– school friends didn’t hold with her ‘Edie’ revisionism – ‘he was not right for you. If he’s treating his girlfriend like shit by doing this, if you ended up together, he’d treat you like shit too. That is an eternal truth, and you know it.’
Edie couldn’t allow this to be true, even though she knew it couldn’t be truer than Darwin being right about the ape thing.
She whimpered that maybe he didn’t want to hurt Charlotte.
‘Haha!’ Hannah said. ‘Oh wait, you’re serious?’
‘Also,’ Edie said, knowing she was truly rummaging at the bottom of the Christmas stocking with this one, with the unshelled Brazil nuts you could never find a nutcracker to open, ‘he once said that I’m unpindownable and intimidating, I’ve been independent for so long. Perhaps he thinks I’d be a risk …’
‘Oh yeah, so hard to catch that you’re sat in another country crying about him over your weekends! Exactly the sort of thing that manipulative bullshitters say,’ Hannah said. ‘Ugh. Sorry, I really don’t like him, Edith.’
Edie sort-of agreed and yet thought if Hannah met Jack and was exposed to the full force of his charm, she’d understand. And that perhaps Edie shouldn’t have said so much, because now if Hannah and Jack ever met she’d have to do some serious repair work on his image. This was such a triumph of hope over rationality, she wondered if he’d made her loopy.
So, all things considered, Edie should’ve seen the engagement coming.
Yet the Friday when Edie spied Charlotte pink-cheeked with excitement, fingers of her left hand clasped by a cooing secretary – it was like someone had put a fish hook in her stomach, attached it to a flatbed truck and accelerated away.
Edie pretended not to have seen, and slipped out to a client meeting, which she didn’t return from. She got a text later that night.
Hey you. Where were you today? Didn’t see you in Luigis’s after work? And yeah so I’m getting married, what’s up with that? Gulp. Are we growing up? Please tell me we aren’t … I’m not ready for the La-Z-Boy recliner yet, E.T. Jx
She threw her phone across the room, drank three-quarters of a bottle of gin and danced around so loudly to Kelis’s ‘Caught Out There’ that the couple downstairs complained.
It was in many ways worse than if she and Jack had a full- blown physical affair. That infidelity was incontrovertible; making fury and hurt legitimate. An emotional affair required two people to agree it had taken place, even while one person lay in tatters. Her dad once told her about ‘quantum superposition’ which seemed to boil down to something both existing and not existing at the same time. This, to Edie, summed up her and Jack.
She couldn’t complain. She should never have got entangled with someone who was with someone else.
It was like trying to go to the police to report that you’d had a knife pulled on you during a drug deal.
The problem with waking up after a day like yesterday, Edie discovered, were those few seconds of freedom before you remembered what had happened. A psychological prison break where you didn’t make it to the perimeter fence.
She had finally passed out in twitchy exhaustion around four a.m., roused by the alarm on her phone at five. For a split second, she couldn’t remember where she was, why she was looking at a flowery bed canopy or why she was so tired and wrung out. When it all came rushing back, it was almost as bad as realising her fate the first time round.
Edie jumped up and ran to the bathroom, dragged a flannel across her puffy eyes, threw make-up in the general direction of her face. She pushed every possession into her trolley case, swallowed hard and squared her shoulders. None of this should be happening. She should be sleeping off the previous night’s consumption, and later sharing a full English with other hungover refugees from the stop-when-you-drop service of a hotel bar. Instead, this.
In the pin-drop quiet deserted dawn on a Sunday, her heart was pulsing, ker-thunk ker-thunk.
Any traces of sleepiness from her grotty hour’s rest were chased away by the gigantic adrenaline surge as she turned the lock to open her door. She half expected to find a crowd of snoring people with outstretched legs, weaponry like unplugged irons in their hands, a boobytrap tripwire at her feet.
The hotel was silent, and Edie winced as if the squeak of her trolley case was making the noise of a jumbo jet taking off. She pushed the handle down and picked it up. She reasoned with herself: what percentage of people will have stayed awake, patrolling the building? What percentage of people, bar Louis, would be able to visually ID her as the fallen woman anyway?
She breathed deeply and jabbed her finger on the button to call the lift, as her skin glowed and prickled with the combined heat of an intensely bright yellow summer morning and the slick of guilty, fearful sweat. As per last night’s vomiting episode, she knew that once the practical problem of getting out of here was out of the way, the creeping psychic torture would be far, far worse.
The middle-aged man on reception looked startled as Edie rolled her case out of the lift and said, testing her croaky voice: ‘I’d like to check out, please.’
He stared at Edie for a moment, putting two and two together, and Edie felt like a celebrity for all the wrong reasons. She had some dark glasses somewhere in her bag, but wasn’t going to put them on until she hit exterior sunlight. Only Stevie Wonder was allowed to wear sunglasses indoors without being a tit, even Edie’s predicament didn’t change that. She wished Hannah was here. She wished she had just one person on her side, to vouch for her. Although she knew Hannah would have some vigorous words for her, too.
‘Could I order a taxi to the station?’ Edie said, ‘I’ll wait out there.’
The man nodded in embarrassed understanding. Given her state, Edie couldn’t help but think that he was thinking was this woman really worth it.
Edie pushed through the revolving door, into the car park and came face to face with another human being. She tried not to startle at seeing the 40-something mother with curly hair, a very small baby in her arms and a toddler bumbling around at her feet. Thankfully, Edie didn’t know who she was, and the woman smiled at her as a reflex response, suggesting she definitely didn’t know who Edie was.
‘Morning!’ Edie said in a peppy, sergeant major-ish voice.
‘Morning! Nice one, isn’t it?’
‘Gorgeous.’ Appalling.
‘You’re up early!’ Her eyes moved from Edie to her case, and back again. ‘And you don’t have this lot to contend with,’ she jiggled the baby, who frowned at Edie with its suspicious crumpled face.
‘Haha no, tons of work to do. Big project on. Thought I’d best get home.’
Oh God, taxi, please turn up, and soon.
‘Do you have far to go?’
‘London.’ Edie swallowed, with a dry mouth. ‘You?’
‘Cheltenham.
