But Freud said there were no accidents, giddy or otherwise. Clearly this had been my subconscious speaking up, articulating what the more polite part of my brain wouldn’t dare admit.
I grabbed my iPad and opened Facebook: time for a little light spying.
Feeling thrilled and ashamed I scrolled down his feed, being extremely careful not to like anything of his.
Then, right before my astonished eyes, Josh Rowan liked something of mine. Yes! It said it! Josh Rowan liked your post! I stared at it, hungry with joy, my knuckles white with concentration. Clearly he was stalking me, just like I was stalking him! Almost immediately it got unliked – just like me, he was trying to cover his tracks. Christ alive! ‘That’s a shame …’
‘You okay?’ Hugh’s voice set my heart thudding.
For the love of God! How hard is it to have some time to myself in my own head, playing with my own happy thoughts? Just for once!
‘Yeah. Grand.’ My voice carried a hint of my resentment. ‘Just on Facebook.’
‘You need anything?’
Some uninterrupted time to think my own thoughts would be nice.
‘No. Thanks. I’ll be down in a while.’
… and he said, ‘That’s a shame.’
32
Tuesday, 20 September, day eight
‘If he was going to lose his nerve and come home,’ Druzie says, ‘it would have happened by now.’ It’s Tuesday evening and we’re sitting in her garden, eating cheese. She’s back from Syria for a few days and, in her dusty sand-coloured clothes, she looks like a soldier or a foreign correspondent. Everything about her seems to be the same colour: her short hair is dirty-blonde and her skin is tanned and freckled.
‘He’s been living his new life for a week,’ she says. ‘Getting the hang of it, meeting other travellers, starting to enjoy himself. Too harsh?’
Despite everything, I laugh. ‘Of course. But you’re right.’ In the first few days after Hugh had left I’d thought he really might not be able for the loneliness, for the enormity of what he’d done. But now? He’s gone for the duration.
‘So what are you going to do?’ Druzie asks. ‘You’ve six months, minus a week. You can achieve a lot in that time.’
‘Ah, stop, I’m not you.’
Druzie is never afraid. A Zimbabwean who doesn’t watch television and knows how to fire a rifle, she doesn’t give a shite about societal rules. She’s the first person I’d call if I found myself arrested in a dodgy foreign country.
‘C’mon, what do you want from life, Amy?’
‘Nothing,’ I admit. ‘Apart from Hugh to come home. But the other stuff, bucket list, unfulfilled ambition – not really.’
‘Huh.’
‘Embarrassing, right? I mean, I’d like the girls to be okay. A mother is only ever as happy as her least happy child, and I worry about Neeve because of Richie –’
‘Idiot.’
‘Idiot is right. I worry she won’t ever make an income. It’s rough on her still living at home – she’s twenty-two, she should be out having fun, swiping right. And Sofie, I just want her to be happy.’
‘Sounds so simple, but –’
‘– it’s the hardest thing ever. As for Kiara, she should be President of the World. Then I worry that everyone’s expectations might send her off the rails.’ I lapse into silent thought, while the wind gets up a bit. I’d like to go inside but Druzie is outdoorsy and doesn’t feel the cold. ‘Now I feel pitiful that my only goals are around my children. That’s nearly as bad as simply wanting Hugh to come back. I’m living through other people.’
‘You don’t want to be that woman. C’mon, Amy, put some thought into this.’
I go down a couple of exploratory avenues and the best I can come up with is ‘I’d like to feel safe.’
‘And be thin?’ Druzie thinks wanting to be thin is utterly pathetic.
‘Says the woman who forgets to eat!’
‘Says the woman who works in war zones with starving people. But go for it, honey, indulge yourself.’
I know it’s shallow, but … ‘Yeah, okay, and be thin. And have nice clothes and go on fabulous holidays with Hugh and live in an extremely beautiful house with a squad of invisible cleaners and gardeners and a man whose sole job is to fix small annoying problems, like loose light-switches and broken panes of glass, and I wouldn’t even have to ask him to do anything – he’d magically spirit himself around the house, making things right without me even knowing anything was wrong instead of standing before me and telling me all the reasons why he couldn’t fix it.’
Druzie smiles. She can do all those things herself. But I’m on a roll now.
‘We’d have so many rooms in the house that I’d have my own to decorate exactly in my taste and I’d commission special wallpaper from artisans in Hungary or places like that – it would be an actual painting but on wallpaper, you know? And hand-embroidered curtains. And hand-embroidered cushions, not the same as the curtains because matchy-matchy is twee, but they’d be similar. Or maybe they’d actually clash, but in a strangely harmonious way.’
‘Strangely harmonious? Huh.’
‘And paintings. I’d buy every one of Du?anka Petrovi?’s paintings.’
‘Who?’
‘The mystery Serbian artist I’m obsessed by. We’d have a gym and a movie room and maybe a swimming pool … but what if we didn’t use it? I’m worried that after the initial thrill we wouldn’t, and then I’d feel guilty about the water being heated every day, and it would be like Elton John spending a fortune on flowers in all his homes, even when he’s not there, and this is a fantasy and it’s supposed to be enjoyable, but now it’s just making me anxious.’
‘What if Hugh doesn’t come back? Do you still want to be rich?’
I swallow hard. ‘I might as well.’
‘But what use would all that money be, if you didn’t have Hugh?’
‘I know, right!’
This long-running in-joke started when I was in post-Richie bitterness and she was in permanent pragmatic Druzie-ness. We used to scorn our sexist society for telling women they counted for nothing if they didn’t have a man on their arm.
‘Sad and all as your life is now, Amy,’ her tone is tragi-mocking, ‘it would be worse to be rich and single.’
‘Too right. Gold-digger men would prey upon me, young men who’d rain compliments down on my head.’
‘And because you’d had stuff injected into your face –’
‘– and could afford Simone Rocha dresses –’
‘– you’d believe them.’
‘But they wouldn’t love me at all! They’d have a real girlfriend –’
‘– or boyfriend.’
‘Or boyfriend. They’d propose marriage, but they’d only do it if we had a pre-nup giving them nothing.’
‘And because of you being a total idiot, you’d think this meant true love and you’d say, “No, no, we won’t have a pre-nup.” ’
‘Then I’d happily get spliced even though everyone – Derry, Neeve, even Kiara – was telling me that your man was a shyster.’
‘So your new husband fancies himself as a film director –’
‘Oh, yes! Love it. I’d finance a couple of vanity films, which starred his secret girlfriend –’
‘– or boyfriend.’
‘The films would be car-crashes and all the critics would mock me.’
‘Then you’d die in suspicious circumstances and they’d do a big piece about you in Vanity Fair.’
‘Which would be mortifying. And I’d be dead. And, bad as things are, I don’t want to be dead. I’m curious about how things will turn out. This is good, right?’
33
Friday, 23 September, day eleven
‘Hello, hello!’ Friday lunchtime, and Alastair struts in from London with his usual fanfare.
Tim ends a call and says, ‘Give us a debrief and make it quick. I’m leaving at three.’
‘What’s up?’
‘My wife is taking me to Paris for the weekend.’
Both Alastair and I are stunned into silence.
‘That’s wonderful.’ I’m nearly sick with envy.
Then Tim says, ‘Mrs Staunton’s just landed tickets for the rugby.’
Aaaaah. My vision of a sexy, romantic weekend of rumpled sheets and luxury-macarooning, adorable little boutiques and flea-markets-full-of-vintage-Chanel vanishes. The rugby. Wouldn’t be for me.