You Can’t Fall in Love With Your Ex (Can You?) (36 page)

Even
so, the carrier bags were not light. I felt my shoulder muscles protesting at
the weight of them as I walked out into the street, and noticed it had started
to rain again. I had no umbrella, and even if I had, I needed both arms to
balance the bags, so it wouldn’t have helped.

I
thought about waiting for a bus to take me the one stop to home, or even
calling a taxi, but then I thought how ridiculously feeble that would be. It
was only a few hundred yards; only a bit of rain. So I walked on, but as I did
so, the shower intensified to a downpour. My hair was soaked and dripping down
my face; the legs of my jeans were sodden.

Reluctantly,
I gave up and huddled under a bus shelter with a group of similarly wet,
disconsolate shoppers. We looked at one another with a mixture of fellow
feeling and hostility – I knew the collective thinking was running along the
lines of, ‘I’m wet, you’re wet, we’re all wet. We’re all in it together – but
what if someone comes along who is also wet and needs this more than we do?’

And,
inevitably, it happened.

A
woman with a guide dog came down the street, pulling one of those wheely
trolleys. She needed one hand for the dog and one for the trolley, and she was
soaked through. The dog, of course, looked perfectly happy, trotting proudly
along leading its mistress home.

There
was a sort of collective shuffle among the bus shelter’s occupants, like in a
Tube carriage when a pregnant woman gets on. Everyone knows someone should get
up and give up their place, but no one wants it to be them. No one meets anyone
else’s eyes, especially not those of the person who needs a seat.

Except
this woman didn’t have eyes to meet – well, she did, obviously, but they were
concealed behind dark glasses. I had a brief tussle with my conscience, but my
conscience easily won. After all, I was wet anyway – how much wetter could I
get? I headed back into the downpour and approached the woman and her dog.

“Excuse
me,” I said. “There’s a bus shelter just here, if you want to get out of the
rain?”

“Thank
you, dear,” she said. “That’s very kind. Isn’t it the wettest August you’ve
ever known?”

“Dismal,”
I agreed, steering her under the shelter, into the last corner of space. “There
you go. I hope you get home safe, when it eventually stops raining.”

And,
my good deed for the day done, I hurried on towards the house.

But
before I got as far as the next corner, I felt a tap on my shoulder and a voice
behind me said, “Carry your bags, madam?”

I
spun around. It was Felix. At first I thought I must be hallucinating – but no,
it was unquestionably him, grinning at me from under his umbrella.

“You’re
in New York,” I said stupidly.

“I
came back,” he said. “I’ll tell you all about it, when we’re somewhere dry.”

“I
live just round the corner,” I said. “But you know that, of course.”

“I
do,” he said. “Are you going to invite me back for a coffee?”

Briefly,
I wondered whether that would be the stupidest idea ever. Then I said, “Fancy a
coffee?”

“I
thought you’d never ask.” He took my shopping bags in one hand and my arm in
the other and, huddled under his umbrella, we walked the rest of the way home.

“I’ll
make the coffee,” he said. “You get yourself dry.”

Gratefully,
I kicked off my soggy sneakers and headed upstairs. God, I was a sight. My
mascara had washed off my eyelashes and spread itself down my face, my hair was
drenched rats’ tails and my top had gone completely see-through, revealing my
red bra. I dried off, changed my clothes and repaired my face, then hurried
back to the kitchen.

Felix
handed me a mug of coffee and I rummaged in the carrier bags and found a packet
of biscuits.

“They’re
only Jammie Dodgers,” I said apologetically. “For the children.”

“My
favourite,” he said, ripping open the pack.

“So,
are you going to tell me what you’re going here?” I said. “I thought the
Dream
run started last week.”

“It
did,” he said. “But I took a few days off. I’m flying back tomorrow, and I’ll
be there for the rest of the summer, then I’m back in London, hopefully for the
foreseeable future.”

“Why?”
I said. “I mean, why did you come back?”

“For
an audition.”

The
excitement he radiated told me the answer, but I asked the question anyway.
“And you got the part?”

“I
did. I totally fucking nailed it. They love me.”

“So
they should.” His pleasure was infectious – I smiled at him over my coffee mug
and he smiled back. “What is it?”

“It’s
a new BBC series, about the Wars of the Roses. Kind of
Game of Thrones
meets
The Tudors
. Big budget, lots of galloping horses and heaving
bosoms – you know the kind of thing. It’s called
A Crown of Thorns
.”

“Felix,
that’s amazing,” I said. “They’re not making you play Richard III, are they?
With a prosthetic hump?”

“Guess
again,” he said.

“Whatisname
– the middle one? The drunk who drowned in a barrel of wine?”

“Hell,
no,” he said. “I’m Edward, the hot older brother who gets to shag all the
girls. And the male lead, as it happens.”

“That’s
so brilliant,” I said. “Do you get to smoulder?”

“Of
course,” he said, and smouldered.

I
laughed. “Congratulations. It’s your big break, like you said was going to
happen.”

“Looks
that way,” he said. “And even if nothing comes of it, they’re planning three
seasons so it’ll keep me in lunches at Dmitri’s for a bit. And if it gets
syndicated to the States – but that’s thinking too far ahead.”

“But
why are you here? Not just in London, but here, here?”

“I
came for the biscuits, obviously,” Felix said.

“No,
you didn’t.”

“Okay,
they’re an unexpected bonus. I’m staying down the road, with your friend Zélide.”

“With
Zé? Why?”

“Her
mate Anton told her I was auditioning, and she rang to wish me luck. She
asked me where I was staying, but I hadn’t sorted anything yet, so she offered
her spare bedroom. She’s having a bit of a rough time – I think she wanted
company.”

“She
told me what happened with Rick,” I said.

“And
I wanted – I guess I wanted to see you again, Laura. To make sure you were
okay, after what happened in New York.”

I
said, “Jonathan found out about us. He’s moved out and I don’t know if he’s
going to come back.”

Felix
said, “Oh God. I’m so sorry.”

The
joy had drained out of his face. He didn’t look triumphant at all, just shocked
and concerned. I sniffed and felt a tear trickle down my cheek.

“Sweetheart,
don’t cry.” He jumped to his feet and wrapped his arms around me, holding me
tight. There was nothing sexual in his embrace, and no desire in my response to
it. I let him hold me while I wept, but all I could think was how much I wanted
another pair of arms around me, another chest to press my face against – the
embrace of the man I’d loved and trusted for ten years, whose trust I’d
betrayed.

“You
really love him, don’t you?” Felix said.

I
nodded my head against his chest, smearing my newly applied eye make-up all
over his T-shirt.

“Then
we’ll just have to get him back for you,” he said.

The
first thing I said to my orthopaedic surgeon, when I’d emerged from the
anaesthetic and she came to see how I was doing, was, “Will I be able to dance
again?”

To
her eternal credit, she didn’t actually roll around on the floor pissing
herself laughing. The NHS trains its daughters well.

“Laura,
that was a highly complex fracture,” she said gravely. “A compound one also,
with damage not only to both the medial and lateral maleollus, but also to the
surrounding ligaments and tendons, and the skin, of course. You have two screws
and a plate in your ankle. I see a lot of professional athletes in my work – and
I count dancers among them – and I know you have a better understanding than
most people of how your body works.”

I
nodded. I was still pleasantly goofed out on painkillers. “So it’s bad, right?”

“Athletes
– and dancers – are, in my experience, highly motivated when it comes to their
recovery,” Mrs Bhattacharyya went on. “Believe me, what you have ahead of you,
for the next few weeks and months, will be highly challenging. How well you
recover depends on how well you rise to those challenges.”

“Yes,
but…” I began, and then I stopped. I didn’t need to ask her anything more – her
face, and the x-rays she’d shown me earlier, when she was explaining what had
been done to me, told me everything I needed to know. I didn’t bother asking
her whether I’d be able to run down a flight of stairs or whether the pain that
throbbed through the cushion of morphine would ever go away, or even whether
I’d always walk with a limp. My dancing career was over – that was all that
mattered to me.

I
said, “Okay. Thank you,” and went back to sleep.

I
slept for most of the week I spent in hospital – it felt like I did, anyway.
The physiotherapist’s twice-daily visits were a maddening interruption – more
than the pain, I resented her focus on what seemed to me the trivial matter of
achieving strength in the muscles surrounding my shattered joint, the minor
detail of keeping early-onset arthritis at bay. I wasn’t going to be able to
dance again, so as far as I was concerned I might as well use a wheelchair for
the rest of my life, which I hoped would be short. I was in the grip of shock
and depression, and it made me absolutely horrible to everyone.

Sadie
visited, bringing flowers, chocolates and heaps of glossy magazines. Her
patience was phenomenal – when I snapped at her and asked what the fuck I
wanted with chocolates when they’d only make me even fatter than I was going to
get anyway, she calmly said, “Fine, I’ll have a couple then. They’re from this
artisan place in the village and they’re lovely.”

And
so she sat on the chair next to me, eating chocolates and reading me bits of
scurrilous gossip from
Heat
magazine, and not minding when I snapped
back that I didn’t give a shit what colour Victoria Beckham’s hair was this
week. She knew – and I knew – that her mere presence was as healing as even the
strongest drugs.

When
Roddy came, he was twitchy and overly sympathetic at first, then his flood of
concern dried up and I knew he’d come with not only a basket of slightly
wrinkly grapes that were going an unappealing shade of beige around their
stems, but also an agenda.

“Listen,
Laura,” he said, shifting from foot to foot, ignoring the plastic chair in
which Sadie seemed able to sit tranquilly for hours. “I know you haven’t been
taking Lawsonski’s calls, but…”

“But
what?” I said. My ankle was throbbing and I was very thirsty, but I wasn’t going
to ask Roddy to pour me a glass of water. It was warm, anyway, and tasted
stale. And it no longer made any difference to anyone, least of all me, if I
stayed properly hydrated.

“But
he really wants to see you. He’s so sorry, now he knows everything. I tried to
talk to him that night, babe, I did honestly. But Marius was with him in his
dressing room, and then we got the five-minute call and…”

“Tell
him I never want to see him again,” I said. “Tell him if he comes here I’ll
call security and get him thrown out. Tell him I hate him.”

And
I adjusted my pillows, closed my eyes and pretended to go to sleep.

A
couple of days after that, I went home with Sadie and Gareth, because there was
nowhere else for me to go. I felt like the worst kind of imposition, with my
crutches and my stultifying gloom and my bed in their dining room because I
couldn’t manage the stairs yet, but I also felt safe, because Felix had never
met my family and wouldn’t be able to come and find me there.

Mel,
however, had and could. I was in the conservatory, lying uncomfortably on a
wicker sofa watching the lights flicker on and off on the Christmas tree, when
I heard Gareth say cheerfully behind me, “Visitor for you, Laura.”

Sadie
would never have let Mel past the front door, but she was off coaching a Pony
Club rally, and such nuances were lost on her husband. As far as he was
concerned, guests were to be welcomed with open arms and given tea and scones.
Even as I craned round to see who it was, Gareth was moving a table over and putting
a laden tray down on it.

“If
there’s anything else you need, I’ll be in the field just over there, beyond
the house,” Gareth said. “Or just ring my mobile, obviously.” He flushed,
clearly not knowing how to cope with Mel, who looked like she’d arrived from an
alien planet in her leather hotpants and cashmere poncho.

“Thanks,
Gareth,” I said, and he hurried away, relieved.