the messages in his face.
‘You’re having an affair.’
He actually snorted! It turned into a cough. He ran the back of his hand across his mouth.
‘What! You’ve well got the wrong end of the stick! That’s just a client I went out for dinner with. Just a random client.’
‘A random client you call sexy?’
‘For God’s sake. That’s just a turn of phrase! Business speak.’
‘Sexy is not a turn of phrase!’ she snarled, in a terrified whisper. ‘Come on, James! I’m not a bloody idiot! I suppose rubbing and friction is some business jargon, too! Was it an all-hands meeting? Did you have an ideas shower? She said her blouse was off! You’re shagging her!’
His head was lowered. He wouldn’t look at her.
‘That was her breast,’ she said quietly.
‘What breast?’
‘You’re unbelievable, James. The breast on your phone.’
‘Oh, that.’
‘Yes, that!’
He shrugged. ‘A tit’s a tit,’ he said. His hair was all sticking up and he had a five o’clock shadow. She used to find it endearing. Now she just hated him.
It was typical of the sort of thing he always said, with that cheeky, handsome smile of his. Tits are just tits; there’s no harm in looking; more than a handful is a waste (although considering the size of Work’s, he didn’t stand by this sentiment). She was appalled to realise that she actually used to find it funny when he spoke about women like that. Everyone did. He was a good bloke was James, a laugh. If he said things like that, people just shrugged and smiled. He could get away with it. He was a top man. The best.
Grace had had a lot of boyfriends; she was one of those girls who always had a boy waiting in the wings. They were all okay, nothing special. Not quite good enough for her. Then James had come along. He was special. Tall and dark blond and ridiculously handsome. Funny and brilliant and surrounded by adoring people – his mum, his brothers and sisters, his work colleagues. Everyone she met when she was with him told her what a great guy he was: she was surprised he didn’t receive applause just for walking down the street. She had thought, yes, at last. James was special. James deserved her; at last there was somebody who did.
That was all gone now.
‘A tit – God I hate that word – is not just a tit! I want you to admit it, James.’ James was ruffling his sticky-up hair like Stan Laurel, but he still looked unruffled, unaffected. ‘So I can kick you out. Have you been sleeping with someone: yes or no?’
‘What?’ He turned his baby blues directly towards hers. Those eyes with the eyelashes that were longer than hers. Those eyes she had stared into on their wedding day and seen everything in.
‘Yes or no? Tell the truth. I’ll respect you more.’
Another hair ruffle. Was he about to do the Stan Laurel whimper? Unlikely. He wasn’t the whimpering kind. He tried to turn on his age-old charm. He smiled his slow, sexy smile and narrowed his eyes. ‘If I tell you the truth would there be a chance I don’t have to go?’
‘Yes.’
He paused, then said, ‘Okay, then it’s true. I’m bang to rights. Sorry, Grace.’ And his winning smile became a pleading smirk, one that always made her stomach flip and made her forgive him anything. Not now. She felt like she’d been punched in the gut. She would have collapsed onto the bed next to him if she could bear to be that close. She would never put her body that close to his again.
‘I lied,’ she said. ‘You have to go. Now.’
She knew he would have loved to slam the back door as he left, but he chose not to let the entire neighbourhood know he was highly displeased. He was all about appearances, our James. And Grace had to keep up hers.
She’d had to swallow down the tears she wanted to cry her heart out with and take Daniel to Sunday football.
That evening, after the football kit had been washed and tumble-dried and Daniel had gone to bed with his iPad, Grace put love in the bin. Large cream, wooden letters that spelt L.O.V.E. to be exact. They used to sit on the mantelpiece in the living room, when love had meant something. Along with them she dumped a wooden plaque that said LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE and a slate heart that had hung in the kitchen on the wall by the fridge that said MR and MRS. It left a lighter, heart-shaped space on the paintwork. She frowned; she’d have to touch that up.
The lid of her posh, soft-close bin settled back into place and she opened the fridge and took out a bottle of wine. She wasn’t much of a drinker, but tonight she needed wine. She’d stopped off at the Co-op on the way home from football to get some while Daniel had waited in the car. A glimpse of herself in the reflection of the shop’s chiller door had horrified her. It was a catastrophic hair day. Really bad. The wind on the football pitch had whipped her thick, blonde curls into an unruly bush. A cowlick bounced on her forehead. James liked her hair; he always said it was cute. Bastard. Maybe she’d straighten it now; maybe she’d iron out everything James had ever liked about it.
She stood by the fridge and poured some of the bottle into the glass ready and waiting on the worktop, and her eye caught her calendar. It had three columns, one for James, one for her, one for Daniel. She used three different coloured pens for each of them, perfect and precise.
She quite liked it when her friends called her ‘Princess Grace’. They didn’t mean it nastily; she wasn’t princess-y: she didn’t have pouting hissy fits and expect people to bring her cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off, on velvet cushions or anything, nor was she a J-Lo style demanding diva. But she did like kitten heels and pale pink nail varnish, cashmere cardis and pretty ballerina flats. She never overdid her make-up or wore tarty clothes. She liked small, delicate stud earrings. She would be horrified at anything remotely Pat Butcher. She was a princess but not princess-y: if she had the perfect life she had worked hard to get it.
She believed in morals. She believed people got what they deserved. Her favourite book, as a child, was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and she knew exactly what Roald Dahl was saying. Good children were given chocolate factories; awful children got what was coming to them. Follow the path; toe the line.
She took a pair of scissors from the kitchen drawer, carefully cut off James’s column from the calendar and threw it in the bin. The calendar was now lopsided so she took some Blu-Tack and glued the drooping corner to the back of the kitchen door. Then she took the green pen from her neat pen pot and threw that into the bin as well.
She was done. With James. With men. If James, the very best man of all, had turned out to be a traitor, a hurter, a destroyer, then there would be no more men for her. H.O.M.E as declared in big letters on the wall of her living room was now just about her and Daniel.
Men were a mistake. A big mistake.
And no man would ever hurt her again.
Imogen
