of cottage with weirdly placed paintings to hide the mildew, surrounded by terriers who will fight over my dead body. I don’t even think the roses round the door are roses, I think they’re just brambles.’
‘Well, maybe it’s time to think about getting back in the game then?’ suggested Colin.
‘Back in the saddle, so to speak,’ added Sam with a lascivious wink.
‘Saddle? Game?’ I said in confusion. ‘What on earth are you talking about? You think I should take up tennis? And riding? Or cycling? Do a triathlon like Fiona Montague?’
‘Well, riding of a sort,’ snorted Sam with another leery wink. ‘Crikey, is Fiona doing a triathlon? I’d have thought she’d be too worried about her make-up running!’
‘Sam,’ snapped Colin. ‘Your double entendres are not helping, nor is your winking, which frankly is just disturbing. Please never do that at me. And we’re not here to talk about Fiona Montague.’
Sam muttered something mutinous.
‘No, Ellen,’ Colin went on. ‘We’re talking about you getting back in the dating game. Finding yourself a man. Getting a bit of cock. You’re a beautiful woman in her prime, who deserves to have a bit of fun, and we thought you maybe just need a nudge.’
I looked at them both in horror. ‘No. Just … no. I can’t. It’s not possible. And please don’t describe me as a woman in her prime, because that just reminds me of Miss Jean Brodie, who was a mad, sex-obsessed fascist who came to no good in the end. I’m not a nympho Nazi, thank you very much!’
‘But Ellen, don’t you miss sex?’ asked Colin gently.
‘No,’ I said bluntly. ‘I don’t. I miss Simon. I miss the man I thought he was. I miss having someone to come home to and tell about my day, even if he doesn’t listen, and someone to make me a cup of tea in bed on Sunday morning, and having someone I’ve spent my whole life with so that sometimes when I see something funny and I know they’d be the only other person in the world who would find that funny too I can just tell them or text them a photo and know they’ll get my joke without having to explain it. I miss having someone who remembers our children’s firsts – their first steps, their first words, their first days at school. I miss having someone who knows me in the way you can only know someone after twenty-five years together. And he wasn’t annoying all the time. There was a lot of good stuff too, when he took off his ratty fleeces and wore the nice jumpers I bought him. We had a lot of laughs together, and now I’ve no one to think about going on Nile cruises with when we’re old, or to share my indignation when the first SAGA catalogue drops through the door, and I miss the thought of all the things we should have done together when we finally had time and money and were free from the children. But I don’t miss fucking SEX, if you’ll pardon the pun!’
And then I burst into tears. Hideous, wracking tears, the tears I’d been holding in for months, ever since the furious, scalding, angry tears the night that he told me he needed some ‘space’, and I decided after those tears that I could either get on with my life or I could give in to the tears, but I couldn’t do both because if I gave in to the tears I’d drown in them. But it seems they were still there and had sneakily found a way to escape, which after all is what water always does. I sobbed and I sobbed, while Sam did the awkward man thing of patting my back gingerly and mumbling ‘There, there’, until Colin dispatched him in search of tissues and ‘a PROPER drink, darling, something stronger than bloody champagne, but for Christ’s sake not gin, she’s in enough of a state as it is!’ and I attempted to howl something about there being twelve packs of Mansize tissues in the cupboard under the stairs, and Colin took over and pulled me into a huge bear hug and just held me while I cried and cried, until the storm started to pass and I became uncomfortably aware that I’d drenched the front of his shirt in tears and, much worse, snot.
As the howling subsided into that awkward sniffling hiccupping that comes at the end of a really bad crying jag, and I attempted to gain some sort of control over myself, Colin handed me a large wad of tissues, and an eye-wateringly strong vodka and tonic.
‘Better?’ he enquired.
‘Uh huh,’ I gulped.
‘I think you needed that, didn’t you?’ he said gently.
I had needed it. I felt oddly cleansed, and calmer than I’d been for months.
‘Ellen,’ said Hannah. ‘Do you really still love Simon? Do you regret divorcing him?’
‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘It’s all so confusing. We’d been together so long, and I was so hurt and angry by what he did, but I thought we’d get through it in the end, we’d find a way, but then he started all that shit about “needing space” and not knowing if he loved me, so that was that, really … But it’s strange, life without him, because there were good bits too, you know. I know you thought he was an arse, but I do, did, I don’t know, love him, and despite everything, deep down I always thought he loved me too. I just always thought we’d grow old together. I’ve thought that since the very first night we got together. And now we won’t. And that takes a bit of getting used to, the idea that I’ll be on my own now for the rest of my life, with no one to accompany me on that Nile cruise.’
‘In fairness, you’d been trying to persuade Simon to go on a Nile cruise for years and he always refused on the basis that you’d only be disappointed when no one was murdered on board so you could don a shady hat and solve the mystery, gin and tonic in hand. Same as he wouldn’t go on the Orient Express with you either, because the murder-free reality would just shatter all your Agatha Christie fantasies,’ pointed out Colin.
‘And anyway, things like that are exactly what we were talking about,’ said Sam. ‘You seem to think that that’s it, that you’re now condemned to some lonely nun-like existence for evermore, but it’s the twenty-first century, people split up, move on, find new partners all the fucking time, babe. Look at me. Look at Colin. Look at Hannah and Charlie. We’ve all had failed marriages or long-term relationships, and we’ve all found someone else. Why do you think you won’t?’
‘I didn’t say I thought I won’t,’ I pointed out. ‘I said I can’t. There’s a difference.’
‘But why not?’ said Colin, looking baffled. ‘Unless you are still in love with Simon and feel you’ve made a terrible mistake, in which case it’s probably not too late to tell him, don’t be like Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler, both too proud to admit how they feel. If you want Simon, do something about it. You’re not actually divorced yet – you could just put all this behind you and move on and we’ll say no more about it.’
‘I’m not pining for Simon,’ I said, remembering the very annoying coffee conversation we’d had that morning and his utter uselessness in attempting to galvanise his children into action even when it was officially his time to be responsible for them, and also reminding myself he was probably even now having red-hot contortionist sex to put on Instagram while his children were shut in their cupboards. ‘I just miss the companionship and the shorthand of an established relationship. Anyway, I can’t tell you why I can’t find someone else. You will just have to take my word for it,’ and I took a large slug of my drink.
Two more enormous vodka and tonics later, while Charlie was out getting a curry, I thought maybe, after all, I could tell the rest of them why I was now destined for a life of celibacy and loneliness.
‘I can’t have sex with another man,’ I announced.
‘Why
