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‘Fucking hell,’ said Sheridan, more breath than voice. ‘What did you do?’
‘He got back in and I told him what Mrs Jones had said and he went ape, saying I shouldn’t be reading his texts, how dare I? I just got out and walked off.’
‘Did he go after you?’
‘No, he drove off the other way. I spent the night in a hotel. Then I went to the house when I knew he’d be at work, packed some things and moved into an Airbnb. It wasn’t ideal living out of a suitcase. I ignored his calls for a while; then, after a month, I stupidly weakened and answered. We agreed to give things another go but he said that if we had any chance of repairing we should look forward not back. What’s done is done, no point in raking it all up, blah blah. He refused to tell me anything about her, other than it was finished.’
‘I bet he did, the bellend,’ said Sheridan, her mouth contracted into a grim line. ‘I’d have ripped his bollocks off with my bare hands.’
The Billy Paul song ‘Me and Mrs Jones’ had kept cropping up everywhere in the weeks that followed. It had haunted her. Piped through speakers in the supermarket, playing on the radio in her car, even in a hotel toilet once during a work conference. Especially that line about having a thing going on.
‘The Airbnb was awful, I was mashed and I just wanted to go home. You don’t have to tell me I gave in too quickly and let him dictate the terms.’
Always his terms.
She’d read countless books about how to heal a broken heart and they hadn’t worked. His affair had altered him irrevocably in her eyes and she’d tried her best to love the changed man she saw him as now, just like the books advised. They said you could build a new stage in a relationship even if you couldn’t forgive. And maybe, if he’d put the effort in to sewing up the holes that her trust in him had escaped through, they might have had a chance. But he hadn’t even bothered threading the needle to try.
Sheridan reached over and put her hand on top of Polly’s.
‘Oh Pol. I wish I’d known all this. Maybe I could havehelped you, even if I was just a soundboard for you. But why now, Pol? If he had the affair last year?’
‘It sounds dumb I know, but I told myself that I’d give it a full twelve months from when I moved back in with him on May Day for us to… recalibrate; heal, if you like. Some people’s relationships reset for the better after something like this’ – so said another of those stupid books – ‘and I hoped that might happen to us, I hoped we could make it right. The idea of splitting up and starting again back then was too big for my head; I was crushed and it was so much easier to stay and hope than leave for good. For a while I really thought we’d recover, then he just stopped putting the effort in, all the things he’d promised didn’t happen, and I realised that after nearly a year of trying, I couldn’t forgive and I’d never forget.’
‘So why the heck did you say yes to being a flaming bridesmaid? You could have been out of it all by now.’
‘You have to have met Camay to understand,’ said Polly, though she knew it was a weak answer. ‘She sort of cornered me in a roomful of family after announcing this mad impulsive wedding idea’ –And of course Polly will be the bridesmaid, won’t you, Polly?– ‘and I couldn’t think of a viable reason why not at the time, other than I was hoping to have left her brother by then. I rang later to suggest maybe she should ask Chris’s daughter instead but she was insistent I was the best person for the job and she would not take no for an answer.’ Polly rubbed her forehead and groaned, realising how pathetic she sounded even though Sheridan couldn’t begin to imagine how forceful Camay could be when she wanted her own way on things. ‘I thought about just leaving Chris when I said I would and not even thinking about the wedding, but then the house I’d had lined up fell through at the last minute and Camay seemed so excited about everything and it was all moving sofast and becoming so complicated that in the end I thought what difference is another couple of weeks going to make? Let her have her day without me spoiling the run-up to it, even if she does scribble out my face on all the photos afterwards.’
‘I’d be scribbling out your dress before your face,’ said Sheridan, then softly, ‘What promises did Chris make to you, Pol?’
‘Nothing big,’ said Polly. ‘Just that he’d take time off from work so we could go off for a mini-break, or the cinema, a meal, even though he thinks eating out is a waste of cash.’
‘Butyoulike going out for meals,’ said Sheridan, with emphasis.
Polly swallowed because she knew that what she was about to say would hurt herself.
‘When I went back to him, I found a restaurant receipt in the pocket of his suit. He’d taken someone out for fillet steaks, an expensive bottle of wine, porn star martinis and truffles with their coffees.’
‘Ouch,’ said Sheridan with a grimace. ‘I’m figuring he wasn’t such an insensitive twat when you first started going out with him.’
‘Charm personified. I’d just lost my mum and it raked up a lot of feelings so I suppose I was… vulnerable. He was ten years older than me and he said all the right things, like:you need someone to look after you.’
‘Are you sure you didn’t mishear and what he actually said was,I need someone to look after me.’
Polly chuckled. ‘Maybe I did.’
‘Did he seduce you with fillet steaks and porn star martinis?’ asked Sheridan.
‘Not even in our early days. I think he bought me a rump once, in a Wetherspoons.’
Sheridan’s turn to feel teary. ‘Oh Pol.’
‘I don’t know when we became the couple that we are now. I don’t know how it happened.’
‘What about friends, Polly? You never talk about any. Is there no bestie you can call on for some support?’
Polly shook her head slowly. Her once close friends had moved away, had families, found new close friends.
Sheridan took a deep breath that lifted up her shoulders before she exhaled, letting them drop.
