WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU LEMONS
Fiona Gibson

Copyright

Published by AVON

A division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

Copyright © Fiona Gibson 2020

Cover illustrations © Shutterstock.com

Fiona Gibson 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 ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, 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: 9780008310998

Ebook Edition © 2020 ISBN: 9780008311001

Version: 2020-01-31

Dedication

For Ellie Stott

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Part One: Before

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Part Two: After

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Part Three: Moving On

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

Part Four: The Show

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Acknowledgements

Keep Reading …

About the Author

By the same author

About the Publisher

Part One

Chapter One
Sunday, February 10

It’s happened again, the night-sweating thing. ‘Christ, Viv,’ Andy announces. ‘It’s like waking up in a swamp around here.’

I blink at my husband as he climbs out of bed. ‘I can’t help it. It just comes out of my body while I’m asleep.’

He winces. ‘Yeah, well, I’m just saying.’

‘But you’re not just saying, are you? You’re telling me off for being a middle-aged woman in the throes of hormonal collapse—’

‘It’s just unpleasant, that’s all I mean.’

He pulls on his dressing gown, tightening the belt with a sharp tug. It’s unpleasant for him? Well, I’m sorry, but along with the sweats I have a few other issues on my plate right now, such as: mood swings, heart palpitations, irrational outbursts and perpetually simmering anxiety that’s ramped up considerably from my usual already significant levels; plus a craving for hefty puddings (which might explain the weight piling onto my stomach), a tendency to cry at the sight of puppies, kittens, calves – any juvenile animal in fact – and more spots than I’ve been plagued with since I was thirteen years old. Oh, and there are the night fears too, neatly parcelled up with insomnia: about whether I booked my boss’s flights for the correct date, and why I am overdrawn so badly, and what’s happened to make my hair go crunchy like straw. There’s always something to fret about at 4.37 a.m., from the state of the government to the size of my arse – and, failing that, I can angst about my anxiety in general (is it normal to feel this way?). And my husband has the audacity to moan about a clammy bed? For a man, the menopause is a breeze.

‘I could sleep in the spare room?’ I suggest. ‘If it’s that bad for you?’

‘No need for that,’ he says with a martyrish sigh.

‘Or book into a special hotel for menopausal ladies with fans everywhere and sympathetic men to tend to our needs?’

He chooses not to respond to this.

‘There’s not much else I can do,’ I add. ‘It’s not as if I can have a thermostat fitted.’

‘All right, you’ve made your point …’

‘Although I wish I did have a little knob.’

I study my husband’s face: dashing Doctor Flint, with those intensely blue eyes and long, long lashes, as lush and curly as if he’s been at my mascara. I suspect the majority of his colleagues and patients nurture a crush on him. I’m hoping to detect a glimmer of humour – or at least sympathy for my plummeting oestrogen levels on this drab, grey-skied morning. He just regards me coolly as if I’ve been sweating disgustingly just to spite him. Considering his lofty position in the medical profession, his bedside manner stinks.

Trying to shrug off my irritation, I shower after Andy and peep into our daughter’s room where she is still in bed. She has fine, light brown hair, big blue eyes like her dad’s and a wide gappy smile, with two milk teeth gone.

‘Morning, Iz,’ I say. ‘Time to get up, love. Remember we said we’d go swimming today?’

‘Oh, I forgot!’

‘Let’s go before it gets too busy,’ I add. She slips out of bed and grabs at clothes from her wardrobe; Izzy won’t tolerate being told what to wear. People are often taken aback that Andy and I have a seven-year-old daughter. We are both fifty-two and I am easily the oldest mother at the school gate. When Izzy was conceived we had long given up hope of ever having a second child; there were a couple of miscarriages after we’d had our son, and then nothing more after that. We both had tests, and everything seemed to be in proper working order, but the years rolled by with no more pregnancies.

Andy and I had just accepted that we would only have the one child. Spencer was a brilliant boy, and we didn’t feel short-changed in any way. In fact, although we never used contraception, we’d almost forgotten it might be possible for us to conceive again. We certainly didn’t expect it to happen when I was forty-four.

When I missed a period I thought it was the menopause starting. But instead, along came Izzy, an explosion of joy for whom I am grateful every single day. Spencer, who’s twenty-two, looked a little queasy when we announced that he’d soon have a sibling (although he came round, of course, and he has adored Izzy from the moment she was born). But I guess most teenage boys don’t wish to be confronted by the hard evidence that their parents still do it.

We don’t much anymore, which wouldn’t be so much of an issue, were it not for a more startling aspect of the menopause. More startling, anyway, than the sweating, which I’d expected. But I hadn’t anticipated this surge in libido, to the point where I want it constantly and am driven to pawing at Andy in bed like a rampant sex pest.

Aw, Viv, I’m a bit knackered tonight.

I want to get up early for a run, love.

My lower back’s playing up again. Pretty sure it’s sciatica.

… Or maybe lumbago? Yeah, I think it’s that.

Ouch! Sorry, I got a twinge when you did that …

Such is the loin-stirring effect I have on my beloved. One day he’ll be desperate, breathing hotly in my ear and I’ll be the exhausted/sciatica-bothered one. Sorry, mate, you had your chance! The prospect of denying him sex cheers me hugely while I make scrambled eggs for the three of us, and by the time we sit down to breakfast, I have just about forgiven him for his grumpiness earlier.

I even find it within myself to apologise, basically for being a woman, growing older. ‘Sorry I’m being so narky,’ I say, sipping my coffee. ‘It’s just horrible, waking up feeling like a slimy reptile.’

He eyes me levelly, this man who is supposed to love me and, by extension, possibly care about the hormonal stew I have found myself in. ‘I think you’ll find reptiles are dry-skinned, Viv,’ he says.

Chapter Two
Monday, February 11

First day back after half-term, and Izzy and I are speed-walking to school. I am trying to greet the new week with a positive attitude and forget about how snarky and unsupportive Andy has been lately. Maybe it’s work pressures and I should try to be more understanding of his needs? I know his job is pressurised, that everyone is overstretched, that working in a major hospital under tighter and tighter budget restrictions is no picnic. And, Christ, I respect what he does.

However, the reptile thing is still niggling me, especially as he added, ‘I’d say you’re more … amphibious,’ while quirking his left eyebrow in that irritating way that always makes me want to thump him (have I always been this intolerant, with fury simmering just below the surface, or is it a new thing?). Plus, I’ve noticed Andy using the phrase ‘I think you’ll find’ quite a lot recently, and not just in a reptile context. For instance, we have a worrying fan heater in our bedroom (Andy really feels the cold), which he refuses to throw away, despite the fact that it emits a burning smell sporadically.

He insists it’s perfectly safe. Being male, with that x-ray vision all men have, he can obviously see through the white plastic exterior to its inner workings and be confident in his diagnosis. ‘I think you’ll find it’s just the dust inside burning off,’ he added, last time I ‘went on’ about it (i.e. happened to mention that it smelt worryingly close to burning the house down).

‘But should there be dust in it?’ I asked. ‘And, if so, is it meant to “burn off”?’

‘It’s fine!’

I can see it inscribed on our tombstones: He said the fan heater was perfectly safe to use. One more thing to add to the menopausal worries currently piling up in my head.

‘Mum, there’s Maeve!’ Izzy announces, snapping me back to the present as she spots her best friend across the street. Maeve and her mother, Jules, wave to us, and we cross the road to join them.

‘Hey, we were hoping to see you on the way,’ Jules says as the girls fall into conversation and scamper ahead. ‘What’ve you been up to?’

‘Just pottering about really,’ I reply. ‘How about you?’

‘We decided to go down to the caravan at the last minute. I know it sounds mad at this time of year but Erol was determined to get away for a few days.’

Ah, lovely Erol, Jules’s husband, who makes no secret of the fact that he adores her and is always festooning her with compliments. She seems to think this is entirely normal, to be expected in a marriage. Maybe it is?

‘Bet it was lovely,’ I say, at which Jules chuckles. Jokingly, they call their static mobile home The World’s Most Disgusting Caravan although, from what I’ve seen, it looks pretty idyllic with its faded green decking and hanging baskets, and views of Lake Windermere.

‘I’d never say it’s lovely,’ she says, ‘especially now it seems to have developed a leak right over our bed. But we had fun, didn’t we, Maeve?’

‘Yeah.’ Her daughter looks back and grins. ‘We built a fire by the lake and cooked sausages on it.’

‘Wow, in February?’ I exclaim.

Jules smiles. At forty-two, she looks even more youthful than her years with her wiry body and boyish crop. I guess her look would be described as ‘elfin.’ If I had her hairstyle it would be more ‘stout, angry man.’

‘You know what Erol’s like,’ she goes on. ‘Never deterred by bad weather. Anyway, it was lovely to be away, especially as I have a pretty full-on time coming up.’

‘Plenty of clients at the moment?’ I ask.

‘Yeah, and I’m starting some new classes too.’

I nod, and a thought starts to form. Before I knew her, Jules was something very important in banking. Burnt out and disillusioned with corporate life, she chucked all that in and now has several strings to her bow: yoga teacher, caterer and … life coach. I know Andy regards coaching as a silly indulgence for the privileged few, but, frankly, who cares what he thinks? If I booked a few sessions, perhaps some of Jules’s qualities might rub off on me. Perhaps I’d be less … amphibious.

‘D’you have room for any more clients at the moment?’ I ask as we approach the school.

‘You mean, for someone you know?’

‘Erm, not exactly …’

‘You mean for you?’

‘I do, actually,’ I say.

‘Great! Yes, we can fix something up no problem. Fancy a coffee now, or are you rushing straight off to work?’

‘Back to work, unfortunately,’ I reply, ‘but let’s get together soon.’ At the school gates now, I turn to Izzy. ‘Remember it’s after-school club today, won’t you?’

‘Yeah.’ She grins. Maeve goes too; they have toast and honey and are apparently embarking on a mural-painting project in the playground. ‘Is my gym kit in my bag?’ she asks.

‘Yes, love.’

‘What kind of sandwiches did you give me?’

‘Cheese and pickle.’

‘What else is there?’

‘Tangerine, cereal bar, packet of Crunchy-Bites …’

‘Did you pack Woolly?’ That’s the joke sandwich my friend Penny knitted for Izzy’s last birthday, which amused her so much that she likes to bring it to school every day. Every so often I have to wrestle it off her for a gentle hand-wash.

‘Of course I did.’ I bob down to kiss her as the bell sounds. ‘Have a good day, sweetheart—’

‘Mum, I’ll be late!’ She pulls away, inadequately brushed hair flying behind her as she and Maeve charge towards the door.

And so to work, on an unlovely industrial estate to the west of Glasgow, where I find my office phone already ringing. It’s my boss calling in a state of distress.

‘What on earth made you book this place, Viv?’

Rose is phoning from China. This is why she is shouting. Despite her undeniable intellect, she seems to believe that the further she is from our headquarters, the louder she has to be. Never mind that she could easily have messaged me. Rose prefers to communicate verbally and – with the seven-hour time difference firmly established in her mind – had obviously been poised to call me the minute I’d sat down at my desk.

‘It looked fine on the website,’ I say. ‘I checked out loads of options and thought it seemed like the best …’

‘You said it was as good as the Larson!’

‘Yes, but the Larson was full. Remember I told you?’ And I showed you pictures of this place, of the glass-walled lounge and rooftop infinity pool, which you barely looked at. We have clients all over the world and, with China being a particularly big market for us, Rose has been to Tianjin on business several times.

‘Yes, well, they’re in the throes of building works here,’ she explains, as if I should have known this, ‘and I’ve been shovelled off into this god-awful annexe.’

‘Oh, I am sorry to hear that. Is it comfortable, though?’

‘Not exactly. There’s a problem.’

I clear my throat. ‘What is it?’

‘There’s …’ her voice tightens ‘… a pubic hair on the toilet seat.’

For a moment, I don’t quite know how to respond.

‘Can you hear me, Viv?’

‘Yes, yes, I hear you …’ Loud and ruddy clear! ‘Um, could you call housekeeping or something? Maybe they could send someone along to deal with it?’ Or how about grabbing a piece of loo paper and wiping it away by yourself?

I’m prepared to humour her little freak-out because, in many ways, Rose is a remarkable woman. Our company, Flaxico, might sound like some kind of anti-flatulence medication but it’s actually a long-established, male-dominated global food company. Perennially single and child-free, Rose has forced her way, terrier-like, up through the ranks and now presides over our sprawling complex of glass and steel. At barely five feet tall, she favours massive blow-dries and teetering heels and, although the overall effect is a little scary, I admire her commitment to adding height to herself from both ends.

It wasn’t part of my life’s plan to work somewhere like this. Years ago, I worked in theatre, which I loved. I did various jobs – props, lighting, set building – before working my way up to stage manager. However, the hours were insane, which was fine when I was younger, but less so when I became a mum again at forty-five. So I took a couple of years out after having Izzy. By the time I was ready to return, the theatre company I’d been connected to had had its funding stopped, and I couldn’t find anything else. Disconcertingly, it felt like all of my reliable contacts had moved on. To tide me over I took on some temping work here until Rose appointed me as her PA five years ago.

When I’d taken the temp role, I’d had no idea that Flaxico was one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of … well, pellets in fact. They’re formed mainly from cereals (corn, wheat, rice) that have been ‘extruded’ (i.e. forced through a shaping machine). When they leave our factory they look like beanbag filler, or gravel from the bottom of a fish tank, and are what’s known as an ‘intermediate product’. They are then sold on to other companies to be flavoured, dyed, fried, baked, air-puffed or whatever’s required to turn them into the desired savoury snacks, breakfast cereals or pet treats.

So, that’s what we are about; hardly artisanal, nothing fresh or even resembling anything you’d actually want to eat. It’s basically enormous vats of stuff being pumped about. Meanwhile, Rose travels the world, negotiating eye-watering deals with some of the most ruthless individuals in food manufacturing – yet she falls apart at the sight of a pube on a loo seat.

‘Could you get onto someone please?’ she asks now.

‘Yes, of course. Leave it with me and I’ll get straight back to you.’

‘Thanks so much.’ When I manage to sort it, Rose calls me a ‘lifesaver’, which is perhaps overshooting it a bit, but at least she is appreciative of my efforts.

I tell Andy about all of this as we get ready for bed that night – thinking, well, it’s funny, isn’t it, the pube-in-China emergency? ‘So,’ I rattle on, ‘from a distance of 5,000 miles I finally managed to speak to a human being on the phone – they speak English, of course they do, Tianjin’s an international city of something like thirteen million people. Can you believe that? That there are these enormous cities, way bigger than London, some of them, that most people in Britain have never even heard of?’

I clamber into bed. Andy is sitting on the edge of it, seemingly engrossed in the task of peeling off a sock.

‘Andy?’

He flinches as if he’s only just remembered I’m here. ‘Huh?’

‘I was just saying, most people haven’t even heard of it.’

‘Haven’t heard of what?’

‘Tianjin.’

He gives me a baffled stare. ‘Tian … jin?’

‘It’s where Rose is right now.’ I think you’ll find it’s in China.

‘Oh, is it? Right …’

As he climbs into bed, I wonder if this is how it feels to do stand-up and be faced with row upon row of unsmiling faces as your routine bombs. Maybe it’s my material, you’d think, desperately. I need to change direction – find something fresh and new.

The problem is, this is my life. It’s the only material I have.

Chapter Three
Thursday, February 14

No Valentine’s present – not even a card – but then I didn’t get anything for Andy either. This year, we decided ‘not to honour Valentine’s Day’. As it was by mutual agreement (at least, he suggested it and I couldn’t think of a good enough reason to disagree without seeming needy or simply wanting a gift), I can hardly be huffy about it. In fact, I don’t even mention it. I just get ready for work as normal, and chivvy Izzy along, pretending it’s just an ordinary day.

Until last year, we exchanged cards at least. The fact that even this ritual has dropped off the radar gives me an uneasy feeling deep in my gut, but I try to ignore it as I drive to work.

At the office, a bouquet of red roses arrives for one of the other PAs from her newish boyfriend. That’s what newish boyfriends do, I reassure myself as everyone gathers around and makes a big fuss of it. They make these grand gestures; it’s almost expected. And an image flashes into my mind of a Valentine’s Day many years ago, when I still worked in theatre. I’d just gone back after having Spencer and was working on a production that was proving incredibly tricky to pull together. In the middle of a rehearsal, an enormous, showy concoction of pink lilies and white baby’s breath arrived for me from Andy. The entire cast and crew gathered around and cheered, and my face blazed with delight.

To my gorgeous superwoman, the card said.

Another time, Andy had a request played for me on the radio, when people still did that. Further back, when we were still pretty new as a couple, having recently met at an otherwise terrible party, he’d make mix tapes for me and turn up at my door at 2 a.m., a bit drunk and proclaiming love, which I’d pretend to be mad about for about three seconds before pulling him in and hauling him off to my bed.

Back then, we didn’t need it to be Valentine’s Day to make thoughtful, affectionate gestures. Andy and I sent cards and letters to each other in the post all the time. If he’d stayed over at my flat, and left before I’d got up, I’d often find a sweet or funny note from him, sitting by the kettle. I’d draw silly cartoons to make him smile when he found them in his fridge. It occurs to me now that Valentine’s Day is more useful to long-term couples like us, acting as it does as a reminder to make an effort, to consider the other person and make them feel special. But too late for that now, at least for this year. As we are Not Honouring It, there’s no night out planned, no treaty dinner, just for the two of us.

Back home after work, I tell myself that this is a good thing as restaurants are always packed on February 14th, and they have those special Valentine’s menus, which are actually just their normal ones with ‘seduction cocktails’ and pink champagne jellies tacked on, as if that constitutes romance. I have almost convinced myself that going out with one’s beloved on Valentine’s Day is corny and faintly embarrassing (who wants to eat out just because the date on the calendar says we should? All that pressure, jeez!) when Andy announces he is going out – with other people!

‘Just a couple of drinks,’ Andy says, kissing me fleetingly on his way out. ‘Won’t be a late one. Sorry, I totally forgot what day it is. You don’t mind, do you?’ He pulls a pained expression.

‘Of course not.’ What else am I going to say? Since V-Day is Non-Honoured it would seem ridiculous to kick up a fuss. I mean, what would we be doing anyway? Watching TV?

An hour or so later, still irritated and listless, I text my friend Shelley to vent that my husband has chosen tonight to meet up with a couple of old mates, but never-bloody-mind. I hadn’t realised her partner, Laurence, is away with work. We decide she must come over right away (Izzy is already tucked up in bed, and Shelley doesn’t have kids).

It’s my full intention to be perky and cheerful tonight. Shelley is a social worker with a barely manageable caseload, and the last thing she wants is for me to be blethering on about how Andy seems to have developed an aversion towards me. But after a large glass of wine, it all tumbles out: how mild disdain seems to be his default setting; how unaffectionate he is generally, and how I suspect he could quite happily never have sex with me again. How there’s always some excuse not to do it, and how shitty and rejected I’ve felt, night after night, to the point at which I have now stopped trying to initiate anything at all.

How I stand there naked sometimes, looking at my middle-aged body with the saggy boobs and wobbly stomach in our full-length mirror and think: Christ, no wonder he doesn’t want to do it with me. I mean, who would?

‘Could it be that simple?’ I ask Shelley. ‘That, basically, he no longer likes what he sees?’

‘Of course it’s not that,’ she retorts. ‘You’re gorgeous, Viv. Don’t be crazy. If he doesn’t realise how lucky he is, he’s an idiot.’ She pauses. ‘It’s probably nothing to do with you at all. It’ll be his job, I bet. He’s probably just tired and stressed, or he’s become complacent—’

‘Or maybe I had all my quota in our early years,’ I cut in, topping up her glass.

‘Of sex, you mean?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I don’t think it quite works like that,’ she says with a wry smile. She tucks her stockinged feet under her on the sofa and smooths down her fine auburn hair.

‘It might. You can overdo things, can’t you? Like when you eat too much of the same thing and suddenly you can’t stand it.’

‘Oh, God, yeah. Like hummus.’ She shudders. ‘The smell of it makes me want to vomit now.’

‘Mine’s strawberry fromage frais. Izzy used to love it and I was always scoffing a pot whenever she had one. But once I’d reached that tipping point, that was that.’

‘You’d over-fromaged yourself?’ she suggests.

‘Yep. I could hardly bear to look at it. So maybe that’s what’s happened, and these days I have a sort of fromage frais effect on Andy.’

‘’Course you don’t,’ she splutters.

‘Or are my sprouting face hairs putting him off?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’

‘But maybe they are,’ I say firmly. ‘There was a new one this morning – a thick, long wire – like you might find if you took a vintage radio to bits …’

‘Before they were wireless?’

I nod. ‘Exactly.’

‘I had one of those too, sticking out of my chin. I couldn’t believe my own body had made it.’

‘And then there are the softer ones,’ I add. ‘The ones that sneak out, barely visible but definitely there, like little bits of fur. No wonder he doesn’t want to have sex when I’m halfway to being a goat.’

‘Some people would pay good money for that,’ she guffaws.

She does cheer me up, because when you talk about how someone won’t do it with you, it seems jokey and ridiculous and easily fixable with ‘a chat’.

‘You are going to talk to him, aren’t you?’ Shelley asks as she leaves. ‘I mean, to find out what’s actually going on?’

And I agree that I am.

We’re in bed now, and he is engrossed in a weighty psychological thriller. I clear my throat. ‘Andy?’

‘Mmm-hmm?’ His eyes remain fixed upon the book.

‘You know all this sweating and stuff I’ve got going on?’ I begin, alluringly.

‘Er, yeah?’

‘Well …’ I pause. ‘Does it kind of … put you off, you know … us doing stuff?’

He turns and blinks at me. ‘Doing stuff? What d’you mean?’

What does he think I mean? Having day trips at the seaside? ‘Doing it,’ I mutter. ‘You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?’

Oh God, I am rapidly losing confidence here. This is ridiculous! We’ve been together for twenty-five years. He held back my hair while I threw up from a bad oyster at his youngest brother’s wedding. He has seen me push out two babies. He didn’t seem to enjoy it especially, and with Izzy I caught him poking at his phone – but still, it’s mad that I should feel shy with him.

‘Doing it?’ he says carefully. ‘D’you mean, uh—’

‘Yes,’ I say, my cheeks burning now.

He frowns at me. ‘No, I’m not put off. Why d’you say that?’

Because you’re always in too much pain with your raging sciatica, although not so much that you can’t bound off to the pub …

‘I just wondered,’ I say flatly.

He turns back to his book, and I pretend to read mine, skimming the same paragraph over and over. Perhaps I’d get along better with Fantastic Mr Fox, which I am currently reading to Izzy.

I decide to try another angle. ‘Andy, d’you think I should try HRT?’

He gives me a confused look, which I might expect, were he not an endocrinologist: i.e. a doctor who specialises in hormones and therefore knows every sodding thing about them. And not any old endocrinologist either, but an eminent one, who travels the country to deliver lectures on the subject – although not to his wife, obviously. That would be far too troublesome. All this world-renowned oestrogen expert will say on the matter is: ‘Oh, I dunno, love. It’s up to you really.’

I fall into silence, unable to dredge up a response to that. Am I being unreasonable? I wonder. Is it crazy behaviour to ask one’s husband for advice when the subject happens to relate to his profession? Jules doesn’t seem to think so. Erol is a roofer and any trouble they have with their guttering, he has it sorted no problem. When their garage fell into a state of disrepair, he had it demolished and replaced with a spanking new one he built with his own hands.

My eyes are prickling now and I’m aware that I am dangerously close to crying. Get a grip, I chastise myself silently. Like Shelley suggested, he’s probably just tired and stressed. I should leave it until he’s more amenable.

‘I’d just like to know what you think,’ I bark at him. ‘I’m wondering if I should do something about it instead of just accepting all these horrible symptoms, you know? It feels like I’m losing my mind sometimes—’

‘Well, yeah. Perhaps you should see the doctor?’ he concedes, which has the effect of accelerating my heart rate to the point at which my entire chest seems to be juddering. I am seeing the doctor, I want to snap. He’s lying here a foot away from me in his stripy pyjamas and he doesn’t give a flying fuck.

Andy turns the page of his book, and I glare at him. Why won’t he help me? Does he want me to dissolve in a pool of anxiety and stress?

As he yawns and places his book on the bedside table, I tell myself to calm down and stop making such a drama of everything. Instead, I read recently, I should focus on the positive aspects of the menopause, like being able to enjoy sex (pah!) without fear of pregnancy, and being a wise, mature woman, who is graceful and elegant – as if we are all sodding Helen Mirren with sculpted cheekbones, still slipping easily into our size ten jeans.

As Andy clicks off his bedside light, and we exchange terse goodnights, I try to reassure myself that he is behaving like any normal man. After all, he works hard at that hospital and the last thing he wants is to be harangued into giving medical diagnoses at home. If he were a chef, I wouldn’t expect him to whip me up a fabulous carbonara the minute he’d walked in through the door.

So, our marriage is probably fine. Isn’t it?

Chapter Four
Saturday, February 16

But it’s not. As it turns out, it’s not fine at all.

It’s because of the stars. That’s how I find out. In the city you don’t often see them shining so brightly, but tonight you can. They are sparkling entrancingly. It’s magical.

It’s around 10 p.m. and I’m standing in our back garden, looking up at them, still gripping the bucket from emptying our recycling into the wheelie bin. Remembering the app that Andy installed on his phone, I head back into the house to ask him if I can have a go with it. He was telling me how it can identify constellations when it’s pointed at the sky, and tonight is the perfect night for it.

‘Andy!’ I call out from the hallway.

‘In the bath,’ comes his voice from upstairs. ‘What is it?’

‘Oh, nothing …’ I’d forgotten he’d gone up for a soak. Izzy is over at Maeve’s on a sleepover, so it’s just the two of us in tonight. Spencer moved out four years ago, when he was eighteen. He dropped out of university in first year – it just wasn’t for him, he insisted, and there was no arguing with him – and we were thrown into panic about his future, but he got a job pretty quickly for a company that installs sound systems for gigs. He lives in Newcastle now, in a shared flat with two friends and a varied selection of fungi sprouting from the bathroom carpet. Whenever I ask him what his job entails he just laughs and says, ‘Lifting things, Mum,’ and ruffles my hair as if I’m a little kid.

I spot Andy’s phone sitting on the hall table, take it out to the garden and tap in his passcode. That’s weird; it’s been his date of birth for as long as I can remember, but now it doesn’t seem to work. He must have changed it. I try tapping in the full year – still no luck. Shrugging off a twinge of unease (why has he changed it?) I try reversing the six digits of his date of birth. Bingo, that was easy! I’m now in the inner sanctum of my husband’s telephonic device.

Having found the app, I hold up the phone, marvelling at the way it names Betelgeuse, Venatici, Perseus; what beautiful decorative names they have. Ooh, there’s Mars! This is brilliant. I must get this app. It’s a lot more fun than my fitness one that reminds me – scathingly – that I have only done 397 steps out of the recommended daily 10,000.

Ping! That’s a text from ‘Estelle’, which I know means something celestial (I find out later that it’s Latin for star) so I assume it’s to do with the app. I open it, expecting it to say something like, Look out for incredible shooting stars tonight!

Darling baby, it reads, missing your sweet kisses so much xxx.

I frown at it. How very weird. Perhaps the app is malfunctioning? Or has someone messaged my husband by mistake? A moment later, there’s another:

Aching for you sweetheart xxx

Something clenches inside me as I see that it’s one of a string of messages. I scroll up and read the conversation:

Andy: Soon I hope xxx

Estelle: When can I see you darling? xxx

Andy: It really was baby xxx

Estelle: Last time was so special xxx

The fact that I am reading it from the bottom up makes me wonder again – momentarily – if my brain has tipped upside down and I am misinterpreting the situation. Could this be another menopausal symptom? I’m aware that I can be a little oversensitive, even verging on paranoid. I read on: I love you baby (from Andy). Is this some kind of joke? Or – I realise I’m clutching at straws here – could someone have hacked into his phone?

Sweetie, reads another of her messages, that was the best ever!!! What was the best? It can only mean sex, can’t it? Which means he’s done it with someone who isn’t me. My heart is pounding hard and I feel dizzy and quite sick. I try, desperately, to think of other things that might be described in that way but can’t come up with anything except, perhaps, ‘cake’. And I don’t think she was referring to cake.

‘Evening, Viv!’ The voice makes me jump. I swing around to see Tim, our next-door neighbour, beaming at me.

‘Hi, Tim.’ Please go away and let me quietly freak out.

‘Everything okay?’ Tim – a short, tubby quantity surveyor who’s as bald as an egg in his late thirties – gives me a concerned look.

‘Yes, I’m fine, thanks,’ I say, forcing a smile.

He looks up at the sky. ‘Aren’t the stars amazing tonight?’

‘They are, yes.’

‘Erm, look, Viv, I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings …’ My heartbeat accelerates. Does Tim know about Estelle? Does everyone know? ‘… but we have rats in the garden,’ he goes on. ‘Seen them a few times so a council guy’s coming round tomorrow to check things out. Is it okay if he has a poke around your garden too?’

I blink at him. ‘Rats?’

‘Well, yes,’ he says, looking regretful now, as if he feels somehow responsible for their arrival. ‘And if they’re in our garden, they’re probably in yours. I don’t think they respect boundaries …’ I watch our neighbour’s fleshy mouth moving as he carries on talking, but nothing seems to make sense anymore. I think he’s talking about poison, something about rats tending to follow a specific route. All I can think is: Andy says he loves her. He’s sleeping with her. My husband has an entire parallel life with this woman that I’ve known nothing about.

‘Oh, Viv,’ Tim exclaims, looking aghast now. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you. Was it something I—’

‘No, no, you haven’t upset me, Tim. I’m fine …’ I realise I am crying.

‘It’s just rats,’ he adds, brow furrowed in concern as he hurries closer and peers at me over the fence. ‘Not ideal, I know, but they’re everywhere these days. The guy’ll put poison down in little bags, buried in the ground …’

I nod, wordlessly, as tears continue to roll down my cheeks.

‘Honestly, it’s nothing to worry about,’ he goes on, looking quite distraught at the state of me. As parents, he and his wife might be spectacularly ineffective – ‘We don’t believe in saying no,’ Chrissie told me recently – but Tim is a decent, well-meaning man. He’s not a cheating bastard of a husband.

‘Worse things happen,’ he adds as I dab at my face with my sweater sleeve.

‘It’s not the rats, Tim—’

‘Oh …?’

‘It’s something else.’ I glance up at our frosted bathroom window with light coming through it, where Andy – ‘Sweetie’ – is currently marinating in bubbles, oblivious to my distress.

‘Is it, um, anything I can help with?’

‘No, I’m sorry, and it’s fine – about the rat man,’ I blurt out, marching towards the house, thinking, He can concrete over our entire garden for all I care.

Inside now, I run upstairs and rap sharply on the bathroom door.

‘Still in the bath,’ Andy calls out in a jovial tone.

‘Could you open the door?’

‘Mmm?’ The water sloshes. ‘Won’t be long …’

‘Andy,’ I bark.

‘Can’t you use the downstairs bathroom?’

‘No, I can’t.’ Fury is bubbling up in me now. I’m gripping his phone so hard it’s a wonder I don’t crush the screen. I bang harder on the door, at which Andy curses under his breath – but still audibly – then there’s more sloshing and ostentatious sighing as he hauls himself out of the water. He opens the bathroom door wearing his dressing gown unbelted and stands there dripping all over our wooden floor.

‘What’s up?’

I thrust his phone at him.

‘What is it?’ He gives me an uncomprehending look.

‘I read your texts. I read them just now. The ones from Estelle.’

My back teeth are jammed together and my heart seems to be battering inside my chest. Andy hesitates before taking his phone from me. And I know, as a sense of grim resignation settles over his face, that there’s no innocent explanation for these messages.

The astronomy app didn’t malfunction. No one hacked into his phone. My husband has been seeing this woman, and calling her ‘Baby’, and our marriage will never be the same again.

Chapter Five
The terrible early hours of Sunday, February 17

The way he tells it, it was a dreadful mistake. Too much drink after a heady day at that conference in Manchester, back in October: ‘So full on, Viv. You know what these things are like, especially on the last night when everything’s wrapping up.’

October! A whole four months ago! That’s sixteen weeks … a hundred and, um, a lot of days. And, actually, I don’t know what ‘these things’ are like. At Flaxico we don’t go away for conferences. We don’t even have any. Instead, we have ‘ideas days’, held in what’s known as the lower basement (as opposed to the upper basement), down in the bowels of the earth, perilously close to its fiery core, which is never used at any other time.

There’s no shagging at these, obviously. There isn’t even any booze; just a dismal buffet sent down to our windowless bunker from the canteen, comprising cress-garnished sandwiches containing something called ‘cheese savoury’ (i.e. grated cheese and onion bound with generous quantities of mayonnaise) plus small, sticky, factory-made cakes sweating in their cellophane wrappers. But that’s not the issue. The real point is, even if I did know what ‘these things are like’, I can’t imagine any situation where I’d have slept with someone else. The naughtiest thing I’ve ever done in a hotel was pinch an extra shampoo from a chambermaid’s trolley.

‘Massive night at the bar,’ Andy goes on, slumped on our sofa in his dressing gown. ‘Everyone all charged up, free drinks all night, things got out of hand …’ So what better way to round things off than to ‘find himself’ in someone else’s room, rather than in his own? An easy mistake to make, when blundering drunkenly along the corridors. Thank God for the eminent Dr Estelle Lang – whom he’d ‘barely known really’ – who had pulled him in, removed all his clothing and had frenzied sex with him until it was time for him to stagger, limping, down for breakfast.

Of course, I am making that bit up. Andy just blurts out the bare details – that it ‘sort of’ happened, though he was so horribly drunk he can hardly remember anything at all. In fact, it might not have happened that night. He’s really not sure. ‘And then,’ he continues, but only because I force it out of him, ‘we met up, just for coffee, to talk about stuff, and we slipped into this thing, Christ knows how it even started. I’m so sorry, Viv …’

His dressing gown is now belted tightly. That’s a relief. I don’t think I could bear to glimpse his sorrowful wandering penis right now. As for this celestial Estelle, I gather that she is based in Edinburgh, and that’s where these subsequent meetings took place. It was easy for him to get away with it. It’s a fifty-minute train journey from Glasgow, and he’s often invited to lunches, presentations and the occasional evening with his old medical-school mates; events I’ve been happy for him to go to without me tagging along.

Sometimes, he stays overnight in Edinburgh, supposedly at a friend’s place. ‘Can’t face rushing for the last train,’ he told me last time.

The lying shit.

‘I’ll do anything to make things right,’ he says now, wringing his hands as if trying to squeeze all the badness out of himself. He is crying, and I am crying, and we go on like this, shouting and snotting and repeating ourselves, winding up exactly where we started hours before.

At one point I pick up a board game of Izzy’s and throw it at him. The lid falls off and tiddlywinks fly out. Both of us scrabble to gather them all up. As dawn creeps into the living room I consider going out for cigarettes. However, as I haven’t bought any in twenty-four years, I’m not sure where I’d go. Plus, the alluring shiny gold packaging has been replaced by pictures of diseased mouths and babies on respirators, which would hardly make me feel better about anything, and I seem to remember that they did away with packets of ten so I’d be stuck with twenty, and I’d feel obliged to smoke them all and become addicted again: fagging it up in the back garden, horrifying Tim and Chrissie and their little darling, Ludo, next door. That would be more alarming than a few rats!

By the time it’s properly morning – we have been up raging and crying the entire night – I have started to grasp at fragments of positivity: like, thank God Izzy was invited to a sleepover at Maeve’s last night (how would Jules set about life coaching me out of this?). And: at least Andy seems genuinely sorry.

‘I suppose I was just flattered,’ he murmurs, ‘that a woman like her seemed to have feelings for me.’

A woman like her, i.e. several notches above his slightly overweight, menopausally sweating wife back at home?

‘I just got sucked into it,’ he adds.

‘Could you possibly use a different turn of phrase?’

‘Sorry! I’m sorry!’

I glare at him, my nerves shredded, utterly exhausted, yet simultaneously wondering whether I will ever sleep soundly again. ‘You said you loved her. Remember, I read the texts.’

‘I lost my mind for a bit,’ he says, trying to hug me. I push him away. I’m not ready for hugging. It’s bizarre to think how much I craved his arms around me, and his kisses, before I found out. ‘I’ll delete her number,’ he adds. ‘You can watch me do it.’

‘Do what you want. It won’t make any difference to what’s happened, will it?’

‘But it will, Viv.’ He holds his phone in front of me, trying to make me watch as he deletes her. ‘Look, the number’s gone. I swear on my life I’ll never contact her again.’

Still Sunday, properly daytime

After our night of madness, naturally I am the one who has to patch up my face in order to try to look normal when I go to pick up Izzy from Maeve’s. ‘Are you okay, Viv?’ Jules asks, registering my puffy eyes and ravaged complexion as Izzy gathers her stuff together in Maeve’s bedroom.

‘Me and Andy had a bit of a thing last night,’ I explain quickly. ‘I’m sure we’ll be all right. I’ll tell you all about it another time.’ I mean it – I will tell her – but I can’t face it right now. I’m not sure if I’d even be able to talk sense.

‘I hate to say this, but you look exhausted.’

‘Well, yes, I am. But honestly, I’ll be okay,’ I say, trying to believe it myself. But God, the mess of it. A quarter of a century, we’ve been together: almost half of our lives. We have our two lovely children and live in a sturdy Victorian house in a leafy area of the Southside. We have plenty of friends, both individually and as a couple, and although I had my gripes, I thought we were basically solid.

How wrong I was. Why on earth didn’t I suspect anything? The going-off-sex thing, for instance. Now that makes sense. Have I been walking around in some kind of daze?

Thankfully, Izzy doesn’t notice anything’s wrong – not because my clumsily applied make-up has acted as a successful camouflage, but because she’s full of all the fun things she and Maeve have been up to.

‘Jules let us make dinner,’ she says proudly as we walk home.

‘Oh, that’s nice,’ I say, pausing from trying to count up all the lies Andy’s told me over the past few weeks.

What about the last time he was in Edinburgh, supposedly for his mate Colin’s fiftieth birthday? And the time before that, when I seem to remember he made a particular effort to look good for a talk in the National Library?

‘Mum?’

‘Yes, Izzy?’

‘I said, d’you want to know what we made?’

‘Yes. Yes, of course I do.’ I take her hand and squeeze it and she beams up at me.

‘Stuffed tomatoes.’

‘What?’ I exclaim. She’s terribly iffy about vegetables usually. Even peas can be shunned.

‘They’re Turkish,’ she adds. ‘Erol’s Turkish.’

‘Yes, I know he is, honey. What were they stuffed with?’

‘Um, rice, pine kernels, raisins …’

My God, a dried fruit component? For a moment, this seems even more shocking than Andy shagging Estelle Lang at the Crowne Plaza hotel. What is it about Jules that enables her to persuade children to enjoy such exotic delights? Then we turn the corner and that awful sense of dread settles back over me. Our house is in view now, no longer solid and safe, a cosy haven, but emitting anguish and doom.

Izzy drops my hand and runs ahead of me, barging in through the front door. I step inside to see her hugging her dad and feel as if my heart could break.

Chapter Six
Six days later: Saturday, February 23

Bizarrely, my previously disinterested husband has become terribly attentive. I suppose I’d almost become accustomed to the way we were, with each of us doing our own thing, inhabiting the same house but not interacting very much at all. It’s just the way things were. Now he follows me around the house like a needy dog, trying to nuzzle me and sitting jammed up next to me whenever I dare to sit on the sofa for five minutes. I almost feel as if I should let him out to the garden to do his business.

I know why he’s doing it, of course. He’s hoping it’ll make the terrible Estelle stuff go away. Before all of this, he hadn’t touched me for weeks – apart from to pick a crisp off my jumper – so it’s unsettling to say the least. Often, I flinch at Andy’s touch, and on occasion I’ve swung around, primed for combat – or to at least pull the emergency cord – as if I’ve been groped on a train. I’ve had to explain, very firmly, that I have no wish to have my neck kissed when I’m battering away at the ice that’s stopping our freezer door from shutting properly.

As well as being Strokey McStrokerson, Andy has acquired another startling new role: the DIY Enthusiast. The coat hooks I’ve been asking him to put up for several decades are finally up; yes, I know I should have acquainted myself with the cordless drill and done it myself, as any self-respecting modern woman would have. But I didn’t, and – hurrah! – I no longer need to trouble myself, as they now adorn our hall wall (exactly where I’d asked him to put them). He has also put up shelves in the bathroom, yet more in our bedroom and hung a large mirror in the hallway; in fact, he has been erecting things all over the house. But not near me, thankfully. Another unexpected development is that he’s come over all canoodly in bed. But naturally, my libido was killed stone dead when the Estelle stuff broke, so there’s nothing happening on that score. Not that he’s being grumpy about his loving attentions being thwarted. On the contrary, he has been extremely pleasant to me, and appreciative to the point of ridiculousness:

Thanks for doing those shirts for me, darling!

Oh, you’ve washed up? I would’ve done those …

Wow, this so delicious …

‘It’s just an omelette,’ I snap. No need to over-egg it, is what I want to say – but I don’t want him to think we’re allowed to be jokey again. I’m still angry, yes – but I also hate the way this whole mess is making me so snarky and bitter, and I wonder if this is me now, for the rest of my life.

Everywhere I look, there seems to be an article on how to ‘be your best self’. Now, with Andy firmly on best behaviour, I seem to have turned into the very worst version of myself: that of a grim-faced parole officer, unmoved by praise.

‘Yes, but you make the best omelettes,’ Andy murmurs, gazing at it reverentially as if he might kiss it. ‘I’ve always said that.’

No, actually, I want to remind him, you’re only saying it because you couldn’t keep your dick in your pants. He looks at me across the kitchen table. Izzy – who thankfully still has no idea that anything is wrong – is tucked up under a blanket on the sofa in the living room, with a cold. I get up from my chair to go through to her. I’m still finding it difficult to be in the same room as Andy.

‘What’s the secret?’ he asks, having followed me through.

‘The secret of what?’ I frown at him.

‘Of your omelettes!’

‘Do you really want to know?’

‘Yes, I do,’ he splutters, looking hurt.

‘He does want to know,’ Izzy says, peering at me in confusion, which makes me feel as if my heart is being crushed. ‘Why won’t you tell him? Are you cross with Daddy?’

‘Of course not,’ I say with a terse smile as I scuttle out of the room.

I hide upstairs for a while, wondering how on earth we are going to get through this. We are doing our best to manoeuvre around each other, somehow managing to do the normal things that couples do, like cook dinner and watch TV and, of course, all the usual stuff with Izzy. All week, we’ve talked plenty about Estelle – long after Izzy’s gone to bed, obviously – as I’ve tried to drag every detail out of him: whether she’s married (yes), has children (no) and how successful she is in her field (‘Fairly,’ he admitted, reluctantly, which clearly meant: extremely).

It’s the length of time it’s been happening that’s the toughest thing to handle. It means they were ‘carrying on’ (such an old-fashioned phrase!) throughout Christmas, when I’d thought everything was fine and normal with us. But now I realise he was probably thinking about her when he carved the turkey. She’d have been on his mind when he and Spencer played a tipsy game of Jenga together, and when he hugged Izzy and told her the Christmas card she’d made him was ‘the best one I’ve ever had’.

How could he do this to us?

Naturally, I have googled the shit out of this woman. As I’m hardly sleeping anyway I’ve taken the sensible option of sitting up half the night, staring at pictures of her speaking at conferences and sitting on panels of Terribly Important Doctors.

She is attractive in that cool, thin, almost transparently pale kind of way: lightly freckled with challenging green eyes and rod-straight fair hair that hangs, wig-like, at her chin. If she were a sales assistant in a clothes shop, you’d take one look at her and decide you’d be better blundering around, trying to find the right thing in your size, rather than asking her for help. And you’d be too scared to ask to try anything on. You’d decide you’re probably too fat anyway and leave without buying anything, muttering a meek ‘thank you’ as you left the shop.

So yes, she is thin. Of course she ruddy is. I imagine she’s tall, too; she has that lofty look about her, as if she ‘carries herself’ well, whereas I merely barge about. However, I can’t find any mention of her height anywhere, and when I ask Andy he just groans, ‘Please, Viv, can we stop this now?’ and leaves the room.

I do manage to find out her age, though. She looks way younger than me – early forties at most – but, horrifyingly, it transpires that she and I are the same age. Fifty-bloody-two with the skin of a peach! She looks natural, too – not obviously Botoxed or weirdly stretched as if she’s had her skin hoisted up behind her ears. I can’t decide whether she is ageing incredibly well or I am crumbling at a terrifying rate.

‘I just want us to be happy, like we were,’ Andy says, looking exhausted when I try to grill him on this. ‘What can I do to help us get over it?’

The trouble is, I don’t know.

Sunday, February 24

But my friend Penny does. ‘Make the most of it,’ she says. ‘All those household tasks you’ve wanted doing? Get him onto them right away.’

I had to escape the house today – I literally can’t bear being around Andy – and was grateful she was around. It’s a sharp, blue-skied afternoon, and I’m helping Jules out by looking after Maeve for the day. As the girls scale the climbing frame, Penny details how I should put my husband to work as a handyman; a ‘strike while the iron’s hot’ sort of approach.

‘But he’s done everything already,’ I explain. ‘I found him the other day, prowling around actually looking for jobs that needed doing. There’s not one lightbulb that needs changing. He even pumped my bike tyres without being asked. He washed the skirting boards. There’s literally nothing left to do.’

‘How about the garden? Didn’t you say you want to start growing veg?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Then get him started,’ she insists.

‘It’s too early, Pen,’ I say.

She looks quizzical. ‘You mean you’re not ready to talk?’

‘No, it’s too early to plant veg.’

‘Yes, but he could start digging things over, preparing the ground …’

I laugh, despite the awfulness of it all. As if a ready supply of rocket will make everything all right. ‘Penny, I don’t care about that anymore.’

‘But you were so keen,’ she insists. ‘You said—’

‘Yes, before I found out about this woman!’

‘Oh, darling. I’m so sorry this has happened to you.’ As she squeezes my arm I look round at her kind face, pillarbox-red lipstick on as always, ash-blonde hair tumbling around her shoulders in bouncy waves. Despite being almost two decades older – Penny is seventy-one – she’s not remotely maternal with me. If anything, I find our age difference refreshing as, whatever I’m going through, there’s a pretty good chance she’s breezed her way through it and emerged, if not quite unscathed, then laughing throatily with a G&T clamped to her hand. So far, I have managed to keep my own booze consumption to a reasonable level; at least, reasonable for someone who’s been lied to and humiliated.

We first met right here, Penny and I. Back then – five years ago – Izzy and I virtually lived in the park, a five-minute walk from our house, and we’d started to notice the lady who often wore dazzling bright colours when she walked her little black dog. We began to look out for her and, of course, she was delighted when Izzy made a fuss of Bobby, her schnauzer-poodle cross (‘He’s a schnoodle,’ she explained, to Izzy’s delight). After a few weeks of chatting we’d exchanged numbers so we could meet up. I started to look forward to seeing her.

With her prim accent and crackly laugh, Penny seemed both earthy and grandiose. I soon learned that she’d been a fashion model in London in her teens, featuring on magazine covers and dancing in the Top of the Pops audience in a home-made crocheted dress. A mother at twenty-two, she had taught herself to pattern cut as a means of making a living once the modelling work had dried up. Whilst working in a typing pool by day, she started making clothes at night to sell at Portobello Road market – ‘My ponchos are collectors’ items now!’ she told me proudly – and eventually opened a tiny boutique back in her home city of Glasgow. Her talent and charm had attracted investors, and more shops opened. Throughout the latter half of the Seventies she presided over a popular, hugely influential chain of boutiques, called Girl Friday – the Topshop of its day.

She’s turned serious now. ‘What are you going to do, d’you think?’

‘I honestly don’t know.’ I glance down at my scuffed boots poking out from my jeans. Penny is wearing a quilted red jacket with a fur-edged hood, a calf-length blue shimmery skirt and tan brogues.

‘So he’s promised he’ll never contact her again?’

I nod. ‘Yeah, that’s what he says.’

‘D’you believe him?’

‘I don’t know what to believe.’ I glance at the girls who are huddled together, engrossed in chatter in the rope nest on the climbing frame. Bobby is snuffling around the bushes close by. ‘But I suppose I have to,’ I add.

‘You mean, you have to believe him, or you have to stay with him?’ She looks incredulous.

‘Well, both.’ I know how feeble this must sound. Apparently, Penny had kicked out her husband before their son Nick’s first birthday. When she told me this, she made it sound as if their break-up was as easy as dropping off a bag of old clothes at the charity shop. ‘I cleared the decks,’ was how she described it in her usual blasé way.

‘Darling, you do know Izzy would be fine,’ she ventures, not unkindly. ‘I know it seems enormous, breaking up when you have a young child. But it can work out better for everyone, believe me.’

I nod, although the very idea of doing that to her makes me feel sick.

‘She’s a smart, level-headed girl,’ Penny adds. ‘She’d get used to the idea. Children adapt to all kinds of situations.’

‘It would be a massive thing to her,’ I murmur. ‘She adores her dad.’

‘But she must have lots of friends whose parents aren’t together,’ Penny adds, as if that would make things easier.

‘Well, yes, there’s a few.’

‘What about Maeve’s mum and dad?’

‘No, they’re very much together and blissfully happy.’ I fix my gaze upon my daughter’s cheery, animated face. I can’t even bear to think about turning her life on its head. ‘And then there’s Spencer to consider,’ I add.

‘But he’s an adult, leading his own independent life!’

‘He’d still be upset. I’m sure he thinks me and his dad are pretty solid, you know?’

‘Yes, but it’s not about them, is it? It’s about you, and what you want. And look what Andy’s done to you.’

‘Yes, I know,’ I say, unconvincingly. But we’re a family, is what I really want to say, and I’m not sure I can throw away these twenty-five years. Although I’m still angry and hurt, I’m trying to do the right thing here. I don’t know how to explain that to Penny without it sounding as if I somehow disapprove that she left her son’s dad. In fact I think she was far braver than I could ever hope to be. Right now, I feel terrified.

‘Pen,’ I say now, ‘can I ask why you split up with Nick’s dad?’

‘Oh, I’ve told you all that already,’ she says quickly.

In fact, she has barely mentioned him, beyond remarking that he was hardly a hands-on father – ‘He’d rather have chopped off his own foot than change a nappy’ – and started a new life in Canada after they’d split. When I asked if he is still alive, she shrugged and said, ‘Allegedly.’

‘Well, yes, you have a bit,’ I say now. ‘But I wondered … was there something specific that happened?’

‘A final straw kind of thing?’ she asks, getting up from the bench as Bobby potters out of sight. ‘Well, yes,’ she continues, ‘there was the soup incident …’

‘What happened?’

She chuckles. ‘I’ve told you what Brian was like. Big-shot architect, shagging half the office, probably, surrounded by dolly birds, as he called them …’

‘Was it that? Was he sleeping with other women?’

‘Oh, almost definitely,’ she says blithely as she clips on Bobby’s lead. ‘But that wasn’t the reason. Everyone in our circle was doing it. It was more how he viewed me, you know?’

I nod, although I don’t really understand. The girls run over to us, pleading for ice creams. Izzy takes Bobby’s lead as we leave the park and make our way towards the van. ‘I mean, these days you’d never be expected to do this,’ Penny goes on, ‘but back then, men like Brian wanted the corporate wife back at home. You know – the good little woman flapping about in a pinny, rustling up dinner parties for his colleagues …’

‘Surely he didn’t expect that from you!’ I exclaim.

She sniggers. ‘Unfortunately, he did. You mean, you can’t imagine me topping up glasses and handing out vol-au-vents?’

‘Absolutely not.’

Izzy looks round. ‘What’s volly vonts?’

‘Little pies,’ Penny replies, ‘with something like mushrooms inside, in a creamy sauce.’

‘Ugh,’ exclaims Maeve.

‘You didn’t make them, did you?’ I ask. I have encountered Penny’s ‘experimental’ cooking a couple of times: her ‘mango pork’ consisting of anaemic-looking chops and sliced fruit in a dish of cider, and a lime cheesecake with the texture of blackboard chalk. She seems to exist mainly on boxed meals from her freezer.

‘Of course not,’ she declares as we join the small queue at the ice cream van. ‘But one day, Brian phoned from his office – never mind that I was up to my neck with a new baby – and said, “Pen, darling, Roger and Cleo are coming over for dinner. Make sure you put together something nice, would you?”’

‘What did you do?’

She beams at me. ‘We had a big tin of tomato soup so I heated that up. Brian came into the kitchen as I was ladling it into bowls – pretty, hand-painted bowls from Marrakesh – and said, “God, Penny, is that the best you can do?” And I said, “No, don’t worry, darling …” And I grabbed a lump of Cheddar from the fridge and waved it in his face and said, “I’ll put some fucking grated cheese on it.”’

Izzy and Maeve are thrilled by this, and it feels like the entire ice cream queue has swivelled to glare at us as we crack up. My God, I am actually laughing. My husband has been shagging someone else, someone far more beautiful and successful than I could ever hope to be – but I can still laugh so much, I’m in danger of falling onto the ground.

I’m so grateful to Penny for stopping me from thinking about Estelle Lang for about ten seconds.

Chapter Seven
Monday, February 25

All day at work, I play over what Penny said: that my kids would be fine, and that sometimes, breaking up works out better for everyone.

But then, Penny’s not me. We are entirely different. It’s not that I view myself as a better mother; just that I am incapable of being as relaxed as she seemed to be. I’m a worrier and a fusspot, of the belief that I must do my absolute best at all times, and that if I happen to get anything wrong I’ll be judged and reported and Izzy will be wrestled away from me and put into care.

It sounds mad, but this is the situation we modern mothers have put ourselves in. Parenting Seventies-style was very different.

My dad used to smoke in the car with Mum and me in it, and no one thought that was wrong. Mum once broke a thermometer and gave me the mercury to play with. I loved that mercury like Izzy loves her knitted sandwich! And no one worried about children’s nutrition. It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that they might need something called ‘vitamins’ and ‘not too much sugar’. Penny told me recently that, when Nick was about five, he refused to eat anything but butterscotch Angel Delight – for a whole year.

‘What did you do?’ I asked, aghast.

‘What could I do?’ She shrugged. ‘I let him!’

‘But … what about his health? His teeth? And nutrients?’ Although amazed and impressed, I also felt a little outraged on his behalf, even though he’s now apparently a fully functioning man in his forties, having carved out a successful career as a documentary maker in New Zealand.

Penny laughed. ‘I was running seventeen shops, Viv. We had new stock dropping into these stores every two weeks. I didn’t have time to arrange vegetables in little faces on his plate.’

Then there was the time he stripped off his clothes and ran around naked in the library. Apparently Penny ‘let him’ do that too (‘I was reading, darling’). I’ve heard how she took him on fashion shoots where ‘the make-up artist or model would play with him’; though, if there was a big social thing, there’d usually be a friend – or friend of a friend – she could drop him off with. Yet, amusingly, there’s always an extensive interview procedure before she ever leaves Bobby with anyone. Potential dog sitters are grilled.

Another aspect of Penny that I find fascinatingly bizarre is how unbothered she seems about Nick living on the other side of the world. Divorced from his New Zealander wife, he’s still showing no sign of returning to the UK. She has only ever showed me a single picture of him – bearded and blurry, possibly taken from half a mile away – and that was because I asked her to.

I find it hard enough with Spencer living a three-hour drive away from us. Maybe that’s why, every couple of months, I have a grocery order delivered to his flat.

‘Don’t they have groceries in Newcastle?’ Penny teased me when she found out about this.

I guess the fact is that we are very different, and her insistence that everyone would be ‘just fine’ if Andy and I broke up is doing nothing to sway my decision. As it is, he keeps on saying he’s sorry, and that he loves me, and somehow, we are managing to get through the days. Thankfully, Izzy still seems to have no idea that anything is wrong.

I’m actually quite impressed by the two of us. Our marriage might be in shreds, and every so often I can’t help grilling him yet again about his feelings for that woman, and why he did it – those terribly cyclical conversations which lead us precisely nowhere. But despite all of that, we are doing our utmost to keep up appearances in front of our daughter, or whenever we are in the company of other adults.

Whenever we’re out and about together, no one would guess there was anything wrong. I’d never have imagined we’d be capable of such Oscar-worthy performances.

Wednesday, February 27

I wake up to two revelations:

1 I have somehow made it to my fifty-third birthday without dying of misery and shame.

2 Culinary treats are being bestowed upon me as Izzy brings me breakfast in bed, comprising thickly buttered Cornish Wafers, a sliced banana and some grapes. She also presents me with a beautiful bangle that she made from her bead kit, and a hand-drawn birthday card depicting me looking pleasingly chic in a camel trench coat and jeans, walking Bobby.

It’s raining heavily in her drawing, and the sky is dark and thundery and lacking her signature beaming yellow sun, but at least my eyelashes are lush and my mascara hasn’t run, and I am grinning determinedly in it. I decide it isn’t intended to represent ‘Mum’s life being so crappy it’s pouring down on her birthday’ but, ‘Positive Mum, happy whatever the weather’. And if that’s the case, my ‘everything’s fine!’ act must be working a treat, which is incredible as I still feel as if I am falling to pieces inside. The only reason I’m still sharing a bed with Andy is because I’m not sure I could get away with moving to Spencer’s old room without a barrage of tricky questions from Izzy.

While she rushes off to change from PJs into school clothes – she shuns any assistance from me when it comes to getting ready – Andy presents me with a necklace of milky blue stones on a fine silver chain. ‘Thanks,’ I say, my eyes welling with tears. Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry. There’s also a bottle of my favourite figgy perfume and a thoughtful collection of interesting books.

He really has gone to some effort. He is certainly honouring the occasion, which, rather than making me happy, is having the effect of triggering such a wave of grief that I can barely hold myself together. ‘Happy birthday, darling,’ he says, refilling my coffee cup like an eager elf. It’s a relief when he sets off to work and it’s just Izzy and me, setting off for school.

Although Spencer never gets it together enough to put a card in the post, he calls me at lunchtime, vowing to visit soon. Often, these promises don’t come to fruition, and I’m kind of hoping this one doesn’t. Whereas Izzy seems to be unaware of the tensions between us, I’m pretty sure our son would detect that something’s amiss.

‘What are you doing tonight?’ he asks.

‘Dad’s booked dinner,’ I reply. ‘I’m not sure where we’re going. It’s a surprise.’

‘Aw, that’s nice! Somewhere fancy, then?’

‘I have a feeling it’s not Pizza Hut.’ He chuckles, and it occurs to me as we finish the call that it’s not the restaurant booking that’s significant; it’s the fact that Andy sorted out the babysitter too. He had to ask me for her number. But the fact is, he arranged it: a first for mankind.

The restaurant turns out to be a wonderful seafood place, which I’d normally love. However, as it stands, I am horribly aware of going through the motions, as if it’s a normal birthday and everything’s fine; that we are happy and still very much in love. I pretend to enjoy the astronomically priced crustaceans as we fiddle away with all the little tools – the pliers and tweezers and all that pale flesh. I see Andy’s face blanch when he glimpses the bill.

Later – after the babysitter’s gone, obviously – he’s all over me, kissing and touching and madly complimentary about my body, my face, the beautiful embroidered silky slip I’m wearing (my birthday present from Penny). It’s hard to believe that, until all this stuff happened, he seemed to regard having sex with me as on a par with the community litter pick-up (which we, being Good Citizens, always take part in). Actually, I used to wonder if he preferred the litter pick-up to doing it with me. He always seemed pleased when Mr Singh, the organiser, handed out the grabber sticks, to the point where I wondered if we should try to incorporate one in our sex life.

But not any more, obviously. We actually do it tonight, for the first time since the Estelle revelations; there’s no hint of sciatica/lumbago or any mutterings that he has an early start in the morning. Whilst I feel a little weird and disconnected, it’s at least reassuring that we can still make it happen, and that it doesn’t feel completely abhorrent, which perhaps hints that there may be a future for us after all.

I still love him, I suppose. It’s infuriating, really, how you can’t turn off your feelings for someone just because they’ve been to bed with someone else. It’s all still there, bubbling away beneath the surface layer of fury and hurt: my admiration for his commitment at work, and the way he is as a father – as caring and kind as I’d known he would be. I wish I could just hate him, but it’s not as simple as that. He’s still the man I fell in love with all those years ago, the one I’ve grown with, and the only person I had ever wanted to have children with. Plus, I suppose I still find him attractive, despite everything. He made a mistake and – God, how grown-up do I sound? – he’s contrite, and I think we can get over it. While I’ve been tempted to check his phone numerous times, I’ve managed not to so far.

I mean, I have to be able to trust him again, don’t I? Or what’s the point?

Chapter Eight
Three weeks later: Wednesday, March 20

After a full week of rain it has finally stopped. I have a day off work today. Dental appointment, plus I fancied a few hours to myself.

Our house is empty and blissfully quiet, and as I glance out of the kitchen window, I notice how beautiful the garden looks. Our crocuses are blooming, purple and white with orangey centres, and the border at the bottom is filled with daffodils. I love our garden. It’s a little wild and untamed but things seem to pop up just where you’d want them to be. Izzy has her own little plot, where she’s tending winter pansies in every imaginable colour. After I’ve picked her up from school we potter about in the late afternoon sunshine, not talking much, just happy working side by side.

My low-level worrying hasn’t gone away, and I still wake up in the night from time to time, my heart hammering in panic. However, that had been happening way before I found out about Estelle, and with a start, I realise I am beginning to feel almost normal again. At least, I can safely assume I am no longer on the brink of falling apart.

I used to be of the opinion that, if someone had an affair, that was the marriage over, end of story. And now I’m not sure that’s the case. For one thing, it’s scary, the idea of being on my own at fifty-three. I don’t mean not having someone to drag the wheelie bins out, or to build flatpack. I don’t even mean financially (however tricky, I’m sure we would figure things out somehow). It’s more the idea of suddenly being single – alone – for the first time since I was twenty-seven years old. A tiny part of me thinks that might be thrilling, and that it might have the effect of actually making me twenty-seven again – vibrant, full of life and ambition, smooth of face and pert of arse, with adventures to be had. So, yes, that part seems alluring. But mostly, when I think of starting over as a single woman, I feel deeply sad and frankly terrified. I know it’s the life stage when we’re supposed to ‘give fewer fucks’; to feel emboldened and no longer care what anyone thinks. But is it really? If that’s meant to be the natural way of things, then there must have been some kind of malfunction because that hasn’t happened to me at all.

That evening, after Andy has gone to bed, I sit outside on the back step, trying to hold on to the calmness I felt earlier when I was out in the garden with Izzy. In a small notebook I write a list titled ‘reasons to split’:

Because I feel I should.

Not sure I can ever trust him again.

To punish him.

That’s all I can dredge up.

As for my ‘reasons not to split’ list, there are so many whirling around in my head – such as ‘Better for Izzy’, ‘Avoids upheaval’ and ‘Should try and rescue marriage rather than giving up’. But I don’t jot these down. Instead, I just write:

Because I still love him.

Friday, March 22

During our quiet, unremarkable evening it hits me that something significant has happened. Izzy is asleep, which means we could be going over the whole Estelle thing yet again. But we are not.

Instead, we are just catching up on each other’s days over dinner. Whilst Andy never goes into the ins and outs of his dealings with patients, he tells me about a woman who brought her three children along to her appointment today, and they all tucked into an extensive picnic of sandwiches, crisps and Mini Rolls on the waiting room floor. ‘No one had the heart to ask them to put it away,’ he says.

I realise it’s been a long time since he shared anything about his day, being generally ‘too tired’ to talk to me. As a result, I’d stopped asking. In turn, I tell him about the arrival of my boss’s Barbie pink ‘stability ball’, a kind of giant beach ball that Rose has taken to perching on, rather unstably, as an alternative to sitting on her chair (she hopes to strengthen her core whilst simultaneously dealing with China). Whilst it’s hardly scintillating as far as anecdotes go, at least we are communicating relatively normally, and are no longer so on edge with each other. Andy has finally stopped trying to stroke my hair when I’m stacking the dishwasher. I can now stand there folding up laundry without him lurking behind me, trying to kiss my neck. The mad flurry of affection was understandable. But the fact that it has eased off can only be a good thing, surely?

I am starting to think that we really can get over this, and that Andy’s affair was one of those ‘blips’ people talk about. After all, most marriages tend to hit a crisis at some point or other, and I’ve read many times that it can actually make a couple stronger together, in the long run.

So, this is where we are now; just a normal middle-aged couple hanging out together on a Friday night. It feels kind of right. Never mind Penny’s ‘tell him to sling his hook’ attitude. It’s my marriage, and my decision, and I can’t bear the thought of throwing it all away.

Sunday, March 24

True to his word – albeit a month on from when it was promised – Spencer has arrived for a visit home. Now the worst of the Estelle crisis seems to be over, it’s wonderful to see him. He fills our house with his big, loud laugh and extravagant stories about gigs he’s worked on, and I love it. He has brought his girlfriend, Millie, a sassy girl who can unearth a ratty old lime green satin bedspread in a charity shop and make a fabulous skirt out of it.

She has a finely boned face and a mane of crinkly light brown hair. Izzy is transfixed – despite the fact that we’ve met her several times before – and trots around with her, chatting incessantly. As I look around at the five of us all here together in our sun-filled kitchen, it seems incredible that, barely more than a month ago, I was reading those awful texts in the garden.

As usual, Spencer gave us hardly any notice that he was driving up to Glasgow. He just called from a service station to say he was on his way and would be here in an hour or so – and he didn’t even mention that Millie was with him. As we had little food in, I panicked; I like being able to put on a big feast when he’s here. ‘Just make your omelettes,’ he said, and so that’s what I’m doing (they’re his favourite anyway).

‘How’s the pellet business, Mum?’ he asks cheekily as I bring a huge bowl of home-made fat golden chips to the table, and we all sit down.

‘It’s completely thrilling,’ I reply with a smile.

Spencer fixes me with a look. His blue eyes are bright behind his black-framed spectacles, and now I’m starting to wonder whether he’s noticed that something has happened since we saw him last.

‘You should get back into theatre again,’ he says. ‘Do something you love, Mum. You’re wasted in that place.’

‘Oh, you definitely should,’ Millie agrees. She is a performance artist who seems to do a bit of everything – dance, spoken word, poetry – and is a regular fixture at the Edinburgh Fringe. It astounds me how together and confident she is at twenty years old.

‘Who says I don’t love what I do?’ I say with a smile, knowing there’s no point in explaining that, at my stage of life, manageable working hours are perhaps more valuable than what Spencer would term as ‘following your passion’. When does it happen, this decision to veer down the sensible route?

‘Can I show Millie my clothes?’ Izzy asks, the instant we’ve finished eating. She adores dressing up.

‘Yes, of course,’ I say, my heart soaring as the two of them disappear together.

Spencer picks out a few more chips from the bowl. ‘That was lovely, Mum. You make the best omelettes in the world.’

‘She does,’ Andy says. ‘I keep telling her that.’

‘All this praise!’ I remark as we clear the table. ‘It’s going to go to my head.’

Andy grins at our son. ‘She still won’t tell me her secret method, even after all these years.’

‘If I did, I’d have to kill you,’ I remark.

He chuckles and winds an arm around my waist, and I detect a hint of relief passing over Spencer’s face, as if he’s thinking, Oh, so they are okay after all.

Izzy bounces back into the kitchen wearing a flamboyant outfit the girls have put together: yellow top, red trousers, pea green feather boa and more jewellery than I’d have thought it was possible to pile onto a seven-year-old child.

‘So you let Millie help you choose what to wear and not your own mother?’ I tease her, taking pictures with my phone.

‘Yeah, but Millie knows about fashion.’ She giggles.

‘Penny does too. But you won’t let her pick your outfits either.’

Izzy grins slyly. ‘Penny said the f-word,’ she announces, at which Spencer feigns shock.

‘Did she? That’s outrageous! What was that all about?’

She looks at me. ‘What was it, Mum? She didn’t want to put cheese in the soup?’

‘My God, Izzy, that was weeks ago …’ Of course, kids never forget when an adult does something they shouldn’t. They file it away for future reference and delight in bringing it up.

‘Is cheese in soup a thing?’ Spencer muses, when I tell him the story.

‘Of course it is,’ I exclaim, in mock outrage. ‘Tomato soup needs cheese.’

‘It’s kind of retro,’ Andy adds, ‘but yeah, it really works. You should try it, Spence. But it’s got to be cheap Cheddar—’

‘Thanks for the tip, Dad.’ He grins and turns to me. ‘So, how is the lovely Penny?’

‘She’s doing great.’

‘Still seeing that musician guy on the boat?’ He means Hamish, with the velvet jackets, cravats and a great bouffe of silvery hair, who has the kind of voice that ‘carries’ (i.e. he always talks as if he’s making a public speech).

‘He says he’s a composer,’ I reply with a smile, ‘and yes, she is, although I don’t know how serious it is …’

‘He’s quite a bit younger than her, isn’t he?’ Andy remarks. I’m surprised he’s even picked up on that. Before the Estelle business he was never interested in my friends.

‘Um, yes. He’s in his early sixties, I think.’

‘That’s not young,’ Izzy splutters.

‘It’s all relative,’ Spencer says loftily, patting her arm. He turns to me. ‘Well, give her my love, won’t you?’ As Spencer and Millie get ready to leave, I try not to show my disappointment that they’re not staying overnight. However, the prospect of a gig in Edinburgh is clearly irresistible, and with a flurry of hugs and kisses, they’re off.

‘Wasn’t that lovely?’ I remark.

Andy nods, looking a little deflated now. ‘It was.’

‘But I wish they’d stayed a bit longer.’

‘Me too.’ He wipes down the table and looks around the kitchen, as if unsure of what to do next. Izzy has disappeared off to her room.

‘It’s great that he has his own full life, though,’ I add. ‘I’m proud of him, aren’t you?’

He clears his throat. ‘Oh, yeah, of course I am.’ There’s a slight catch to his voice. He seemed particularly sorry to see Spencer go tonight, and I can’t quite work out why. Yes, the visit was brief, but that’s hardly unusual. We are used to him bowling up, all singing and dancing, then scooting off before we’ve had chance to fully appreciate him being home with us again.

While Andy loads the dishwasher I go upstairs to run Izzy’s bath and sit chatting to her while she soaks in the bubbles. I read to her in her room – a couple of chapters of The Twits, which has her in giggles – then tuck her in and kiss her goodnight.

‘Did you enjoy seeing Spence and Millie?’ I ask.

‘Yeah.’ She grins. ‘I love Millie.’

I smile and squeeze her hand. ‘I do too. She’s a great girl.’

‘Spence loves her, doesn’t he?’

Something seems to clench inside me. ‘Yes, I’m pretty sure he does. It’s kind of obvious, isn’t it?’

She nods. ‘Yeah.’ A pause. ‘Will they get married?’

‘Oh, darling, I don’t know about that. We’ll have to see, won’t we? But they’re a bit young for that right now.’

I stand up and smooth back the fine hair from her lightly freckled pale face. ‘I wish I had a sister,’ she adds.

‘Like Millie you mean? A big sister?’

She nods.

‘Oh, honey, you have Spencer, though, don’t you? You’re lucky.’

She seems to be considering this, and her expression turns solemn. ‘You don’t have anyone.’

I laugh dryly. ‘No brothers or sisters, you mean? Yes, you’re right there, but it’s okay, you know. It’s what I’m used to, and I have you guys. You’re my family. So I’m very lucky too.’

I turn to her bedroom door as Andy appears, having come up to say goodnight to Izzy too. It’s all so ordinary, I muse as he hugs her. Just a dad saying goodnight to his daughter. A month ago, I thought my marriage was over and now here we are, still together, still a family.

It’s true, what I said to Izzy just then. I do feel very lucky indeed.

Early hours of Monday, March 25

When terrible things happen you sometimes have the weirdest thoughts. You don’t think about big things. You think about trivial details, like: I could have taken the time to explain why my omelettes are so good. If Andy had really wanted to know, I could have gone into the importance of the right kind of frying pan (i.e. a really good non-stick one), the fact that you don’t need much butter – a small knob will suffice – and that the pan must be smokingly hot before the beaten eggs are tipped in.

I might also have mentioned, had he been genuinely interested, that as soon as it starts to set, the eggy mixture should be dragged to the centre with a spatula, and the pan tipped and swirled, so the omelette cooks as quickly as possible: speed is of the essence. But the truth is, Andy’s interest was faked.

He didn’t give a stuff about my omelettes, and nor was he telling the truth when he’d vowed that all communications with Estelle Lang had stopped. They’ve been in touch the whole time and, he’s so sorry, he tells me now, as he hurriedly packs a bag, but they are in love and he needs to be with her.

And that’s why he is leaving me.

Part Two

Chapter Nine
Four months later: Saturday, July 20

The rice is nearly cooked, my very own four-foot-tall, gap-toothed TV chef says with a flourish of her wooden spoon, and now we’re adding the pine kernels, the salt and the sugar to the frying pan and giving it a big stir … Izzy looks up with a smile. Since her father left another milk tooth has gone. The sugar, she adds, as though sensing my note of surprise, makes it nicer to eat. Now, we’re adding some, uh … She picks up a clump of greenery and frowns at it. Basil?

‘Dill,’ I prompt her.

We add the dill and the parsley and cinnamon, uh … nearly forgot the raisins!

Who’d have thought that my daughter would acquaint herself with such exotic ingredients? On this bright summer’s afternoon she is rustling up the Turkish stuffed tomatoes she first made at Maeve’s a few months ago. She has become mad about cooking and taken to demonstrating dishes to me in her one-woman cookery ‘show’ here in our kitchen. We have ventured far and wide, food-wise, with Thai, Caribbean and even Russian dishes featuring on Izzy Cooks! One time she rustled up a spicy Indonesian salad – ‘It’s called gado-gado!’ she announced – which involved covering most of our kitchen with smashed-up peanuts but was, admittedly, so delicious I didn’t really mind the mess. These culinary delights have almost made up for the fact that I haven’t managed to get it together to book a summer holiday for us this year.

Sunshine is managing to beam in through the grubby window. Izzy’s hair is tied back neatly beneath the chef’s hat we made from white cardboard, and she’s wearing the polka dot apron Penny whizzed up for her on her sewing machine. As there’s no production team here, sourcing ingredients has been keeping me busy. Left to my own devices, I’m what might be described as a ‘basic cook’. I’d never imagined that Medjool dates and preserved lemons would ever put in an appearance in this house, or that the phrase ‘We’re out of polenta!’ would fall from my seven-year-old’s mouth. This new project is ruining me financially and the clearing up afterwards is colossal. But at least Izzy’s having fun, making these mad, exotic feasts.

While Izzy Cooks! is a fairly new project, lots of things haven’t changed since her father moved out. Obviously, Izzy was shocked and upset when we told her (‘Mum and I will still be really good friends,’ Andy explained, twisting his hands together as he sat hunched on the sofa). There were plenty of tears and for a while, she took to coming into my room at night and snuggling into bed with me. But she seems to have accepted how things are. And now, well into the summer holidays – school broke up at the end of June – she is generally back to her sunny, happy self, as if everything is normal.

Which it is, in the ways that matter. Her parents and brother still love her. The tooth fairy hasn’t stopped leaving a pound under her pillow. She sees her dad regularly (although he’s said he’s ‘not quite ready’ for her to visit his new flat across town, whatever that means), and she still loves to sit drawing at the kitchen table. In Izzy’s world, there is little in life that can’t be made better with a new set of felt tips.

Spencer, too, was initially appalled when news broke, but has come around to a kind of stoical acceptance. Although he insisted that there was no need at all, that he was absolutely FINE, Andy and I drove (separately) to Newcastle to talk things over with him. Although we were managing to be reasonably cordial with each other – at least in front of Izzy – I couldn’t bear the thought of being trapped in a car with him for the six-hour round trip.

Our son was incredibly sweet and kind about everything. ‘As long as you’re all right, Mum,’ he said, with genuine concern, as I fought back tears over a bowl of noodles I couldn’t even eat. A couple of weeks later he arrived in Glasgow to check whether I really was okay, which made my heart soar. It amazes me sometimes that he has grown up into this thoughtful, caring young man despite a cheating bastard of a father being fifty per cent responsible for his genetic make-up.

By then, Spencer had dragged it out of his father that there was another woman involved. And eventually, Izzy asked outright, ‘Does Daddy have a new girlfriend?’ It all tumbled out that, yes, he has ‘a friend.’ Neither she nor Spencer have met her yet, although I expect they will at some point. All I can hope is that they’ll come back to report some unfortunate trait, like horrendous body odour or a screechy voice, the kind that causes babies to start crying spontaneously and have to be hurried out of the room.

Considering Andy’s apparent devotion to That Woman, I realise it’s pretty unlikely. But we are doing okay, I keep telling myself. We are certainly eating well.

‘Shall we keep some of these for Dad?’ Izzy asks as we tuck in.

‘Yes, we can, love,’ I say.

‘I’m seeing him tomorrow, aren’t I?’

‘Yep, he’s taking you out for the day.’

‘Hurrah!’ She grins. ‘Where are we going?’

‘I’m not sure what he has planned, but I’m sure it’ll be something fun.’

We don’t have any formal system in place yet, for when he sees her; we are playing it by ear, stepping around each other carefully with brittle politeness. He and Izzy usually see a film, potter around the shops or have a pizza, stuff like that. I know the place he’s renting is in the West End. However, although I’ve managed to narrow it down to a fairly small vicinity, he won’t tell me the name of the actual street. He’s adamant that this isn’t because his new woman is living with him – but I can’t think of any other reason why he’d be so cagey about it. What else am I supposed to think?

I look at Izzy across the table as she tucks in. She loves her days with her dad. I can tell she’s thinking about him and wondering what treats he has in store.

She glances up at me, mouth full. ‘What are you gonna do tomorrow?’

‘Oh, I have loads of things to catch up with,’ I say, meaning: I’ll be a whirl of productivity and not roam about the house, feeling abandoned and listless, thinking I really should clean the loo, but not doing it, and I must tackle that box of bath toys as I suspect there’s a nasty slime situation developing in there, but not doing that either.

‘Dad said he’s going to buy me new trainers,’ she says happily, jumping down from her chair.

Sunday, July 21

Izzy is out with Andy and I am alone. With no plans or obligations, the whole day spreads before me. I really must put it to good use.

I could clean the extractor hood or hoover under the beds. I could use the opportunity to take up running to try and shift this menopausal belly of mine – which is starting to look like someone’s strapped a cushion to my middle – or see if Jules is around, to make a plan for my life coaching sessions (she’s been asking me when I want to get started, and I’ve been putting her off). There are so many things a newly dumped middle-aged woman could do to enhance her life. Instead I find myself frittering away the day by staring at pictures of The Eminent Dr Lang on my laptop – cruelly, there are dozens online – and crying.

‘Oh, darling, you need a different hobby,’ Penny says, not unkindly, when she shows up to rescue me.

‘What, like crochet?’ I bleat.

‘Crochet is very therapeutic.’

‘My fingers are too fat,’ I growl. Penny hugs me, turning serious. She looks especially summery today in a shift dress of pink and yellow squares, like Battenberg, accessorised with a chunky necklace of multicoloured stones.

‘I just think you should stop staring at these pictures,’ she says firmly. ‘It’s only making you feel worse.’

‘I was only having a little look,’ I fib. ‘See, if I do an image search of her, there are tons …’ Penny leans forward, frowning at the screen as I show her Estelle Lang standing at a podium, make-up immaculate, radiating authority as she delivers a keynote speech at some fucking conference or other. Here she is again, in a more formal headshot this time, wearing a crisp white shirt and navy blazer with a red scarf (possibly silk?) tied nattily at her slender neck. It’s a classic, elegant look I have never managed to pull off.

‘Why are you doing this to yourself?’ Penny asks.

I shrug. ‘A kind of self-harm?’

She looks thoughtful for a moment. ‘Like you’re determined to sink really low, into a cesspit of gloom?’

‘Yes, something like that,’ I say dully.

‘And then,’ she adds, brightening, ‘when you’ve hit rock bottom, you can set about building yourself up again!’

I muster a smile, grateful now to her for being here, for marching in when I didn’t answer the door. It’s a trait of hers that used to drive Andy crazy: ‘What makes her think it’s okay to just barge in like that? We could be doing anything!’

Like what? I’d shot back at the time. What, actually, might we be doing?

‘That’s not the point, is it? It’s bloody invasive, that’s all.’

‘I hope you’re right,’ I say now.

‘Of course I am. I always am! Now, come on, put that laptop away.’

‘In a minute,’ I murmur. ‘Look, let me just show you something else. If I do another search, just for comparison, this comes up—’ And here it is: the sole picture of me that’s floating about in the ether. There are no glossy headshots, no pictures where I’m exuding glamour and authoritativeness at conferences. Instead, I’m looking fat in a sweat-stained vest, a ripped tutu and mud-speckled bunny ears at the school fun run last year.

‘Dear God, what’s that?’ Penny exclaims.

I slam my laptop shut. ‘Nothing. No one. Oh, you’re right, Pen, I’ve really got to stop this. Come on, let’s go out.’

As we catch the train into town together, the world immediately feels a little brighter. One of the many positive aspects of having Penny as a friend is that she refuses to indulge wallowing. It’s precisely what I needed today – to be taken in hand and marched out of my house.

There are other benefits, too, in hanging out with an older woman, in that she can reassure me that the menopause ends eventually, and you come out the other side, and everything is all right. The anxiety abates. The sweats disappear. You stop being a carb-guzzling maniac and emerge as a calm, thoroughly emboldened woman, freed from periods, no longer a slave to your mood swings or worries about how you’re perceived.

‘You no longer care about anything,’ Penny has assured me on more than one occasion. ‘You just do whatever you want.’ This might explain why, as we arrive at our favourite bookshop café, I choose a small brownie (with all these books around it feels like a fairly low-risk option) while Penny goes for a whopping cream horn (potentially messy, I’d say, if I were performing a risk assessment).

‘Pen, tell me honestly,’ I say, nibbling my brownie primly. ‘Did you ever fixate on someone like I’ve been doing? Like the way I’ve been googling Estelle Lang, I mean?’

‘There was no internet then, thankfully,’ she says.

‘No, of course not, but did you ever get so mad that you did, I don’t know – something crazy and badly behaved? Something ridiculous?’ I look at her across the table, willing her to say yes.

She looks thoughtful at this. ‘Well,’ she starts hesitantly, ‘I once got terribly drunk and egged someone’s car—’

‘You egged someone’s car?’ I exclaim, delighted. ‘Whose was it?’

‘Just someone’s,’ she says airily, waving the horn about, cream bulging dangerously at its fat end. Sitting directly beneath it is an enormous coffee table book (Through the Lens: Icons of 70s Fashion). I’m not even sure why she lugged it over to our table. It’s not as if she’s looking at it.

‘What happened?’ I ask. ‘Were you caught?’

‘Of course not,’ she says.

‘But did it feel satisfying?’

‘I suppose so, yes—’

‘Maybe that’s why Andy’s being evasive about where he’s living,’ I cut in. ‘And he won’t let Izzy visit, in case she tells me. Perhaps he thinks I’ll go round and inflict some kind of damage on his car, or the property …’

Penny slips off her turquoise cardigan and drapes it over the shoulders of her pink and yellow dress. I always feel terribly unadventurous in my basic tops and jeans whenever I am in her company. I loved fashion when I was younger and pored over magazines for inspiration. Rather than covering my bedroom walls with pop star posters, I stuck up pages carefully cut out from the women’s glossies. Later, as a student, I took to scouring charity shops and pulling together a bright, cheery, mish-mashy sort of look.

When I became a mum, I tried to adhere to a ‘lipstick at toddler group’ rule and did my best to maintain a reasonable standard of appearance; to take a pride in myself, I suppose. It’s only in the past few years that I’ve opted for the easiest, most sensible choices for work and knocking around at home. Practicality has been my priority, and as a result I have amassed a wardrobe of black, grey and navy basics, with barely a glimmer of brightness anywhere.

Penny wears happy clothes, Izzy observed, soon after we’d got to know her. I hope mine don’t scream: Depressed.

‘Are you sure that woman hasn’t moved in?’ Penny asks, licking cream from her lips. ‘I hate to say it, but I think that’s more likely.’

‘He says not,’ I say with a shrug, ‘and I don’t see why he’d bother lying to me at this stage.’

‘Well, perhaps he’s too embarrassed for Izzy to see the place?’ she suggests.

‘But why would that be?’

She grins at me. ‘Maybe it’s next to a strip club?’

I almost choke on this. ‘I wish it was, but I very much doubt it.’

‘Just in a shitty street, then?’

I shake my head. ‘He’d never live anywhere too shabby. You know what he’s like, such a fuss-pants about things. We once rented an Airbnb in Paris. It was immaculate – really lovely. But Andy got it into his head that there was a lingering cheese smell in the fridge. Honestly, the moaning that went on, the perpetual opening and closing of the door and the endless sniffing. It drove me crazy. I couldn’t smell a thing. But he has a thing about odours, a hypersensitive nose—’

Penny smirks. ‘Isn’t that a bit of hindrance for a doctor?’

‘Not really. He’s an endocrinologist, remember. It’s all about hormonal issues, thyroid disorders, that kind of stuff. He never has to do anything murky—’

‘What about tests? Doesn’t he have to take samples, swabs, that sort of thing?’

‘No, he has other people to do that for him.’

‘Well, that doesn’t seem fair,’ she declares, and I smile. Penny is attracted to decidedly un-fussy men; artists or odd-job-types who live in ropey flats with cats constantly meandering in and out or, in the case of Hamish, a composer who lives on a narrowboat on the canal. ‘So he never had any gruesome stories to tell you?’ she asks.

‘No, never. That’s the thing about living with a doctor. You imagine you’ll hear all kinds of juicy stuff, but all you get are gripes about the fact that the canteen staff aren’t allowed to sell buttered scones anymore, so he has to buy an unbuttered scone and a tiny foil-wrapped pat of butter that’s too hard to spread. Christ, the moaning I had to endure about that—’

‘Outrageous,’ she snorts, ‘a man of Andy’s standing, having to spread his own butter …’

‘And it wasn’t just that,’ I continue. ‘When the new car park system was introduced, staff spaces weren’t quite as near to the hospital entrance as they used to be. Honestly, you’d have thought the world had ended.’

‘How ridiculous.’

I nod, enjoying offloading to my friend. It sounds trite, but remembering Andy’s bad points always makes me feel mildly better about my current situation. ‘Then there was the Great Decline in Toilet Paper Quality of 2017, and then they made the dramatic switch from plastic cups at the water cooler to cardboard cones …’

‘He moaned about that?’

‘Yes! You’d think he’d have supported the decision to ditch single-use plastic, but no …’

‘Oh, Viv,’ she announces, ‘you’re well rid of that man—’ As if to emphasise her strength of feeling she bites down hard on her pastry, forcing the cream to jet out in a dramatic spurt.

‘Penny!’ I exclaim, reeling back as a few specks hit me.

‘Oh, God, I’m so sorry, what a mess.’ She snatches my paper napkin and tries to dab at my chest.

‘I don’t care about my top,’ I hiss, indicating the cream-splattered £55 coffee table book sitting between us. ‘Look at that!’

Penny glares at it as if it had no business being there and rubs at it with a napkin. Although a delicate wipe would have sufficed, she rubs so hard, she takes the gloss off it. ‘Oh, God, I’m just making it worse,’ she mutters. ‘C’mon, let’s go.’

‘We can’t just leave it!’

She jumps up from her seat and grabs at my arm. ‘What else are we going to do? Re-gloss it?’

‘Well, maybe we should offer to pay for—’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she splutters. Come on.’

I’m not proud of the fact that we leg it from the café. I love this shop, and I’m grateful that it seems to be thriving when so many others are closing down. What if everyone came in here and spurted whipped cream about the place? Was the incident captured on CCTV?

Maybe I’m over-reacting, and no one will actually care about a ruined book. But it’s in my nature to worry and, much as I’d love to be blasé like Penny, I’m not built that way. I worry about upsetting people and causing offence – it’s ridiculous really. I worry about Spencer, even though he is a bona fide adult who can drive on the road and runs his own smelly little Skoda, filled with crisps packets, Coke cans and the remains of fast food (I always feel like I need a cover-all suit – like the kind asbestos-removal guys wear – whenever I get into it). And, of course, I fret about his diet and whether he’s getting enough nutrients.

I worry about Izzy too, about whether she is really okay about Andy and I splitting up, or is just putting on a brave front. I worry about my future, and whether I’ll be a PA at Flaxico until the end of time, and whether we really do have rats in the garden and, if so, will they find their way into the house and bite Izzy during the night?

‘Hurry up,’ Penny barks, glancing behind as I scuttle after her through the shop like some kind of lady-servant. Seconds later, we reach the exit. She breezes out first, and we speed-walk along the pedestrianised street until we’re safely around the corner.

She stops, catching her breath. It’s a warm, rather clammy afternoon and my hair is sticking to my forehead. ‘Well, that was unfortunate,’ she announces.

‘God, Penny,’ I exclaim. ‘You do realise we can never go in there again.’

‘Of course we can! No one saw us.’

‘Oh, no, we blended right in.’

She shakes her head and links her arm through mine as we make our way towards the subway. ‘You worry far too much.’

‘I know I do.’

‘But I’m really sorry about your top.’

‘That’s okay, it’s just an old thing.’

I catch her eye, and she smiles, and I can’t help chuckling. Yet again, she’s briefly stopped me from obsessing over my husband’s new love.

‘You know what I think?’ she asks.

‘What?’ I’m anticipating a nugget of sage advice.

‘I think,’ she announces as we descend into the station, ‘they shouldn’t sell those kinds of cakes if they don’t want customers to eat them.’

Chapter Ten
Wednesday, July 24

Before it happened to me, I’d imagined that being left by one’s husband would be traumatic for those first few weeks – and then there’d be a quiet and gradual recovery. The calm after the storm, I suppose. And for much of the time, it is like this: reasonably civilised and fairly businesslike. I have done my utmost to remain dignified whenever Andy has come over to pick up Izzy or to take away more of his stuff. I’ve even gone so far as making him cups of tea (without spitting in them) and helping him to lug bags of books and medical magazines out to his car.

However, on other days, it can feel as if my heart’s been broken all over again, and I’m simmering with fury and hurt. I have found myself crying inconsolably in the dairy aisle of the supermarket. I’ve had to pull over in my car on my way home from work, and sit there mopping at my face, knowing I’m going to look a state when I pick up Izzy from holiday club or a friend’s place, but unable to pull myself together. I have ploughed up and down the swimming pool, imagining Andy and her together, doing it, my tears mingling with all that chlorinated water. I have called him, intending to shout and rage, but just cried into the phone and then hung up. Such incidents seem to happen in bursts, then a couple of weeks can go by and there’s not a single tear shed.

Sometimes, rather than crying, I want to scream and break things and physically hurt him. As it is, I have merely kicked a hole in a wicker waste paper basket, smashed his favourite mug and stabbed a hole in his ratty old gardening sweater with a biro. Thankfully, Izzy hasn’t witnessed any of this. The fact that she needs me to keep things rattling along has been something of a saviour.

She’s in bed now – it’s just gone 9 p.m. – and Andy is here, taking far too long to remove his boxes of paperwork that have been clogging up the cupboard on the landing.

Seemingly, he can’t just load them into his car and fuck off out of my hair. No, he needs to carry everything into the living room and sort through it painstakingly slowly without any regard for my feelings at all. I am fidgeting about, tidying up and straightening things unnecessarily, willing him to leave.

‘Can’t you do that at home?’ I ask tersely.

‘Yeah, I will,’ he mutters. ‘Won’t be much longer.’ He continues to flick through paperwork.

If anything, my Sunday afternoon with Penny has ignited a fresh spark of anger in me. After all, when she was pissed off over some matter of the heart, she didn’t sit there feeling sorry for herself. Instead, she got drunk and egged someone’s car.

She guzzled a cream horn in a bookshop café because she wanted one. Although it didn’t end well, the fact is, she didn’t worry about the possible consequences. I should be more like Penny, I decide.

‘I really don’t want you doing this here,’ I bark at him.

‘Oh.’ Looking startled, he starts to gather up his stuff.

‘Can I also ask you,’ I add, my heart thudding now, ‘if there’s some reason why you won’t let Izzy visit you at your flat?’

He blinks at me in surprise. ‘Er, not really, no.’

‘It’s just, if there is, I’d rather you said why instead of spouting me a load of old shit.’

‘All right. Jesus.’ He shakes his head as if I am being entirely unreasonable. ‘There isn’t much space, that’s all.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, really!’ Clutching a box crammed with papers, he starts to make his way towards the front door.

I can feel one of those hormonal rages building up in me, the ones I have no control over, and I inhale slowly and deeply in an attempt to calm myself. ‘I don’t mean for her to stay overnight,’ I go on. ‘I just mean to visit, so she can see what your place is like. I think it’d be really good for her.’

‘Why?’ He frowns, almost comically.

‘To satisfy her curiosity of course. So she knows you’re living somewhere nice and that she’s welcome there.’

‘Well, yeah, but it’s really tiny,’ he says, raking back his neatly cropped grey-speckled hair.

‘She’s only four feet tall,’ I remark tersely. ‘I’m sure she’d manage to fit in—’ I break off as Izzy saunters into the room.

‘Honey, you’re meant to be in bed,’ I start, which she ignores.

‘We use centimetres at school,’ she announces. ‘I’m a hundred and twenty-two centimetres tall, exactly the same as Maeve.’

‘Are you? Andy blusters, getting up. ‘Wow. I had no idea you were as tall as that …’

She plonks a hand on her hip. ‘Why can’t I come to your flat, Dad?’

‘Ohh …’ He darts me a thank-you-very-much-for-dragging-our-daughter-into-this look, as if it’s my fault. ‘I just need to sort things out, love, and make the place nice for you.’

She frowns at him. ‘I don’t mind what it’s like.’

‘No. No, I realise that,’ he says, cheeks flushed and now seemingly in an almighty hurry to cart his stuff out to his car.

I follow him outside. ‘Andy?’

‘I’m not really in the mood for this right now,’ he huffs, slamming the boot shut.

‘Not in the mood for what?’

‘For this interrogation …’

I look at him, this man who created such a fuss about the unbuttered scone regime when people are starving in the world and would be bloody delighted with a plain pastry from a hospital canteen, and who lied to me horribly over months and months. Whatever possessed me to fall in love with him? Was I insane? ‘It’s only your daughter who wants to visit you,’ I snap. ‘Not the bloody Duchess of Kent—’ I turn on my heel and start to march back towards the house.

‘Viv!’ he calls after me.

‘What?’ I stop and glare back at him.

‘Please don’t storm off like that. Can we talk for a minute?’

‘I’m going inside. Izzy should be in bed.’

‘I really do mean just for a minute.’

I sigh heavily and plod back towards him at his car.

‘Look …’ He pauses. ‘I’m sorry about all this. I will ask her over, but just not at the moment, okay?’

‘Whatever,’ I huff, maturely.

‘But, um … I did want to ask you something.’ He pauses again. ‘D’you mind if I take her away for a week—’

‘A week?’ I exclaim. ‘You mean a whole week?’

He nods. ‘Er … yeah. I haven’t mentioned it to her yet, obviously. I wanted to check with you first.’

‘Oh.’ I feel hollow. So this is what we do now, I realise; we take our daughter on separate holidays. Of course we do. What did I expect? ‘Well, um, yes. I suppose that’s okay. Where are you thinking of going?’

‘Just to Lewis and Nina’s. They’re having a bit of a gathering up there.’

‘A gathering for a whole week?’ Lewis is Andy’s youngest brother. He and his wife run an acclaimed restaurant perched on the shores of Loch Fyne. People often imagine that the Highlands are all about fish and chips and pie suppers, basically carbs dowsed with ketchup and vinegar, but The Nest is terribly chi-chi – all samphire and edible flowers served by bearded hipster types. As a family we’ve had many happy trips there over the years, staying at their pretty white cottage, and messing around with their rowing boat on the loch.

I try not to think about those blissful days as Andy goes on: ‘Remember they were building those chalets? Sorry, eco-lodges, I should say …’

‘Er, vaguely.’ Although I have to admit, I’ve had more pressing matters on my mind.

‘Well, they’re finally finished. The idea is, everyone’ll stay for the week and it’ll end with a big party in the restaurant.’

‘Everyone?’ My heart seems to twist.

‘Yeah, Mum and Dad and the whole rabble …’

With everything that’s happened, it hasn’t yet sunk in properly that my relationship with his parents will change dramatically. I’m extremely fond of them, and I know they are of me. But what will happen now?

‘Seems like Nina’s put a lot of effort into fitting them out,’ he goes on. ‘She’s had quilts made – bespoke quilts – and there are log-burning stoves and sheepskin rugs …’

‘It sounds amazing,’ I remark flatly.

‘Better than camping, anyhow,’ he rabbits on. ‘You know how bad the midges can be up there—’

‘Andy?’ I cut in.

‘Yes?’

Shit, I think I’m going to lose it now. ‘She’s not going with you, is she? To this gathering, I mean?’

‘What?’

‘You know who I mean. You’re not taking her, are you, on your family holiday with Izzy?’

‘Christ, no!’ he exclaims, looking aghast. ‘No, Viv, I promise you …’

‘If you were, I’d want to know.’

‘Of course she’s not coming,’ he says firmly. ‘We’ve agreed, haven’t we, that I’ll tell you when – if I feel it’s okay for them to meet. But that’s not happening anytime soon.’

Why not? I want to ask, conscious of my Penny-inspired bravado dwindling rapidly. Does a tiny part of you wonder if you’ve made a mistake? What made you want her anyway? Apart from her obvious beauty, intelligence, amazing career and impeccable dress sense, what caused you to choose her over your neurotic, perpetually worrying wife who works at the nerve centre of extruded snack pellets?

But I don’t ask these questions. I don’t ask anything at all. I just bark, ‘That’s fine. About the holiday, I mean.’ And I rub at my hot face as, blinking rapidly, I turn and march back to the house.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.