Chapter one
Lockdown had been over for four years by this point but to be honest, I’d never really returned to what everyone else was calling normal life.
I’d secretly enjoyed lockdown. It was such a relief not to have to have opinions, or ironed clothes, or to spend hours sitting in traffic to get to an office where people had genuinely strong feelings about the taxable benefits of solar panels.
Plus, I didn’t have to explain to anyone about Fraser.
So in my defence, I hadn’t been out very much lately.
I mean, other than walking Tomsk, I hadn’t been out at all.
The woman accepting my donation bags at the charity shop was the first human being I’d spoken to in nearly .
. . a week? My housemate Ashley, and I communicated mainly in grunts and eyerolls, as you do when you’ve shared a bathroom for as long as we had, and my professional communication mainly took place via a keyboard, where I had ample time to phrase things neatly, and avoid any awkwardness before it happened.
Not like real life, where I had a microsecond to think of what to say, and no chance to delete anything. Even if it was stupid, or rude, or – unintentionally, I swear – both at the same time.
A fresh wave of mortification flashed over me as the woman’s face reared up in my mind’s eye. Startled, slightly afraid, even. I picked up my pace as if I could outwalk the embarrassment.
Again, in my defence, I was also in the middle of moving house.
Moving house is stressful, right? It’s basically a personal appraisal, but with bin bags and a running tally of how much money you’ve wasted on abandoned hobbies.
One minute you’re stacking paperbacks that you won’t read again (if you ever got round to reading them in the first place), next minute you’re yanking at what were once your never-fail jeans, which no longer go over your knees, let alone your hips, staring at the stranger in the mirror and thinking, Who even am I now?
Maybe that was just me. As I say, I hadn’t been out a lot lately.
The worst thing was, I fully knew I was going to say something stupid, being so out of practice, so I’d run the conversation through in my head first. I was going to hand over the clothes and books, and say: one, I’d adopted Tomsk from their rescue and two, that I hoped these donations would help other dogs find their forever humans.
I’d even had a follow-up comment ready to go, about how he’d changed my life. Which he had.
The trouble was, the volunteer threw me by pulling out a blue velvet Anthropologie dress which I hadn’t meant to put in the bag, even though it no longer fitted.
It was perfect – elegant, yet stretchy – and had been Fraser’s favourite.
I’d worn it on some of our happiest times together: that New Year’s Eve in London, his sister Jackie’s super-fancy fortieth, an anniversary trip to Paris.
It made my blue eyes bluer and had a wonderful swish.
Even now, after so many years, my heart had lurched seeing it – and remembering. A starburst of regret and longing had exploded behind my eyes. Where had that Beth gone?
‘Ooh,’ she’d said. ‘This is gorgeous. I might have to bag this for myself!’
And I’d blurted out . . .
I sped up, hot sweat prickling my underarms.
Come on, Beth.
I’d said, ‘You’re welcome,’ while thinking, No problem!, and somehow what had come out of my mouth, very loudly, was, ‘You’re the problem!’
‘I’m . . . what?’
I tried to rearrange the words properly this time, but the pain of letting go of that dress, losing another precious connection to a life I desperately needed to get back to, blurred my brain, and I said, ‘You’re a problem! No, I mean, I’m the problem!’
‘Are you . . . are you all right?’
We’d stared at each other in mutual shock, and I’d spun on my heel and rushed out, because I had no idea how to rescue that particular situation, and I was already too close to bursting into tears.
Thanks to my humiliation-power-walking, I was halfway down Longhampton High Street, where I’d planned to reward myself for my charitable donation/trip to the outside world with a lemon tart at the Wild Dog Café.
I could have dropped off my junk somewhere closer to my house – which was, full disclosure, forty miles away, in a different county – but the Wild Dog’s lemon tarts were so good they regularly featured in round-ups of the best patisseries in the country.
And, if I’m honest, I wanted an excuse to go to Longhampton. Longhampton was my happy place.
It wasn’t on any Must Visit list of English landmarks, but Longhampton was the sort of unassuming Midlands market town where yarn bombers covered the postboxes with seasonal displays and everyone turned out for an illuminated tractor parade for charity at Christmas.
Sure, it had its low points – the bleak sixties precinct being one – but as I walked along the high street, my still-pounding anxiety was soothed by the Britain in Bloom flower baskets, plump pink fuchsia buds and tumbling heart-shaped ivy trailing prettily down the black streetlights.
The rest of the world might be battling graffiti and ugly road furniture, but somehow Longhampton maintained the tidy, cheerful atmosphere of a place where residents arranged town-twinning visits with other tidy, cheerful places in France or Luxembourg.
Possibly, I was well aware, down to the iron determination of people like Fraser’s parents, Ray and Martine, both long-standing pillars of the community.
I let my eyes drift along the shop signs, checking what was still there, what was new.
I kept my gaze high, avoiding the windows themselves – I avoided reflections, generally – and ticked off the familiar landmarks.
Boots, Hotel Chocolat, a bookshop, a new bakery, charity shop.
Taylor Maid, a housekeeping agency? Blimey, Longhampton must be getting some city relocators if even the cleaners had shopfronts now.
I paused opposite the ornate frontage of Longhampton Cellars, the sign painted in silver on darkened Victorian glass, with ‘a family business since 1854’ in swirling cursive underneath.
Until about ten years ago, Longhampton Cellars had been Fraser’s family’s business.
It wasn’t anymore – as Fraser had controversially declined to take up the mantle of Longhampton’s premier vintner, in favour of a career in cyber security – but the new owners, a chain whose logo was discreetly set back on the door, had kept the shopfront as it had been for the past hundred or so years, because why wouldn’t you?
The original golden grapes hanging from a bracket over the double doors were a Longhampton landmark.
Also, it had had, for over seventy years, a Royal Warrant for its blackcurrant cordial.
That was pretty much the first thing Ray had ever said to me.
Did I know Princess Margaret was partial to a hot blackcurrant after a big night out?
The family row had simmered down by then, but I was still instructed never to talk about supermarket wine, on pain of death. Or Ribena.
I caught sight of my bulky reflection behind the pyramid of champagne, flinched, and hurried on.
I was having bitter second thoughts about my outfit.
I’d thought it was OK at home (loose, flattering, faintly Scandi) but my reflection was giving more Teletubby than Toast. Toast, of course, being one of the reasons I was currently the size I was.
Were people staring at me? As I walked on towards the Wild Dog, I tried to keep a neutral but friendly expression on my face, despite a new bubbling of anxiety in the pit of my stomach.
My gaze drifted across passers-by; not that I expected to see Fraser – I think he’d moved to London, but I wasn’t sure, since he’d blocked me on his social media the day after our break-up.
Although maybe he’d deleted it altogether; his job wasn’t exactly compatible with a lively social media presence – but there was always that chance that I might bump into Martine.
Martine Henderson was the sort of woman usually described as ‘a dame’ in films d’un certain age.
She had that straight-backed, clear-eyed confidence only doled out to a special few, and whenever Fraser and I attended one of her many fundraisers, she inevitably upsold me in introductions, which only compelled me to explain that, no, actually, I wasn’t ‘a rising tax specialist’, I was just a mid-range standard-issue small-business accountant.
Fraser, her golden boy, was always introduced as doing ‘something so terribly important and so top-secret he won’t even tell me!
’ – which he undercut by insisting that he mainly wrote code for credit-card fraud checks.
Which wasn’t true either, because he did have an important security job in a bank, but I think he liked to show some solidarity with me.
I wasn’t used to people upselling me. I wasn’t used to much encouragement, parental or otherwise, but Martine had a way of zhuzhing people up, plumping them like sagging sofa cushions.
It induced equal measures of gratitude and anxiety.
Seeing the blue dress again had stirred up memories that now floated mercilessly before my mind’s eye; I’d worn it to the James Bond fundraiser at Longhampton’s hospice, where we’d won a year’s supply of ham in the raffle, and Martine talked us into donating it to the food bank.
I tried to distract myself – look! there was the town hall, covered in pastel bunting and posters for an Easter Egg Hunt – but the memory of Fraser, secret agent, refused to shift.
He had the perfect shoulders for a dinner jacket, broad and lean.
That had been one of the nights I was so sure he was going to propose that I’d had a manicure specially.
‘Beth, it’s not that I don’t love you . . .’