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

  “No,” I said, “It’s fine. I can find my way.”

  And so I kissed Felix chastely goodbye and walked blearily to the Tube and endured the journey home, feeling sick, anxious and guilty as sin for what I’d allowed myself to imagine. Once the children were in bed and I’d received the expected text from Jonathan saying how terribly sorry he was, he’d been held up at work, and we’d celebrate my birthday properly another night, I made a pot of tea and sat outside in the garden, looking into the darkness, thinking and thinking until I couldn’t put off going to sleep any longer.

  Chapter 15

  It was the last day of term before the start of the long summer holidays. In just a week, Jonathan and I would be departing for our holiday, leaving the kids with Sadie and Gareth. Instead of last-day-of-term excitement, I was filled with a weird sense of dread that I couldn’t quite put a name to. Was it worry about leaving the children? But we’d left them before, when we’d escaped for a weekend in the Lake District last year. They were fine – they loved staying with my sister and her husband.

  It was Felix, I realised. He hadn’t contacted me since my birthday – I didn’t know whether I was relieved or disappointed. What I did know was that I was on a constant knife-edge of tension, my stomach lurching every time I heard my phone ring, my checking of email and Facebook becoming not so much frequent as obsessive.

  I checked them now, walking slowly away from the school, but there was nothing – no message, no text, no missed call. Then I heard the sound of pounding feet slapping the pavement behind me, and almost jumped out of my skin.

  But it was Zé, in running kit, her hair in a swishy ponytail.

  “Laura! I thought it was you. I spotted you from way back – no one else has such amazing posture – and sprinted to catch you up. Come in for a coffee? My machine makes killer espresso.”

  “I’d love to,” I said. “You nearly gave me heart failure – I thought you were a mugger or… something.”

  She laughed, wiping the sleeve of her top over her sweating face. “If only I could run that fast! Ten k in an hour is about my limit these days. Come on in.”

  Across the road, I saw Amanda and Sigourney watching us, their heads close together as they whispered to each other. Fuck it, I thought – let them gossip. I was allowed to have other friends, wasn’t I? I smiled sweetly and gave them a little wave.

  “I’d love a coffee,” I said.

  We walked back towards Zé’s house, and I noticed with envy how quickly her breathing returned to normal. God, I needed to get fit again. But what was the point? I supposed Owen would reach a stage at which he could outrun me in the park, but he hadn’t yet, and when he did he’d be grown-up enough for it not to matter.

  “Here we are. Shall we sit outside? Then I can have a fag when I’ve put the coffee on.”

  “Great idea.”

  She grinned. “It’s reprehensible, isn’t it? But I only ever smoke outside. And only after my workout, and when Juniper isn’t here. And I don’t think she knows. And I can stop any time I like, right?”

  “Yeah, right,” I said, and she laughed.

  “I won’t be a second.”

  I sat on one of the cushioned benches surrounding the small, splashy water feature. Although the house was just feet from a main road, it seemed to be totally silent here. Then I realised, when I listened carefully, I could hear the traffic, but the sound of the water, the rustle of the bamboo plants that lined the lawn, and a chorus of birds from somewhere – had edited it carefully, unobtrusively out. My friend’s garden, like her house and her clothes, was a masterpiece of design.

  Zé appeared from the kitchen with a tray laden with coffee, steaming-hot milk, a packet of Marlboro Gold and a lighter.

  “Breakfast,” she said. “Black or white?”

  “Black, please,” I said, and she passed me a small cup, intoxicatingly fragrant, thick with perfect crema.

  “You don’t take sugar?”

  “Not with this.” I smiled and sipped.

  Zé sat opposite me, her feet up on the bench, her knees under her chin. The sunlight filtered through the leaves of the magnolia tree and cast soft shadows on her face, still flushed from her run. She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke politely past my shoulder, but I still caught a dizzying whiff of it.

  “Are you sure you won’t have one?” she said.

  “Oh, go on then.”

  “God, I’m such an enabler,” she laughed, then her face became serious again. I noticed lines of tension running across her smooth brown forehead. “Rick didn’t come home last night. Again.”

  “Oh, Zé. Was it work? Jonathan sometimes gets stuck in the office all night – or almost all night.” But he never doesn’t phone, I thought.

  “He wasn’t at work. I know, because I rang the office. His PA said he left at seven.”

  “Was he out for drinks, maybe?” I said, casting desperately around in my head for something I could say that would comfort her. “They seem to socialise loads. Jonathan’s forever having dinners and stuff. He loathes it. Or he says he does, anyway. Probably Rick does too.”

  Zé laughed again, but it was a different sort of laugh, harsh and mirthless. She lit another fag and offered me the packet. I hesitated, then took one too. “I don’t even know what he likes or doesn’t any more, Laura. We just don’t talk. I don’t know what he thinks or feels about anything. Since I had Juniper, it’s all just shut down. I do my thing, he does his. Not that I even fucking know what his thing is. I presume it’s other women. Other men, maybe. He hasn’t touched me for years.”

  “But, Zé, you’re so beautiful,” I said helplessly. “You’re funny and amazing, how can he not…”

  She shrugged. “At first I thought it was me having had Juniper. You know – minge like a wizard’s sleeve, like sticking his cock out of the window and fucking the night… All that. But I’ve done more pelvic floor exercises than you can shake a stick at – not that he knows, because we haven’t had sex since before she was born.”

  I tried not to let my face show how shocked I was. Eight years in a marriage with no intimacy at all. The idea filled me with horror. I remembered how lovely Jonathan had been when I had a meltdown after Owen was born, wailing and lamenting about how I’d lost my figure for good and I’d never be the same again, and he’d assured me that I was more beautiful than I’d ever been, and he desired me even more than he had before.

  “Have you talked to him about it?”

  “I tried to, at first. But we just ended up shouting at each other, so I gave up. I’m lazy, Laura. I’ll put up with a lot for the sake of a quiet life. But this – being out all night when I’ve got no idea where he is – I don’t think I can cope with it for much longer. If he’s with someone else, I’ll deal with it. I’ll ignore it and carry on as normal until it passes. Or until he decides to leave me, and then I’ll take him to the fucking cleaners. But what if something happened to him? What if he fell under a train or something and I didn’t know? That’s what scares me. If Juniper were to lose her father like that… He loves her, you know. Even though he doesn’t love me any more.”

  “Do you think you might be happier if you left?” I said. “I hate thinking of you being so miserable, and worrying about him all the time. He doesn’t deserve you.”

  She laughed. “Damn straight he doesn’t. But I have it easy. I don’t mind that much that I never see him. I get to do my own thing. I have a lovely life, and more importantly, Juniper does.”

  She lit another fag and stared out across the garden. She looked, suddenly, unbearably sad.

  “But I worry that I’ll never be in love again,” she said. “Never have sex again, never have anyone look at me that way, and look back at them, and – you know. I’m forty-three, Laura. If I wait until Juniper goes to university and then leave him I’ll be fifty-three. I’ll be ancient. On the scrap heap.”

  “You won’t!” I said. “You never will. You’ll always be amazing. When you’re ready, there�
��ll be someone who falls head over heels for you, and you with them.”

  “Yeah, some old codger who can’t get it up without Viagra,” she laughed and did a little faux shudder. “Not like that lush actor who fancies you.”

  I felt my face turning hot and scarlet under her steady dark gaze.

  “Zé…” I began.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “It’s not nothing, Laura. Come on, what’s the matter?”

  I nicked another of her fags and lit it and, almost against my will, the whole story came spilling out. How I’d met Felix when I was twenty-one, what had happened then, how he’d disappeared from my life for all those years and now come back, bringing with him a torrent of emotions I didn’t want to feel but had no idea how to stop. How I hadn’t told Jonathan about any of it. How I’d seen him on my birthday and how I’d felt. That I had no idea at all what I was going to do next.

  “So there you have it,” I finished miserably. “One massive fuck-up waiting to happen, and it’s all my fault.”

  “Life’s pants, isn’t it?” Zé said. “The way it chucks curve-balls at us and we’re meant to find a way of hitting them straight. I can’t tell you what to do. I know what I’d do. I’d have a wonderful affair with him, make myself happy, then find a way to walk away before anyone got hurt too badly. But that’s me. I don’t love my husband. You do.”

  “But you can’t love two people at the same time!” I said. “You can’t. Can you?”

  “As far as I know, there’s no rule against it,” Zé said. “We all love lots of people; we just love them in different ways. It’s when you love two people the same way that the problems start.”

  I thought about that for a bit. I didn’t love Felix and Jonathan in the same way at all – I was certain of it. Even when I’d met Jonathan, in those first heady days when we were going out and then engaged, I’d felt differently about him from the way I’d felt about Felix. But that was because I was a different person. Now, it was as if my twenty-one-year-old self was back in my head and my heart, bringing with her all the feelings I’d had then.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I said again.

  “Just be careful, Laura,” Zé said. “Please be careful. I want you to be happy, but try and be it without causing too much carnage.”

  In spite of myself, I laughed. “Don’t worry. I definitely don’t want to cause carnage. I just want – I don’t know! I want to make it all unhappen – either what went wrong with Felix and me in the first place, or meeting him again, or – something.”

  “Well, we both know you can’t do that,” Zé said. “Take some time to think about stuff, that’s all. Don’t rush into anything you’ll regret.”

  “I won’t,” I promised. But there was something I hadn’t told her – that when Jonathan and I went to New York in just a few days’ time, Felix was going to be there too. And I didn’t know if I’d be able to resist seeing him, or what would happen if I did.

  I stood up to go, and as I was gathering my things together, Zé’s phone rang. “Rick,” she said, glancing at the screen.

  “Want me to wait?”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll have it out with him, and speak to you later.” She hugged me hastily, snatched up her phone and said coldly, “Yes?”

  It would have been horribly intrusive to stay. Zé needed to deal with this on her own. So I walked back through the house, let myself out and went home, and when I got there I sent her a text saying how grateful I was for her friendship and advice, and that I was there any time she wanted to talk about things.

  The contrast between Zé’s serene, immaculate home and our house couldn’t have been more stark. The kitchen was carnage. Milk all over the floor, Owen’s Marmitey fingerprints on the cabinets rapidly taking on the adhesive qualities of superglue, Darcey’s scooter lying where she’d left it in a prime tripping spot by the door, the lamb chops I’d taken out of the freezer for Jonathan’s and my dinner looking unpromising in a puddle of pinkish liquid on the worktop.

  “Laura, you are a slattern,” I told myself. Back when I’d been working, we’d had a cleaner once a fortnight to come in and sort out the worst of it, but now, with me at home all day, there was no way I could justify it. What did I do all day, anyway, when the children were at school and nursery, except drink coffee with Zé, go for walks in the park and daydream? I was meant to be a housewife, but I was neglecting the poor house.

  Reluctantly, I pulled on a pair of Marigolds and set to work. Cleaning is meant to be therapeutic, I know, but I’ve never found it to be so. For every job you do, another seems to appear, like a hydra growing extra heads with each one you chop off. You clean the kitchen cabinets, then notice the fridge needs doing too, then once you’ve cleaned the outside you may as well do the inside, then you realise that the freezer is clogged with ice so decide to defrost it, then end up with water all over the floor you cleaned earlier. You take the sheets off the beds and then realise all the spare sets are dirty, and you can’t wash them until you hang up the wet stuff that’s been festering the machine for days. You get out the hoover and discover that its bag needs changing, and the old one bursts when you take it out, scattering six months’ worth of dust and crud everywhere. You clean the bath and realise the shower head is clogged with limescale and you’ll have to go out to the shop and buy a load of industrial-strength chemicals to dissolve it.

  I know, I know – according to Kim and Aggie and their ilk, all you need to turn the most disgusting hovel into a show home is a tub of bicarb and half a lemon. Good luck to them – as far as I’m concerned, the more powerful the chemicals, the less elbow grease is needed on my part.

  And it doesn’t help that inanimate objects seem to have it in for me. The stairgate that I’ve walked through five seconds before will mysteriously close and trip me up. The children’s car seats are forever breaking my nails out of sheer spite. Even the letterbox attacks me with its lethal brass jaws when I try and remove a stuck pizza menu.

  So my blitz on the house took far longer than I intended. When it was time to fetch the children, I still hadn’t finished, so I parked them in front of the telly with microwaved frozen pizza (less frozen than it had been when I’d started defrosting the fridge, admittedly) and carried on. I gave them their bath, wondering what the hell the point had been of cleaning the bathroom from top to bottom when they were only going to flood the floor and scatter toys everywhere. I read them a shorter story than usual, put them to bed and returned to my tedious, endless task.

  By the time Jonathan got home, the house was immaculate and sparkling. He found me folding the last of the bed linen, which had emerged warm and fragrant from the dryer. I should have been full of Stepford Wifely smugness, but I wasn’t – I’d found a video on YouTube showing how to fold fitted sheets into perfect squares, rather than just squashing them into whatever random shape they chose to take on. But the sheets were refusing to co-operate. However many times I watched the tutorial, I managed to pick up the corners in the wrong order and ended up with a misshapen triangle instead.

  “Fucking wanker sheets,” I muttered. “Sort yourselves out, for God’s sake.”

  “What on earth are you doing, Laura?” Jonathan asked. “Glass of wine?”

  “Look,” I said, thrusting my tablet at him. “Just look at this. Martha Stewart says you should fold your sheets so they’re square, but ours are having none of it. Why have we got rogue sheets?”

  I took a large gulp from my glass of wine, and watched as Jonathan played the video, then picked up a sheet and folded it perfectly.

  “Have you been fighting with inanimate objects again?” he said.

  In spite of myself, I laughed. “All bloody day. But how come it worked for you and it won’t work for me?”

  “It’s not rocket science.” Quickly and deftly, Jonathan folded the rest of the laundry. “There. But honestly, how much does it contribute to the sum of human happiness if our sheets are
folded into squares? And why are you taking housekeeping advice from a woman who got chucked in prison for insider trading, anyway?”

  “It’s not just her,” I said. “You should see what Anthea Turner says about towels. Apparently you’re not allowed to see the edges.”

  “Have you been drinking, Laura?”

  “No! Well, only now.” I drank some more wine.

  “Who the hell cares if you can see the edges of towels?”

  “Anthea Turner, obviously.”

  Jonathan laughed. “Come here.” He folded me into a hug. “Look, as long as the house isn’t so filthy we all catch dysentery, no one cares. I don’t care. You don’t have to spend your time trying to be some model housewife when you could be having fun with the kids, or seeing your friends or whatever. Just because you’re not working, doesn’t mean you have to turn yourself into some kind of domestic drudge, okay? We can do the cleaning perfectly well together at weekends.”

  “Okay,” I said. Privately, I knew that wouldn’t happen – Jonathan would be working, or playing golf, or want to take the children out somewhere. But at least his heart was in the right place. And at least the afternoon of frantic activity had taken my mind off Zé’s problems, and my own.

  “By the way,” Jonathan said, “are you home tomorrow?”

  “I expect so. Why?”

  “Great. They’re delivering my new car.”

  “What new car? We’ve got a car.”

  “Yes, but it’s ancient and besides, I wanted…” he looked embarrassed, almost shifty. “I wanted a change.”

  “What is it?”

  He told me.

  “Jesus, Jonathan! How much did that cost?”

  He didn’t tell me that. He said, “I – we can afford it. I got my bonus last month, remember?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were buying a car?” I demanded. “It’s a massive decision.”

  Jonathan shrugged. “I guess because I knew you wouldn’t like it. You’re such a bohemian, darling. But I’m allowed to spend money on stuff I want sometimes. God knows I work hard enough.”