‘It must be so difficult for you.’
‘It’s been hell.’ I shut my eyes as if the memory were too painful to bear.
How long has this affair been going on? I’ve been suspicious for about five months now—but it could have started even earlier. When I took the children to my mum’s for half-term? When Jonathan went to Glasgow for that conference on hair regeneration?
‘Poor you,’ Mimi whispers. ‘It must be hard to cope.’
‘It can all get a bit much.’ I nod, voice cracking with grief.
Mimi’s eyes are wide with sympathy. She leans across the table, puts her (beautifully manicured) hand on mine: ‘If there’s anything I can do to help, let me know.’
‘Yes…’ I whisper.
‘You’ve been very brave.’
‘I have to be.’ I shrug.
‘I won’t forget what you told me, Rosie.’ Mimi looks sincere—and shaken.
I breathe a sigh of relief: I’ve pulled it off. As I turn to ask the waiter for the bill, I spot Jonathan through the restaurant window. He’s across the street, sheltering beneath an umbrella with Linda, his American colleague. They’re looking at one another and suddenly he reaches to touch her face. It’s only a second—but I know immediately that I’ve been lunching the wrong woman.
I look away, and hold the tabletop to steady myself. I wasn’t expecting this. Mimi, yes: sweet, obvious, none too bright. Jonathan would have fun with her, and nothing more. But Linda? When Linda first arrived at the lab, Jonathan had said she was ‘impressive’. ‘She knows her stuff ‘: he’d sounded admiring. She knows her stuff and is tall, dark and handsome (if you like a red pout, double-D breasts and legs that go on for ever). American, and half my age (or just looks that way).
I pay the bill and stay behind while Mimi, looking thoughtful and slightly worried, goes on her way.
I step out of the restaurant and begin walking towards the tube station.
It’s Tuesday, one of my two days off, so I’m not rushing back to work. Yet still I walk quickly, trying to put some distance between me and the sighting of my husband and his lover. Passers-by brush against me, cars whizz past, bicycle brakes screech. It’s muggy and grey—a bad beginning to the summer. I’m walking uphill, and my cotton dress sticks to my back. I breathe in slowly, with difficulty. I’m feeling uncomfortably sweaty, and keep tugging at my dress where it sticks to me. This is serious. But what do I do? Confront him? Ignore it? Talk it through in a friendly tête-à-tête?
Jonathan wakes up in his five-star hotel room in Venice. Linda stands, gloriously naked, by the balcony, looking down at his open case. ‘My love!’ Jonathan pulls off the sheet, inviting his lover back into the bed. ‘What is this filth?’ Linda throws a handful of seamy fetishist mags on to the bed. ‘You know what? You are sick!’ She snatches her clothes and runs from the room.
Scenario number two: Jonathan is in the kitchen of the little love nest he and Linda are renting from a friend of hers. He is opening a bottle of wine (Châteauneuf-du-Pape—nothing but the best for his beloved) and looking forward to the cinq-?sept he has so brilliantly organised. Suddenly he hears what sounds like sobs from the bedroom. He rushes next door to find Linda weeping, holding a letter in her hand. ‘How could you? You’re two-timing me!’ She throws the sheet of paper at him. Jonathan slowly unfolds the letter and reads, in a handwriting that looks vaguely familiar, a breathless declaration of love from someone who signs herself as T. ‘It fell from your jacket pocket…’
Or scenario number three: Linda sits, massaging rose oil into her naked body, in anticipation of an afternoon’s lovemaking. She and Jonathan are attending a conference on folliculitis in Florence. He’s in the shower. The phone rings.
‘Hello?’ she purrs.
‘Hello, this is Gould Jewellery in Hatton Gardens. Is it possible to speak with Mr Martin?’
‘Afraid not. Can I help?’
‘Oh, I don’t know…’ the woman’s voice sounds reluctant.
‘I’m his partner.’
‘Well…just to let him know the emerald ring he wanted tightened is ready for collection.’
‘B-b-b-b-b-but what ring?’
‘The one with the engraving in the band—“For Lola with Love”.’
‘What?!!’ Linda splutters as the line goes dead.
This is how I deal with my jealousy in my imagination: I wreak revenge. I spend hours at my desk at Dr Casey’s surgery planning the different vendettas, and imagining the shock on the lovers’ faces.
‘Rosie, did you hear what I said?’ Mrs Stevens startles me. It’s always the way: Mrs S ignores me all day, pretending I’m but a speck of dust in her beloved Dr Casey’s wood-panelled offices. Then, just as I am deep in texting Jill or in a phone conversation with the children after school, she pounces, beady eyes gleaming with dislike, and exposes me for what I am: a medical receptionist and administrative assistant desperate to swap this part-time job for a full-time one as counsellor. Kat and Freddy are old enough now, and I’ve sent in my application for a four-year course. By the fourth, I’ll be allowed to have my own ‘clients’, with a qualified counsellor monitoring our sessions.
‘Did you put Mrs Morrow’s file back?’
I start rummaging through the metal filing cabinet.
‘Should be here,’ I mutter, as I search among the alphabetically arranged manila envelopes. In fact, I suddenly remember to my horror, I have left the Botox patient’s substantial file beside my coffee in the kitchenette.
‘I don’t think you’ll find it there.’ Mrs S smiles smugly. ‘My question was purely rhetorical. I found the file by the coffee machine—you managed to get a stain on it, as well.’ An eyebrow shoots up: ‘I do wish you would concentrate on the task at hand.’
With a triumphant air, she watches me turn red. Then she slaps down the file, turns on her sensible heel, and sails away. She leaves me wondering, for the umpteenth time, if I shouldn’t hand in my resignation now, rather than wait to see whether I’ve been accepted on the counselling course. I’ve been working for Dr Hugh Casey, well-known dermatologist, since Freddy was four and I decided the children would not be traumatised if I were to step back into the work place a few days a week.
When Jonathan and I met, I was twenty-two and working at HOME, a charity for the homeless. Jonathan was a pharmacologist bent on finding new drugs to revolutionise existing treatments. He yearned for the glory of being published in the BMJ—and the profits that would come in the wake of his discovery. By the time we had been going out for about a year, Jonathan had started talking about our future family; then the family was no longer just talk but a loud and needy wail from the little pink room I grandly called the nursery. I left HOME for home and soon found my daughter so engrossing, and Freddy’s arrival so overwhelming, that work languished. Jonathan encouraged me to stay with the children, taking pride in the fact that he could provide for his family.
Five years ago, though, I decided to ease my way back into work. I wanted something not too taxing, part-time, that would allow me to do what I enjoy doing most: listening to people. ‘You certainly have a knack for getting people to open up,’ my dad’s patients would tell me when, as a teenager, I earned pocket money by helping out in his GP’s practice. I soon realised that often the men and women who filed in were distressed not so much because they were ill but because they were lonely, worried, unhappy, or just a little down. I only needed to give them an opening, and they would lean on the counter and unburden themselves about the daughter who hadn’t shown up at Christmas, or the husband who had died last spring.
When I joined Dr Casey’s practice as a part-time receptionist, I looked forward to working with his patients—or clients, as Mrs Stevens likes to remind