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

  At first, I couldn’t even unlock it. I walked around and around its indifferent silver body pressing buttons on the remote control, until finally I lost my temper and delivered almighty kick to one of the tyres, shouting, “Come on, you fucking fucker of a thing!” Amazingly, it worked. On the next press, the car bleeped and the doors unlocked obediently, as if to say, “I don’t know what you were making such a fuss about. Woman drivers!”

  Then I had to figure out how to adjust the seat so it was in the right place for me and not for Jonathan, which took another quarter of an hour and left me sweating and furious. I was still in the clothes I’d put on the previous morning to go and meet Felix – I hadn’t eaten or slept for twenty-four hours and, I realised, I was in no state to drive. But there was nothing for it – I needed to get to my daughter.

  I gave up on trying to figure out the sat nav. I’d have to get there the old-fashioned way, using street signs and memory. I carefully reversed out of the parking space and headed towards the exit in a series of jerks, my knuckles white on the steering wheel.

  By the time I got to the motorway, I’d reached something of an armed truce with the car and my breathing had returned to normal. Just take it slowly, Laura, I told myself – don’t crash, and don’t fall asleep, and it will all be okay. Then I realised that Darcey might not be okay, and a fresh wave of panic washed over me.

  How could I have abandoned her, gone chasing off after Felix and left my little girl in harm’s way? I remembered how, when she was born, I’d looked into her eyes for the first time, and whispered, “I promise I’ll never let anything bad happen to you.”

  I remembered how, in the first exhausted confusion of learning how to look after her, I’d squirted baby shampoo into my own eyes to find out if it really didn’t sting. I remembered walking the streets for hours and hours with her in her sling, because that was the only thing that seemed to stop her crying. I remembered when that didn’t work and I ended up crying too, thinking that I must be a total failure as a mother if I couldn’t even comfort my own baby.

  I’d failed her now – and it was through my own selfishness.

  Right now, my daughter could be lying in a hospital bed, surrounded by wires and tubes, in pain and frightened. And I didn’t even know which hospital she was in, because in my panic to get the latest update from Sadie before I left New York, I hadn’t asked, thinking I’d call when I landed. And now I couldn’t, because I wasn’t even competent enough to charge a phone.

  And Jonathan wasn’t there. The one person I needed, I trusted to be by my side, a loving, steadying presence, talking me down when I was being ridiculous, making me laugh when I was at my lowest ebb. The person who loved our children as much as I did. If Jonathan had been there, he would have reassured me that it wasn’t my fault, that there was no point panicking, that Darcey would be looked after by professionals who saw children with bangs to the head every day. But he wasn’t there. He wasn’t there because only one of us really needed to be, because he had other responsibilities, and because however much he wanted to, however much he longed to rush back to our little girl, he’d had to do his duty for his employer, trusting me to care for our family.

  But I hadn’t – I’d placed it all in jeopardy in the worst, most selfish way. I was alone in this crisis, without my husband, and the horrible magnitude of the row we’d had made me doubt he would ever be with me again. Thinking of Jonathan made me start to cry again, and the road ahead of me blurred with tears.

  I was still crying when I drove through the red-brick gateposts and on to the crunching gravel drive that led to Sadie’s house. I forced myself to pull over, blow my nose and compose myself – I didn’t want Owen to see me in this state. I sipped water, snatched a few deep breaths, and drove up to the house, ready to find out the full horror of the news that awaited me.

  The first person I saw was Owen, riding a yellow toy tractor across the lawn. As soon as he spotted the car, he jumped off and came running over.

  “Mummy!”

  “Hello, Muffin,” I picked him up and pressed his solid little body to my chest, trying not to cry again. “I’ve missed you so much. Have you had a lovely time?”

  “I got a tractor,” he said. “It’s a toy one but I rode a real one with Uncle Gareth. When I grow up I want to be a farmer too.”

  “He can have a job here any time he likes,” Gareth said, emerging from the house. “Hello, Laura. You must be exhausted. We’ve been trying to call you but your phone was off – was the flight okay?”

  How was the flight? Never mind the fucking flight, I thought, how was Darcey?

  “Sadie spoke to Jonathan earlier,” Gareth went on. “I’m awfully sorry we gave you both such a fright. We tried to reach you but you’d obviously boarded the plane already. Sadie and Darcey are down at the stables.”

  “What?” My voice rose to a shriek.

  “Yes, when the hospital checked her over they assured us there was no harm done,” Gareth said. “She gave us all a bit of a scare, falling on her head like that, but riding helmets are pretty tough, and she’s tough too. We can go and find them, if you like.”

  Dazed, I followed him round the house and through the avenue of trees that led to Sadie’s domain.

  She was leaning on a fence post, watching a chestnut pony trotting round a paddock in circles.

  “Heels down, Darcey,” she called. “That’s better. Back straight – oh, hello, Laura. We were expecting you to ring.”

  “Sadie, what the fuck is my daughter doing on that horse?”

  “Rising trot,” Sadie said. “She’s going to make a lovely little rider, you know. What happened yesterday wasn’t her fault at all, or Bumble’s. A bird scarer spooked him – bloody things should be banned – and he took off. He’s normally pretty bomb-proof but you just never know.”

  Fury and relief fought for the upper hand in my mind, and relief won.

  I climbed through the post-and-rail fence, and walked over to Darcey, trying to assume a calm I didn’t feel.

  “Hello, Pickle.”

  “Mummy! Look, I can ride! Auntie Sadie said after you fall off you should get straight back on, so I did. I went to hospital, you know.”

  “I know you did,” I said, through clenched teeth.

  “Bumble got a fright and bolted. He jumped over a log, but I only fell off afterwards,” she said proudly. “Auntie Sadie says I’ve got a good seat.”

  “It certainly sounds like you do,” I said faintly. “Come on, why don’t you get off and give me a hug?”

  “Don’t you want to watch me do rising trot?”

  “I did just now, Pickle,” I said. “You looked great.”

  “Come on, Darcey,” Sadie said. “I think Bumble’s had enough for one afternoon. Show Mummy how you dismount.”

  Darcey took her feet out of the stirrups, swung one leg over the pony’s hindquarters and slid to the ground, looping the reins over her arms like a pro. Only when she’d taken off its saddle and bridle and fed it a carrot would she let me hug her.

  The sun had brought out new freckles on her nose and lightened her hair. She smelled of saddles and fresh air, and she looked completely happy.

  I’d promised to protect my baby girl but, I realised, it simply wasn’t going to be possible. However much I longed to wrap her in cotton wool and keep her safe like the precious treasure she was, I wouldn’t be able to. She’d have accidents, she’d fail at things she desperately wanted to succeed in, she’d make bad decisions. One day, hopefully a long time in the future, someone would break her heart. But for now, she was confident, courageous and glowing with pride – I couldn’t let my own fears for her show.

  “Can I have riding lessons when we go back to London, Mummy? Please, please can I? I’ll never ask for anything again, ever.”

  I looked at Sadie and we exchanged a smile. I wanted to wring my sister’s neck, but I also loved her for being part of Darcey’s discovery of something she adored.

  “I’ll have
to talk to Daddy,” I said.

  I did indeed have to talk to Jonathan, but it proved to be harder than I expected. Not to get through to him, but to communicate about what, now I knew Darcey was safe and well, was troubling me.

  “Laura? Is she okay?” he said, answering his phone on the first ring. “I talked to Sadie while you were flying, but…”

  “She’s fine,” I said. “Absolutely fine. She fell off and hit her head, and she was a bit woozy afterwards, Sadie says, so they took her to be checked out just in case. But there’s nothing wrong with her at all. She was back on the fuc— back on the horse today when I arrived.”

  “That’s my girl,” Jonathan said. “Can I talk to her?”

  I passed the phone over to Darcey.

  “Hello, Daddy,” she said, suddenly shy.

  I hovered and listened while she told him everything she’d told me about how wonderful Bumble was, and how it hadn’t been his fault she’d fallen off, and launched an impassioned plea for a pony of her own. Half an hour before it had just been riding lessons – clearly our daughter could sense the thin end of the wedge.

  Then Jonathan wanted to talk to Owen, and I heard one side of a long conversation about tractors.

  “It’s like a fire engine, only better,” Owen said, and I wondered how on earth Jonathan and I, the most urban couple in the world, ever, had given birth to two children whose spiritual home seemed to be the countryside.

  For a moment, I imagined moving to a little cottage in a village somewhere, with roses growing up the wall and an apple tree in the garden. I’d learn to make jam and cheer my daughter on from the sidelines at gymkhanas. Owen would join the Young Farmers. Jonathan would – no. It was unthinkable. No one needed management consultants in the country. And besides, right now I didn’t even know whether I had a marriage any more.

  “Can I talk to Daddy again, darling?”

  Owen handed my phone reluctantly back.

  Sadie said, “Come on, you two, let’s go and see how the kittens are doing,” and the children ran eagerly after her.

  “So, yeah, they’re fine, as you can hear,” I said. “Listen, Jonathan, we need to talk about stuff.”

  “We do,” he said. “But right now isn’t the time, Laura. I’m sorry, but I don’t have the headspace for it right now. Things are crazy here. There’s – just one second – okay, Wanda, I’ll be right there. I have to go. I’ll be home on Thursday, we’ll speak then.”

  I said, “Okay, we’ll speak then.”

  He ended the call and I looked at my phone for a moment, wishing that its smooth blank screen could communicate Jonathan’s thoughts to me across the miles that separated us. But it couldn’t, of course.

  And then Sadie came bustling in and said, “Tea’s ready, Laura, you must be starving,” and I realised that I was.

  Over sausages, buttery mashed potato and peas, I gave the edited highlights of my adventures in New York, telling the kids about the subway and the skyscrapers and the horses that took tourists around Central Park in carriages. I didn’t mention Felix at all – the time I’d spent with him felt like it had happened to another person in another lifetime. Which, in a way, it had.

  By the time Gareth brought a massive dish of gooseberry crumble to the table, to “Oooh”s of joy from the children, I was almost comatose with tiredness. At one point I drooped so much that my hair ended up in my pudding bowl, and I splattered cream on to my face when I jerked awake.

  “You lot carry on,” Sadie said. “I’m taking Laura up to bed.”

  Gareth said, “Come on then – who’s helping me wash up?”

  To my amazement, Darcey and Owen both leapt to their feet, Owen reaching up to grab the crumble dish and almost tipping it over his head before Gareth rescued it.

  “You’re in here, same as usual,” Sadie said, leading me upstairs to the room where I’d always slept during school holidays when I was a teenager.

  The bed was covered with the familiar, faded patchwork quilt under which I’d tried, misguidedly, sleeping with my pointe shoes on to improve the flexion in my feet. My suitcase was propped open against a mahogany chest of drawers that squatted in the corner of the room as if it had been there forever – probably because it had. There was even a rosebud in a glass vase on the windowsill.

  “I’m going to run you a bath,” Sadie said. “It won’t take long, we’ve had a new boiler fitted. Unpack your stuff, I’ll be right back.”

  I didn’t do as she said. I sat on the bed, too tired to think or move, until my sister returned and practically manhandled me into a tub of scalding scented water, then ten minutes later extracted me from it and took me back to my room.

  “I’ve left you a cup of chamomile tea,” she said. “Although frankly you’d sleep if it was quadruple espresso. Gareth and I will put the kids to bed. Don’t worry about anything. We’ll talk in the morning.”

  I said, “Thanks Sades. I love you.”

  “Love you,” she said, and even though she was already on her way out of the room, her mind on the dogs or the kittens or her sourdough starter, I knew she meant it.

  Chapter 21

  For the next two days, I just let myself and the children be looked after. We went for long walks in the sunshine. We ate mountains of Sadie’s wonderful cooking. Darcey rode Bumble and Owen rode on the tractor with Gareth. Jonathan Facetimed the children in the evenings, but didn’t seem to want to talk to me beyond asking if I was all right, and telling me that he was.

  When it was time to go home, we had an extra passenger in the car: the smallest of the kittens, a little biscuit-coloured ball of fluff who Darcey christened Elsa.

  The drive to the Cotswolds, when I’d been frantic to get to Darcey, had seemed to take an eternity. The drive back to London passed in no time at all, because I was dreading what awaited me there.

  Jonathan had gone straight to the office from the airport, but he arrived home in time to see the children, give them their baths and read them a story before bedtime. It broke my heart to see their excitement at seeing their daddy again, and Jonathan’s pleasure in doing the simple, everyday tasks of being a father. The guilt I felt, knowing that our little family might be about to be shattered, and it would be all my fault, was almost unbearable – I couldn’t watch as he kissed them goodnight, knowing it might be the last time he did so here, in this house we’d chosen together with so much excitement.

  I went downstairs, opened a bottle of wine and sat in the kitchen to wait for Jonathan, the kitten purring on my lap. I’d made up my mind, at some point in the course of one of those long country walks: I was going to tell him the truth. However much it hurt, however much was at stake – I couldn’t lie to him any longer. Whatever decision he made about our marriage, he needed to make with the facts, not with the cowardly half-truths I’d told before.

  “They’re both asleep,” he said when he came to find me a few minutes later. “Out for the count. It must be all the country air.”

  “It did them good, I think,” I said. “Apart from Darcey frightening the bloody life out of everyone, they had a wonderful time.”

  Jonathan sat down opposite me. The kitten regarded him with one amber eye, then jumped on to the table and padded over to him to say hello.

  “She shouldn’t be allowed on the table, should she?” I said.

  “She’s a cat,” Jonathan said. “She makes her own rules.”

  He waggled the end of his tie at her and she crouched, tail twitching, then pounced and began savaging it viciously. We both laughed, and for the first time since I’d left New York, we met each other’s eyes.

  Jonathan looked awful, I saw with shock. There were dark rings under his eyes and his hands were trembling as he lifted his glass of wine and took a sip. His belt was on a tighter hole than usual, and I wondered if he’d eaten at all, or slept, the past few days.

  “Shall I make some food?” I said. “We haven’t got much in but there’s spaghetti, and some jars of sauce somewhere I think.”<
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  Jonathan shook his head. “I’ll get something later. Laura, I don’t think I should stay here tonight. I can stay at the flat in the City we use for clients – there’s no one there this week. I think we both need some space.”

  ‘Space’ – that dreaded word that signals the beginning of the end of a relationship, together with its ominous successor, ‘trial separation’.

  “Okay,” I said. My throat was so tight and dry I could barely get the word out. I sipped my wine and tried again. “But before you go, I want to tell you about what happened with Felix.”

  “Go on,” he said. His voice was hoarse and I knew he felt just the same way I did, strangled with dread and sadness.

  “I didn’t just meet him a few months ago,” I said. “He was my boyfriend, when I was dancing. My first proper boyfriend. And the thing is, you know how normally when you break up with someone, when you’re really young, it kind of peters out? You get sick of them, or you meet someone else you like more and realise it’s too soon for you to be tied down. You start having rows, and they get worse and worse, and in the end you’re miserable more than you’re happy, and you call it quits. You know what it’s like.”

  He nodded. “I guess so.”

  “That didn’t happen with him and me. Everything was perfect, it was wonderful, and then it was over. There wasn’t any in between bit. So I didn’t have the chance to stop loving him then, and I don’t think I ever really did afterwards, either.”

  “Even when you met me?”

  I looked down at the kitten, who was washing her whiskers with a tiny white paw. “Even then. Even when I was so in love with you, part of me hadn’t let go of him.”

  “As if he’d died,” Jonathan said, and I remembered him telling me years ago, when we first got together, that his last girlfriend had been a widow, a girl called Tash, whose husband had been killed in a motorcycle accident. Jonathan had felt, he said, as if he could never live up to the memory of the man she’d loved and lost, and that’s why their relationship didn’t work out.