathetic.

  ‘Says the woman who forgets to eat!’

  ‘Says the woman who works in war zones with starving people. But go for it, honey, indulge yourself.’

  I know it’s shallow, but … ‘Yeah, okay, and be thin. And have nice clothes and go on fabulous holidays with Hugh and live in an extremely beautiful house with a squad of invisible cleaners and gardeners and a man whose sole job is to fix small annoying problems, like loose light-switches and broken panes of glass, and I wouldn’t even have to ask him to do anything – he’d magically spirit himself around the house, making things right without me even knowing anything was wrong instead of standing before me and telling me all the reasons why he couldn’t fix it.’

  Druzie smiles. She can do all those things herself. But I’m on a roll now.

  ‘We’d have so many rooms in the house that I’d have my own to decorate exactly in my taste and I’d commission special wallpaper from artisans in Hungary or places like that – it would be an actual painting but on wallpaper, you know? And hand-embroidered curtains. And hand-embroidered cushions, not the same as the curtains because matchy-matchy is twee, but they’d be similar. Or maybe they’d actually clash, but in a strangely harmonious way.’

  ‘Strangely harmonious? Huh.’

  ‘And paintings. I’d buy every one of Dušanka Petrović’s paintings.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The mystery Serbian artist I’m obsessed by. We’d have a gym and a movie room and maybe a swimming pool … but what if we didn’t use it? I’m worried that after the initial thrill we wouldn’t, and then I’d feel guilty about the water being heated every day, and it would be like Elton John spending a fortune on flowers in all his homes, even when he’s not there, and this is a fantasy and it’s supposed to be enjoyable, but now it’s just making me anxious.’

  ‘What if Hugh doesn’t come back? Do you still want to be rich?’

  I swallow hard. ‘I might as well.’

  ‘But what use would all that money be, if you didn’t have Hugh?’

  ‘I know, right!’

  This long-running in-joke started when I was in post-Richie bitterness and she was in permanent pragmatic Druzie-ness. We used to scorn our sexist society for telling women they counted for nothing if they didn’t have a man on their arm.

  ‘Sad and all as your life is now, Amy,’ her tone is tragi-mocking, ‘it would be worse to be rich and single.’

  ‘Too right. Gold-digger men would prey upon me, young men who’d rain compliments down on my head.’

  ‘And because you’d had stuff injected into your face –’

  ‘– and could afford Simone Rocha dresses –’

  ‘– you’d believe them.’

  ‘But they wouldn’t love me at all! They’d have a real girlfriend –’

  ‘– or boyfriend.’

  ‘Or boyfriend. They’d propose marriage, but they’d only do it if we had a pre-nup giving them nothing.’

  ‘And because of you being a total idiot, you’d think this meant true love and you’d say, “No, no, we won’t have a pre-nup.” ’

  ‘Then I’d happily get spliced even though everyone – Derry, Neeve, even Kiara – was telling me that your man was a shyster.’

  ‘So your new husband fancies himself as a film director –’

  ‘Oh, yes! Love it. I’d finance a couple of vanity films, which starred his secret girlfriend –’

  ‘– or boyfriend.’

  ‘The films would be car-crashes and all the critics would mock me.’

  ‘Then you’d die in suspicious circumstances and they’d do a big piece about you in Vanity Fair.’

  ‘Which would be mortifying. And I’d be dead. And, bad as things are, I don’t want to be dead. I’m curious about how things will turn out. This is good, right?’

  33

  Friday, 23 September, day eleven

  ‘Hello, hello!’ Friday lunchtime, and Alastair struts in from London with his usual fanfare.

  Tim ends a call and says, ‘Give us a debrief and make it quick. I’m leaving at three.’

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘My wife is taking me to Paris for the weekend.’

  Both Alastair and I are stunned into silence.

  ‘That’s wonderful.’ I’m nearly sick with envy.

  Then Tim says, ‘Mrs Staunton’s just landed tickets for the rugby.’

  Aaaaah. My vision of a sexy, romantic weekend of rumpled sheets and luxury-macarooning, adorable little boutiques and flea-markets-full-of-vintage-Chanel vanishes. The rugby. Wouldn’t be for me.

  ‘Mrs Staunton loves rugby,’ Tim says. ‘Loves France. Nothing she likes better than sitting in a café on the Champs-Élysées sipping absinthe and smoking a cheroot.’

  You never know if Tim is joking or not.

  ‘Okay, maybe not a cheroot,’ he says. ‘Just a cigarette. Or twenty.’

  ‘Who’s minding your many children?’ Alastair asks.

  ‘Mrs Staunton’s parents. They command terror.’

  If they’re anything like their daughter, I can well believe it. Alastair and I have known Tim for donkey’s years but we’ve never bonded with Mrs Staunton. She’s always really, really busy and arrives late to everything, even the party we threw to launch Hatch. She doesn’t bother with niceties and she tends to the abrupt. When Alastair flirts with her she does perplexed frowns, as if he’s speaking Swahili (I must admit I admire that). And she doesn’t do that thing women usually do, where I show her handbag lots of love, then she does the same to mine, then I tell her she has great hair and she says it’s usually a disaster, but it’s not so bad since she got the sixteen-week blow-dry and so on.

  But she and Tim seem to knock along very nicely. Each to their own.

  ‘Would you get me some stuff in Sephora?’ I ask.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You don’t even know what Sephora is.’

  ‘Do you mind? I’ve a teenage daughter.’

  ‘I’ll do an email. You’d just have to show your phone to the lady – you wouldn’t even have to speak.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ah, Tim,’ Alastair says. ‘Have a heart. Poor Amy.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Amy, but Mrs Staunton has informed me she wants my undivided.’

  At three on the dot, Tim switches off his screen. ‘I’m away. Have nice weekends. See you Monday.’

  ‘Au revoir!’

  ‘Bonne chance!’

  ‘It’s the Marc Jacobs primer,’ I call after him. ‘Just in case.’

  Tim shakes his head in exasperation, then goes.

  ‘Lucky Tim,’ Alastair says.

  I check he’s properly gone before I say, ‘But he has to go to the rugby. I think I’d actually cry.’

  ‘And he has to go with Rosanna.’

  ‘She’s … God, she’s an odd one.’ We have this conversation regularly. ‘Definitely the alpha in that marriage.’ Then I add, ‘Fair play to her.’ Because, yeah, fair play to her. Woman. Surgeon. Five children. Taking her husband away for the weekend.

  ‘Mind you,’ says Alastair. ‘Tim is so cut-and-dried about everything, not everyone would put up with him.’

  ‘Ah, no!’ I’m not having it. ‘Tim is great. He’s so reliable, and
hard-working, and a good father and kind – he’s kind, Alastair. We’re lucky to have him. Him and Rosanna, okay, she’s not the most likeable, but it works for them.’

  ‘Is it the rule that the alpha doesn’t have to be nice to the beta’s colleagues?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know. Neither Hugh nor I is an alpha, neither of us earns enough …’

  ‘Amy? Hello? Amy?’

  Should I still be thinking of Hugh and me in the present tense?

  ‘Amy? Talk to me. Are you okay?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Seriously, are you okay?’

  ‘Yep.’

  34

  Sixteen months ago

  ‘… which brings us to our next award of the evening …’ Up on the stage the MC droned on. During the prize giving and the humble-brag acceptance speeches, these media award events were so bone-crushingly boring.

  If only they’d finish up so I could loiter in the general area of Josh Rowan’s table. But that was still a long way off, and if something nice didn’t happen inside my head soon, there was a real fear I’d go mental – a quick ten minutes in the powder-room on Asos might save me.

  ‘I’m going to the loo,’ I whispered to Alastair.

  My browsing would have been done right at the table if I wasn’t so afraid of giving offence to our hosts, the multi-media group who’d invited me, Tim and Alastair to this, the Press Awards.

  Alastair gripped my arm tight. ‘Make bloody sure you come back. Do not abandon me. No man left behind, right?’

  ‘Grand.’ With my head down, desperate to not make eye-contact and risk being shamed for leaving during someone’s proud moment, I scurried around the circular tables, heading for the Ladies, which was at the back of the ballroom, about half a mile away.

  The trick was to move speedily in a running crouch so as not to break people’s view of the stage. I’d just passed the invisible line where the rows of tables ended, feeling like a person who’d escaped from a cruel regime, when my head butted against someone’s chest. ‘Sorry,’ I muttered, already moving away.

  ‘Hey, Amy.’ My forearm was grabbed and I looked up. Christ alive, it was Josh.

  ‘Hi!’ I was suddenly breathless.

  It was almost four weeks, twenty-five days, to be precise, since the Premilla Routh interview, and in those twenty-five days I’d thought of him. Quite a bit. To be honest, it was bordering on mild obsession.

  A few days after I’d last seen him, he’d Instagrammed me a motivational platitude of exquisite awfulness. This had plunged me into a yin-yang state of thrilled shame and, after spending far too long deleting dozens of possible responses, I’d eventually replied with a smiling emoji and a single ‘x’. Immediately I followed him on Instagram and Twitter and, minutes later, he followed me.

  Another platitude arrived two days later. Then, after wasting far too long trying to find something special, I sent him one. Things ramped up, when I retweeted a video of a dog dancing to Wham! He retweeted it, then – obviously thinking this was my sort of thing, which it was – he sent me a GIF of cocker spaniels dressed up as penguins. Since then we’d been bouncing funny stuff across the Irish Sea, the jokiness undercut by the number of Xs we signed off with. We were now up to three.

  In the meantime we’d become Facebook friends. My digital stalking was under control during daylight hours, but late at night, when I’d had maybe a bit too much to drink, I’d sneak on to Facebook, both his and Marcia’s pages, just to see what was going on.

  They’d recently got a new puppy, a Labrador cross, that was proving a nightmare to train, but it was upbeat stuff: chewed shoes – hilaire! The legs of the chairs gnawed to bits – all the lolz!

  About two weeks ago, Marcia had installed a black wood-burning stove in their living room and, even though it was beyond me as to why anyone would want something so needy, she was ecstatic about it.

  Shortly after that, the whole family went skiing in Utah – I’d have thought Utah would be way too warm for skiing, but clearly I hadn’t a clue. There were tons of photos of the four of them kitted out in reflective sunglasses and padded snowsuits against a background of blinding snow; they’d seemed to be having a great time.

  That plunged me into lip-gnawing worry because you could never call me outdoorsy. But maybe Josh could do that with his male friends. Or, indeed, his sons. But, oh, God, I’d have broken up their happy home …

  And their home did look happy. Josh’s marriage seemed like a good one, and I’d find myself puzzling over the flirtiness, attraction, whatever it was, that had crackled between us.

  In my less insane moments I admitted he was probably just a shagger who was good at compartmentalizing. But thinking that way didn’t generate the sparky feels I’d become too fond of, and it felt far nicer to reconfigure the whole business into a wild, romantic fantasy.

  We had been certain to bump into each other tonight – we’d made a studiedly light and casual arrangement to find each other after the speeches. As a consequence, I’d gone to too much trouble with my hair and clothes. Indeed, earlier, before we’d entered the ballroom, Alastair had narrowed his eyes at me and said, ‘What’s with the knockers?’

  ‘I’m a woman,’ I’d said, a little haughtily. ‘I have breasts.’

  ‘Yeah, but …’

  I also had an arse and a stomach. ‘Let me look.’ I stood in front of the full-length mirror in the lobby and studied myself in the slippery bias-cut sheath. God, I was a bit bursty and not just in the chest region.

  ‘Seriously,’ Alastair said, ‘don’t you have a shawl thing?’

  There was a wrap back in my room but I didn’t want to be a woman who wore wraps. Or, worse still, a shrug. I wanted to be a defiant warrior woman, who strode about with bare arms and a straight back and an out-and-proud embonpoint.

  Tim had arrived, looking eleven years of age, in his neat black tux and black dickie-bow. ‘Tim, is this too much?’ I gestured in the general direction of my bosom and he gave an I’m-sorry-to-be-the-bearer-of-bad-news smile. Well, if Tim thought it …

  I’d returned to my room and the spirit-dampening wrap had accompanied me to the ballroom – but now Josh Rowan was standing looking at me, still holding on to my arm, and my wrap was miles away, slithering around on the back of my chair.

  ‘You look great.’

  ‘So do you! Very James Bond in your tux. Very Daniel Craig. Sorry, sorry.’ Apologetically I flapped a hand in front of my face. He didn’t look like Daniel Craig … well, not in his colouring, maybe a little in the uncompromising expression. I pulled him close and said into his ear, ‘I’m a bit pissed.’

  ‘That’s okay.’ He moved back enough, just so I could see his face. ‘So am I.’

  Together we said, ‘Only way to get through these things.’ Then we both laughed, quite long and quite hard.

  When the laughter had stopped and we were standing, smiling broadly at each other, I said, ‘You know something?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I have a room upstairs.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘You like to come up and join me there?’

  35

  Saturday, 24 September, day twelve

  ‘Hiiii!’ Bronagh Kingston greets me with a bright smile. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Yes, good!’ I exclaim. Is that positive enough? Maybe not. ‘Great!’ I say. ‘Top form! Yourself?’

  ‘Wow, you’re in a good mood.’ She laughs. ‘Have you had good news or something?’

  ‘Er …’ Oddly, I’m finding my downtime more challenging than work – especially having conversations with those who don’t know what’s going on between myself and Hugh.

  Bronagh had texted on Tuesday that she’d put aside tons of clothes for me. So, during the week, whenever the horror hit, I’d calm myself with the promise of gorgeous affordable clothes on Saturday. There seems, however, to be a gap between anticipated events and their reality. Bronagh is lovely but we’ve never crossed the line into the personal full-and-franks, so
talking to her is a surprising effort.

  ‘I’ve loads of great stuff to show you.’ With pride, she displays a heap of dead people’s clothes and, because my instinctive-response centre seems to have shut down, I’m having to manufacture my reactions. I’m aiming for positive but clearly my pitch is off because at one stage Bronagh says, with concern, ‘Are you okay, Amy? You seem a bit … manic?’

  Manic? Right. I’d better tone down the chirpiness. It’s hard to get the balance right – it’ll take trial and error, I guess. Well, I’ve six months (minus twelve days) to get it down. No doubt I’ll be pitch perfect by March.

  To apologize for my weirdness I buy too much, stuff I wouldn’t have shelled out for if my mind hadn’t been unhinged, and when I leave, whether it’s due to the waste of money or the loneliness of faking a bond with someone when it used to come naturally, I feel extremely low.

  From there I go to meet Steevie for a coffee. We made up during the week – a flurry of ‘Sorry’ and ‘No, I’m sorry’ and ‘No, I’m more sorry!’ But as I hurry across town, it’s clear that my bond with everyone is fragile. If Steevie mocks my bag of dead people’s clothes or if she tries to make me wish gonorrhoea on Hugh, I don’t think I can deal.

  There she is, at a window table in Il Valentino. She wanted us to have lunch but I’d asked if it could be something shorter, then had to speak at high speed to ameliorate her resentful silence with the admission that I’ve become prone to panic.

  ‘Even with me?’ She’d been hurt.

  ‘With everyone,’ I’d replied, which wasn’t entirely true.

  ‘Just since Hugh went?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Poor Amy. Fucking Hugh.’ She added, in a grim tone, ‘I hope he gets rabies of the dick.’

  But we get on fine, lovely even. I tell her about Genevieve Payne showing up with the casserole, and even though she’d already heard it from numerous sources, she wants my version. She laughs and laughs at Neeve saying, ‘Keep your casserole.’ Although the report that reached her ears was ‘You can stick your fucking casserole, lid and all, up your skinny arse, you piece of trash.’