Chapter 3
‘I don’t really see the problem,’ Dawn said, digging a fork into her macaroni cheese with extra pulled pork. ‘And I should hope that you’d at least listen to Rory and find out why he’s suddenly so keen to leave Borehamwood. Or maybe I’m being naive.’
We were sitting in the little cafe we’d frequented for years, eating pasta and drinking wine, and mulling over my sudden and unexpected fear that I was about to be uprooted from my nice, cosy little life and transported to who knows where.
‘But Rory likes Borehamwood as much as I do,’ I mused. ‘It’s got everything we need. And I love our little house. I wonder if it’s travelling into central London that’s getting to him? Although it’s only once a week so I don’t see why.’
‘I do,’ Dawn said with a shudder. ‘I don’t know how you stand it to be honest. Trekking off to Oxford Street every day, facing a train journey then the bus. All the hustle and bustle. The noise. The traffic. The fumes. Then doing it all over again on the way back home, day in, day out. Ugh!’
She glanced out of the window at the stream of cars and vans going by and shook her head. ‘Horrible.’
‘But you love London!’ I protested. ‘It was you who wanted us to meet up here today!’
‘I love visiting London,’ she corrected me. ‘It’s great to come here three or four times a year, get my fix, then go home to my lovely house and breathe the fresh air again. I couldn’t stand living here.’
‘You didn’t always think like that,’ I muttered.
Back in the day, Dawn and I had shared a flat in Barking with another girl, which frankly had been a bit of a dump.
It hadn’t really mattered, though, as we were hardly ever in.
Life back then had been about socialising and building our careers.
Fresh out of university and eager to make our mark on the world, London life had seemed so exciting with endless possibilities.
Even after we’d gone our separate ways Dawn and I stayed in London – she in Southwark and I in Camden. But when Dawn got pregnant, she and her husband had a change of heart.
‘I’m thirty-three now,’ she’d pointed out. ‘London’s great when you’re in your twenties, but I don’t want to raise a family in a city. We’re moving back to Surrey to be closer to my family. Don’t worry – I’ll still be able to visit regularly. Our coffee shop chats won’t stop.’
But naturally, they’d grown fewer and further apart as Dawn and her husband concentrated on raising their two children and building a new life in the small town in which they’d settled.
By then I’d moved to Borehamwood, to the house I still lived in, and I thought Dawn was crazy to move out to the sticks.
I’d married Rory the year after she left London, and he’d moved in with me straight after the wedding. We’d agreed we didn’t want children, and London life suited us. Rory had a great job working as deputy director of software development for a company within the education and research sector.
If anyone had asked me what that meant I wouldn’t have had a clue how to explain it.
It was way too technical for me. All I knew was he mostly worked from home but had a lot of responsibility and earned a shedload of money.
More than I did anyway, although now I was lead buyer at Rochester’s my income had gone up substantially, too.
I’d come a long way from those flat sharing days in Barking.
‘I think you should at least hear him out instead of closing down the subject every time he brings it up,’ Dawn said, clearly trying to sound neutral although it was obvious to me whose side she was on. ‘What harm could it do to listen to his point of view?’
‘I’ve been here before, remember?’ I pushed away my plate, suddenly not hungry. ‘My first marriage. He went exactly the same way. Suddenly London lost its shine. He wanted to move to the country. I didn’t think much of the idea back then either.’
‘But you were much younger in those days,’ Dawn reminded me gently.
Much younger. There’s a world of difference between someone in their mid-twenties and someone in their mid-forties. Yet here I was, still digging my heels in and refusing to consider the possibilities, just as I had then.
I thought about Rory and realised, with a pang, how tired he looked recently.
There were far more lines around his eyes and a permanent crease in his forehead from the frown he seemed to wear a lot.
And his dark hair was peppered with grey now.
Was I being unfair not even considering the possibility of giving him something he clearly wanted?
He’d been so good to me, so patient. He deserved better, surely?
And was moving away from London and starting again really such a terrible idea? We could sell our house for a good price and move somewhere cheaper. We’d probably get a bigger garden, and it would be nice to have a view of something other than more houses.
But what about my job? It was all right for Rory.
He only had to commute once a week, and if he wanted to move further away from London his company had other hubs scattered around the country – Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Glasgow.
He could, theoretically, move to within commuting distance of any of those cities.
I, on the other hand…
But Rochester’s had other stores. At some point there might be a vacancy in any one of those. Shouldn’t I at least consider it? Maybe put out some feelers?
I should go along with whatever Rory wanted, for his sake.
My stomach lurched and I took a sip of wine, desperate to bury the feelings that this train of thought was stirring up.
Once, many years ago, I’d gone along with what my first husband had wanted.
Or I’d pretended to. He’d had a dream to leave city life behind and find rural bliss with me in some pretty little cottage where we could raise our children and be a proper family.
And I’d said of course that was what I wanted too, and I’d really tried to convince myself that it was.
That I could be happy living that sort of life with the man I loved.
Except, deep down, I’d known I couldn’t be, and I’d spiralled into a panic that had led me to do stupid things that I would regret for the rest of my life.
I had to be sure this time. I couldn’t just go along with Rory’s dreams and make the same mistakes over again. If he really wanted us to start a new life somewhere else then I had to be absolutely sure it was what I wanted, too.
Okay, so my thoughts were spiralling again. I had to rein them in, or I’d go to the same dark place I had before. After all, Rory hadn’t actually said he was planning to start house hunting, had he?
But if he was…
Then maybe Rory wasn’t the right man for me after all. And maybe, just maybe, I’d married him for all the wrong reasons.