by Daisy Tate
She looked at her husband. Smiling. Pleading really. He looked lost. Her very own Peter Pan about to walk the plank.
She’d trusted him.
She remembered her mother once saying a strong marriage was strong because of all the little chips and nicks it had endured through the years. That somehow, with trust and love, those chips and nicks healed and grew stronger.
She didn’t want her family to be destroyed because of money. So. ‘You’ll be more honest in the future? Talk to me. Properly?’
Relief softened Monty’s anxious features. Eased the hunch in his shoulders. Glassed over his eyes. ‘Absolutely. With every fibre of my being.’ He craned his neck, looking past her to where their children had just disappeared down the zip line. Her eyes snagged on his profile.
Monty was the love of her life. She didn’t want to hate him. But there was an increasingly large chance they would be homeless if things carried on as they were.
‘C’mere.’ He took her small hand in his big old wide ones. The hands he’d used to build all of the cupboards in their kitchen. Her shed in the back garden. The one who kept everything going while she went on research trips to meet new suppliers. The ones that had bathed the children while she sat late into the night making new designs. They were softer now than they’d been back when he’d been their resident Monts the Builder. He’d been happier then. More charged with purpose. He led her to a weathered picnic table that overlooked the sprawling vista. They sat down, side by side, both of her hands in both of his. He kissed her fingertips then put them back in her lap.
‘I know I cocked up. I should’ve been honest with you. I should’ve got a job years ago when the kids started school. Used my degree. Sold some photos. Sold that bloody microbrewery kit.’ He pressed his hands between his knees and they both stared as the blood drained from his thumbs. Then he looked her straight in the eye. ‘I was ashamed, Frey. You work so hard for us. I know your dreams aren’t being fulfilled, at least in the way you thought they might be, but I guess I just … I’d hoped having the kids and me was enough. And we’re all so used to you being the capable one. The one who sorts everything out. I’m not like that. I don’t have it in me to do what you do.’
Freya wanted to protest. Wanted to remind him how bloody brilliant he would’ve been as a lawyer. He was so passionate. So intelligent. So caring.
Was that what he was doing now? Laying out his case before her? Both judge and juror of how their marriage would continue?
‘I’m going to talk to my parents,’ Monty said. ‘See if I can get a loan.’ He held up his hands because he knew how Freya felt about borrowing money. Especially from his family. ‘And I’m going to get a job.’
Her eyes popped wide open. ‘Seriously?’
She’d heard that one before.
‘Yes. Absolutely. Let’s make some changes. The kids are old enough to start helping out round the house a bit more. I can dust off the old CV. We’ll all muck in. We’ll do this. Together. As a family.’
She wanted to say yes. Wanted to believe him. But … ‘I just …’ Oh, blimey, it was so many things. Trust. Fear. Control. They were all big issues with her. Holding them tight was so much easier than letting go. But had that been part of the problem? Had she held so tight to her dream of running a shop that she’d cornered Monty into being something he wasn’t? What if he’d taken that law job? Or a corporate one like his mum had wanted? Would she be the stay-at-home mum? Buying bits of fabric with her pin money, trying to steal the odd free hour to put together a frock to sell on Etsy? Perhaps that’s why all of Monty’s projects had gone wrong. He was so busy looking after them, he genuinely had no time to make a success of himself. Who knew? They both might be where they’d wanted now if they’d chosen his path and not hers.
Was there not one path wide enough for both of them?
‘C’mere, babe.’ Monty pulled her into his arms. Arms she had always been powerless to resist. Today she sat rigidly, desperately counting down the seconds until he let go.
‘We can’t live like this any more,’ she said as she eventually extracted herself from the never-ending hug.
‘I know, babe. I know.’
Their names were called to go up to the zip-line platform.
She knew he would try to change. He always did. It never worked but at least he tried. Had she? Or each time something like this cropped up, had she simply popped on some blinkers and soldiered on, waiting for him to one day catch up with her vision of who she wanted him to be? The male version of a power woman.
Maybe being strapped to him for a kilometre-long zip ride would do the trick.
‘You two ready for the ride of your life?’ the guide asked enthusiastically.
‘Bring it on!’ Monty rubbed his hands together and held out his hand. ‘Ready to hurtle yourself out into the great unknown with me?’
Freya thought for a nanosecond then said, ‘No. I think I need to do this one alone.’
Charlotte was a bit shell-shocked at how swiftly her real life had pierced through the new-found strength she thought she’d channelled over the past few days.
They’d lost signal for a bit on the drive up, and here, at the top of the quarry, a flurry of messages had pinged in. The first one was from Oli. He’d been held up getting the paperwork together but it should be with her in the next few days. One from Jack with a solitary question mark. Then seven from Poppy. All asking to come home.
They knew about the divorce.
Oliver had told them. By text.
He’d not waited for them to come home. Not rung to form a ‘party line’. Nothing. So she did something she hadn’t done in a very long time. Followed her instinct. After a tearful ‘why is this happening to me?’ talk, and a lengthy conversation with Poppy’s head of year, Charlotte had booked her daughter on the next flight home. If all went according to plan, and there was no reason why it shouldn’t, Charlotte would be holding her baby girl in her arms by the end of the day. Half of her was terrified she wouldn’t know what to do, the other half was desperate to reclaim the love and respect she feared she’d lost.
‘You all right there, love?’
She looked at the safety instructor and, for one mad moment, considered saying, ‘No. No, I’m not all right. My husband’s left me for another woman. She’s pregnant. By him. At least I presume so. He’s also told our children we’re splitting up, which he’d promised not to do. I think my daughter’s being bullied and that my son’s respect for me is subterranean, but other than that … things are tickety-boo, ta.’
She didn’t of course. She smiled, said she was fine and watched as the lean, corded muscles of his arms stretched and lengthened while he triple-checked the multiple ropes and clips she was attached to. His arms reminded her of Rocco. Freya’s brother was a much larger man, of course. Taller. Not fat. Not at all. Just … capable. One of those men who, given a few minutes, could tinker about with anything and fix it. A tractor. A cow with a dislocated shoulder. A broken heart.
‘Safety’s off!’
She bent her knees and felt her weight being taken by the double sets of cables and the thick harness. She barely heard the guide doing a swift countdown as he eased her towards the edge of the platform, her heart pounding so hard she couldn’t make out what he was saying to her. It didn’t matter now. She was flying!
Arms spread wide, she was soaring towards the woodlands. For the first time in she didn’t know how long, she let all of her thoughts and worries glide away.
Her broken marriage. Her children’s swithering loyalties. The fact she didn’t know how long she’d be living in her house. There was nothing she could do about anything over the next ten minutes. No cakes to bake. Shirts to press. Appearances to maintain. It was an extraordinary feeling. This, she thought, was the sensation she wanted to capture as she set off on the next phase of her life. Liberated. Powerful. Free.
Chapter Seventeen
‘Mum! Get out!’
‘Sorry, darling.’
Charlotte made a beeline for the washing basket. ‘I was just checking if you had anything that needed urgent washing before your ski trip tomorrow.’
Poppy glared at her then burst into tears.
Charlotte took some tissues off her daughter’s bedside table and carried them over to the beanbag, where Poppy had buried her forehead against her knees after flinging her phone to the floor. A lame joke about Boxing Day not having anything to do with tissue boxes briefly flared then fizzled.
A fortnight into the winter holidays, Charlotte had grown accustomed to expecting the unexpected when she dared open Poppy’s bedroom door. For the first few days she’d written off her kaleidoscoping moods as exhaustion, hormones, and the fact it was to be the first family Christmas without their father. Though Oli and Xanthe’s baby wasn’t due until mid-January, Oli had made it very clear his calendar was blocked out. Xanthe had put him on call for emergencies. Emergencies, Charlotte presumed, like proposing to his girlfriend before his divorce had gone through. Not that there’d been an announcement. A trip to Paris and a surprisingly large diamond had made an unexpected appearance on #CheekyLawGirl’s Instagram account a couple of weeks back. Izzy had since banned her from the site.
Now that they’d stumbled through Christmas Day (thank you Izzy and Luna for making Wii fun again!), Charlotte was acutely aware that there was definitely more to Poppy’s moods than her parents’ looming divorce. Unlike Jack, who was constantly out with friends or making plans with friends or gaming over his headsets with friends, Poppy seemed to be increasingly isolated. If she wasn’t reading, practising her flute, or thumbing through heaven-knew-what on her phone, she was rewatching Gilmore Girls with a near feverish dedication. She’d never once suggested inviting a friend over or going out.
Whenever Charlotte braved suggesting they watch television together or, heaven forbid, talk, there was either a total shutdown or a whirl and strop – Poppy’s new signature move. It had swept into their lives after this summer’s disastrous divorce announcement and showed few signs of departure.
If it weren’t so heartbreaking – the glare, dramatic whirl of hair and rapid-fire departure – it would be funny. ‘Classic teenager’, Izzy had laughed when she first bore witness to one. Hilarious!
If only she knew. She had a little girl who still liked holding hands.
In truth, the only time Poppy seemed truly at peace was when she was playing with Luna. Izzy’s ten year old absolutely adored her. Followed her around the same way Bonzer, the not-so-puppy-sized puppy, loped after Luna. She was always trying to copy her hair, giddily accepting hand-me-downs, absolutely loved being experimented on with Poppy’s increasingly large eyeliner collection. The genuine smiles and occasional laughs that Luna elicited were just one of the many pluses of having Izzy and Luna living in the granny flat above the garage.
They were just the injection of energy she’d needed to keep the huge family home from feeling like a mausoleum to a failed marriage. Selling the place and moving closer to the children’s boarding school had occurred to her more than once, but Jack hadn’t spoken to her for a week when she’d suggested as much. Poppy had given a world-weary shrug and said, ‘Whatever. It isn’t like we actually have a choice, is it?’
At this point, there was an element of truth to it. The past few months had been lived in limbo as the lawyers dug their claws into Charlotte and Oliver’s marital history. It was just the sort of thing Charlotte abhorred. Luckily, Emily had found Charlotte an extremely confident lawyer called Hazel Pryce – a quirkily dressed, rainbow-haired woman – whose sole remit seemed to be nailing Oli to the cross. All good things come at a Pryce!
The intensity of her crusade against Oli made Charlotte squeamish. She was, after all, entitled to stay in the house until the children were eighteen. She was earning some money of her own (who knew so many farm shops would pay her for her advice?). And there was the monthly direct debit Oli continued to pay into the household account. (His lawyers probably told him to do that so we couldn’t take him to the cleaners, Charlotte. Stay tough. Stay focused. We won’t stop until the Pryce is right.)
Normally she found speaking with someone who regularly referred to herself in the third person tricky terrain, but on days when her daughter was falling to bits in front of her? She was a card-carrying Hazel fan.
‘Darling,’ Charlotte rubbed Poppy’s back and gently wiggled the tissues in front of her. ‘Anything I can help with?’
‘Look!’ Poppy grabbed her phone and virtually flung it at Charlotte before hurling herself across the room onto her bed and curling into a small, weeping ball. Charlotte’s favourite cushion, one Freya had given her years ago, absorbed her daughter’s tears.
When Charlotte looked at the phone, her frustration with not being able to stem her daughter’s histrionics instantly shifted to pain.
CheekyLawGirl’s Instagram page.
Charlotte ran her tongue along her upper teeth as she flicked through the images. She wasn’t a vain woman, but she certainly wasn’t succumbing to lip wrinkles because of her husband’s pregnant lover.
Ah.
The chronicles of ‘Bump in the City’ had gone on holiday. ‘Le Bump dans Les Montagnes’ was the latest instalment. A swish chalet in France or Switzerland, from the looks of the gooey cheese she was selflessly forgoing. They must’ve taken the train as Xanthe wouldn’t be allowed to fly this late into her pregnancy. Honestly. Did the world really care if Xanthe and Oli were ‘seeing out the rest of the year à la française’? Charlotte wasn’t even sure that was a thing. Unless, of course, you were talking about peas.
As she absorbed the picture, the comments, the time, the date, the penny dropped.
Poppy and Jack were meant to be skiing with their father. Tomorrow. In Austria.
The plan had been to drop the children off at the airport with Oli before she, Izzy and Luna headed up to Scotland.
It was the one bit of normal the children had planned for the holidays. The annual Mayfield Family ski trip: new country, new pistes, new year. Oli’s parents, sister and her family went every year and had done so since the children were little.
They hired a huge chalet. The children took overpriced lessons, chased up by insanely priced cake and hot chocolate sessions. The adults had ridiculously boozy lunches. Everyone ate too much, drank too much, stayed up too late and annually declared New Year’s Eve the best time ever. Charlotte had never really taken to skiing, or the pressure of having the best time ever, so was ‘given a few days off to pamper herself at home’ every year. No one ever noticed that the house was always immaculate when they returned. Regardless, it was the one thing Oli had vowed would stay the same.
It appeared Oli had lied.
Charlotte scrolled down and saw yet another post.
Xanthe gazing thoughtfully out into the middle-distance. A mountainscape at sunset glowed beyond the gauzily curtained window, her diamond-ringed finger held just so … Her hair was down, she didn’t have on make-up and she was … oh … she was wearing a hospital gown.
And then the telephone beeped.
Emms: Happy Après Christmas from Ward Seven. Feasted on Twiglets and Christmas cake that tasted of old boot.
Lotte: I would’ve paid handsomely for some of yours. Next year can you do mail order? How boozy are they? #Askingforafriend
Izz: Hey woman! I’ll see if I can bring one up to Scotland with us tommoz. I’m sure there’s one kicking around Charlotte’s mahooosive pantry. You still taking the train?
Emms: Yup. Surgeries through the rest of today and tomorrow, then off midday on the 27th. See you at cocktail o’clock?
Izz: Deffo. Total chaos at Charlotte’s. Looney and I are hiding in the granny flat. ()£&%)ing Oli’s bit on the side has gone into labour! In FRANCE!
FREYA: Wot??????
Emms: Way to bury the freaking lead! More deets please, Detective Yeats.
Charlotte: Poppy and I are at Sittingstone delivering cakes. Will hold one back for you Emily. Izzy �
�� perhaps it’s best to let the dust settle a bit before we air the details on Oliver’s situation?
Izz: Sorry, Lotts! My bad! I just thought as skiing was off and we’re bringing Pops and Jack up to Scotland it was open news. *zips lips until further notice*
Freya: WOT?????????
Freya put her phone down with a weary sigh. She’d been so excited for Izzy, Loons, Charlotte and Emily to arrive, but Charlotte’s children as well? Obviously it wasn’t nice to dislike other people’s children but plfffttt … they were just so … bleurgh.
She started making a mental list for extra bedding, pillows, hot-water bottles and whatever else the over-privileged little so-and-sos would be used to at their fancy boarding school. Chocolates on their pillows at night? A butler?
Freya caught her sourpuss expression as she passed the entrance hall mirror, backtracked then stuck her tongue out at herself. She was being envious, spiteful and ungracious. The perfect trilogy of holiday cheer!
Not.
Her shoulders sagged as the last twenty-four hours swept through her afresh. This wasn’t her. She loved huge, boisterous, holiday get-togethers. She loved Christmas! More to the point, she loved coming home. Her annual top-up of ‘Burns juju’. Her mum had always made these sorts of unexpected arrivals an adventure, not a burden. Besides. What were a couple of bratty teens when the whole rest of her life was a shambles? She pressed her head to the cool front-door window.
She still couldn’t wrap her head round how her childhood home looked the same as it had last Christmas, but felt completely different. The tumbling remains of the stone tower still stood to the side of the huge old house. The cowsheds still circled the yard abutting the back of the house. The grazing and fodder fields still sprawled on for acres and acres until they eventually dipped into the River Tay. Yes, it all looked the same, but none of the comfort or beauty of her childhood home had distracted from just how tough Christmas Day had been.