One
April 1stLondon Bridge, 2pm
You are fat and ugly, and you have terrible skin. Look into the mirror, Millie, and face the truth about yourself. Beige face, beige hair – even beigeunderwear.
Millie changed down into first gear and tried to find a way out of the snarled-up traffic while she struggled to understand what could have made Henry speak to her this way. What changed the loving Henry who’d been her school sweetheart, the boy with eyes only for her. The man who’d held her in his arms on their wedding night and whispered, “I’m the luckiest man in the world. How did I get a beauty like you? Promise you’ll love me forever, please, pleasepromise.”
She’d promised, of course. Although at nineteen, neither of them could have guessed how short ‘forever’ would turn out to be. Nine years, ten months and eleven days.
What had gone wrong?
The taxi in front of her turned left and she followed, her little Nissan Micra slotted quickly between the taxi and the red double-decker bus; then she cursed under her breath. She was now in the one-way system going over London Bridge towards a maze of streets in the heart of the city. She craned her neck out of the window trying to see ahead but her view was blocked. Wonderful. Just perfect. She was stuck on the wrong road going somewhere she didn’t know with no way toturn back.
Which pretty much summed upher life.
It wasn’t supposed to be like that. She should have been graduating with a degree in horticulture and starting a business creating beautiful gardens. She’d dreamed up exquisite designs for the Chelsea Flower Show. Why had she stoppeddreaming?
They’d promised to take it in turns, she and Henry. One would study while the other worked and paid the bills. He’d argued that once he became a corporate lawyer he’d earn so much more and be able to support her. So, she had let him go first and she’d put her plans on hold. Law school was expensive, and even after he qualified, all his earnings had to go on the astronomical rent for swish offices in central London because, he’d argued, a man had to look successful to attract good clients. No one was going to hire him from a cheap back room in south Tooting.
She looked down at her clothes. The skirt was six years old, and it showed. Her blouse might have been new – well, newish – but it looked like a reject from the£1.99 pile.
In her defence, no one earned much by sitting in a phone cubicle in a basement saying “Hello, customer service, how can I help you?” a hundred times a day. So, she’d worked double shifts and weekends, she’d worked through lunch and supper, sitting on hard chairs eating soft biscuits and never going out in the sun. It was her complexion that paid for Henry’s shiny BMW, her expanding hips that answered for his expensive suits and his golf club membership.
How could he call herbeige and ugly? Did he mean it or was he just feeling cornered and defensive. And being caught in bed with another woman would make any man feel cornered anddefensive.
Obviously, it was her fault that she found him wrapped around a Portuguese lingerie model. According to Henry, she’d driven him to it because, “Millie you have no idea the pressure. I need to look like a successful lawyer.”
And it seems, looking like successful lawyer meant having a woman on his arm. “It’s expected I have to attend business functions and I can’t attend alone like a loser. You have to have a date for these events.”
Millie had pointed out thatshewould have gone with him if only he’d asked.
“You?” Henry had exploded. “Imagine me turning up to a swanky club with frumpy-dumpy Miss Beige on my arm.”
She had stood there while he shouted, and she’d tried to understand what had happened to change her husband into a cruel man, what was happening to hermarriage.
They must have stopped arguing eventually because she was now in her old Nissan Micra, an hour away from home, and what she really, really, wanted, more than anything, was to rest her head on the steering-wheel and cry like a little girl. Which she planned to do, very soon. As soon as she got somewhere quiet.
The driver in the car behind her blew his horn impatiently. The traffic was finally moving. As soon as she could, she turned off the busy road. She huffed out a breath, shifted up to third gear overtaking a black taxi, and continued towards the quieter back streets.
She looked in the rear-view mirror. Was her face really beige?
No, itwas grey.
She was only twenty-nine; she shouldn’t lookthis bad.
Before she could even think about saving her marriage, she needed to saveher face.
She rubbed her cheeks with her free hand to get some colour into them, combed her hair with her fingers and looked in the mirror.
Metalcrunched.
Her foot slammed the brakes.
A tall, suited man leapt two yards out of her way.
She’d taken another corner too fast and too wide. A midnight-blue BMW to her right, shiny, sleek and beautiful, showed an ugly white stripe down the side where the corner of her old Micra had scraped it.A parked car. Could things get any worse today?
Had the man moved a fraction of a second slower, she’d have hithim, too.
