The One Before The One

I just couldn’t do this any more. It was killing me. Not softly, like the song, but slowly and painfully, sucking the life force out of me like hands around my neck.

I reached over and gently (guilty, probably, at what was about to come) pushed his dark hair, clammy after another Indian summer’s night, from his face so that it stuck up, revealing his widow’s peak. I’d watched that peak develop. That deepening V was like a measure of the fourteen years we’d spent together. Sometimes I felt like my feelings were receding at the same rate as his hair. Fourteen years. More than a third of my life. Did I even know who I was without him? My heart thudded with nerves.

‘Happy Birthday, gorgeous,’ he mumbled, still half-conscious, before flinging a heavy arm across my chest.

I swallowed hard. It felt like trying to swallow a mouthful of dried leaves.

‘Thanks,’ I managed eventually. But it was already anything but happy.

The next time I would be in this bed, I would be here alone. What I hadn’t predicted at that point, however, was that technically I was about to finish with my fiancé, the man I was due to marry in a month’s time, the only man I had ever loved or who had loved me, over a present. A present he’d bought for me.

‘Here we are birthday girl, one blueberry smoothie and Eggs Benedict with – I dare say so myself – a Michelin star standard Hollandaise sauce.’

It’s two hours later (one of those spent perfecting the Hollandaise sauce) so that I’m that unfortunate mix of so ravenous I am annoyed, and guilty that I’m annoyed, Martin places the tray on the duvet in front of me, then sits down on the bed. He tightens the belt of his white ‘waffle’ dressing gown, a free gift from Boots with a Magimix coffee machine last Christmas.

I look at the tall glass with the sprig of mint placed lovingly on top and then at his face – such a pleasant, friendly face that I knew so well: the neat, narrow mouth, pressed deep into a generous chin that told of a man who was full of joie de vivre and liked the good things in life; the slightly upturned nose that he liked to root around constantly when he thought I wasn’t looking; round cheeks that made you want to reach out and squeeze them and those small, yet ever-twinkling dark eyes behind tortoiseshell glasses, slightly too far apart like a sheep, and yet filled with so much unwavering love it made me want to cry.

I forced a smile. ‘Thank you, honey.’

‘My pleasure. Now, does birthday girl want her present now, whilst she’s eating her breakfast, or later?’ Martin liked to refer to me in the third person.

‘Ooh, I think now.’

‘Good choice.’ Martin reached deep into his dressing gown pocket and produced an envelope wrapped up in red ribbon. Martin was always an excellent present-wrapper, unusual for a man I’d always thought. A momentary flurry of hope: tickets to the theatre perhaps? Beauty Salon facials? A voucher for John Lewis? It didn’t really matter since I’d already decided I won’t be able to keep it.

‘Come on then, Caro, the suspense is killing me. Aren’t you going to open it?’ he said, eyes glistening.

I opened the envelope, my hands shaking. A leaflet with a picture of a tree in full autumnal blaze on the front.

‘Your Guide to the National Trust', it read in an uninspiring font.

Membership to the National Trust? I momentarily had to catch my breath. If it was membership of the National Trust at thirty-two, what would it be at forty? His-and-her flasks? The Vicar of Dibley box set? Jesus Christ, I was about to marry my dad. (If my dad were a normal sort of dad, which he isn’t).

‘So do you like it? he said, nudging closer whilst I held the membership card in my shaking hand. ‘I thought after the honeymoon, when weekends are more free, we could start with the Stately—’

‘Course I like it!’ I cut in, and then an awful, awful thing happened. I started to cry. I started to cry and I couldn’t stop.

Martin peered at me, alarmed.

‘Caro, what on earth is the matter?’ The membership leaflet was damp with tears now. ‘Please. Tell me. What on earth is wrong?’

And that’s where it ended, in what should have been our marital bed. Martin, the only man I had ever known, really, the man who had loved me for more than a decade, who had talked about having children with me, who had held me whilst I sobbed through no end of twenty-something self-esteem crises, who had listened to me moan about my parents and my mental family, who knew the best of me, the worst of me, the ugly truth of me and yet accepted me more than anyone else in he world, was lying next to me, shushing me, stroking my hair.

And I was about to break his big heart into a million different pieces.

CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_a9f0b6fb-f486-5989-8106-e31b5d383ebb)

Early June 2009

I suppose you could say that things had barely moved on in my life, nine months later, when my seventeen-year-old sister turns up on my doorstep and I am drunk, alone, on a Sunday afternoon.

When I say drunk, I don’t mean staggering-all-over-the-place drunk. God no! That would have been humiliating. It was more like two-large-glasses-of-wine drunk. Okay, possibly half a bottle, exacerbated by two fags and the dregs of a bottle of Prosecco. I’d say, on alcohol consumption alone, I would have just about got away with convincing someone I wasn’t drunk. If I hadn’t been crying. Or if I hadn’t answered the door with said bottle of Prosecco. Or if I wasn’t standing barefoot on my doorstep at 4 p.m. on a Sunday wearing a wedding dress and a tiara.

It had been raining, sheeting it down for hours, but was on the verge of brightening up so that the sky glowed, making the row of white terraces behind where Lexi stood and the trees of Battersea Park – full as broccoli florets in the height of summer – look unreal, like a stage set.

She was carrying a trolley case with fuscia-pink lips all over it and was wearing gold leggings, and a silver headband, Grecian-style, around her forehead. In the luminescent light, I thought how lovely she’d become, a modern take on Wonder Woman, with her gamine crop and kittenish eyeliner. I, on the other hand, must have looked like a contestant for Trailer-Trash Bride of the Year.

‘Hi! It’s me, Lexi.’

Did she think I had dementia? That I needed to be reminded of who she was before being escorted back to the church where I would get on with the wedding I had clearly wandered off from?

‘Sorry, is this a crap time?’

I leant one hand on the top of the doorframe, but missed, so that I stumbled forward and ended up doing a strange unintentional dance on the front step.

‘Er … no.’

‘Right, it’s just you –’ I was aware I was swaying, that the trees were moving although there was no breeze – ‘look like you’ve been crying. And you’re wearing a wedding dress.’ I looked down. This was no word of a lie. ‘And a tiara. And you’re holding an empty bottle of wine.’

‘It’s Prosecco, actually.’

Overlooking the empty bottle of Prosecco and the fact my house stank of booze and fags and the fact I had Pat Benatar’s ‘Love is a Battlefield', blasting from the stereo, I think I styled it out well. It was regrettable that my wedding dress had a four foot train and so could not be passed off as evening wear, but like I say, all this was exacerbated by the fact I was drunk and it was the middle of the afternoon.

‘So how long are you planning on staying?’ We’re standing in my kitchen now and I’m trying to sound as breezy as possible.

Lexi leans against the doorframe and looks around her.

‘Um, well, I thought maybe the summer holidays …?’ she says, hopefully.

The summer holidays? I almost heave.

‘What? Like, the whole summer?’

‘Er, yeah.’ She smiles. She still has the same rosebud mouth she had as a baby. Pouty and cherubic. A real Drew Barrymore mouth. ‘Why, are you going somewhere?’

‘No.’

‘Cool,’ she says brightly, like, that’s that sorted then.

She sits down at the kitchen table, helps herself from the bowl of pistachios. Inside, I’m beginning to panic – this is all a bit sudden, isn’t it? A bit unexpected. She’s been here half an hour now and I don’t feel we’ve quite got to the bottom of why she is.

‘Look, Lex …’ I say, gently. She looks at me with her big, brown eyes – there’s something hopeful about them, so innocent and trusting and I already feel awful. ‘I’m more than happy to have you for a while but you have to understand, I have a job, a really demanding job. I’m out all day …’

‘I’m very resourceful.’ She shrugs. ‘I’m used to amusing myself.’

That’s what’s worrying me.

‘I often have client events at night.’