Stella
It’s the last week of mat leave, before I head back to work.
My boss, Charlotte, has, without exception, been exemplary.
After I told her what happened with Gav she sent an email, all lower case, no punctuation: what a shit leave it with me.
And a few weeks later I got a bemused email from the HR department who said they were extending the paid portion of my mat leave to the full fifty-two weeks.
I’ve never entirely understood how they managed to do it, or why, given that she openly dislikes children and calls marriage ‘modern slavery’, and it’s not like I was some golden-girl wunderkind of the office.
For whatever reason, she did, and I was inordinately grateful to her.
But even I have to accept that right now, it’s time.
Rose is bored at the baby classes I drag her to, and if I’m totally honest, the idea of buying an overpriced lunch from Pret and then eating in total silence at my desk is starting to feel incredibly appealing.
I’ve found a childminder down the road, a blissfully kind but surprisingly firm Spanish woman named Anna.
It’s in a big, bright, Victorian house on a quiet street, with a shady garden and five other happy-looking children of various ages.
Anna gave me a long list of rules to follow and things to bring, all of which terrified me, and then explained about the settling-in period, which is where I leave Rose with her for increasingly long windows so that she gets used to it.
Obviously leaving Rose, who has been attached to me (sometimes literally, by my nipple, though I basically stopped breastfeeding way back in spring) for almost a year, felt like having a limb amputated.
But to my relief, she didn’t seem especially bothered by any of it.
She waddled towards Anna on day two with a gummy smile and then wrenched a toy out another child’s hand.
After I drop her off each morning, I come home and stand in the house and try to decide what to do.
I work through my wardrobe, cobbling together work-appropriate outfits from the things that still just about fit me.
I throw away piles of clothes from my pre-pregnancy life that are never going to fit or have a purpose in my wardrobe again.
I sand and paint the woodwork in the spare room, strip the hideous wallpaper from the upstairs hall.
On Thursday, Richard comes over – a new compromise on our step towards him being in my life in a more formal capacity.
I make us a bolognese and he tells me about his trip – he’s just got back from Dubai, bringing a beautiful and very expensive-looking doll for Rose, and a beautiful and even more expensive-looking pair of earrings for me.
I light candles, lay the table properly, revel in having someone come to the house to justify making things nice, instead of shoving some food in a bowl and eating it while I mindlessly scroll the internet.
We sit at the table, him tanned from his trip, me tired from my day, and it feels nice.
‘How was the party?’ he asks as I dust Parmesan over our food.
‘It was good,’ I say, which was true. All our old friends, the ones who’d known me and Gav through baby classes, turned out in force.
Though, I suppose they’re more my friends now than ‘ours’.
I doubt they’re talking to Gav, now he’s not in the WhatsApp groups where we trade questions about our kids’ poo and rashes.
Many of them fled London the second their babies breathed in a whiff of pollution.
A handful of my school friends came with their babies.
Gavin had the good grace to have a ‘gig’ that afternoon (again, I’m really not sure who’s going to see comedy on a Saturday afternoon), and obviously Louella was brilliant, if a bit hungover. ‘We had a lovely time.’
‘Who was there?’
I run him through the guest list. ‘Though, my friend Dom brought his new girlfriend and Louella said she was a complete dick.’
Richard looks amused. ‘How so?’
I recount how unfriendly Florrie was, and her vintage showdown with Louella who is the patron saint of not gatekeeping.
‘Maybe she’s threatened.’ Richard smiles.
‘By Lou?’
‘By you. How do you know her boyfriend?’
‘We matched on an app ages ago,’ I say. ‘When I was dating.’
Richard’s demeanour changes. ‘He’s an ex?’
‘Not an ex, no,’ I explain, twisting a strand of spaghetti around my fork. ‘We went on one date, then he came over here for dinner and it was a total disaster.’
‘I thought you didn’t let men meet your daughter.’
It feels weird that he still calls Rose ‘your daughter’ but maybe this isn’t the moment to raise it. He also seems oddly bothered about something that I’ve so easily explained to him. ‘Yeah, anyone I’m romantically involved with, sure. But I’m not romantically involved with him.’
‘But you were.’ Richard has put his fork down and is looking at me searchingly. ‘Right?’
‘For a bit,’ I say. ‘But like I explained, we worked out pretty quickly that we’re better off as friends, and now we’re just friends.’
Richard says nothing. He goes back to eating.
I’m completely unsure how to approach this.
Gavin never had the slightest whiff of jealousy about him.
I’m assuming this is jealousy, anyway. So I don’t know exactly how I’m supposed to handle it.
Presumably it would be best to reassure him.
I know there’s nothing to worry about, obviously, but he maybe doesn’t?
Louella has gone to Korea for work and she’s hooking up with a guy from the office out there, so I’ve resolved to give her a break from my stupid questions about dating.
I could message my uni friends but – and I know this is pathetic – they enjoyed the divorce so much, I just know how this would go down and I can’t deal with days of questions about whether we managed to resolve this terrible situation.
So I should just follow my instincts. I have good instincts.
I mean, not with men, historically, but more broadly.
At work, people think I do, and with the interiors for the house.
‘I could not have Dom around Rose again,’ I say tentatively. ‘If you think it feels like a double standard.’
Richard nods. ‘I think that sounds sensible.’
‘Cool,’ I say. ‘Let’s do that.’
I go back to eating, assuming that this will shift the weird, moody cloud that’s settled over the room, but it doesn’t.
‘I think,’ Richard says after a few minutes of silence, just the music and our forks on our plates, ‘if you don’t mind, I would feel more comfortable if you stopped seeing him entirely.’
On a flight back from Italy a few years ago a woman accidentally knocked an icy gin and tonic into my lap while having a row with her husband, and it’s a similar sensation to this, a sort of cold shock. ‘Stop seeing Dom?’
‘I mean he’s a new friend, right? It’s not like you go back a long way, or anything?’
He’s right, technically. And I don’t know how to explain that because Dom found me when I was this squishy broken shell-less snail of a person, and he was the only one I could properly talk to in that weird moment, it feels like we bypassed all the temporal limitations of becoming friends and skipped to having known each other for years. ‘He’s important to me,’ I venture.
‘I understand that,’ he says, not looking at me. ‘But. . .’ He trails off.
‘But what?’
He gets up, going into the kitchen. He takes the water jug as if he’s going to refill it but I’m not sure who this pretence is for. When he comes back, he takes a deep breath then sits down again. ‘I was in a long-term relationship. Before we met.’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘You said.’
‘She cheated on me,’ he continues, halting, like he’s hardly able to get the words out. ‘With an ex-boyfriend. Someone I always had a bad feeling about.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ I say, suddenly understanding. ‘That’s awful.’
‘Now I know,’ he adds, ‘this isn’t entirely rational and I am working through it.
But my therapist has told me that if I have a boundary, I need to ask for that boundary to be respected.
So for now, while I’m still very hurt from what I went through, I have to ask if you’ll consider not being in an active friendship with any exes. ’
He’s not an ex. I want to reiterate that he’s not an ex. But I get it. I wouldn’t date someone with a blazing but unspent need to try stand-up comedy, in case they did what Gav did to me. And maybe this is just exactly the same thing?
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘I’ll stick a pin in the friendship with Dom, and we’ll check in and see where things are going a bit further down the line. Cool?’
I don’t like saying it. The words feel wrong as they leave my mouth.
I know what Louella would tell me. I know what I’d tell Rose if someone asked this of her.
But Richard is sweet and respectful and successful, and he wants me despite all the complexity of my life.
He’s made huge compromises in how we date, coming to my house rather than going out, my only ever going to his place on a Thursday night, him never being allowed to go upstairs at my house.
Those things are huge. So really, is it such an enormous deal if I make one sacrifice in return, for him?