‘I’ll need to come back and get my bike,’ said Faye.
She would, and rather than be annoyed by the intrusion, Bonnie was rather looking forward to it. ‘Would you come too, Margot?’
Margot gave her a winning smile. ‘I would really like that.’
‘Does tomorrow afternoon suit you both?’ Bonnie said it so quickly she hoped it sounded less desperate to their ears than her own.
‘That sounds perfect,’ said Margot with Faye readily agreeing.
The taxi came, the girls left, and when Bonnie closed the front door and locked up, she felt as though she might just have taken a very big leap back into the world.
And she went into her bedroom, picked up the framed photograph of her and Howard taken in the sunshine on their travels, and told him, ‘If I believed it was possible, I’d say you sent me these women for a reason, Howard.’
Maybe in a way that was exactly what he’d managed to do.
19
MARGOT
Margot had barely slept. She’d been too preoccupied wondering why Perry hadn’t been in touch. And now she was on her way to an appointment with a solicitor. She’d found details of a few but hadn’t done anything with them since and the longer the silence from Perry went on the more uneasy she felt. It had been three weeks since she left and she had no idea what her husband was thinking now or what he might be planning.
At the solicitor’s office she just had enough time for a quick WhatsApp exchange with Faye to check up on her – she was fine and resting at her dad’s – before she was called in. She had a free thirty-minute consultation and she needed to get as much advice as possible in that time because once it went to an hourly rate it was going to eat into her money.
Margot left the solicitor’s with her head swimming. They’d covered the basic process of what filing for divorce would look like, discussing everything from pre-marital assets, current assets, pensions, property, and all the nuances around each of those things. She had a headache when she ventured outside to the street and into gloomy rain that made her feel worse. The only bright thing was that the boys were grown up now, which did make part of the divorce process a little easier.
Margot arrived at Bonnie’s before Faye. Bonnie answered the door quicker than she had done previously but she still seemed a little cautious.
‘It’s not a very nice day out there,’ said Margot, peeling off her coat and allowing Bonnie to take it and hang it on the coat stand.
‘I can tell.’ She looked at the drips on the garment. ‘I pulled this coat stand out especially for this purpose. It sits in my spare room a lot of the time but come the winter months it’ll be by the door for wet things.’
‘I quite enjoy the rain,’ Margot admitted and her casual claim had Bonnie looking at her differently.
‘Howard always did too. Oh, he was a pain making me go out in it.’
‘Would he at least let you have an umbrella and wellies?’
Bonnie chortled. ‘I wouldn’t have gone out without the proper attire. You know the day we met it was raining.’
‘I bet he held an umbrella over you.’
Bonnie’s cheeks flushed with warmth. ‘As a matter of fact, he did.’
They sat and talked over a mug of tea about the day Bonnie and Howard had met in Blackpool and Bonnie told Margot about the painting of the ice-cream van and the story behind it. Unsurprisingly, Bonnie asked how Margot had met Perry and Margot recapped the happy early days, how head over heels she’d been with him.
Bonnie didn’t know that Margot had walked out on her marriage and right now Margot didn’t want to share the other side of Perry, the side she’d wanted to get away from, the side that was the only one she’d been seeing for a long time.
She changed the subject. ‘Howard told us all at book club that you didn’t like to read.’
‘Well, I don’t suppose he thought we’d ever meet, let alone have a cup of tea together.’ They both smiled at that. ‘I never got into it, no.’
‘And those?’ Margot spotted the books on grief piled on top of the coffee table. ‘Are they as bad as they look?’
She laughed. ‘Worse. I bought them and haven’t bothered reading any at all.’
‘I could be a pain and say that it isn’t that you don’t like books, it’s that you haven’t found the right one.’
‘Howard told me that often enough.’
