Page 11 of The Monday Night Heartbreak Club
‘I think she’ll know. The flames and the smell of scorching M&S underpants will be the giveaway.’
He stared at me silently for a moment. ‘I meant, are you going to tell her you’re tracking her husband, not about the setting fire to his trousers, which, as you so eloquently put it, will become obvious in time.’
‘Oh.’ My confidence left me in the face of his matter-of-factness and I felt myself go red. ‘I don’t know. I have to talk to Margot and Wren first. I just had the idea, I can’t go off and do it by myself.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I have a job that I absolutely will lose if I take any more time off. They’ve run out of sympathy. Especially because,’ I admitted to the bottom of my now-empty glass, ‘I’m really shit atit. I hate it. Call-centre work was the only thing I could find, though, and it covers the bills.’
‘Oh dear, you are having a bad time,’ Flynn said cheerily. ‘I’d offer you a job here, but I don’t think you’d like the conditions.’
‘Working with you? Nope, you’re right there. I couldn’t work with a smarmy arse like you.’
‘Ha.’ He wandered off to go and serve a trendy young couple who were dressed to the nines. I wondered where they were off to. Then I wondered what their relationship looked like, whether he was cheating on her or she on him, or whether they were totally loved up, as they appeared to be, and a pang of jealousy hit me like sniper fire, strafing my nerve endings until I had to turn away.
Flynn didn’t come back. I wasn’t even sure that I wanted him to, but he got busy, serving and sorting bottles and loading the dishwasher, and I’d finished my wine, so I went home.
The silence buzzed. Even the couple downstairs had entered their refractory period. The shops were closed, there was no traffic apart from the odd car bumping up or down the hill on its way somewhere. Everyone seemed to be where they wanted to be right now. I picked up my phone.
‘Margot, I’ve been thinking.’ It was her voicemail, but better than sitting in silence. ‘If we can find out Eddie’s usual routine from Annie – carefully, so we don’t let on what we’re doing – then maybe the three of us could take it in turns to keep an eye on him? Maybe we could take photos? Then maybe we can tell Annie what we know, but we can do it in a supportive way, so that we’re there when she finds out who it is, and she’s got us there to talk to about what she does next? Maybe. Anyway. See you on Monday.’
I hesitated. My finger hovered over the 0 button, and I fought with myself not to delete the message which had, after all, mostly been maybes stuck together with supposition andnot quite given the impression of Purposeful Fee that I’d intended.Sod it. I carried on. ‘Oh, and of course Fraser might want to be involved too, but then again he might think it’s too revengey for him, being a man. Okay then, bye.’
There. I took a deep breath and the unaccustomed feeling of accomplishment settled on my head like a crown. See, world? Icoulddo it. I could have ideas…
The phone rang five minutes later. ‘Hello, Fee, it’s Margot. Are you free tomorrow evening? Only, I’ve had a bit of a think about what you said.’
All the poise and certainty plummeted. What had I said? Had I just been stupid? But it was only the club, I hadn’t proposed holding strip nights in the wine bar. Was I free? A kind of bitterness scratched at the back of my eyes. ‘Yes, I’m free.’
‘Then let’s meet in the usual place. Oh, and let’s not mention this to Annie yet, shall we? I’ll phone the others and ask them to come. We’ll all have a little conflab and maybe come up with something? Would that suit?’
There was an eagerness in Margot’s voice, as though she was looking forward to it, and it struck me suddenly that perhaps she was as lonely as I was. Newly single, having to adjust to a whole new way of life – not that it was new for me, more a recurring reality, but it was still an adjustment. I felt that glimmer of warmth again, not happiness that someone else was as miserable as I was, but a snatch of fellow-feeling. Itwasn’tjust me. Other people were alone too.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ I said, knowing that I sounded jaunty and in control again and rather liking it.
‘Wonderful.’ And Margot hung up. I sat for a moment, staring around the flat, and then went to tidy the kitchen.
6
To my surprise, Margot arrived with Fraze-the-Haze. ‘He asked if he could have a lift,’ she said to my raised eyebrows while Fraser was at the bar. ‘And it turns out that he doesn’t live that far from me, and I know his mother slightly.’ She watched Fraser, who was trying to initiate banter with Flynn, a man so far removed from banter that he was practically Trappist. ‘We met through work,’ Margot went on, slightly dreamily.
‘Oh? What is it that you do?’ I asked politely. I had Margot down as a woman who lunches and attends every work function of her husband’s looking groomed and together.
‘I’m a barrister,’ she said, still vague, and I nearly swallowed my tongue. ‘Wren should be here in a… ah. There she is.’
Wren pushed at the door, reversing in with a large cardboard box in her arms which she set down on the table with the air of one expecting a fanfare.
‘What the fuck’s that?’ Fraser came over carrying a long glass of something for himself and a wine for Margot, which he handed over with ceremony.
‘Everything I could get from Annie without being obvious.’Wren lifted the lid. ‘I popped over this morning, after Margot rang. It’s all right,’ she said to our intakes of breath, ‘I was subtle. I didn’t tell her what I wanted it for. In fact, some of it I stole off her shelf. Oh, it’s all right, I’ll take it back, I’ll tell her I picked it up by accident.’
Wren took out a framed photograph of a man, some other loose photographs and one of the notepads that Margot had given us. ‘I managed to get some details of his timetable too, so I wrote them down here.’
Margot bestowed a smile. She was the kind of woman who ‘bestowed’ most of her expressions, wearing them as though the front of her face was an advertising hoarding. ‘Well done!’
Wren’s cheeks glowed. ‘Thank you. It wasn’t too hard to get Annie to talk to me – she’s got all those groups and clubs but she says that nobody there knows anything about her circumstances, so she can’t really talk to them the way she can to us.’ She glanced around at Fraser and me. ‘It’s really sad,’ she said. ‘For the whole forty years that they’ve been together, Eddie has always bought her flowers and a card for Valentine’s Day. And this year he forgot. She said that he bought her some the next day, but it’s not the same, is it?’
I thought of Dexter, who had never bought me anything for Valentine’s Day. Or birthdays, Christmas or even just because. He’d always been too busy trying to break out as a TikTok-sensationMMAfighter, while making what money he did from stealing cars and drug dealing.
