2
Before I get to set off for all of that fun and friendship, I have to navigate seeing my ex-husband, Robert. It will not be an enjoyable experience, but it will, at least, be brief. I am always tense when my daughter spends time with him, but the contact is not extensive, and it is part of a custody agreement that was signed in haste as I exited my old life so fast it made me dizzy.
He lives in a gracious three-storey Georgian townhouse in a leafy part of North London. It’s beautiful, and oozes both class and cash – in fact, it’s exactly the kind of place Amelia Leamington-Smythe might own.
He shares his home with his wife, Lyssa, their ten-year-old twins, Alfie and Hugh, and their daughter, Eleanor, who is four.
We split up ten years ago and, as the maths implies, he and Lyssa were very much a thing before then. That sounds traumatic, but if I’m being honest all I felt when he told me he wanted a divorce was a huge sense of relief – relief that our marriage would finally be over.
I’d been initially scared that he would fight me for our daughter, Rose, but soon realised that he was looking for a fresh start – and that didn’t include keeping any old baggage around. We were yesterday’s news, and I had ceased to entertain him. He made it clear he wanted Rose to stay in his life, but luckily seemed happy to do that at a distance.
I took the first divorce settlement the lawyers offered, scooped her up when she was only six years old and ran as fast as I could before he changed his mind. Robert wasn’t the kind of man to end up as a weekend dad, and agreed to her visiting during a portion of her school holidays instead. Giddy with relief, I settled on the south-east coast of Northern Ireland, a whole sea away, living in the ramshackle old house that I still call home.
It’s a gorgeous place in the middle of nowhere, a five-mile drive to the nearest town and with no neighbours to speak of. After living with Robert, I needed the solitude – and I wanted to put as much distance between us as I could.
That was a decade ago, and in the intervening years not much has changed apart from Rose, who has blossomed into a good reflection of her namesake – beautiful, but with a few sharp thorns. She’s sixteen now, and the light of my life. That, I am starting to realise, is a problem – because I want her to be the light of her own life, not mine.
Rose is far and away the best thing to come out of my marriage – everything else is measured not by what was gained, but by what was taken away. I emerged from it all with a non-existent career, my confidence in shreds, and with an almost pathological mistrust of other human beings.
The place I ran to, the place in which we have lived for the last ten years, is worth a fraction of the impressive property I find myself now standing in front of, and my life doesn’t come with many luxuries. Having a mojito at the airport is as flashy as it gets for me these days.
But even with all of that taken into account, I still feel like I got the better part of the bargain – and one look at Lyssa as she opens the door does nothing to dispel that belief. She was always a small woman, petite and pretty, but these days she seems to have sunken into her own body. She is wearing stylish and expensive clothes, but her shoulders are hunched, as though she is protecting herself. Her face is perfectly made up, but her eyes tell the truth – she is tired, and anxious, and worried that she will do something wrong.
Maybe I’m just mixed up. Maybe I see what I expect to see. Maybe she is super happy and I am simply projecting, as my psychiatrist friend Priya might say.
I suck in a breath, and put a smile on my face. It’s always an awkward relationship, isn’t it, with exes and their new partners? I bear Lyssa no ill will at all – I can’t blame her for falling for Robert’s charms. I did, after all.
“Hi!” I say brightly, hefting my backpack. “I’ve come to collect a surly teenager – do you have one to spare?”
Lyssa smiles back, and ushers me in. I hear the sound of a video game in the background, Rose’s voice rising above her half-siblings, telling something to “Die, die now!”
There is a loud explosion, lots of laughter, and as we walk into the room I see all of them sprawled out across a vast Chesterfield sofa. My eyes immediately go to my daughter, carrying out an initial scan for any damage, injury or other signs of anything being wrong. As usual, I don’t find them.
Rose is tall, like me, but has her father’s blue eyes and dark hair – currently highlighted with a purple stripe either side of her parting. She dresses like the lead singer of an indie band from the nineties, which I know drives him mad, but I love. Today she has on a tartan mini-skirt over black leggings, and battered old Dr. Martens boots laced up to her knees. Her hair is long and wild, and her eyeliner is all dramatic wings and swoops.
Scattered around her, the other three are contorted into various positions – Eleanor snuggled up next to her, picture perfect in a pretty sundress; Alfie draped across the back of the sofa, his head next to Rose’s; and Hugh lying flat, with his bare feet in her lap. I grin as I take it in – things might have ended badly with me and her dad, but I know she loves her sibs, and they clearly adore her.
“Hi, Mum,” she says, glancing up at me, putting down the controller. “You look nice – what’s wrong?”
I make a huffing sound and stick my tongue out at her. I’m very mature like that.
“Coffee?” Lyssa says quietly, hovering at my side. I want to say no. I want to do what I did all those years ago – scoop Rose up and run. I probably would, if it wasn’t for the eyes – I am literally surrounded by eyes, all of them looking at me imploringly.
“Please stay!” says Eleanor, her eyes the biggest of them all.
I know, of course, that she doesn’t mean “please stay” – she means “please don’t take Rose away”, and I find that I can’t resist. I nod, and follow Lyssa through into the kitchen.
I haven’t been here for just under a year, and it’s had a make-over – new granite surfaces and splashbacks, a wine cooler built in beneath the island. It looks, like everything else in this place, perfect, and yet I wouldn’t swap it for my born-in-the-eighties kitchen cupboards and battered pine dining table for all the world.
I notice Lyssa’s hands trembling as she approaches the monstrous coffee machine, and say, “That looks like it belongs in Costa. You know what, I’m just as happy with a mug of instant?—”
“Oh. Okay. If you’re sure?”
I tell her that I am, and feel a rush of sympathy for this woman – the woman who stole my husband, stole my life, stole my future. I might have been glad to get rid of it all, but still. It’s weird to feel sorry for her, but I can’t help it – she’s so nervous she’s even worried about what coffee to make.
I walk over to the kettle, fill it with water, and tell her to sit down. She does as she is told, because she is conditioned to do exactly that. I remember the feeling well and am thrilled at the thought that my own daughter very much enjoys doing the opposite of what she’s told, whenever possible. Better a rebel than a mouse, I decide.
When I first met Lyssa, she was a junior doctor in the hospital where Robert worked as a cardio-thoracic surgeon – in Manchester back then, before he joined a private practice in Harley Street. As soon as she was pregnant, he insisted that she stop working – which is exactly what he did with me. It sounds insane now, I realise – after all those years of training, in her case medical school and in my case veterinary, why on earth would we give it all up for some outdated idea of family life and motherhood?
Except it only sounds insane if you’ve never met Robert Marchant. He is man made up of good looks and charm and confidence. He is a man who has a way of convincing you that his ideas are in fact your own, of undermining your views and beliefs until they are so eroded they collapse and leave you entirely dependent on his. That you’d be a fool to doubt him.
Before you know it, you’re entirely his – financially, emotionally, socially. Nothing but an extension of his own world, looking wistfully out of the window at the one you remember being part of. I escaped, but only when he let me – I am not deluded enough to imagine that it was some great show of strength on my part, some epiphany that gave me the determination to break free. It was none of that – it was his shiny new toy, distracting him. And now she is sitting in her perfect kitchen, her arms wrapped around herself, telling me where the mugs are and asking for decaf in a voice so small it barely exists.
I place the cups down on the table, making sure to use coasters – I know how upset he gets if people don’t use coasters. Even after all this time, a part of me is still obedient.
“Lyssa,” I say, sipping scalding hot liquid and gazing at her over the steam cloud, “are you okay?”
She stares at me, tears suddenly appearing in her eyes, and shakes her head gently.
“No,” she replies quietly. “I’m pregnant again.”
“Oh,” I reply, reaching out to briefly pat her hand. She recoils from the contact, and I immediately regret it. I can be much the same myself. “And that’s not good news?”
Her lower lip trembles, and she is just about to reply when he walks into the room. He is tall and lean and good-looking, if you’re able to gloss over the cold eyes and the twist of what passes for a smile. The things you don’t notice when you first meet him. His hair is now touched with grey, but still thick and styled in that “Mills Priya, who lives in Birmingham with her husband and two little girls; and Katie, who lectures in dentistry at a university near Norwich.
Back in the day, we were inseparable, and the summer we all spent backpacking around Europe after we graduated was one of the happiest times of my life. I met Robert a few months after that, and everything changed – by the time I was twenty-four, I was pregnant with Rose, and slowly everything I used to be was erased.
When Ella reached out to me last year, I’d been delighted. She even came to stay with us in Ireland, much to Rose’s delight – Ella was, and is, an interesting woman. A winning combination of caring and taking-no-shit. I am thrilled to have her, and the others, back in my life – and I refuse to let Robert take that joy away from me.
“Yep, back in touch with that lot,” I reply lightly, not even engaging with his thinly veiled contempt. “And we probably should be making a move now…”
I stand up so abruptly my chair falls over, and I curse myself as I pick it back up and straighten it.
“Still as graceful as ever, I see,” Robert says as he watches, not lifting a hand to help. “Sadly, I think Rose has inherited your clumsiness.”
He wrinkles his nose as he says this, and I feel a welcome twinge of anger. Taking a pop at me is one thing, but Rose is an entirely different matter. I know she doesn’t fit his image of a perfect daughter – she dresses all wrong, she’s not interested in ponies, she has no ambitions to either marry well or become a brain surgeon. She shows no signs of doing any of the things he would approve of, and even fewer signs of giving a damn what he thinks about her.
“I’m so sorry if she broke a precious Ming vase or displaced one of your framed certificates, Robert. And those boots of hers? They must have made a terrible mess of the stair carpets… maybe we should send her away to finishing school?”
Lyssa stares at the table, obviously shocked by my defiant tone, and Robert looks almost as surprised. He hides it quickly, though, and laughs out loud, apparently genuinely amused.
“You sound just like her!” he announces, reaching out as though he’s going to pat my shoulder. I take a rapid step back, just in case.
“Well, I’ll take that as a compliment.”
I pause, and then yell at the top of my voice: “Rose! Time to go!”
I see him grimace, and it is a small victory. He absolutely hates anyone raising their voice, adults and children alike. He never shouts himself – he doesn’t need to – and hearing loud voices is sure to upset him. Petty but satisfying.
Rose yells back, “Okay, Mum!” at an ear-splitting decibel level, and I have to grin. Attagirl.
I swig down the last of my coffee, and put the mug on the table, deliberately ignoring the coaster. I see his face redden slightly, which is often the first sign of one of his Very Bad Moods, and stand up to leave.
I look at Lyssa, who is busily putting the mug back on its coaster, and feel a flood of guilt. I’ve wound him up, and now I’ll be leaving her to deal with the consequences.
“Lyssa,” I say gently. “Will you show us out?”
She nods rapidly and stands up, walking out of the room in front of me. We meet all four of the kids in the grand hallway, and three of them are clinging to Rose like she’s a life raft. Eleanor is in her arms, holding on to her, her face buried in her hair, the boys holding on to her legs, arms twined around her Doc Martens, giggling.
I let them say their goodbyes, and turn to their mum.
“You’ve got my phone number,” I say quietly. “If you ever need to talk, or you need any help… you can call me, you know?”
Lyssa stares at me for a moment, her expression wavering, before the shutters come down.
“Thank you,” she says, a hostile edge to the polite words. “But I have absolutely no idea why I’d need to call you, Lucy, or why you might think I would. It’s not like we’re friends, is it?”
She looks away from me abruptly and starts chivvying the children along, and I am left standing there feeling like a prize plum. That’ll teach me to interfere . Maybe I’m wrong, or maybe she’s just not ready, but even though I feel embarrassed right now I tell myself it was better to have offered and been rejected than not to have offered at all.
“Come on, children, let go of Rose,” she says, clapping her hands briskly, obviously keen to get rid of us. “You’ll see her again soon!”
As the younger ones disentangle themselves and Rose picks up her bags, my daughter looks at me and winks.
“Bye, Dad!” she shouts, so loud we all recoil.
By the time the door closes behind us, we are both holding back laughter, giving in to it as we walk down the street and make our way to the Tube station.
“That was mean of us,” I say eventually.
“I know. But it was funny, and that’s what counts… I don’t really love being there, Mum. But I hate leaving them as well.”
I nod, and know exactly what she means. I stop dead in my tracks, breaking the unwritten rule of London and earning a few annoyed sighs as people are forced to move around us. I take her in my arms, and squeeze her tight.
“I love you, Rose Marchant-Brown,” I say, kissing her forehead. She’s still shorter than me, but not by much.
“I know,” she replies, pulling free after the allotted ten seconds of tolerance is up. “I am extremely lovable.”
*
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