Page 4 of A Midlife Marriage

‘I do feel different,’ she settled on, leaving outtorn,leaving outconflicted,leaving outguilty.She took a sip of champagne and looked across to a table by the window, where two women of a similar age to herself sat. They wore matching floral blouses and had matching honey-highlights. One was even picking away at what looked like a piece of lemon-drizzle. Her favourite. ‘Places like this,’ she said turning back to Caro and Kay, ‘usedto be my happy place. The day Jack started school, the first day I’d been child-free in seven years, I took myself off to the garden centre cafe, ordered a latte and sat and read the paper for two hours. I think it was the first coffee I’d managed to finish while it was still hot for years.’

Caro smiled. ‘I remember you telling me that.’

‘And I can’t count how many wet Saturday afternoons I spent there, trawling through the gossip pages, stuffing myself with cake while everyone else was off doing something …’

‘Exciting?’ Kay finished.

Helen paused, her mouth curling into a rueful smile. ‘More exciting than eating cake,’ she said. ‘I was even there before we went to Cyprus. I’d just seen the doctor to go on HRT, and I was so miserable, I was thinking I wouldn’t go, but imagine …’ As she stopped talking, her eyes fixed on a point halfway across the room. ‘Imagine if Cyprus hadn’t happened?’

For a moment no-one spoke.

‘Do you think you wouldn’t be divorced?’ Caro said.

Helen looked at her. ‘I don’t like to think about that. The idea that I would have just kept on doing the same thing.’ She sighed. ‘As it is, I’m not looking forward to going back to work.’

‘When do you start back?’ Kay said.

‘Next Wednesday.’

‘Oh, how funny.’

‘What is?’ Helen turned.

‘School finishes on Wednesday,’ Kay said. ‘That’s my last day.’

Helen put her mouth to her hand. ‘I haven’t even asked! How ironic. My first day back, is your last.’

‘Do you have anything planned?’ Caro said, turning to Kay. ‘A leaving party?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing?’

‘I’m just having a quiet night.’ And the pocket of silence that followed was unnaturally deep. ‘So,’ picking up her glass, Kay nodded at Helen’s t-shirt. ‘I presume you’ll have to unpack for work?’

‘Yes.’ Helen said quietly. ‘I suppose I will.’

6

‘Wait! Eyebrows is coming! I have to hide.’

‘Who is eyebrows?’

‘Sophia. You don’t know her. She’s the area manager. She has a degree in tourismand the eyebrows of my grandfather.’

Kay picked up her cup and peered at her screen. Marianne had her phone positioned under her chin, so mostly all she could see were nostrils. She smiled. Marianne worked as a receptionist at the Hotel Adagio in Cyprus, where Caro, Helen and herself had stayed. They had kept in touch, had in fact become such good friends, Marianne had joined their trip to Vegas last year and been part of the wedding planning party in April. Thinking this, she shivered, and it was such a violent movement the tea in her cup wobbled. The trip to Vegas had ended with her waking up under a sheet in her airline seat, after a doctor on the flight had declared her dead. Never mind that Helen had panicked, or that the ‘doctor’ being a Doctor of Podiatry, was good at feet and obviously not much else. Never mind that, utterly exhausted by the highs and lows of Vegas and overwhelmed with relief to be on her way back to Alex, Kay had simply fallen into the deepest,calmest sleep she’d experienced since she’d first heard the word cancer. She might have been buried alive! This time the tea jumped the cup. It was a time and a moment she didn’t like to dwell on.

‘She draws them on,’ Marianne said, ‘very thick.’ And leaning even closer to the screen, she drew her finger across her eyebrow to mimic the action.

Relieved to be distracted, Kay laughed. Over numerous FaceTime calls since they had become friends, she had seen parts of Marianne she wasn’t sure anyone else had. The insides of her nostrils, like now, the pink-caved walls of her inner ear, even her belly button, as Marianne had sunbathed, blissfully unaware of the direction in which her camera pointed. Suddenly the view changed again, and she found herself looking at Marianne’s bosom, heaving like the Southern Ocean as Marianne began an awkward half-jog, half-walk.

‘I’m going out the gates,’ Marianne panted. ‘She won’t find me there. Ouch!’ The bosom disappeared, so now Kay was looking at blue sky. ‘Oi mana mou!I dropped it…’

‘Is it cracked?’

More panting, more sky and a smudge of dust. ‘Leonard Cohen,’ Marianne breathed as her face came back into view, ‘says there is a crack in everything. I told you the story of how my mother gave me my name?’

Kay laughed. ‘Yes, you told me.’

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