‘Hardly,’ I say, and I fill her in on what I saw at Christmas.
With a willing listener, it all comes tumbling out. The gift receipt, hiscornflower-blue shirt, all my fears.
‘I didn’t want to believe, but I knew something was wrong,’ I say, ‘and I kept hoping I was imagining it, that he was going through amid-life crisis or something. But it’s not just me who’s seen something, you have too –’
‘Nate loves you, though,’ Louise says. ‘Men – men are different. We love with all our hearts but they’re not the same. They can honestly have sex and it can mean nothing to them. For us, it does.’
‘So it meant something to the blonde woman and nothing to him? I don’t care!’ I cry. ‘It matters to me. I love him and he’s slept with another woman.’
‘I didn’t see that –’ she begins, but I stop her.
‘What else would he be coming out of a hotel with another woman for?’ I say. ‘It’s got to be that. He’s got someone else.’
I feel like I’m crumbling from the inside: my security blanket was that I was loved. Without that belief, I am nothing.
I sit at Louise’s kitchen table and sob. My breathing is laboured and I think, brokenly, of how Rachel and Joey argued about people breathing properly, and how I was happy then. Or maybe I wasn’t really happy – I simply didn’t know all the facts. I was unhappiness in waiting. Now it’s arrived in all its painful glory. I try to work out was I better when I’d just wondered if Nate was unhappy – or if the proof is the rock falling onto me, crushing me. I don’t know the answer. But I feel crushed, all right. Crushed into pieces.
32
Bea
I walk through the front door and begin texting Mum to let her know how it went.
‘Piers was lovely, Mum, but no romance. Sorry!’
Mum has almost given up theblind-date thing because it’s been so bad, but finally she’s met one of her friends’ nephews and says, ‘He’sgood-looking and funny. I think dinner wouldn’t be a hardship.’
It’s not a hardship at all, even though Piers and myself know within five minutes that there’s not a spark between us, but he’s truly entertaining. Luke and the puppies are staying over at Mum’s, so we linger over coffee and tell stories about our blind dates from hell.
‘If you ever need a fun night out,’ he says to me as we leave the restaurant, ‘give me a buzz.’
‘Right back at you,’ I say, cheerfully, thinking that if only all the dates were like this funny,non-date one, then who needed a man in their life?
I’ll fill Mum in on the details in the morning but now, I angle my head as I hear something odd.
Water, water dripping from somewhere. It’s coming from the kitchen.
I race in to find the floor near the sink awash with water. Something is leaking and, after ten minutes, I still can’t stop the leaking or figure out what to do. The pool of water is growing slowly, so I’ve thrown towels on it. I’m worrying about the cost of getting a plumber out at half nine on a Saturday evening when the phone rings: Marin.
Briefly, I consider not answering because I have this crisis to figure out, but autopilot kicks in and I pick up.
We haven’t talked since Christmas and she’s ringing for a chat.
‘Nate has had some work thing on,’ she says brightly, and I’m not sure why, but she sounds a little off.
‘Myself, Rachel and Joey are here and we’ve had a takeaway – bliss not to cook. They’re arguing over what Disney movie to watch.
‘Frozen Two,’ I manage to joke, because Joey’s true adoration for this movie shows no sign of abating. Nate hates this, he doesn’t understand why Joey doesn’t want to watch some macho little boy movie. But, no, he’s aFrozenboy. And Marin, normally so yielding with Nate, takes no crap when it comes to Joey’s obsession with the Disney princesses.
‘Possibly,’ says Marin, and I’m distracted from her odd tone by the continual leaking of whatever it is under the sink.
‘Ah, that sounds lovely,’ I say, ‘but you know what, I’m going to have to hang up. I’m going to try Finn and see if he’s around because I’ve got a leak in the kitchen and if he’s not there, it’s time to call the emergency plumber.’
I’d had to ring the emergency plumber before. And when he left, I was quite surprised he wasn’t driving off in anS-Class Mercedes because of the amount he charged me just for the pleasure of coming out to my house on a Friday evening.
‘Finn’s out with Sid,’ says Marin. ‘I’ll phone Nate,’ she offers.
‘That’s so kind of you, Marin,’ I say, mentally shelving the option of phoning Finn, ‘but if Nate is at a business thing, you can hardly get him out on the grounds that his wife’s friend is having a problem with a leak.’
