Claire sat down on a stool in Caprice, a cocktail bar on Essex Road, and grinned at the two friends who’d been waiting for her. Peggy was slurping her way through a Cosmopolitan, and Candy was still scanning the cocktail list.
‘Spill!’ Peggy said, as soon as Claire’s bum hit the seat of a stool.
‘All in good time,’ Claire said, and picked up a menu herself, hiding a smile. Really, it was too easy to wind Peggy up. ‘Have you ever tried the Movie Night cocktail?’ she asked Candy, her face a picture of innocence. ‘It sounds very appropriate for us.’
‘No,’ said Candy, playing along. ‘What’s in it?’
‘Rum, Disaronno, chocolate sau—’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ Peggy said and snatched the menu out of Claire’s hand. She turned to the barman pointed at Claire. ‘She’ll have a Mojito …’ and then she pointed at Candy ‘… and she’ll have a strawberry Daiquiri.’
‘Hang on!’ said Candy.
‘Peggy!’ Claire shouted at the same time.
Peggy gave them a weary look. ‘You always order the same bloody thing every time,’ she told them, ‘no matter how long you spend picking the menu apart.’ She fixed her gaze on Claire. ‘Come on then.’
Claire released the smile she’d been hiding. ‘Nothing much to tell really. Lovely venue. Lovely party. Lovely people, darling …’
‘That’s it?’ Peggy asked, sounding more than a little disappointed.
‘Just about,’ Claire replied. ‘Oh, but I did go home with a man’s telephone number tucked inside my handbag.’
Peggy squealed and Candy leaned forward. ‘What’s he like?’ she asked, with the kind of vicarious interest reserved for ‘happily marrieds’ when discussing their single friends’ dating lives.
‘Nice,’ Claire said, her smile growing in wattage. ‘Very nice.’ She pulled the cocktail glass the barman had just placed on the bar towards her. ‘And not my usual type at all and maybe that’s a good thing. He’s the complete opposite of my ex.’
‘Really? How?’ Peggy asked.
Claire took a long cool sip of her Mojito and thought for a moment. ‘In my experience, the kind of man who likes to project a perfect image is always high maintenance in one way or another. Take Philip … No one would have thought that under all that grown-up sophistication lay the heart of a whining little boy.’
Peggy’s snorted in agreement. She’d heard all about Philip over the year or so Claire had known her, but Candy was a newer friend and hadn’t heard the whole story. She frowned slightly. ‘You’ve never really talked about him much. What do you mean “high maintenance”?’
Claire stared past the bartender to the mirrored shelves. In between the multicoloured bottles lined up there she could just about see fragments of her own reflection. How could she explain it? Many of her ‘married life’ friends had been just like Candy – nice husband, nice house, nice jobs – and they often hadn’t understood why she’d been unhappy with Philip. On the outside he’d seemed so dashing, so charming.
‘Oh, I don’t know … Take my work, for example. Things were fine when I was lower down the ladder at the ad agency, but then I was offered a couple of promotions and he didn’t like it much.’
‘He told you to turn them down?’ Candy was reassuringly shocked at the idea.
‘No. He was never that outright about things, much more passive-aggressive. He had this way of making these little comments. They’d sound perfectly reasonable on the surface.’
‘Such as?’
Claire shifted position and took another, longer slurp of her drink. ‘For example, when I’d tell him I had to stay late at the office, he’d say of course he wanted me to do well at my job, but …’ she paused to smile wryly ‘… with Philip there was always a but.’ She changed her tone to mimic the smooth, soothing one he’d used on her. ‘It’s just that you work so hard and I miss you when you’re not here. Can’t you say no? I only ask because I love you so much … And before I knew it I was sabotaging my own career, giving in to please him. It was a long time before I realised he never compromised the same way for me.’
Peggy scowled but Candy gave her a sympathetic look. ‘I’m lucky with Mike,’ she said, ‘but I know what it’s like to get a little caught up in being Mrs so-and-so, of wanting so badly for it to work that you’re prepared to give a little bit more than you should. Between that and the kids being really little, I kind of lost myself for a while. That’s why I joined the film club. I thought it was important to have outside friends, outside interests.’
‘Well, we’re very glad you did join,’ Claire said, smiling back at her, and that was definitely the truth. Candy was often the voice of sanity and reason amidst the other more colourful members of the Doris Day Film Club.
Peggy had been silent for a while, processing. She drained the last of her cosmopolitan and signalled for the barman to hit her again. ‘I still don’t think that sounds like the Claire I know.’
Claire sighed. ‘I know, I know … I let him change me, manipulate me to being what he wanted. It was just, after my father, I was so overwhelmed to have a man who loved me like that, who said everything I did was wonderful, that he couldn’t bear to be apart from me.’
Her soul had been hungry for those things for a long, long time, but, after a while, instead of feeling like a lovely warm nest she could snuggle down in, those little requests, those little things he asked her to do for him, multiplied and multiplied, until she felt hemmed in, until breathing had felt difficult once again.
‘In the end, I realised I’d been allowing him to slowly carve away at me, shaping me into who he wanted me to be.’ She paused to let out a low self-mocking chuckle. ‘You know what?’
‘What?’ Candy and Peggy said in unison.
‘He reminded me of those insect-eating plants – you know the ones I’m talking about?’
‘I think so,’ Candy said.
‘The kind that trap flies?’ Peggy asked.
‘Yup,’ Claire said, ‘that’s them. I saw a programme on the Discovery Channel once. Did you know some of them produce narcotic fluid? Once the flies are trapped in the pitcher they don’t bother climbing out again. They’re so affected by all that lovely, hazy sweetness that they hardly notice they’re being slowly digested.’
‘Ew!’ Candy said.
Peggy just laughed. ‘That’s a bit dramatic!’
Claire gave her a knowing look. ‘Well, firstly, pot calling the kettle black! And, secondly, that’s how he made me feel – as if he was slowly squeezing the life out of me, giving me the appearance of freedom, but keeping me trapped buzzing around him with no hope of escape.’
Candy finished shuddering. ‘But you did escape.’
‘Yes,’ Claire said, her tone grateful. ‘I woke up. It all happened when he got fixated on the idea of having a baby.’
‘You didn’t want one?’ Candy asked, sounding surprised. ‘I think you’d make a great mum.’
Claire felt something warm flood her chest. ‘Thank you. There was nothing – nothing – I wanted more than to have the kind of happy secure family I never had.’
She’d wanted to have babies, like Candy had, that grew into cute toddlers. She’d wanted to love them and cuddle them and tell them they were wonderful and they could fly and be whatever they wanted to be.
‘But contemplating all that with Philip suddenly brought my marriage sharply into focus. It didn’t feel like a dream come true when I thought about it. It felt like a life sentence.’
‘So you left?’ Candy asked.
Claire shook her head. ‘If only I’d been that sensible. I was daft enough to keep on trying. We went to counselling and I felt really hopeful when he said all the right things at the sessions, said how much he wanted to change, but when we got back home he’d just carry on the way he always had. It was like he just couldn’t have a grown-up conversation, you know? Instead, he resorted to emotional blackmail and manipulation. Finally, I asked for some breathing space. I couldn’t think straight with him hovering around me all the time. The more he tried to hold on to me, the more restless I got. We separated. I suppose a part of me still hadn’t given up, although I didn’t realise that until he announced he’d found someone else. Claire, mark two.’
Candy looked disgusted. ‘What? A younger, more malleable model?’
Claire let out a snort of dry laughter ‘Yes, and yes. And the total irony is she actually is called Claire, and she’s just as needy and clingy as he is. They really make the perfect couple.’
Peggy made gagging noises and Claire wanted to hug her for it.
‘Honestly, Peg, I ought to thank her for taking him off my hands. The longer we’ve been apart, the more I see that. And Philip isn’t a monster. He just isn’t the man he pretended to be when we first met. I wish them well.’
‘God, you’re in great shape about it,’ Candy said. ‘I’d be a mess if Mike did that to me.’
Peggy nodded. ‘Me? When I’ve been dumped, all I can do is fantasise about slashing his tyres – or something else vital – and then I curl into a ball and cry for a week.’
‘I’ve moved on,’ Claire said simply. She didn’t want to think about the other Claire, her belly currently stretched round with her first child, because every time she did she felt a pang of something sharp and ugly. Jealousy. And anger. Anger that Philip had stolen almost a decade of her life on false pretences and that she seemed to have paid the price for that, not him.
‘Anyway, I’m not sure how I got on to digging up ancient history, especially as there’s a new guy on the horizon – maybe – and he’s nothing like Philip.’
‘Yay!’ Peggy said, returning to her earlier cheeky mood. ‘So when are you going to meet up and get naked together?’
Claire let out a throaty laugh then she slurped as much mojito as she could from around the large chunks of ice in her glass with her straw. ‘I’m not jumping into anything too fast this time around. I did that with Philip and look where it got me.’
Peggy made a disappointed face. ‘You’re no fun,’ she chided.
‘So you’re always telling me.’
Claire took once last sip of her drink, making sure she really had got it all, and looked at the woman in the mirror opposite her.
No, no matter what Peggy said, this time she wasn’t going to be blinded by whatever chemicals addled her brain at the start of a relationship. She was going to take things slowly, get to know him, really check him out. And if he didn’t like that, well, maybe he wasn’t the right one for her anyway.