Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Harper 2015

Copyright © Fionnuala Kearney 2015

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015 Images © Shutterstock.com

Fionnuala Kearney asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007593972

Ebook Edition © 9780007593989 February 2015

Version 2015-03-25

Dedication

For Aidan. For always loving me the way you do …

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Part One

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Part Two

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Part Three

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Epilogue

Q&A and Reading Group Questions

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

PART ONE

They say best men are moulded out of faults, And, for the most, become much more the better For being a little bad …

William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

Prologue

I should not be here. As sure as I know my name, my NHS number by heart and my daughter’s date and time of birth, I know I shouldn’t be here. Adam Hall … NC 100Z9T … The third of March 1994, 8.04 a.m., Meg Sarah-Louise Hall, born by caesarean delivery, firstborn child to my wife Beth and me. My head shakes of its own accord, my conscience nudging me, reminding me that I shouldn’t be here.

I drive by the house. There’s no parking, so I’m forced to keep going. On the passenger seat of my car, a gift sits boxed, wrapped. Today is someone else’s birthday. I spent time choosing this gift, wanting to get it right. It’s important to me, important that they know how I feel. I do a U-turn at the top of the narrow street, try again to get a nearby parking spot. About ten houses away, someone has pulled out, and I slip my car in their space.

Up ahead, there’s a party going on, the house marked by the telltale bunch of balloons on the pillar. I glance at the box. When I wrapped it earlier, I doubled over the Sellotape so that it’s unseen on the outside of the paper. Beth showed me how to do it one Christmas. ‘You have to hide it. Makes it so much neater,’ she’d said. She’s right. Hidden things are so much neater.

I open the window. Loud voices come from the house with the balloons. A woman passes by, a heavy-looking handbag slung high on her shoulder, a small package and a bottle of wine in her hands. I have no idea who she is, but she’s walking quickly, as if she’s late. Less than three feet from my car, just the width of a narrow footpath away, is a blooming jasmine plant. I inhale the heady scent, close my eyes, immediately cast back in time to my mother’s floral perfume. My left hand grips the handbrake as a childhood nursery rhyme she used to sing about Dick Whittington sounds in my head. Turn around. I glance at the gift. My bottom teeth chew my top lip. I shouldn’t be here.

I start the engine. I’ll get rid of the box and I won’t come back here. I promise myself I won’t return. I say it out loud, address myself in the rear-view mirror and speak the words slowly, like my life depends on it …

And, on the drive back, I look forward to the Sunday evening meal that awaits me. I’ll enter our home, kiss my wife. I’ll choose to have a shower to wash away my morning of madness. I’ll immerse myself in the life I love. I imagine it gift-wrapped, the outside wrapping seamless, double-sided sticky tape, or whatever it takes, to keep some of the inner content neat and tidy – hidden from the people I love.

Chapter One

‘My husband is a philanderer,’ I reply. She sits, her legs crossed, taking notes in her feint-lined legal pad. ‘That’s a four-syllable word for a cheating dickwit. How am I supposed to feel? He’s screwing a waitress …’ The last word tastes like Marmite on my tongue. In my head, I apologize to all the nice waitresses in the world. Aloud, I reveal how I really feel as my right hand clutches my upper left side. ‘I feel betrayed.’ I lower my voice. ‘And it hurts.’

Dr Caroline Gothenburg offers a sympathetic nodding motion. She has olive-coloured eyes, set in a wide face, flanked by titian curls; long, shapely legs encased in glossy tights – and I can’t help wondering if she has ever been betrayed in her shiny life. Lots of qualifications set in pencil-thin chrome frames adorn her wall. Bright as well as beautiful … I find myself focusing on her rather than me.

‘I’d like you to do me a timeline for the next session,’ she interrupts my thoughts. I feel crevices begin to stack one above the other on my forehead. I’m an intelligent woman. What the hell am I doing here? Glancing across her coffee table towards her neat, ordered frame, I swallow the panic creeping up my throat.

‘It will help me get to know you,’ she says. ‘Who is Beth? What makes Beth be Beth? I’d like to understand who you are, where you come from.’

A siren sounds in the distance, as if to warn me of an impending emergency.

‘Me too,’ I whisper.

In the car, my smart phone tells me I have three missed calls. One from Josh, my agent, and two from Adam. If my phone was really smart, it would delete Adam’s number. I’ve thought about it – but erasing him from my phone will not remove him from my brain. I switch on the Bluetooth, return Josh’s call and head to the nearest supermarket.

Twenty minutes later, I unload the contents of my wire basket and watch them move along a conveyor belt. Navel oranges, tuna, sweetcorn, trashy mags, a dodgy chicken wrap and two bottles of chilled sauvignon blanc.

‘Is Your Man a Love Cheat?’ screams a headline from one of the moving magazines. There are four, all with similar revelations, to reassure myself that I’m not alone, that there is in fact mass treachery in the world.

‘Points?’ a young girl with coffee skin and almond eyes asks from behind the till.

‘Points?’ I reply.

‘You got a points card?’ she says, stifling a yawn. I notice a tiny yin and yang tattoo on the back of her wrist.

I find I want to shout at Miss Points Yin-yang. I want to scream at her, tell her not to ask such a stupid question; ask her whether or not she noticed the vital subject matter of the magazines in my basket; tell her, if she didn’t, that she receives nil points for customer service today. I want to hurl a stream of nasty words at her – they’re already formed in my head. Then I remind myself she’s no older than Meg, my nineteen-year-old daughter, and as such, she should not yet know what betrayal tastes like. I breathe deeply – it really isn’t Miss Yin-yang’s fault that my husband is a shit …

So instead, I shake my head at her. No, I am all out of points. I am trembling all over by the time I’m back in the car. Silently, I count to a hundred, and push the facts that he has really left me and that I have just spent an hour in a therapist’s office to the back folds of my mind. I still my hands by sitting on them for a moment, then shake them out, start the ignition and point the car towards home.

Our home is a beautiful, three-floor, semi-detached Edwardian house in a sycamore-lined avenue in Surrey’s commuter belt. We bought it as a wreck fourteen years ago. Red-bricked, with original bay windows, inside we knocked walls down, built new ones – a bit like our marriage really, except today the house looks like something from Homes & Gardens and I, one half of our marriage, look like a ‘before’ picture in a plastic surgeon’s office.

As the gravel crunches under my wheels, I stare at the building I love, wonder if it will have to be sold, if I’ll end up in a tiny cottage-ette somewhere called nowhere. My hand massages my churning stomach and, not for the first time, the waitress flashes across my mind. She’s an incomplete image, blurred around the edges. I’m unaware if she has long or short hair, blonde or dark, curly or straight. Is she thirties or forties? Not twenties, please. I’d find that hard to take, not to mention how Meg would cope. The idea of her beloved father screwing someone who buys her clothes in Topshop would be too much.

A sudden image of them having sex ambushes me. Does she cry out like me? Does he hold her hair at the nape of her neck the same way he does mine? Silent tears fall. I have to stop this … I wipe them with my sleeve, staying a while to stare at Adam’s garden. Quite quickly, I come to one conclusion. He is not selling my home. He’ll have to take me out of here in a pine box.

Inside, I dump the shopping and head upstairs to my workspace in the loft. Flooded with natural light from three angled Velux windows, it is where, opposite my two large screens displaying notes and melodies, I sit to handwrite the requested timeline. Within a minute, six hastily written lines and I’m already a convent-educated, only surviving child of an eccentric mother and a drinking father. I continue, silently praying that Dr Gothenburg is good at her job, my hand scrawling my past onto the page. Very soon, I’m a child who loses her father to his love of alcohol, a wife whose husband has already notched up a previous one-night stand and a mother who feels guilty about wanting more than motherhood alone.

Staring at it, spaced over two sheets of paper, it’s not a spectacular life. Nor is it the stuff that keeps the Samaritans busy, but will it help Dr Gothenburg get to know me? Will the existence of a baby brother who died when he was three and I was six divulge something I’m not aware of? Does my ambition to succeed as a songwriter help frame me as a person? Josh assures me regularly I’m the next best thing to hit country pop. It’s me who’s not so sure. What I am sure about – what screams at me from the second page – is that my husband is a cheat. Considering he’s been offside at least twice, that makes him a serial cheat. It’s there in black and white for Dr Gothenburg to read. The words, confirming his failure, might as well be sticking out on stalks.

The mobile sounds and this time I laugh aloud at the sight of his number. He genuinely thinks that if he keeps calling, one day I’ll just stop being angry. Another part of me hopes he’s right, because this anger is eating me up from the inside out. I can feel it coil itself around my very being, munching away; as if a sound effect is required, my stomach grumbles loudly. I head back downstairs, passing the photo-lined walls on the way.

Rogues’ gallery … The fingers of my right hand hover above them, yearning to touch the baby shots of Meg, to tap into those younger grinning images of Adam and me. An old wedding shot, so full of hope and love. One of him taken at a barbecue next door – Adam posing like a catalogue model, his face looking at the camera, his chin tilted upwards; his long legs, tanned in Bermuda shorts, his dirty blond, close-cropped hair flashing in the summer sun. I take the stairs slowly, lost in years of memories. By the last step, I try to comprehend that if someone had asked me only weeks ago if we were happy, I’d have given them a rather smug, ‘Yes, of course.’ That’s how good a liar my husband is.

In the kitchen, I grab a wine glass and fill it to the rim with cold sauvignon. Rummaging through one of the shopping bags, I remove the chicken wrap and chew it slowly, obediently listening to the voice in my head that tells me I have to eat. I don’t want to eat. I just want to drink. Taking a large swallow of wine, I feel the alcohol slide down, immediately hitting the spot it needs to.

Late-afternoon September sun slices through the bi-fold doors that back onto the rear garden. I walk in and out of its shadows, chicken wrap in one hand and glass in the other. One mouthful of food for each gulp of wine … In between, I hum the words of a song I wrote yesterday and feel the faint curve of a smile on my face. Thesaurus had obliged with a rhyme for bastard. ‘Dastard’ – a sneaky malicious coward. Adam the ‘dastard’. The grin on my face makes it even harder to chew.

Needing to immerse myself in work, I start back upstairs, only to turn around and sit, motionless, on the fourth step. I stare into the living room opposite, unable to move. The cognitive part of my brain has switched off. My legs refuse to stand, my hands seem glued to my knees. Assailed by snapshot memories of places we’ve been, songs we’ve sung, moments we’ve shared, I’m numb with the fear of starting again. Where do I begin? If I just breathe in and out, will time just pass? I nod. Yes, that’s what will happen. I just have to wait this out and suddenly it will be next month and this new beginning will already have happened without me even having to register it.

I only stir when darkness surrounds me. I step downstairs, switch on a light and carry the bottle of wine from the fridge to the living room. Thirty minutes later, I’m watching Adam’s oversized, penile-extension plasma screen when the landline rings.

‘You’re fired!’ Lord Alan Sugar fills the screen as he points an index finger at some underperforming female.

‘Yeah, mate, I know how you feel,’ I sympathize. ‘Beth, you’re fired!’ I point my glass at Lord Sugar’s evictee and pick up the phone, sure that it will be Meg at this hour.

‘Meg?’

‘Beth, it’s me …’

It’s not Meg, my precious girl. It’s him, the bastard that provided half of her DNA, the dastard who, as soon as I hear his voice, I miss with every fibre of my being. My heart pulses loudly behind my ribcage.

‘How are you?’ he asks. ‘Beth, don’t hang up. Please, we need to talk?’

‘I don’t want to talk to you.’

He is silent.

‘Are you with her?’ I ask.

He remains guiltily silent.

‘Do you know you’re a dastard?’ The wine speaks.

He sighs. ‘Yes, you’ve told me many times.’

‘No, I’ve told you many times you’re a “bastard”, now I’m telling you you’re a “dastard” too.’ No reply.

I can hear kitchen sounds in the background, like a dishwasher being unloaded. I picture the scene. How domestic. How very Jamie and Nigella. He speaks in a hushed voice, as if he doesn’t want to be heard on the phone.

‘Oh just fuck off, Adam.’ I slam the phone down. I look at the bottle and my father’s genes beckon.

Chapter Two

I stare at the small screen. Call ended. She hung up on me. Again … And she swore at me. Beth knows how much I hate her potty mouth. Two weeks since I left and she still won’t talk without swearing.

Through the open door to the kitchen, I see Emma bend down to reach the lower shelf of the dishwasher. Clad in a figure-hugging black dress, the sight makes my head reel; images of Emma naked, Beth naked, cloud my fuzzy brain. I breathe deeply, filling my anxious lungs as quietly as I can.

‘I know you’re staring.’ Emma looks over her left shoulder and catches my eye. In one swift movement, she crosses her hands, grabs the hem of her dress and pulls it over her head. She’s wearing stockings. No knickers, just hold-ups, a tiny bra, and I feel immediate stirrings as she walks towards me. Some instinct tells me to back away from her, raise my palms in the air, say, ‘No, Emma, no,’ but it’s way too late for that. If I’d been a better man, I’d have said that months ago. So, I let my more primal instincts rule, the ones that make me want to take her here on her white Amtico kitchen floor. Before I know it, she’s on her knees, unzipping me. I squeeze my eyes shut. With one hand, I steady myself on the doorway, with the other I hold her head, just at the nape of her neck, my fingers lacing her long blonde hair.

I knew I was in trouble the moment I met her. It had started out a simple evening with a group from work in the restaurant where she works. She flirted with me. Private winks, smiles. At first I thought I was imagining it, until Matt, my business partner, cornered me outside the loo.

‘Don’t do it, mate,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Don’t go there. You’re so flattered some blonde totty fancies you, you’ve been twirling your wedding ring under the table all night.’

‘I have not.’

‘Don’t be such a tosser, Adam. You and Beth have a good thing.’

But by the time I shared a taxi home with Emma, my ring was in my pocket, my choice made. I thought of Beth, my gorgeous, loyal, talented wife; the woman who made me laugh at least once a day; the woman I loved, the woman I would have died for, still would. I did think of her, but only briefly.

Emma was the most forward woman I’d ever met, launching herself on me in the back of the taxi, cupping my balls with long manicured fingers. I was weak, powerless. And months later, I’m still a weak forty-three-year-old man who has hurt his wife so much he doesn’t know how to fix it, so chooses to ignore it and indulge in copious amounts of fantastic, life-affirming sex with a new and younger woman.

I leave the office early, exit the underground car park to a beautiful September evening, the sun still quite high in the sky. Just across the river to my right, I see the shape of the London Eye, its capsules laden with carefree tourists. It’s Friday and normally I’d be heading across the river and down the A3 towards home, after staying the week in town. Eight months ago, Beth and I decided to ‘borrow’ my brother Ben’s flat while he’s abroad for a year. Both parties have a good deal. We pay a lot less than market rent, covering his mortgage, and he knows his tenants. The plan was we’d stay there during the week, cut out the commute for me, and Beth could enjoy London and write her songs. A new environment, new inspirations – that was the plan.

I turn the car east towards the highway, heading to Docklands, to the one-bedroom flat near the river, intent on staying in this evening. Tonight’s plan is for an Emma-free zone; give myself some head-space with a takeaway and Sky Plus footie on the telly. Why then do I keep driving east along the A13, towards the M25, taking a long route towards the house I used to call home?

I call ahead on the hands-free. She’ll kill me if I just turn up. I can imagine dying on the spot in the power of her penetrating stare. But I feel the need to see her, to try and explain. I have no words, just the will to try, because I can’t bear her hating me. The phone rings out and I hear her voice.

‘You have reached Adam and Beth Hall. Sorry we can’t get to the phone – leave a message. We’ll get back to you.’

Only she hasn’t got back to me yet. I dial another number, hoping the other person I’ve hurt is still talking to me.

‘Hey, Dad,’ she says, picking up on the third ring.

‘Hey, Meg.’ I resist using my pet name of Pumpkin for her. ‘You all right?’ I can hear my heartbeat.

‘As all right as I possibly can be with an arsehole for a father …’

I sigh – an audible, slow sigh. ‘I deserve that. I’m sorry.’

‘You do and somehow sorry doesn’t quite cut it. Are you still with her?’

Straight for the jugular – she may have my eyes, my long legs and the hair colour that Beth calls conker, directly from my gene pool, but when it comes down to it, Meg is Beth’s daughter. She doesn’t believe in wasting words.

So I respond in the same vein. ‘Yes.’

‘Right … Why did you call?’

‘You’re my daughter, Meg. I’d like to see you. Please?’

‘And what? Introduce me to your bitch totty so we can play dysfunctional families?’

I flinch at her words. And blame Beth. My daughter has a potty mouth too.

‘I—’

‘Look, Dad. It’s too soon. Too raw. You’re not the man I thought you were. The man I respected.’ I can imagine her shaking her head as she continues. ‘You’re just not that man.’

I bite my lower lip, feel it tremble. She’s right. I’m not that man, but then, I never have been. ‘I’m sorry,’ I offer lamely.

‘Blah, blah, blah.’ She hangs up.

I pull over to the hard shoulder. The contents of my stomach heave onto the edge of the A13. I have managed to pebble-dash the door of my beloved Lexus. Words of my long-dead mother echo in my ears: ‘I hope you’re proud of yourself, Adam.’ I wipe my mouth with my shirtsleeve, stare across three lanes of fast-flowing traffic and look up to the sky. Meg hates me. I have screwed up. I have really screwed up large.

The house looks just the same. I’m not sure why I thought it wouldn’t. The time I’ve been away has been no longer than an average holiday, yet so much has changed. Beth’s car is not in the driveway and I wonder if she’s using the garage, now that mine isn’t here. I pop a mint into my mouth and without thinking too much about what I’m about to do, step out of the car.

The bell trills under my fingertip. No answer. I try the phone. Answerphone. I have keys but I dare not … I walk towards the garage, peer in the side window. No car, so she’s definitely out. I clean the glass with the back of my hand and stare inside. Tidy shelves line the sides, everything organized. The empty space in the middle reserved for the car I loved, the one that now has puke on the passenger door.

I decide to use the keys and try the lower Chubb. No luck. The Banham refuses to move too. Then it dawns – she’s changed the locks. Suddenly, I have a feeling that she’s in there. She’s been there all the time. I prise open the letterbox.

‘Beth! Open the door!’ I am greeted by silence. Now I’m on my knees peering through the letterbox, my head tilted sideways.

‘Hello, Adam.’

I leap to my feet. Sylvia, our next-door neighbour, the one we’re attached to, is standing at a gap in the laurel hedge.

‘Sylvia,’ I say, wiping the dust from my trousers. ‘I er—’

‘The locks have been changed,’ she confirms, staring at the driveway.

‘I see.’ I aim for eye contact; after all, we have been dinner-party mates for more than ten years. ‘I don’t suppose …’ Sylvia is also key-holder for the alarm company.

‘Don’t ask me that, Adam, please.’

‘No.’ I nod. ‘Sorry. Do you know where she is?’

Sylvia shrugs. I see it then. Sadness, pity, in her expression. I’m not sure what to call it, but I am sure I’m not ready to be judged on my own doorstep.

‘Okay, not to worry. I’ll call her later.’ With that, I nod to my erstwhile dinner-party mate and head to the safety of my pukey Lexus. Jesus … I lean back into the soft leather of the driver’s seat and wonder where my wife is. She could be out with her mate, Karen. I start the engine, do a three-point turn out of the driveway. In the rear-view mirror, I see the house sign, ‘The Lodge’, shrink as I move away. I’m feeling a slow reality check develop in the pit of my stomach. Beth can do as she likes. I no longer have the right to wonder where she is on a Friday night – or any night, for that matter. An image of her with another man flashes briefly in my brain. And I don’t like it. I don’t like it one bit. By the time I reach the motorway, I can only conclude that I like myself even less.

Chapter Three

‘I’d like you to write about yourself,’ she says, just as the hour is up. ‘I want you to only write about you – not Adam, not Meg, nor your mum, your alcoholic father, your dead baby brother or anyone else – just you. Don’t think about it too much. Just let it flow.’

I write every day, but the idea of me, and only me, being my subject matter makes me want to grab my knees and rock back and forth in my chair.

‘Use the Russian doll idea,’ she suggests, picking up a small barrel-shaped doll from the coffee table. Last time I was here, I noticed a whole shelf of them nearby. Opening it up, she reveals five layers, with the final one being the size and shape of a monkey nut.

‘That’s where you need to get to,’ she says, pointing a filed French nail to the monkey nut centre. ‘Peel back the outer layers, get to yourself. Your core.’ She is smiling, as though she’s rather pleased with herself.

‘I’m not sure …’ The anxiety in my voice is audible. ‘I can’t get that small, I don’t think I’d know my inner bits if they walked up and introduced themselves.’

‘Maybe you could start with, “Who am I?”,’ she says, leaning back.

I imagine this in my head using word association, and panic as I only have enough words to cover the two outer dolls at most. She tells me to breathe, breathe, slowly in and out.

I close my eyes.

‘Then go on to “How do I feel?”,’ she continues.

Oh God, I feel a little sick. Please don’t let that be vomit at the back of my throat.

‘And then maybe what do I like and dislike?’

‘Okay, stop!’ I get it. I look at her and her coffee-table toy. ‘You’re going to need a bigger doll.’

Caroline, as she has insisted on me calling her, has suggested that I borrow some books and CDs on relaxation techniques. She showed me a reflexology pressure point on the fleshy part of my hand, between my thumb and index finger, advising me to press it gently whenever I feel panicky. I think Abba songs work well too, so I’m singing ‘Fernando’ aloud when I reach Weybridge High Street. It’s the afternoon school run and the traffic has formed a long, snaking queue.

‘Fernando’ over, I tackle ‘The Winner Takes It All’, only to decide, midway, that it’s a bad song choice. I push one of Caroline’s CDs into the player. The sound of the sea crashing against rocks and some dolphin-like ‘clicks’ fill the car. I breathe in deeply through my nose and exhale through my mouth, just like she showed me. Three minutes later, I haven’t moved an inch and I leap at the Bluetooth trill of the mobile.

‘Hey, darling,’ I say.

‘Hi, Mum. You okay?’

‘Great.’ I never lie to Meg, but now is not the moment to confirm that neither Abba nor dolphins are resolving my anxiety. I glance at the clock. ‘Didn’t you say you had lectures all afternoon?’

‘I did. I do. I didn’t go in.’

‘I see …’

‘He called me.’

‘Okay …’ The traffic still at a standstill, I prod the fleshy part on my left hand with my right thumb.

‘I mean, I’m not sure what he wants me to say? He leaves you – I mean us – for another woman, phones me up and just wants to have a chat! I asked him. I mean, I asked him if he was still with her. He didn’t even have the balls to just admit it.’

Meg takes a moment to breathe and I remove my foot from the brake, inch the car forward, jab the flesh again. I’m sure I’ll have a bruise tomorrow.

I’m determined to say the right thing. ‘Meg, love, don’t cut him off. This is about me and him. It’s our marriage that’s the problem, not you and him. He’s still your father and he loves you with all his heart.’ Even as I’m saying this, I can imagine her twisted grimace. She and I have wondered lately if he even has a heart.

‘He’s a liar,’ is her angry reply.

‘Yes, yes he is, but it’s me he’s lied to, not you.’

‘His lies still affect me! Can’t you see that, Mum?’

‘I’m sorry.’ My head is nodding. Of course I can see it. I’ve always been able to see it, but something tells me that, while she hates him now, it’s a temporary thing. Soon, she’ll love him again, and I don’t want her to feel she needs my permission. They are, and will always be, thick as thieves. ‘Just talk to him if he calls. Don’t cut him off for my sake. You need each other.’

She makes a ‘hmph’-like sound and I change the subject, urge her back to classes, insist she keep carrying on as normal. She hangs up with a promise to visit next week.

The entire exchange with my daughter lasts a few minutes and I’m still stuck in the High Street. There is nothing else for it. I press play on the CD player and surround myself with more ‘Flipper’ noises.

By the time I get home, I feel quite serene, if a little seasick. I park the car a few metres back from the double garage. It’s separate from the house, set back on the unattached side, and it’s another of Adam’s anally tidy spaces.

I enter through the up-and-over door. Inside, there is floor-to-ceiling shelving on one side, with various selections of paint, paint brushes, rollers, cleaning fluids – all filed beautifully in shades and can sizes. I find a tin of gold spray paint, which I used last Christmas to colour pine cones. I can’t quite comprehend that I ever considered pine-cone colour important. Opposite the paint shelves is the ‘car section’, with a selection of chamois leathers, T-Cut, car shampoo, mini-vacuum, wax, rolls of soft cloth.

I move a few things around. I put some paint in the car section, throw the chamois leathers on the floor and dance like a dervish on them. I remove the bag from his mini-vacuum and empty it over the chamois, then tear the bag up and replace it in the vacuum. I mix big cans with little cans of paint and, whilst I’m busy generally messing with Adam’s space, I find the can of paint I bought for the hall last year. I remember Adam being adamant.

‘No way,’ he’d said, ‘it’s awful.’

And I remember just accepting that.

It’s much later, after my tuna sandwich dinner, when I return to the garage. I retrieve the can of paint, a wonderful shade of ‘Tiffany’ blue, some brushes and a roller, and begin to redecorate the hall. I’ve never liked the cold stone shade that Adam chose. The preparation – taking all the pictures down, washing the walls – takes ages, and I’m just about to give up when I pick up the tiniest brush and dip it in the paint. It seems to have a life of its own, writing in Tiffany blue over cold stone:

I am Beth. I am strong. I am middle aged. I like champagne, chocolate, the ocean, lacy stockings, Ikea meatballs, flip-flops, Touche Éclat, music and lyrics. I don’t like politicians, call centres, size zero women, snobs, punk rock, horseradish, dastards and women who sleep with dastards

I stand back and admire my work. Without realizing it, I’ve created a sort of text box on the hallway wall. Drawing a square around it, I underline ‘dastards and women who sleep with dastards’. I’m not sure it’s exactly what Caroline had in mind when she said ‘write about yourself’, but it works for me. Before going to bed, I take another peek. Marvellous.

Sleep, however, has become another problem for me. An hour later, I’m still wide awake, with the television on mute and the laptop perched next to me. A small whirring noise lets me know it’s still turned on. Lucky laptop. I leap out of bed, not wanting to think about sex.

In our en-suite bathroom, I am assaulted by images of myself. The French oval wall mirror above the walnut unit housing double sinks confirms that though my green eyes remain my best feature, they have been particularly challenged by Adam leaving. Even my fabulous Touche Éclat struggles to keep up with the dark shadowy veins of a broken marriage.

The full-length mirror to the right of the bath reveals legs that are far too short for my torso. A couple of grey pubic hairs prove beyond any Dead Sea Scrolls that God is a man. The loose bit of my skin overhanging the top of my knickers reminds me I’m a mother, as if I need reminding … My hair which – when I was twenty-two – used to be long, dark brown and shiny, is – now I am forty-two – short, dark brown and matt, compliments of L’Oréal, because I’m worth it. I cleanse my face with a wipe one more time and start to sing. I sing ‘Missing’, the last song of mine that Josh sold, which has earned me the princely sum of £10,500 so far.

‘The mirror doesn’t lie, but who is she and where am I?’ I blast out the lyric with gusto as I head downstairs and take the vacuum from the hall cupboard. I sing louder in my best voice above the drone.

I vacuum the living room, then the dining room and finally the hall. I pass my artwork and smile. When I put the vacuum away and liberate the limescale loo cleaner from the cupboard under the sink, I realize I’m having what Adam used to call an OCD moment, an episode that my therapist would probably have a proper Latin word for. Yellow gloves are snapped into place before I scrub the loos, still singing, with a scourer in one hand and a newly poured glass of wine in the other. If someone could see me, they’d think me quite mad. If there are any aliens watching, they’ll kidnap Sylvia next door instead. They could never take the risk.

Chapter Four

I’m sitting in my office, my head in my hands, my elbows rested on the scarred walnut antique desk that Beth sourced somewhere in rural Brittany. My wristwatch claims its ten thirty, which means I’ve been here two hours. Despite the two large screens on the wall opposite, with Bloomberg blinking red downward arrows at me, all I’ve done since I got in is paper-shuffle. Outside my door, the plaque six feet away in the reception area says HALL & FRY. The name is well known in the City. It tells people that we are a respected wealth-management firm, a highly regarded family office. If your family has money, come to us; we’ll look after it, help it grow. You want art? You want to invest in property? The markets? We are specialist consultants. Offering advice. I wish to hell someone would offer me some.

As if on cue, Matt – my business partner for almost twenty years – enters without knocking.

‘You look like shit,’ is his opening line.

I rub my two-day-old facial hair. ‘We’re not seeing clients,’ is my only offer of defence.

‘I still have to look at you.’ He throws a couple of files on my desk. ‘Can you have these back by four and we do have to see clients tomorrow, the Granger brothers? So a shave might be in order?’

I ignore the client reference, ignore Matt’s worried face looking at the screens, lean back and put my feet up on my desk. ‘You pissed off at me for some reason?’

‘Now what would make you think that?’ Matt turns back to me, peers at me above his glasses, then reconsiders and removes them completely. It gives him something to wave at me. ‘Why in the world would anyone be pissed off at the wonderful Adam Hall?’

‘Yeah well, join the queue,’ I mutter, removing my feet.

Matt sits in the chair opposite, runs a hand through his scant hair.

‘What is it you’re doing, Adam? Do you even know? I mean, do you love this girl?’

I stand and look out of the window, try to lose myself in the urban sounds below. The loud hum of traffic, the odd siren, riverboat horns … My office overlooks Tower Bridge and there isn’t a day goes by where I don’t look down from my sixth-floor room and pinch myself. I’m a lucky guy. At least I was a lucky guy. Now I’m a lucky bastard. Lucky dastard. A lucky dastardly bastard. I feel Matt’s eyes bore holes in my back.

‘Adam?’

‘That’s three questions. Which one would you like me to answer first?’

‘Whichever.’

I turn to face him. ‘The truth is, I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t think I’m in love, but I’m drawn to this woman—’

Matt makes a ‘haruuumph’-type sound. ‘It’s called lust,’ he says, matter-of-factly.

I feel my head shake in defence.

‘If it’s not lust and it’s not love, what is it? Do you have anything in common with her?’

‘Her name is Emma.’

‘Emma then.’ Matt shrugs as he stands, replaces his glasses. ‘What is it you have in common with Emma?’

‘She’s …’ I hesitate for just a moment too long.

‘She is gorgeous,’ he offers. I think in a strange way, he’s trying to help.

She’s ten years younger than me. She comes from money, while my DNA originated in Bethnal Green. She doesn’t even know who The Eagles are and I’ve been to every concert they’ve played in the UK. She couldn’t sing along to Bruce Springsteen with me. She lives in a clutter-free, white, sterile house, whereas I’m – I mean Beth’s – a hoarder.

‘She is gorgeous,’ I agree. ‘And, frankly, the sex is phenomenal.’

I stare at his suited back as he exits the room.

‘Lust.’ He looks back over his shoulder. ‘Told you so … Speaking of which,’ he says grinning, ‘you have a lunch appointment with the subject of my dreams.’

My eyes squeeze shut as the door closes.

Bloody hell. Karen. I have a lunch appointment with the woman Matt has been lusting after for years. Karen, our outsourced IT specialist and Beth’s best friend in the world.

As she approaches, I notice men staring. Karen is stunning: a tall, willowy redhead with a slim figure. Straight, short, spiky hair; wide brown eyes flanked by long lashes; a pert nose and full lips. She’s wearing a fitted jacket and loose flared trousers. Karen refuses my air kiss, turns her head away and slowly begins to fold her long legs into the booth I’ve reserved for lunch. I hand her an envelope.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I could’ve just sent it by BACS, but I wanted to apologize in person. That brings us all up to date.’

She nods, doesn’t look at me and immediately begins to remove her limbs from the booth again.

‘What? That’s it?’ I hear my voice sound as if I’m fourteen and it’s about to break.

She looks me up and down. ‘Adam, I agreed to meet you when you guys owed me six grand. I thought I’d have to butter you up to be paid. I thought I’d get quoted the fact that times are bad, that we’re all still feeling the pain of recession. That your clients haven’t paid you, so you’re a little slow in paying contractors, but hey …’ She waves an arm dramatically as she swings her designer handbag over her other shoulder. ‘Here we are and you’ve already paid me!’

‘Stay for lunch …’

‘I’d rather starve.’

‘Please.’ I meet her narrowed eyes. ‘I need to talk to you, to someone.’

‘Try Yell.com. Look under “Counselling for fucktards”.’ She is still standing.

‘Please? Beth won’t talk to me.’

She relents a little and sits down, no legs under the table, just seated on the edge, ready for a speedy exit. It’s good enough for me.

‘Drink?’

She shakes her head.

‘Do you mind if I have one?’

More head-shaking. I motion to the waiter by pointing to my empty G&T glass, mouthing ‘another’ to him. Karen is looking at her feet.

‘Where do I start?’ I place both my palms on the table, clutching the edge with my thumbs.

‘Well, you could explain why you’re playing hunt the sausage with some blonde waitress?’

‘She’s not a waitress,’ I begin, ‘she part-owns the restaurant.’ I’ve recently learned this fact and feel eager to share it with Karen.

‘Bully for her. Explain then why you’re playing hunt the sausage with a blonde part-restaurant owner. Again …’

She spits the last word out. For a moment I’m confused. Then I realize. This is Karen; Beth tells her everything. Of course she would know about the last time, but that was different. And it was such a long time ago.

‘That was a long time ago,’ I whisper.

‘What? I can’t hear you,’ she says, raising a palm to her ear. ‘I’m assuming it was an apology for breaking Beth’s heart. Again.’

I almost snatch the G&T from the waiter’s tray as he walks by.

‘I am sorry. Of course, I’m sorry. Every day I’m sorry—’

‘Words, Adam, just words … Thank you for the cheque.’ She stands up, straightens out her tailored trousers and eyeballs me. ‘I do hope that we can continue a working relationship, but when it comes to your behaviour and Beth, don’t ever expect me to take your side.’

‘I don’t, Karen.’ I reach out and grab her arm. ‘Look, I only want to talk to her. Just talk to her, try and explain.’

‘Don’t you get it?’ She pulls away. ‘You’ve hurt her too badly this time. There is no explanation you could possibly offer.’

‘But we’ve been married for—’

Karen tuts loudly, shakes me off her and walks away. Men stare in her wake, then look back at me. It looks like a lovers’ tiff and I’m the baddie. Well. They’re half right.

‘Twenty years,’ I finish my sentence, addressing my G&T. I swallow back the remains of the drink in one gulp, realizing for the first time that this is it, the possible end of my marriage, and I wonder how the hell I ended up being so arrogant. What had I thought? That she’d just take me back again. Yes. That’s exactly what I’d thought. That I could have a bit of fun, admit my mistake and that Beth would take me back. Fuck. Shit. Fuck. The words roll around my head and I hear myself speaking just like her. I’m trying ‘Beth-speak’, potty-mouth stuff. I leave the restaurant, thinking I’m due at Emma’s in five hours for dinner. Fuck. Double plus fuck.

I’m a little drunk. Home-cooked, slow-braised lamb shank is staring up at me from a white plate – on a white table. I’m sitting on a white chair on a white rug. I have a white linen napkin on my lap. I’m in the White House.

‘You’re not perfect, you know.’ I point a fork at the figure sitting opposite me. ‘Not all that …’ I look at my surroundings, searching for the right word. ‘White,’ I add.

‘More wine?’ she offers.

‘You’re not innocent. No way, not at all. You knew I was married. Yes, you knew.’

She sips her wine. ‘I did,’ she agrees.

‘All this white.’ I wave my cutlery around the room, splashing gravy on the white rug below. ‘Oops,’ I place a slightly drunken hand to my mouth, ‘a stain. Emma, you have a stain.’

She stands up, walks to the kitchen and returns with a spray cleaner and a cloth. She lowers herself and tries to rub the blemish away.

‘I have a stain too – on my soul,’ I whisper. ‘No, two actually … two big ugly black marks on my soul.’

She looks up at me, nods and returns to the rug below.

‘But hey, while you’re down there,’ I say, and laugh out loud. I’m fucking hilarious, I am.

Chapter Five

‘Don’t be so hard on yourself,’ she says. I’d been talking about my work. How I feel that I’m not good enough, that I may never be ‘successful’.

‘What would it be like if you achieved everything you wanted, rather than feeling you have to sabotage it?’ Caroline asks.

I am momentarily horrified. ‘Sabotage?’ I exhale loudly. Is that what I do? I let her question linger and my shoulders unlock and lift.

‘I’ve been listening to you.’ She leans forward. ‘And you’re really hard on yourself. If anyone else treated you like that, you could sue for harassment.’

I scan the copy of the crumpled timeline in my hand for a hint. What went wrong? I want to scream out loud and blame Adam, but I can’t. I suspect I also played a part in getting to this place today.

‘He did it once before you know.’ I begin to cry. ‘Years ago … but I forgave him.’

She makes a face, an acknowledging grimace. ‘What happened?’

‘Some client …’ I rub some white lint from my navy blazer. ‘A woman he was working on some deal with. I never found out who. Meg was only nine at the time. I didn’t want to know, I just wanted it fixed – so we worked on it.’ The lint is gone but I’m still rubbing my arm. ‘Though what really happened is: I worked on it and he just nodded, played along.’ I shake my head. ‘To hell with him. Let’s concentrate on me …’

‘Okay. Some homework.’ Caroline claps her hands lightly. ‘I want you to try and reinstate upbeat thoughts into your life. Try reciting some positive affirmations, almost mantra-like.’

I can do that. I offer a rare smile. No problem.

‘Try to be spontaneous. Imagine what it might be like to do something unplanned.’

My immediate instinct is to tell her not to be stupid. I don’t do unplanned, and I invented control-freakery. ‘I’m not sure,’ I say.

‘What is it you’re afraid of?’ she challenges.

Everything, I realize, I am afraid of everything.

When I arrive home, there’s a familiar car in the driveway and Karen is sitting on my doorstep with a large bunch of yolk-yellow gerbera daisies, my favourite flowers, and a bottle of orange label bubbles. Her face is raised to the morning sun.

I hug her. ‘It’s ten a.m. Why aren’t you in work?’

‘I work for myself; took a few hours off, figured you might need this?’ She waves the bottle as I unlock the front door.

‘It’s ten a.m.,’ I repeat, smiling.

‘So what? It’s a half-bottle and I brought orange juice too if you want to spoil the taste.’ Her nose wrinkles, a pout that says she couldn’t imagine anything worse. I reach out and hug her again, whisper a quiet ‘thank you’ into her ear. In that moment, I’m so grateful to have her. Her antennae twitch whenever I need her. As if to prove the point, when we reach the kitchen, she whips out some fresh bagels filled with salmon and cream cheese from a tiny cool bag in her titan handbag.

‘You need to eat something healthy,’ she says as she pours champagne. The irony is lost and we munch, talk and drink, or at least she munches and I talk and drink. Occasionally, she just shakes her head. I tell her about this morning’s session with Dr Gothenburg.

‘Well?’ she says, creasing her brow, ‘What are you afraid of?’

I hesitate, but just for a moment, before the tears fall. ‘I’m constantly afraid.’

She pushes the already empty glasses aside and reaches for my hand. ‘Go on.’

‘Being alone … taking him back and not trusting him; something happening to Meg; being with someone else … I’m not sure I could.’

‘Pah,’ she splutters, as she stands up and heads towards the sink. ‘If it comes to that,’ she shakes the kettle then flicks the switch, ‘believe me – a cock is a cock is a cock.’

I shudder and she laughs.

‘The devil, witches and aliens,’ I continue, counting out my fears on my fingers.

‘Be serious.’

‘I am, Karen, I really am.’

Her bottom lip protrudes. ‘I see.’

‘Losing it someday.’ I raise my eyebrows.

‘Losing what?’

‘My temper … control … I feel if I show the world how angry I actually am, that I’d be locked up and the key thrown away.’

‘I’ll buy you a punchbag. Next?’

‘I worry about Meg, what this is going to do to her. She worships her father.’

‘Meg will be fine. She’s young and strong and she’s got too much of you in her to let this defeat her.’

‘It won’t defeat her, but it might shape how she views men.’

‘Rubbish.’

‘Getting cancer,’ I add. ‘What if pentapeptides are found to be carcinogenic? What if I like my alcohol too much? What if my father’s genes take over?’

‘And what if you’re overreacting?’

I ignore her. ‘Oh, and the dark and deep water and air travel and wait … I’ve apparently got an inner saboteur.’

Karen’s quiet. She hovers by the boiled kettle, deep in thought, so I get up, usher her back to her stool and make two mugs of steaming Earl Grey.

Her hands straddle her cup. ‘I saw him last week.’

‘You did?’ The mood in the room shifts.

‘He owed me money and I went to collect a cheque. He looks like shit.’

‘Yeah well, he’s screwing some waitress. He deserves to look like shit.’ I take a seat opposite her.

‘She’s not a waitress. He told me that she part-owns the restaurant.’

‘She does? Well, I couldn’t give a shit if she whole-owns the restaurant. I don’t give a rat’s arse if she whole-owns a chain of restaurants. She’s a husband-stealing bitch.’

Karen laughs.

‘Did he ask about me?’ I’m not sure why I want to know. I just do.

‘Of course. He wants to know if I’ll speak to you on his behalf. I told him to go screw himself. Smug bastard … Enough about him!’ She suddenly slaps a hand on the breakfast bar and I flinch. ‘What about if I come down next weekend?’ she says. ‘We could have a takeaway and sleepover, maybe go out to a wine bar. I’m not sure you’re ready yet, but maybe if you pulled someone, you know, just a snog—’

I groan out loud and lay my head in my hands.

‘I was talking a quick snog, not a frigging wedding.’

‘You know what? I’m bored. Let’s talk about your love life.’

‘Hmmm …’ Karen replies. ‘Nothing new to report except a decision.’

I raise my head and my eyebrows.

‘I’ve decided,’ she continues, ‘that I need an older man. A solvent, older, mature, loving man.’

I smile. ‘Good decision. You do know that means a man in his forties.’

Karen sticks her tongue out, ignoring my jibe about the fact that she’s forty this year.

‘Anyhow, now you and I can go on the pull together.’

‘That’s not going to happen.’ I cannot imagine anything worse in the world right now.

‘Never say never.’

‘I’m saying never.’

‘Really?’ She pours me another glass, ignores her own. ‘C’mon, Beth, feel the fear and do it anyway! Never is an awfully long time. Take it from me. You’ll need a snog. And soon.’ She adds the last two words as if my very life will depend on me swapping saliva. Soon.

I shudder visibly, catch her eye and we both hoot.

Painful belly laughs later, somehow we’re back to discussing more of my inner fears when she glances at her watch and makes a face. ‘Sorry, I’ve really got to go.’ She comes to hug me.

‘Relying on my “rampant rabbit” for sex?’ I offer as a parting shot.

She puts her coat on in the hall. ‘Sounds like my life. Be afraid,’ she says gravely, ‘be very afraid …’ And just as I think she’s out of the door, she stops, narrows her eyes and points to the wall with a questioning tilt of her head.

‘Oh, yeah.’ I raise my eyebrows. ‘That. I’m redecorating. What do you think of the colour?’

She reads the words, a hint of a smile appearing on her full lips.

‘The colour’s bloody awful,’ she says finally. ‘And is “dastard” a real word?’

Later that day, when I’m upstairs working in the loft, my stomach flips when I check my emails.

-----Original Message-----

From: ahall@hall&fryuk.net

Sent: 23 September 2014 15:37 PM

To: bhall@intranethalluk.net

Subject: You (and me)

Hi,

I’m sure I’m the last person you want to hear from now but I really feel the need to talk to you. I hope you’re okay. I’m okay. I’m thinking of you. I miss you. A x

Stomach still playing leapfrog, I type my reply.

-----Original Message-----

From: bhall@intranethalluk.net

Sent: 23 September 2014 15:45 PM

To: ahall@hall&fryuk.net

Subject: Your mail

I am SO fed up with your needs. You needed to leave me to shag another woman. Now you need to talk to me. Miss me – you left me! What bloody planet are you on? And shove your ‘x’ directly up your ass. Beth.

Just as I press send, I hear the front door slam and my heart clenches. Shit. I creep to the door and listen. I’m not ready to see him. All sorts of thoughts skip through my head. Heart thumping, I remember I’ve changed the locks, but it’s only when I hear the footsteps on the stairs being taken two at a time and a telltale ‘Mum?’ that I realize I’ve been holding my breath. I’m sitting down, pressing that spot between my thumb and forefinger, when Meg peers around the door.

‘There you are! Should have known! God, Mum, open a window!’ She comes across the room and embraces me, then walks back to the first Velux, pushing it open.

‘How can you work? It’s like a coffin in here! Any food in? C’mon,’ she pulls my hand. ‘I’m famished.’

‘You’ll be lucky,’ I say, following her downstairs. ‘I was going to food-shop tonight.’ The lie slips easily off my tongue. ‘Why are you home anyway? I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow.’

Meg turns on the stairway and stares at me with Adam’s eyes.

‘Look at you. I guess I just knew,’ is her explanation.

‘What?’ I’m a bit miffed because, midnight OCD episodes aside, I feel I’m doing pretty well. I tug self-consciously at my worn-out tracksuit, run a hand through my limp hair.

‘Tell you what.’ She nods towards my art text box. ‘Give me time to have a shower and freshen up, then take me to Guido’s for supper and I won’t mention how you’re generally behaving weirdly.’

‘Deal,’ I say, suddenly very grateful that she’s there.

‘I miss him,’ she confesses later over her gnocchi.

‘Sweetheart, it’s me he’s stopped loving, not you.’

The eyes look at me again. ‘Mum, Dad will never stop loving you. It’s just that he loves himself more.’

Oh, the words of the wise.

‘But he loves you the most,’ I add. ‘Never forget that.’

I can tell she’s trying not to cry, tearing a little piece of garlic bread off every few seconds. It’s like, if she keeps chewing, the tears won’t come.

‘I still can’t quite believe it,’ she confesses. ‘Every morning I wake up and think of how he’s behaved and I just shake my head.’

I nod mine.

‘It’s so bloody clichéd. I thought he was better than that.’

‘Didn’t we all?’ I sigh, a deep sigh. ‘Eat your food, it’ll get cold.’

She takes her fork and stabs some gnocchi, raises it to her mouth.

And, in that moment, watching her, I’m cast back in time to a three-year-old Meg. Her lower lip would tremble, just like it’s starting to now; she’d take a deep breath and she would either howl like a feral vixen or keep the lip-tremble going, stubbornly refusing to cry. Tonight there is no wild sound but the floodgates open anyway. Silent tears slide down her face. She looks away, searching for an escape route to the Ladies and I reach for her hand, clutch it tightly.

‘Stay,’ I plead. ‘You’re okay …’ The restaurant only has four other diners and we’re seated far enough away from them. I can feel the taste of my own cries in the back of my jaw. Controlling them, I hand her tissues and whisper, ‘It’s going to be okay.’ The words seem empty and hollow to me. I hope they sound different to her.

‘Will you,’ she sniffs, wipes her eyes, ‘will you take him back?’

The hope in those eyes makes me want to gasp, grab at some extra air to help me come to terms with what her expression means. Despite her strength, despite her obvious anger at her father, all she wants is for this to be over and her family back together again. I want to kill Adam. I want to kill him for doing this to her and to me. I shake my head slowly. ‘I don’t know, Meg, I just don’t know yet.’

She nods, looks away, places the cooling gnocchi in her mouth and chews slowly. I watch her pierce another piece and repeat. Letting go of her hand, I take my own fork and swirl some spaghetti around its end. The bolognese is garlic heavy and I think about how Adam always shied away from garlic kisses. It feels something like spite when I clear my plate slowly.

We chat about anything that is nothing to do with Adam and me, or Adam and me and her. Her coursework, her flatmates, her tutors and her shower, which has mould in the tiling grout. Soon her tears have turned to laughter and I smile and she does too. She stands, comes over to my side of the table and hugs me. Tight. No more words are needed. She’s strong. She will be all right and, as long as she’s all right, I will be too.

Later, after late-night cocoa at home, Meg apologizes again for not staying the night and pulls a jumper on over her T-shirt. ‘I’m sorry, Mum. I’ve got an important tutorial first thing. You okay?’ I take her in my arms, not an easy feat as she’s a lot taller than me. I stroke her beautiful chestnut curls.

‘I’m fine if you are,’ I whisper into their softness.

‘The “f” word, Mum. That bad, eh?’

‘Fine’ is a swearword in our house, usually meaning, ‘fed-up, insecure, neurotic and emotional’.

She kisses me, a slight touch of lips. ‘Take care, Mum.’ I want to keep hold of her as we hug, wrap her up in my clothes or shrink her, put her in my pocket for safekeeping. As soon as she leaves, I run to my handbag, remove my notebook and my Dictaphone. As I write the words, I record the melody I’m humming. I call it ‘The F Word’.

I’m not fine,

No, I’m not fine this time,

I can’t even say that word in this hell of mine.

I close my eyes and positively visualize it performed on a worldwide stage.

Maybe given time,

Fine might mean fine,

But right now it’s early days,

I hurt in a hundred ways,

And I’m not fine.

Climbing the stairs to bed, I yawn – a long, gaping, sleepy yawn, and am so relieved that I crawl fully clothed under the bed covers. In my dreams, Gordon Ramsay is in my bed.

‘You can’t call it “The F Word”,’ he says.

‘How did you get here?’ I say.

He doesn’t answer but I have to admit that he looks quite dishy there, his head resting on Adam’s pillow.

‘But since you’re here, does the “F” stand for fuck or for fine?’ I lean up on my left elbow. ‘See, around here when you say “fine”, it’s called “The F Word”,’ I explain.

‘No,’ he says, raising his head to meet mine. ‘It definitely stands for fuck in our house.’

‘But this is my house,’ I pout. In my dreams, my pout is suggestive, my lips dressed in scarlet gloss.

‘Who the fuck cares,’ he says, and kisses me. Gordon, it seems, is not averse to my garlic kisses.

Chapter Six

Emma has a fourteen-year-old son called Harold. Not Harry – Harold. I imagine him to be complete with spots and a pathological hatred of both his name and his divorced parents.

So far, because I generally visit the White House at weekends, when Harold is with his father, Alan, I have avoided meeting him. Last night was an exception to this rule. A Wednesday and dinner at the White House was on, because Alan had taken Harold to the cinema straight after his school tennis match. They would not be back until ten, by which time, having eaten dinner, I would be gone. That was the plan. Like all best-laid plans in my life, it didn’t quite pan out – which is why I’m sitting in St Thomas’s A&E department, nursing a minor head wound. I don’t blame Harold. He and Alan had argued, so he’d come back early. Any child of fourteen who’d walked in to find a stranger mounted on his mother on the white rug would do the same thing. I think his tennis racket came off worse.

‘How are you feeling?’ Meg asks. I haven’t yet explained what happened since calling her on a payphone.

‘Fine, it looks worse than it is.’ I tug on the bandage.

‘Leave it,’ she says, ‘I don’t think the bleeding’s stopped yet.’

I look around. No sign of a doctor with the X-ray results yet.

‘Did she bring you here?’

I nod, slightly.

‘So, where is she? Why did you call me?’

‘She had to go, be with her boy.’

‘She has a son?’

I nod again.

‘How old?’

‘Fourteen. With a hell of a right swing …’

Meg’s face scrunches. She looks me up and down, and frowns in a way that makes her look like her mother. ‘Please tell me he didn’t catch you,’ she whispers.

I remain silent. I feel nauseous, and the antiseptic scent of the surroundings doesn’t help; that clawing taste that lingers at the back of my throat.

‘You already have Mum in therapy and now some poor child will probably need counselling for the rest of his life. You’re disgusting,’ she says, looking far into the distance, ‘absolutely disgusting.’

I would nod again, agree with her, but I’m afraid the motion would make me puke.

‘Mr Hall?’

We both turn to see the doctor who’d spoken to me earlier. I raise my hand, acknowledging my name.

‘Ahh, there you are. Well, the good news is there’s nothing broken, no fractures. You have a mild concussion. You may feel nauseous, even vomit, but if it lasts longer than twenty-four hours, come straight back to us.’ He smiles at Meg. ‘You are?’

‘His daughter,’ she says, her lips curling in distaste.

‘He shouldn’t be alone, just in case he’s sick?’

She nods, pulls me upright and pushes me towards the exit.

‘His clothes?’ The doctor, noting my state of undress, looks back towards the A&E department. I have no shoes or socks on, no shirt; just a large, blood-splattered white bath sheet, presumably Emma’s.

‘Doctor, he doesn’t deserve clothes,’ is her response, as I’m pushed through the swinging door to the car park and the bite of the midnight air.

I awake to the sound of birdsong. Meg is standing above me with a glass of water in her hands.

‘Drink,’ she orders.

I do as I’m told, the cold, limey tap water a relief on my furry tongue. I’m in her room, in the house she shares with two other girls in Clapham. From here, it’s not far to where she studies at Westminster.

‘Why am I here?’ I sit up in her narrow bed. ‘Where did you sleep?’

She points to a couple of duvets on the floor. ‘You fell asleep in the car and we were nearer here than Ben’s. Don’t you remember getting here?’

‘No. Look, I’m sorry, Meg.’ I move to get up, the pain in my head sudden and sharp, like a machete has pierced my skull. I fight the urge to vomit.

‘Stay put. Let’s make sure you keep the water down.’

‘I need to call the office.’ I look for my jacket, my phone.

Meg shrugs. ‘I assume your stuff is still at hers. Besides. I’ve already called Matt and told him you’re not coming in today.’

‘You did?’ I close my eyes and lean back on her thin pillow, the throbbing in my head mirroring the beating of my heart. ‘How?’

‘I called Mum for his number.’

My eyes shoot open and I groan aloud. ‘No, Meg, please tell me you didn’t—’

She raises a palm to silence me. ‘Enough, Dad. I didn’t tell her the truth. See?’ She swings her long hair around at me, looks like an ad image for shampoo, except for the anger flashing in her eyes. ‘See, now you even have me lying to her. Christ, you’re a piece of work.’

‘What did you tell her?’

‘Well, I had to tell her you were hurt. I just lied about the circumstances – told her you’d been mugged.’

A soft smile shapes my lips. ‘Well I was, sort of.’

She tries not to grin, but I can see her fight it. ‘By a jealous fourteen-year-old boy … no, I didn’t tell her that bit.’

‘Thank you, Pumpkin.’ I reach for her hand, hanging loose by her side just inches away from me in the tiny room. She snatches it back.

‘I didn’t do it for you. I did it for her,’ she says simply.

‘I know that. Thank you anyway?’

She nods. ‘Right, if you haven’t barfed in the next few hours, I’m going to try and get to my three o’clock lecture. Do you think you can stay alive for an hour without me?’

‘Sure.’ I straighten up in the bed. The clock on the wall says eleven thirty, which reminds me I should be in work. ‘What did Matt say, by the way?’

Meg smiles. ‘I didn’t lie to Matt, Dad. I told him you’d been bashed over the head by your mistress’s sprog.’

I feel the limited contents of my stomach churn. ‘Oh shit …’

‘Funnily enough,’ Meg laughs as she pulls up a chair to sit at her desk, ‘that’s exactly what he said. Now, sleep. Talk to yourself in your head, whatever, but I have to study.’

‘I’m going.’ I move to get out of the bed.

‘Lie the hell down,’ she shouts at me, and there’s that flash in the eyes again. ‘You have to stay here until tonight. Then I have to drive you home since you have no clothes.’

‘I’m fine.’ I sit stubbornly on the side of the bed, ignoring the hammering in my head.

‘Dad, you’ve used the “f” word. You’re anything but fine, so be a good boy and lie down.’ Her voice softens. ‘Please?’

I do what she says. My head is fuzzy, crowded with imaginary scenes. Beth getting the call from Meg; Emma, unable to call me since my phone was still at hers. Harold, would he be damaged, having attacked his mother’s lover? Did Meg say something last night about Beth being in therapy?

I watch my daughter at her desk, surrounded by books on her chosen subject, criminology. Faces of famous serial killers stare up at her from large hardback tomes. Her room is a weird space – a pink draped bed with fairy lights on the headboard and every free gap crammed full of books on vicious minds. I notice she holds herself so upright, years of her mother teaching her not to slouch. She’s only pretending to read a particularly thick book with small writing, but I can tell she’s not concentrating.

‘Have you seen your mum lately?’

‘Last night, earlier, I was on my way back here when you called,’ she replies, without lifting her eyes from the page.

‘I sent her an email.’ I don’t tell Meg about the return one telling me where to shove my kisses. ‘How is she?’

‘Better than the last time I saw her. She’s getting there.’

I wonder where ‘there’ is. ‘Do you think she’ll ever forgive me?’

Meg seems to ignore the question.

‘Meg?’

She lifts her eyes to mine. ‘Would you?’ she says.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, it’s not the first time, is it, Dad?’

I flinch. My past is obviously now out there for debate by all and sundry, but I find myself unable to answer the question. I try to imagine how I’d feel if the roles had been reversed. Not nice, more stomach-churning, and I wonder why I do what I do. Why I can hurt the people I love, why I assume forgiveness should be their first port of call. My brain nudges images of my parents forward, and I’m reminded how their tutoring meant I was always expected to do the forgiving. I close my eyes …

‘I didn’t think so.’ Meg returns to Ted Bundy, preferring the antics of a serial killer to occupy the space in her head.

Just as I think I couldn’t possibly sink lower in my daughter’s eyes, the expression on her face when she opens the door to my brother Ben’s flat with her spare key tells me otherwise. Emma has got there before us.

‘Darling! I’ve been so worried.’ Emma leaps from the sofa, which is visible from the front door. She sees Meg immediately and I watch her face process the facts, putting two and two together. ‘Your keys …’ She points to my jacket and the rest of the clothes she’s returned, my CK jocks taking pride of place on top of the pile. ‘They were in your pocket. I hope you don’t mind.’

‘Well, it seems you’ll be okay from here.’ Meg turns to leave.

‘Don’t go.’ I grab her jumper.

‘Don’t touch me,’ she hisses.

My fingers immediately release her.

‘It’s good to meet you, Meg.’ Emma tries. ‘I’m sorry it’s under such strange circumstances.’ She raises both her shoulders upwards.

Meg nods in her direction, then bolts.

‘Darling,’ Emma repeats as the door closes. She nuzzles into my neck. ‘I’m so sorry, so very sorry. I don’t know what came over Harold. I left him with Alan, told him to think about his behaviour, told him I expect him to apologize to you.’

I can see both our reflections in the tall windows of the living room. The sliding door to the tiny balcony is open and I can hear the sounds of the busy road below. In the glass, Emma’s tall body almost dwarfs mine as she holds me. I see myself, a forty-three-year-old idiot with a gash in his head.

Chapter Seven

‘I am just so angry all the time.’ I try to explain. ‘Angry and frightened and confused …’ I tell her that Karen came around with her builder brother, Brian, and they fitted a punchbag in the garage.

She grins. ‘Have you used it yet?’

‘Oh yes.’ I hold my hand out to show her the tiny bruise on the second knuckle of my right hand. ‘I convinced myself I was working out, but actually I have a picture of Adam on it.’

‘So, why exactly are you angry, Beth?’ She puts it so simply that I find myself getting annoyed at her too.

‘I’m angry because my dickwit of a husband cheated on me. I’m angry because I bet he’s stupid enough to think he’s in love. I’m angry because his fragile forty-three-year-old male ego needs to be massaged by another woman. I am angry because he’s greedy, immature and selfish. I’m angry at myself because I forgave him once before when he was greedy, immature and selfish, and I’m angry because he’s made us just another statistic.’ Tears pool in my eyes and I reach for the tissue she hands me.

‘Before, you know, it took ages … It was only a one-night stand, at least that’s what he swore to me, but it took a long time to rebuild that trust again.’

Caroline is still handing me tissues. ‘Research shows,’ she says, ‘that it takes between one and three years to recover from a breach of loyalty within a marriage, so why do you think he did it again?’

‘Because he could? Because he’s a bastard? I don’t know, are you trying to say that this could be my fault; something I didn’t see?’

‘No, no, of course not, but if you raise the point, is it valid?’

Now, I’m furious. I resist the urge to march out through the door and never come back. But something keeps me here, rooted to the chair, and she at least has the grace to avoid my eyes. Silence.

The fact is, she’s right. There were signs. We weren’t as physically close as usual and he seemed uncommunicative, emotionally detached for months before the night I found out. I ignored it. I can feel my neck colour, feel my part in this whole mess crawl up my face. My defences are now on red alert. Since when has it become my burden to stop my husband dropping his pants?

‘Apparently,’ I break the silence, ‘somewhere between fifty and seventy per cent of married men have an affair at some time, as opposed to between twenty and forty per cent for women? A lot of marriages survive and, of those that don’t, up to eighty per cent of those who divorce over an affair regret their decision.’ I am armed with my own research, compliments of a survey in a trashy magazine.

Caroline nods sagely.

‘So, without going all Mars and Venus on me, why is it, Dr Gothenburg, that men are bigger fuckers, literally?’

A hint of a smile. ‘Well, evolutionary psychology says that men are predisposed to spread their seed but, if we bring evolution into it, historically women would have feared sex more because of the possibility of pregnancy, so maybe they just didn’t indulge as willingly, who knows?’ she finishes, shaking her head.

‘Or maybe they’re just greedy, immature and selfish?’ I say, and we laugh together.

My agent Josh has an office just off Soho Square. He rents first-floor space in a dilapidated old building and insists the building’s more ‘shabby’ and less ‘chic’ appearance is a must for ‘creatives’. He’s asked me in for coffee, which will accompany a good portion of the ‘Now, this is what we’re going to do about your career’ chat. I’m sitting opposite him in his favourite old leather Conran chair. I only know Terence Conran designed it because Josh tells me he did. On the low-slung coffee table in between us is the predictable array of tiny pastries. In my hand is a hot mug of Arabica roast with lashings of frothy milk. In the thirteen years I have known Josh, we have never consumed anything together other than cake and coffee.

He starts the ‘chat’ by bringing me up to speed on the sales of ‘Missing’, which are better than I’d expected. He confirms that two Nashville publishers have options on three other songs. My eyebrows rise: this is all good news, really good news, so I reach for a Danish. Then he tells me about the fact that he’s been approached for me to write a song for a movie. I put the Danish down and listen.

‘It’s all hush-hush for now.’ He taps the end of his nose with his forefinger. ‘But they’re looking at three UK writers and you’re one of them.’

I nod, feeling excited, so I pick up the cake again, allowing myself a small swirly bit. It tastes like sugary paste. I’ve been here before, supposedly shortlisted, presented newly written material, only to be told: maybe next time; not quite what we were looking for.

‘Think “Twilight”,’ Josh adds. He wanders around the office, searching in various different piles of paper for something. Upstairs the sound of a lunchtime soap’s theme music vibrates through the floorboards. ‘Which movie was it? You know, the one with Bella’s wedding to the Dracula guy?’

I smile. ‘Not Dracula, Edward.’

‘Edward, whoever. Anyway that song, the one about him loving her for a thousand years? Or her loving him for a thousand years, whatever.’

I nod my head.

‘Think that!’ He points at me, wagging his finger. ‘Only not that, obviously. We have to be different. And better,’ he adds, handing me a red folder. ‘The script. Page 312 is where the song appears. Make it work?’

I ignore the slight pleading inflection. ‘Right. Love song. Wedding. Make it work.’

He scratches his head. ‘Read the script. It’s not a wedding. It’s a love song. It’s a sort of “I’ve loved you forever, will always love you” love song. But the storyline is a couple who split up, get back together and er …’ He eyeballs me. ‘Well, they get back together and—’

‘Live happily ever after?’ I snort loudly, then sip my cooling coffee. ‘Movies,’ I say. ‘Only in the movies.’

‘Write the song.’ He’s back opposite me, wide-eyed. ‘Please?’

‘I’ll write the song.’

‘Beth, have you talked to Adam yet?’ He refills his own mug from a shiny red machine in the corner.

I don’t look at him. Instead I think about his American accent and the way he says Beth. Coming from Nashville, he’s the only living person I know who can add a twang to a one-syllable word.

‘Beth?’ He’s suddenly standing beside me.

There it is again. I look up. ‘Josh, I really have nothing to say to Adam.’

‘You never did tell me exactly what happened. I mean, how did you know? I mean, I know he had an affair and left and that it’s not the first time, but what actually happened?’

He says all of this without taking a breath. And I realize I’m holding mine as the memory of the night plays in sepia in my head:

‘Where have you been till now, Adam?’

‘Matt and I worked late on a new pitch, then went for a curry.’

‘You didn’t think to call?’

‘I just didn’t notice the time, Beth, sorry.’

He then undresses in the bathroom. And scrubs his teeth. Not brushes them, scrubs them. Then, he takes a shower.

‘You tired?’ I ask when he gets into bed.

‘Mmmm. Beat.’ He plants a brief kiss on my cheek then turns over. I get up and go to the bathroom. He has pushed his clothes into the end of the linen basket, covered them with other items. I sit on the loo and pull it towards me. His shirt is in my hands. I smell it. Lemons. Citrus perfume. From the doorway, I rub my right hand slowly left to right over the place I know my heart lies beneath my skin. It’s like I’m massaging it, willing it to keep beating. I look at his body, already curled away from my side of the bed.

‘Adam. Who is she?’

I shake my head. ‘Nothing much “happened”. I smelt perfume on his clothes, tackled him, he folded and I asked him to leave. End of story.’ I give a gentle shrug.

Josh reaches over, takes my hand, and stares for a long time at my ring-less finger. ‘You’re a songwriter,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘That is never the end of the story.’

Home by three, I check the answerphone to find a message from my mother. Hearing her voice makes me sigh. Hearing what she says makes me scrunch my face painfully. ‘Elizabeth! If you do not call me back, I shall be forced to get in my car and drive to see you. I’d prefer not to have to get in my car to drive to see you, but I will.’

I call her back, knowing that if I think about it too much, I’ll never call her. I have no idea what I’m going to say, but I do know it will be laced with lies. I cannot tell her that Adam left me. As it happens, I only have to lie to her answerphone. Giddy fibs trip easily from my tongue as I tell her machine that I’m sorry for not being in touch, that I’ve been busy with an amazing project. I guess I have, really. I’ve been surviving. Ending it with a ‘Let’s meet for lunch?’ comment seems like a good idea.

I put a recorded episode of CSI on the telly and start surfing the net on my iPad. I Google everything that has anything to do with infidelity. I find all sorts of stories and heart-wrenching tales that make me feel quite lucky. At least my dastardly husband is a crap liar. At least the smug bastard confessed when confronted. According to the Internet, I’m lucky that he hasn’t been running three wives at a time and that he doesn’t wear my knickers while shagging them. I’ve found a website full of questionnaires that are supposed to tell you how you’re dealing with betrayal and I’m completing my third one. I think that it’s helping:

Question One: Did you know something was wrong before you found out?

Answer: No. (There is only a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ response box. There is none that says ‘well, maybe, maybe just a little’.)

Question Two: Has your partner ever been unfaithful before in your or in previous relationships?

Answer: Yes. (The bastard.)

Question Three: Do you find yourself consumed with the physical betrayal?

Answer: Yes. (I can’t stop thinking about Adam being inside another woman.)

Question Four: Are you finding it difficult to cope with your anger?

Answer: Yes.

Question Five: Do you believe your marriage can be saved?

Shit … I surf again and find lots and lots of positive mantras, the sort that Caroline wants me to embrace. I send them to my printer upstairs. Tomorrow, I will place them randomly all over the house, making sure to use Sellotape rather than Blu-tack, just because I can and because I know it would piss him off. I then discover an Internet forum site that has live web-chats for women who have been cheated on.

Amy from Hull is online.

‘Sometimes I just want to call him up and say, “Okay, point proved. Come on home now.” Then, other times I want to smash his face in,’ she says.

Patsy from Seattle replies.

‘Oh, I get that one! My best friend was so angry with her ex that she posted frozen prawns to him every day for a week when she knew he was away. Even though my ex is awful, I don’t think I’d have the nerve.’

I laugh out loud. ‘Hi,’ I type. ‘My name is Beth and I’m almost an alcoholic.’ I hope they get the irony and don’t really think I’m an alcoholic. I touch my wine glass, which is almost empty, and put it to one side. In reality, I think I am drinking too much, beginning to rely on that glass of wine, self-medicating.

‘Hi Beth, LOL and welcome! What’s your story?’ Sally from Manchester … Shit. Where do I begin?

‘My husband cheated on me with a younger woman. He is immature and selfish and I am so angry with him that although I don’t want to smash his face in, I think I quite like the prawn idea.’ I hit the return button.

‘Is she beautiful?’ Sally asks. ‘My husband is currently shagging an ex-Miss Great Britain,’ she says. ‘As I’m twenty pounds overweight from giving birth to his one son-and-heir six months ago, I find this fact harder to take than the fact that he has cheated. He cheated on me with a younger, solvent, skinny woman with a flat, scar-free stomach and pert tits.’

‘Chin up Sally.’ Briana from Queens … ‘Mine left me for a man. Sorry for appearing to downgrade your pain, but I think I’d prefer an ex-beauty queen to another man.’

Christ. It’s overwhelming. I take a break and make a cup of tea before resuming my position on the sofa, where I read a few more tales of woe before finally deciding to be more proactive. Having spent an entire episode of CSI on the worldwide web of betrayal, I am armed and dangerous. I email Adam.

-----Original Message-----

From: bhall@intranethalluk.net

30 September 2014 21:42 PM

To: ahall@hall&fryuk.net

Subject: You

I don’t want to talk to you, but I do want to let you know how I feel. The dictionary says that monogamy is ‘a state of being paired with a single mate’. So, Adam, a question: What do you have in common with gibbon apes, grey wolves, swans, barn owls, beavers, black vultures, whales and termites?

Answer: Absolutely nothing. They all mate for life. You, on the other hand, are a specimen beneath the level of a termite. How does that make you feel? Proud of yourself?

Now that I’ve got that off my chest, I’d like you to stay away from me.

Beth

PS Meg said you were mugged. I’m trying to be sympathetic but sort of feel it may be some karmic force at work. Meg assures me you’re well and completely unaffected by what happened and knowing this has allowed me to send this email. I mean what I say Adam, I want nothing to do with you any more.

After I press the send button, I make my way to the garage to do some left-handed damage to the punchbag.

Chapter Eight

I’m sipping my first coffee of the day, sitting at the tiny wrought-iron bistro table on Ben’s balcony. Though the noise of the street below is sometimes intrusive, today I find it a positive distraction from the noise in my head. I have to go to work, but I want to crawl back into bed.

Though, if I do, the nightmares will be back. Dreams of my parents when they were alive, dreams of Beth and I when we were young … It seems my brain simply doesn’t want to sleep. It seems my brain is in frightening overdrive as soon as my head nears a pillow. Last night, my mother was shouting at me about Ben’s broken guitar, telling me that I was responsible. Then she burst into song. It was like something from The Sound of Music. Then Beth called her a termite. I asked her if she meant me. Isn’t it me who’s the termite? Just before I woke, Beth morphed into an enormous insect and bit my mother’s head off. Completely screwed. My head is completely screwed.

In the kitchen, I munch on a week-old croissant that I find in the bread bin. It tastes stale but the cupboards are bare. I’ve never really had to consider food shopping before. Beth always took care of it and the cooking. Briefly I wonder how she is, if she’s ready to talk.

The email from her telling me she wants nothing to do with me, the one that is probably the root cause of my nightmares, is now a week old. I was tempted, so tempted to tell her to sod off and pay for everything if she’s so goddamned independent, but I didn’t. I slam the plate and coffee cup into the sink, head to the bathroom to brush my teeth. My head is banging. I touch the back of it, run my fingers over the scar Harold gave me. It still feels bruised and sore. I root through the tiny medicine box that Beth brought up from the house; there are plasters, antiseptic lotion, some loose gauze but no paracetamol. In need of some form of analgesic, I stare at my mirror image and am horrified to see it start to cry.

Sitting on the edge of the bath, my tears fall. I’m painfully aware that the last time I cried was twenty-two years earlier when my parents died together. I held onto Ben at the graveside and knew our lives would never be the same.

‘Big boys don’t cry, Adam.’

My head hurts more when I shake the memory of one of my mother’s favourite mantras from my head. I don’t know what Beth would do now – possibly magic up some pain relief from a pocket somewhere – but I do know she’d fix this, just like she fixed me then, when she walked into my life a year later. And I can’t ask her because she’s not talking to me, has told me to stay away from her and would probably rather I curled up and died. A fate I possibly deserve.

I peer around the door of the office opposite mine and smile my brightest smile.

‘Jen!’

Jen, who has been both Matt and my shared PA for many years, looks up from the floor where she is sitting amongst three archive boxes full of files.

‘Ooh,’ she says, scrunching her face on seeing me. ‘Still not sleeping?’

‘Not great. As the authorized first-aider on site, please tell me you have a bucketfull of paracetamol. The Grangers are due in and my head’s lifting.’

She stands up, stretches her back out. ‘You should see your doctor, get something to help you sleep.’

I watch her open the meds cabinet; my eyes are wide like a junkie waiting for a fix.

‘Did you hear me?’

‘I did. It’ll pass. I’ve got a lot on my mind.’

‘You look exhausted.’

‘I am exhausted.’ I manage a smile. ‘I’ll be fine. Matt in yet?’

‘Already on his second coffee. Can I get you one?’ She hands me six paracetamol.

I smile again. ‘Thanks, Jen. I’ll be down with him doing prep.’

She grabs my hand as she passes the tablets. ‘We’ve known each other a while, yeah?’

Smile disappeared, I’m immediately concerned. An image of her resigning and somehow Matt blaming me pops up.

‘Well, you need to look after yourself. Ever since you and Beth split, you’ve been heading straight down the shitter.’

My eyebrows rise. ‘Succinctly put, Moneypenny. I’ll take that under advisement.’

She laughs.

And I head down to Matt’s office to prepare for a meeting with our biggest client.

For the second time in a month, my car is headed towards Weybridge, apparently driving of its own accord. Somehow, I got through the working day, but now, I need to try and sort this mess with Beth out; plus, I desperately need some fresh clothes. I haven’t called ahead. If she’s in, she’s in. If not, I have a cunning plan.

It was during the Granger meeting I noticed. It was a difficult meeting, with the clients more antsy than usual, the markets having given us a thrashing these last months. I made the right noises but, as I moved my keys around in my pocket, I felt it. The back door key … She can’t lock me out of the house! My cunning plan – talk to her if she’s in, but enter my own home if she’s not. Get some clothes, have a wander around, just because I can … Maybe wait for her to come home, lounging on the oversized sofa in the living room, a glass of rioja in my hand. I hold my breath for most of the A3. When I reach Weybridge, I see that Beth’s car isn’t there and I park around the corner from the house.

From the car, I phone the house. Answerphone … I approach slowly, quietly, ring the doorbell. She’s definitely out. I’m careful not to make too much noise. I don’t want snoopy Sylvia peering over the hedge again. I head around the side entrance and place the key in the backdoor lock, turning it quickly. Smiling, I enter, feeling like a thief in the night. I lean on the back door, praying that as usual she won’t have set the alarm. Beth forgetting to set the alarm when she leaves the house was a constant battle for us. Not looking forward to the telltale siren and mad dash to the box by the front door, my heart is racing in my chest. Nothing, she has left it off. I’m thrilled yet irritated.

Slowly, my heartbeat returns to something close to normal and I move around the house. It’s October and really I could do with the lights on, but I dare not; instead I use my phone light to navigate my way. In the kitchen I run my hand along the granite worktop. Everything looks just the same as it did all those weeks ago. If anything it’s tidier because I’m not here.

I climb the stairs slowly towards our bedroom. In the en-suite, I open the wall cabinet. My things are still there: aftershave, moisturizer, razor, toenail clippers. On the back of the door, my navy striped robe hangs on the hook next to Beth’s. I walk towards the bed, feeling a Goldilocks moment. I sit down on her side, then lie down, inhaling her scent. I stare at the ceiling. This was my home. This was the home we made and shared together. It still feels like home. The only thing that’s different is I’m not in it any more. I sit up, overwhelmed by a feeling of guilt.

As I exit the bedroom and walk downstairs, I look at my watch and can’t believe I’ve already been here for over an hour. And it’s at that moment that I hear the front door opening.

I dart into the living room, towards the back door. It’s locked. Shit! Did I lock it again when I came in? Where are my keys? I hear Beth humming to herself, pottering about in the kitchen. I can tell by the opening of the fridge and the slamming of a cupboard door, she’s getting a glass of wine. Shit. She’ll come in here to drink it. I hear the glug sound of the wine pouring, search my jeans pockets. Shit! As I hear Beth’s steps pace across the marble hallway, I do the only thing possible and hide behind the curtains. When Beth ordered them about five years ago, I was horrified by their sheer floor-to-ceiling size and the cost. Cost aside, I’m now grateful for their mass. Racking my brain, I come across an image. My keys. I left them by the bathroom sink while I was handling my toiletries. Shit!

From behind the curtain, after an entire episode of The Apprentice, I pray she’ll get another drink. C’mon, Beth, you always have two, why not tonight? Or have a pee? Your bladder is like a sieve, surely you need a pee? As if on cue, she heads to the kitchen. I listen for the swish of the fridge door opening but hear the sound of the kettle being filled instead. It is quickly followed by the closing click of the cloakroom door.

I race out of the living room and up the stairs. I grab the keys, listen from the top of the stairs and take my chance. I’m in the hallway, just short of the front door, when she emerges. Leaning against the door to the coats cupboard, I catch my breath. She can’t see me from inside. She’d need to actually come out into the hall. Once she settles down to the TV again, I can open the door and slip out quietly. Passing by, she stops and turns the lamps in the hallway on, from a switch just inside. The room is now bright; if she moves just a half metre to her right I am screwed with a capital ‘S’.

She doesn’t. Instead she takes her place on the sofa by the laptop again and drinks her cup of tea. I can tell all of this by sound alone. The irony is, I haven’t seen her. I can’t tell if she looks well, or drawn. I take a deep breath and then I see it, a floodlit message written on the hallway wall in paint:

I am Beth. I am strong. I am middle aged. I like champagne, chocolate, the ocean, lacy stockings, Ikea meatballs, flip-flops, Touche Éclat, music and lyrics. I don’t like politicians, call centres, size zero women, snobs, punk rock, horseradish, dastards and women who sleep with dastards

I can’t help but smile as, without even one item of fresh clothing, I slip silently out through the front door. Horseradish … Who knew?

Chapter Nine

Her office is cold today. I shiver visibly as soon as I take my seat, rub my hands together. Without moving from her chair, Caroline leans back and tweaks a thermostat on the wall behind her.

We chat a bit about the minutiae of my life and then it’s as if she goes straight for my solar plexus. ‘Tell me about Simon?’ she says. ‘How he died, if you remember how you felt at the time?’

I’m suddenly mute, assaulted by memories of the little boy who was my brother. His dark curly hair, his tiny, ticklish feet, his laugh … I realize I haven’t thought about Simon for a very long time.

‘He was,’ I finally speak, ‘the sweetest child, a cherub, always laughing. He chatted all the time, such a little chatterbox and … he loved me. It was meningitis …’ I hesitate a moment. ‘Meningitis killed him.’

Caroline is listening, not a poised pen in sight. Briefly, I wonder if this is some new tactic of hers.

‘What do you remember of the time around his death?’

I nibble along the width of my top lip. ‘I just remember him being gone. The house emptied. That’s how it felt, like a vacuum. Hollow …’

‘What did your parents tell you?’

‘That he’d been sick, that he’d gone to heaven. My dad described it and it sounded such a beautiful place that I just didn’t understand why we couldn’t all go there. Together …’

I clamp my teeth together, take a deep breath through my nose, and release it slowly through my mouth. ‘I haven’t thought about this for years,’ I confess.

‘It’s painful, obviously; an incredible loss for you at such a young age. For someone you loved, someone who was there for half of your life up to that point, for them just not to be there ever again. It leaves a big hole.’

My eyebrows stretch upwards.

‘And, of course, your parents would have been different afterwards.’

It’s a question without it sounding like one. I nod in silent agreement. I’m not ready to talk about my parents and the almost disintegration of their marriage after Simon died. I didn’t understand it then and don’t really understand it now. Besides, I’m here to discuss the disintegration of my own.

Caroline senses she has almost lost me. ‘Let’s park that for now if you’d prefer?’

‘I’d prefer,’ I tell her, ‘but I’d also rather get it over with. The truth is my parents were in trouble for years afterwards. A couple living together, but mentally apart … I became their everything and I became their nothing.’

Oh shit, her pen is up. It’s like it’s appeared from nowhere and she’s writing. ‘That’s a powerful statement. “Their everything and their nothing”,’ she repeats. ‘Can you elaborate?’

‘I was quiet, thoughtful, pensive – their only surviving child, yet I was nothing like him, a constant reminder of their loss. Simon had filled the house with laughter and joy, and suddenly it was gone. All of it.’

‘Did you feel guilty?’

I sigh. ‘I think, even as a child, I knew how useless that would be, so no … “guilty” isn’t the right word. But I did feel like they’d been short-changed and that I had too. I’d lost my brother and I knew I could never fill that hole.’

‘You had …’ Caroline taps her pad with the nib of her pen. ‘You had been short-changed, all of you …’

We’re both quiet for a minute, then she is first to speak. ‘Do you see any parallels between your own and your parents’ marriage?’

‘Other than the fact that they both hit the skids at some time, no …’

‘Who was it that mentally left your parents’ marriage, if you had to say? After Simon’s death – your mother or your father?’

Really? Sometimes this woman has a talent for making me wince with her jabbing questions. I don’t reply, not out loud at least, now that I can see where she’s going with this particular train of thought. Yes, my father was the bastard. Yes, Adam is the bastard.

I lean forward. ‘How is any of this relevant, Caroline?’

‘Maybe it’s not.’ She shrugs. ‘But it’s probably worth exploring.’

‘Can we park it for another time?’ I use her expression for ignoring it at the moment.

‘Of course,’ she says, making sure that, as she says that, our eyes lock; making sure she lets me know that she knows I’m merely hiding.

Caroline assured me before I left today that most learned behaviours can be unlearned, most bad habits broken. It’s six p.m. and I’ve just drunk a half-litre bottle of sparkling water, brushed my teeth, popped a chewing gum into my mouth – anything to try and convince myself I don’t want crisps. I can unlearn my salt-and-vinegar crisp habit. I do not need crisps. They are wasted calories. My image looks back at me from the mirror in the hallway, the one that’s wall-mounted above the console table. I tilt my head left and right slowly, releasing the creaking tension. ‘What you looking at, bitch?’ I ask my inner saboteur.

‘Not much,’ she replies in my head.

‘You’re horrible, you know that, don’t you?’

‘You want crisps, you know that, don’t you?’

I run my fingers through my hair like a comb.

‘You want crisps, you want salt-and-vinegar crisps,’ she taunts me again.

The phone rings and I grab the receiver. It’s Mum. She’s brief, since she’s dashing out; just wants to make sure I’m still all right for tomorrow.

I’m not all right for tomorrow. I feel like I lost a layer of skin with Caroline today, like somehow I’ll be painfully susceptible to a mother’s probing. Much as I want to cancel, I confirm our plans.

The next day, as suspected, my mother is no pushover. Having worried myself sick that she will be able to read me like a book when I see her, I insisted we meet for lunch halfway, purely to keep her away from the house. Allowed into the house, she would, like an anteater, sniff out the absence of Adam. Instead, we are lunching and shopping at John Lewis in High Wycombe.

Unusually, Mum is full of chat about herself. Her latest course at the local adult education centre, where she is learning how to manicure nails; her friend Trish who cheats at bridge; the vicar’s wife who’s seeing the guy who runs the off-licence. I listen for ages, smile, and laugh appropriately. I love my mother deeply. Sybil Moir has polar-white hair, having refused to succumb to hair dye like the rest of us. It is styled in flicked curls that curve away from her face. A few facial lines reveal she’s in her sixties, but it’s her grey eyes that light her face. If eyes can make a face smile, my mother’s, fringed with thick silver lashes, do – without ever needing the curve of her lips.

Her staple clothes choice of jeans, a polo-neck sweater and Barbour jacket hasn’t changed in years. Today, a bottle-green sweater hugs her neck. Black jeans ride above black leather ankle boots, Chelsea style – Mum doesn’t do heels – and her black padded jacket hangs on the back of the café chair.

I’m quite tickled at the fact that my phone lies have worked so far and all is going swimmingly until, grey eyes looking down into her latte, she asks me how Adam is. Really is. She just detects that maybe all’s not well. Then she looks up and stares right at me.

I dig deep. Right down into that monkey-nut inner core, match her gaze and tell her that Adam’s fine. Really. He’s really fine. This isn’t even a lie. He is allegedly very fine. He’s having lots of sex with another, younger woman. What man wouldn’t be?

‘And you?’ she asks. ‘I suppose you’re fine too?’

‘I am. And Meg, she’s—’

‘Yes, she’s fine. I know. Meg returns my calls.’

I take the dig.

‘Well, as long as everyone’s fine.’ She smacks her hands lightly on the edge of the table. ‘Let’s see what John Lewis has to offer?’

A few hours of shopping later, she seems satisfied, heading back to the Cotswolds as I wave her off. I climb into the car and chew my cheek. I know I’ve only dodged the ball. She’s like Arnie, my mum. She’ll be back.

After a fairly sleepless night, I wake to the sound of staccato showers and someone singing in my head. I always wake to some random track playing in my brain. Adam used to ask me every morning who was featuring and what they were singing. He believed it used to dictate my mood. Today, it’s someone whose name I can’t remember, but she’s telling me I’ve got to live my life and do what I want to do.

I head to the shower clutching my stomach. Whenever I think of him, of what he’s doing with his day, I feel my insides churn, then coil around themselves so tightly that it physically hurts. I close my eyes, hold my head up to the scalding, pulsing water as I soap my body. I dismiss him from my head, deciding that I will have a proactive work day today and I will start by reading the movie script Josh gave me. Again … I’ve tried and failed before, finding anything love-related too sweet to endure.

Three hours and four cups of coffee later, I’m sitting at the dual computer screens in the loft. The left one shows my petty attempt at a lyric while the right one displays the musical effort. My head is buzzing as I open YouTube and I watch the Twilight song Josh had spoken about. Again, I’m immediately consumed with song-writing envy. How does that woman Christina Whatsit do it? I watch the clip a few more times and then get back to the script. I can do this, I tell myself, my head in my hands. They asked for me. I’m one of three they asked for – I can do this. On the wall, all around my writing area, are the inspirational mantras I’d found weeks ago, printed in purple gothic font. Some I’d copied and some are all my own work. I stare up at ‘I AM A SONGWRITING PHENOMENON!!!’ And I almost believe it, as I set to work.

I work through lunchtime and only move away from the screen when my stomach is doing a hunger dance. Downstairs, I eat a bag of crisps. A voice inside my head tells me that I have to do a food shop, as I tear open today’s mail.

My bank statement shows me that, early last week, Adam paid the same amount that he has paid into my bank account for years, a monthly sum, to run the house, pay for food and bills, etc. I lick the crisps from the end of my fingers as a new fear blindsides me. What if he stops doing that? What if he just decides not to pay it? We have no dependent children any more and it’s all very well me telling him to fuck right off, but what happens practically? We both own the house, it’s not mortgaged, but I want to stay living here. Panic seeps from my brain through my entire system.

The hard fact is that I do not make nearly enough money to run this house alone. Even with my latest increase in royalties, I would have to get a job as well … The thought of getting a job, a real job that pays me a regular wage, terrifies me. I’m forty-two. The country has been in a double-dip recession; thousands of graduates and highly qualified people are out of work. My eyelids droop momentarily. Maybe that termite email was a bit much. Maybe I need to calm down a bit and maybe we do need to talk.

I don’t want to have time to change my mind, so I send Adam a text, asking him to come by the house. I keep it simple and it is only minutes before my phone pings a reply.

‘R u in tonite?’

I feel immediately irritated, angry even. I hate text language, and anyone who knows me respects that and uses proper English words when texting me. I’ve told them for years not to be so bloody lazy.

‘No. I’m not in tonight,’ I lie. ‘I’m out.’

‘Wen then?’ chimes back.

‘You idle bastard. Since when have you forgotten I hate lazy texting? I’m not your stupid bimbo whore. Yes, whore is spelt with a “w”.’

The landline rings and I ignore it. He has such an ability to rile me.

‘Idle?’ The mobile responds instead. ‘You call ME idle! Some of us are WORKING 24/7 for a living!’

My hand goes automatically to my mouth. Shit. My eyes flash to the bank statement and I text him back.

‘Sorry. Come by Friday?’

‘C U Fri at 8.’

I inhale a deep sigh and toss my mobile across the worktop.

I’ve abandoned the idea of writing an Oscar-nominated song for film this afternoon and instead I’m riffling through random papers in Adam’s desk. It struck me, seeing my bank balance, that I haven’t seen a statement in months from Adam’s bank account. He has a habit of leaving paper around, but there’s nothing – no statements anywhere.

I open up the bank’s web page saved on his computer. Keying in what I know to be his default password, ‘BeautifulMeg’, the account opens before me. I make a note of the common standing orders and direct debits on a blank page, just so I’m fully up to speed with what goes out on normal expenses – insurances, cars, etc., etc. On another blank page, I note all the other sundry spends, including the restaurants he’s been visiting with his bimbo whore. Nearly five hundred pounds last month. Then I see it. A transaction for two hundred and ninety pounds in Agent Provocateur … I set my pen down on his desk and stare at it until the letters become jumbled.

Images of Adam shagging a faceless but scantily clad woman swim in my brain like scenes from some Swedish porn movie. I hear the soundtrack in my head. Something shifts in that moment and I’m past angry. Now, I just want to know how long my husband has been lying to me and about what. Scanning the account for the last six months, I send the information to the printer.

Leaning on his desk with both hands, I contemplate how the hell I’m supposed to write about love right now, when all I feel is a furious sense of having been taken for a complete idiot. I head out to the hall table, grab my car keys and walk to the shop at the nearby garage. I need crisps and lots of them.

Sylvia is outside her house with Ted, her Yorkshire terrier, on a lead. ‘Hey,’ she says as I exit the gate.

‘Hi.’ I automatically hug her. ‘I’m sorry it’s been a while, I’ve been busy licking my wounds.’

‘You’re entitled. Where you headed?’

‘The garage, I need crisps.’

She giggles. ‘I’ll walk with you. Just taking Ted out for a stretch.’

‘How’re Nigel and the kids?’

‘They’re great. Now … That’s enough small talk. How are you?’

‘All the better for all the food you bring me.’ I link her arm for a moment. ‘Seriously, I’d probably have fallen down a grate without you.’

‘You look like you probably will anyway. How much weight have you lost? No, don’t tell me. Maybe I can persuade Nige to leave me, just for a while.’ She yanks on Ted’s lead, pulling him closer. ‘Sorry, too soon?’

I shake my head, attempt a smile. We walk for a few minutes; when we reach the main road, the smell of traffic fumes almost overcomes me.

‘Come over for dinner tonight when the kids are in bed,’ she says. ‘Just you, me and Nige. You don’t have to talk about anything to do with Adam. Just eat homemade chicken.’

‘Tempting.’ I can feel myself salivate at the thought. ‘But no, I really have to work and I’m not ready to socialize yet. Soon, I promise. Please don’t stop asking.’

‘I won’t.’ She steers me into the garage shop and again, I breathe deep to combat the smell of fuel outside. ‘Salt-and-vinegar crisps,’ she tells the guy at the till. ‘A big bag. A big bag with lots of little bags, you know the type?’

Seb, as his badge reveals he’s been named, looks at Sylvia like she’s a lunatic. ‘You need a supermarket for multi-bags,’ he says, already bored.

‘Well, just fill a plastic bag with as many little bags as you can.’ She rolls her eyes at me.

I’m not even sure I want crisps any more. I shiver, pray I’m not coming down with something.

‘Have you noticed?’ Sylvia asks.

‘What?’ I remove my purse from my pocket, get it ready for Seb as he’s done exactly what Sylvia asked.

She tugs on my cotton jacket. ‘It’s mid-October. The trees will soon be bare. Evenings will be dark, the sun shielded by dense layers of cloud, not to be seen again until springtime. It’s cold out there.’ She speaks as if she’s in a Shakespearean play; makes the word ‘cold’ sound very long and very loud.

I shudder on cue and nod. ‘Note to self. Summer jackets to be put away.’

‘Warm jackets to be worn on late-afternoon jaunts for crisps …’

Walking back, she makes me laugh with stories of the kids and Nigel; when we stop outside the house, Ted does an enormous circular crap right in the centre of my driveway. Sylvia scoops it up into a plastic bag and asks me if I want her to let it harden a little and send it to Adam. ‘Shit for a shit.’ She shrugs. ‘Seems reasonable …’

I don’t disagree. After hugging her goodbye, I’m soon back in the kitchen, tearing open a bag of crisps. And there, on my own, the dark night drawing in, I turn the thermostat up, throw a cardigan from a pile of washing around me. I flick the tiny kitchen television into life with the remote and scroll through channels until I find a rerun of Game of Thrones. Leaning on the worktop, I lick my salty fingertips, as Catelyn Stark tells me, her face grave, that ‘Winter is Coming.’

Chapter Ten

‘Why are you still wearing your ring?’

I stop twirling it around my finger and look at Matt. ‘I’m a married man until Beth tells me otherwise,’ I say.

‘Do you think she will?’ Matt keeps glancing at the clock on the meeting room wall. I’m sure he’s trying diversionary tactics, rather than discussing the more immediate elephant in the room.

‘Forget my wedding ring, Matt. We need to figure out our response. They’ll be here in forty minutes.’

He’s nodding, biting his bottom lip, and I can tell he’s worried. Matt and I go way back to university days and I first saw him chew his lip when Shelly Lewis dumped him. I stare at him, can practically hear his brain whirring, and Shelly Lewis pales into insignificance as the reality of the Granger brothers, our largest single family account, potentially sacking us, dawns.

‘Look,’ he offers, ‘we directly advised them, yes. They’ve lost a shitload of money, yes. Of course they’re not happy. Shit, I’m not happy.’ He runs a hand over his head of thinning hair. ‘We did our due diligence. The fund seemed right. But, there is something else.’ Matt is now standing and staring out of my office window.

I hear laughter in the corridor outside but, for some reason, I can feel my stomach sink.

He turns slowly. ‘I need you here for the meeting today, obviously, we’ve got to face them together about this latest dip, but they’ve asked for you to be removed from the account. There, I’ve said it – there’s no easy way.’

I know my face is scrunching as I process what he’s just said. The Granger brothers want me off the account. That can’t be right. I brought the Granger brothers to the firm. I discovered the family business, nurtured them and have looked after them for the last God-knows-how-many years. ‘I don’t understand—’

He interrupts. ‘Yes, you do. You’ve had your eye off the ball for months now. I’ve made allowances, everyone has, but this – ’ he raises his hands to the heavens – ‘this midlife crisis, or whatever it is, has made you lose your edge. You just don’t seem to care?’

‘I care.’ I feel my neck redden under my shirt collar and loosen my tie automatically. ‘Of course I care. I can’t believe you’re saying this and saying it now.’ I jab a finger at my watch, indicating we have even less time to figure out what to do about the Grangers. I ignore what he’s said for a minute. ‘Will they sack us?’ I ask.

‘I think so, I don’t know …’

I’m baffled. ‘They’re almost thirty per cent of our business.’ My voice is almost a whisper.

‘I know that.’ Matt removes his glasses, rubs both his eyes with a forefinger and thumb.

‘And what? You blame me? They blame me? The markets aren’t my fault.’

‘I know that too.’ He raises a calming hand. ‘They know that, but they also know you’ve been away with the fairies during meetings, and now with this … They need a scapegoat.’

‘And I’m it. Adam and his midlife crisis, eh? How convenient.’ I stand up and take my jacket from the back of my chair.

‘Where are you going?’ His voice raises a notch when he sees me head for the door.

‘You don’t need me. They want me off the account. I’m sure you’ll handle it from here.’

‘Do not walk out, Adam.’

I slam the door for added effect and Jen, who’s sitting in reception, averts her eyes. I ignore Matt calling my name and press the button for the lift. Taking deep breaths, I process the facts. We’ve probably lost thirty per cent of our business. I’ve played a part in that. I lean a hand on the mirrored wall of the lift, breathe slowly, in and out. Everything is falling apart. Exiting the lift, I do what any man in that position would. I call Emma.

As I drive to Weybridge for what will probably be the second row of the day, I’m calm. After a steak sandwich in the White House, followed by a soothing massage to ‘release the stress knots’ in my shoulders, followed by sex – yes, I’m calm. The wrestling session has left me exhausted but I’m calm. And shallow. Shallow enough to need sexual release when everything is going to rat-shit. Shallow enough to keep going back to Emma since she’s the only one who seems to think I’m incredible.

My phone pings a text from Matt. ‘Call me. Urgent.’

I dial the number via the Bluetooth connection.

‘About time,’ he says almost instantly. ‘Where have you been?’

I decline to answer on the grounds that I would definitely incriminate myself.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he says. ‘I need to bring you up to speed. Adam?’

‘I’m here.’

‘Well, they didn’t fire us.’ He sighs. ‘But it was a tough meeting. As suspected, you’re off the account.’

I remain silent.

‘Where are you? Can we meet?’

‘No. I’m a few minutes from Weybridge. Meeting Beth tonight to see what happens from here. I won’t get back until late.’

‘Early breakfast meeting? Starbucks? We need to talk.’

‘I think you’ve probably said enough.’

‘Adam, not everything is about you? We need to discuss this mess we’ve been left with and you need to get your arse in gear, get your finger back on the pulse.’

I can’t even speak. Matt telling me off like a child makes my blood boil, even if he’s right – probably because he’s right.

‘Starbucks at seven thirty,’ he continues. ‘Oh, and by the way – it’s not me, it’s you.’

I hear the phone disconnect and can’t help a short-lived smile at his attempt at break-up humour. Moments later, the smile fades as I steer into the driveway of what was my beautiful home and now appears to be Beth’s beautiful home.

She answers the door so quickly, I don’t really have time to gather my thoughts.

‘Hi.’ She stands back and ushers me in. She looks well. She’s wearing a little makeup, eyeliner, lip gloss, blusher. She has on what I know to be jeans from her ‘skinny’ clothes, kept on the left-hand side of the walk-in wardrobe we shared. The blouse, too, I recognize from the same rack of clothes that Beth now fits easily.

‘I never knew,’ I say, as she takes my jacket.

‘Knew what?’

‘That you don’t like horseradish.’ My head nudges to the wall art and she shrugs.

‘I guess you know now,’ she replies. We head to the kitchen. ‘Wine?’

‘No thanks, I’ll just have a coffee.’ I pass a photo of Beth and me taken years ago on a ski trip. We’re smiling and there is such love in our eyes that it rattles me. She flicks the kettle on, takes out two cups and the scene seems so normal. I realize I miss this. This afternoon’s sex, the last few months, all seem to disappear when I see a photo of Beth and me the way we were and she’s making me a cup of coffee in our kitchen.

‘How’ve you been?’ she asks.

‘I’m okay. A tough day at the coalface … You?’

She shrugs, doesn’t reply. She hands me my mug, takes her cup of green tea and sits opposite me at the island in the kitchen. I try to catch her eye. ‘Beth, I …’ I reach across and touch her free hand. She snatches it away.

‘Please, I need to explain.’

‘I forgot you take sugar,’ she says, heading back to the larder, removing the bowl and handing it to me with a teaspoon. ‘Have you heard from Meg this week?’

‘No. I … Look, there’s not much point in saying it just happened, but it did, really. She came on to me. No, I didn’t stop her. I should have stopped her. I wish I’d stopped her, I wish I’d stopped myself. I wish none of it had happened and I was home here with you.’ I banish any thoughts of this afternoon’s antics from my mind. I am here to talk to Beth. I’m here to try and get her to listen. I’m not even sure what I want to say, but I do know that here and now, in this moment, I’ll tell any lie necessary, because I’m not ready for my marriage to end.

Beth is staring downwards at the oak flooring. ‘Meg’s got her exams soon, don’t forget.’

‘Beth? It’s sex, just sex. You and I, we …’

Beth, her head still pointed downwards, looks as though she’s trying to swallow a golf ball. I shrug, helpless. ‘Sex, that’s all … You stopped wanting me.’ I bite my tongue; the last thing I want to do is make her feel like I’m blaming her.

She looks up. ‘We need to sort out the details. What happens, how we actually separate … I don’t want to lose the house.’

Jesus Christ. I sip my coffee. ‘Is that the only reason I’m here, Beth? My wallet, the house?’

‘You left to shack up with your whore,’ she murmurs.

‘I’m not shacked up with her. I’m living in Ben’s place. And you threw me out.’ I don’t bother defending Emma’s honour.

‘I don’t want to do this.’ She’s standing suddenly, one hand on her hip.

I don’t move. ‘What, you don’t want to do it now? Or never? We have to do this. We can’t pretend nothing happened and just talk money!’

‘Why not?’ She finally looks at me.

Suddenly, I’m weary. ‘Don’t you want to talk? We’re broken, Beth. I know it’s all my fault, but please—’

‘Adam, are you still with that woman?’ Both hands are now on her hips and she seems to be saying that as long as Emma is in the picture, conversation is pointless.

I think of this afternoon, debate lying, and decide against it. ‘It depends on what you mean, but I guess the answer is yes, I’m still seeing Emma.’

Beth’s beautiful head shakes in slow motion.

‘Seeing her … How quaint. Don’t you mean: shagging her and letting her give you the rampant blow jobs that you think you never got at home? Maybe in some of the underwear you bought for her?’

For the second time today, I feel colour course through my neck and land firmly on my cheeks.

‘Transparent, that’s what you are. What could you possibly have to say? To “talk” about?’ She turns back towards the sink, tosses her green tea into it and heads to the fridge. There, she takes out a wine bottle and pours herself a glass. She takes a large gulp from it and speaks with her back still to me. ‘You just don’t get it, do you? Back then, way back whenever, that’s when we should have talked. You could have and should have talked to me then.’

‘You’re right,’ I tell her spine. ‘I’m sorry.’

She stares into the kitchen window. With her back still to me, she asks my reflection. ‘When did it start?’

‘Beth—’

‘I need to know, Adam.’ She turns around. ‘How long have you been lying to me?’

I sit very still. That is a very difficult question, and has so many potential answers that I quickly reason she must only mean Emma.

‘Not long.’

‘How long exactly?’

Though I know the answer to be about five months, I hear my considered reply. ‘Three months.’

She focuses on my eyes, blinks twice and then looks away. I know she’s trying hard not to cry. I watch her take a wedge of paper from one of the kitchen drawers. Taking another mouthful of wine, she waves them at me. ‘Bank account stuff,’ she says. ‘I just wanted to get up to speed with who pays what every month before we talked tonight.’

I feel a deep-rooted pulse develop behind my eyes.

‘There’s over five months’ worth here,’ she continues. ‘I’m not even going to ask you when the last time you took me to Langham’s was, or the last time you bought me something in Agent Provocateur. But, here’s the thing: every lie you tell makes me care less and less.’

My heart hurts looking at her. The pulse is now throbbing behind my eyeballs and I wonder briefly if guilt can present as pure pain.

‘Do you know,’ she turns to face me, her eyes pools of tears, ‘there’s hardly a day goes by where I don’t cry. Sometimes, I’m angry, so angry, that I hate you, and other days I’m just sad.’ She seems to linger over the word ‘sad’.

‘What do you want me to do?’ I hear the resignation in my own voice.

‘Stop lying for a start.’

I sigh, a weary, heavy sound.

‘Do I need to get myself checked out?’ Her voice sounds remote, distant.

I shake my head. ‘I’ve always used something.’

‘Maybe I should anyway. I’ve been sort of ignoring it.’ She seems to be talking to no one in particular.

‘You don’t need to worry, Beth.’

‘I need not to worry about money.’ Her wet eyes refuse mine. ‘I need not to have to worry about losing my home because of your dick. I need time to think about my life without you in it and I need you to think about my needs for once.’

I find myself nodding because she’s right. I can’t think right now about me and where I’ll live when Ben gets back and if I can actually afford to run two homes. A brief image of me living in the White House with Emma and Harold clouds my thoughts and I shudder. I imagine my straightjacket would be crispy white.

As I excuse myself to go to the loo, I hear myself reassure Beth that I will continue to take care of things. I sit on the seat in the downstairs cloakroom, wondering what that means. I’m not sure, but Beth needs to hear what I’m telling her right now and it’s what I want her to believe. So I sit for a while, with my head in my hands, ignoring the red flag waving in it telling me that I don’t really believe it – which can only mean that it’s more lies.

Chapter Eleven

‘Adam told me I stopped wanting him. It was there in the middle of some long spiel of his, like a barbed accusation.’

‘And did you? Stop wanting him?’

I’ve been asking myself the same question since. Carefully, I clean underneath my left thumbnail with my right one. ‘It’s just not that simple. We’ve been married a long time. It was one of those phases where I only wanted to sleep. I don’t think I stopped wanting him as much as stopped having sex for a while.’

‘Did you talk about it?’

I shake my head. ‘I know now that I wanted him to. I wanted him to notice and talk to me, ask me how I felt. Rather than the other way around. It’s always me who does the talking. It’s exhausting.’ I look up. ‘It didn’t last long, maybe a couple of months. We had sex again as soon as I gave in and made the first move.’ I sigh. ‘Of course, I’d lost him by then …’

‘Do you remember a few weeks ago we spoke about your fears?’ Caroline blows her coffee as she changes the subject.

I can only nod.

‘You say things are clearer, so tell me what your greatest fear is, right now, in this space in time?’

I close my eyes and immediately wonder if I can live without Adam, if I actually want to, or is forgiving him again and trying to reboot our marriage an option? The clenching behind my ribs assures me that this is indeed a fear rather than a solution.

‘Taking Adam back, nothing really changing, me just carrying on with my head hovered above the sand.’ There, I’ve said it out loud.

‘Anything else?’ she prods.

‘Leading half a life …’

She raises a questioning eyebrow.

‘What if I can’t move from this small world I’ve created for myself? What if I don’t allow another man near me and, worse, if I did, what if I discovered I had “Go ahead – cheat on me” stamped on my forehead?’

She smiles. ‘You have nothing stamped on your forehead,’ she reassures me, ‘just on your brain.’

I lean forward, pick up the Russian doll she used weeks ago with me and I slowly open the five parts. I caress the tiniest figure, and the fear floodgates are well and truly opened.

‘Personal failure,’ I hear myself say. ‘I know I’m good; my agent tells me just to get on with it – success will come if I work hard. It’s just that inner saboteur constantly waiting to leap.’

‘You’re going to have to find a way to gag her.’ Caroline shrugs. ‘I find that imagery actually helps. Maybe name her too? If you feel negativity creep up on you, visualize her, how she looks, what she’s wearing and then gag her with a cloth – really tightly.’

I’m fascinated. ‘You have an inner saboteur too?’

‘A lot of people do.’ She grins, as if it’s just the most normal thing in the world to be gagging an imaginary part of your head with a cloth – really tightly.

‘So, she’s gagged, you’re successful in your own right, maybe you’re even happy living alone. What do you think you have to put in place to get there?’

My roll grinds to a vicious halt. Me. Happy. Living alone. I like that thought, but still shake my head vigorously. ‘I don’t know …’

Caroline takes a book from her desk, opens it where it’s marked with a Post-it note.

‘“We gain strength, and courage,”’ she quotes aloud from the page, ‘“and confidence by each experience in which we really stop to look fear in the face … we must do that which we think we cannot.”’ She emphasizes the last few words as she shuts the book. ‘Eleanor Roosevelt,’ she says.

Swallowing hard, I put the doll together again and place it back on the table, my head still disagreeing. ‘Whatever that is,’ I tell her, ‘I’m not ready.’

‘Take the doll with you,’ she says, ‘for more positive imagery – if it helps? Her name’s Babushka.’

I stare at the figure, then reach for her and put her in my handbag. Somehow it makes sense, but I avoid Caroline’s eye. Christ Almighty, I’m in therapy with an adult who gags her inner saboteur and names her dolls.

This week, I’ve written half of a song. There is an air of excitement in the loft as I’ve probably written half of ‘the’ song. My devil-like inner saboteur, whom I have now named ‘Lucy Fir’, has been well and truly gagged. Eleanor Roosevelt lives on in my head. I’ve listened to lots of fantastic music, watched some classic movies and somehow tapped into the world of love again. I’ve forced myself, for work purposes, to wallow in love’s glorious potential. I haven’t got a title for the song yet, but it’s about a couple being the right fit. About the fact that they just don’t fit anyone else except one another and that they fall apart without each other. It’s all still first-draft stuff, but I think I’m onto something. I’m just sending a soundbite through to Josh, when I hear the doorbell downstairs ringing persistently.

The sound pulses through the house, again and again.

‘I’m coming, I’m coming,’ I mutter, taking the stairs down two at a time. I peer through the spyhole, wondering who on earth can be so determined. My shoulders droop and I rest my forehead on the white gloss door.

‘Stop peering through the thingy, Elizabeth. Open up.’

I pull it towards me.

‘Darling,’ she says, giving me a kiss on my cheek and moving past me, glancing only briefly at my text wall art. ‘It’s drizzling a bit out there,’ she says, placing a long, neon-pink umbrella in the hallstand next to Adam’s cricket bat.

‘Mum,’ I reply. ‘What brings you here?’

‘Meg called me.’ She holds a small kitbag up. ‘I’ve come to do your nails.’

I’m lost for words as she walks away from me. I can hear her unpack what must be manicure regalia onto the dining table before I’ve even shut the front door.

‘Mum,’ I stand in the living room doorway, feeling a prickle of anxiety, wondering what Meg has said. ‘My nails are fine, I …’ I’m trying to find the words that express what I feel but are not – Please leave, Mum. I need to write an Oscar-nominated song. I don’t want to tell you what’s going on in my world. I like to pretend that everything’s all right on the phone. Can you please piss off back to the Cotswolds?

‘Open a bottle of wine, Elizabeth, I’m staying the night.’ Her stone-grey eyes catch mine and her eyebrows arch as if to say, ‘Go on, I dare you. Tell me you’re too busy.’ She says nothing, then continues to unpack an array of tiny, multicoloured bottles.

My husband has left me and I’ve just been up in the loft convincing myself I can earn a proper living songwriting, yet it seems – I glance down at my fingernails – that a manicure is more important. ‘I’ll get the wine.’ I walk towards the fridge, hoping she won’t follow me, and discover the lack of food and abundance of crisps. There is, however, a beef stew I’d forgotten about. Sylvia. I offer up a silent thanks to her.

Having filled two glasses, I place them both on the dining table and take a seat. She’s standing at the bi-folds, staring out into the garden. The tail end of a rain shower spits on the glazing.

‘You’ll have to take up gardening,’ she says, her arms folded across her chest.

I know then that Meg has revealed enough. ‘I was going to tell you.’

‘When, exactly?’ She hasn’t taken her eyes off the lawn.

‘When I felt I could.’ I shrug. ‘It’s only just beginning to be real to me.’

The sounds of Sylvia’s children, rushing into their garden after the rain, permeate the room. I stare at an ancient ring of a coffee cup on the walnut dining table, as my mother takes a seat next to me. She raises her wine glass to her mouth and I can tell she’s fighting tears. She then pulls an antiseptic wipe from a plastic container, leans forward and grabs one of my hands. She uses both of hers to gently clean mine. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says.

My shoulders move up and down again. ‘It is what it is.’

‘What happened?’ She asks the question as she wipes clean my other hand.

‘How much did Meg say?’

‘She just told me that he’d gone, implied there was another woman.’ Her eyes once again meet mine. ‘Was there? Is there?’

I let her words hang in the air a moment before replying. ‘Yes and yes.’

‘Bastard,’ she whispers, picking out a particularly lurid bottle. ‘Fuchsia, I think. You need brightening up.’

I don’t reply; know there’s no point. If my mother has made up her mind that I need fuchsia nails, then that’s exactly what I’m going to get. She has already travelled a hundred miles. She picks up the file and gets to work.

Minutes later, she speaks again. ‘You’re not alone.’

I tap her arm affectionately. ‘I know that, Mum. Thank you.’

‘We all have crosses to bear. Most of us have faulty husbands and most of us learn to live with them.’

She is, of course, referring to the fact that my father’s first love was alcohol, over and above both her and me.

She squeezes my hand in hers. ‘I loved your dad,’ she says, ‘and he loved me.’

I remember lots of tears; my mother weeping into her coffee cup, her bed sheets, her book … I can’t hide my discomfort, and I shift awkwardly in the chair. ‘He had a funny way of showing it,’ I say.

Mum frowns. ‘Don’t judge.’ Her voice has a hint of scolding to it. ‘I get what you’re going through but … there’s nothing worse in this world than losing a child. When Simon died, a big part of your dad did too. It was after that he changed. He was running away from the hell of it all.’

I start to interrupt but she stops me.

‘This was before people talked about their feelings. There was no such thing as counselling. Grief counselling was what he needed but, to be honest, even if it had been around, he wouldn’t have gone. Instead he drank bourbon to help face the pain.’

I wait until she draws breath. ‘I’m not judging, Mum. I just don’t understand why you’d put up with that.’

‘You were young. And then, suddenly, you weren’t. Why change something that worked in so many ways for us? Besides …’ She smiles and cocks her head at me. ‘We were happy.’

I bite my lip. And my tongue. She’s right. I have never had to deal with the heartache of losing a child. And who am I to judge her when I forgave Adam once before too? I convinced myself we could get past his failings.

‘Can you forgive him, maybe forget about this, and put it behind you?’ she asks. It’s as if she can hear my thoughts, see into my very soul.

‘No.’ My tone is emphatic. ‘I hope someday I won’t care, so maybe I can forgive him, but I’ll never forget how he’s hurt me.’ I do not say the word ‘again’ out loud. My mother doesn’t need to know about the last time.

She nods, doesn’t push the point.

I hear my last words echo in my head and feel a huge weight lift from my locked shoulders. After many weeks of therapy, it’s taken my mum talking to make me say it out loud. I will not be taking Adam back. My marriage is over.

I can almost hear the tiny monkey-nut-size baby Babushka cry. I may finally be back in touch with my core, but it hurts – as if my heart is being squeezed in a vice. The coffee ring on the table blurs as my eyes fill and my mouth begins to tremble. My mother drops my fuchsia hand and pulls me into her arms.

I can’t sleep. Today’s emotions have just been too much. I feel spent, exhausted, but somehow I’m not sleepy. I’m sitting up in bed, my back against the silver-button-punched, fabric headboard, having a conversation online with Sally from Manchester. We’ve kept in touch since we found each other on an Internet forum months ago. For someone whose husband has made mine look like the archangel Gabriel, I’m astounded at her capacity for forgiveness. She has taken him back. She makes no apologies for the fact that she loves him; he’s still her husband and the father of her child. Part of me admires her and part of me feels for her.

‘He’ll do it again!’ I want to shout at the screen, type the words, but I don’t. I wish her well, but secretly believe that ‘her Colin’, as she calls him, will soon be back in the arms of the skinny, solvent woman he was shagging, or someone else just as accommodating.

I stare into space. Maybe my mother is right. Maybe I judge far too quickly, and just maybe I shouldn’t. Then again, I focus on the image of Adam actually shagging his bitch whore girlfriend. I grit my teeth and almost visualize penetration.

Nope. No forgiveness here anytime soon.

Chapter Twelve

I have, since meeting with Matt in Starbucks, wallowed in my own filth for almost a week. All he did then was tell me nicely what a wanker I’ve been and suggest I try and be less of a wanker. Now, we’re back in the same American coffee house, but I have showered, shaved and am dressed in dry-cleaned jeans and a crisp white shirt. I still haven’t figured out how to use the washing machine without getting creased clothes that can’t possibly be ironed.

‘I’m taking a few more days off.’ I’m aware I’m telling Matt rather than discussing it as we would normally do. I blow the steam from my second latte and end up with frothy milk on my spotless jeans.

He nods, staring at me over his steepled hands. For the last half-hour, we’ve redone the whole Granger thing and I’ve been suitably placed on the naughty step.

‘Just the rest of the week,’ I add. ‘I’ll be back on Monday.’

‘Are you all right?’ he asks.

‘Peachy,’ I say, ‘just have to get my head around the fact that my marriage is falling apart, my brother comes back in four weeks and I’ll have nowhere to live. And, oh, you’ve tossed me off an account I brought to the firm.’

Matt inhales deeply. I can tell he’s trying to decide on the right reply. I know there is none, that this isn’t his fault, but I need someone to blame for the Grangers’ betrayal. I’m knee-deep in my own.

‘They’ll calm down after a while, Adam. Let it settle for a bit. Why don’t you take some time away in the sun?’

I don’t reply, but imagine me away sunning myself – on my own. I have never holidayed alone and I don’t intend to start now.

‘Maybe Emma would like to go?’ He seems to read my mind.

She probably would, but the thought of Emma and I playing happily on a sandy beach, her frolicking in a white bikini, does not fill me with the lusty urge I expected it to.

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