Kiss Me Under the Mistletoe

‘Relief,’ Louise said quietly. ‘They support carers—especially children.’

Tara scrunched up her pretty face. Five years younger. Three sizes thinner. She had none of the telltale lines on her forehead that Louise had, the ones that refused to disappear completely when she stopped frowning. Not that she did that much these days.

‘Isn’t child slavery illegal?’

‘It is,’ Louise said. ‘But there are tons of kids whose parents are sick and they have to take on the role of looking after them. Sometimes they have no choice.’

A different form of child slavery. One Louise knew all about. But she wasn’t going to tell Tara that. The younger woman might be the closest thing she had to a best friend in this shark-infested world she lived in, but she didn’t tell anyone about her childhood. They had enough ammunition for looking down at her as it was.

At least she could support Relief in some small way. At the end of the charity benefit she’d be writing a ridiculously large cheque. Since that dinner a week ago, spending Toby’s money had become an act of revenge.

‘You’re so good to remember all of that stuff they put on the invite,’ Tara said, fluffing her hair and looking out of the window as they sped through central London. ‘All I do is turn up and drink champagne at these things. One benefit just seems to merge into the next.’

Which was a pity, Louise thought. Relief could use someone like Tara championing them. She might play the dumb blonde, but she was nothing of the sort. She’d been to a good private school, got a university degree—in other words, had the education that Louise had only been able to dream about. Tara knew words that Louise couldn’t even spell, let alone understand, but she chose to hide that side of herself away. Didn’t serve her purpose, she said. Degrees didn’t get you much these days. Certainly not a footballer husband who earned more in ten minutes than most people made in six months.

The limo pulled up outside an exclusive Park Lane hotel. She and Tara slid out and walked down the red carpet together. Louise heard her name called repeatedly, but she practised the vague and ethereal smile she wore for these occasions, never really focusing on one person or one thing.

She wanted to rush inside as quickly as possible, but that wouldn’t do. She needed to look calm and poised as always. While she wasn’t going to cover up for Toby about this latest story, she knew that if she gave a hint of a twitch or a frown a lens somewhere would catch it and she’d see it blown up in the morning editions, with a caption reading ‘Louise’s private hell’, or some other rubbish. She wouldn’t give Toby—or his pre-schooler of a girlfriend—the satisfaction.

Oh, she’d fall apart at some point. Just not tonight, especially as this was her last public engagement before she announced her split from Toby and her retirement into private life. She was going to make it count.

But as she and Tara ran the gauntlet of the red carpet, stopping to pose for the cameras, Louise’s smile began to take on a frozen quality. Nowadays, this kind of thing was as common to her as walking down the aisles of a supermarket once had been, but Toby’s shenanigans seemed to have hurled her into a time warp, back to the days when she’d been terrified of all the noise and popping lights, when she’d half-expected to hear a lone accusatory voice above the crowd. ‘Fake …! Imposter!’

‘Let’s get out of here,’ she whispered to Tara, who was taking far too long. But she’d just had her boobs done again, so Louise supposed she was happy to have the excuse to show them off. The lime-green halter-neck dress she was wearing had been deliberately chosen to showcase their new gravity-defying properties.

Tara frowned at her request, and Louise thought she was going to pout and moan, but she took one look at Louise’s flushed face and furrowed brow and gave in. Only when they were in the lobby, once they were out of earshot and camera range, did she turn to her friend and whisper, ‘I thought you were just letting off steam when you ranted to me about Toby down the phone the other day, but you’re really going to go through with it, aren’t you?’

Louise gave her a hooded look. ‘He’s cheating on me. Why would I not go through with it?’ For an intelligent woman, Tara could be really thick sometimes.

‘He loves you really, you know,’ she said, smiling brightly as they entered the ballroom. She paused to waggle her fingers in reply to someone on the other side of the room. ‘Can’t stand her,’ she said out of the corner of her mouth, and then switched seamlessly into the one subject Louise was hoping she’d drop. ‘Husbands like ours … There are some big perks, but there’s a price to pay too.’ She gave Louise a sideways look. ‘It never bothered you before.’

Louise snorted. ‘I never had anything truly concrete before, just suspicions, and my darling husband would just deny everything convincingly and make me feel stupid and disloyal for asking in the first place.’ If Toby’s on-screen performances had been as good as his private ones, he’d have had an Oscar or three by now.

Tara’s eyes widened. ‘You have actual proof? Really?’

Louise nodded. She’d got up early the next morning after their dinner and had checked Toby’s phone and email account. Plenty of proof. All sickeningly graphic. He’d got lazy about hiding it from her. She really didn’t want to think about what that said about the state of their relationship.

Tara sighed as she plucked two glasses of champagne from a passing waiter’s tray and handed one to Louise. ‘But divorce … it’s such a big step. Are you sure?’

Louise nodded.

Around them the glitzy party continued. People swanned past, greeting each other loudly, air-kissing each other even more loudly, all the while their eyes moving, gauging just how many others they’d impressed with their entrance.

It was a big step. This was the only life she’d known for more than a decade. And the only security she’d ever known in her thirty years. Until her late teens she’d been an outsider, someone who only got to look on while other girls her age were young and silly and carefree. She’d felt like a ghost. Someone not real. Someone who didn’t count.

And then Toby had come along and swept her off her feet. He’d not only seen her, but he’d liked what he saw. It had been nectar to Louise’s neglected soul. She must be worth something if a man like him wanted her, right? For so long she’d hung on to that thought, used it to give her inner strength when she felt out of her depth or that everyone could see past the designer clothes and make-up to the lanky, shy teenager still hiding beneath.

But now everything had gone wrong. Toby didn’t want her any more.

Not really. Oh, he might say he didn’t want the marriage to end, that he wanted to work on it with her, but she’d lost hope he’d ever change. Even if he wanted to—which was a big if—she wasn’t sure he was capable of it.

So, big step or not, it was time to go.

And no one thought being with Toby made her special any more, anyway. Even though she knew for a fact that half the newspaper reports hadn’t been true, Toby had not behaved well the last few years. The rest of the world thought she was a fool. And she was finally ready to agree with them. Staying with Toby was making her an object of scorn—or worse, pity.

‘I’m going to buy a big house in the country somewhere,’ she told Tara, ‘Maybe Devon or Somerset. And Jack and I are going to have long, healthy walks in the fresh air and enjoy the community spirit of village life.’

‘Devon!’ Tara almost choked on her champagne. ‘Nobody lives in Devon!’

Louise blinked. She knew for a fact they did. The county had been the location of some of her favourite family holidays as a girl, before her mother died. ‘Well you’d better phone up the police and report all those people in the houses down there for breaking and entering then,’ she said.

Tara rolled her eyes. ‘You know what I mean. God, I’m so lucky that Gareth is the sort who’d never stray. I’d hate to have to do what you’re doing. But do you really have to go to the lengths of burying yourself alive in the back of beyond?’ She turned to Louise with a genuinely sincere expression on her face, so Tara’s next words astonished her completely. ‘Couldn’t you just, you know, have a hot fling with some young stud to get Toby back and then forget about it all? Tit for tat and all that …’

Louise shook her head again. ‘I can’t.’

She had to think of Jack. What would seeing an I-can-shag-more-people-than-you-can contest between his parents in the tabloids teach him? It was precisely because she didn’t want him to grow up and think that was normal behaviour that she was leaving.

‘Pity,’ Tara said. ‘There’s going to be a complete lack of eligible men in Dorset …’

‘Devon,’ Louise reminded her.

Tara waved a hand. ‘Wherever. The geography’s irrelevant. You’re going to become a dried-up old prune with no sex life.’

‘Thanks for the encouragement,’ Louise said dryly. ‘Nice to know you’re on my side.’

Tara’s brows arched. ‘I am on your side. I’m trying to get you to think this through properly, Lou. I don’t think you’ve really considered what you’ll be giving up.’

Ah, the one time Tara liked to play the clever card was when she was instructing Louise on how to live her life. She did it very well. It got right up Louise’s nose.

‘Perhaps I’ll meet a hot surfer dude or a nice young farmer,’ she told Tara in silky voice, going for shock effect and knowing she’d succeeded from the look of horror on the other woman’s face. Unlike Tara, Louise didn’t need guarantees of Porsches in the garage or Rolexes on a man’s wrist before she dropped her knickers.

‘Maybe I’ll have a hot fling after all,’ Louise said airily, then swigged back a mouthful of her warming champagne. ‘All men are rats, anyway. There’s not a good one out there. I don’t want or need their money. I might as well use them for sex. That’s what they do to us, and it’s about time someone turned the tables.’

Tara’s expertise also extended to her vast vocabulary of swear words. She let a choice phrase out now. ‘I seriously don’t know what’s wrong with you tonight, Lou. I’ve got half a mind to bundle you into a cab and take you to The Priory.’

Louise just laughed. ‘What for? Regaining my sanity? Taking control of my life? I don’t think they make a pill or a detox treatment for that.’

Tara’s brows lowered as she looked at her friend. ‘They should.’ And then she pouted. ‘I’m going to miss you if you move away from London. What are you going to do with yourself?’ She looked her up and down. ‘I suppose you could try plus size modelling.’

Louise closed her eyes briefly and swallowed. Thanks for that, Tara, she muttered silently in her head. You know just how to cheer a girl up.

And she wasn’t plus size, really. She was a normal thirty-year-old woman, with a normal, post-pregnancy, thirty-year-old body. Why was that such a crime? So what if she was the only one amongst her peers not to have shrunk back to beanpole proportions within ten minutes of giving birth?

That was the problem with the kind of life she led: her current version of ‘normal’. Everything was distorted: body image, priorities, people, marriages … children. What some of her older acquaintances were shelling out in rehab fees for their teenage children was shocking. She didn’t want that to be Jack’s fate in a few years’ time. Some of those kids were only thirteen, fourteen …

No, she didn’t want to have a get-you-back fling and carry on like nothing had happened. She wanted out of this life. For her and for Jack. She wanted to find a way to be normal again, to feel like a proper person again. But Tara wouldn’t understand that. All she was interested in was climbing the bling-encrusted ladder of WAGdom until she was Queen Bee. And Louise was quite happy to step out her way and let her.

The time came for speeches and donations, and Louise wrote an eye-watering cheque for the charity. But even that only gave a momentary lift in her spirits. All evening she’d talked and sipped champagne and watched the other people congratulating themselves on having made it onto the exclusive guest list, and all she’d been able to think was: is this all there is? Is this all I was made for?