Sex with the Ex

by Tyne O’Connell

  “Oh, has he? Well, in that case, can you tell me, Lola, where you suppose he is today?”

  “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing,” he replied mildly, looking out the window as if done with our conversation. “It was an idle question.”

  “Well, it didn’t sound very idle to me, it sounded energetically pointed. Richard works really hard and doesn’t deserve to have snide comments made about him.”

  He spoke more gently. “Look, Lola, just think about it, he hasn’t paid his membership for over two years and his bar bill is astronomical. Were he anyone else, I would have canceled his membership.”

  “Well, don’t give him special treatment on my account,” I told him as I gathered Jean up into my arms. “Look, I’ll see you tomorrow. I’m meeting Richard.”

  “Ask him how Marcus is for me, will you?” he called out to me as I was about to push on the door.

  “Excuse me, you mean the guy he works with?”

  Charlie shook his head. “Forget I said anything. It’s been a long day. Your mother asked me to your aunt’s funeral tomorrow, I’m driving Elizabeth down, you sure you wouldn’t like a lift?”

  “No, thank you,” I informed him grandly. “I’d prefer to go with Richard.” And with that, I flounced theatrically out of Posh House and took a cab home.

  fifteen

  “…I begin to wonder if even you, my darling Elizabeth, can countenance this latest allowance I have made for Edward. While I was nursing my daughter he made love to my closest friend, Matilda, even going so far as to write her a sonnet, which, in her ignorance, she showed to me.

  I have adored her since first coming to London, and her many kindnesses to me have meant much to me over the years. Yet so sickened am I by the thought of her lying in Edward’s arms, I cannot bear to look upon her and have refused her each time she has paid a visit. She, of course, has no idea why I am punishing her in this way, but if I relent and see her, I should betray myself. What else must be sacrificed on the altar of my love, dearest Elizabeth? Please try and come down to London. I still cannot leave as Katherine is so weak…”

  Extract of a letter from Lady Henrietta Posche to her sister, Elizabeth

  Richard turned up at my flat on the day of Aunt Camilla’s funeral in a Mercedes convertible he’d hired specially. I know he was only trying to be sweet, but I told him I’d have preferred to have arrived at the crematorium in a more somber vehicle.

  “Like a hearse, you mean?” he asked, giving me a kiss on the nose.

  “No, not a hearse, it’s just that this roof-down, wind-in-our-hair thing…it doesn’t seem quite funereal.”

  He put his hand on my knee. “Look, we haven’t been out of London together for years and I just wanted to make the most of it. Besides, your aunt wasn’t the somber type, and from what you told me about her heavily scripted funeral fete, I think she would have approved. This car struck me as the perfect car for a village fete.”

  I gave his hand a squeeze, settled into the expensive comfort of the tan leather seat and turned on the CD player. He was right, and I loved the way he was using words like we and together in the same sentence. It was a glorious late-spring day and I was probably still vexed by Charlie and his insinuations about Richard. Also, Jeremy had left several messages on my phone. Seriously, having a love life can be very demanding and stressful.

  Richard drove with his foot down the whole way, so that we arrived outside ten minutes early. I felt a horrible shiver go through me as we climbed out of the car and looked toward the ominous faux-Tudor crematorium. Richard looked at me and made a face. “Bit ghastly, isn’t it?” he remarked.

  Clemmie and Josie weren’t able to make the funeral due to work commitments. Clemmie was looking after Jean for me and they were joining us at the fete tomorrow. But Elizabeth had insisted on coming, as had Charlie, and I was relieved when their car pulled up alongside ours, because Richard and I were just sitting there in strained silence. “These places give me the creeps,” Richard said when I would have much rather he put his arm around me.

  Charlie ran chivalrously round to open the door for Elizabeth, who climbed out of his old Aston Martin looking slightly flushed. Her long dark hair was tied up in an elegant chignon, and in her A-line black dress and chocolate-brown shawl, she looked very Audrey Hepburn. I was wearing a horrible black pantsuit I’d bought specially, as the only dark-colored item of clothing I owned was my black-sequined cleavage-bearing top. I’d tied my hair back in a tight bun. I looked like the funeral director.

  “Hello, Richard,” Elizabeth said in as cursory a way as she could without being outright rude. She’d always been immune to his charm and always made sure he knew it. Then she turned away from him and spoke to me as if he didn’t exist. “Darling, we were trying to catch up with you the whole way! God, you were flying around those hairpin bends like a Formula One car!”

  “Yes, well, it seems a shame not to open up the throttle on the old girl when you get out of London,” Richard explained as if the car were his own. I felt both embarrassed by his stupid remark and guilty for feeling embarrassed. Poor Richard, I knew how being around my friends always made him feel uncomfortable. No matter what he said or did, they’d never really got him.

  Charlie smiled at me and put his hand on my shoulder. “Okay, old girl?”

  “Fine,” I told him. He hadn’t even made eye contact with Richard, so I wasn’t going to reward his bad manners with civility even if he was trying to be kind. Instead, I put my arm protectively around Richard and suggested we all go in.

  All four of us looked at the daunting building.

  “I guess we have to go in at some point,” Richard agreed.

  Charlie was dressed in plain dark Armani linen suit. And as he took Elizabeth’s arm to help her totter across the uneven bitumen in her heels, I thought they looked like the perfect couple, and even though the two of them had every right to be the perfect couple, should they choose, like everything else that day the idea seemed upsetting. I suppose funerals are like that.

  Kitty and Martin were in the entrance vestibule of the crematorium, greeting people as they were going in. Richard and I both lingered behind for a bit while they spoke to Elizabeth and Charles. The whole setup was weirdly office-like in that there was already another group of mourners coming out, dabbing away tears and supporting one another in their grief. Kitty was in black, wearing a big black hat and swathed in her trademark chiffon. She told us that the ceremony was to start in three minutes, sharp.

  Martin shook his head. “Horrible business this.” I wasn’t sure if he meant the burning-of-the-body business, the tight schedule or the whole death issue. He looked very handsome, though, beside Kitty, attired in uncharacteristic formality, a white carnation in his lapel.

  Richard leaned in to kiss Kitty on the cheek and Martin gave me one of his big bear hugs.

  “We’ll miss the old girl,” he said.

  Kitty and Richard agreed, with Richard adding, “Yes, on the few occasions I met her she made an enormous impact.” I know Kitty and Martin didn’t know about Richard’s true feelings toward Camilla, but his falseness made me cringe, so I took his hand and led him into the crematorium.

  There was a malingering misery inside, partly due to the horrible green swirly carpet that was several decades past its due-by date, and the nasty deep red-flocked wallpaper. Worst of all, there were still a few stragglers from the last funeral sitting on the nasty dark green plastic folding chairs sobbing quietly into handkerchiefs. I didn’t know whether to comfort them or hurry them along. Elizabeth looked at me and made a face. I knew what she meant. The whole effect was like a cross between a London registry office and a nasty B and B. A clearinghouse for dead people, and our slot was next.

  By the time Kitty and Martin joined us in the grandly named “mourning parlor,” we had a party of about forty people, all uncomfortably looking about in bewilderment at the surroundings. Eventually we were ushered into the funeral
room by a small man in a dark suit heavily sprinkled with dandruff.

  Camilla’s coffin stood on a silk-swathed podium in the center. It was covered in white lilies and wreaths and on top was a large silver-framed photograph of Camilla as a young woman. She was laughing, her eyes looking into the eyes of a handsome man with a pencil-thin mustache. Scrawled across the photograph in a dark pen were the words,

  Forever yours, Oliver, x

  I wondered about Oliver. About where he was, alive or dead, and whether the two had ever had contact after their initial break. The ceremony was sad in a civil-ceremony sort of way, but most of all it was very weird. Apart from my parents, Richard, Charlie and Elizabeth, none of us knew one another. A man in a suit said a few words about Camilla that could have applied to any elderly woman and then a woman turned on a cheap CD player and we all sang along as best we could to “The Way You Look Tonight.”

  Notwithstanding the horrendous cheap grimness of everything, all of us were crying. The words “darling, never, never change,” seemed to drag sobs out of everyone, and Richard reached out and took my hand as the curtain crept slowly and eerily around the coffin and the last of the Grand Old Edwardians was taken from us on a conveyer belt.

  “They burn them in the night,” Richard explained unnecessarily as we left the building, passing through another funeral party waiting their turn. “The body screams, you see.”

  I looked at him, chilled with the shock of what he’d just told me.

  “The lungs still have air in them and they make a screaming sound as they burn them. I’d never invest in property near a place like this.” He shuddered. “Worse than an abattoir.”

  I was rescued from commenting on his macabre facts by my father, who put his arm around me. “It’s a sad old business,” he sighed. After that, we all stood there for a bit in the car park, the men holding their keys, the girls holding their hats, all of us lost for words.

  Eventually Elizabeth wrapped me in a hug and told me how much she loved me and then Charles hugged me, and for some reason I didn’t want to let go. His reassuring strength and the comforting smell of lime that hung about him made me feel safe.

  “I know she was old but I am going to miss her,” I told them. The thought of her being burned chilled me and I must have kept on holding on to him as I thought about my aunt, because in the end Richard pulled me away and said, “Come on, Lola. We’ll see you all tomorrow at the fete, then.”

  I felt numb as I allowed myself to be prized from Charlie and led away.

  “We’re staying at the Old Castle Bed & Breakfast if you want to drop in this evening for a drink and a chat,” Elizabeth called out kindly, but Richard didn’t turn back.

  We drove back to my parents’ in silence, Richard’s hand resting on my knee, and I recalled going to Kitty’s mother’s funeral as a teenager; a traditional funeral where the coffin was lowered into the ground and we were able to say a proper goodbye. Afterward, Kitty, Martin and I and a few other close relatives had greeted people at the reception. It was held at my grandmother’s house, which was later sold. As the guests came through the door, they all offered some form of condolence, mostly the “I’m sorry for your loss. Let me know if there is anything I can do” sort of thing. One woman, though, had the temerity to take Kitty’s hand and say, “I don’t really know what to say.”

  Kitty’s reaction had had a profound effect on me at the time. She had pulled herself from her grief and looked the woman straight in the eye and said, “Well, why don’t you go off and give it some thought, you gauche creature!” The woman looked shocked and muttered something about it being a figure of speech. So Kitty pointed her crime out more neatly. “I’m dealing with the loss of my mother and yet you arrive here to ask me for my help in scripting words of sympathy? Next time try something sympathetic like, I’m sorry for your loss! Most people seem to be able to manage that much at the very least.”

  The woman, of course, scuttled off shamed while the other guests mentally applauded. The reason I was remembering that day was that I was worried Richard would say something gauche. Not because he was gauche, but because being around my family and friends seemed to bring out the worst in him. Surely he would behave, I tried to reassure myself. Surely he wouldn’t…

  “I don’t know what to say,” he told Kitty as she answered the door. She had clearly been crying and I simply wrapped her in my arms instinctively, although a part of me froze waiting for the derision to be heaped on Richard.

  Instead, she held me while Martin came to the door and shook Richard’s hand. Richard asked where he should put our bags and went off, utterly insensitive to his own insensitivity.

  Kitty seemed uncharacteristically rattled. “I suppose I should have invited Charlie and Elizabeth to stay with us, there’s plenty of room, I can’t have been thinking clearly,” she remarked. I assured her it was fine, and added that they might feel more comfortable in a B and B, given the circumstances.

  “Now, come on, girls,” Martin cut in. “Let’s stop all this doom and gloom now. We’ve said our goodbyes and Cam-Cam wouldn’t have wanted long faces. In fact, she’s left us with the strictest instructions not to cast a shadow over her passing. She’s going to be shot off into the stars tomorrow night and we should all pay our respects by enjoying ourselves.”

  Despite my father’s heartiness it was not the most comfortable evening. Martin and Kitty were both subdued, but that wasn’t the worst of it. Richard kept attempting conversation, seemingly mindless to the mood of the rest of us. He was like a playful red setter at…well…at a funeral. I know he was only trying to cheer us all up, but despite Martin’s reminder that Camilla wouldn’t have wanted us to be glum, we all felt emotionally subdued.

  During our supper of oysters and champagne, or as Kitty referred to it, “a no-nonsense snack,” Richard inquired about Oliver. “I always thought of her as an old spinster,” he added.

  Kitty froze but said nothing.

  I waded in to save him. “Well, they had some sort of romance when she was younger.”

  “So is the guy still alive?”

  Martin shook his head. “I very much doubt it,” he said, and then left the table for more bread. Nothing more was said, and out of fear of further strain I suggested that Richard and I might go to visit Charlie and Elizabeth at their B and B and Kitty leaped on the idea with enthusiasm.

  “What a lovely idea.”

  “But if you’d rather we stayed,” I prevaricated.

  “No, no, no, you must join your friends. I feel dreadful that I didn’t invite them.”

  “Yes, you young ones go off. I’ll call you a cab, shall I?” Martin added.

  Things at the Old Castle were no better, though. Charlie and Elizabeth were curled up on a sofa, a backgammon board between them, laughing and chattering companionably when we arrived. It might have been my imagination, but they didn’t look thrilled to see us.

  “Oh, we didn’t think you’d come,” Elizabeth sighed. But it seemed to me that what she wanted to say was, “We didn’t want you to come.”

  “No? Well, we did, here we are, but if you’d rather…” My sentence trailed off as I took in the look of barely concealed hatred on Charlie’s face as he stared at Richard. Thank goodness Richard was blissfully unaware of the subtext as he was looking around the room.

  “Which way are the toilets?” he asked.

  I confronted Charlie about the way he was looking at Richard while he was out of the room. He claimed not to know what I was talking about and offered me a drink.

  We stayed for a couple of games of backgammon, but talk was strained mostly due to Charlie’s demeanor. He barely said a word and hardly looked up from the backgammon board—whether he was playing or not. After a few attempts at polite conversation, Richard fell into silence, too, quietly reading the Times while I played backgammon with Elizabeth and Charlie watched on.

  I had a sense of Charlie’s eyes on me the entire evening, and at one point I even met his stare, bu
t he didn’t turn away. He just looked unflinchingly (judgmentally, I suppose) into my eyes. Elizabeth caught his look but I don’t think Richard noticed. Elizabeth spent the rest of the game glancing from Charlie to me and giving me significant looks that I didn’t understand and didn’t have the emotional energy to interpret.

  When Richard suggested we call a cab at eleven-thirty, I dived on the idea with relish. We held hands in the back of the car but neither of us spoke. By silent agreement we went straight to bed. I remembered the last time we had stayed in this bed together. We’d been married a few months and we had both decided it would be too weird making love in my parents’ house.

  Richard claimed, “It’s only fun making love in your parents’ house when you’re not supposed to.”

  I agreed even at the time although my reason had been I wasn’t in the mood, but when he added that “Sanctioned sex is a bit of a turnoff, don’t you think?” I’d been shocked.

  Looking back on that conversation I still felt uneasy. Because after all, that’s what marriage was…sanctioned sex. We did spoon now, though, which was nice, and as I was falling asleep, Richard asked me if I’d like to marry him again. Just like that. “Let’s get married.”

  I waited in case he was going to say something else, but he didn’t, so I said, “Are you sure that’s what you really want?”

  “I was never sure about getting divorced, Lolly, you know that.”

  I snuggled in to him. “Me neither,” I agreed, and that seemed to settle it. “You’ve still got your ring, haven’t you?” he asked.

  I breathed the words of course into his ear.

  “Me, too,” he added, interlocking his hand in mine.

  It wasn’t exactly a passionate declaration of love or the most romantic of proposals but it felt timely, and it felt right. It really did feel right. It felt like the past years apart from Richard had been swept away, as if nothing but our being together mattered at all. There was a continuous thread running through our relationship and that was what I was clinging to.