‘Where’s Rory again?’ Cordelia Thorne – Thorne by name and sometimes by nature – asked Sue as she lay out her detailed plans for the pageant all over the kitchen table, so she could complete her final checklist before the silent rehearsal. The children were asleep, thank God. Meadow had been asking to talk to Daddy again, and both Petal and Forest had wanted to know when he would be home. It had been almost impossible to distract them sufficiently to stop them asking her questions that she didn’t know the answer to.
‘At a writing convention thingy,’ Sue said, brushing the question away, with a flick of her wrist.
‘He’s been gone a long time.’ Cordelia scowled. ‘Normally it’s a weekend, or a week at most. But this is more than a week, and just before Christmas. I’m surprised you let him go. The kids were asking for him. I tried his phone, but it went straight to answerphone.’
Sue closed her eyes. She had forgotten that Cordelia had Rory’s number, and the sort of incentive that meant she’d try to call him herself.
‘Well, I don’t hold him under lock and key you know,’ she said smartly, turning as she heard Cordelia’s chuckle. ‘I don’t!’
‘Hey listen.’ Cordelia raised her palms. ‘I’m not criticising your methods. I’m just saying that, you have a thumb and Rory lives under it. If anything I admire you and your iron grip on his entire life. If I ever get married, which I never will, I definitely want to marry someone who would also make a good lackey. Now, do you fancy a cuppa? I’m going to make myself a pot and then go and have a zombie Christmas movie marathon. I know what you are thinking – that there are not enough zombie Christmas movies to make up a marathon, well, Sue, you’d be surprised there’s actually—Sue? Wait … are you crying?’
Sue turned her back on Cordelia and tried her best to stop her shoulders from shaking, as the sobs threatened in the base of her throat.
‘Seriously.’ Cordelia crossed to her side and peered at her face. ‘Sue, you don’t have Rory under your thumb. I was joking! It was a joke. Is it the change, are you having the change?’
‘I’m only forty!’ Sue whipped around. ‘I’m not old, I’m not a decrepit dried-up old shrew. That’s the trouble with you young people, with your hair, and your skin and your perkiness. You think that a woman gets into her forties and she’s worth nothing any more, no one looks at her, no one cares about her.’
‘What? Wait.’ Cordelia took a couple of steps back, her hands gravitating to her hips. ‘Sue, dude. What’s going on? Where’s General Sue, the woman who runs Poldore like a well-oiled machine, beloved and feared by her people in equal measure?’
Sue sat down, feeling every ounce of fight and emotion draining from her body, flowing out through her fingertips as the tears she no longer had the strength to hold back began to flow in earnest. Suddenly she didn’t care about the pageant any more, or Santa’s grotto, or co-ordinating the fake snow consignment, or any of the things that usually kept her on her toes at this time of year. Nope, she just wanted to drink a bottle of Baileys and go to sleep.
‘Rory has left me,’ she said. ‘He left almost two weeks ago. I found a note on my pillow.’
‘Don’t be silly, Rory hasn’t left you,’ Cordelia said, sitting down beside her. ‘I mean, you know, he’s a nice enough man, but he can barely tie his own shoelaces, let alone survive on his own, in the wild.’
‘He’s not on his own,’ Sue said. ‘He’s with Vivien Marley from his book group, last known location a Travelodge somewhere near Totnes. I know this because he’s been using my credit card.’
‘Shitting shit.’ Cordelia summed the situation up with her usual succinctness.
‘Indeed,’ Sue said. ‘Of course there have always been other women …’
‘Fuck, no way? What? But why didn’t you bin him ages ago then?’
‘Because we’re married, because we have children,’ Sue said. ‘Because I didn’t want to be forty and divorced.’
‘Mate.’ Cordelia shook her head. ‘If he was mine, I’d remove his eyes with a spoon, but … well, if he’s come back before then surely he will come back again?’
‘Not this time.’ Sue took a breath, feeling suddenly calmer. ‘Before they were never after him, they were after the castle, or the money, or at least the money they thought came with a castle. Marissa thought she was getting a life of luxury—’
‘That bitch Marissa had a thing with Rory McSnory? No offence,’ Cordelia added hastily.
‘I don’t think any is likely to be taken at this point, do you?’ Sue said, wearily. ‘But Vivien, she isn’t his usual type, a young girl with pound signs in her eyes. She’s older, although not as old as me. She thinks he’s brilliant, that’s what he said in the note he left. Brilliant, funny, sexy and worth her respect. He says she treats him like a man.’
‘Then she’s making a big mistake. What sort of a man worth a fart walks out on his wife and kids before Christmas?’
‘I don’t suppose there would have ever been a good time,’ Sue said thoughtfully. ‘If he’d left it to New Year then we would all have known that Christmas was a sham.’
‘Well, good riddance,’ Cordelia said. ‘OK, he’s gone. So what you have to do next is to start getting your life back on track.’
‘I’ve been trying to just keep things the same.’
‘Things are not the same,’ Cordelia said. ‘They are not, there are things you have to do, Sue. First of all you have to talk to the children. They won’t thank you for lying to them, they need to know … Of course we can’t tell them that Daddy is a lying piece of scum, but we can start explaining that he isn’t coming back. And you need to tell your friends – Alex and Tamsyn will want to know. There are nights of inappropriate drinking and retro-disco dancing to be organised, revenge sex with perfect strangers to be had, dating profiles to be set up online. You can’t handle this stuff alone, you need your people.’
‘I don’t really think you and I have quite the same idea about the best ways to get over a broken marriage.’
‘Well, all I know is that it’s a system that has never failed my friends. Not me, of course, I am never going to fall in love. I am never going to let some man be able to have control of my psyche.’
Cordelia picked Sue’s bag up and fished her purse out.
‘What are you doing?’ Sue asked her.
‘I’m not doing anything,’ Cordelia said. ‘You’re going to ring your credit card provider and tell them to stop your card. If he is such a man, he can start acting like one and funding his little adventure himself, then let’s see how long Vivien respects him for when he asking her to foot the bill.’
Sue took the card and looked at it.
‘It almost doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘I’m so up to my ears in debt with the castle, it’s probably a matter of months if not weeks before it all goes anyway. What difference does fifty quid on a Travelodge make?’
‘Sue … What?’ Cordelia ran her fingers through her dark hair, which she had recently streaked with a neon blue. ‘Seriously? Why don’t any of us know this? You spend your life helping everyone else! How much did it cost you to put everyone up during the floods? And you never asked for a penny, and now … now you are saying you are what – bankrupt? Why have you never said you need help?’
‘I’m a Montaigne,’ Sue said, straightening her shoulders. ‘I give help, I don’t receive it. It has always been thus and I will not be the first in my family to fail. This is a private residence. It’s no one’s responsibility except mine. How can I possibly ask people, most of whom lost something, if not everything, in the flood, to help me cling on this ridiculous old relic? No, for now, I need to pull myself together and get back on the wagon and get through Christmas somehow. I will tell the children, but not yet. After Christmas. They are so excited, how can I ruin it for them now?’
‘Well,’ Cordelia said, ‘obviously this is your life, you have to handle the best way you can. But don’t try to do it on your own. Let me tell Tam and Alex, at least. They won’t tell anyone else – but at least we can be here for you. And, honestly, revenge sex really is a tonic. I’ve got a mate, a drummer, he loves older women, and he’s got fantastic rhythm, if you know what I’m saying.’ There was a pause. ‘Well, what I’m saying is that he is very good at sex, not that I know, I haven’t slept with him, he’s got a ridiculous beard, but I know two people who have and they say he’s excellent.’
Sue stared sightless at her pages of notes for a few seconds, waiting for her focus to return.
‘Fine,’ Cordelia said. ‘Maybe it is a bit soon for revenge sex. But the way I see it, we could sit down here, ticking things off a list that you’ve ticked things off of at least ten times before, or we could get a bottle of some of that fancy wine you keep in the cellar, or two, take them upstairs and watch zombie Christmas movies together until we pass out. Yeah, like a night off? You’ve heard of those, right? And you can pretend that you are bashing in Rory’s brains with the butt of a rifle until they splatter up the wall.’ Cordelia wrinkled up her nose. ‘Too much?’
‘Do you know what? Not, not too much at all. I’ve had it up to here with reality for a day.’ Sue dropped her pen on the table. ‘Come on then, Cordelia Thorne, introduce me to the world of zombie reindeers.’