Chapter Thirty
Tess took herself home on autopilot and the Jubilee Line.
After the grandeur of the library, the bustle of Hyde Park, she was pleased to let herself into the silent flat.
Appreciating for once the simplicity of Saskia’s muted colour palette and love of a minimalist interior.
She also appreciated that Saskia was currently on her way to Singapore because if she were there, she’d either go tough love or sympathetic bestie on Tess. Either one would break her.
She shouldered open the door of her bedroom. She’d had a major clothes panic before she’d left for her date. That seemed like a lifetime ago. Full of terror and excitement and not quite able to comprehend that all of her dreams were about to come true.
Tess forced herself to hang up each discarded dress. To bring order to the top of her chest of drawers where her make-up and her accessories lived in a series of pretty boxes and decorative bowls.
Then she ran a bath that was one degree of hot away from hell fire and lowered herself gingerly into the tub.
As her white and actually quite sticky flesh pinked then reddened, Tess felt a strange pang of sadness as the water, rose-scented bodywash and loofah rendered her squeaky clean. As if it had never happened.
Nobody, not even Sean, not once in the ten years they’d been together, had made her body sing the song that Gabe had. He had worshipped her, apart from those five minutes when he’d fucked her like he was the devil.
It had been the best five minutes of her life.
She hauled herself out of the bath and towelled herself off roughly because she wasn’t just angry with Gabe, she was angry with herself.
It had all happened so quickly: the arguing, although they always argued, then the kissing and the worshipping and the fucking, that she hadn’t had a chance to get her bearings.
To realise that this was a bad idea. That it couldn’t and wouldn’t end well.
To know that a man like Gabe, handsome, together, more clever than any person had the right to be, would never choose Tess.
She’d been nothing more than a mere prop in his ongoing evil but very boring plan to monetise the library with his dead philosophers.
It was so callous that it took Tess’s breath away.
Finally, she was moisturised (though her treacherous body really didn’t deserve to be hydrated), in her rattiest, cosiest pyjamas and submerged under the covers of her bed.
It was then, and only then, that Tess let herself cry. She didn’t even know why she was crying. Probably because she was still angry. Frustrated. But sad, so very sad that a man like Gabe would never want a forever with someone like Tess.
Not even a man like Gabe.
But Gabe.
She was crying because she was never going to see him again and that felt like the worst hurt of all.
Tess cried for so long that her throat ached and her face was swollen and puffy. Eventually she didn’t have any more sobs left in her, just a few tears that trickled down her face and into her ears because she was lying on her back, fists clenched into her duvet cover.
How Tess wished that she’d cried herself to sleep, but she was wide awake and inevitably about to spend the hours until morning reliving all her bad choices and mistakes. Particularly the ones that had occurred over the last six hours.
Well, not tonight, Satan!
Tess sat up, snapped on the light and eyed the pile of books on her bedside table. All romance novels. Well, she was done with them. She was going cold turkey on classic romantic literature. Swearing off spicy, steamy reads. Revoking the romcom.
Which left only one book, its cover stained and puffy from being soaked in melted ice cream.
She’d only managed to get halfway through it because it was very hard to get a handle on philosophy, even with jokes.
Still, it might help her to sleep. She opened it at a random page.
Then another. And another until she thrust the book away from her in disgust.
What a sausagefest! All these philosophers were men. On the evidence of today alone, it was obvious that Tess didn’t know much, but she did know that she’d never been mansplained any useful advice before.
She picked up her phone which was lying under her pillow, even though she also knew that it was bad sleep hygiene to have it so close to hand. But how else was she going to google ‘female philosophers’?
It turned out that there were quite a lot of them.
Hannah Arendt was a big fan of something called active thinking. She was an even bigger fan of taking responsibilities for one’s own actions, whereas that was something Tess could leave or take. Preferably leave.
Then there was Ayn Rand, self-confessed male chauvinist, who not surprisingly was the darling of a lot of dodgy men with dodgy podcasts.
She’d believed in something called Objectivism; that happiness was the moral purpose of life and that productive achievement was its noblest activity, which meant Tess was failing on both counts.
Simone de Beauvoir seemed like she might be more simpatico.
Tess could get behind a woman who spent a lot of time hanging out in Parisian cafés and having affairs.
Her philosophy was much harder to get a read on, especially when she was using words like immanence, but as far as Tess could work out, women should take responsibility for their own freedom.
None of these women and their theories and isms and what have yous were really speaking any language that Tess understood.
There was a lot more googling until Tess happened upon Hypatia, a mathematician and astronomer who’d founded something called the Neoplatonist School of Philosophy, which sounded very dry but Hypatia herself sounded like one hell of a woman.
Out-philosophising all the men. Spurning their romantic advances so she could focus on her career.
The kind of woman who’d probably give Tess all sorts of good advice if Tess took her out of a book, which she wouldn’t be doing anytime soon.
Mostly because very few, if any, of Hypatia’s works had survived, and also because Tess had vowed never to set foot in that place, the library, ever again. Also, why had Gabe never mentioned Hypatia to her? That was so … so … so like him.
As soon as she thought about Gabe, Tess waited for the anger to rise up in her like bile but instead she was flooded with heat as her body remembered how he’d made her feel.
Tess flung off her duvet and tried to ignore the heat and the thigh-tightening memories. There was no point even attempting to sleep, so instead she dived into a Hypatia google K-hole.
As well as philosophising, she’d invented the hydrometer, a device to measure the density of liquid.
Even better, she’d once got rid of a persistent admirer who didn’t understand the word no, by whipping out her menstrual rags and immediately traumatising him.
Tragically though, she’d been brutally and savagely murdered by a Christian mob, the details of which were sure to give Tess nightmares.
Typical of men to literally cut down a woman in her prime.
By the time the sun was well and truly up in the sky, Tess knew one thing for certain: Hypatia was her homegirl. A homegirl who believed that ‘To think wrongly is better than not to think at all.’
And wasn’t Tess the queen of wrong thinking?
She sent a quick email to Claire to tell her that she wouldn’t be coming into work that day.
‘I’ve been up all night and I feel awful,’ she was able to write quite truthfully before she finally managed to fall asleep.
It was no surprise that she later woke up to an email from Claire complaining that she hadn’t authorised any sick leave and Tess would have to take it as a personal day.
Tess had thought that she was so angry with Gabe that she didn’t have the bandwidth to be angry with anyone else.
That turned out to be a grievous error of judgement.
She logged Claire’s email as more evidence that she was a heinous bitch and as she made toast, Tess fumed and huffed even more.
She took the toast back to bed but, in a Tess Hardy first, she was actually too angry to eat. Not just angry, but she felt a restlessness that she didn’t know how to quieten.
Tess wondered if she’d ever know happiness again or if she was now condemned to going through life accompanied by a seething discontent.
She had always believed that her happiness would come through love, just like she’d read about in all those bloody novels.
There’d be a happy ever after once she’d found someone to complete her.
It was a truth that she’d rarely acknowledged but her quest for a happy ever after was always going to be impossible if she was secretly so unhappy. Like trying to plant a beautiful garden on dry, stony soil or build a magnificent house on crumbling foundations.
Love was not going to cure all of Tess’s many ills.
It wouldn’t make up for a miserable work situation.
It wasn’t going to miraculously fix her low self-esteem or stop her from endlessly comparing herself to other people who seemed to be far more accomplished and content in doing this thing called life.
There was no point in asking herself What would Elizabeth Bennet do?
For one thing, you should never meet your idols, and for another thing, although she and Darcy seemed blissfully happy together, that was the end of their story.
Happy ever afters only happened in novels.
Real life was more nuanced and a lot more complicated.
Tess realised now that her own story wasn’t contained in a book, to be closed and put back on the shelf. It was constantly being written and rewritten. So why was Tess letting other people write her story, instead of putting her own words on the page?
And to think that she was meant to be a writer!
A new kind of happy ever after was required. A happy ever after that had Tess at the centre of it, responsible for her own happiness.
A new philosophy was also needed; a new mantra to get her through the darkest days and steer her passage through life.
A new question.
What would Hypatia do? That fierce woman who faced down critics, unwanted suitors and even the violent mob, which had torn her limb from limb.
Hypatia was a woman of decisive action.
Well, Tess could be both decisive and active too. Or she could learn to be those things.
Decision. Action.
The first item on her decisive action agenda was so obvious, it was as if it was signposted in flashing neon letters.
Tess created a group chat which she called Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead, added her Creative Solutions colleagues to it and sent them a call to arms masquerading as a message.
Tess Hardy: Guys, we’re all unhappy and the time has come to rise up against the root cause of that unhappiness.
You know exactly who I mean. If you’re with me, then meet me in the coffee shop round the corner from the office at 9 tomorrow morning.
(The one that does the amazing cheese toasties.
Not the one where Jovan saw a mouse last Christmas.) Bring the receipts!
I’m bringing mine. Let’s do this! #powertothepeople
The sheer relief of doing something instead of just being unhappy about the something was galvanising. Addictive.
Who knew how long it would last? Tess was going to take advantage of it while she could.
She spent the rest of the day sending her CV and her newly finessed cover letter to everyone she could think of.
Had a huge wardrobe clearout of anything she hadn’t worn in the last year then ferried several large blue IKEA bags to the nearest chazza.
She made appointments with her dentist, optician and hairdresser.
Then after an evening meal, which was high in protein and low in carbs, Tess did what she should have done months ago and deleted the dating apps. No more looking for love in all the wrong places.
After that momentous event, deleting every email and text message her mother had ever sent her was the easiest thing in the world.
Finally, Tess was writing her own story, and the words were just pouring out of her.