Separate Lives (9 page)

I don't regret that weekend with Heinous in Random-on-Sea, despite the fact that it changed everything. I don't believe in regrets—why dwell on the past when there's so much future to fuck up and then pretend not to have any regrets about?

I spoke to Heinous on the Tuesday after the party, the day after I had returned from the morning school run so full of thoughts that I barely even registered that Alex was still at home, much less wearing his pajama bottoms in the kitchen and synching his new iPhone on the laptop instead of at work (presumably that late night on Friday had earned him a Monday morning off? Whatever). Either way, having psyched myself up on the journey to school and back—all of twenty minutes—I barely paused for breath after shutting the front door before confronting him about the text message from “P.” I took a deep breath. And then I just launched into it.

“So, Alex, um, I was just wondering, er—”

But before I'd got into my stride, Alex interrupted.

“Look, hang on, Susie—you and I probably need to talk about lots of things, but first . . .” And his voice went from calm, disengaged, distracted to, well, the opposite, really—chilly, his words like a cold shower.

“Let's just stick to the stuff that really matters. Like the fact that on Friday I . . . I lost my bloody job, Susie. Which, in case you were wondering, is why I'm sitting here in our kitchen in Queen's Park at 9:30 a.m. on a Monday morning, instead of in Soho preparing for the weekly 10:30 strategy meeting, as fucking per . . .”

And at this point he picked up his (nearly empty, thankfully) coffee mug and hurled it at the kitchen wall, helpfully painted in Farrow and Ball's near-as-dammit coffee-colored “London Clay.”

I know that men define themselves by their work even more than women do; however, Alex has always defined himself by his work more than most men. Which meant that an out-of-the-blue redundancy (because while Alex may have been brooding over this all weekend, which of course explained a lot, it was still news to me) was bound to test the strongest relationship. And we didn't, at this moment in time, have anything even approaching the strongest relationship. And now I had to tap dance in fuck-me slingbacks on hot coals.

“OK, Alex. This is suddenly a lot to take in. And I don't think chucking coffee mugs at walls is really any way to—”

“Oh shut up, Susie.”

“No, I will not shut up. I am incredibly sorry—and shocked—that you have just lost your job but for some reason you are not making it very easy for me to sympathize.”

“Yeah, let's make it all about you.”

Actually, I could see that he might have a point. Thinking on my dancing feet—which still hurt from Saturday—I decided to make it All About Him. My partner had just lost his job. Out of sorts was the order of the day. Accusations about affairs were unhelpful. They could wait. Or I could even be spectacularly grown-up and just ignore them completely. So, what did I do? Farrow and Ball be damned, I put the kettle on.

The rest of the day was much calmer. We sat down and talked about the redundancy situation. About lawyers (“I bet Isobel knows someone” was easily my most helpful suggestion). We talked about the “opportunities” redundancy represented, albeit theoretically. Alex talked vaguely about photography, his great passion, and how maybe Now Was The Time. And we talked about the kids, and how, thank God, we didn't have school fees to worry about since we had been “fortunate” enough to pay a premium to live in the catchment for a decent, if not actually outstanding, London primary. And when Alex wanted to make a couple of calls, I snuck off to the computer and ordered those boots from Georgina Goodman, because I am a modern working woman with my own income and bank account, and fuck it . . . they were great boots. And we both agreed we wouldn't tell the kids about Alex's job because they wouldn't understand, and we'd just try to get through the next few days like grown-ups, if that was humanly possible. And I thought, “Try to forget about ‘P,' because ‘P' is not necessarily a cuckoo in our little familial nest; she may just be a red herring.”

So the week became as calm as any week that begins with a job loss and portentously simmering accusations of infidelity can be. Which is to say, not quite as calm as one may like but not entirely unbearable, either.

Ruby, our . . . well, “nanny” is far too grand a word for someone who does three or four hours after school, and no weekends, and not quite enough of the holidays (i.e. no August, or religious festivals) . . . anyway, Ruby agreed to babysit on Tuesday night so that Alex and I could go for a quick Thai. During which I came very—dangerously—close to saying that I was on a tight deadline with this year's
100 Best Restaurants in the World
—my professional baby, the one I'd given birth to a decade ago and which was still bouncing, but fortunately I bit my tongue just in time.

Before I'd had the children I'd done a lot of the legwork on the guide myself, but these days I mostly edited, while the terrible drudgery of having to eat great meals in the world's very best restaurants was grudgingly farmed out to legions of slavering food hacks, which did a lot for my waistline and my professional popularity but I can't pretend I didn't miss it. And I'd never missed it more than while I was sitting in a no-better-than-OK local restaurant on a drizzly June evening with a partner so wound up he looked as if he might actually punch his Pad Thai unless an even softer target presented itself. Fortunately I quickly realized that any mention of my working life would, in the current context, probably ensure I was that target, so I stopped mid-sentence. But Alex seemed to be so far away, so lost in his own thoughts, that I'm not sure he would've heard me anyway.

During the five-minute walk back to the house, I had the proverbial brainwave.

“Look, Alex. On Saturday Heinous invited us, well mostly me and the kids to be honest, down to visit her in, er, Random-on-Sea,” (I had genuinely forgotten where she really lived) “so I thought I might give her a call tomorrow and avail ourselves of her offer. Drive down after school this
Friday. Come back late afternoon Sunday, if that's cool with Heinous—and you? It will give us all a bit of, dare I say it,” (I even felt brave enough to waggle my fingers in the air), “'space.'”

“Yeah, yeah. Whatever.”

“Sure?”

“Yeah. Go on. Where the fuck's Random-on-Sea?”

“Um, not Brighton but down and left a bit and keep going until you're nearly in Kent, apparently.”

“That'd be the A21 then. The Highway to Hell. Take you forever if the weather's good. Don't you remember, we went to a wedding down that way a few years ago, after Lula, before Charlie? Philip from our marketing department and that ditzy fashion editor girlie—Bridget, wasn't it? The one who was so skinny she looked like she'd faint before she got her vows out?”

For the first time in two days Alex sounded . . . normal, I suppose. And sometimes when you're adrift in the Ocean of Abnormal you have to seize on normal as if it were a passing lifesaver.

“Yes, yes, God, Philip and Bridget, whatever happened to them? It was in Battle, wasn't it?”

“Yeah. Philip set up on his own and dumb Bridget just wanted babies straight away. But she would have had to spend a couple of years just eating before bothering to have sex. Actually, if memory serves, I think they ended up with IVF triplets. Can you imagine?”

It was deliciously normal, me and Alex comfortably slagging off old acquaintances. Even if it doesn't reflect very well on us as generous and warm-hearted individuals, we all do it, don't we, inside the co-dependently bitchy bubble of coupledom? So I felt safe, if not entirely secure.

“Anyway,” Alex continued, quite perked up by now, “yes, why don't you go and see the Sausage Woman. Report back. I like it down there. The travel links are so rubbish that you can get a lot of house for your money. I remember having the conversation with Philip.”

“Yes, that's what Heinous said too. ‘A lot of house for the price of a two-bedder in Media Vale.'”

So the next day I called Heinous, and she said, “Of course! Come, for God's sake. But that's rough on Alex, about the job, isn't it? Are you sure you shouldn't be at home, massaging his fragile male ego in a wifely manner?”

“No, I'm pretty sure I shouldn't, as it happens. I'll explain when I see you. Email me directions. See you supper time Friday, if that's OK?”

So, on Friday, when me and the kids finally fell out of the car at 7:45 p.m. and into Heinous's front door at the beginning of my first visit to Random-on-Sea (Alex had not been wrong about the A21 being the Highway to—or conceivably, in this case, from—Hell, especially on a Friday) the first thing Heinous said was: “Nice boots. Cozy for the end of June, but one must suffer for such glamour.” The second thing: “Drink?”

And as I glanced around her pretty Victorian townhouse—which was, unnervingly (this was the woman I'd hated, after all), decorated almost exactly the way I would've decorated it, in muted colors, referencing its location with seascapes and driftwood and beach stones and tongue-and-groove paneling in the loo but not theming it up too much—it felt, weirdly, a little bit like a home-from-home. Which was a very strange feeling for a confirmed Londoner who had spent a lifetime suffering from agoraphobic panic attacks whenever she ventured beyond the M25.

So that weekend all the planets were in the correct alignment for me to start my somewhat fraught affair with Random-on-Sea: my partner had lost his job, he may (or may not, we'd see) be having an affair of his own and thus an idea began to form in my mind. Just the hintette of an idea at this point, really, but one that took a more concrete—or at least bricks-and-mortar-ish—form over the next few days.

There were several compelling factors that contributed to the unfolding of my Master Plan.

1) Heinous and I got on like the proverbial burning
maison
. During the next forty-eight hours it occurred to both of us (we discussed it at length over an implausible amount of Sauvignon on the Saturday night) that one of the reasons we'd probably loathed each other at school was because we were so similar, and of course, at sixteen, entirely without the wisdom to see it.

2) I was also particularly vulnerable to the idea of a new BF since my old BF, Bella, had moved to Australia to edit the glossy magazine
Girlfriend
nine months ago. I missed Bells more than I ever quite dared tell her during our emails because, with a deflating sense of insecurity, I wasn't sure if it was entirely reciprocated. Her emails were relentlessly enthusiastic (The weather! The city! Commuting to work by ferry from her groovy Sydney suburb! The beach-based social life! The weekends in the Blue Mountains and hip spas in Byron Bay!) while from me they were basically just more-of-the-same (Work! The kids! Alex! The kids! Work! The weather . . . the weather . . . the arsing, twunting weather!).

3) Lula and Heinous's chip-off-the-block of a daughter, Edie—just the right side of being a wildly precocious only child (and it takes one to know one)—bonded instantly. Charlie, meanwhile, took charge of Heinous's labradoodle,
Sausage, and was beside himself that it took precisely five and a half minutes to get from Heinous's front door to the beach.

4) Random-on-Sea was, it turned out, a town of two halves. To the east was ye Olde Towne, all Tudorbethan beams and inglenookery and steeply winding streets teeming with a combination of beardy-boho local artists (more RAs per square foot than anywhere else in the country, according to Heinous—something to do with the light, apparently), beardy-weirdy yokels (possibly actual fisherfolk) and hip “DFLs”—aka the Down-from-Londoners. These were either rich enough to be weekenders escaping from their pricey postcodes or self-employed creatives who didn't need to commute and had traded the same kind of expensive alleged-lifestyle I was living—and, it turned out, Heinous had also lived in nearby “Media Vale” with her ex—for a life of sun, seaside and bracing cliff walks on the beautiful Fire Hills.

Meanwhile, to the west of the town's seen-better-days pier was the formerly elegant and gracious, now fairly dilapidated and grungy, Victorian New Town. This was where Heinous lived, in a Grade 2-listed four-story terrace with sea views. As conservation areas go this one was less chic than it was shabby, frankly, but I loved it at first sight. The houses may have needed re-painting, re-roofing, re-pointing and in some cases entirely re-building, but they were big and beautiful and everybody appeared to park right outside their own front doors, a major novelty for a Londoner. The area even reminded me (and if I squinted it helped) of a run-down version of London's Little Venice, with the Channel standing in for the Grand Union canal.

5) All of which was why, as early as Saturday lunchtime when we were trawling en masse for fish and chips in ye Olde Towne, I found myself peering in estate agents' windows and exclaiming, with (according to Heinous) predictable Londoner's zeal, “Look at THAT! Five beds, garden the size of Queen's Park and all for the—”

“Yup,” said Heinous, who had been in this position every time she was accessorized by over-excitable off-the-leash Londoners, “the price of a poky two-bed flat in ‘Media Vale' . . . I know, Soos. Why do you think I'm here?”

So we had had a great weekend, but I was pretty surprised by how little persuading Alex had needed about the Master Plan.

When I'd returned home excited on the Sunday night, full of tales of big, cheap houses, and
the beach at the end of the road
and how much the kids loved it, Alex and I had finally sat down and had the conversation I'd been practicing again in my head on the drive home.

“Look, Alex. Um. Who is this person whose name begins with P who wants you to live . . .” (at which point, yes, I did do air-quotes with my fingers) “. . . ‘a different sort of life'? A life that apparently includes smiley emoticons and three kisses?”