Lessons in Heartbreak (23 page)

It was all so calm and beautiful, and for the first time since Edward had left, Anneliese found herself able to take pleasure in its postcard prettiness.

‘Dorota’s?’ suggested Jodi as they reached Harbour Square.

Anneliese was about to say yes, and then she remembered that she’d been avoiding it lately, in case she bumped into Edward and Nell. There were so many places she was avoiding, including the supermarket, except late at night, because she knew she couldn’t cope with a chance meeting with either her husband or Nell.

Moral superiority was no match for the double whammy of betrayal and depression. Anneliese knew that no matter how much she’d want to glare at the two of them should they meet, she’d be far more likely to collapse in tears on the floor.

‘How about we try the Nook?’ she suggested. The Nook was a small bar-cum-restaurant, with a cosy name, but a modern décor. Anneliese wasn’t much for minimalism, but they always had lots of pastries from Oma’s Kitchen, the Austrian pastry shop next door. Although Anneliese hadn’t felt hungry lately, the thought of a sugar hit from lots of almond, honeyed pastry, made her mouth water. Plus, Edward hated the place. Perfect.

They ambled along towards the Nook and, once there, Anneliese pushed open the door. Standing directly inside, talking to a couple at a table set up for dinner, was Nell.

Anneliese stopped as if she’d been turned to stone.

Thanks to her late-night shopping and careful choosing of places to go in Tamarin, she hadn’t seen Nell since that day a week ago when Edward had left. After so much time spent obsessing over her, it was odd to actually see Nell in the flesh and realise that she didn’t have horns or a forked tail but was
still a middle-aged woman with frizzy hair and pale eyelashes. At the table beside Nell sat Geraldine, a friend of both of theirs, and her husband, Benny.

The three of them looked shocked as well as guilty and Anneliese had a suspicion that she was the subject of the conversation.

The sharp pinprick of another betrayal struck Anneliese. Geraldine hadn’t rung her to commiserate or talk, even though she clearly knew what was going on. Without Anneliese’s realising it, Geraldine had turned into an ex-friend. She’d already picked which side of the split she was on.

‘I was going, I’m just going,’ said Nell hurriedly, her eyes dark with shock and embarrassment.

‘Isn’t this the cutest little place,’ said Jodi, who’d come into the Nook just behind Anneliese and was looking around the pub. ‘It’s so pretty. Look at those suede purple seats. They’re fantastic!’

Nobody answered her.

‘Anneliese, I meant to call,’ said Geraldine, getting to her feet, clearly even more embarrassed than Nell. She attempted to hug Anneliese, but Anneliese shrugged her off. Every bit of staid conservatism seemed to have left her and the effects of the tablet must have suddenly worn off because she felt wild with rage. Who cared what people thought of her? She must have been mad to be avoiding her normal haunts – Nell deserved to face her rage.

‘Don’t touch me!’ she snapped at Geraldine. ‘You’ve chosen your side and I bet you’ve been sitting here listening to Nell’s story.’

‘It’s not like that,’ Geraldine said soothingly. ‘We’re worried about you.’

Anneliese snorted. ‘Worried about me? You’re not worried enough to pick up the phone to ask how I am when my husband walks off with this cow! And she –’ she gestured fiercely
towards Nell ‘– she’s hardly worried about me, no matter how she tries to paint the situation in a flattering light. Isn’t that right, Nell?’

Some core inside Anneliese told her she shouldn’t be doing this, that she would regret standing in a bar in Tamarin, screaming everything that came into her head. But she couldn’t help it, she wanted to say it. She could as lief stop herself as the sea water could stop pouring into the harbour, ebbing and flowing in the tides.

‘Actually, I’d give anything to know what Nasty Nell has been telling you, Geraldine. Has she been giving you the edited, poor-me-and-poor-Edward version or the truthful version? Hmm, let me see: the edited one, I think.’

Nell flushed even more. ‘I don’t have to listen to this,’ she said. ‘This isn’t the time or the place.’

‘You’re the expert on everything these says – what is the time or the place?’ Anneliese demanded. ‘I think the old conventions were smashed up when you took Edward off me. Yes, you took him, didn’t you? Don’t pretend otherwise. You sickened me the other morning when you tried to pretend that I must have known about you and Edward. You know damn well that I had no idea what was going on behind my back. I still thought you were my friend.’

There wasn’t a sound in the whole place: everyone in the Nook was listening. Even the waiting staff who didn’t speak English were motionless with their mouths open, trying to follow the conversation.

‘You knew almost every thought that went through my head, Nell, and if I thought Edward was having an affair, you’d have been the person I’d have confided in. I’m glad I didn’t know because imagine telling you I suspected Edward was having an affair and you sitting there smiling and simpering and going “oh no!” only for it to turn out that you were the one he was having the affair with.’

Outraged muttering noises could be heard coming from the other customers.

‘I’m going,’ Nell said angrily, and tried to push past Anneliese.

‘No, you’re not!’ hissed Anneliese back. She was taller than Nell and stronger. She was so angry that she wanted to hit out and wipe that simpering lipsticked smile off Nell’s stupid face.

‘Anneliese,’ said Benny, speaking for the first time. Geraldine’s husband was a gentle giant of a man and he got slowly to his feet to intervene.

Jodi stepped in before he could.

‘Anneliese,’ she said, ‘please, don’t.’

Anneliese felt Jodi’s hands on her, gentling her the way someone would gentle a young horse. ‘You don’t want to do this, not now.’ Jodi was stronger than she looked and somehow she managed to manoeuvre Anneliese away from the door. Immediately, Nell pushed it open and rushed off into the dusk.

Geraldine stood for a moment, staring at Anneliese.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ineffectively. ‘Sorry.’

‘Sure,’ muttered Anneliese.

Jodi hauled her into the bar part of the Nook and found a corner as far away from the door and her ex-friends as was possible. There, Anneliese slumped on to one of the purple suede seats and put her head in her hands, not caring what she looked like or who saw. Let her life be lived in the open with her dirty linen fluttering around in the breeze for all to see. Nell would tell her side of the story anyway.

Jodi didn’t wait for a waitress but went to where the mugs and coffee jug were kept for the waiting staff.

‘Here,’ she said, putting a steaming mug down on the table. ‘Have this.’

She sat as close to Anneliese as she possibly could and put her arm around her. ‘I know you’re in shock, but have some coffee, it’ll give you a jolt.’

‘I thought brandy was the answer for shock,’ Anneliese said, wrapping her hands around the steaming mug.

‘Bad for the heart,’ Jodi said briskly. ‘I don’t want to have to drag you right back up to the hospital on a stretcher.’

Anneliese laughed weakly. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Sorry you had to see that. Guess you aren’t looped into the Tamarin rumour mill or you’d have heard that my husband left me for her, my ex-best friend.’

‘No, I didn’t know,’ Jodi said. ‘We’ve not lived here long enough to be in on the round-robin emails. Does Yvonne know?’ she asked, referring to her next-door neighbour and Anneliese’s friend from the Lifeboat Shop.

‘I don’t know.’ Anneliese shrugged. ‘I didn’t tell her yet, couldn’t face it. Although she’s a good friend and she’d probably be on my side. God,’ she said, ‘why do there have to be sides in marriage break-ups?’

‘Most people don’t want to take sides,’ Jodi replied.

But Anneliese wasn’t listening.

‘Actually, it’s not a marriage break-up,’ she said. ‘It’s a marriage grenade launch or landmine or something. Break-up is far too innocuous a word for it. Break-up implies you knew it was coming, and I didn’t. I hadn’t a clue. How stupid does that make me? Don’t make that mistake, Jodi. Keep your eyes open in your marriage. Forgive me,’ she apologised. ‘You don’t need my advice. You young people, you’re better at relationships than my generation. We think we have to stay in them no matter what; it’s a sign of weakness if you walk out. Maybe it’s a sign of weakness to stay when it’s all pretty crap. I didn’t know it was crap, I thought it was OK. Forgive me,’ she said again. ‘You don’t want to be burdened with this. The tawdry details of other people’s marriages. I didn’t mean to shock you.’

‘You didn’t shock me at all,’ Jodi said, shrugging. ‘Breakups happen all the time. My parents are divorced.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Anneliese said.

‘Don’t be,’ Jodi replied. ‘It’s better this way. When I was a kid, they did nothing but fight when me and my brothers were in bed, and then they’d pretend everything was perfect when we were up, like we were deaf and couldn’t hear them shouting. It’s better this way. They’re both happy, just not together.’

‘And that didn’t put you off marriage?’ Anneliese enquired.

‘No, it put me off arguments. Dan and I don’t argue. I used to think there was something wrong with us. Everyone says you need passionate fights in a marriage, but we’ve never had that. We have disagreements and we both get really upset because we’re fighting with the other person. I don’t think we’ve ever had a stand-up screaming match. I wouldn’t want to.’

‘Me neither,’ said Anneliese, thinking that she should have used the past tense because she wasn’t likely to be having a significant other ever again, so her not liking marital arguments was very much in the past. ‘I didn’t like screaming matches,’ she amended. ‘We never had stand-up screaming matches in our marriage. Edward and I got on pretty well. Not saying it was always easy, but we had Beth and we had to try and just muddle through the hard times.’

‘Beth’s your daughter? What does she think of all of this?’

‘She doesn’t know.’

‘You haven’t told her?’

‘No, I haven’t told her. I’m going to have to because she’s coming to Tamarin to see Lily and she’s going to go crazy when she finds out that her dad and I aren’t together.’

‘Why haven’t you told her?’ Jodi asked.

‘I don’t know how,’ Anneliese sighed. She thought of how she’d tried to keep things from Beth all her life. To make everything perfect. It was over-protectiveness, she knew, but she’d always felt it was the right thing to do. Beth was such a
gentle, fragile soul that she couldn’t cope with life’s pain. It was Anneliese’s job as a mother to shield Beth from the pain, and now there was no option but to land her right in the middle of it.

‘I’m going to have to tell her. I just don’t know how I’m going to do it.’

‘Say it out straight,’ Jodi advised. ‘That’s what I’d like, if I was your daughter. Your niece, Izzie, she knows, right?’

‘Yes, I told Izzie. I told her today, actually, and she was pretty shocked.’ Anneliese winced at the thought of that conversation and how appalling it had been. ‘Izzie’s very strong and sophisticated and the fact that she was so shocked really upset me. Made me wonder how I am going to tell my daughter the same news. I didn’t think anything would shock Izzie, but this did.’

‘It might be hard for her to hear the news because she lives abroad,’ Jodi said thoughtfully. ‘When you’re not living at home, bad news makes you feel guilty for being away. You’ve got guilt for that and then you’re a teeny bit grateful you’re away because it means you don’t have to deal with it so much. That sounds awful, doesn’t it?’

‘No,’ Anneliese said. ‘Just honest. I wish I was far away right now, then I wouldn’t have to deal with anything awful. But that’s not an option. I have to be here for Lily and Beth and Izzie. You’d like them both. Beth won’t be here long but Izzie has an open-ended ticket, so she’ll be around for another week certainly.’

An idea struck Anneliese. Inactivity wasn’t normal for her niece and it was quite possible that Lily would remain in the same state for some time to come, so that Izzie would have nothing to do except sit at her grandmother’s bedside.

It might be good for her to hang out with Jodi, doing a little investigating into Rathnaree and this Jamie person. It would
take her mind off Lily, because Anneliese was beginning to wonder if Lily would ever come back to them.

‘She could help with the research. She’s very clever and it’s going to be hard for her to be here with Lily so ill. She left such a long time ago, and you lose touch with the place. It could help her feel a part of it all,’ Anneliese said.

‘That would be great,’ Jodi replied. ‘I’d like that. She wouldn’t mind, do you think, helping me?’

‘No, Izzie’s very hands-on, very clever. If you want someone to help you get to the bottom of a mystery, I’d say Izzie is your woman. She can charm information out of anyone and she’s very driven and focused, that’s why she’s so successful in her job. I guess she’s sort of married to it, really. It’s a pity,’ Anneliese added. ‘She’s a gorgeous-looking girl. But everyone makes their own choices and I guess Izzie’s choice is to be on her own.’

‘Hard for her if Lily doesn’t make it,’ Jodi said.

Anneliese nodded sadly. ‘Hard for all of us,’ she agreed, ‘but especially for Izzie. It would be like losing her mother all over again.’

Breaking up with Joe had more or less cured two addictions, Izzie realised after a few days at home in Tamarin. She was going cold turkey on Joe and the ensuing misery meant she no longer checked her BlackBerry fifteen times a day in case she had email messages.

Before, she’d known exactly why it was nicknamed ‘CrackBerry’, because it was clearly almost as addictive as the deadly rock cocaine. But currently work, New York and Joe were all mingled together in her head and she looked at her BlackBerry warily, as if it might impart some more news with the power to hurt her.

Instead, there was a message from Carla, written in her usual crisp style.

Stefan from Jacobman keeps wanting to know when you’re going to be back. Everyone here is wild about the competition for the girl to be the face of SupaGirl! – it’s going to be worth millions. Best news is Stefan promises Laurel and Hardy won’t be on the team.

Izzie grinned, Stefan was a brat. They’d both have their knuckles rapped if anyone heard them talk that way. She was sure there was a piece of equality racism that forbade naming irritating colleagues after a couple of lovable clowns.

He says they can fire his ass, he doesn’t care, he wants you back. How cute. I’d say it must be love, if he wasn’t such a hound.

She and Carla had often talked about Stefan’s roving eye.

Have you talked to your Uptown Man? Hope not, but whatever happens, I’m here for you. Take care, tell me if you need anything, Carla.

It was brusque, to the point, and very Carla, emanating warmth and friendship, with a bit of careful advice buried in there:
Stay away from Joe, he’s no good for you.
Yeah, well, Izzie had worked that one out for herself by now.

Hi Carla, great to hear from you. Glad you’re coping with it all – if Stefan acts up, treat him like a dog. I think that’s the only way to deal with him. Give him simple commands and he’ll roll over!

No news from Uptown Guy. I haven’t contacted him and that’s the way it’s going to stay.

If her willpower held out, that was. She felt so emotionally fragile that she longed to hear his voice, but she knew she couldn’t allow that to happen. It wasn’t just that Joe was bad for her, he was bad for every woman in his life. Since Anneliese had told her about Nell and Edward, the reality kept throbbing in her skull: her uncle Edward had left someone as wonderful as Anneliese because he was in love, but damn Joe
Hansen hadn’t been able to leave his wife – a wife he allegedly was no longer really with – for her.

Therefore he didn’t love her, despite what he said. And she was no longer sure she believed what he said about his marriage being over – although she’d been so
certain
he was telling the truth about that. If it really was over, why couldn’t he just walk away? The fact that he couldn’t made her think what he’d said was just a handy excuse. Joe respected nobody except himself.

The alternative was that he did love her and still couldn’t put her first. Which was worse?

I am over him, she wrote. O.V.E.R.

Gran isn’t great. There’s been no change since the first day and Dad says he’d understand if I want to get back to the US. She could stay like that for a long time, nobody knows.

I hate to leave, though. I want to talk to her again, and though Dad says I could hop on a plane quickly to come home if she improves, it feels like abandoning her if I go back to work. But he’s got a point. I can’t do anything here except sit with her and hold her hand and –

Izzie hadn’t said this to her father or Anneliese

– it feels like she’s not there. Like she’s already gone.

Even writing it made her shiver. She couldn’t quite imagine a world without her grandmother in it and yet, that world was already there. Despite sitting at Gran’s bedside every day, there was no sense of the woman she’d loved all her life. No, she couldn’t think that.

Better go,

Love, Izzie

She quickly emailed Stefan back. Of course they were thrilled. Being involved in a huge campaign to find the next SupaGirl! model would mean both prestige and publicity for the agency. The publicity would make them top of the list for aspiring models. As a bonus, they’d get first dibs on any good candidates from the competition.

The girl who won the competition would need a specific look for SupaGirl!, but the search would draw out plenty of runners up whom Perfect-NY could then sign. Well-advertised competitions that made TV news drew out girls with model potential much faster than ordinary model searches that involved trailing around cities looking for prospective girls. Everyone in the industry talked about how the
America’s Next Top Model
series had taken off. Izzie knew that a lot of those girls would not have come forward without the bonus of TV and the excitement the whole thing generated.

Carla said you would be picking a good team for us to be working with

she added, grinning. She dared not use the words Laurel and Hardy.

Really looking forward to working with you, let’s talk when I get back, thanks, Izzie.

There was an email from Lola, who worked alongside her and Carla in Perfect-NY. A feisty Latina lady who had come into the industry working as a make-up artist, Lola had been with Perfect-NY so long that she was practically management. She was in her early forties but looked younger and was a tiny sprite of a thing, just five feet, and made Izzie feel like a giantess beside her.

Hi Izzie, just checking in to see how you are and how your grandmother is. We’re all thinking about you here and hope you’re OK.

Business is quiet right now. There is only one blot on the landscape and it’s a pretty terrible blot. You know Shawnee, that girl from Florida with the cute gap-tooth look and the short platinum crop? She’s very sick, and I feel like it’s totally my fault. She’s always been very thin, worked really well in editorial. She had that edgy, androgynous look going, but she didn’t get picked for a couple of jobs recently and she’s taken it badly. She collapsed yesterday because she hasn’t been eating. She’s in hospital all wired up and they’re checking her for heart problems, not enough potassium in her system, of course.

I just feel like it’s my fault, I should have been watching her better. She’s so young, for all that she does that cool ‘I can handle it’ trip. Sorry, didn’t mean to lay this on you, just needed someone to talk to I guess. I tried to say it to Natalie –

Natalie was the company’s boss

– but she just doesn’t see it the same way that I do. Shit, Izzie, it’s a tough business out there.

Hope you’re OK, give us a call.

Lola

Lola’s email was a sobering wake-up call for Izzie. Her grandmother might be in a hospital bed looking like a fragile little collection of bones beneath papery fair skin, but at least she was an old lady who had lived her life. Izzie knew exactly which model Shawnee was. She had an almost photographic recall of all the models on the agency’s books, which was what made her so good at her job, because she never forgot a face, and therefore was always able to work out which model would work for which booking.

She’d never have figured Shawnee for someone who would end up in hospital. Shawnee seemed so together, so happy: all lightly sun-kissed skin and those amazing pale green eyes that gave her the edgy look Lola had talked about. And now she was ill, weighing who knows what, all because she’d felt that she hadn’t got the last few jobs because she wasn’t thin enough.

And it was all about being thin. Beautiful was important too, but thin was almost as vital, no doubt about it.

When she’d first started in the modelling industry, Izzie had been irritated by people who had spoken about how crazy it was to have these incredible slim women striding up and down catwalks, showing off clothes.

‘Why are they so thin? Why don’t you use real women?’ was the complaint, and Izzie would roll her eyes and look for another industry person to back her up by explaining how it all worked.

‘They need to be thin to show the clothes to best advantage,’ she’d say patiently. ‘That way, you see the clothes and not their bodies. It would be different if they all looked va-va-voom, J-Lo-style. You’d be looking at them, not the garments. That’s partly how the supermodel thing went out of fashion – it became all about the models and not about the clothes they were wearing.’

Sometimes people got it.

‘I see what you mean,’ they’d say.

Sometimes they didn’t.

‘That’s bullshit,’ a woman said to her at a party once in Washington. Izzie had been with her Irish friend, Sorcha, who lived in DC, and they’d attended the launch of a book of political speeches. The crowd was very different from the sort of people Izzie usually mixed with and she’d been cornered by a woman with a bad haircut who wore a very masculine-cut suit and T-shirt and managed to make this fashion statement look drab.

‘The fashion industry is bullying women to make them powerless,’ the woman said. ‘Wear this, eat this, don’t eat this, be thinner. It’s all bullshit to sell clothes. Thin is a feminist issue. Actual women don’t have flat stomachs and no tits. The fashion industry is conspiring to turn real women into powerless little girls. You people should be working from the inside to change it all.’

Izzie cringed to think how she’d responded.

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she’d snapped, fed up with this politics-obsessed city where nobody ever talked about anything except Capitol Hill.

‘Let’s go, Sorcha,’ she’d said to her friend. ‘I’ve just been yelled at by this nutcase in a suit. I work in fashion – I’m not the industry spokesperson. Sometimes a dress is just a damn dress.’

But that woman had been absolutely right, she thought sadly. At the time she’d dismissed her words, assuming that a woman without fashion sense couldn’t possibly grasp what the industry was really about, but in fact the woman had put her finger on the problem with great accuracy.

There wasn’t any real need for models to be that thin. People weren’t stupid, they could work out what the clothes looked like on real women. Apart from the ones who’d bought into the whole thin-is-fabulous mental state, most of the people buying the clothes were real women, anyway. It would be handy to see how the garments moved and flared on similar figures, instead of on six-foot beauties who wore size zero.

Even the beauties couldn’t stay that thin for ever, which was how girls like Shawnee ended up in hospital beds on heart monitors.

Izzie felt ashamed when she thought about the SilverWebb Agency she and Carla had been so excited about. She’d lost that excitement in the last few months because of being involved with Joe.

She bet he hadn’t stopped improving his business. But she’d done that dumb woman thing of taking her eye off every single ball while she was with him. She’d also neglected her friends: she hadn’t been to see Sorcha for months, even though Sorcha had been ringing her up, begging her to visit.

Naturally, Izzie hadn’t been able to explain why she couldn’t come.

‘Just busy at work,’ she’d said.

‘Come on,’ Sorcha had groaned, ‘you can’t be busy all of the time. At this rate, you ought to own the company by now – or do they own you?’

And Izzie had promised to make the trip to Washington sometime in the future, but not just yet, because she couldn’t very well tell her old friend that she didn’t want to leave New York in case she missed spending time with her not-really-married lover.

Then there were Laura and Jacob, friends from yogalates. The three of them had been friends for ages. Laura and Jacob had shared dating stories for years until one day they’d looked at each other in a different way and, kapow – cupid’s arrow skewered them. They’d got married the previous Christmas and Izzie was ashamed to realise that she had only seen them once since.

Joe Hansen had taken over her life and she had nothing to show for it. Tish was another Joe casualty. How long had it been since Izzie had dropped in to see her and her new baby?

She was going to change, she decided. When she got back home, she’d phone all the people she’d neglected. The Joe days were over.

Dear Lola, I’m so sorry to hear about Shawnee. That’s truly terrible. It’s the one thing I really hate about this industry and I’ve hated it for a long time. It makes you wonder what’s going on when someone like Shawnee looks in the mirror and hates
what she sees. I know we all do our best to take care of the girls we work with, but it’s a big world out there and we can’t protect them from that, unless we try and change that world. I’d love to talk to you about it sometime when I get back to New York.

She dared not say any more; this email was being sent to the office, after all.

But it’s wrong that someone as beautiful as Shawnee thinks she’s not good enough.

It makes you wonder what’s going on in our world when girls like her look in the mirror and hate what they see. She shouldn’t hate what she sees.

Things aren’t good here. My grandmother had a stroke and still hasn’t recovered. It’s a waiting game now and the longer she stays in a coma, the less chance there is of her coming out of it without neurological damage. I guess I’m saying goodbye to her.

Izzie wiped away the wetness that suddenly came to her eyes.

But I was thinking, before I wrote this, that at least Gran has lived her life. She’s done so much, not like poor Shawnee. Talk soon, Izzie.

Izzie wasn’t entirely sure of everything her grandmother had done, but she knew it had been a packed life. A person didn’t get the wisdom Gran had without having seen and understood a huge amount. Anneliese had mentioned that Jodi, the Australian girl, had offered to find out who Jamie was. Maybe Izzie should talk to her too.

‘Everything happens for a reason,’ Gran used to say. She’d said it when Izzie missed out on a job in London and decided it was time to go to the States.

Perhaps Gran had called out the name ‘Jamie’ so that Izzie would look into her past and learn something from it. The more she thought about it, the more sense it made. Looking into her grandmother’s past would be as near as she could get to actually talking to darling Gran. Her brief moment of lucidity had to be a message to them all.