Page 54 of The F*cking Fabulous Forties Club

As I walk up the drive, reach for the doorbell and press it, I’m rehearsing over and over what I will say, trying to pre-empt what her reaction might be. If she’s angry, I’ll let her rant. If she’s sad, I’ll let her cry. If she looks like she could cut a bitch, I’ll turn and run/hobble down the icy path as quick as I can.

But it’s not Laura who answers the door. It’s Aidan. Aidan who looks tired and middle-aged and has a bit of a paunch which certainly wasn’t there ten years ago. Not that I can judge anyone on excess padding gained in the last decade.

Although I saw him at Kitty’s funeral, it still feels odd to see him now. My brain still expects him to be how he was ten years ago. Just as it expects this house – Laura’s house – to look just as it did. This place was once so familiar to me but now I’d be hard pushed to recognise it. There’s a new front door for a start. One of those fancy black composite jobs which cost a fortune. It’s decorated with a holly-laden Christmas wreath, faux frost glistening on the forest-green leaves.

The laminate flooring Laura once had in her hall has been replaced with high polished tiles. The walls are no longer sage green, but now a subtle greige, with accents of gold in the artwork on the walls. It looks well, but then again, Laura always has had good taste.

‘Becca,’ Aidan says from behind his fine rimmed glasses. Those too are a new addition. None of us can hold back the ageing process.

‘Aidan,’ I say feeling exceptionally awkward. ‘I’ve come to see Laura. Is she in?’ I peek over his shoulder as if expecting her to materialise behind him. There’s a pause and I realise she may not actually be in. I may have come all this way for nothing.

‘Actually, she’s at her mum’s house,’ Aidan says, his tone unreadable. ‘She went back to work today so clearing the house is going to be an evenings-only job. I offered to go with her, but she wanted to go alone. Today has been a tough one, you know.’

The way he says it is so pointed I can tell he’s pissed off at me for upsetting his wife. Of course that’s completely understandable, and I’m certainly not going to try and talk him round – not here, and not now. Laura’s not in. It’s freezing cold and starting to rain the kind of icy cold rain that jabs at your skin like needles. Right now, I just want to go back to my car.

‘It meant a lot to her,’ he says. ‘That you girls came to the funeral. That you’ve been there for her. It’s been a tough time, but finding you girls again added a spring to her step that I haven’t seen in… well…’

He doesn’t finish the sentence and I fight the urge to reply with a snarky ‘ten years’? I know that demon on my shoulder is clawing to be set free and, similarly, I know I have to keep her under control. Nothing good ever happens when she gets out to play.

‘I understand,’ I say instead. There’s a pause that is just bordering on uncomfortable. ‘Well, if you could let her know I called by anyway. I’d best get on home before this weather gets any worse. It’s not a night to be driving.’

As I turn to leave, I hear him say my name again, calling me back. I stop and turn to face him once more.

‘It was a horrible situation, you know. When you and Simon split up,’ Aidan says.

‘When he left me, with two boys who were broken-hearted that their daddy walked out?’ that pesky demon snaps, and I hate myself for letting her. But more than that I hate myself for still feeling abandoned, and feeling it so deeply at that. If anyone had asked me before this moment if I was over the break-up I’d have laughed and told them I was so very, very over it that I didn’t even think about it any more. But this last week has brought a lot of long buried feelings to the surface. Seems I wasn’t wrong when I called the time capsule Pandora’s Shoebox. It has spilled out its messy contents in style and forced us to confront more than we wanted to.

‘Yes,’ Aidan replies. ‘When Simon walked out on you and the boys. I’m not going to defend him, Becca. He may well be my best friend but he really fucked up back then. Yes, your marriage was over and I think even you probably agree that him leaving was ultimately for the best. But he was wrong to cheat on you. I told him that at the time. Laura told him that at the time and many times since.’

His words stop me in my tracks. Laura had told him he was wrong. She had stood up for me. I’ve needed to hear that so much over the last ten years and here it is, being said to me right at the time I might have carpet-bombed what little chance there was left for a lasting reconciliation between us.

Aidan is still speaking. ‘We were angry at him – Laura especially,’ he says, ‘but I wasn’t going to abandon my friend. He might have been an arsehole, but he was my friend and even if you don’t think so, the break-up hurt him too. He lost the family he thought he’d have. He lost the chance to live with his boys as they grew up and yes, he might’ve been to blame for that but it still hurt him. I wasn’t going to let him go through that alone. But I’m sorry it hurt you so badly.’ He pauses, shakes his head wearily. ‘We all could’ve handled it so much better.’

The ‘all’ in that sentence lands heavily because I know that it’s true. Others handled it badly, but so did I. I knew my marriage was past the point of rescue when Simon told me he was leaving. If I’m being honest with myself, it was over for a long time before that day. I didn’t want him to stay. I didn’t fall to pieces and beg him not to go. I knew in my heart we had nothing left worth fighting for. I knew deep down that the boys would benefit more from being in a happy single-parent home than with a mum and dad who had stopped loving each other. If we’d stayed together any longer the apathy with which we now viewed each other would’ve turned to resentment and anger.

I knew it was the right thing to do, even if I couldn’t admit it to myself. I buried the inner voice that was, perhaps, relieved he had made the decision for us, and I didn’t have to ask him to leave. Yes, I was bruised and blindsided by his infidelity, but that same inner voice, if I was being really honest with myself, told me she felt relieved to be single again. I did my best to ignore her and push her down because even with all those thoughts in my head, it was still sad. I was still sad.

I still grieved the life I thought Simon and I would have. We had, after all, loved each other once. We’d loved each other enough to get married and start a family. When we stood at the altar and made our wedding vows we had meant them with every part of our bodies. I dreamt of having a marriage just like the one my mum and dad had, where love was a daily declaration. We thought we would have the perfect, life-long bond and it was going to be sweeter because our joint best friends, Laura and Aidan, would be coming along for the ride with us. Our friendship group was as solid as any could be. Until it wasn’t.

So even though breaking up was the right thing to do, and would’ve been the right thing to do whether or not he had been seeing someone else, it still hurt. And my reactions to everything that happened then came from a place of hurt. Including, I realise with a thud, trying to force Laura to choose between her husband and her best friend. I was wrong to assume she wasn’t calling him out on his behaviour. I had no right to enact the Girl Code Manifesto and tell Laura she couldn’t be friends with my ex-husband and still be friends me, not when Aidan was still very much a part of his life. Standing in the rain, icy rivulets now running down my face and neck and under my scarf – making me shiver – I realise it all now.

Just as I realise, with another sickening thud, that it wasn’t so much that I didn’t want Laura to be friends with Simon any more, it was more that I hated that I wasn’t going to be a part of that precious friendship bubble that had meant so much to me any more. I hated that so much.

36

THE RECKONING: PART TWO

I don’t go home when I leave Aidan and Laura’s house. I know that if I did, I would only be consumed with a restlessness that would keep me awake and anxious all night.

So I have arrived at Kitty’s house, ready to sort this all out once and for all and wondering if there is a human equivalent for ‘tail between my legs’?

All the fight has gone out of me. But not in a bad way. The hurt I have carried on my shoulders for the last decade, in the form of the demon troll, has melted away – like the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz when she gets a bucket of water thrown over her. It’s a relief, of course, in many ways. But it would be more of one if it hadn’t been replaced by a sizeable wedge of guilt and shame.

Aidan had said that we all handled it badly, and I can see that now. Ultimately though, it was me who threw the mother of all tantrums and walked away from one of the most important friendships of my life.

Be it through pride, or pain, or just because I was ridiculously immature about the whole thing, I pushed away one of the two friends I really needed. I didn’t acknowledge the awful position Laura was in. I don’t think I allowed – or could allow – myself to consider how awful it was for her.

Simon hadn’t wronged Laura. He hadn’t wronged Aidan – his best friend since school. When I think of the bigger picture, Simon hadn’t actually wronged me all that much either. In the end, his cheating was just a symptom of a much bigger problem and without it, maybe we’d have rumbled on unhappily for another few years. The truth is, though, we just weren’t meant to go the distance and I don’t think there is anything either of us could’ve done to change that.

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