pants that littered the floor. Once they were stowed, she turned her attention to the contents of her washbag that had rolled towards the check-in.
As she snatched up the tweezers (the laser treatment to her chin was something else that had been too low on her priority list) and the bumper pack of ibuprofen, she became aware of a pair of unfamiliar male hands retrieving the pair of Bridget Jones knickers that she’d missed – the big cream M&S ones that only she knew she possessed. Until now. She’d brought them because they were perfect for the woman who only took her kit off when she was alone and who wanted to disguise her VPL without resorting to the bum-splitting discomfort of a thong. She certainly hadn’t envisaged sharing them with anyone else. They had landed on his very shiny dark brown left brogue. She watched aghast as the hands folded them once, then twice, before holding out the neat parcel to her. She wasn’t sure she could endure another moment of this.
Who would fold another person’s knickers? Mortified, she glanced up to lock eyes with a smart, suited Indian man of a certain age who was squatting beside her. He smiled a sympathetic smile. She had watched the DVD of Slumdog Millionaire for the nth time before she left, and the only thought that crossed her mind was that he was a dead ringer for the quiz-show host played by Anil Kapoor. It couldn’t be. Could it? Of course not. She took the knickers from his hand as briskly as she could without snatching.
‘Thank you,’ she mumbled, wishing the floor would rip apart to swallow her and her bloody case.
He nodded, straightened up and looked away. But Lou hadn’t missed the glint of amusement in his eye.
Meanwhile, Ali had recovered herself and had squatted down beside her to help Lou retrieve the last few clothes and shove them into her own case. ‘Let’s get this sorted. Quick. A gin and tonic is definitely called for.’
‘A large one!’ Lou agreed.
An hour and a half later, they had reached the departure gate, the alcohol having aided the recovery of Lou’s sense of humour. They were still laughing about what had happened as they walked down the tunnel onto the plane. Dodging elbows as hand luggage was stowed above heads and sidling past passengers preparing to sit down, they made their way through the nirvana of business class to the unholy limbo at the back of the plane. Lou was leading the way, checking the numbers of the seats, when she stopped dead. Ali bumped into her. ‘Easy!’ she said, taking a step back. ‘What’re you doing?’
‘It’s him!’ said Lou, feeling her inner temperature soar, the perspiration prickle. She gestured down the aisle to where, in the outside seat of three, sat her knicker-rescuer immersed in a magazine. ‘Those are our seats! You’ll have to sit in the middle. I can’t small-talk with someone who’s on such intimate terms with my underwear.’
‘Sounds like a perfect match to me,’ said Ali.
For once, Lou was unamused.
As they waited for him to stand up and let them into their seats, Lou tried but failed to avoid his eye. They acknowledged each other with the briefest of nods before Lou, feeling herself blush, looked away and slid into her seat by the window, followed by Ali.
Trying not to panic about having to spend the next eight hours cramped in the economy seat, Lou jammed the airline freebies into her seat-back pocket. Preparing for take-off and landing were the parts of the flight that scared her most. Shutting her eyes, she tried again to find the calm that had so far eluded her. She breathed in, closing her eyes and trying to direct her breath out through the centre of her forehead, her third eye. Wasn’t that what the yoga teacher had said on the course she’d taken that summer, as he encouraged the class in the final relaxation exercise? She hadn’t understood what he was on about as she lay freezing on the floor of the decaying church hall, wishing she’d remembered to bring a blanket, and she certainly didn’t understand now. She tried again.
‘What are you doing?’ Ali’s voice interrupted her concentration.
‘Breathing. Not panicking. I’ll be fine.’ (Don’t talk to me.)
‘Tell me about your shop then.’ Ali ignored the incipient hysteria in Lou’s voice. ‘Now we’re on our way home, we might as well think about what we’re going back to.’
‘Give me a minute.’ Lou took in another breath and tightened her grip on the armrests, closing her eyes again. She was better dealing with her fear on her own. She refocused her mind. What would be waiting for her at the end of the flight? Just the words ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz: vintage and vintage-inspired clothes’ gave her a buzz of excitement. Her online business selling the vintage clothes that she’d acquired over years of working in the fashion biz, trawling vintage fairs, charity and junk shops, car boot sales and relatives’ attics was going to expand into the here and now. Finding the premises would be her number one priority when she got home.
Home. Rather than open her eyes to her present surroundings, she let herself drift back to the day, a couple of months earlier, when she had moved into the small Victorian house that she had inherited from Jenny.
‘Are you sure you’ll be all right?’ Hooker, her husband of nearly thirty-one years, had grasped her hand as tightly as if he was trying to pull her from a fast-flowing river. Then she remembered how, apparently satisfied that he’d succeeded, he leaned forward for a kiss.
She pulled back, ignoring the look of displeasure that crossed his face, reclaiming her hand and abandoning herself to the current that was already carrying her out of his reach. ‘I’ll be absolutely fine,’ she said, firmly.
Until months earlier, that moment had only been wishful thinking, just like those times when she was drifting off to sleep and had fantasised about him leaving her or had even gone as far as imagining his funeral, what she’d wear and how she’d behave: respectful and grief-stricken on the outside, but gleeful about her new freedom on the inside. She was ashamed about those darker moments but he hadn’t always been the most ideal husband, especially of late, and it wasn’t as if she’d really believed anything bad would happen – or wanted it to. Not really. She had tightened her grip on the door as she began to shut him out of her life.
‘You are sure you’re doing the right thing?’ He stood his ground. ‘It’s not too late to change your mind and come home, you know.’
Leaning against the door frame, she willed her apprehension not to show. She knew him too well. If he spotted any weakness in her, he’d be quick to exploit it. ‘We’ve been through this a thousand and one times.’ She spoke slowly, as if drumming the information through his skull and into his brain. ‘We don’t love each other any more. We’ve agreed on that. So I’m going to live here now. It’s over.’
She remembered how she’d been reduced to romantic clichés. But they were true. She didn’t love him any more. And she doubted that he’d loved her for years, not really. Her sadness came less from their parting and more from the fact that their separation marked the end of their family as they had all known it.
Cramped in her airline seat, she flexed her feet, lifted one leg and rotated her ankle, then the other. Ali said something, but she took no notice. To take her mind off the flight, she forced herself to return to that day, the day that marked the start of her new independence. From now on, she was going to be devoting some time to herself instead of to the hours demanded by being Hooker’s chief wardrobe mistress, cook and bottle-washer: hours during which she had chosen to dismiss the occasional unfounded suspicion that Hooker might be playing away. That was a side to their recent life together that she’d never confronted. While the children were in their teens, she was determined to put them first. But they were grown up now and the need for that was finally over.
He’d
