Chapter 3
Polly hated lying. Lies hurt people, lies made holes in trust that could never quite be sealed up again; this she knew only
too well. But she allowed herself to lie once a week, and though it was quite an innocent lie, she still felt a bit bad about
it. Every Monday she left work early and drove straight to the church hall in Millspring, a village near her home in Penistone,
for a creative writing class, and she hadn’t missed a single one since she joined.
She had pretended she had to work late on Mondays for over ten months now, not that it inconvenienced Chris, because he was
never in before her on that night anyway. He kept open longer hours on Mondays and Tuesdays for emergency jobs and those willing
to stump up extra to queue-jump. Those two days were proper money-spinners for him.
Chris had his own body shop garage. He was good at what he did and in much demand, and his charges reflected that because
people paid him a small fortune to suck out the dents and touch up the imperfections in their prestige cars. That’s where
he’d met her : Mrs. Jones, the “seven-year itch,” he called it, as if it was somehow out of his control, possibly even medical.
On the first day of April ( ha! ) last year, Polly found out about the affair and she’d left him, moved into the first Airbnb she could find that was available.
And in the four weeks when they were apart, she started writing down her feelings and found it helped.
Sometimes she wrote prose, sometimes her words bent to poetry; both formats took her out of the zone.
She hadn’t written creatively since she’d been at school and had no idea why she turned to a pen instead of a bottle of wine, but she rediscovered the pleasure of spilling her innermost thoughts out onto paper.
Poetry helped put her emotions into a manageable framework; story writing allowed her to climb into the skin of characters, walk in their footsteps, and find some sadly lacking control.
Being in charge of a fictitious world helped her deal with a real world in which she had been flattened.
Then she joined the Millspring Quillers, which had turned out to be her salvation.
Sometimes they wrote haiku or limericks for light relief.
One week they’d had an assignment to make a shopping list sexy; they’d even done a letter to an imaginary lover, an exercise in subverting any intrinsic decent values they might have to release a deceptive, self-serving side of themselves, which was pretty ironic given how she’d come to be part of the group.
Now they were working through the planning of a novel—the characters, the setting, the dialogue, the plot, the story arc—as an exercise.
She didn’t tell Chris about her classes because once, not long after they’d gotten back together, she’d walked in on him and
his daughter Shauna reading her “Ode to Old Tom” in her notepad and laughing uncontrollably. Admittedly Simon Armitage wouldn’t
have felt threatened, but it was a highly personal piece about a cat she’d once been fond of, and she’d poured her heart into
it. Their scorn burned her, humiliated her, and when Shauna had gone home, Polly had taken him to task about it. But Chris
was politician-skilled at spinning things on their heads, and managed to make her into the bad guy because she couldn’t take
a joke. So she went underground after that, hiding her creative work out of sight. And she was glad that she’d heeded her
intuition not to tell him about the classes, because he’d have put her off or scoffed for he never could see how people got
so much enjoyment out of the written word.
Polly found the book project really exciting.
In her story she had even reimagined some of her life to bring her comfort.
Her uncle Ed and auntie Rina featured as Sabrina’s parents, and though gone now, they had enjoyed a long, happy life.
Her daughter Linnet was working her way around Australia, having safe and exciting adventures, doing all the things Polly would have wished for her.
Polly liked to imagine that as a young adult she was pretty and petite with sun-kissed skin, dark hair, and a voice like a song.
Even Tom the cat from next door was in it, and the house Sabrina was escaping to was the cottage her uncle and auntie had rented in real life until they could find one they liked as much to buy.
It was bittersweet to write about her lost loved ones, but she found more solace than pain in the exercises.
In her story Sabrina had been pushed too far at work and pushed too far in her marriage. Sabrina was based on herself, but
she was much more confident and kickass. Jasper had his womanizing roots in Chris, but he was far nastier, more volatile and
toxic. Sabrina was excited about the prospect of being single again. So was Polly, but Sabrina didn’t wake up sometimes in
a cold sweat worrying about the logistics of breaking free. But both writer and character were united in the knowledge that
cutting loose was their only option.
Polly hadn’t a clue how Chris was going to take it when she said that she was leaving him, because she knew he thought that
everything in the garden was lovely, and it probably was from his side of things. He was looking at flower-filled borders
and a verdant green lawn, and all she could see was a barren wasteland; all the seeds and bulbs she’d planted hoping they
would grow lay rotten under the surface of the soil.
In hindsight the damage had been done long before his affair, but the affair shone the harsh light on the truth of her relationship, and she saw it now fully exposed.
That it was the worst kind of loneliness, to feel alone when you were with someone, and how tiny scraps of shrapnel could do as much harm as big thunderous bullets, even though you barely felt them at the time.
Little things that on their own didn’t amount to much, but once lumped together made a huge ugly insurmountable mound: never saying thank you to her, taking her for granted, not allowing her to get someone in to put new tiles up or a new carpet down, rolling his eyes at her with exasperation if she told him to shove his dirty clothes in the wash basket instead of dropping them at the side of it, leaving his work bag in a place where she’d always have to shift it.
His lack of consideration, his obliviousness to her needs had chipped away at her love but also her self-esteem.
She’d been so battered and bewildered, so reduced after the affair with Mrs. Jones, that she didn’t know if she’d taken him back more to salve her ego or because she really loved him, though it felt like the latter then.
She’d wanted to believe his promises that he’d do what it took to get them back on track.
In the first few weeks he tried. He’d even rustled up a couple of meals—pasta in jarred sauce—and had letterbox flowers sent to the house for her that came with free chocolates.
She really felt as if a new dawn had come, but in truth it was just a false spring, like the ones in January when the ground warms up and the snowdrops pop out, only for a winter frost to descend and kill them.
It all started to slip back to how it was before when she was the only one making the effort in the relationship.
And like a worm, in a part of her brain that she couldn’t reach to excise it, sat the affair, always there, always hurting.
She told herself that if she still felt the same by the first of May, a year to the day since she moved back in, if his vow
to make it all right hadn’t come to fruition, then she’d ring the final bell, stupidly hoping that in the meantime, Chris
would realize what was slipping away from him. He’d refused to talk things through, he wouldn’t listen or change, so she’d
kept her promise to herself and set her plan in motion. Then Camay had thrown a spanner in the works with this impulsively
arranged wedding. Polly put everything on hold, but it was a mere delay, not a cancellation. She had to leave. She felt herself
becoming more and more transparent with every passing day, and if she didn’t leave soon, there would be nothing left of her
to go.
She had no doubt she would have to absorb the blame for the end of their relationship.
Chris would mop up all available sympathy and portray himself as a saint worthy of his own stained glass church window.
People who knew him would be flabbergasted that she could leave such a hardworking, good-looking, well-minted family man as Chris Barrett.
Was she bonkers? Chris was popular, well-liked, but he saved his best for others, not her.
No doubt Camay would have a lot to say about it and Ward would nod along in consensus. Chris’s daughter Shauna would be the
most vocal. She’d never liked her stepmother, despite every effort Polly had made to build a relationship with her. Will was
a different kettle of fish, a kid with a lovely aura, and Polly liked being around him. She’d helped him with his A-levels
when he was struggling and he’d sent her a beautiful thank-you notelet when he passed them all with flying colors. She’d kept
it; it was now with the brooches in her handbag.
He and his father didn’t have a lot of middle ground, and Chris had been a fool not to try to make some, she’d told him, though
he hadn’t listened to that either.
In her class that evening, Polly worked on the scene of the big marital split, when Sabrina tells Jasper it’s all over. When
he’d reneged on his promise not to stick his fingers in his ears and sing loud “la-las” whenever she wanted to talk emotions;
when he continued to say that it was unreasonable for him to turn down work so they could go out for a meal or take a holiday;
when sex was no longer a giving, sharing thing, but a taking, a mere scratching when an itch presented itself to him. Sabrina
had given Jasper a full year to reform, and if anything, he’d gotten worse.
It was all so much easier when you could control the whole thing in your head, like both sides of a chess game. Not so much
when playing with only the black pieces and trying to second-guess if the white pieces would erupt, implode, cry, or physically
throw her out of the door when her queen checkmated his king.