Lessons in Heartbreak

She unearthed a small container of sleeping tablets from the bathroom cabinet, took one and washed it down with tapwater. In Beth’s room, she found an old nightdress of her daughter’s and pulled it on. She didn’t want anything from her own room to contaminate her. She climbed into the spare-room bed, turned out the light and closed her eyes until the chemically-induced sleep claimed her.

The Lifeboat Shop in Tamarin was very successful. Perhaps it was due to the loud proximity of the sea itself, but everyone – locals and visitors alike – dutifully went in to search for bargains, knowing that for every second-hand blouse they bought, money went to the upkeep of the local lifeboats. Even with the sea in the bay shining serenely up at people on a summer’s day, the power of the water was felt: beautiful, and yet all-powerful.

Monday was one of Anneliese’s days for working in the shop. She worked there Mondays and Wednesdays and had done so ever since she’d given up full-time work in the garden centre. When she woke early the day after Edward left her, she knew she had to go in.

Not turning up would make everyone think she was sick, and then someone might see Edward and ask him how she was, and he might tell the truth and –

Anneliese couldn’t bear that. She didn’t want everyone knowing what had happened, not until she’d dealt with it in her own head. She wasn’t sure when she was going to be able to do that – the sleeping tablet had made all thinking impossible as she’d crashed out twenty minutes after taking it, and to stave off the sense of solitude in the cottage the following morning, she’d turned on the radio loud, preferring plenty of news stories to being alone with her thoughts.

Her thoughts were dangerous, she decided: she didn’t want to be on her own with them.

Anneliese preferred the mornings in the shop.

The churchgoers were sure to arrive after Mass, and the women who’d dropped children at school popped in for a quick rummage. People who took early lunches sometimes crammed their sandwiches into a few minutes so they could rifle through the rails of clothes, or scan the shelves lined with books.

It was a nice, chatty place to work, with no real pressure, except when something of value came in and all the staff panicked slightly about getting the correct price sorted out for it, in case the original owner returned and felt their donation wasn’t being prized enough.

Today, there were five refuse sacks of stuff to be gone through, so Anneliese sat in the back of the shop where the storeroom, kitchenette and toilet were situated, and went through it all carefully. There were piles of clothes, mainly women’s, soft toys still covered with dust, and children’s clothes alongside ornaments, some paperback books, and bits of costume jewellery. About half of the stuff was in good condition and Anneliese began the painstaking job of sorting the wheat from the chaff.

It was incredible what some people thought was acceptable to donate to charity, she thought, holding up a man’s shirt with a threadbare collar, several missing buttons and a suspicious yellow stain on the sleeve. Curry? Flower pollen? She threw it into the ‘dump’ box.

Yvonne, another volunteer, was manning the front counter and kept up a steady stream of chat with the customers. Anneliese liked working with Yvonne because no response was ever required. Yvonne talked and didn’t appear to care if anyone replied or not. This normally suited Anneliese because she liked working in peace with just the faint hum of the radio in the background. Today, it suited her because she wasn’t sure if she’d be able to have a conversation if her life depended on it.

Anneliese knew she looked wretched and said she hadn’t slept to cover up the fact, even though the chemical cosh had knocked her out for eight hours. But she looked much worse than any lack of sleep could account for. She’d been shocked at the sight of herself in the mirror that morning. Grief had aged her overnight and it was as if her very bones had thrown themselves against her skin in protest at all the pain. She felt as if the last, vaguely youthful bloom of her skin had gone, leaving nothing but sharp angles, hollows and the big indigo-blue eyes her daughter, Beth, had inherited, like shining pools in an oval face. The thick white hair – once a stunning white blonde, now just silky white – that she kept neatly tied back no longer looked feminine. Instead, it made her look far older than her years: older and pantomime witchy.

Anneliese could barely recognise the woman who’d been told by an admirer, many years ago, that she looked like a prima ballerina with her long, graceful neck and doe eyes. She’d been one of Tamarin’s beauties about a million years ago, she thought sadly, or so Edward had told her.

Who’d have thought it now?

She should have bothered with make-up, after all, she decided. Some base, a little concealer to hide the dark circles, mascara to lift her eyes and some creamy blush to bring warmth to the apples of her cheeks: Anneliese had always been very proficient with make-up.

It was the one thing she and her mother had agreed on.

If Anneliese was going to throw herself away on a job in gardening, then she should still look after her skin and never go out without lipstick, her mother had said.

Her mother had also always been firm on women not drinking hard spirits. Anneliese had kept to that dictum too and was regretting her brandies and glasses of wine the day before. Her head ached dully from the unaccustomed drinking.

‘Dogs will do their business on the beach, I said,’ Yvonne was saying to a customer. ‘Signs, that’s what we need; signs on the beach about doggy doo.’

Anneliese was one of the people who disagreed with this point of view, preferring the dog-crap option to lots of ugly signs telling people off for not clearing up. Signs would ruin the craggy, bare beauty of the beach.

But she kept quiet and allowed herself to wonder what Yvonne would make of her news.

Edward has left me. He’s living with Nell Mitchell. Yes, that Nell – my best friend. There you go. Shows you don’t really ever know people, do you?

It still sounded wrong.

She tried it again, saying it more slowly in her mind, to see if she could make sense of it.

We’ve been through hard times, Edward and I, and perhaps it was too hard for him and Nell is so easygoing and, after all, they know each other so well –

‘Anneliese, what did you say?’ Yvonne looked at her expectantly from the front of the shop. The customer was gone and it was only the two of them in the shop.

‘Nothing, Yvonne. Just talking to myself.’

‘Oh sure, I do the same myself, Anneliese.’ Yvonne sighed and went back to scanning the local paper. ‘Nobody pays me the slightest heed. Mam, the kids say, you talk nineteen to the dozen and when we try to answer, you keep rattling on, so we let you at it. Kids!’

‘Kids, yeah,’ Anneliese nodded, when what she was really thinking was ‘husbands’ and ‘best friends’.

‘But we love them, don’t we?’ Yvonne went on, still talking about children and not in the least aware that she and Anneliese weren’t on the same wavelength at all.

It struck Anneliese at that moment that it was really quite easy to deceive people once they didn’t expect to be deceived. How easy had she been to deceive? Shamefully easy, probably.

She stopped sorting out clothes to ponder this. What lies had Edward and Nell told her? Had they gone home to the cottage on days when Anneliese was in the shop, and lain on her bed, having sex?

Suddenly, she had to rush into the tiny toilet to throw up. Bile, yesterday’s wine and nothing else came up.

‘Anneliese, you all right?’ said Yvonne.

‘Fine,’ she lied. ‘Heartburn. Smoked fish pie last night.’

Where did that excuse come from, she wondered, unbending and looking at her red-eyed face in the tiny room’s mirror. Was lying just a matter of practice?

The shop was mercifully busy all morning. Yvonne rushed about, chatting and working the till, while Anneliese gave the appearance of industriousness by tidying shelves and rails after the customers.

Her gaze often strayed out on to the streets of Tamarin, searching for the familiar figure of her husband loping along. Edward worked in an engineering company in town and sometimes dropped in on her when she was in the Lifeboat Shop.

But not, she decided, today.

Still, she stared out of the window, wondering if he and Nell would pass by.

The town was designed like half of a many-pointed star, with streets all heading down towards the harbour where they converged on Harbour Square, a wide piazza with squat Mediterranean-style palm trees, an open-air café called Dorota’s, and the horseshoe-shaped harbour beyond, like two arms reaching into the sea – or like the curve of a crab’s front claws, depending on which way you liked to look at it.

The Lifeboat Shop was on Fillibert Street, halfway between Harbour Square below, and the tiny Church Square above, where St Canice’s stood in its mellow-stone glory.

Her shift in the shop ended at two, when Corinne Brady arrived to take over, trailing scarves, dangly bead necklaces and an overpowering scent of a musky oil purchased many moons ago in the town’s health-food shop. Anneliese knew this because Corinne was always telling her that modern perfumes were bad for you and that eau d’elderly musk was where it was at.

‘Natural smells are best, Anneliese,’ Corinne would say gaily, waving a tiny bottle sticky with age. ‘Modern perfumes cause cancer, you know.’

Normally, Anneliese tolerated Corinne’s eccentricities and her bizarre medical theories, but she couldn’t cope today. She was all out of the milk of human kindness and she wasn’t sure if any of the local shops stocked it.

‘Hello, Yvonne, look at this! A new consignment of black cohosh. Now, Yvonne, I know you don’t want to talk about the whole menopause thing…’

In the background, Anneliese winced. Poor Yvonne. There was no chance of a discreet talk about female problems when Corinne was involved. Corinne didn’t do volume control. She roared, even when attempting to whisper.

‘This is fabulous,’ Corinne was saying.

‘Shout a bit louder,’ Yvonne said crossly, ‘I don’t think the whole town heard you.’