Chapter 5
This is one of those times when I feel Ed’s absence most acutely.
Had he still been alive, I know what he’d have done now: wrap his warm arms around me, kiss me gently on the lips and sleepily tell me that our daughter will be absolutely fine, before going back to sleep.
And although a part of me would be irritated by his fathomless conviction that things would work out okay, it transpires that I needed that steadying presence like I need oxygen.
Right now, I’d give anything to not be going through this without him.
Ed and I met the way most twenty-somethings did back then: at work. I’d gone to London to study art history at university and, after finishing my degree, never left the capital – except to go Interrailing with a couple of friends the summer I graduated.
Afterwards, I started a dream job in a gallery in Soho that I hated immediately, thanks to colleagues I never really gelled with and an openly lecherous boss. I stuck it out for a few months, then spotted an advert for a graduate trainee scheme for Marks & Spencer.
I’d worked in retail part-time while studying – selling stationery in a branch of Paperchase and measuring children’s feet in a shoe store – but had never really thought of it as a potential career until then.
But I liked interacting with customers, solving problems and learning about how things worked behind the scenes.
And, though it wasn’t an obvious choice for someone with an art history degree, the prospects were good and it felt like something I could really enjoy.
I was taken on in that year’s cohort and immediately dispatched to the flagship Oxford Street store to learn everything from buying and design to merchandising and supply. I spent my first day in lingerie. Ed was in menswear.
Our paths barely crossed at first, though I’d occasionally see him in the staff room, where at lunchtimes I found a quiet corner to snatch half an hour with a book.
I often found my eyes drawn to him from afar, to his broad shoulders and gentle eyes.
He walked over one day and asked if the seat opposite was taken.
I said it wasn’t, expecting him to drag it to another part of the room.
But he placed his copy of Successful Habits of Visionary Companies on the table and sat down.
I closed Memoirs of a Geisha and we started to chat.
‘How’s the book?’ he asked.
‘I can’t put it down. Yours?’
‘Would it be weird if I said the same?’ he grinned.
I looked at the title again. ‘Very. Though admittedly I’m not a big non-fiction fan.’
My first impression was that he was way too confident, while at the same time impossible not to like.
He was handsome, popular and had this amazing, expansive laugh that made you feel like the funniest person alive.
I admired every new, little thing I learned about him.
How he remembered everyone’s name, from the operations manager to the cleaners.
How much he loved his family – three brothers and a sister, all born and raised in Streatham.
We sat together all the following week and, the one after that, he asked me out.
Our first date was in a pub along the Thames, even though he never drank, and we kissed in the shimmering light of the London Eye afterwards. I went home bursting with happiness, feeling like my feet were barely touching the ground.
Before Ed, my romantic history was what you might politely call chequered (and, less politely, an absolute shitstorm). Boys had been the source of non-stop heartache, trouble and paranoia from the moment I’d had my first crush.
But Ed was the antidote to every terrible man I’d ever encountered.
There was no second-guessing about whether he’d call.
No worrying about whether he was going to disappear.
This was a completely new and unexpected feeling in which I finally realised love should not be difficult.
With him, it was ridiculously easy. He was never going to make promises and then disappear.
I was in no doubt whatsoever about what he felt for me.
In our first year as a couple, I don’t think we argued once.
While I moved on to various roles in the years that followed, Ed remained at M&S throughout his entire career and was a regional director by the time he died.
He loved the place so much that there was only one time he ever considered leaving, when we talked about setting up our own company together.
He got the idea for it while we were on a weekend break in Morocco and I was souvenir shopping in one of the souks.
Not for myself – or at least not only for myself – but for everyone back home.
I have always prided myself on being an excellent buyer of gifts.
It’s a knack and I genuinely love it. Even as a teenager, I was the one people phoned when they didn’t have a clue what to buy someone for Christmas.
That night in our hotel room, as I happily unpacked teapots, embroidered cushions, slippers and trinkets, Ed said, ‘You really should do this for a living.’
It was a throwaway comment, but over the next few months the idea took hold.
I spent hours every evening writing down ideas in notebooks and scouring other independent shops for inspiration.
He looked into securing investors and investigated leasing a unit in Brixton, as well as buying the domain for ‘Jules Loves’.
He came up with the name. I found it a bit cringey and self-indulgent myself, but he was insistent.
Our gift store would be a cornucopia of the elegant and the quirky, the strange and the beautiful, packed with things that quite simply set my heart alight.
Our plans were thrown into disarray when I fell pregnant with Frankie.
Her arrival turned our world upside down in the best possible way and changed Ed in ways I’d never envisaged possible.
He’d been a workaholic before then. Now, for all the hours that he spent at his desk, there were more spent teaching his daughter to swim or taking her to karate lessons.
We married when Frankie was four years old and stole the show during our first dance to ‘God Only Knows’ by the Beach Boys, when she performed ‘Gangnam Style’ instead.
In our twenty years together, we had the odd sticky moment, but overwhelmingly, Ed and I just worked.
As friends, as parents, as two people who were completely in love.
Till death do us part.