Best of Friends

But Mrs Hegarty’s mind had moved on to the absorbing subject of her husband’s varicose veins.

‘They’re at him again and he’s tormented with them. I said, if only you’d wear support stockings, Liam, I said, you’d be fine, but oh no, men don’t wear them, he said. So I said…’

Mrs Hegarty’s monologue went on and Lizzie waited patiently. Some of the people in Dunmore considered her on a par with the doctor, as if all Dr Morgan’s years of medical training had somehow rubbed off and Lizzie was perfectly able to diagnose all manner of illnesses.

‘He should call in to the surgery,’ Lizzie said, as she always did. ‘I should rush, Mrs Hegarty, I’ll be late.’

‘Ah.’ Mrs Hegarty was all smiles at the thought of Lizzie rushing to see her ex. What with that and the confusion over the flowers, it would be all over town that the Shanahans were getting back together. Lizzie sighed. Chinese whispers was Dunmore’s favourite occupation. But she was smiling as she bade Mrs Hegarty a fond goodbye.

As she drove out of town with the ancient Golf clanking gears noisily, Lizzie’s eyes were drawn to the bouquet lying on the passenger seat. Myles had never been much of a man for flowers. He liked to buy either practical presents or gift vouchers.

‘What’s the point in me buying you a fleet of things you don’t need,’ he’d smile, ‘when I can get you a voucher and you’ll pick out what you really want?’

It had made perfect sense to Lizzie. Men hated shopping. The world and his wife knew that.

In a small Italian coffee shop scented with amaretti biscuits and freshly crushed coffee beans, Myles waited for Lizzie. He’d attempted to speed through the crossword but he was just too nervous. Throwing the paper down on the seat beside him, he fiddled with his Palm Pilot, counting how many months there were until Debra’s wedding. Three and a half. Three and a half months to sort it all out and hope the whole family could come to terms with his news.

He hadn’t planned for it to happen. Well, who’d have thought it would? Certainly not Myles. When he and Lizzie had split up, he hadn’t thought he’d meet anyone else. That hadn’t been on his radar at all and it wasn’t why he’d left Lizzie.

Male friends all assumed he’d wanted out of his marriage because he was bored and wanted to be footloose and fancy free. But it wasn’t that. Myles and Lizzie had had to get married and for all his married life Myles had thought of a time in the future when he’d have done his duty and could do what he wanted to in life. He didn’t regret a second of his family life, it was just that he knew there were sides of himself that he could never express with Lizzie and he wanted to explore these while he still had the courage. Freedom to be his own person had been the spur – not the freedom to make notches on his bedpost. The very notion of that was ridiculous. Myles had no illusions about his chances of turning into Warren Beatty once he was no longer married. His appearance reflected his character: understated.

Joe managed to make the Shanahan male pattern baldness look interesting by keeping his receding thick dark hair short and wearing trendy black-rimmed glasses and casual chic clothes. But Myles would never be a trendsetter. He was a laid-back sort of man with an air of quiet intensity. And women, according to those male friends who’d tried to take him in hand when he and Lizzie had split up, were not mad for quietly intense, divorced civil servants with meagre wallets.

That was fine by Myles. He wasn’t expecting wild passion. Despite all this, he’d met Sabine, thought she was gorgeous and, incredibly, it transpired that she was interested in him. He was fitter than he’d ever been, tanned from his time on the ocean. And the contentment he felt in his new life must have shown on his face, lending him an attractiveness he hadn’t had in years. But he was still pleasantly surprised that she appeared to like him so much. He had acted as if they were just friends at first, like all the others on the scuba-diving course. For four weekends, the group of ten had driven in the minibus to Donegal to stay in the hostel and get their dives in, laughing and joking, retiring to the pub for song-filled evenings. He’d liked Sabine, was touched by her shyness and by how her light, pure voice wobbled with nerves when it was her turn to sing alone, but how she still entered into the whole thing with gusto. He’d liked the way her pale freckled skin looked almost translucent in the clear Donegal light, and he liked the way she smiled at him…

The door of the café opened and Lizzie whirled in, her cheeks flushed from running. Lizzie was always rushing. Myles’s earliest memories of her were as a laughing schoolgirl hurrying to class, weighed down with an enormous schoolbag, her hair flying. She might have been a lot older now, but the hair was still the same, a shoulder-length mop of shaggy curls, and she still had a big bag, this time an elderly leather one she’d had for donkey’s years. Lizzie’s bag used to be a family joke.

‘The kitchen sink bag,’ Joe would tease her, hoisting it up and pretending to groan under the weight. ‘No wonder you’ve good muscles, Mum, from lugging this around.’

‘Sorry I’m late,’ Lizzie gasped, reaching his table. ‘Couldn’t park the car.’

Now that she was here, Myles felt the desire to tell her his news and disappear. His stomach churned with anxiety.

‘You’ve finished your coffee, shall I get you another?’ she said cheerily.

Myles nodded.

When she got back with fresh coffee, he’d nervously rolled and rerolled his empty sugar packets up into two taut lengths.

‘How are things?’ asked Lizzie, licking her cappuccino spoon. ‘I bet this is about the wedding. I had Debra on the phone last night raging over the band. It seems they’ve been asked to sing at a huge Abba convention in Germany and they’re desperate to get out of doing the wedding. Luckily, Barry got a receipt from them when he paid the deposit and he says that’s as good as a contract. Honestly, there’s more drama in this wedding than in the Opera House!’

She looked up at Myles, her face still rosy from her hectic dash, her big chocolate-brown eyes shining and with a frothy line of cappuccino beading her upper lip. Myles felt like someone about to club a baby seal. He’d never forget how hurt and bewildered she’d been when he’d told her he wanted a divorce. He’d been so sure she’d be as eager as he was. But Lizzie, brave, resilient Lizzie, had dealt with it and now he was about to deliver another blow. He owed it to her to tell her about Sabine before all Dunmore rushed up to the house with the news that he’d been seen holding hands with a fair-haired, freckle-faced woman.

‘I’m seeing someone, Lizzie,’ he said, staring down at his rolled-up sugar packets.

‘Seeing someone,’ she repeated, as if she hadn’t quite heard correctly and was hoping he’d contradict her.

‘Yes.’ Myles chanced looking at her. The merriment was gone from her face and it was as if she’d closed the shutters on her sparkling eyes. ‘I met her at the scuba-diving course. I’m sorry but I had to tell you.’

‘You don’t have to be sorry. Why should you?’ Lizzie said, shocked. ‘We’re divorced, you don’t even have to tell me.’

Myles with another woman? She was more than shocked, she felt utterly stunned. When he’d left, he’d told her it wasn’t for some middle-aged chance at fresh love and she’d believed him. Now this. But she wouldn’t show Myles how shocked she was – no way. She’d hide her hurt.

‘In fact, it’s none of my business what you do any more,’ she added tartly.

‘I wanted to tell you before anyone else did. You know what Dunmore is like for gossip and if someone saw Sabine and me somewhere and told you before I did, well…’

‘Well what?’ she demanded, abandoning all attempts to hide how she felt. ‘You were afraid I’d be embarrassed or humiliated or upset? I’ve been all those things, Myles.’ Lizzie’s voice had become shrill and Myles could sense the other coffee shop customers watching them with interest. ‘I was embarrassed and upset when you left me but I dealt with it. And now this.’ She stopped talking, as though all the breath had left her lungs.

‘It was bound to happen to one of us, Lizzie,’ Myles said, hoping to comfort her, conveniently forgetting that he hadn’t planned to fall in love again.

Lizzie’s gaze caught his. ‘It wasn’t bound to happen to me,’ she said fiercely. ‘What did you say her name was?’

Myles hadn’t meant to tell her the name, but he realised now that he had. ‘Sabine.’

‘Very exotic,’ Lizzie said shakily. Grabbing her handbag from the chair beside them, she got up. ‘I have to go. I hope you’ll be very happy.’ And she was gone, handbag banging off a table as she rushed for the door.

On the street, Lizzie allowed herself to slow down. Myles wouldn’t rush after her, she knew that. He wasn’t the sort of man who ran after people. Or perhaps he was, but only if Sabine was the one who’d left him sitting in a café so abruptly.

Her name sounded exotic, all right. Not like good solid Lizzie, reliable Lizzie who could be told anything and not lose her temper. But she wanted to lose her temper now. She wanted to scream and yell because it was so unfair. She’d been a good person. She’d behaved like a grown-up and hadn’t raged or spread malicious rumours when Myles had left her. She hadn’t become a paid-up member of the local ex-wives’ group – nicknamed the Harridans by Clare Morgan – praying for famine, pestilence and penile gangrene to hit him.

She’d got on with her life with quiet dignity and where had it got her? Absolutely nowhere. Myles had someone else and she had no one.

She reached the car park and marched up to the automated ticket machine. Fumbling in her handbag for her ticket, she dropped it and her change purse, which was half open. Coins rolled off everywhere like freed lab rats making a dash for freedom.

‘Bugger,’ said Lizzie viciously. She never usually swore. She scrabbled around and found the ticket, and some of the coins. ‘Double fucking bugger.’ For good measure she kicked the ticket machine, not caring that it hurt her toe in her soft leather boots. Shock had left her beyond pain.

The couple of young mothers with pushchairs behind her gasped. Lizzie snatched her ticket from the jaws of the machine and whirled around, glaring at the women.

‘Bloody fucking men!’ she growled, and stomped off to the lift.

Lizzie’s wild rage lasted for days. On the plus side, it meant that she cleaned out the attic and the spare bedroom the way local decluttering guru Abby Barton was always telling people to do. As she grimly went through the pieces of her life, Lizzie wondered did Abby ever envision people throwing out stuff because their ex-husband had just found himself a new love? Probably not, Lizzie thought, jettisoning whole bagfuls of precious cards and mementoes of her marriage, including the faded ribbon from her wedding bouquet.

‘I. Don’t. Want. You,’ she said staccato as she held the once-pink ribbon over the bin bag, snipping it viciously into inch-long pieces with her kitchen shears. Photos of the wedding followed, along with a big pile of the cards Myles has given her over the years. Her courage faltered at the sight of one birthday card that wasn’t even a ‘To my darling wife on her birthday’ one. Just a plain ‘Happy Birthday’ type with badly painted lilies on the front, the sort of card you’d give to someone you didn’t like but who, inexplicably, always sent you birthday cards. The legend inside in Myles’s writing read: ‘Hope you like the saucepans.’

Saucepans. Lizzie remembered that birthday. Ten years ago, about. Her thirty-ninth, because Myles had bought her a clothes voucher for her fortieth, she remembered. She still had the saucepans. Heavy stainless steel with a lifetime guarantee, they were built to last. Unlike her and Myles.

For a moment, she didn’t know which one of them she was angrier with: herself, for being so hopelessly unable to read the signs; or Myles, for daring to give her saucepans for a birthday.

The minus side of Lizzie’s temper meant she was too wound up every night to sleep and ended up tossing and turning until she gave in, switched both the lamp and the bedroom TV on, and watched black-and-white cable movies until dawn.

Debra was no help. She hadn’t known about Sabine but she didn’t sound too put out by the news that her father had a woman in his life.

‘Well, Mum, you’ve got to move on, you’ve got to forget the pain, haven’t you? That’s what I always say,’ Debra told her in the misty tones of the oracle.

Lizzie, who’d never noticed even the faintest ability in Debra to forget pain and move on, had to bite her tongue to remind her daughter how long it had taken her to move on after the débâcle of leaving nursing college. For at least two years after she’d flunked her first year, Debra had burst into noisy tears at the first sign of a medical drama on television. Joe was the only member of the family who hadn’t rushed in to comfort her, pointing out with great practicality that if Debra had studied instead of being out partying with junior doctors for the whole of her first year, she might have got through. Naturally, this wasn’t a very popular theory with Debra.

‘You don’t understand,’ she’d wail, reaching for a tissue. ‘I did my best. It just got to me. You have to have a hard core to be a nurse. I’m too sensitive.’