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

by Fiona Perrin

  He was young, strong and much more dexterous in bed than he was in life. He toured my body with the pleasure of an aficionado, and each moan from me seemed to make him happier. The drink had driven out all my inhibitions. As I undid his jeans and found his erection, I could remember very little about who I’d actually been before I experienced such sheer, friendly pleasure.

  For a brief moment I remembered the smell and taste of Lars and how passionate our lovemaking had been. It seemed so long ago.

  ‘You’re so gorgeous,’ Peter said, just when I thought that if he didn’t put himself inside me, I would die from lust. ‘Are you really sure you want to do this?’

  ‘Of course, I am,’ I said. ‘Please, please get on with it…’ He was very proficient at putting on a condom; I remembered the smell from so many years ago and I wondered how I’d let those raw, hopeful times go.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ he said when he finally edged his way inside me.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ I whispered in return.

  There was a moment when I knew that this was it: doing this changes everything forever. I’ve slept with another man.

  I breathed deeply and blocked out any bigger thought than the ‘boy’ above me rocking backwards and forwards breathlessly, each thrust of him coming further into me. Instinctively, I moved my hips and held him until he rested for a moment. ‘Slowly,’ I told him.

  ‘Fuck me, you’re sensational,’ he said, covering my face in kisses from above me and then getting so carried away that he started to move again.

  It wasn’t the longest sex in the world. Eventually, he collapsed on top of me as I started to buck a little in turn.

  I only just had time to tip him off and shut out my conscience with another swig of champagne before I passed into the dreamless vacuum of drunken sleep.

  24

  2016

  I was at the launch party for Brand New in the Goldwyn boardroom. Marti made a speech that seemed to float over my head into the crowd of colleagues, journalists and clients. Liv was wearing a vintage fifties floral number; I was in a Whistles dress of cream and camel that I’d bought off The Outnet and was terrified I’d spill something over it.

  Everyone congratulated me and I smiled broadly. Board directors milled around and patted Marti on his back and told me how exciting it was for the share price. I’d just finished giving an off-the-cuff interview to a reporter from the magazine for AWE – the Association of Women Entrepreneurs.

  But all I could think about was Lars and the text I’d received earlier.

  So sorry, stuck in Zurich – the deal is going on and on but is really important. Very proud of you and hope it goes well.

  I’d been getting a blow-dry and had to hold it together while the hairdresser finished GHD-ing my curls into submission; but then I went outside and kicked a rubbish bin in the street in fury.

  Thor texted me.

  I think they say in England, break a leg, but please don’t as you have lovely legs.

  Even this didn’t bring a smile to my face. Ulrika messaged.

  You will be magnificent.

  I read it and thought, magnificent on my own, but simply sent her kisses back.

  Now, Liv appeared beside me, pushing her way through a crowd of younger women who also worked at Goldwyn. One was boasting about her long, full blonde hair and the others were feeling her head where the extensions were woven in.

  ‘Her hair is pre-owned,’ Liv hissed in my ear.

  I sniggered but couldn’t keep up the front I’d been pulling off in front of Liv. ‘I really thought he’d make it this time. He knew how important it was to me.’

  ‘Oh, darling, and this is your moment,’ Liv said. ‘I’m sure he would be here unless it was life or death.’

  ‘It’s not though, is it? It’s not life and death.’ It was just – in the end – his job. But I could feel something dying inside me.

  *

  The next evening, though, Lars was back, deeply sorry in the face of my cold fury. ‘I will make it up to you,’ he said, as he had so many times before. I let him kiss my cheek and didn’t say that it was impossible for him to make up for missing the most important moment in my career to date. I was quiet instead.

  He arranged a babysitter and insisted we went back to the Spanish bistro of our first date. When we arrived, he bribed the waiter to give us the table under the awning that we’d shared back then. We ate tapas and he concentrated hard on making me relay all the details of the launch. Two glasses of Rioja later, I found myself thawing. He couldn’t help that his business was so demanding, could he?

  He turned the conversation back to that day we met. ‘Do you remember how you wrote ‘IOU one night out’ up my arm?’

  I remembered it so clearly. I remembered the possibilities of that beginning and our naïve faith that we would achieve them all. We still could, I thought sadly. We still could.

  25

  2017

  The phone rang and it was as if a brass band had been commissioned to play in my head – big baton on my eardrums, tubas in every synapse. I opened my eyes and stared at the unfamiliar sight of the ceiling in the spare room. Must have passed out in here, I thought, trying very hard as the sound of the phone ricocheted around the house to work out where and who I was.

  I had to make the noise stop. It was only as I scrambled out of bed that I realised I was naked and with someone who wasn’t my husband.

  ‘Oh, what have I done?’ I shrieked and the lump that was Peter beside me stirred and sat up.

  ‘What is it?’

  I grabbed my dress from the floor and, holding it in front of me, ran from the room. As I raced along the landing towards the phone in my bedroom, I had a vision of Peter above me, pushing into me.

  I grabbed the phone. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Mummy?’ the tentative sound of Finn’s voice came down the line. ‘Why’re you shouting?’

  Two worlds collided as my sexual drunken animal met the purity of my mother beast. Tears welled immediately in my eyes. More pictures from last night flashed in my mind – snogging in a taxi, letting Peter come into the house, hating Lars as I did it and knowing and not caring that there was no way back. I took a deep breath. Christ, what had I done?

  ‘Hello, darling,’ I said as calmly as I could to Finn. ‘How are you? Are you being good?’

  ‘Daddy said I could ring you whenever I want. He said I could ring you now even and dialled the number but then he went back to sleep.’

  ‘Yes, of course. I miss you and love you very much.’

  ‘Grandie’s got bent fingers,’ Finn said.

  ‘And she had a hair growing out of her chin but she let me pull it out.’ Tessa came on the line.

  ‘Are you both being good?’

  ‘Well, Finn is being extra farty,’ Tessa said.

  ‘You’re the stinker,’ Finn shouted in the background and then grabbed the phone back from his sister. ‘Do you want to talk to Daddy now? He’s pretending to be asleep but I can jump on his head.’ Before I could object, there was the sound of my son doing exactly that and Lars’ muffled sleepy anger.

  I have a man in my bed while I’m listening to the intimate sounds of my husband sleeping.

  ‘They wake up so early,’ Lars said.

  ‘What’re you going to do with them today?’

  ‘We’re going to the Playpit,’ he said. ‘Tessa says it’s a great place.’ I thought of the sticky, scream-infested, fried-food-ridden hell that was the Playpit Indoor Centre, and told Lars that he’d enjoy it.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Nothing much. Champneys with Liv tomorrow.’

  ‘Fy fan, you can’t afford to be throwing money around like that, Ami, with all this going on. Look, I’m not saying you don’t deserve it, it’s just—’

  ‘My father paid for it. It’s got nothing to do with you what I do.’ I slammed the phone down, angry with him all over again.

  The tousled but still beautiful form of the Hon Peter a
ppeared in the doorway, wrapped in the white bedsheet from the spare room.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked and opened his arms to me so that the sheet fell onto the floor. He looked very young in the morning light.

  After last night, there was no going back.

  ‘I think I’m still drunk,’ I said, because I couldn’t say my thoughts out loud to him.

  ‘Come back to bed.’ He pulled me up and the dress I was holding to cover my nakedness dropped to the floor. He held me and breathed into my hair. I felt as if I were looking down at someone else – someone who went home with ‘boys’ they picked up in clubs when they were only recently separated from their husband. It didn’t feel as if I was in my own body even as I stood so close to him.

  ‘I really shouldn’t have let you come home with me,’ I said. ‘You know… I’m not sure I can remember much about last night.’

  ‘We’d probably better do it again so that you can remember it properly. I’m only saying that in the interests of you not thinking you’re losing your memory.’ He came in to kiss me and at the same time started to lead me back to the spare room, lifting my feet onto his, so that as he walked and kissed me, I walked with him back down the landing. I didn’t resist him even as my conscience started to quake somewhere deep in my soul.

  ‘I really ought to clean my teeth,’ I said just as he pushed me back down onto the bed.

  *

  It was later that the remorse came, heavy and unforgiving along with my hangover.

  ‘Oh, what have you done? What have you done? Slept with someone other than Lars,’ went the devil of doubt.

  ‘But he doesn’t want you,’ said the angel of angst. ‘You’re getting divorced. You haven’t done anything wrong.’

  But the devil was unrelenting. I rolled round in my bed trying to escape from its accusations. ‘How will you face Lars? What if your children knew what their mother had done?’

  I went downstairs and took some Nurofen, then sat on the sofa with a mug of tea as I rang Liv.

  ‘Remember what it felt like to lose your virginity? I feel like that, like everyone is going to know. Oh, Liv, what have I done?’

  ‘You’ve done a perfectly normal thing and got off with someone to get over someone else,’ Liv said in her perfunctory way. ‘It’s good for you. You haven’t done anything wrong, except have some fun for once. You can’t remember telling me how I wasn’t going anywhere with you because you were going to go shagadelic with that boy…’

  ‘I did not. I’m still married.’

  ‘So you keep saying, but you were up for it, big time.’

  ‘Oh, how am I going to face Lars when he brings the children back?’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with him. He got up and left you, remember? Are you going to see Peter again?’

  ‘Well, he asked for my number but, of course, I can’t. I should never have done it in the first place.’ Despite this I told Liv how Peter had said goodbye: ‘Thank you for having me,’ and how I’d replied very gravely, ‘Thank you for coming,’ before we both collapsed in laughter. ‘Listen to me. I sound like you.’

  *

  ‘You look all right considering,’ Liv said when I pulled up outside her flat the following morning to collect her for our trip to Champneys. She climbed into the car wearing enormous dark glasses, which made her look not so much Jackie O as Jackie-Oh-my-God.

  ‘The thing is, I know that Lars walked out and everything but I feel so guilty, Liv.’ I had a permanent icy feeling in my stomach, which I couldn’t get rid of. How quickly Lars would think I’d moved on; how little I must care about him. Then: he doesn’t give a toss if I care about him any more. Still, my cold belly would not let me forget.

  ‘You have absolutely nothing to feel guilty about. It was just what you needed,’ said Liv. ‘Let’s hope he’s the first of many.’

  *

  ‘Do I look a bit better?’ I asked in the changing room at the end of the day, when Liv and I had been plucked, scrubbed, oiled and cooked. We’d spent a good hour in the Jacuzzi and had even slowly swum a couple of lengths. The bit we’d enjoyed most, though, was having a gossip while we ate lunch in our towelling robes, toasting my dad with our water glasses. Unfortunately, I’d spent quite a bit of time while trying to relax during my massage wondering if Lars had done what I’d done and slept with someone else; it had made me squirm as I tried to stay still under the masseur’s hands.

  ‘You look gorgeous. And a little bit more relaxed. But that’ll be the sex.’ Liv added another couple of bottles of Champney’s body lotion to her bag, along with a pair of white slippers.

  ‘Don’t forget the paper knickers,’ I said. ‘They’re free too.’

  26

  2016

  Chickenpox. Nadine said that it was sensible to expose children deliberately to the virus, so that they had just a few spots and avoided a more serious infection later. She went in search of spotty children for Jemima to hang out with.

  Frankly, that wasn’t top of my list, what with my fledgling business, two kids to look after and a nearly-always-absent husband. So, the first I knew about Tessa and Finn potentially having it was when my au pair called me at work saying the kids had a fever.

  ‘They said at school it is probably the chickenpox,’ said Ingrid in her factual German way. ‘There are no spots yet but Finn has a temperature and Tessa is also hot. The school says that we are not to return for one week due to the policy.’

  ‘Oh, no. You’ve had it, right?’ I was in the middle of forking a salad into my mouth from a plastic carton while I typed a late report for Land.

  ‘Unfortunately, no, I have already called my mother and she says that I have not had the chickenpox,’ Ingrid said. ‘She is apologetic as it was a fashion to avoid the chickenpox when I was growing up.’

  I groaned. ‘Do you think you’ll already have caught it?’ I asked. The answer was probably, yes.

  ‘My mother is saying that I should go to stay with my aunt until we are free of the contagious period,’ Ingrid said. ‘We are very sorry for the fashion in Germany regarding this disease but I must avoid the shingles.’

  My inner stress level rose like mercury in a thermometer dropped into a hot bath; I had so much work to do in the next couple of days. I stood up and hastily unplugged my laptop. ‘I’ll be home as soon as I can.’

  So, poor Ingrid was packed off to her aunt in south London in an Uber and the rest of that day wasn’t too bad – I got the report done while the kids lay under a duvet, top and tail at both ends of the playroom sofa, happily watching back-to-back Disney.

  Lars was away again – by then I’d stopped wondering where; I’d have asked Ulrika for help but she was in the Lakes on a lyrical poets’ tour. I sat in the armchair in the playroom typing and monitored the kids’ temperatures, which hovered around thirty-eight degrees.

  It was in the middle of that night that Finn woke me in my bed; he’d trailed into the room clutching his toy dog, Barker, and was crying loudly.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I said.

  ‘I’ve got a head egg,’ he wailed. ‘An awful head egg.’

  I put out my arms and he came into them – his body felt like a mini furnace. ‘Oh, poor baby.’

  By the morning, three doses of Calpol later, he was less hot but covered in mini red blisters as if he were wearing a suit of irregular polka dots. Tessa, meanwhile, had just a few on her chest and happily set to treating her brother’s symptoms with her plastic doctor’s set until he puked all over her and the playroom carpet. Finn carried on being sick throughout the day, gushing up more food than was really possible to fit into his miniature stomach.

  In the afternoon, when he finally went to sleep, I called Lars and got a UK ringtone; this was good news – it potentially meant he was on his way home.

  ‘Ami?’ He sounded as if he was walking fast.

  ‘Lars? Where are you? The kids have got chickenpox and I need to do lots of work and Ingrid hasn’t had it and—’

/>   ‘I told you, I had the chance to meet some hackers who’ll tell me the secrets of site security,’ Lars said excitedly. I dimly remembered something about Hull?

  ‘I’m in Hull now,’ Lars confirmed. ‘Just got off the train. I’ll be home on Sunday probably. Are the kids OK?’

  ‘No, they’ve got f-ing chickenpox,’ I said. I slammed the phone down and ignored it when he tried to ring back.

  By then, any determination not to mind about being left alone in my marriage had disappeared. Work, children. Work and children. The relentless repetition. And me, always waiting for Lars to be the missing piece of sky in the jigsaw of my life.

  By Saturday, I’d loosely taped a pair of mittens onto Finn to stop him scratching the spots; called NHS Direct only to hear that ‘unfortunately there are some cases of chickenpox that are more severe than others’ and, hysterical with so little sleep, eventually pleaded with Liv to come round for an hour so I could have a bath.

  ‘This is the best contraception I can think of,’ she said in horror as she watched Finn writhe around on the sofa, bashing his head with the toy mittens and crying with the sort of sobs that ripped out my heart.

  Later, when I’d finally managed to get him to sleep, Liv held me tight while I cried into her shoulder only slightly less loudly than Finn.

  ‘This quasi-single parenthood can’t go on,’ Liv said. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘We’re going to marriage guidance counselling,’ I told her. ‘As soon as he has time.’

  ‘You know what? Screw Lars,’ said Liv, with more force than usual. She’d adored Lars in the beginning and as he became more absent only called him ‘Lars Who?’ ‘He should bloody make time.’

  She got up, came back with mugs of tea and handed me one as she sat down. ‘You need to be honest with yourself,’ she said. ‘Ask yourself whether you wouldn’t be better off without him. I know that’s not what you want to hear but I wouldn’t be your friend if I didn’t say it.’