She’s starting to break apart, Scarlett, just small pieces of shrapnel coming away, and that’s satisfying. I look at her hair sometimes, and see oily roots, white residue from a rushed application of dry shampoo. Ugh.
I see her eyes starved of sleep, heavy. A brief expression of self-doubt that says her confidence had been delivered a blow. Less alpha, more beta. They are fleeting, but I cling to them. Smile as she walks away. This is what I wanted.
But it isn’t enough. Because Scarlett still functions; the building blocks of her life still in place.
Would money help? Stripping her of that?
The Salloways’ house is a four-bedroomed listed building on a private road and Scarlett calls it ‘the cottage’ like we’d all have to stoop to get in there before we sit, shivering, in the three-foot-squared kitchen eating jacket potatoes with own-brand margarine. Ha.
‘I’m working class!’ she protests when she is boozy, her accent deliberately at its strongest.
But there is no evidence of it, this working-class core she claims.
It is another thing that is hard not to roll your eyes at because Scarlett orders the most expensive wine on the list without thinking about it. Clicks order on designer bags while she watches TV. And we all know there is cash, inherited from her mum.
Money isn’t what this is about though.
It’s about so many things, the unfairness of the world, those rolled eyes, a man I love, but money isn’t one of them.
Or it wasn’t meant to be, at least.