face and Fu Man Chu for nails plz. Will try. No promises. Just read weather report. Major suckage incoming from Ireland. Still time to reconsider and meet in London instead.
[Izz]
Will bring bongos for child-friendly mini-rave. Please can we film Charlotte on the bongos? #PromiseNotToExploitHerGriefForComedicEffect Need snowsuit. Forgot how bloody cold it was here in summer.
[Freya]
Monty???? WTF? Hurry. Up. No sex for a week – not even a BJ if you aren’t back in five.
[Emily]
Freya. Please. There’s only so much we want to know about your private life.
[Freya]
My humiliation is complete.
Charlotte shook away the cloud of washing-up bubbles and stared at her rings.
She should leave soon if she was going to beat the traffic to meet up with Freya. She also should’ve packed. Should’ve baked a cake. Packed a hamper. It was very unlike her not to be prepared. It was also a very unusual day. Her very first as an about-to-be-divorcée.
Oli had waited until she’d gone downstairs to start his packing. A strange courtesy considering he hadn’t really left much to the imagination when he’d explained why he’d been ‘forced to do this.’ As he spoke the words – not in love any more, fenced-in, someone with more drive – Charlotte wondered if the buzzing in her head would ever stop.
It had. But the new sounds were every bit as bewildering. Step, step, step from the chest of drawers to the suitcase. This as she’d gone through the motions down in the kitchen, getting some breakfast together for the pair of them. Breakfast. As if it were just another day. Scritch, scritch went the hangars as shirt after shirt came out of the wardrobe. He’d taken an awful lot of toiletries, judging from all the clatter coming from the en suite. The methodical cadence of it all had put her in a sort of stupor. One she’d best snap out of now that ‘Xanthe and the baby were his priorities’. And the children, he’d hastily added. Charlotte, of course, had now officially been dropped off the list.
She stared at the rings again.
What did one do in this scenario?
Take them off straight away, or feign, as she had the past couple of months, that everything in her life was perfectly perfect?
What a fool she’d been. Believing Oliver wanted to make a go of things.
At least she was getting out of this wretched house for a bit of perspective. It had been her pride and joy when the children were young and she’d bustled about like Doris Day. Now it was little more than a show home for a beautiful but meaningless life.
She glanced out the window to where Oli’s car had been, chiding herself for having been so acquiescent about the whole thing. She’d just sat there and listened. Accepted everything he’d said, as if it would be sheer madness to express any sort of opinion about the fact he’d pulled the grenade pin on her life.
She tried to channel her friends to see if that would help. Freya, Izzy and Emily were all so different but each of them seemed to possess a core strength she herself lacked.
If she had been more like Freya, she would’ve made a proper show of things. Thrown something. Strode out to the recently relaid stone patio after Oli announced his ‘slight’ change of heart and, one by one, dropped the rings into the well with some sort of pithy comment about how they were most likely blood diamonds anyway. Heaven knew he’d sucked her dry.
Emily would’ve quirked an eyebrow and said, ‘Get out your chequebook.’
Lady Venetia might very likely have done the same. Charlotte made a quick note to ring her to say she wouldn’t be coming into the shop this week. Part of her still couldn’t believe her birthday glamping trip that had reunited her with her besties from university had brought her the most unexpected of presents. A new friend and mentor. Lady V sold honey produced from her own hives from a ramshackle hut in the car park of the Sittingstone Estate glampsite, alongside a few suspect baked goods. When she’d suggested to Charlotte that she might like to have a go at redesigning the whole place and turning it into a micro-farm shop, Charlotte had leapt at the chance. It was a proper shop now. The Sittingstone Larder. There was a part of her that wanted to be there right now. Pour the mounting pressure-cooker of unspent emotion into making it even better, but in her heart she knew what she needed most was to see her friends.
She wasn’t entirely sure what Izzy would have done after Oliver had finished his speech (rehearsed, from the sounds of it). Laughed? Told Oli that if his spirit animal was guiding him elsewhere then to go for it?
She hadn’t done any of those things. Of course. She’d sat and nodded and, when Oliver had finished, offered to make up the guest room with fresh sheets, only to end up sleeping there herself as Oli found the room too draughty.
She scrubbed at a plate, suddenly furious with herself for not having left him on her birthday. After the whole mess with the cake (when a somewhat tipsy Freya had hurled it straight into Oli’s face after having heard enough of his patronizing speech), it had taken Charlotte well over a fortnight to get back into his good books. As if a bit of wayward buttercream had wreaked more havoc in their marriage than the stark truth that her husband had impregnated his law firm’s most active Instragrammer, the ludicrously named Xanthe. CheekyLawGirl if she was going for full accuracy. Not that Charlotte had been cyber-stalking her. Much.
She put the dish on the rack and sighed. She felt doubly foolish now. Not acting on that instinct to take her children and go.
She stared at the wrinkled pads of her fingers, then turned them over. She would keep the eternity ring. That was for the children and it wasn’t their fault their father had a changeable heart.
Earlier, when Oli had been hungrily polishing off a bit of toast as if he were popping out for another one of his charity golf weekends (how often had she fallen for that one?), she’d considered hurling the engagement ring out of the window, but had been overcome with panic that a magpie would swallow it and die, leaving a nest full of orphaned chicks unable to fend for themselves. In reality she knew it was well past nesting season. The recent advent of July would’ve seen all the little fledglings out and off into the world by now. Just like her two little travellers. Poppy had gone to the South of France (Cannes!) for language submersion, and Jack was in Namibia for she wasn’t entirely sure what sort of ‘formative cultural experience’.
Would either trip prepare them for parents en route to a divorce? En route … Poppy’s French submersion would definitely come in handy. A mother who sat listening to her husband devalue the last fifteen years of their lives together as ‘non-progressive’ would not.
A question she’d asked herself with increasingly regularity popped into her mind. What would Lady Venetia do?
Her new, slightly formidable friend and mentor had stayed and toed the line when her own husband had strayed, but Charlotte no longer had that option. Lady Venetia had hardly bowed her head and just ‘got on with things’. She’d taken charge of her own life, refusing to pin her happiness to her husband’s. She’d travelled widely. Joined all sorts of clubs. Got a second and then a third degree in subjects that had precisely nothing to do with one another. She’d simply been curious. The same way she’d been curious to see what Charlotte might be able to turn their ‘little snack shack’ into, if given a bit of time and a few resources.
