no, I’m OK,’ I insist. ‘I want to get it done now.’
Or maybe it’s some damn smart reverse psychology.
Caroline stands up, brushes her knees off and holds out her hand to help me up.
‘I’ll get Mindy to choose some pyjamas for you. You know how she loves a shopping project.’
I smile, weakly, take her hand and haul myself to my feet.
‘Sure you want to leave so much behind?’ Caroline says, as she checks she’s squeezed the boot shut fully. ‘I know Mindy thinks it’s a good idea, but Mindy thought her last three boyfriends were good ideas.’
‘Yeah. I’ll have the money to buy it all again. I’m not leaving that much.’
I look up at the house and it stares down at me blankly, in agreement. I think about the envelope I left next to the telephone, containing the ring I’m no longer wearing.
Caroline says nothing more, pats me on the shoulder and gets into the driver’s seat. I take a deep rattling breath and walk round to the passenger side.
This is it. I’m leaving.
12
Caroline eventually breaks the waterlogged silence in the front of the Audi.
‘I was wrong about buying straight away. Maybe Mindy is right and this … interlude is exactly what you need.’
‘Thanks. I thought you were saying Mindy’s judgement is dubious?’
‘Not always.’
I know they’ll have discussed me, worried about me, and there’s a question that I can’t put off asking any longer.
‘Do you all think I’m making a massive mistake?’
There’s a tense pause.
‘There isn’t an “all”…’
‘Oh, God.’ I put a hand over my face. ‘Three different types of disapproval.’
‘It’s not disapproval, you’re thirty-one. It’s not for us or anyone else to say what’s right for you. I suppose I was surprised you didn’t mention any problems before, that’s all.’
‘I didn’t want to talk behind Rhys’s back. I wasn’t sure how I felt, truth be told. I was being carried along by the wedding planning and then he was being a shit about it and it came tumbling out and there it was.’
‘It wasn’t worth giving him a shape-up-or-ship-out? You never put your foot down enough, in my opinion, and it might’ve led to … laziness.’
‘I did try suggesting a counsellor or whatever. He wasn’t interested.’
‘I doubt he wanted to lose you. He’s stubborn …’
‘You can’t ask someone not to be who they are. That’s where we were.’
‘Couldn’t you … if you’d …’
‘Caro, please. I can’t do this now. I will do soon, over wine, for hours. We can thrash the whole thing out until you’re sick of hearing about it. But not now.’
‘Sorry.’
‘It’s fine. Let’s talk about something else.’
Hmm. Not sure when this ‘soon’ will arrive. I possibly want to wait until 2064 when she can put a data stick in her ear and download the information straight into her frontal cortex.
Then on reckless impulse I add: ‘Oh, I saw Ben.’
‘Ben? Ben from uni? Where? I thought you weren’t going to look him up? How was he?’
I’m grateful that Caroline can only fix her eyes on me momentarily before she has to return them to the road.
‘Uh, the library. I decided I wanted to learn Italian as part of the New Me, and there he was. We had a coffee. Seems well. Married.’
Caroline snorts. ‘Hah! Well he was bound to be. Anyone as attractive and house-trainable as that gets snapped up mid-twenties, latest.’
‘Anyone decent’s married by now?’
Caroline realises what she’s said and grimaces. ‘No! I mean, men like him are. There are more good women than men, so supply and demand dictates his sort are long gone off the market.’
‘Doesn’t bode well for my prospects in finding someone then.’
Caroline is crunching the gears, and looks like an Egyptian terracotta head I once saw in the British Museum. ‘I didn’t mean … oh, you know …’
‘Don’t worry,’ I say, ‘I agree with you. Ben was always going to be married, and maybe choices post-thirty aren’t great. The divorces are going to start soon, I’ll pick someone up on their second lap.’
Caroline gives me a laugh that’s more grateful than amused. ‘You’ll be fine.’
‘Mindy and Ivor are still single, and they’re normal and nice. Well, fairly normal.’
‘Exactly!’
I’m not feeling half as casual as I’m trying to sound, for both our sakes. Starting again. From the beginning. With someone who doesn’t know the million important and incidental things about me, who isn’t fluent in the long-term couple language that I’ve taken for granted for so long with Rhys. How will anyone ever know as much about me again, and vice versa? Will I find anyone who wants to learn it? I imagine a York Notes revision style aid on Rachel Woodford. Or a Wikipedia page, lots of claims from Rhys followed by [citation needed].
And is this a brutal truth, everyone good has gone? As if soul mates are one big early-bird-gets-the-worm January sale. Buy the wrong thing, have to return it, and you’re left with the stuff no one else wanted. This is the kind of thinking I’d scoff at from my mum, yet I was always scoffing from the security of a relationship. I feel a lot less sure of my ‘Don’t be so Stepford’ stance now I’ve got to test the truth of the hypothesis.
A few circuits of the apartment building to find a parking space demonstrates why it’s as well Rhys has kept our car.
‘I’ll stay here so I don’t get a clamping,’ Caroline says. ‘If I see a warden I’ll go round the block, so don’t panic I’ve legged it with your towels.’
I discover how unfit I am as I run from car to flat door, and Caroline manages not to get ticketed the whole time.
When I take the last of it, she says: ‘So I’d stay but I’d have thought you want to show your mum round, now she’s here?’
‘Uh? My mum’s not here.’
‘She’s there.’
Caroline gestures over my shoulder. My mum is counting out coins from her big snap-clasp purse into the upturned hat of a man with a dog on a string, her black Windsmoor shawl coat billowing like Professor Snape’s cape. She’s always immaculately turned out and a ringer for Anne Bancroft, circa The Graduate. I think she wonders how she gave birth to someone inches shorter, and many degrees swearier and scabbier in her habits, though she might want to look to my dad for at least part of the answer.
‘Oh, bloody hell …’
Caroline smiles and climbs back into the car, waving farewell to my mum.
‘Hello darling! Was that Caroline? Delightful girl. Still has the metabolism of a greyhound, I see. Some have all the luck, eh?’