You Can’t Fall in Love With Your Ex (Can You?) Read online

  I pushed a trolley through the aisles with no real intent. I’d make a salad – Darcey loved salad, and so did I. But Darcey wouldn’t be home. What would Jonathan like? Browsing the shelves as I ambled along, I found myself dropping random thing after random thing into my shopping cart. Chilli Heatwave Doritos. Frozen pizza with pineapple on it. Cherry tomatoes. Wafer-thin ham. A massive pack of Diet Coke. Two bottles of prosecco. Pink Lady apples.

  It was only when I caught myself lingering over the small section of shelf devoted to pain-relief and corn plasters, and found my hand automatically dropping two packs of ibuprofen and a giant roll of Elsastoplast onto my trolley that I realised.

  I wasn’t shopping for my family. I was shopping for Felix and me.

  I actually blushed, as if I’d been spotted by one of the school run mums stocking up on extra-strong ribbed condoms. I retraced my steps, putting everything back in more or less the same place where I’d found it. Even so, I found myself lingering by the herbs and spices, remembering how Felix and I used to corpse with childish laughter in Tesco, arranging the spices so their labels spelled out rude words.

  Basil, oregano, thyme and mixed herbs made ‘bottom’. Bay leaves, oregano and sage made ‘boobs’. Felix even managed ‘spanking’ in a particularly impressive effort that required kaffir lime leaves and Italian mixed herbs. It was the most juvenile thing ever, and it used to make as laugh so much we could hardly stand (and we laughed even more when we wondered what possibilities would extend if only there was a herb whose name began with U).

  I caught myself giggling like a loon, right there in the herbs and spices aisle.

  A passing child asked his mother, “Why’s that lady laughing, Mummy?”

  “She must be a nutter,” said his sister.

  “Sssh, Felicia,” the mother said. “You remember I talked to you the other day about how unkind it is to make fun of people who are… different.”

  Even though she dropped her voice discreetly for the final word, I heard it, and my laughter died in my throat.

  What was I doing, exactly? Mooning, that’s what. Mooning like a teenager with a crush on Harry Styles. Except teenagers were allowed to do that, because – well, because they were teenagers. In a woman of my age – a married woman of my age – it was nothing short of pathetic. And it’s not even as if Felix was a legitimate crush, like Robert Webb or Dr Ranj or someone. He was my ex, for God’s sake. And he was my ex for a reason.

  Think about it for one second, Laura, I told myself. If you weren’t married to Jonathan, you wouldn’t have your children. Other ones, perhaps, but not these ones, my favourite people in the world. The idea was chilling – if I allowed myself to think this way, wasn’t I inviting some sort of disaster? If fate thought I was wishing them away, mightn’t it intervene to remove them from me?

  The thought gave me the horrors, and I pushed it away, forcing my attention back to the absurd contents of my shopping trolley. This was it. Enough. It had to stop.

  I forced myself to retrace my steps, replacing all the random items on the shelves where I’d found them. I started again, putting Aberdeen Angus fillet, potatoes, salad, tarragon, butter and eggs in the trolley along with a couple of bottles of expensive red wine. I’d cook Jonathan’s favourite meal for us – it would be the beginning of reclaiming the wonderful joy I’d felt when we were first together.

  Chapter 12

  My resolve to be a better wife and mother lasted well into the evening. I watched a DVD with the children to stop them disturbing Jonathan while he worked, then cooked pasta with pesto and cherry tomatoes for their supper, supervised their baths, read Owen a story and told Darcey she could spend half an hour and not a minute more watching unboxing clips on YouTube.

  “I don’t like those any more, Mum,” she said scornfully. “They’re babyish.”

  I detected Juniper’s influence, and felt a pang of nostalgia for the asinine vloggers who’d annoyed me so much just a few weeks before.

  “What are you going to do then, before you go to sleep?”

  She pulled a stack of glossy magazines out from under her bed. I spotted Girl Talk, Shout and a couple of others in the same genre – harmless enough.

  “Read,” she said.

  “Okay, Pickle. But only half an hour, remember. I’m going to come up and check.”

  “Whatever.” Darcey attempted a disaffected roll of her eyes, then smiled her sweet smile and said, “Night, Mummy.”

  “Night, precious.” I folded her small, sweet-smelling body in a tight hug and held her until she started to squirm, then kissed her again and went downstairs.

  So – béarnaise sauce. How hard could it be? Jonathan had made it a few times for dinner parties and it had been rapturously received. It involved a horrible smell, I recalled, and a bit of stirring. That was okay – I could stir with the best of them. It was about the extent of my culinary skill, as it happened. I scanned the shelf of cookbooks and picked one out by a chef with a French-sounding name. And sure enough, there it was in the index under B. I flipped to the relevant page.

  “Know this,” the chef declaimed in bold type. “If you haven’t made béarnaise before, you will surely fuck this sauce up.”

  “Well, fuck you too, Anthony Bourdain,” I said. “Way to encourage the beginners. Dick.”

  I scanned the instructions. There seemed to be a lot of faff in the beginning with the butter. What difference would melting it and skimming stuff off the top make, anyway, I thought. Butter was butter was butter – loaded with calories and not very good for you, but I could see no sign of the impurities he was waffling on about in the perfectly ordinary pack of Waitrose Essential unsalted butter I’d purchased earlier. I’d just skip that bit and crack on.

  I chopped the tarragon and shallot – well, not shallot, because I hadn’t checked the recipe before I went shopping, but Google assured me that a small onion would do in extremis. We had no sherry vinegar either, but even Bourdain conceded reluctantly that wine vinegar would be an acceptable substitute, and there was plenty of that – Jonathan used it for salad dressing, I remembered, not allowing myself to wonder whether making your own salad dressing wasn’t a bit weird when you could buy perfectly good stuff in bottles – low-fat stuff even.

  “Separate the eggs,” Bourdain commanded. I looked at my box of organic eggs. They were already separate, weren’t they? Each one in its own little cardboard nest. Baffled, I turned again to Google.

  Half an hour and a dozen eggs later, I had the requisite four yolks in a bowl, a stack of potatoes cut into matchsticks – more like firelighters, but who cared – and a salad made. Salad I could do – I’d lived on the stuff for the best part of ten years. It looked beautiful – cherry tomatoes and avocado resting on a bed (see, I thought, I can do the cheffy lingo too) of pre-washed baby leaves from a packet. I unearthed a jar of Jonathan’s famous dressing from the fridge and sloshed some over my leafy creation.

  Now – back to the béarnaise. I scanned the next paragraph of the impossibly complicated instructions.

  “What the actual fuck is a Bain Marie, Anthony?” I demanded. I felt like the chef and I should be on first-name terms, given the tribulations we’d shared. Google again. “Well, if it’s a bowl over a pan of hot water, why didn’t you just damn well say that, instead of wanging on about Mary’s bath?”

  I turned on some music, poured a gin and tonic, and turned back to the recipe.

  I might not be much of a cook but I could follow instructions, and follow them I did. I whisked like a woman possessed, adding the butter gradually like it said, and to my utter amazement, a few minutes later, a cohesive yellow mass had formed in the bowl.

  “Yes! In your face, poncy macho chef man,” I said, allowing myself a minor victory dance around the kitchen, the whisk held aloft over my head, ignoring the splatters of sauce that ricocheted off the ceiling on to the floor.

  The major hurdle was over. I could cook chips – Darcey went through a stage that lasted a coupl
e of months when she was three when that was literally all she would eat, and we’d run out of frozen oven chips often enough that the deep-fat frier and I were not strangers. At the time, I’d panicked, thinking that my daughter was destined for a life of obesity and an early death from coronary artery disease. I’d even booked an appointment with the GP, taking precious time off work, to discuss my concerns.

  “All toddlers and small children go through a picky phase,” the doctor said, barely looking up from her computer screen.

  “Yes, but chips,” I said. “If it was lettuce, or something, it would be…”

  “Mrs Payne,” the GP said sternly. “Your daughter is a perfectly healthy child, a little underweight if anything. If she’s still so restricted in her diet in a couple of months, we’ll talk again. In the meantime, you might want to work at addressing your own anxiety about weight-related issues.”

  And that was me told. So I fried chips then, and I fried them now. I was frying away, watching the potatoes gradually changing colour in the hot oil, when Jonathan came into the kitchen.

  “Hello, darling,” he said. “Sorry I’ve been so dull all day. What have you been up to?”

  “I’m making dinner,” I said proudly. “Look, there’s steak from Waitrose, and salad, and I even made béarnaise.”

  “You what?” Jonathan said, sticking a finger into the sauce. “You did too. That’s amazing. I wish I was hungrier, so I could do justice to this.”

  I looked at him. There were deep shadows under his eyes, which were red with strain. His shoulders looked bowed, too, from spending the day hunched over his laptop.

  “You need to eat,” I said. “And you need a drink, too. I bought a couple of bottles of red – over there. And then you can help me cook the steak.”

  “Oh, pinot noir,” Jonathan said. The way he looked at the label told me I’d fucked up, but he wasn’t going to. “Lovely.”

  He poured us both a glass, sipped his, and grimaced almost imperceptibly.

  “Why don’t I clear the decks a bit before we cook the meat?” he said.

  “Thanks.” I kissed him, then turned my attention back to the chips. Golden perfection – that was the thing. I poked at the hot oil with my slotted spoon, fishing out the bits of potato that looked brownest and placing them tenderly on a mat of paper towels.

  Then I heard Jonathan say, “Jesus Christ, what’s this?”

  “What’s what?” I turned around and saw him looking into the kitchen sink, as horrified as if the Loch Ness monster had emerged from its depths. And to be fair, what was there was no less grim in its way.

  Steaming water was bubbling up from the plughole, clogged with strands of opaque white… something. Like tentacles. Tentacles with yellow bits. Like a poached egg gone horribly wrong.

  Jonathan realised what I’d done before I did.

  “Laura, did you put raw egg down the sink?”

  “I might have done,” I said, feeling like Owen must do when I ask him whether he’s forgotten to wipe his bottom after doing a poo. “Why, what’s wrong with that?”

  “Jesus, Laura. Basically you’ve made scrambled egg in our u-bend. As soon as I ran hot water through it, it cooked and solidified, and now… Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

  Looking at the overflowing sink, bits of albumen swimming on its surface, I had to admit he had a point.

  “Sorry,” I said humbly. “I didn’t know…”

  “Didn’t know what? That hot water cooks egg? God, Laura. Sometimes I wonder… Wait, I’ll get a coathanger. If that doesn’t work, we’ll have to get a plumber in. Christ only knows how much that will cost. As if I…”

  He stomped off upstairs. I fought back tears, and told myself not to be silly. This was just a blip – I’d made a minor fuck-up, but it didn’t have to ruin our evening. Resisting the urge to run upstairs after Jonathan and rally round suggesting that one wire hanger might make a better weapon in the fight against our eggy enemy than another, I cooked the steak, trying to preserve normality as much as I could.

  “Well, that’s going to have to do.” Five minutes later, Jonathan was splattered to the elbows with water and bits of congealed egg. “Our contribution to the next fatberg news story – or rather, yours.”

  He looked at me so sourly I actually flinched.

  “Darling, I’m so sorry,” I said, cursing myself for apologising even as I did so. “But look, the steak’s done and the chips are perfect. Have some wine, let’s eat, and the béarnaise worked brilliantly, didn’t it, even though I blocked the drain.”

  Then I looked back at the puddle of golden sauce I’d been so proud of, and realised I’d left the bowl over the heat. What had been a perfect, smooth emulsion was now a puddle of noxious vinegar in which swam yet more scrambled fucking egg.

  I stared at it in horror, feeling as if I might be about to cry. But Jonathan burst out laughing. “Oh, Laura,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. I’m sorry I was such a grouchy bastard. You tried to make something lovely for me and a tiny thing went wrong and I was a dick about it.”

  He folded me in his arms and gave me a huge hug that soon turned into more than a hug, and much later we ate the cold, soggy fries and overdone steak, washing it all down with a bottle of ridiculously expensive red wine Jonathan said was a gift from a grateful client.

  When we’d finished, I got reluctantly to my feet. “I’d better sort out the kitchen.”

  “Leave it a second, Laura,” Jonathan said. “I want to talk to you.”

  I felt a cold finger of fear run down my spine. Could it be about Felix? Had he discovered something? But there was nothing to discover – nothing but the shameful, persistent thoughts of him that kept pushing their way into my head. Reluctantly, I sat down again, on the sofa this time, not on the carpet next to Jonathan.

  “Is something wrong?” I said.

  “Not exactly,” Jonathan said. “But I was thinking, today, when you were off with Owen and I was working…”

  I waited, but his words had dried up. “What? We had a lovely time, we just went to the library and the park and had an ice cream.”

  God, why did I feel so horribly, obscurely guilty, as if he was about to accuse me of something?

  “I know,” Jonathan said. “Owen told me. We hung out together a bit this afternoon, except he kept wanting to help with work and I was worried he’d mess up my spreadsheet so I stuck him in front of Peppa Pig for a quiet life.”

  “I always feel sorry for Daddy Pig,” I said. “It’s horribly sexist, don’t you think, the way he’s portrayed as this hapless, incompetent male who gets everything wrong around the house, and getting called fat and lazy all the time. And Peppa’s such a precocious little madam. I’m sure she learns all those snidey put-downs from bloody Mummy Pig. Such negative stereotyping.”

  Jonathan laughed. “You’ve clearly watched too much of it if you’re starting to analyse its depiction of gender roles.”

  “It’s true though!” I said. “Have you seen the episode where… Anyway. I guess you didn’t, if you were working.”

  “That’s kind of what I wanted to talk about,” Jonathan said.

  “What? Not Peppa Pig?”

  Jonathan reached over and stroked my bare calf. “Not Peppa bloody Pig, Laura. Although it’s kind of apt. No, I wanted to talk about work. I was thinking today, when you were off with Owen – I barely see the kids these days, or you. It feels like you’re doing all the parent stuff on your own, and we… I don’t know.”

  He splashed more wine into our glasses.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “We kind of knew it was going to be like this, when you got the promotion. It’s one of those things. I wish you were around more, obviously. But you mustn’t worry about it. You’ve worked so hard for it – it’s what you’ve always wanted, for as long as I’ve known you.”

  I knew I wasn’t being entirely honest. This was my chance to tell him how lonely I felt, in the hours between the children going to bed and him getting home – and even
when they were awake. How bored I got and how resentful I sometimes felt. But moments like this, moments when we were alone together, had become so rare and precious. I didn’t want to sour our calm closeness by saying anything that wasn’t calculated to reassure him. And I didn’t want to have a conversation that might lead to my saying something about Felix.

  “Yeah, it’s what I’ve always wanted,” Jonathan said, although it sounded pretty hollow. “Anyway, I thought… Hold on.”

  We could both hear it – the insistent buzz of Jonathan’s phone ringing in the kitchen.

  “That’s going to be Peter calling from the New York office,” he said, uncurling from the floor. “Hell. On a Saturday fucking night.”

  I heard him answer the call, then say, “No, no problem. Nothing important. Just let me get the figures in front of me.”

  Jonathan went upstairs and I heard his study door open and close. I waited a few minutes, then gave up and began to stack the dishwasher.

  He was still talking when I got into bed – I could hear the low hum of his voice, but I couldn’t make out any words. Clearly our conversation, whatever it had really been about, was over. I turned out the light and pulled the duvet over my shoulder, chilly without his warmth next to me, even on this warm summer night.

  I was almost asleep when Jonathan came into our bedroom and said abruptly, “I’m going to have to go to New York for a week in August,” he said. “More time away from you and the kids.”

  I sat up, blinking in the light from the hallway. “Why don’t I come too? It’s school holidays – Sadie and Gareth can have the kids. It’ll be fun.”

  “That isn’t exactly the word I’d use,” Jonathan said. “I don’t even know how much time we’d have together.”

  “Go on,” I said. “It’s my birthday next week – you can give me the trip as a present. We’ll be able to do some stuff together, won’t we? And I love New York.”

  I’d only been once, and seen nothing much beyond the inside of a dance studio, but it had been enough to convince me.