Chapter 29
JEMMA
A few minutes after ten o’clock, I decide I’ve sorted my head out as much as I can for the time being, and pick up my phone to ring Simon Waterhouse.
Lottie is staying overnight with Suzanne, who kindly offered to do some ‘marriage-saving babysitting – or divorce-hastening babysitting; whichever you want it to be, Jemm’.
Upstairs, Paddy is snoring. I wonder if I should go outside and call Simon from the farthest end of the garden, but in the end I decide not to bother.
It’s cold tonight, and it isn’t as if being that little bit further away when you tell a virtual stranger you no longer love your husband makes anything any better, morally.
Funny thing is, I’ve known Paddy since I was a child, yet he feels more like a stranger to me than Simon does – Simon whom I met on Monday for the first time in my life.
He picks up immediately, and I’m about to say I’m sorry if I woke him when I hear voices and a clattering noise in the background. ‘You sound like you’re somewhere busy,’ I say.
‘Motorway services,’ he says. ‘What’s up? Has something happened?’
‘Kind of. I hope you’re sitting down and not in a hurry.’
‘Tell me,’ he says.
I give him an update: everything I’ve found out since we last spoke. He listens without interrupting. There’s a short silence after I’ve finished. Then he asks, ‘When did Marianne give up drinking?’
I make a frustrated face at my phone. How can that be his first question, after everything I’ve just told him?
‘What’s that got to do with anything? She didn’t give up, as far as I know.
She just didn’t drink. Never did. Not that I can remember, anyway.
I mean, she’d have the odd sip of champagne at a special occasion – she did at Lottie’s christening, I remember. ’
‘Tell me about Christmas in the Cotswolds,’ says Simon.
‘What?’ I’m tempted to ask if he’s the one who’s been hitting the bottle. He seems to be trying to have a different conversation from the one I started.
‘There was a Christmas before 2006 that you spent with Oliver Mayo in a rented house in the Cotswolds. True?’
‘That’s right, 2005. Probably the only great Christmas I’ve ever had since Mum died.
’ Something twists inside me. That whole period – the week away, the weeks before, the months after when Ollie was the main focus of my days – was one of the happiest of my life, except I didn’t realise it at the time.
If you’d asked me then, I’d probably have said I expected to maintain that same level of happiness for the rest of my life.
‘Who went?’ Simon asks.
‘To the Cotswolds? Me, Ollie, Dad and Marianne.’
‘Just the four of you?’
‘Yes. Simon, what have Marianne’s drinking habits and a trip to the Cotswolds from nearly twenty years ago got to do with anything?’
‘Unbelievable,’ he says, as if he’s just received shocking news. ‘Okay.’
‘You’re not making sense,’ I tell him. ‘Why’s it unbelievable? Who else would you expect to have spent Christmas with us, the Archbishop of Canterbury? Plenty of photos got taken, if you need proof it was just us four.’
‘No, I didn’t mean I don’t believe you—’
‘Dad got Marianne a posh camera as a Christmas present and, boy, did she use it. Dad joked all week that she was secretly planning to sell an exposé of our holiday to Hello magazine.’
‘And you had a great time even though Marianne was there?’ Simon asks.
‘Yes. Ollie was my main focus, not her. Actually …’ Is it strange that this hasn’t occurred to me before?
‘I hated her significantly less that week. Probably because she and Ollie kind of … bonded. Or seemed to get on really well, anyway. It was kind of like … I saw her liking him. So I liked her more – or at least, I could cope with her company more easily.’
Even though she was running a regime in which it was pretty much illegal to mention your mother, or your grief at losing her.
True – but that week in the Cotswolds was the height of the ‘Nothing Matters But Ollie’ season of my life.
‘So Marianne wasn’t trying to persuade you to dump Mayo and throw in your lot with Paddy Stelling at that point?’
‘Paddy hadn’t yet declared himself willing.
He was still believing he was too young for a committed relationship, so there was no Ollie/Paddy choice to make until late May 2006.
Christmas 2005 we were still in the Golden Age of Marianne letting me choose who I wanted to be with.
God knows what changed between then and her weeping hysterically a few years later, as if the world would end if Paddy and I got divorced, but something definitely did. ’
‘Were you surprised when that happened? The hysterics?’ Simon asked.
‘That’s an understatement. I literally wouldn’t have believed it if it hadn’t been happening in front of my eyes.’
‘Why not?’
‘Disapproval because I’d had a one-night stand?
Sure,’ I say. ‘A smug lecture – that’s what I’d have expected, and maybe a “Look, you really need to tell Paddy the truth.” Instead, what I saw was …
proper anguish and heartbreak. That’s what it looked like, anyway.
Made no sense to me – still doesn’t. Why would Marianne care so much?
It was my marriage, not hers. But she cared all right – enough to fund nearly a year of date nights for me and Paddy in a posh London hotel, while she babysat Lottie. ’
‘Right. Right.’ Simon sounds as if everything I’m saying is confirmation of what he’s worked out. I’m about to demand to know what that is when he says, ‘Back to alcohol. Do you drink?’
I make a rude face at my phone. ‘I wish you’d tell me what booze has got to do with any of this.
Yes, I like getting tipsy now and again, and I like a glass of wine or two with dinner.
I definitely put away more units than my GP would recommend.
In fact … I lied to her recently when she asked me what my weekly alcohol intake was. ’
‘Ha!’
‘What the hell are you sounding so excited about?’ I ask irritably.
‘When was the first time you did that, do you remember? Or … Sorry, scratch that. This recent time, when your doctor was asking you about your drinking – did she ask you any other questions as well? How did alcohol come up?’
‘It was just a routine questionnaire, and no, she didn’t. Simon, what’s going on?’
‘Never mind. I can’t talk now – have to get home, unless I want to spend the night on the M4. Just one more thing: do you like cocktails—’
‘What?’
‘—and if so, do you have a favourite one?’