Stella #2
They both seem mightily relieved.
When I’m packed, they escort me to reception where the manager is waiting. She’s a no-nonsense eastern European with poker-straight, blonde hair and perfect make-up.
‘I can call the police,’ she tells me, as we sit in a room behind reception. ‘Or I can have him removed from the hotel, or both.’
I say that I can’t bring myself to make any more of a fuss and she seems to understand.
She insists on getting me my own room for the night.
‘In the morning, I’ll have a car waiting for 7 a.m. It will take you to the station before your.
. .’ She pauses for a moment, considering the right word. ‘Before he has checked out.’
Security guide me up to a room, an enormous suite in the main building, our footsteps muffled on the thick carpets as we walk.
I try to make as little imprint on the room as possible given that I’m not paying to be here and I don’t want to make more work for housekeeping.
Without changing or taking my make-up off, I slip between the cold sheets and begin to cry.
I cry for Rose, and the fact that this happened to me and it might happen to her one day and the idea that if security hadn’t arrived at just the right time, Rose might have ended up without me.
I cry for myself, all the versions of me who tried so hard to get everything right, to build a normal, happy, safe life and still ended up in this absolute fucking mess.
I cry until the hotel pillow is soaked and then I roll over to the empty, cold side of the bed, where other people who sleep in this room find the warm body of their partner, and I stare at the fuzzy ceiling, waiting until morning.
I get home before 10 a.m. on Thursday, the traffic mercifully quick on the way home.
I pay the driver, wincing at the cost of a taxi all the way from Oxfordshire, not that a train ticket at peak time would have been much better.
Rose is already at Anna the childminder’s, and Gavin is picking her up directly this evening for his night with her.
I could, in theory, go to work. But I don’t know if they’d let me claim the day back and I don’t really feel very much like I can be in a room with other people right now.
I’m slightly nervous that Richard might turn up on my doorstep and my broken phone means that if he’s tried to get hold of me, I haven’t heard about it.
I double-lock the front door and make sure all the windows and back door are locked, wondering how I’ve managed to get myself into a situation where I’m securing the house I live in alone with my child from a man I was dating.
What the fuck went wrong? How am I so uniquely talented at getting things wrong?
I realise that I didn’t date much, that I’m na?ve, that I’m inexperienced, but this can’t happen to everyone.
Other people must be able to date without getting themself into an endless series of dangerous, humiliating fuck-ups.
Did I just use up all of my luck in the first thirty years of my life when I had a good job and a healthy baby and a husband who came home to me at night?
I unpack. Change the sheets on Rose’s cot and tidy her room.
Change my own sheets. Take a long and very hot shower, scrubbing my skin until it’s red and every last trace of the weekend is gone from it.
I keep remembering him on top of me, the noises he made, the feeling of his skin on mine, the way he called me a ‘good girl’. I want to have him exorcised.
Then I message Louella from my laptop, giving a brief overview that Richard turned out to be a psycho and I’m home for the night if she happens to want to come over and hear all the gory details.
I don’t much want to see her, but I don’t want to be alone either and I know she’ll insist on knowing what happened.
At a loss for something to do, I try to remember how I used to fill my time before I had Rose.
On Saturdays, I’d usually beg Gavin to drive me to some antique market in the middle of nowhere so I could buy furniture that would hardly fit in our flat.
Saturday afternoon would mean stripping and priming on the patio, and on Sunday, I’d watch Pride and Prejudice or some other period drama that I’d seen a hundred times.
I’d show Gavin my work from the day before, triumphantly, while he was reading the newspapers and he’d praise me endlessly, even if he thought the whole thing was a folly, and then act disappointed we couldn’t keep the piece because I’d sold it on Etsy.
It’s been months since I’ve picked up a brush for more than five minutes.
So I take a box of paint samples and start stencilling flowers on the wall in Rose’s room, something I’ve wanted to do since we first moved in.
I paint ivy along the walls and roses branching off them.
Eventually I look up and it’s lunchtime.
There’s paint on my hands and my arm is aching, but it looks lovely.
I’m proud of it. I reach for my phone to take a picture and show someone what I’ve done, but I don’t have a phone. So I just look at it.
After lunch I wash my brushes and marvel at how long the day feels without anyone else to take care of.
I go to the spare room and excavate my sewing machine.
There’s a bag of fabric scraps from various projects that I’ve never finished and a packet of stuffing, so I resolve to make a cushion.
Deeply uncomplicated work – a child could do it.
But it’s finished in less than an hour, so I stitch pom-poms around the edge and it looks nice on my freshly made bed.
I’m halfway through searching the fabric bag to find something else to sew when the doorbell goes.
I freeze. If it’s Richard, I’m really not sure what to do.
Would I call the police? Actually, I literally can’t call the police because I don’t have a working phone, which is only occurring to me in the moment.
If it’s not Richard, I need to stop dicking around enjoying craft time and go to the nearest Vodafone and get one.
But if it is. . . I keep still and hope that the person outside will go away, but they don’t.
They knock again. And then I hear a voice – a voice that, thank god, doesn’t belong to Richard.
‘Stel?’ it calls.
Standing on the doorstep, holding a suitcase, is Dom. He looks exhausted and there’s a coffee stain down the front of his T-shirt. ‘Thank fuck you’re here,’ he says. ‘Can I come in?’
I pull the door open further and he puts his case down in the hall, heading into the kitchen. ‘Am I allowed to be here?’
‘Allowed?’ I ask, perplexed.
‘Richard? He wasn’t wild about you seeing me?’
I half laugh. ‘Richard doesn’t get a vote any more.’
‘You broke up?’ He looks relieved.
‘We did,’ I say, going to make us a coffee with the fancy machine. ‘Well, I didn’t literally say the words “we are over” but I think the bit where you called hotel security on him and I fled the room—’
‘I was worried it was an overstep—’
‘No,’ I interrupt. ‘It wasn’t, he was about to hit me when they came in, I think.’
Dom blanches. ‘You’re not serious.’
‘I mean, I don’t know,’ I say, backtracking. ‘He might not have done, but he had me against a wall and I didn’t feel great about the direction things were going in.’
‘I’ll kill him,’ Dom says. ‘I’ll absolutely fucking kill him.’
I hand him the coffee, as if he needs to add caffeine to this situation.
‘Thanks,’ he says. ‘Jesus, Stel, I am so fucking sorry.’
I shrug. ‘These things happen.’
‘They shouldn’t. Not to anyone. Especially not to you.’
‘Well, at least I figured out who he was pretty early on.’