sounded like you said you and Pete …?’
‘… have split up.’
‘No?’ Edie said. It was as much a statement as a question. Hannah and Pete couldn’t simply ‘split up’ any more than the Queen and Prince Philip. Together since university, inseparable, finished each other’s sentences, each other’s equal and opposite reaction. This was unthinkable. This was like your parents divorcing.
‘I don’t know where to start,’ Hannah said, and Edie heard the unusual tremor in her voice. ‘We’d been not happy for so long we’d forgotten what happy felt like, so we were numb to it all. I couldn’t bring myself to say the words, I kept losing my nerve. I lay in bed at night thinking, “I’ll do it tomorrow” and then the next day was never the right day to do it. I went away on this training course and shagged someone else so that I’d done something definitive I couldn’t take back.’
‘You had an affair?’ Edie said. This was un-possible.
‘Not sure if it’s an affair if it’s a one-off? I fell off the fidelity wagon with a thud, yes. I knew Pete and I were over and had to push myself to make it real. I haven’t told him. I’m not proud of it, but there it is. It was as if I had to prove to myself we were over, as well as him. I came home two weeks ago and finished it.’ Hannah paused. ‘I was going to call you before now but I needed to get it straight in my head and we had to tell the parents and everything … With Mum having the MS flare up, I wanted to pick my moment …’
Edie nodded. She owed it to Hannah to be as supportively hard-to-shock as she’d been for her.
‘I had no idea. You seemed so steady.’
‘We had no idea. Or we had some idea, but it was like carrying a weight. Sooner or later you forget you’re carrying it and think you always walked with a stoop. Fuck, Edith, I can hardly bring myself to admit this to you, but I found myself thinking: we can’t split up because we’ve just had the floors sanded. We were seriously staying together because of sofas and tiles and stripped floors. Like the beautiful house had become this tomb we were interred in together.’
Edie had forgotten how smart Hannah was. It was intimidating she was so good with words when Edie did words for a living. You’d hardly let Edie tinker with your urine- filtration system.
‘We didn’t want a wedding or kids and so it was possible to drift, you know? And the whole constant mantra about how long-term relationships are hard work and everything has its ups and downs and you’re going to be annoyed by their toenails and stick with it and the grass only looks greener and so on. It’s actually very hard to tell when you should split up with someone. All I knew was I was waking up every morning thinking this can’t be it, until death. When your relationship is making you feel life’s too long, something’s gone awry.’
Hannah’s voice had become thick, and she sipped her wine. Edie felt bad that Hannah had obviously churned on this a lot, with her friend so many hundreds of miles away, not able to help.
‘You should’ve said …’
‘I didn’t want to say it out loud until I was sure. You know that’s me.’
Edie nodded. She’d done the same over HarrogateGate, after all. Waited until she could face saying it.
‘… I’m moving back to Nottingham,’ Hannah continued. ‘I was here for a job interview at the Queen’s Med yesterday and they’ve offered it to me. I don’t want to hang around in Edinburgh and bump into Pete all the time. I can’t stand the whole access arrangements to mutual friends thing, I want a clean break. My mum’s not getting any better. I start in two weeks.’
‘Oh my God! Both of us back at the same time, what are the chances?’
‘You’re not staying, though?’
‘No,’ Edie said, with a small shudder, although why she thought London was the safe haven was unclear. ‘I technically have my job to go back to.’ As if that made it more appealing.
‘How lucky are we, to at least end up here at the same time in our hour of need,’ Edie said, as Hannah returned from the bar with more massive glasses of red that were going to wreak flamboyant revenge in the morning.
‘Well, qualified lucky,’ Hannah said, into her glass, and smiled.
‘OK, we know our lives are a shitty mess. To the outside world, I am a celebrity biographer and you are a superb renal surgeon and we have most of a bottle of Shiraz to neck.’
They clinked glasses.
‘To being together in our time of need,’ Hannah said. ‘Shall we look Nick up? Have you heard from him lately?’
Edie shook her head, guiltily. She’d not seen Nick for eighteen months, bar trading the odd ‘did you see this’ funny email. Nick was a friend they’d made in sixth form. You might say he was ‘Eeyore-ish’ although ‘prone to mildly depressive episodes’ might be more accurate. With bizarre juxtaposition, he had a very sunny local radio show where he chatted with old dears and played Fleetwood Mac.
Aged twenty-four, he’d made a catastrophically bad choice of sour, bossy wife in Alice. Hannah had once described marrying Alice as ‘an act of self-loathing’.
It seemed as if it was so much strife for him to wriggle out from under the yoke of oppression, it was easier to turn down social occasions. They had a young son, Max, and Nick had pretty much been grounded by Alice, forever.
‘Do you think A Town Called Malice is letting him roam around free range, yet?’ Hannah said. They had called her this for some time.
‘I doubt it,’ Edie said.
‘I want to talk to him, you know. Life is too short to put up with being unhappy.’
Edie nodded, though she suspected it was futile. ‘We should definitely let him know we’re back.’
Now she thought about it, Nick had been unusually quiet on email, even by his standards. Maybe Baby 2 was on the way and he didn’t want to face their creaky-polite erm great what wonderful news.
‘If he tries to avoid us, we can call in to his radio show,’ Hannah said.
Edie agreed. ‘We could even ask him out with Alice? Turn a new page?’
‘We could. I bet that page will say Yep Still A Cow on it though.’
When she rolled in later, revived, Edie was surprised to find her dad waiting up for her, watching the television with a glass of Glenmorangie.
‘Haven’t waited up for you to come home for quite a few years,’ he said, smiling.
Edie had to say it fast or she’d lose her nerve. ‘Dad, I’m going to find somewhere else to stay, tomorrow. Me and Meg is too much stress for everyone.’
Her dad didn’t look surprised.
‘Look. Give it a week or two. The settling in was always going to have its rocky moments.’
‘She hates me!’ Edie said, in hysterical whisper-squeak. ‘I don’t do anything to
