The Story After Us: A heartwarming tale of life and love for modern women everywhere

by Fiona Perrin

  She let me cry then for the next half an hour, without real comment aside from warm hugs and comforting words.

  ‘It’s just everything we were,’ I kept saying, ‘and everything I wanted us to be again.’

  And all she could say, this lovely woman who’d believed in us and loved her own husband so much, was, ‘I know, I know,’ and, ‘I wish I could fix this.’

  I wanted to ask her whether she could talk to him, make him see that his dad would not have wanted this. He’d have wanted him to have a happy family as well as a great career. Maybe she’d already had this talk with Lars? I knew she would have done what she thought was right.

  *

  Thor had been texting me quite often.

  Just checking in? You OK gorgeous? How are the kids?

  And I’d reassured him. His latest text, however, told me that he was planning to visit the UK soon:

  We got to sort this thing.

  I wondered how he would feel when he found out, like Ulrika, that there was nothing left to fix.

  *

  Friday: there was still no phone call from Campury. Bridget bit off most of her fingernails and rang Claudia, who said they were still away making a decision.

  ‘He took her to Sorrento so that they could have time to think,’ Bridget told me.

  I pictured Ben throwing Claudia onto a white bed, muslin curtains blowing in the breeze behind them, where an aqua sea met an azure sky. Later, Ben would cram his big body into a Fiat 500 and she’d climb in beside him; they’d have dinner above a white beach, al fresco – probably something fishy with tomatoes. Perhaps they’d laugh as they remembered how mad old Amelia had behaved at the pitch.

  This was the man who was in charge of what happened next in my life, who had seen me at my lowest professional moment, and he was away in the sunshine, shagging.

  22

  2015

  Lars rushed round the kitchen, putting out the recycling, checking the M&S ready meals in the oven to see if they were, in fact, ready. I came down from putting the children to bed; he solicitously placed a glass of wine onto the kitchen table for me. This was one of his periods of trying – he’d committed to being more around for the kids and me; we were a few days in and, because of all the times he’d promised before and failed to deliver, I was conscious I was waiting for it to come to an end.

  I sat down and tried to relax as he ran around me. Eventually, he spooned some sort of meat in a sauce onto plates – it looked nothing like the picture on the front of the packet – and sat down opposite me. We talked about the kids – a subject that shouldn’t trip us up.

  ‘Finn’s fallen head over heels for Jemima at nursery,’ I said. ‘Keeps asking for playdates. The worst part about it is having to talk to her mother, Nadine.’

  Lars smiled. ‘Is she the one who’s always trying to save the world?’

  I nodded. ‘Earnest type, always going on about dolphins and perfect parenting, which means apparently never exposing your kid to conflict. And free love. She’s very out there about sex.’

  ‘It’s her husband I feel sorry for…’

  ‘Freddie? Unfortunate beard? They keep asking us round for dinner. But it would be tofu-flavoured nut roast and we’d probably have to do a “getting to know each other” session of tai chi before we were allowed to eat. Luckily I can never say yes because you’re not here.’ Lars looked at me to see if I was trying to start an argument. I wasn’t, it was just a statement of fact, but I tried to get the conversation back onto something fun. ‘She’s apparently asked one of the other mothers to a class on “how to make your orgasms multiple” with practical sessions where you get naked in an adult learning centre at Finsbury Park.’

  Lars laughed and visibly relaxed. But then his phone started to ring from the kitchen counter. He looked up and stared at it. I could almost feel his stress as he tried not to jump up and answer it. ‘Do you mind?’ he said eventually. ‘It’s just…’

  It’s just another one of the never-ending work crises that rule our lives, I thought, but didn’t say. Instead I just nodded and he leapt to his feet saying, ‘Bill? Everything OK?’ as he went out to stride up and down the hallway.

  Can love evaporate if you don’t keep a tight lid on it? Ours seemed to have been subsumed by all the big issues of growing up and being married: work, children, ambition and age. I picked up my fork and started to eat alone again.

  23

  2017

  A vodka tonic, a bottle of champagne, absolutely no mineral water, a great dinner and a conversation where we listed every single man we’d ever slept with – or in Liv’s case all those she could remember – and I felt OK for a divorced and desperate person. The dining room at Berkeley House was decorated with Summer of Love flowers and bright purple chairs. The room buzzed with the knowledge that it was the zeitgeist.

  The evening hadn’t started with such promise. Lars arrived to pick up the children and it seemed to me that this was the reality of divorce – weekends divided unnaturally, children wrested from the arms of their mothers into the every-other-week care of their fathers; mothers setting out to find out who they are again without the children they’d grown inside them.

  Lars looked apprehensive as he stood on the doorstep. Tessa and Finn were excitable – they’d been talking about ‘going to stay with Daddy’ all week. I churned out instructions – bedtimes, food, where Tessa’s stinky blanket was in the two sad little suitcases that sat in the hall. I kissed the children hard.

  ‘Chilly willies, chilly willies,’ sang Finn, who had a thing about the lack of heating at Ulrika’s house. Lars and I talked all the while to the children so we didn’t have to talk to each other.

  I stood in the road and waved a mock-cheerful goodbye then went back inside and wandered around the playroom and the kitchen. I pushed back the sadness and thought about how I was going to have to get used to this.

  Liv rang but managed to sound as if she wasn’t phoning on purpose exactly at the point when she knew I’d be free of the kids. ‘You’re not even dressed yet, are you? Think what heaven it’ll be to be able to get ready on your own.’ I had a long bath and tried not to worry about the kids, then put on a monochrome dress I’d bought for a dinner with Lars that had never happened.

  Three hours and many glasses of golden bubbles later, Liv and I decided we ought to really concentrate on the review she was supposed to be writing for Pas Faux. We settled for ‘You’ll come here’ as a headline before writing about the food as if it were a passionate bout of sex. ‘I delve into the warm triangle of salad, licking my lips, revelling in the rounded softness of breasts of avocado,’ scribbled Liv into her notebook.

  ‘Each mouthful caresses my taste buds, sliding into my body as if it’s heading for the very centre of my desire,’ I suggested.

  ‘The hot juices spurt from my steak to the back of my throat; each chip is a cock, eager to be eaten,’ Liv went on.

  ‘That’s a bit hardcore, isn’t it? How about the jus wraps itself around the pulsating lamb as if they should never part?’

  Liv put her notebook away, saying that was clearly enough hard work for one night. She twirled her champagne glass round and round so that the shafts of light from the chandeliers on the club roof pierced the gold of the liquid. ‘Your trouble, Ami, is that you associate sex with procreation and it really has nothing to do with it.’

  ‘Absolutely nothing at all.’

  ‘Well, of course it does, in some circumstances. But did I tell you about the latest theory? I read about it in Grazia. There’s ovulation man and anti-ovulation man: ones you want to have children with and ones you just want to shag for sheer pleasure. You choose the first sort when you’re ovulating and the second ones when you’re at infertile times of the month. Lars was your ovulation man, and now you’re going to find anti-ovulation man.’

  ‘What about you – you only shag for the three weeks of the month in which you’re not ovulating?’

  ‘God, no,’ said Liv. �
��You know I have injections. They take me beyond science – I never ovulate at all. Haven’t for years. Anyway, let’s have a dance?’

  Standing up, I clung onto the back of my chair, realised I was a bit drunk and giggled. When we got to the dance floor, it was full of ultra-slim bodies making shapes. The music was eclectic in the worst sense of the word: random disco and R&B designed to find some middle ground between the twenty-somethings who made the club glamorous and the decade-older members who could afford the exorbitant membership fees.

  We elbowed a little room for ourselves in the crowd and I began to move, shutting my eyes and moving into the octopus of limbs around me.

  The next moment I felt the thud of a large hand smack clean into my nose. ‘Aaarghhhhhh,’ I screamed, more in shock than pain, and opened my eyes to see a man in his mid-twenties stop jumping up and down and, instead, peer at me with concern.

  ‘God, I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘Let me get you some ice. Got carried away there.’ He led me to a chair, then disappeared in the direction of the bar.

  After a few moments I looked unsteadily around for Liv but instead found myself being hit once again in the face, this time by a cloth chock-full of ice. ‘Aaarghhhhhh!’

  ‘Oh, my God, I’ve done it again.’

  ‘You’re trying to kill me.’

  ‘It was an accident, I’m sorry, just got carried away dancing.’

  ‘Arms in the air like you just don’t care,’ I muttered, which was what I always said to the children when trying to wrestle clothes over their heads.

  I grabbed the ice from him and more delicately applied it to the centre of my nose. ‘Am I bleeding?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ The man leant in closer. ‘Shit, we’d better get you into the light.’ I struggled to my feet and followed him, carrying the ice, out into the brighter light of the corridor. I rested against the wall while he peered at me.

  ‘No, no blood.’ His voice sounded very well-bred. His naturally streaked hair was pulled into spikes at the top of his high forehead. His face shone with blue-blooded genes – a long nose and high cheekbones, green eyes darting around.

  ‘Did you go to public school?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, Harrow, why?’

  ‘It’s the way boys from public schools dance. Arms all over the place.’ On sleepover nights at Liv’s as a teenager, we’d been allowed to go to the local teenage dry disco, which was the favourite haunt of Hampstead’s finest posh-school boys. We’d snogged a few of them, of course, but never stopped laughing at their moves.

  He roared with very upper-class laughter. ‘Are you taking the piss out of me?’

  ‘It’s the least I can do after you smashed me in the face.’

  ‘Let me buy you a drink to say sorry.’

  ‘I’ll just go and check I’m all still here.’ I wobbled off in the direction of the loos where I reassured myself that, in fact, though there were two of me staring back from the mirror, each version did seem to have its own nose.

  I emerged to find the ‘boy’ lounging against the wall. ‘I’m fine,’ I said.

  ‘Come with me.’ He led me up some stairs into a library bar, where old leather sofas were laden with cushions the colour of overripe cherries. I sat in a high-backed chair and watched his tall body, dressed in what looked like a vintage dinner jacket and old blue jeans, go off to the bar and return with a bottle of champagne and two glasses.

  ‘I thought I should say sorry in style.’ He poured me half a glass before spilling quite a lot over the table.

  ‘Do you think I should do that, given your track record?’

  He smiled and sat down opposite me. ‘At least I haven’t damaged your beautiful face.’

  ‘You might get on quite well with my friend Liv.’

  ‘I want to get on quite well with you, but, damn.’ I raised my glass to my mouth and his eyes landed on my wedding ring, which shone in the gold of my drink. ‘You’re married. Might have known.’

  ‘Actually, I’m separated, but I haven’t got round to taking the ring off.’

  ‘You’re lying. No one would be mad enough to let you go.’

  ‘I’m not lying. I’m getting divorced.’

  ‘Funny, because that’s supposed to be what men always say when they’re trying to get girls into bed – never heard a woman do it though.’

  I wondered how we could be talking about bed and laughed.

  ‘So, if I come home with you, there’s not going to be a psychotic husband waiting in the kitchen with a shotgun?’

  Now we were talking about him coming home with me. ‘I think you might get on very well indeed with my friend.’

  ‘Does that mean you don’t fancy me?’ He mock-hung his head.

  Half an hour and the rest of the champagne later, I was very charmed. Peter Calthorpe-Prentiss – or ‘double-barrelled twat’, as he swore his friends called him – worked in the City in his uncle’s bank. ‘Nepotism, sheer unadulterated nepotism.’ He made me laugh with tales of him losing his family millions through ongoing ineptitude. He loved snowboarding and surfing.

  ‘I bet you’re an “Hon”,’ I teased.

  ‘I am actually,’ he admitted. ‘But it doesn’t pay to be posh any more, does it?’

  I told him about my job and the kids – ‘Blimey, two kids,’ he said. ‘Can’t even look after myself.’ – and even a little about my divorce.

  ‘Found a new chap yet?’ he asked as he ordered another bottle of champagne.

  ‘Not looking for one.’

  ‘May I apply for the position?’ Peter picked up one of my hands and kissed it.

  I laughed. ‘I really ought to go and find my friend and tell her where I am. And I’m old enough to be your much older sister.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’m thirty-seven and you can’t be a day over twenty-nine.’

  ‘That’s very sweet of you but there’s no way you’re anywhere near thirty-seven.’

  Liv appeared around the corner. ‘I wondered where you’d got to,’ she said, out of breath from dancing, and then took a look at the Hon Peter. ‘But now I understand and forgive you.’

  ‘Peter Calthorpe-Prentiss,’ I said. ‘Liv McDade.’

  ‘Very pleased to meet you,’ said Peter. The waiter delivered another glass as Liv sat down.

  We all talked immense silliness as we slid through the second bottle and I bobsleighed into a state of drunkenness where little seemed to make sense or matter.

  I went to the loo with Liv at one point and listened to her telling me that I was absolutely fucking nuts if I didn’t go shag Peter and, later, as I tried to make sense of his laughing face, it was as if the drink, the comfort and charm of the library and the Hon Peter were all conspiring against me. I remembered that I hadn’t been this drunk in a very long time and wondered why the hell not.

  *

  ‘Crouch End,’ said Peter to the taxi driver and I realised he wasn’t just putting me in the cab, but was climbing in alongside me, and that made very good sense indeed. As the car chugged up the hills of north London, I was voraciously snogging a manboy I’d just met in a bar, and, instead of seeming a heinous crime, it seemed exactly the right thing to be doing.

  Lars wanted to divorce me. He’d stopped loving me despite everything that we’d once dreamed of together. He’d upped and left me, and hired lawyers to get rid of me. I’d snog this lovely man. He wanted me but Lars didn’t.

  ‘I never do things like this,’ I said and fell against Peter as the cab crawled up Crouch Hill. He had surprisingly muscly arms that he wrapped around me and his hair gel smelt of the sea. He had another bottle of champagne with him on the seat.

  ‘Glad you picked me to never do it with.’ Peter started to burrow into my dress as he kissed me.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ I said, because there it was: the familiar old pull of desire rose from the bottom of my stomach. ‘This is what I used to feel like.’ I felt his strength, his hands circling my chest.

  It was only when we pul
led into my road that I fully realised what was happening.

  ‘You’ll have to get out here,’ I told Peter, pushing him off me and banging on the cab window to attract the driver’s attention. He pulled over to the kerb.

  ‘Don’t tell me you’ve changed your mind.’

  ‘No. Yes. No. I don’t know. I don’t want the neighbours to see you,’ I said. God, I wanted him but… ‘I’m still married. I’m a mother of two…’ The only thing I didn’t say was: ‘And I’m trying to deal with the terrible hurt of being dumped by the man I loved for so long.’

  ‘You’re a very yummy mummy,’ Peter said, pulling me towards him again. ‘But I’ll get out here and then come and knock on the door in a minute or two.’

  ‘No.’ I was very drunk and being very drunk didn’t always lead to the best decisions. My husband had been gone less than a few weeks and…

  And he’d left me. He didn’t want me any more.

  ‘This isn’t just any old thing, you know,’ Peter said. ‘When I smashed you in the face tonight, the gods were on our side.’

  The cabbie sighed audibly through the glass.

  ‘Were they?’ Giggles gurgled from me at such nonsense.

  ‘Jesus wants me for a sunbeam,’ he said and then, climbing out of the cab, whispered, ‘See you in a minute.’

  I stumbled up the steps to my house, fumbled for a key and let myself in. There was – just for a moment – a pang of guilt, but then I said out loud, ‘Fuck you, Lars,’ and went to answer the door, knowing even then that what I was doing was revenge.

  *

  ‘God, you’re gorgeous,’ Peter told me one hundred times or more, as he undressed me in between kisses, pulling my dress awkwardly over my head, taking one step at a time, backwards up to the landing and into the spare room, where we eventually fell back onto the bed. He popped open the champagne and we swigged it straight from the bottle in between deep, soggy kisses.