2

Sylvie, Kensal Town, London, Now

I heave the last cardboard box from the house to the car, hands on the bulging base so bits of me don’t fall out into the street and cause a scene. I glance back at the house, my eyes stinging. Is this it? My family home, like the marriage I’ve stuck with for so long, finally excavated of me?

My married life has been bookended by moving boxes. Arrivals and exits. Whoops and sobs. When we first moved in, nineteen years ago, I was five months pregnant, a busy makeup artist with a carry-on case always packed, ready to easyJet off for a shoot abroad at short notice. I didn’t own a salad spinner. I’d never changed a nappy. My engagement ring—antique gold, pea-green emerald—had belonged to Steve’s great-aunt and made me smile every time I looked at it. The wedding would happen after I’d lost the baby weight (not all of it). I’d wear an ivory lace vintage dress and T-bar shoes, just the right side of Courtney Love. We’d dance to Pulp’s “Common People.” We’d be married forever.

I couldn’t have imagined this street changing either.

Cheap for Zone 2, it was home to a kebab shop, a resident loon, who shouted abuse at lampposts, and a thriving drug den. The front doors were painted a council rust red. Now those doors are mostly sludgy shades of charcoal gray. The kebab shop is a much-Instagrammed florist, selling dragon-red dahlias. There are five Sophies living on the street. Probably fifty juicers. If we had to buy our house now, we wouldn’t be able to afford it. We? That mental slip again. Keeps happening.

I say, “Good-bye,” under my breath. I’ve been moving boxes out of the house into my tiny apartment for the last month, tentatively, while Steve’s at work. Now it’s done, I feel elated. But my heart aches. I can’t shut it as easily as the front door. So many memories remain in that house, stored like sunlight in a jar: Annie’s ascending height marks penciled on the bathroom wall; the baby-pink rose we planted to mark the grave of Lettuce, Annie’s rabbit; folders of tear sheets, editorial magazine work I did when starting out, well over twenty years ago, happy to be cool rather than properly paid. I’ve no storage space now. No garden, either. And way too many bills to settle on my own.

A trial separation, Steve still calls it. He didn’t believe me when I first told him six weeks ago. We were eating prawn linguine in silence. I’d been away that week, working on a countrywear catalog shoot in the Highlands, involving lots of corduroy, shivering models, and driving rain. Steve had forgotten the bin day—crime A—so we’d be stuck with the recycling for another two weeks, and the bin was stuffed full already. But really it was about something else—other layers of rubbish built up in our marriage (crimes B–Z).

I watched Steve decapitate a prawn with his fingers, humming under his breath. His face—the angular dark brows, the childhood BMX scar on his chin—was so familiar it was as if I couldn’t see him. “What have I done now?” he said, not looking up at me.

I put down my fork. The words just tumbled out. “Steve, I can’t do this . . . us . . . anymore.” A moment passed. Steve blinked rapidly. He waited for me to apologize or blame my hormones. The music shuffled on to Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day.” Normally we’d quip about the irony. We didn’t. It felt like nothing would be funny again.

“But I love you,” Steve stuttered, floored. And at that moment—8:11 P.M., 19 June—I knew he meant it, he really did, but also that he couldn’t imagine life without me, which is not quite the same. Then I thought about our eighteen-year-old daughter, Annie, out in Camden celebrating finishing her last A-level exam, sweetly oblivious, and I burst into tears. What was I doing?

Love. Stability. An unbroken home. The moment Annie slid into the world, unfathomably precious, I’d promised her all of this. I didn’t mourn my lost freedoms, even though my career soon shrank like cashmere in a hot wash. I could no longer travel or work late into the night. I was exhausted. Even my feet were fat. But there was no getting around it, I was also deeply, shockingly happy, maybe for the first time in my life. My magnetic north had flipped. So yes, I’d get motherhood right. That was all that mattered. I’d give Annie absolutely everything I had.

To this end, I’ve done my very best to forget about Lisa from HR—early thirties, balayage blonde, spilled her Negroni on my best Isabel Marant dress at Steve’s office Christmas party—and, I’m 55 percent sure, the woman he plays doubles with at the tennis club—and other encounters I’ve sensed but not been able to prove these last few years.

If you learn as a kid how to bury painful things—for me, everything that happened in a forest long ago, the sort of questions that’ll stop my mother dead in her tracks, with a coronary grimace—you get pretty bloody good at blocking things out. And keeping secrets. Only secrets don’t go away completely, it turns out. Like moths in a wardrobe, they nibble away, hidden, before you notice the hole.

As Annie’s schooldays drew to a close earlier this summer, I felt an internal shift, one I hadn’t expected. Like a gear change on my bike, a strange freewheeling feeling, then a clunking into place. A little voice in my head started to whisper: You’re forty-six years old. If you don’t leave now, when? What sort of example are you setting for Annie anyway? She’d want you to be happy.

Annie didn’t quite see it like that. “So you’ve been living a lie all this time? Pretending?” she stuttered when I broke the news, desperately trying to make our separation sound like a Gwyneth-style conscious uncoupling (admittedly, a stretch). I couldn’t bear to tell her about Steve’s affair, since that’s an adult mess, and my own humiliating business, a symptom of our breakup as much as its cause. Also, despite everything, he’s always been a brilliant father. So I said, “We’re united in our love for you, Annie. That’s the most important thing.” Which is true. But when I tried to hug her, she pushed me away.

“Why didn’t you warn me? You know what, Mum? It’s been like this all my life, you going la, la, la, everything’s great, just don’t ask too many questions.”

I flinched, sensing I’d tapped into something else, more subcutaneous, a vein of resentment that went beyond Steve’s and my split.

“And it’s bullshit.”

The next day Annie decamped to my mother’s cottage in Devon for the summer, where Granny’s sympathetic shoulder was waiting. “Right now she’s lying on the sofa, eating a tub of my homemade caramel ice cream, watching reruns of Girls,” my mother reported back reassuringly on the phone later that evening. “Of course she doesn’t hate you! No, stop it, Sylvie. You’re a wonderful mother. But it’s a bit of a shock. She feels duped. She needs time to digest it. We all do,” she added, which I took as a small dig.

I hadn’t warned Mum, either. We both share difficult news on a need-to-know basis. Like mother, like daughter.

“Let her have a carefree summer by the sea. I’ll take good care of her, don’t you worry. But who’ll look after you?”

I laughed and said I was quite able to look after myself. Yes, really. But after many years of wifedom, I needed to find out who I was.

“Who you are?” she said quietly, after a beat or two of fully loaded silence, then swiftly changed the subject.

Annie quickly sorted herself out with a waitressing job and a boyfriend. On the phone she’ll often claim, not wholly convincingly, the signal’s dodgy and promise to phone back later, then doesn’t. If I ask about the new boyfriend—“Dotty about him,” Mum says—Annie immediately shuts down the conversation, as if I’ve lost the right to her confidence. Can I meet him? Silence. When will she come back to London and see my new apartment? “Soon,” she says, often with a muffled giggle, as if the boyfriend is there in the background, nuzzling her neck. “Gotta go. Love you. Yeah, miss you too, Mum.”

At least she’s having fun, I reason as I park the car on my new street that’s not nearly as nice as my old one and grab the cardboard box out of the boot. I can hear the building’s summer pulse already. Out of its open windows, the competing sounds of cooped-up children, hip-hop, radio commentary—“Goal!”—and the opera singer on the second floor, throat open, practicing her scales. A group of hooded teenage boys watch me idly, leaning back against a graffiti-spattered wall, smoking weed. I smile brightly at them, refusing to be intimidated, and climb determinedly up four flights of stairs, the last bit of my married life weighty in my arms.

The block is what estate agents call “industrial cool,” a mix of council and private with concrete communal walkways and balconies overlooking the Grand Union Canal. Slightly edgy. My apartment—with two small bedrooms, the nicest one ready for Annie, yet to be used—is owned by an understanding old friend, Val, and usually rented as an Airbnb. It’s an immaculate vision of pink gallery-picture walls, whitewashed Scandi floorboards, Berber rugs, and enormous, hard-to-kill waxy-leafed houseplants. More important, it’s only a couple of tube stops from the old house, so Annie can move between Steve and me easily, as she pleases. Or not.

I drop the box to the floor and wish there was someone I could shout to “Put the kettle on!”

Silence chases me around, like a cat. I flick on the radio and open the balcony’s glass doors, arms outstretched, head thrown back, pretending I’m in an old French movie. The city rumbles in, smelling of canal, diesel, and beer-soaked late-July heat. I lift my face to the sunshine and smile. I can do this.

Even after I’ve lived here a month, the view from the balcony is a novelty, as though big gray London’s cleaved open its hidden green heart and let me in. The color of matcha tea, it’s an urban highway for dragonflies, butterflies, and birds. Other interesting wildlife: a thirtysomething, who likes hats, plays guitar, and sings—weirdly unselfconscious, not in tune—on his canal-boat deck in the evenings. A resident heron. Displaced from my old home, I’ve felt a funny kinship with that tatty urban heron—awkward yet stoic, no spring chicken—and can’t help but see it as a symbol of my strange new freedom. No sign of it yet this morning.

I rest my arms on the balustrade, my dark curls starting to frizz, and my mind restlessly twitches forward, like the hand of a clock, to work, the earliest acceptable time to drink a glass of wine, then Annie. Images bloom in my mind. Mum yomping across a beach, toddler Annie on her shoulders; Annie curled up on the sofa, like a silky mammal, in a nest of cushions with a hoard of electronic devices; her freckles, persimmon stars, impossible for a makeup artist’s brush to replicate. I miss those freckles. I miss her. And I can still recall, as if it happened hours ago, the precise sensation of running my fingertip over her first tooth, hidden under the sore scarlet gum, intent on surfacing.

Out of the corner of my eye, the heron, my freedom bird, swoops down and turns into a statue on the bank. I smile at it. My mobile rings. Not recognizing the number, suspecting spam, I flick it to voice mail. It rings again. “Hello . . . Sorry? . . . Yes, Sylvie. Sylvie Broom . . . What?” My breath catches. The heron’s huge wings hinge open and it holds them there, still, open, frozen at the first intention of flight. Time slows. The words “an accident” snag the baked London afternoon. And with a clap of feathers and air, my heron’s gone.