Altar Ego (29 page)

But it was useless. Romantically, I’d vanished from his emotional radar.

But red-eyed remorse was not enough to get him back. I would have to try much harder than that.

Calling for double cream for my coffee and slathering butter on to a bread roll with a sacrilegious fervour that caused audible gasps of dismay from the dieting diners, I vowed to win him back, fair and square … even if I had to cheat to do so.

Part Three
The Divorce

31
An Impediment Of Reach

LIFE IS FULL
of frustrating and infuriating things. Treading in a puddle in the aeroplane toilet in absorbent airline socks and realizing that it’s
not your own
; bumping into a bloke you’ve got the hots for in the waiting room of the Pox Doctor’s Clinic … But finding the man you love in the arms and legs of your best friend had to top the Devastation-ometer.

I was tortured by images of them making love, searing images of legs and lips entwined. Shadowing him seemed the only way I could cauterize such festering emotions. And so, with Zack away on his European tour, I dedicated myself to stalking.

Huddling into Zack’s black leather jacket in the shadows beneath Julian’s office, or opposite his favourite restaurants, or outside the gates of Pentonville Prison while he visited clients, I tried to
ignore
Care-In-the-Community types talking to their fish and chips, whilst reassuring myself that I had not turned into a bunny boiler.

‘Got any bunnies, doll?’ Anouska asked pointedly as I directed her to drive, headlamps off, down Julian’s street, so I could train binoculars on my old bedroom window. ‘This is OTT, doll … And I want you to appreciate that this comment is from a woman who sent her husband for a holiday to Kosovo.’

‘This is
not
over the top,’ I seethed, hauling on a balaclava. ‘Just curious … Creeping into the garden and pressing a glass up against their window, now
that’s
going to be OTT.’

With my ear pressed to the cold base of a glass tumbler, I could hear them laughing but their words were lost in the television hiss. Detecting movement through the wooden slats of the bedroom blind, I shinnied up the tree in the front garden in time to see the Venetian blind suddenly coagulate.

For the first few weeks, I soothed myself that Kate would soon become dismayed with Julian’s workaholic tendencies. But then,
he stopped working
. I watched in horrified amazement as he set about cramming a decade’s worth of social occasions into one season. Labour Party galas, a Salman Rushdie book launch, fund-raisers for One World Action, opening nights at ENO, Glyndebourne excursions, an informal dinner at Chequers; same outings, same seats
at
Wimbledon, same friends. All through June and July I observed Kate stepping into my old life as if it were a pair of warm slippers I’d lovingly worn in for her. I fantasized about revenge.

First I spread a rumour around our Feminist-inclined work-place that Kate was having liposuction and nipple enlargement surgery. Next I put Nair hair-removal cream on the panty liners in her desk drawer. Okay, it was a tacky, petty, little revenge. But hey, it’s a tacky, petty, little world.

When Julian refused to answer any of my calls, I realized that I needed to pull out all the wooing stops. I started off with Killer Bouquets.

‘What kind of flowers do you suggest for the husband you dumped and now want back again?’

In response to my floral tributes, I wasn’t so much as inundated with a single postcard. This only served to make him more desirable and to make me more determined. I
bombarded
him with bouquets. I opened an account with the florist. She took to sighing when I rang and saying, ‘Okay. How sorry are you
this
time?’

When he had a newsworthy case, I pretended to be a journalist so that I could ‘interview’ him.

When Julian took on a client who was clairvoyant, I bribed her to mention my name.

I tried to apply mental calamine to my burning jealousy by soothing myself with the notion that Julian and Kate would soon become disenchanted with each other’s sartorial solecisms … But more and more often
I
found myself trailing them to Harvey Nichols, Versace, Armani. It was as if they’d both been put on probation by the fashion police. Those Peruvian jumpers that not even Peruvians would wear were a thing of the past. Kate, who’d always been lamb dressed as mutton, was suddenly mutton dressed as fox.

It was six weeks before I saw the whole transformation. Kate, who hadn’t had a holiday since the Bronze Age, suddenly took off, leaving me as Acting Head of Everything. When she finally reappeared in the office, I didn’t recognize her. Her svelte bottom wiggled when she walked. Her cleavage peeka-booed above a push-up bra. Even the glittering lenses of her famous bug spectacles were gone, replaced by eye-colour-enhancing contact lenses, you know, to make her look less intelligent. To complete the dumbing-down exercise she was reading – and even laughing at –
Bridget Jones’s Diary
.

I gasped like a deflating Lilo. ‘Oh you are so transparent, Kate.’

‘No. Just thin,’ she rejoindered.

‘I thought you said that your weight was a terrorist act against fascist stereotyping?’ I exploded.

Before she could retort, Julian appeared behind her. My heart catapulted into my throat. He’d grown his hair out into Byronic, collar-length curls which made him look ten years younger. Until now, all Julian had required of his skin was that it grew hair and, when
shaved
, stopped bleeding before he got to the office. But his face now sported a moisturized, sunbed glow. Also missing were the traditional pleat-fronted pinstripes and Jermyn Street double-cuff shirts. My jaw dropped as I took in the details of his Gucci leather suit, black Armani T-shirt and Patrick Cox shoes which looked as though they’d been made from the hides of hand-reared steers and stitched by brain surgeons.

When he saw me his smile congealed on his lips. The wads of his jaw muscle thickened. ‘Hello.’ His mellifluous voice took on the impersonal tone of a speak-your-weight bathroom scale.

‘Hi!’ I squealed. I was twitching with espresso, having been up all night stalking. As Kate and Julian had become healthier and happier, my late-night vigils and full working days had left me looking more and more haggard. How quickly I had gone from dumper to dumpette. Rejection was hanging off me like the stink of a dead animal.

‘It’s good to see you,’ Julian said with the blandness of a popular, easily spreadable luncheon substance.

Kate kissed him territorially. They kissed the whole bloody time they were at the ICA.

‘You know, new lovers really should have a minimum isolation period of say, six months so as not to nauseate absolutely everyone they meet,’ I said snidely.
Where’d I heard that before?

When Kate went into the toilets, I followed her,
kicking
the door closed behind me with my battered regulation stalker’s Doc Martens. ‘In the parlance of trained marriage-guidance counsellors – ‘You
slut
! You
whore
! You double-crossing
Jezebel
!!’

‘“Whore” … that’s the definition of a woman who gets the bloke
you
want, right?’ Kate tried to push past me, but I wedged myself into the door frame to block her way.

‘I thought you said romance was a trick mother nature plays on us? A lie?’ Ignoring me, Kate turned to the mirror to re-scrunch her newly streaked, styled and root-lifted locks. ‘I thought a woman needs a man like a cow needs an abattoir?’

‘But Julian is not just
any man
.’

‘No. He’s my man.’

‘Becky, make like a turtle and pull your head in.’ She squared her fuck-off shoulder pads. ‘Julian doesn’t want to see you ever again – not without an electrified fence and a German police dog present. He doesn’t love you any more.’

The two worst things that can ever be said to a woman are 1) ‘Yoo-hoo – hey, listen to that echo!’ in the middle of oral sex. And 2) I don’t love you any more.

I sank into a crumpled position on the cold, white tiles. Was she lying? She had to be lying. But what could I do? I kept telling Julian that he loved me, but he wouldn’t believe me! Having tried all the usual getting-the-love-of-your-life-back techniques – begging, grovelling, blackmail threats, lying down on
the
road in front of his car – I’d just have to resort to more drastic measures. I started by stepping up my surveillance. I hired a van, and staked out Julian’s house morning, noon and night. I never left my post, not even when I had chair-lock and could only walk like a crab – knees bent, hands frozen at dashboard level.

When I could no longer afford the van, I got an accomplice. Anouska, an insomniac due to Darius’s snoring (‘sleeping out loud’, she called it) fitted the bill nicely. She swung her Mercedes into a disabled-parking spot in Connaught Road and cut the engine.

‘Annie, you can’t park here!’

She levelled me with a dubious stare. ‘Call me old-fashioned, but we’re
stalking
. We’re breaking about 400 rules
for which we could be put in prison
and you’re worried about a parking ticket?’

‘Oh my God,’ I shrieked, focusing the binoculars. ‘He’s given her a whole shelf in the bathroom!’

‘A whole shelf? Jesus, doll, that
is
serious.’ Anouska commandeered the field glasses.

‘Bloody hell. I think she’s moving in.’ I unclicked my seatbelt. ‘I’m going to go in for a closer look.’

‘Oh no, you’re not. This past-husband regression’s gone far enough, Becky.’ Anouska pressed down on the automatic door locks. ‘You have got to get on with your life.’

I rested my head wearily on the dashboard. I’d tried, truly I had. But I was like a big piece of blotting paper,
craving
moisture. Without him, the world seemed to have taken on the exhausted sepia of an old photograph.

Things to do today. 1) Stop thinking of Julian. 2) Buy Julian an expensive present. 3) Break into house to see if best friend is moving in with husband.

‘I can’t, Annie. I’ve tried.’

‘There is a good side to this, you know, doll.’

‘There is?’

‘If they do move in together it’ll mean a considerable saving on Chrissy cards.’

With Anouska in recalcitrant tow, I scurried across to the dank alleyway that runs beside my old house. For the next hour we haunted those windswept shadows, warding off horny dogs and carnivorous bugs.

‘I’m cold,’ Anouska whinged.

‘Sshhh.’

‘Let’s go.’

‘No.’

‘Becky, there’s a dog romancing my leg!’ she said delicately.

I gazed at the signature of the city against the horizon, written in landmarks of skyscrapers and monuments – places I’d been to, with him – and gnawed the inside of my cheek so as not to cry.

When Julian and Kate finally left – strolling arm in arm, I noted painfully – and the summer light had
dwindled
sufficiently, I prised open the laundry window which had the dud lock.

‘Becky! When you said “closer look”, I didn’t realize you meant breaking in!!’ Anouska gasped. ‘I am
so
out of here! … You should know better, doll.’

I was half squeezed through the window when I heard my accomplice floor the accelerator and skid, burning rubber, down the street. Scrambling for purchase, I grazed my shin and, cussing loudly, pondered the one true lesson I had learnt of late – that no woman is ever old enough to know better.

32
Remembrance Of Flings Past

HOME IS DEFINITELY
where the heartache is. The house smelt of freshly ground coffee and leather-bound books. It was an olfactory ambush which brought on a haemorrhage of nostalgia.

After poking through kitchen utensils (the espresso machine and pasta maker were
definitely
hers) and bedroom cupboards (she’d colonized one whole drawer for underwear – not a good sign), I made the mistake of burying my face in Julian’s dressing gown. The aroma of him sparked a throb of loss and longing. In my mind’s eye I could see him coiled in sleep, sheets twisted and kicked aside, his hair pressed by the pillow into a crazy coiffure: a coronet fit for a king. And there, next to him, the empty pillow where my head should be; now bearing the indentation of my best friend’s cranium.

I was so lost in regrets that I didn’t hear their key in the lock. When the creak of the stairs jerked me from my sentimental reverie, I punched out the light and, dextrous as Kate’s cat (whose bowl had taken up smelly residency on the window sill) shot beneath the brass bed.

When the light flickered on, my whole body jumped, causing me to snag my hair on the bedsprings. For a few moments there was a disquieting silence. I felt sure I’d been rumbled. My pulse was beating loud enough to be coming over a PA system. Lying there in the dust balls and rank Kleenex, trying not to sneeze, my eyes lit upon items given up as missing in action – one satin slipper,
Kobbe’s Opera Guide
, a copy of
Thinner Thighs in Thirty Days
.

I strained to decipher the audial hieroglyphics beyond the valance … And then the noises began to take nauseating shape.

Is there anything worse than listening to other people having sex? To the wet gasping sounds of harpooned whales surfacing simultaneously? Especially when each bounce of the bed is pulling your hair out by the roots. When I realized what was happening above, I made that involuntary ‘Ugh’ noise, the sort of air exhalation you make when you witness a car accident.

The harpooned whale noises beached themselves disconcertingly.

‘Did you hear something?’ Kate’s Aussie drawl drifted down to me.

Blood tattooed a terrified rhythm in my temples.

‘No,’ mumbled Julian, a mumble that quickly turned into a long, low, luxurious moan.

The thought of Kate as an erotic enchantress filled me with equal amounts of wonder and despair. How could Julian be in a state of sexual thrall to
her
? What was left of my mind boggled. I put my fingers in my ears but the sounds they made during orgasm reached ten on the Richter scale. At first I was appalled.
God! Did they have to have sex so loudly?
Then distressed.
God! Was he that loud with me?