You Can’t Fall in Love With Your Ex (Can You?) (19 page)

He
was frowning at a spreadsheet, flicking between it and an internet page which I
could see was a mass of figures, incomprehensible to me.

“How’s
it going?” I asked tentatively.

There
was no reply.

“What
do you think about the terrorist attack on Royal St Andrews?” I said.

“What?”
Jonathan spun round so quickly that his wheely chair almost overshot itself and
slammed his knee into the leg of the table. He winced and caught his balance
just in time, in a way that reminded me of Owen averting an unplanned dismount
from his scooter.

“Just
joking,” I said. “Look, I was wondering what you fancied doing tonight? We
haven’t spent any time together for ages. I’m sure Darcey’s going to want to
stay over with Juniper, so once Owen’s in bed I’ll make us something
nice for dinner. And you can make us cocktails. It’ll be fun.”

“Great,”
Jonathan said distractedly. “That sounds great, Laura.”

“I’ll
go to the shops then, shall I? Owen’s asleep, will you listen for him?”

“Of
course.” Jonathan’s face softened, as it always did when he talked or thought
about the children.

“Okay.”
I brushed the top of his head with my palm, but he was already absent again,
his attention focussed entirely on the screen.

I
picked up my handbag and left the house. If I was going to cook, there was any
amount of stuff in the freezer I could have used, but I was suddenly overcome
by cabin fever, and by the need to be alone. Even walking up the hill to the
main road, crossing it and joining the throngs of shoppers in our local
supermarket felt like a chance to be inside my own head for just a few minutes.

I
pushed a trolley through the aisles with no real intent. I’d make a salad – Darcey
loved salad, and so did I. But Darcey wouldn’t be home. What would Jonathan
like? Browsing the shelves as I ambled along, I found myself dropping random
thing after random thing into my shopping cart. Chilli Heatwave Doritos. Frozen
pizza with pineapple on it. Cherry tomatoes. Wafer-thin ham. A massive pack of
Diet Coke. Two bottles of prosecco. Pink Lady apples.

It
was only when I caught myself lingering over the small section of shelf devoted
to pain-relief and corn plasters, and found my hand automatically dropping two
packs of ibuprofen and a giant roll of Elsastoplast onto my trolley that I
realised.

I
wasn’t shopping for my family. I was shopping for Felix and me.

I
actually blushed, as if I’d been spotted by one of the school run mums stocking
up on extra-strong ribbed condoms. I retraced my steps, putting everything back
in more or less the same place where I’d found it. Even so, I found myself
lingering by the herbs and spices, remembering how Felix and I used to corpse
with childish laughter in Tesco, arranging the spices so their labels spelled
out rude words.

Basil,
oregano, thyme and mixed herbs made ‘bottom’. Bay leaves, oregano and sage made
‘boobs’. Felix even managed ‘spanking’ in a particularly impressive effort that
required kaffir lime leaves and Italian mixed herbs. It was the most juvenile
thing ever, and it used to make as laugh so much we could hardly stand (and we
laughed even more when we wondered what possibilities would extend if only
there was a herb whose name began with U).

I
caught myself giggling like a loon, right there in the herbs and spices aisle.

A
passing child asked his mother, “Why’s that lady laughing, Mummy?”

“She
must be a nutter,” said his sister.

“Sssh,
Felicia,” the mother said. “You remember I talked to you the other day about
how unkind it is to make fun of people who are… different.”

Even
though she dropped her voice discreetly for the final word, I heard it, and my
laughter died in my throat.

What
was I doing, exactly? Mooning, that’s what. Mooning like a teenager with a
crush on Harry Styles. Except teenagers were allowed to do that, because – well,
because they were teenagers. In a woman of my age – a married woman of my age –
it was nothing short of pathetic. And it’s not even as if Felix was a
legitimate crush, like Robert Webb or Dr Ranj or someone. He was my ex, for
God’s sake. And he was my ex for a reason.

Think
about it for one second, Laura, I told myself. If you weren’t married to
Jonathan, you wouldn’t have your children. Other ones, perhaps, but not these
ones, my favourite people in the world. The idea was chilling – if I allowed
myself to think this way, wasn’t I inviting some sort of disaster? If fate
thought I was wishing them away, mightn’t it intervene to remove them from me?

The
thought gave me the horrors, and I pushed it away, forcing my attention back to
the absurd contents of my shopping trolley. This was it. Enough. It had to
stop.

I
forced myself to retrace my steps, replacing all the random items on the
shelves where I’d found them. I started again, putting Aberdeen Angus fillet,
potatoes, salad, tarragon, butter and eggs in the trolley along with a couple
of bottles of expensive red wine. I’d cook Jonathan’s favourite meal for us – it
would be the beginning of reclaiming the wonderful joy I’d felt when we were
first together.

My
resolve to be a better wife and mother lasted well into the evening. I watched
a DVD with the children to stop them disturbing Jonathan while he worked, then
cooked pasta with pesto and cherry tomatoes for their supper, supervised their
baths, read Owen a story and told Darcey she could spend half an hour and not a
minute more watching unboxing clips on YouTube.

“I
don’t like those any more, Mum,” she said scornfully. “They’re babyish.”

I
detected Juniper’s influence, and felt a pang of nostalgia for the asinine
vloggers who’d annoyed me so much just a few weeks before.

“What
are you going to do then, before you go to sleep?”

She
pulled a stack of glossy magazines out from under her bed. I spotted
Girl
Talk
,
Shout
and a couple of others in the same genre – harmless
enough.

“Read,”
she said.

“Okay,
Pickle. But only half an hour, remember. I’m going to come up and check.”

“Whatever.”
Darcey attempted a disaffected roll of her eyes, then smiled her sweet smile
and said, “Night, Mummy.”

“Night,
precious.” I folded her small, sweet-smelling body in a tight hug and held her
until she started to squirm, then kissed her again and went downstairs.

So
– béarnaise sauce. How hard could it be? Jonathan had made it a few times for
dinner parties and it had been rapturously received. It involved a horrible
smell, I recalled, and a bit of stirring. That was okay – I could stir with the
best of them. It was about the extent of my culinary skill, as it happened. I
scanned the shelf of cookbooks and picked one out by a chef with a
French-sounding name. And sure enough, there it was in the index under B. I
flipped to the relevant page.

“Know
this,” the chef declaimed in bold type. “If you haven’t made béarnaise before,
you will surely fuck this sauce up.”

“Well,
fuck you too, Anthony Bourdain,” I said. “Way to encourage the beginners.
Dick.”

I
scanned the instructions. There seemed to be a lot of faff in the beginning
with the butter. What difference would melting it and skimming stuff off the
top make, anyway, I thought. Butter was butter was butter – loaded with
calories and not very good for you, but I could see no sign of the impurities
he was waffling on about in the perfectly ordinary pack of Waitrose Essential
unsalted butter I’d purchased earlier. I’d just skip that bit and crack on.

I
chopped the tarragon and shallot – well, not shallot, because I hadn’t checked
the recipe before I went shopping, but Google assured me that a small onion
would do in extremis. We had no sherry vinegar either, but even Bourdain conceded
reluctantly that wine vinegar would be an acceptable substitute, and there was
plenty of that – Jonathan used it for salad dressing, I remembered, not
allowing myself to wonder whether making your own salad dressing wasn’t a bit
weird when you could buy perfectly good stuff in bottles – low-fat stuff even.

“Separate
the eggs,” Bourdain commanded. I looked at my box of organic eggs. They were
already separate, weren’t they? Each one in its own little cardboard nest.
Baffled, I turned again to Google.

Half
an hour and a dozen eggs later, I had the requisite four yolks in a bowl, a
stack of potatoes cut into matchsticks – more like firelighters, but who cared
– and a salad made. Salad I could do – I’d lived on the stuff for the best part
of ten years. It looked beautiful – cherry tomatoes and avocado resting on a
bed (see, I thought, I can do the cheffy lingo too) of pre-washed baby leaves
from a packet. I unearthed a jar of Jonathan’s famous dressing from the fridge
and sloshed some over my leafy creation.

Now
– back to the béarnaise. I scanned the next paragraph of the impossibly
complicated instructions.

“What
the actual fuck is a Bain Marie, Anthony?” I demanded. I felt like the chef and
I should be on first-name terms, given the tribulations we’d shared. Google
again. “Well, if it’s a bowl over a pan of hot water, why didn’t you just damn
well say that, instead of wanging on about Mary’s bath?”

I
turned on some music, poured a gin and tonic, and turned back to the recipe.

 
I might not be much of a cook but I could follow instructions, and follow them
I did. I whisked like a woman possessed, adding the butter gradually like it
said, and to my utter amazement, a few minutes later, a cohesive yellow mass
had formed in the bowl.

“Yes!
In your face, poncy macho chef man,” I said, allowing myself a minor victory
dance around the kitchen, the whisk held aloft over my head, ignoring the
splatters of sauce that ricocheted off the ceiling on to the floor.

The
major hurdle was over. I could cook chips – Darcey went through a stage that
lasted a couple of months when she was three when that was literally all she
would eat, and we’d run out of frozen oven chips often enough that the deep-fat
frier and I were not strangers. At the time, I’d panicked, thinking that my daughter
was destined for a life of obesity and an early death from coronary artery
disease. I’d even booked an appointment with the GP, taking precious time off
work, to discuss my concerns.

“All
toddlers and small children go through a picky phase,” the doctor said, barely
looking up from her computer screen.

“Yes,
but chips,” I said. “If it was lettuce, or something, it would be…”

“Mrs
Payne,” the GP said sternly. “Your daughter is a perfectly healthy child, a
little underweight if anything. If she’s still so restricted in her diet in a
couple of months, we’ll talk again. In the meantime, you might want to work at
addressing your own anxiety about weight-related issues.”

And
that was me told. So I fried chips then, and I fried them now. I was frying away,
watching the potatoes gradually changing colour in the hot oil, when Jonathan
came into the kitchen.

“Hello,
darling,” he said. “Sorry I’ve been so dull all day. What have you been up to?”

“I’m
making dinner,” I said proudly. “Look, there’s steak from Waitrose, and salad,
and I even made béarnaise.”

“You
what?” Jonathan said, sticking a finger into the sauce. “You did too. That’s
amazing. I wish I was hungrier, so I could do justice to this.”

I
looked at him. There were deep shadows under his eyes, which were red with
strain. His shoulders looked bowed, too, from spending the day hunched over his
laptop.

“You
need to eat,” I said. “And you need a drink, too. I bought a couple of bottles
of red – over there. And then you can help me cook the steak.”

“Oh,
pinot noir,” Jonathan said. The way he looked at the label told me I’d fucked
up, but he wasn’t going to. “Lovely.”

He
poured us both a glass, sipped his, and grimaced almost imperceptibly.

“Why
don’t I clear the decks a bit before we cook the meat?” he said.

“Thanks.”
I kissed him, then turned my attention back to the chips. Golden perfection – that
was the thing. I poked at the hot oil with my slotted spoon, fishing out the
bits of potato that looked brownest and placing them tenderly on a mat of paper
towels.

Then
I heard Jonathan say, “Jesus Christ, what’s this?”

“What’s
what?” I turned around and saw him looking into the kitchen sink, as horrified
as if the Loch Ness monster had emerged from its depths. And to be fair, what
was there was no less grim in its way.

Steaming
water was bubbling up from the plughole, clogged with strands of opaque white…
something. Like tentacles. Tentacles with yellow bits. Like a poached egg gone
horribly wrong.

Jonathan
realised what I’d done before I did.

“Laura,
did you put raw egg down the sink?”

“I
might have done,” I said, feeling like Owen must do when I ask him whether he’s
forgotten to wipe his bottom after doing a poo. “Why, what’s wrong with that?”