25 May
I put my key in the door and place three large shopping bags and one small person on the floor.
Like often lately, I need coffee. Being ashamed is exhausting; nobody mentions that.
Next to the kettle is a piece of paper.
It strikes me then how rarely I see Ed’s handwriting. Cards. And now notes, telling me he’s leaving me.
It’s short, Ed’s note.
Staying with my parents for a few days. I think we need some space after the pressure of the last month. Let’s talk later. Ed x
A little life holiday. How I wish I could book myself one of those. Thanks for the support, Ed.
It’s been ticking away in the back of my mind, the question of whether he is cheating, and it comes back now. Is that where my husband Ed has really gone?
And where does our child come into this, I think, as the kettle boils? Could I just leave, no matter how angry or hurt I was? Of course I couldn’t.
I make my coffee strong. Message Ed a picture of the note asking what the hell he’s doing and realise that I’m not sad, but furious.
Shaking, now, with rage.
Shaking with rage at Ed, at a skewed world that means I can’t sashay out of our home and our responsibilities but my husband can. It’s hard to do dramatic sashays when you have to make fifteen phone calls to sort childcare and pack a Peppa Pig rucksack first.
But mostly I’m shaking with rage at whoever has done this to me and started the Jenga bricks of my life toppling over. I had it all, I think. Now look at me.
I lean back against the kitchen island with my coffee in two hands and sigh. If not Ollie – and how can I think anything else, really – is Mitch the only credible option?
I can’t imagine he ever thought about me or cared enough to have done this. But he did film it; that’s pretty damning. And then there was the oddness of thinking I saw him that day. Too much to be a coincidence?
I can’t think straight.
I message the girls to see what they’re up to because I need human contact. Adults.
Emma replies.
Bumped into Cora at a baby class so came back to hers, she says. Asha too. Come!
I down my drink and grab my keys and strap Poppy in to the pram to walk the ten minutes round to Cora’s.
‘Coffee?’ Emma asks as I walk in and I nod, mute.
Emma puts Cora’s coffee machine on and does mine, then places her already used mug back underneath it. There are at least three very expensive candles vying for aromatic prominence around the house and making me struggle with the urge to gag.
There are kisses and hugs. I am sweating.
Emma turns to the girls. I see them all exchange looks. I realise I have barely said a word since I got here. That I may look a bit odd.
‘Scarlett, are you … all right?’ asks Asha, soft.
I stare at her and cannot remember how to lie. I wonder if they think it’s odd, me having this extra time off work when I regularly bemoan the size of our mortgage. And all of a sudden something is obvious: my mind has run out of space for all of this secrecy. My lies and evasions are pushing at the seams of my mind; they need out.
I sit down at the table and stare at the ‘Live. Laugh. Love’ sign on Cora’s wall. Out of the corner of my eye, I see my friends look at each other. I start to cry.
‘Scarlett?’ says Emma.
Put your seatbelts on, friends: I’m about to go off-message. This is nothing to do with sleep deprivation or weaning methods. We are truly friends now, so this is what you get.
‘Everything is a mess,’ I say, relief in admission. In not swerving and dodging.
Asha glances nervously at Cora. Emma goes to check on the babies and then loiters from her mid position at the door, the nearest thing to childcare that we are going to have for the next half hour while everyone prioritises the gossip of my life over the safety of their children.
‘Ed and I are having some problems,’ I say. ‘He’s moved out for a while.’
I know, already, that the girls are thinking of a spark, diminished after having a small child, not an awkwardness that’s come from me making a sex tape.
So I go with that, let them assume. It’s a version of the truth, which is always easier than an outright lie, and it means I have to speak less. It’s like letting a little air out of a balloon, just to stop it popping.
‘Things haven’t been great,’ I start, but after that I don’t need to decide which way to go because they fill in the gaps for themselves.
And suddenly, the story of Ed and I is forgotten. No one cares. Everyone has seized it and taken it as an excuse to say what they wanted to say, like people do.
Everyone wants this to be a mirror.
‘We were at each other’s throats all of last week, babe,’ says Emma, eager, as she sticks her head around the door to check on the babies. She looks back at us. ‘Always bad on my period.’
Then she goes into the living room to check which one of our children has a nappy that is laughing in the face of the myriad scented candles.
‘Cora, it’s you,’ she says as she re-emerges, then looks sheepish. ‘I mean, it’s Penelope.’
‘Penelope,’ mutters Cora darkly under her breath as she stomps off in her designer slippers, because this is just the opener she needs to unleash about her marriage and she’s missing her window. Bloody Penelope.
We all know that Cora is dismissive of her husband, despite the approximately forty-five pictures around the house of their stunning, expensive wedding involving about a hundred guests in the Caribbean. There’s her other man, Hunter, of course. He’s a key sign.
Cora is back in the room, clutching a bag of poo as far as she can away from her vest top and her prominent fake boobs.
‘What did I miss?’
I watch her drop it in the bin.
Cora goes to the fridge and pours a glass of rosé then puts it in front of me.
‘No I’m okay,’ I say, but she holds a hand up.
Glasses arrive all around me along with a tray of pretty gross mint chocolate cupcakes that Cora is ‘trying out’ and suddenly everyone has one or the other or both in their hand and is speaking over each other, with vents about their marriages masquerading as wisdom.
And yet halfway through that glass of too-sweet wine, with a group of women I have known for only just over a year, I feel the nearest to comforted I have been in a long time.
‘You know what we need?’ says Asha, gently. ‘A night away. A spa?’
‘I could ask my mum to have Seth,’ says Emma, nodding. ‘She’d just be glad to see him. Glad I got in touch.’
I know things between Emma and her mum – between Emma and her whole family – are strained because they don’t get on with her husband. It’s not even an option that he would stay home alone with his own son. We all know that by now, as we know a lot of things by now.
‘I’ve got a decent amount of milk in the freezer after the pumpathon.’ Asha smiles.
An almost token eye-roll from Cora.
A weekend of space from Ed and this nightmare sounds idyllic. Glorious. That’s if he’s even at home anyway. Depends how long this life holiday goes on for. I am crying again, suddenly, as the content of Ed’s note hits and I don’t know whether it’s the afternoon wine or the fact that Emma is holding Poppy on her hip and taking some of the weight of life, but I am appreciative of everything they do for me and of their role: new, odd, intense. Crucial.
So what if we have barely anything in common? We’re building something here, something long-term. It takes a village, and all that.
I look at Emma, jiggling a sleepy Poppy whose eyes are drooping. She rubs at them and leans into Emma. I glance at Cora, holding my hand with her silky smooth manicured one and still suggesting, every now and then, that an affair with a beautiful bendy man can do wonders.
I look at Asha, tipping a bag of Waitrose crisps into a bowl and pushing it in front of my face. I think I would like to have an affair, if we could leave out the other parts and it could just involve someone holding my hand and decanting my crisps.
These women are a team, I think, as I look around at them. And a team is what I’ve been missing.
‘I’m up for a trip,’ I say, as Emma nervously passes me a tissue. ‘I’m absolutely up for a trip.’