Chapter 4
SHEENA
‘Well, I think it’s bloody ridiculous,’ Jeremy Sinclair blustered, going a tad red in the face. As always, Sheena maintained a veneer of cool professionalism while, to her shame, internally enjoying his outrage.
‘Jeremy, I don’t think that’s helpful. If Cassandra feels that taking a holiday on her own will give her the space and clarity she needs to refocus on your marriage, then I think you should be supportive of that.’
Sheena sent up a silent prayer of hope that Cassandra’s plan to go on a spiritual retreat was actually a cover story because she was jaunting off to Morocco with a horny tennis pro with washboard abs.
Either way, Sheena was just glad that Cassandra was making her own decisions and stepping out of Jeremy’s orbit, even for a short time.
‘But what about the children? Who’s going to look after them?’
Cassandra already had an answer for that.
‘Jeremy, they’re in school during the day and you’ll be there at night.
I’m quite sure you can arrange your schedule so that you don’t have any work trips for the five whole days that I’ll be gone.
Can I remind you that you regularly jolly off on business for two or three weeks at a time, not to mention three golf trips in the last year alone.
That’s if they were actually golf trips. ’
The ghost of Debbie the Only Fans model had just re-entered the room and Sheena gave it, and Cassandra, a silent round of applause.
Meanwhile, Jeremy’s face reminded her of a tomato in a microwave, one that was getting redder and swelling and could blow, splattering the sides and causing a mess that would require cleaning spray and a pair of Marigolds. It was almost mesmerising to watch.
‘Aaargh, fuck this,’ he said, and with that, he got up and stormed out, leaving Cassandra looking… strangely… decidedly unbothered.
For a moment, the calm reaction actually concerned Sheena more than if the poor woman had burst into tears. Perhaps she’d just been suppressing her reactions to her husband’s behaviour for so long that she was now living her whole life in a state of numb acceptance.
‘Cassandra, can you tell me how you feel about what just happened?’ Sheena asked.
‘I’m leaving him.’
Sheena had to mentally rewind to check that she’d heard that right and, even then, she sought confirmation. ‘You’re leaving him?’
‘Yes. I’ve met someone else. His name’s Fabio. He’s my tennis coach…’
At which point, Sheena, who had been taking a sip of water at that moment, began choking and came close to requiring resuscitation as she realised that her earlier musings had predicted the boyfriend and the occupation. Maybe she wasn’t so crap at this relationship therapy stuff after all.
‘Are you horrified?’ Cassandra asked, when it became clear that Sheena had recovered the ability to breathe and wouldn’t require medical attention.
‘You know what, Cassandra. I’m bloody not. Does Fabio feel the same way about you?’
‘He does. He’s in love with me.’
Sheena could see the attraction. Cassandra came off as meek and perhaps a little dull when she was in Jeremy’s shadow, but she was actually a striking woman, who was smart, organised, cultured and had successfully juggled the demands of a family and supporting that twat of a husband’s business.
She was the catch in the relationship, and Sheena was thrilled that she’d finally realised it.
‘This is entirely unprofessional of me to say, and if you’re writing a review of my service on Trustpilot, please don’t quote me, but good on you. He’s a dickhead that doesn’t deserve you. You’ve put up with that nonsense for all these years, and you deserve a medal. And a Fabio.’
Casandra broke into the first wide, genuine smile that Sheena had seen on her since she’d started coming here six months ago.
‘Thank you. I’d better go. I need to pack and then I’ll tell him I’m leaving him as soon as I get home.
You know, it’s not actually a retreat in Morocco.
Fabio and I are going to Paris and I’m going to love every second of it. ’
‘I truly hope you do, Cassandra. And you know where I am if you need me. I also provide mediation for separations and divorces. I’m like a one-stop shop of optimism and dysfunction.’
That made Cassandra chuckle, as she picked up her little Dior, and went off to change her whole life.
Sheena had a shit-ton of paperwork to do, but suddenly she couldn’t face it.
The Sinclairs were her last clients of the day, so instead of settling down with the earth-shaking excitement of client reports and a VAT return, she got up, grabbed her bag and her jacket and locked the office door on the way out.
She’d brought the car into work today, so she took the lift down to the underground car park and climbed into the Volvo – the safe, steady car that Gregor had insisted they buy after reading four thousand reviews and watching endless hours of comparison videos on YouTube.
Sheena would have been happy to buy a sports car and spend the rest of that research time in an Airbnb by the beach somewhere, drinking in cosy bars and making love until dawn.
Just thinking that brought Cassandra back into her head.
Sheena couldn’t know for sure, but she would bet her redundant sexy bras that Fabio couldn’t quote the torque, horsepower and miles per gallon of a Volvo Estate.
As soon as she’d cleared the signal void of the underground car park, she hit the call button on her most-used WhatsApp group chat, creatively titled Forty-Two Long.
The name of the group had been changed a couple of years ago, when they were all forty-two, because Sheena was having a saggy boob/strapless bra crisis and mused mournfully that Forty-Two Long was now her bra size.
Chanel joined the call on the second ring, but Martha took much longer. ‘Don’t tell me,’ Sheena sighed, when she finally logged on. ‘You were arse deep in the ironing basket and had to search the whole house for your phone.’
Martha was probably bending the truth when she said, ‘It’s spooky how you know these things,’ but it made her smile, so Sheena took the win and ploughed right in with her opening statement.
‘Cassandra is leaving her husband.’
‘I’m going to need a tad more context,’ Chanel said, while Martha went for, ‘Is Cassandra one of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills?’
Sheena stopped at a set of traffic lights to let a group of early-evening revellers cross in front of her, all of them singing and one of them wearing that ubiquitous Glasgow emblem of a traffic cone on his head.
Sheena guessed their night probably wasn’t going to end well, given that it wasn’t even 7 p.m. yet, but she admired their enthusiasm.
‘No, Cassandra is my client. The one that’s married to the smug wealthy twat that was shagging the Only Fans model. And yes, I’m breaking all sorts of confidentiality rules again, so I hope no one is hacking these calls.’
‘The mousy one?’ Chanel had obviously been paying attention during previous conversations.
‘Yes! Only she’s not that mousy, because she’s going off to Paris with a tennis coach called Fabio.’
‘Good for her,’ Martha piped in, over the sound of a food mixer in the background. Or maybe it was the washing machine. It was hard to tell.
Sheena was crawling along the 20 mph zone on St Vincent Street now, heading for the West End.
‘That’s what I said, but I’m such a hypocrite.
I gave her a whole spiel about how I admired her courage, and yet she’s doing the very thing I haven’t been brave enough to do, because the one time I came close to having the conversation, I bottled it. ’
‘In your defence, the timing hasn’t been great,’ Chanel pointed out, and Sheena appreciated the support.
Only a couple of weeks ago, she’d been ready to have the ‘I want a different life’ discussion with Gregor, but then, of course, he’d ambushed her with the twenty-fifth wedding anniversary party and she’d completely back-pedalled on the decision.
Actually, not so much a back-pedal, but more of a raincheck.
She’d stuck a pin in the idea and she just hadn’t been courageous enough to take the pin back out yet.
Meanwhile, Gregor was completely oblivious because he was the kind of man who thought that making one grand gesture of romance in twenty-five years had bought him another two and a half decades of wedded bliss.
‘I mean,’ Martha piped in, ‘you should really have a relationship therapist to help you figure out how you went from planning to leave him to having the first sex of the year in the space of just a few hours.’
Sheena’s face burned at the thought of that encounter.
The night of the party was the first time they’d had sex since a Hogmanay quickie a few months before.
It had only happened on both occasions because Gregor had broken his vow of alcohol moderation and got sufficiently wellied to be frisky, but not too wellied to perform, and Sheena had been in the right place at the right time.
‘I know, I panicked. And I thought the party was such a sweet gesture. But the next day he got up and went off to play golf and he’s just gone straight back to…
well, to being Gregor. You know, part of the agreement we had last year when I first raised our issues with him was that I’d like a minimum of five minutes a day of physical affection.
Just five minutes. A wee slow dance in the kitchen.
Or a hug in bed at night. Or, God forbid, another night of bendy sex.
Has it happened? Nope. I’m not even worth five minutes out of his day. And I tried, I really did.’
She was trying to make it sound light-hearted, but the truth was that one stung, because she’d tried everything in the marriage-saving guidebook to get things back on track.
Over the years, she’d gone with the sexy underwear, the role playing – he’d played the part of the bored vicar perfectly – and attempts at spontaneity, which were mostly rejected.
It wasn’t even the lack of sex that bothered her most, though.
It was the complete void of romance, of touch, of dreams and excitement.
They’d been together since they were both fourteen years old, they were each other’s only partners so far in life, and they’d simply outgrown each other.
They’d settled into parallel lives where they loved and respected each other, but the passion had long gone.
He had his golf holidays; she had weekends away with the girls.
He did fifty-mile cycle rides on the weekends and she hung out with Martha and Chanel.
He trained every night in the gym, while she read books, watched her favourite shows, or chatted to Forty-Two Long. Because the reality was…
‘We are just two best friends that live together. I don’t understand why he is perfectly content with that, and I truly believe him when he says that he loves our lives, but the problem is that I don’t.
It’s not enough for me. I want more. Before I die, I want to know what it feels like to be adored and desired and to have fun again with a man.
I don’t just want to be a comfortable habit.
I want to dance. To feel sexy. To have a partner who makes me laugh and wants to explore life with me. Is that too much to ask?’
Neither of them answered, because they both knew that it was a rhetorical question. She’d said all of this countless times before, but they were the kind of best friends that would allow her to rant about it on a repetitive loop.
‘I think I need to speak to him tonight. I really do. Otherwise, I’m going to be hanging out with my Zimmer frame in my nineties, just desperately hoping he’ll cop a feel of my buttocks on the way past.’
If either of them fully expected her to back out again, they were too kind to say. In fact, Chanel went one step further.
‘Well, you know my spare room is yours if it gets tense tonight, doll.’
‘And so is mine,’ Martha agreed. ‘But you’d need to share it with a clotheshorse of damp sports kits, an ironing board, and my husband if he’s in the bad books, so I’d definitely go to Chanel’s if I were you.’
‘Thank you, lovelies. I’ll keep you posted. I need to go and rehearse what I’m about to say in my head. It’s so much easier when I’m just telling other people what to do with their lives.’
She wasn’t actually kidding about that. The rest of the way home, she ran through a dozen different conversation openers.
‘Gregor, we need to talk…’ Too clichéd?
‘Gregor, I’ve been thinking about the next chapter of our lives together. Well, not actually together.’ Too blunt. Gave the game away too soon.
‘Gregor, do you feel fulfilled in life?’ Yes, maybe that. Bring his needs into it too.
Or perhaps not, because the problem, as far as she saw it was that he was perfectly content.
He seemed to think this amiable, emotionally flat-lined existence was both normal and perfectly adequate.
And maybe it was for some people. Maybe this restlessness and irritation she was feeling all the time were just perimenopausal side effects and if she blew up her marriage, she’d get through to the other side of her midlife crisis and desperately regret it.
He wasn’t a bad guy. He was actually a really good man and he would be a great catch for someone.
She couldn’t explain why she’d fallen out of love with him, but it had been years now and she was absolutely certain that those feelings weren’t coming back.
The truth was, they’d gone through things early in their relationship that had bonded them, things she chose not to think about right now, that had made them stick together, out of some kind of misplaced loyalty.
She often wondered if they’d have stayed together if those mistakes hadn’t happened, or if they’d just have been a fondly remembered teenage, first love romance that ran its course.
She didn’t have the answers, but she did know that almost thirty years later, she had to believe that she’d paid the price for the awful decisions of their youth.
It was time to let it all go and that clean slate left her with two choices.
Stay with a man she had already spent her entire adult life with, because it was easy.
Or leave and search for a life that fulfilled her, one that still held excitement and joy and the prospect of a new and thrilling chapter.
She rolled down the window, hoping the breeze would cool the furnace that had suddenly switched on inside her, but it was too warm and balmy outside, so she closed the window again and switched on the aircon.
By the time she reached home, a gorgeous two-storey duplex in an old mansion conversion just off Hyndland Road, she was ready. She could do this.
As she walked up the hundred-year-old stone stairs to her front door, she decided to stick with the unimaginative cliché that had pre-empted break-ups since prehistoric women sat their cavemen down for a chat.
‘Darling, we need to talk…’