Chapter Eighteen
The next day, despite Claudia’s insistence that she would sort it out, Lucy phoned her boss to explain her change of circumstances. Luckily for Lucy she was very understanding. She told her to take a few days off work to look after herself. Lucy still had plenty of annual leave to tap into if she felt she wasn’t ready to return to London for a while.
She made the telephone call to her mum that she had been dreading and was surprised at her reaction. No judgement, no comment, just ‘Come home. We’ll sort you out, darling, don’t worry.’
Suddenly longing to retreat into the safety of Ginny and Gus’s familiar domestic routines, she packed a suitcase of clothes and essentials, trying hard to ignore Alex’s things, which were scattered all over the flat. She couldn’t remember what the flat had looked like before he had moved in. No doubt he would be coming round soon to move his stuff out; she blanked the thought from her mind, knowing that she didn’t have the strength for it.
Too tired to face public transport, she called a taxi to take her to Paddington Station. She found her seat on the First Great Western to Penzance, stowed her suitcase in the luggage rack and hoped that her neighbour would not try to initiate conversation. As the train pulled out of London she began to relax, feeling a little stronger and a little more detached from her sad situation with every mile that she put between them. She stared out of the window, watching the English countryside whizzing by, and marvelled at the surety that no matter what happens to you, life will and does go on. Nothing had changed for anyone else but everything had changed for her. Just like that, the perfect future she had envisaged had disappeared.
Ginny was waiting at Bodmin Parkway with open arms, her glasses swinging from her neck on their beaded string. She gave Lucy a huge hug and took her bag from her, carrying it to her trusty Land Rover, opening the boot and heaving it in to sit amongst the dog hairs and wellington boots. They set off for Rose Cottage at Ginny’s usual breakneck speed, careering around corners and past oncoming traffic with scant regard for the paint surface of the car as it scraped against brambles and bushes. They slowed down as they came up the bumpy track leading to the house. All the while Ginny managed to keep up a stream of chatter about Tiggy’s escapades, Gus’s latest findings in his research project and the local parish council.
When they arrived, Lucy stepped through the thatched porch and inhaled deeply, the comforting smell of home washing over her, and she knew that she had been right to come here. This is where she would be able to start putting herself back together again, no matter how hard it was going to be.
Gus was standing by the Aga, pouring hot water into a cracked, old green teapot. He turned around as they came in, peering at his daughter over his reading glasses. ‘Lucy,’ he said, and came over to give her a hug, enveloping her in his soft cashmere jumper. ‘There, there!’ he said as she started to cry. ‘It’ll all be okay. You’ll see.’
Lucy sat at the old pine table where a few months before she had sat with Alex and gratefully accepted a cup of tea. The warm, sweet drink calmed her nerves as she told her parents exactly what had happened. They shook their heads in disbelief. Lucy knew that they were as surprised as she was. They had really liked Alex and she was fairly sure they too had been expecting wedding bells at long last. She almost felt like apologizing for letting them down, but stopped herself short of that. It wasn’t her fault. The relationship just wasn’t quite right and it was better that Alex had told her now, rather than marrying her with doubts, and bitterly regretting it later. Maybe she had been right all along, maybe there wasn’t going to be a perfect match for her. The sooner she accepted that reality, the better. No more daydreams, no more chasing fairy-tale happy endings. She had tried that already and look where she had ended up. She was back in her childhood home, sipping tea with her parents, single once again.
For the rest of the week she slept a lot in the familiar comfort of her little floral bedroom up in the attic, the wooden beams stretching over her head and the small window with views down to the beach. She phoned her boss and arranged to take a couple of weeks of her annual leave to give herself more time. Word of her break-up was clearly spreading around the office, as shortly after hanging up the phone she received an email from Jack saying that he was sorry to hear the news of her and Alex. She was touched that he had made the effort to write.
That afternoon she phoned Tor, who had been texting and calling non-stop since hearing the news from Claudia.
‘Lucy my love, how are you?’ said Tor as she answered the phone. ‘I’ve been so worried about you.’
‘Sorry it’s taken me so long to call,’ apologized Lucy. ‘I’ve been hibernating.’
‘I’m not surprised. How are you feeling?’
‘Not too great to be honest.’
‘What a massive shit! How the hell could he do this to you?’ asked Tor, her frustration on Lucy’s behalf clearly evident down the phone line.
‘Do you know, I’m not even that angry now. Just incredibly sad,’ said Lucy, rubbing her temples as a wave of exhaustion swept over her. She stifled a yawn.
‘He is such an idiot. Does he not realize what he is letting go?’ asked Tor.
‘I don’t think it’s as simple as that,’ said Lucy. ‘He just can’t see a future with me and he doesn’t want to settle for less than perfect.’
‘But you are perfect, Luce,’ said Tor. ‘That’s what I don’t understand.’
‘Well I’m not perfect for him,’ said Lucy, her eyes welling up with tears.
‘You will be perfect for someone better though, Lucy, I promise you that. Sooner or later we will be looking back on this very conversation, remembering how we didn’t know what was going to happen and thinking if only we had known then what we do now,’ Tor reassured her. ‘It could be just around the corner.’
Lucy tried to believe it could be true but her gut was telling her the opposite. She promised Tor that she would call whenever she needed to talk and thanked her for being there for her. She knew that she was supported one hundred per cent by her friends, and for that she was extremely thankful.
Often, in the middle of the night she would wake up, drenched in tears, aching for Alex, hugging her pillow in his absence and praying for him to come back. Her gut would twist with pain and she would scream into her pillow with grief. She spent hours thinking obsessively about what had gone wrong, wondering if she could have done things differently, what it was about her that had caused the relationship to fail. Why couldn’t he love her enough? She felt so sure that if she could just see him again he would change his mind. She would daydream about scenarios where this might happen, playing hundreds of different happy endings in her mind. At times she thought about whether he might be with another woman, perhaps there had been someone else involved? She sent him messages begging him to come back to her. He would reply to each one with the same, steady apologies, the same certainty that this was the right decision, that he wouldn’t change his mind. This did help her to begin to fully realize the unacceptable truth that he had gone. He didn’t want her. He did love her, she was sure of that, but he didn’t love her enough. That kind of love wasn’t built to last a lifetime. It wasn’t strong enough to raise a family, which would eventually end up suffering from the broken relationship at its core. She knew that if he wasn’t happy, if he wasn’t sure, then something was deeply and fundamentally wrong. Maybe she was too blinkered by love to see their relationship clearly. She had to believe that he was right and try to be thankful. It was the only way she knew how to move on.
As she slowly got used to her new circumstances she went for increasingly long walks, sometimes for hours at a time, finding a good spot to stop and sit, lost in her thoughts. Ginny fed her up with nourishing home cooking, making all of her favourite meals. Her appetite gradually began to pick up because of all the fresh air she was getting. Lucy spent her afternoons searching for cowry shells on a little sun-drenched beach just a bit further along the coast from her house. A twisting, treacherous-looking path cut through a hedgerow of wild flowers and led to a hidden cove where the tide washed them on to the seashore. In the olden days they had used cowry shells as currency in certain parts of the world. Lucy adored these shells; they were tiny and pale pink like the inside of a conch. Each shell looked as though it had been hand-sculpted in porcelain, curling delicately in on itself with crease marks like miniature wrinkles etched across. If you walked to the end of the beach you could find them nestling amongst the mussel shells and seaweed that the tide had washed in. Lucy and Ginny had spent hours there during her childhood, sifting through the pebbles on the beach, searching for these precious trophies. It was incredibly cathartic, a sort of mind-numbing therapy, and she spent hours on the beach lost in the rhythmic process.
When Lucy finally broke the news to her, Granny Annie was full of words of wisdom and encouragement. ‘He was not good enough for you, darling,’ her voice crackled slightly down the telephone line. ‘I knew it all along.’
‘I could tell you weren’t quite convinced by him,’ said Lucy. ‘In fact, I find it quite reassuring in a strange way. Perhaps you had some kind of hidden intuition.’
‘When you meet the right man, darling, I will know,’ Annie said. ‘There was something about him that I didn’t warm to. He was a nice enough young chap, don’t get me wrong, but not quite right for my little Lucy.’
‘I just hope he wasn’t all I was going to get!’ laughed Lucy wryly. ‘My time seems to be running out, I think I might be a hopeless case.’
‘Nonsense!’ said Annie. ‘Everything will work out just as it is meant to. You’ll see.’
