Name & Address Withheld (37 page)

‘And a few letter bombs?’

Susan ignored her interjection and carried on regardless. ‘That way you pre-empt any future “scoops” by the tabloids, and Rachel is left high and dry and without any ammunition.’

Lizzie could see that Susan had a point. A very good point. Susan was right; she was going to have to learn to lighten up a bit. What was done was done. Time to move on. And if she could use all this to her advantage then what was the harm in that?

‘Not a bad idea.’ She had to concede that Susan, on this occasion, had made a not entirely unreasonable suggestion.

‘Why—I thank you.’ Susan dipped her head and took a mock bow before an imaginary crowd. ‘I only wish you’d come and spoken to me earlier. I bet you’ve been worrying yourself silly.’

Lizzie half-shrugged, half-nodded. ‘Well, the way I saw it, and the way Rachel had pitched it, I thought I was going to have to give up everything I’ve worked for—but I was hardly about to come running to you with my job in my hand. I needed some time to think.’

They were momentarily interrupted by the arrival of their wild sea bass, and Lizzie busied herself with water-pouring while Susan flirted shamelessly. She was poised to take her first mouthful when Susan refocused her attention on her.

‘So now, of course, what I really want to know, darling—and what I’ve been dying to ask ever since the launch—is was he worth it? I want all the details. You dark horse, you…’

‘Well…’ Lizzie put down her knife and fork. It was going to be a long lunch.

chapter 28

‘I
’ve got it, I’ve got it—and guess what? You’re on the cover…’ Clare’s voice, a crescendo of excitement, swirled up the stairwell.

Lizzie’s heart stopped mid-beat before starting again about three times faster than normal. Cover-girl? No way.

‘Prepare for sales to be up this week. Harri has got a pile on the counter by the till and he’s telling absolutely everyone in there that you only live round the corner…’

Harri was one of life’s unsung heroes. His tiny shop was a neighbourhood cornucopia and thanks to his cash and carry card and dedicated opening hours they’d survived many potentially ruinous dinner party crises as he’d bailed them out with emergency supplies of everything from turmeric to tights to tonic water. Lizzie blushed at the thought of him reading all the details of her personal crisis. The total strangers didn’t worry her. It was everyone else she had to be able to look in the eye.

‘…saw Colin in there. He sends you a kiss and asked me to give you this.’

Clare produced a Toblerone from her jacket pocket.

‘He said to tell you that they don’t make chocolate love triangles but this is as close as he could get…’ Clare giggled.

By the sounds of it there was almost a street party atmosphere down at the shop. Lizzie was glad she’d sent Clare instead of going herself when woken early by a bout of publication-date insomnia.

Clare practically pirouetted into the kitchen with her ‘hot off the press’ copy, and Lizzie, hot on her heels, grabbed it from her. There she was in colour. Glossy A4 colour. Susan had a nerve. She’d never said anything about front covers at lunch; nor when she’d rung to thank Lizzie for the first draft of her article; nor when she’d asked if they could have a new photo done to publish alongside it. No wonder she hadn’t biked round an advance copy this week. Shifting print deadlines, my arse. Lizzie looked at the kitchen clock. Too early. She could wait.

She didn’t dare say anything out loud for fear of inciting serious allegations of vanity, but Lizzie had to admit that she wasn’t looking too bad. She knew that on her way back from the brink of despair, the fleeting appearance of her cheekbones in a photo wasn’t supposed to even register, and, granted, the woman on the front didn’t really resemble the flannel pyjama girl in the kitchen right now, but Arabella was a marvellous make-up artist. Without spots and bags, and with a lot of blow-drying, she could apparently look the part.

Her mother was always complaining that she didn’t have a decent up-to-date photograph of Lizzie. Now everyone who knew her could buy one. The only problem was, she’d sort of been hoping that Rachel and Matt might not see the article, but this whole cover dimension was going to make that pretty impossible. Obviously she hadn’t mentioned them by name, and she’d been careful not to identify them by association, but all of a sudden the sense that Susan had made over lunch was deserting her.

‘I can’t wait to read it, Liz.’ Clare was hovering at Lizzie’s elbow, keen to reclaim her purchase, impatiently shifting her weight from mule to mule, dying to see the article.

Lizzie, it appeared, wasn’t quite ready to hand it back yet.

‘Yeah right. I dare say you could have written it yourself.’

If anyone knew the situation inside out it was Clare. Lizzie just hoped that she felt the article was appropriate. Lizzie needed her on side. She was nervous. Her private life was about to hit the public domain and, as confident as Susan had been, Lizzie was sure that she’d underestimated the repercussions. For one thing, she wasn’t going to be able to go into a newsagent or a branch of WH Smith for at least eight days without a disguise.

Lizzie stared at the magazine in her hand. And there it was, about two thirds of the way down on the right-hand side, half printed over her shoulder.

M
Y AGONY AND MY ECSTASY
C
ONFESSIONS OF AN AGONY AUNT

Lizzie thumbed past countless adverts, scattering a broad selection of flyers and offers on the floor in the process. Finally she found page 154 and started to read. Clare gave up waiting and busied herself with tea and toast duties, annoyed that she hadn’t thought to buy two copies or stopped to read it on the way home.

Apparently absorbed by her all too familiar words, Clare watched Lizzie walk over to the table and sit down on automatic pilot. Lizzie could feel the pit of her stomach tighten. Reading it all again was a bit like picking a scab. Impossible to stop once you’ve started but something she knew she’d end up regretting.

I’ve always lived my life by the rules—well, by most of them. OK, I might have bought my first alcoholic drink in a pub when I was fifteen, I might have parked across a driveway or on a double yellow line in an emergency, and I might have even smoked a joint or two at university, but I’d never purposely done anything to hurt anybody. I regret to inform you that unwittingly I just have. I hurt three people. Four including me. Badly.

Emotional pain is much worse than any other kind. You can’t treat it with sutures, with Savlon or with any of the modern medicine that, fed on a television diet of
Casualty
and
ER,
we think we understand. We’re not talking de-fib, myocardial infarctions, pulmonary embolisms, lacerations, enlarged livers or any of the other conditions that we are alerted to on our weekly dose of danger. We’re talking heartache and heartbreak. Charging up the paddles won’t help. There is only one cure known to man. Time.

We will all recover. No blood was shed. Plenty of tears and a couple of pounds (there had to be one upside), but none of the red sticky stuff. But in order to move on we all need to learn to forgive and not allow ourselves to be consumed by bitter grudges. The parties involved will all have to accept their own imperfections alongside my own.

The biggest lesson I’ve relearnt this year is one of the oldest. It is, of course, that nobody’s perfect. There are times in all our lives when our selective memories see fit to inform us that we are unassailable, above reproach. But no. Not me, not you, not anyone. I’d always thought that I had good judgement, and then I met a man—my own Mr Perfect-for-now. I was ready to stare cynics in the eye and undo their years of research in one fell swoop. I was invincible. I had a ticket to ride on the love train. And then, without any warning, it careered off the rails and crashed. There was definitely a signal problem.

For the first six weeks of our relationship I was totally unaware of one detail. He had a wife. When the truth did finally surface, he told me that he was married in name only. I wanted to believe him, and so for a few weeks I joined the ranks of all those alleged heartless bitches, those red-taloned, calculating, materialistic husband-stealers. But was it all long nails, negligées, turquoise Tiffany boxes and steamy dates in European cities? Was it glamour? Was it excitement? Or was it disappointment, guilt, heartburn, rejection, betrayal and dissatisfaction? I think you’re probably beginning to get the picture.

I fell in love with the wrong man, and yet by the time I found out I was in up to my neck. Head over heels. It was new. We were perfect for each other—or so I thought. Workaholics with a shared passion for romantic comedies and my duvet. I should have known better. How many good-looking guys in their mid-thirties come with hand luggage only? Did I smell a rat? Not even the one I was sleeping with…yet my perfect date had become my worst nightmare.

‘Tea?’ Clare tried to break into Lizzie’s consciousness, but the question ricocheted straight back. She might as well have been invisible. Clare cleared her throat noisily. Still nothing. Lizzie skipped forward to the final paragraph; she’d seen enough.

…there’ll be wives out there baying for my blood. There’ll be mistresses too, desperate to explain the attitude you need to have to make it in life as ‘the other woman’, but I’m coming clean to you now because I want you to know…and to know from me. Now I just want to be able to move on. I don’t want to have unwittingly created a legacy that’ll come back to haunt me, and if there’s anything to be learnt from all of this I guess it’s not to judge a situation, however it might first appear, until you have all the facts. Whatever labels you want to give us, we were just two people caught up in a whirlwind of intensity. There was chemistry, there were promises, there was even love. But there was no winner. Love did not conquer all. Real life got in the way…

There was a deathly silence at the breakfast table. Matt had only popped out to get milk, but the familiar face staring at him from the magazine racks had been hard to miss and even harder to ignore. At first he’d been surprised—angry, even—that Lizzie had sold out, but once the shock had passed it didn’t seem that unreasonable. It was perfect spin. After all, she was in the business of talking about problems, and he’d forfeited the right to pass judgement a long time ago.

Having stared at a two-dimensional Lizzie all the way home, he couldn’t wait to read all about it. Rachel, on the other hand, seemed to be having a sense of humour failure. He’d patently
managed to do the wrong thing—again. But surely if he’d seen the magazine and not said anything he’d have been accused of keeping it from her? Plus, as Matt had just tried to explain, no one would or could know who Lizzie was writing about.

Mistake of the morning number two. Rachel had immediately accused him of taking Lizzie’s side over hers. He didn’t understand—if anyone came out of all of this badly it was him, the two-timer. But maybe she would see that when she had finished absorbing every syllable. She hadn’t made a sound since she’d snatched the magazine from him. She was usually an incredibly speedy reader. He could only presume that she was committing a few key phrases to memory.

He stared through her, waiting for her to finish. He wasn’t in love with her, and she knew it. Five years down the line, she was just reluctant to give in, to be ‘beaten’. It wasn’t about love for her, only a question of lifestyle, of appearances. He hoped she was ready for a new look.

Back at Oxford Road, Clare had read the whole article and was still talking to her—a tacit thumbs-up. Lizzie was relieved. She’d had enough tension to last her a millennium. She pretended to read the rest of the magazine as she waited for the inevitable but it wasn’t until nearly eleven that the phone rang for the first time that morning.

‘Darling.’

She’d been beginning to worry. The newsagents must have been open for at least four hours by now, and she’d hoped her mother was going to be sympathetic. Confessions
à deux
on the sofa were one thing, but an article that her friends could read was a different ballgame altogether. She just wanted everything back to normal, when the most stressful things involved missing buses and trains, running out of milk, paying credit card bills—that sort of thing.

‘Are you OK? Have you seen the article? Of course you have…silly me. What am I saying?’

From the general babble she figured she wasn’t about to get
the ‘letting me and yourself down’ lecture. She felt her spirits lift a little.

‘Well, well… My daughter, the mistress…who’d have thought it? You look beautiful on the cover. So beautiful. Don’t worry about keeping your copy pristine; I just had to buy a couple of spares. I’ll keep one safe for your children. I’m so proud of you.’

If Lizzie wasn’t mistaken her mother was sounding quite emotional. She decided not to ruin the moment by pointing out that sleeping with someone else’s husband wasn’t especially laudable. As for the ‘keeping a copy safe for her children’ moment, it was best ignored.

‘Thanks, Mum. I’m fine.’

‘Well done, darling…’ Lizzie noted her mother had reverted to full stiff-upper-lip-matter-of-fact mode. She knew only too well that underneath there was a ton of carefully concealed emotion. She had to have inherited it from somewhere. ‘Very brave of you. And very poignant. Although I wish you’d come to me about all of this straight away when it first happened, instead of bottling it all up and waiting for Clare to send you home. That’s what I’m here for. I don’t like to interfere most of the time, but I have lived a life or two myself—and besides, I am your mother.’

‘Exactly… I guess I just thought you might not be thrilled.’ And, call her conventional, but Lizzie still felt a little uncomfortable discussing her sex life with her mother.

Luckily Annie couldn’t reprimand and listen at the same time. She’d already moved on. ‘Is everything all right between you and Clare? I didn’t realise you two had fallen out in the first place. Honestly, darling, I’d really rather have heard it all from you instead of having to read about the details in an article. You are a funny one. I mean, thank God I got my hands on a copy straight away before someone rang me about it. Could you imagine the embarrassment if I hadn’t seen it first?’