A Hundred Pieces of Me (14 page)

Why not? she thinks, and Stuart leads her to the sofa to chat, while his mates carry on pogoing inappropriately to Jennifer Lopez.

Why not? she thinks, half an hour later, as Naomi demonstrates the dimmer switch Jason fitted by turning the lights down low, and changes the CD to Katie Melua, throwing a moody blanket of slow music over the remaining guests. Stuart has to lean in to catch what Gina’s saying over the music, and he smells of Hugo Boss, the scent that wafted from the boys’ changing rooms at school. It tickles Gina, and she smiles. She can feel the firm muscle of his thigh through his jeans as he leans closer to her on the sofa, and she can’t quite believe that she is being chatted up in this confident yet polite way. The outcome is not in question, and Gina finds that quite relaxing.

Chatted up. They’re not at school any more. She’s renting a place on her own. So is Stuart, probably. She shivers with desire, partly at the surprising realisation that she’s now a proper adult, then laughs. She’d always assumed it’d be harder than this.

‘Why are you laughing?’ asks Stuart, anxiously.

‘Because you’re too handsome.’ She’s in that happy, cosy stage of drunkenness, the confiding stage where everything feels right. ‘It’s putting me off my conversation.’

He gazes at her. Gina thinks he’s drunker than her: he looks serious. ‘But
you
’re beautiful.’ He leans closer. ‘You’ve got skin like . . . like a peach.’

He reaches out and touches her cheek, not in a lechy way but as if he’s curious to see what it feels like. Gina tingles all over as his finger traces her cheekbone, her nose, her lips. It’s been ages since anyone touched her.

I probably shouldn’t be drinking, she thinks. Mum would go mad. How am I getting home? No, don’t worry. Safe here, with Naomi.

Her dry lips part as Stuart’s finger traces down her neck, along the scoop of her clavicle, joined by another over the freckles in the hollow of her throat. The music is throbbing in Gina’s head now, in time with the blood rushing around her body, waking up parts of her that haven’t tingled in ages. She’d completely forgotten what it feels like to have someone’s fingers reading her body. All Stuart’s done is touch her, and she feels like water inside.

‘You’re like a peach,’ says Stuart, wonderingly. ‘Soft, like a peach.’

Gina stops herself telling him it’s Palmers Cocoa Butter, and congratulates herself on her new adult mystique.

They gaze at each other for a moment in the sleepy chaos of the party, and then, without either of them seemingly initiating it, they’re kissing with the one-night-only, hormone-driven single-mindedness of a pair of teenagers. Stuart feels and tastes and smells exactly as she’d thought he would, and she’s letting go for the first time in years, falling into something that’s completely obvious and straightforward.

Why not? thinks Gina, as Stuart whispers in her ear about getting a cab back to his. Why not?

Gina had vowed, before her first meeting with Rory Stirling of Flint & Cook solicitors, that she wouldn’t be the clichéd vengeful wife when it came to her divorce. She wanted to be calm and mature, given that she had been considering separation before Stuart had made the decision for her, but even with a lawyer as reassuringly competent as Rory, thanks to Stuart’s stupid demands, it was proving harder than she’d hoped to cling onto calmness, let alone maturity.

Friday was her third meeting, and Gina had really hoped that this would be the day she would walk out with a firm date in her diary at which this foggy stage of her life would be over, and the new one would officially begin. Dates helped. She had already set herself the task of emptying the boxes in the flat by her birthday, 2nd May. One box a day, including the ones in storage, would be enough to get there, plus a few weeks to sell some things, at which point she could buy herself a fabulous birthday present, something so wonderful it would go straight onto the list of her hundred special things.

That morning, sorting out had put Gina in a very good mood. She’d given two bags of unused knitting wool, plus assorted needles and pattern books, to David, the tax accountant upstairs, whose wife made tiny hats for the hospital’s premature-baby unit. Not only did the babies get hats, but now Gina never had to get round to learning to knit. She’d donated her unused Sodastream to the office kitchen, much to the delight of the web designers, and she’d left another bag of designer jeans she’d never diet back into at the dog rescue shop. Knowing things were going to better homes gave her a warm glow. But that warm glow vanished the moment she sat down in Rory’s comfortable client chair, and heard what he had to update her on.

When she ran her eye down the list of items Stuart now apparently wanted in addition to the financial settlement, a sound that Gina didn’t recognise had slid out of her. It sounded a lot like a clichéd wife. ‘What?’ she whined. ‘He could have taken this when he moved out. I don’t know where half of it is. I’ve given a lot of stuff away already too!’

‘I know. It’s tedious but, believe me, it’s better that he gets it sorted out now than spends the next five years ringing you about his power drill.’ Rory was only a few years older than Gina but he had the solicitor’s gift of making everything sound reasonable, even when it wasn’t. ‘Try not to take it personally.’

‘How can I not take it personally? It feels like he’s reducing our life together to a series of . . . cash payments.’ Gina flipped through the pages. It was ridiculous, starting out hurtful (he wanted more of the house profit on account of the ‘months he spent supporting Mrs Horsfield while she was unable to make a financial contribution to the domestic finances’) and ending up petty (the list of items he had now decided he wanted from the house). ‘He didn’t take a single photograph of us together, but he wants four glass bowls that we got on holiday in Venice eight years ago?’

‘He’s probably just seen Murano glass on the
Antiques Roadshow
,’ said Rory calmly. ‘Some people become very logical in the face of big emotional situations. We see it all the time. “What I’m owed”. It’s a coping mechanism, makes them feel in control of something. I’m sorry. As I said, don’t take it personally. Easier said than done, I know.’

Gina bit her lip. This was one of the surprisingly painful side effects of divorce. A whole new Stuart coming out, one that she didn’t even know: a Stuart who’d stoop to cheap shots about her illness and hide behind his solicitor. He’d never been like that while they were married. Or had he? Had she just tried not to notice? It was bad enough knowing he’d been running some kind of financial clock on the time she was off work.

Rory saw her expression. ‘Don’t dwell on it,’ he said. ‘Give him what he wants, if you can, and move on. It doesn’t bring out anyone’s best side, arguing over who bought what. If it makes you feel better, it’s probably his solicitor driving all this, not him.’

The list blurred in front of Gina’s eyes. She remembered buying the dishes Stuart wanted. He hadn’t understood why she loved them so much; the artistry had meant nothing to him, and it was hard to imagine why he wanted them now. Unless he wanted to remember how romantic Venice had been, in the giddy early days of their relationship. The memory of that weekend snagged in her throat. It had started so romantically – champagne in the airport, the hotel that felt like a honeymoon suite, the exhilaration of visiting a city she’d always dreamed about going to with a lover. Where had that gone?

‘We were happy sometimes,’ she insisted pathetically. ‘It wasn’t always like this. Honestly. We did have
some
happy times.’

‘I know,’ said Rory. ‘If you hadn’t, this wouldn’t be so painful now.’ He pushed a box of tissues over the desk to her and she took one gratefully.

Flint & Cook’s offices were very near the high street, and Naomi had promised to meet Gina in the café for a cake and debrief. As she wove through the bundled-up office workers shivering at the bus stop, Gina could see her sitting at the prized window table; Naomi was a splash of colour amid the OAPs, in a bright green coat, with a black sequined beret over her chestnut hair.

‘Woah, you look livid, sit down,’ she instructed, when Gina shouldered her way inside. ‘Don’t speak. Not till you’ve eaten some of this carrot cake.’ She gestured to the waitress for two coffees, and sat back,

Gina slid into the chair and took three deep breaths, then exhaled, trying to imagine the tension leaving with the spent breath. It was a calming technique she’d been encouraged to practise by her counsellor: ‘Imagine your stress as a colour. What colour is it?’ Today’s stress was bitter, and an unpleasant orange, the same colour as Stuart’s cycling gear. Gina exhaled, and imagined the air around her nostrils singeing with fiery plumes of her bad mood, like a cartoon dragon.

She was angry because, after an hour of picking over the financial bones of her marriage, she felt like a stranger to herself. The unhappiness had passed, and now it was the waste of time, more than the money, that burned at her conscience. All that, to end up as this bitter stranger.

‘So,’ said Naomi, ‘edited lowlights, please.’

Gina drew a breath. ‘OK, well . . .’

Naomi’s mobile buzzed: a photo of Jason holding a laughing Willow popped up, and she hurriedly turned it upside-down.

Too late. Gina’s stomach lurched. Jason and Stuart were exactly the same kind of straightforward,
Top Gear
-loving, football-playing blokes – but one was a happily married family man with a doting wife and a people carrier, and the other . . . wasn’t. She and Naomi weren’t that different – were they?

Naomi saw her wince, and looked aghast. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘We’re going to his mother’s for dinner, just trying to work out logistics with the childminder . . .’

The coffees appeared and Naomi pushed the cake towards Gina. ‘Just imagine what it’ll be like when all this is over. Focus on Christmas. By Christmas you’ll be a free woman, in that beautiful new flat, looking forward to a romantic New Year’s break with some hot new bloke. I’m envious. I can think of two very eligible men off the top of my head who’d be thrilled to take your mind off all this. Just give me the nod and you can be meeting them over dinner at ours.’

‘Christmas is ten months away. I’ll probably still be getting texts about his sodding bicycle pump.’ Gina scraped the cream cheese icing off the back of the cake. ‘And no blind dates, please. That’s so far down my list of things to do, it’s on the next page. I don’t know if I
ever
want another relationship.’

Naomi made a soothing noise. ‘Don’t say that. Maybe not right now but eventually . . .’

Gina took a long breath – ‘Think blue, a healing colour, imagine your insides flooded with the waters of a lovely clean swimming-pool’ – exhaled and forked the cake into her mouth.

‘So where’ve you got to?’ Naomi poured a stream of brown sugar into her coffee. ‘Is the paperwork for the decree nisi in?’

‘Yup, that’s all going ahead. But Stuart’s solicitor’s making a big deal about the financial settlement. Apparently he’s not happy about some details of the house sale.’

‘What’s to be unhappy about?’ She widened her round eyes in disbelief. ‘You sold the house, you’ve got the money in the bank. Half each. No?’

‘No, apparently not. He feels he deserves more of it than me because he put his bonus into the mortgage and I was on sick pay for months.’ Gina stabbed at the cake, which was crumbling in a very unsatisfactory dry way. Friday cake. Not fresh. ‘It’s so unlike him to be petty like this. He was fine about it at the time – or was he just lying about it? It makes me wonder what else he didn’t really mean. And he keeps texting. Have I got this? Have I got that?’ Gina bit her lip. ‘I wouldn’t mind, but every time the phone beeps, it’s like he’s reminding me that he’s not texting to apologise. He’s texting to get some
stuff
, as if I’m clinging to his old football kit and crying into it at night or something.’

Naomi wasn’t saying anything. Gina glanced up. ‘What are you thinking? You’ve got that face on.’

‘Don’t shout me down,’ said Naomi, cautiously. ‘But . . . you don’t think he’s doing this because he’s hoping you’ll get back together?’

‘Sorry?’

‘All those texts. He’s got a solicitor, so why does he keep texting you? If he doesn’t want to keep in contact?’

Gina put down her fork. In the middle of the night, lonely and disoriented, she’d wondered that too. Underneath all her other reactions, she couldn’t shake the feeling that her mother was right: Stuart was a decent bloke; she should have tried harder. No one had the right to expect to be happy all the time. They’d been together nearly nine years. They’d got over the classic seven-year blip, largely thanks to her serious illness . . .

Then she thought of Bryony, and the supposed murder-mystery weekend. Her ruined Christmas pretending everything was fine for her mother. Their wasted twenties.

‘He doesn’t love me any more,’ she said flatly. ‘I don’t want to start thinking like that. Looking back, I don’t know if he ever did love me. Not really.’

‘What? You don’t go through what he went through with you if you
don’t
love someone.’ Naomi looked horrified. ‘Stuart adored you. And you loved him. That doesn’t just vanish overnight.’

‘It vanished enough for him to have an affair with a younger woman. God, he’s such a
cliché
. Why couldn’t he just get a motorbike like any other bloke?’