He was silent.
‘What the FUCK, Dan? What?! Please explain this because I’m not close to understanding how you could be this ruthless?’
‘It’s not something I planned,’ he said, eventually. ‘I think … the end is more recent for you than for me, in that I wasn’t happy for a while.’
‘Oh God, so we’re back to the idea you’d been miserable for ages?’
‘No, not ages!’
It was over. He was with someone else. Yet Laurie was already asking herself how they came back from this. There is no ‘they’, a voice told her. There is ‘them’ now. Have you gone deaf?
‘You fucking sadist,’ Laurie said, shrill but hoarse. ‘Who are you? I don’t even know. I really don’t even know.’
Don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry, Laurie told herself. Not yet, though it felt like she had psychically collapsed in on herself, like a dying star.
She had an enemy, a nemesis, a rival she never knew about, who had climbed into bed with her long-term partner when, somehow, Laurie wasn’t looking.
Laurie hadn’t for a second considered there was anyone else. When she asked Dan that question, that first night, it was more to embarrass him than anything. To point up the seriousness and the stakes of his actions to him. Laurie was braced to receive Dan back, and now this?
And when exactly did it start?
She held up a trembling hand and counted off on her fingers. ‘You’ve been gone ten weeks, Dan, and you got together with her a few weeks back. And she’s already important enough for you to come round and tell me about? Something’s not quite adding up, is it? This is Concorde speed.’
Dan blew air out. He looked like his jaw had locked, that he was finding it difficult to speak. He couldn’t look at her. ‘Obviously we were friends, before. Only friends though, nothing happened.’
‘But you knew that you were going to get together with her when you left me, didn’t you?’
Dan was vigorously shaking his head but Laurie knew the bones of him, she’d known him half her life. She could see in his eyes that he was lying. Never mind that, she could see on the bare timeline here, he was lying. No intuition needed, that’s how staggeringly obvious his cruelty was.
‘Nothing happened before …’
‘Don’t try to fucking out-lawyer a lawyer, Dan. “Nothing happened” – meaning you waited to have sex until you told me you were leaving me. But she was right there, lined up. You left me for her.’
He shook his head but again Laurie could see he had no words, without completely perjuring himself.
Laurie still loved Dan, deeply, and yet with the excruciating pain he was inflicting on her, she felt the banal truism of there being a fine line between love and hate.
Laurie knew that most people were murdered by someone they knew; she’d stood up in court and argued for the killers’ bail applications, while they wept not only about their fate, but about their loss.
In this moment, she understood why.
8
Laurie suppressed her homicidal impulses and tried to summon every ounce of someone who thought strategy for a living to handle this, to not let Dan off the hook by putting her feelings first.
‘So you were obviously really fucking heartbroken. How long did you wait to climb into bed, after the Pickfords van left here? Days? Hours?’
‘I was. I am. She has nothing to do with us, with what happened.’
‘Oh what SHIT! You’d fallen for someone else, you dumped me for her, but you’ve convinced yourself she is incidental?! This is beyond insulting. It’s downright fucking ludicrous.’
‘Laurie, if we were right, if things had been OK, Megan wouldn’t have happened. The cause and effect is the wrong way round if you think Megan split us up.’
Laurie gasped. ‘These are mental gymnastics, contortions, so you don’t have to feel guilty. Basically it’s my fault, for not making you happy enough?’
‘No! Relationships fail all the time, I’m not saying it’s your fault. This is what has happened, that’s all, and I know it’s shitty for you, I know that.’
‘Yeah relationships are especially likely to fail when one person has started an affair. You know, that thing we promised we’d never ever do to one another. Remember that?’
‘It wasn’t an affair,’ Dan said, grimly, but to Laurie’s ears, without the necessary conviction.
‘Being on a promise with someone is an affair, Dan.’
He said nothing, because she had nailed it. The utter emptiness of this argumentative victory. In fact victory was the wrong word. Sour satisfaction at best, except she felt no satisfaction whatsoever.
‘You had an affair and you won’t even do the decent thing and say as much, call it what it is, in case it makes you feel bad.’
‘I feel awful.’
Laurie had to tell herself to breathe before she could speak again.
‘I begged you to tell me what was going on, I begged you. And you gave me a load of WANK about finding yourself. You had met some other woman you wanted to bang, and you spun me this line about your existential angst?!’
‘All of that was true!’ Dan said, more vehement now, but Laurie knew he was only vehement in the way anyone in a corner was, with a near-hyperventilating woman shouting unwanted truths at him.
‘Was it too obvious, too LAMESTREAM, to admit you’d found a better option, like a million other boring ageing men who can’t keep it in their pants? Is she twenty-five, this mysterious someone who doesn’t make you feel trapped, and like there’s nothing worthwhile between here and death?’
‘Thirty-five.’
Instantly, despite her fury and humiliation at the idea some lissom ingénue had stolen Dan’s affections, this was worse – Laurie hadn’t been traded for a younger model. She’d lost to a woman of her own age, or thereabouts. It was a fair fight, this boxing match, they were in the same weight category with similar length of training. Laurie was simply too boring.
That fear was lurking behind it all, she knew that. Domesticated, exemplary employee, devoted to Dan, ticked so many boxes – but dull. Someone who could make you feel like life held no surprises anymore. Right now, she wanted to surprise the shit out of him, but the only ways she could think of involved petrol and matches.
‘I promise you, that’s not how it was. I was already unhappy, the thing with Megan came right out of the blue …’
‘This is such bullshit!’ Laurie shouted, reacting to hearing her name again like she’d been tasered. ‘Your whole thing was oh no I hate this conventional, being tied down, settled monogamy, it’s not for me, maybe I will go backpacking. And your first big gesture of freedom is getting another girlfriend?! Another lawyer, at that?’
Laurie had to pause for breath but she knew she was dying for Dan to say, she’s not my girlfriend, it’s a fling. He didn’t of course – if she was a fling, why would he be here? Which meant Laurie was still gambling, even now, they could come back from this.
Being confronted with how little you could accept from someone, when your heart was on the line and you were being tortured, was awful. Laurie hated herself too, in that very moment.