How to Break Your Own Heart

by Maggie Alderson

  ‘As easy as ABCC…’ it said on one side of the cards, the initials standing for ‘Amelia Bradlow Clutter-Clearing’.

  That had been Ed’s idea, I remembered, turning one of the sunflower-yellow cards over and over in my fingers, as I sat at my new desk. Ed had come up with the name one night when we were having a ‘business-strategy brain-storming think-tank’ dinner, at his suggestion. It had been incredibly helpful. But thinking about Ed reminded me of my hair all over again.

  For about the hundredth time that afternoon I went and looked in the mirror and wondered, with a slightly sick feeling in my stomach, what he would say about it. But as it turned out, the next person to see my hair wasn’t him. It was his mother.

  She arrived at the flat around nine that night, not long after Ed had rung to say he was going out for dinner with a client and that I shouldn’t wait up for him. He hadn’t said anything about Dervla coming and the first I knew was when I heard a long press on the buzzer.

  ‘Hello, Amelia,’ said an all too familiar voice, colonial RP on top of childhood elocution lessons. I always thought she sounded like someone from a particularly arch Radio Four play. ‘It’s Dervla. Can you run down with the money for this taxi, please?’

  I was so surprised I just said yes, and grabbed my bag. It was lucky I hadn’t just picked up a couple of £20 notes, because it turned out she’d got into the taxi at Bristol airport.

  The fare was nearly £300 and the driver would only take cash, so I had to run to a cashpoint to get it, while Lady Bradlow – oh, how she loved that title, which I always longed to remind her was the result of a knighthood, nothing glamorously inherited – swanned inside.

  ‘Oh, good heavens, whatever have you done to your lovely hair?’ I heard her exclaiming as I headed down the street.

  When I finally made it up to the flat again – quite a while later, because when I got back to the building I found she’d left all her luggage down in the hall, so I’d had to load it into the lift and then heft it in through the front door – she was happily ensconced on the sofa, shoes kicked off, telly on, a glass of single malt by her side, cigarette in her hand.

  ‘Hello, Amelia dear,’ she said, offering her pampered cheek for a kiss, while simultaneously blowing out a cloud of noxious smoke. She smoked menthols, which made it even worse. ‘Whatever does Ed think of your hair? He’s always adored those long blonde locks of yours. I can’t imagine he’s very keen on this boyish style.’

  I decided to ignore it.

  ‘So, Dervla,’ I said, pouring myself a drink to match hers – I needed one after this shock, ‘this is a surprise. Were we expecting you today?’

  ‘Well, I do normally come in mid-June, as you know,’ she said, ‘but this lovely man invited me to Positano, and it seemed crazy to go back to South Africa from there when I could get one of these marvellous new cheap fares straight here from Italy. Do you know, it was only £39?’

  I just smiled politely. There was no point telling her it had cost more like £339 once you factored in the taxi fare I’d paid. This was classic Dervla financial logic.

  ‘Amazing,’ I said tightly. ‘But Ed didn’t mention you were coming tonight. I’m sure he’d have been here to greet you if he’d known…’

  ‘Oh, I can’t remember if I told him or not, but this is such fun, because I’ll be able to go to Chelsea this year – you know how I normally miss it. Have you got tickets for tomorrow? I’m so looking forward to it.’

  She meant the flower show, of course, and Monday was the super-exclusive Queen’s private view which meant invites were as scarce as Willy Wonka’s golden tickets.

  Not surprisingly, we didn’t have any of those, but we did have tickets for the slightly less glamorous but still very nice Tuesday, as the guests of one of Ed’s clients, whose merchant bank was a sponsor of the gardens. I was so furious at her assumption that she was entitled to one of them I just got up and walked out of the room, taking deep breaths as I went.

  God, she made me mad. She hadn’t been with us for fifteen minutes and already she was in full free-loader mode. I didn’t trust myself to stay civil, and as Dervla never listened to what anyone else said anyway, it didn’t seem worth wasting my breath to explain, or complain – and anyway, I had to make up the bed in her room. Maybe I should just put on a maid’s apron, I thought.

  I was just getting some towels out of the airing cupboard for her when she appeared at my side. She took them from me without even saying thank you, just one of her gracious-to-the-little-people Raine Spencer smiles.

  ‘Now, I’m just going to have a shower and then I thought we might have a spot of dinner?’ she was saying. ‘Where shall we go? I hear Scott’s is fun…’

  ‘I’m going to bed, Dervla,’ I said unsmilingly, knowing full well she meant I was supposed to take her out to dinner. ‘It’s nearly ten o’clock, and I have to work early tomorrow and I really don’t like eating this late. There’s cheese and pâté in the fridge and plenty of fruit and crackers. Just help yourself. I’ll see you in the morning.’

  She looked at me with an expression I knew all too well. It was the kind of moue that you might see on a spoilt three-year-old who has just been told they can’t have a second ice cream. At seventy-four – I’d looked at her passport while I was bringing the bags up – Dervla had never grown out of it.

  Ed came to find me when I was having my shower the next morning, which meant he was up unusually early for him.

  ‘Amelia?’ he was calling. ‘Have you really had all your hair cut off ? Or has my mother finally lost it?’

  I turned the water off and opened the cubicle door. I still had my shower cap on and was happy to put off the dreaded moment a little longer.

  ‘Did you know she was coming last night?’ I asked him, as a diversion.

  ‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Hadn’t a clue. She sprang it on us with her usual lack of consideration. She rang me about ten last night to say she was here and wanted to have dinner with me, so she came and joined us for pudding at Harry’s Bar. That’s when she told me you’d had all your hair cut off. Is it really true?’

  I must have looked guilty, because he reached over and grabbed the shower cap off my head. The look on his face said it all. He was horrified.

  He just stood there staring at me with what looked horribly like tears forming in his eyes. Feeling as naked as it was possible to feel, I started to shiver in his gaze and reached out to get a towel.

  ‘What have you done?’ he said eventually.

  He didn’t look angry. He looked bewildered. Bewildered and hurt, which was much worse.

  ‘Your beautiful, beautiful hair. You know I’ve always adored it, and now you look so… so ordinary.’

  Ouch.

  ‘I just wanted a change…’ I said.

  Suddenly, Ed threw my shower cap down on to the floor and kicked it at the wall. I flinched. It was very out of character for him – and reminded me all too vividly of my father’s behaviour.

  ‘What is it with you and change these days, Amelia?’ he said, throwing his arms up in the air. ‘Why do you suddenly want to change everything? You quit your job, you take me to a ghastly sushi bar for my birthday, you’re wearing weird clothes and hooker shoes, you’ve got that hideous handbag, and now you’ve just cut off your wonderful hair on a whim without even mentioning it to me first. Don’t you care what I think?’

  I took a wobbly breath and said nothing. I could feel my heart beating double time in my chest.

  ‘Well?’ he continued, his voice getting tighter. ‘Do my wishes and needs count for nothing in this relationship?’

  I couldn’t believe my ears. As far as I could tell, just about everything in our lives was determined by his wishes and needs, his wish to eat out every night in the same bloody restaurants, his need to lock himself away in his study working the rest of the time, his need to have separate bedrooms. Even in the area that meant most to me in our relationship – having children – only his wishes se
emed to count. And I couldn’t even decide how I wore my own hair!

  I was feeling very upset now, my emotions were churning me up, but it wasn’t the anger I had felt in Paris. It was something more like fear – fear that if I said the wrong thing at this moment it could never be put right between us again.

  I wanted to shout at him, like I had that time, to tell him he was a selfish bastard, as spoilt in his own way as his horrendous mother, and I was sick of running my life according to his ludicrous rules, but I just couldn’t. It was like one of those dreams when you can’t scream. My vocal cords felt frozen.

  ‘Oh well,’ he said, seeming to calm down a little.

  ‘You’ve done it, so I suppose I’ll just have to live with it until it grows back, but what I don’t understand is – how on earth did you get it cut down in Winchelsea? Did the gardener do it with his pruning shears?’

  He’d completely forgotten that Kiki and Oliver had been down there with me, I realized. I felt a small pang of guilt, remembering how I hadn’t told him Joseph was there as well, but if this was how little notice he took of what went on in my life, I thought, I wasn’t going to worry about that small detail any more.

  Plus, I was so outraged at his assumption that I would just grow my hair back because he said I should that I really didn’t feel like tiptoeing around his feelings too much.

  ‘Oliver cut it,’ I said bluntly.

  I could see the coldness settling in his eyes as he took it in.

  ‘Kiki,’ he said, nodding his head very slowly. ‘It was Kiki again. Well, I’ll tell you something, Amelia. I don’t like the influence that woman has on you, so I think you had better decide which you want – to be friends with her or married to me.’

  With that, he stormed out and I heard his study door slam. He’d promised he’d never slam a door again. That didn’t last long. Sighing deeply, I turned to the mirror and wiped the steam off it with the edge of my towel. I swung my head a few times and watched my hair fall perfectly into place again. I still loved it.

  Fuck him, I thought, as I looked at the sophisticated woman in the mirror. Fuck him and his door-slamming and his juvenile Bond girl fantasies. I wasn’t a girl any more. What was it Joseph had said? ‘Pretty girl. Beautiful woman.’ That’s who I wanted to be.

  Feeling a little shaky, I pulled on my bathrobe and went to make myself a restorative cup of coffee, only to find Dervla already in the kitchen, tucking into my fat-free organic yogurt while smoking a cigarette. She stubbed it out in the nearly empty tub.

  ‘I take it Ed didn’t like your hair, then,’ she said brightly. ‘Well, I did warn you. Men don’t like big changes in their women, and they certainly don’t like short hair. It makes them think of lesbians.’

  It took all my considerable self-control not to tell her to sod off. Instead, I just made my coffee without saying a word and took it back to my bedroom. It was possibly the first time I had been glad I had a room of my own in that flat.

  As I got dressed, I still felt shaken by Ed’s reaction, which had been much worse than I had ever expected, but as I looked at myself in the mirror, wearing my new wide-leg white jeans and one of the stripy T-shirt tops, my hair a chic little cap on the top, I felt the upset harden into a kind of resolve: it was my hair, I loved it and I didn’t care what he thought.

  Fortunately, after that less than lovely Monday morning, I had a very busy week and resolved to throw myself into work as the perfect distraction from Dervla – and Ed.

  I’d taken on Kiki’s friend Fiona to be my assistant clutter-clearer and I was taking her to her first appointment with me that afternoon, which felt like quite a big deal. Then I had what was starting to feel like my usual roster of new clients to see and, later in the week, the first meeting with my very own accountant.

  He’d sent me an email with a list of things I needed to take with me, which included bank statements, previous tax returns, investments, pension schemes and the like, which I needed to sort out ready.

  So on the Tuesday afternoon, when Ed and Dervla were out enjoying the Chelsea Flower Show – something I had been really looking forward to myself, but it was worth giving the hideous cow my ticket, just to have some peace – I knew I could spend some undisturbed time in Ed’s study finding what I needed.

  I hadn’t been in there for a while and was quite shocked to see the mess it was in. For years I had sorted it out for him once a month, filing everything in the system I had set up, but lately it had been hard to find a time when he’d let me in to do it. He was always in the middle of something that couldn’t be disturbed.

  In all the chaos, I couldn’t find the most recent statement for our joint bank account, which wasn’t in any of the places it should have been. I was flicking through the back of one of his filing cabinets, in a drawer labelled ‘Stuff ’ – not very helpful, but possible – when I came across a file marked ‘Amelia’. I’d never seen it before and presumed he’d crammed anything relating to me in there, in an earlier fit of organization.

  I opened it to find it was full of notes I’d written to him over the years, which was very touching. There was every Valentine card I’d ever given him, and photographs of us right from the earliest days of our relationship.

  I smiled when I found one taken on our very first trip through France together. I remembered Ed asking the waiter to take it after a wonderful lunch at a restaurant in Perigord. We looked so young and so in love. My hair was so long. Oh well.

  As well as the photos, there were carefully clipped cuttings from various magazines where we had appeared in the social pages, or in profiles of Ed. Looking at it all made me start to feel rather warm and fuzzy towards him again and a bit ashamed of myself for upsetting him so much. It wasn’t like I hadn’t known he was going to hate my haircut. I should have done it in stages, I thought, as I had with my new clothes, or at least warned him I was thinking about going for the chop.

  Not that I’d had much say in it, I reflected, with Kiki and Oliver bossing me around, but I could see it had been a heck of a shock for Ed – which was particularly unfortunate considering all the extra little strains there’d been on the relationship recently.

  I made a resolution, right then, to start working immediately to get things back to normal between us, or perhaps even better than normal. It would be hard with Dervla in residence stirring things up, but it was worth the effort because, despite his undeniable tendency towards selfishness, I still dearly loved my husband.

  I leafed through some more of the photos and couldn’t help smiling. There was Ed beaming with excitement outside the Krug HQ where he had proposed to me. I remembered taking it when we had first arrived there, and it was funny to think he’d already had the engagement ring in his pocket. I’d had no idea what was coming. No wonder his cheeks were so pink in the picture.

  In another snap he was standing outside L’Ambroisie, kissing the sign with the restaurant’s name on it and holding up three fingers to indicate three Michelin stars. In yet another he was sitting in Ladurée, with a coffee éclair in front of him, holding Mr Bun up to look at it.

  He was such a silly old softie, I thought. Yes, he had his quirky little ways, but still he made me feel secure in a way that nobody else did. He was my rock, my best friend and my safe harbour – or he had been up until very recently. I sighed, remembering the scene in the bathroom the morning before. That had been dreadful and I couldn’t just let things slide any further downhill between us.

  Perhaps we could get Dervla a fabulous invitation somewhere that weekend, I thought, so we could go down to the cottage on our own. Then I could talk to him about working a bit less and spending more time with me. Tell him how much I was beginning to hate having separate bedrooms. Then move on to another, more measured discussion of the baby issue.

  I was still mulling all that over when I found some loose sheets of A4 at the back of the file. They were clearly quite old, as the paper was yellowing and they had been typed on the manual typewriter Ed had s
till used when I first met him.

  Without thinking I might be prying into something private – Ed and I had no secrets from each other, as far as I knew – I started reading:

  Marrying Amelia – Pros and Cons

  Pro:

  Very attractive

  Beautiful hair

  Good metabolism

  Fluent French

  Great legs

  Good head for alcohol

  Not a whinger

  Brother a good man

  Good company

  Loves France

  Good appetite

  Well groomed

  Good manners

  Good traveller

  Bright

  Quick learner

  Speaks well, especially considering school

  Enthusiastic

  Organized

  Tidy

  Fit

  Disciplined

  Unknowns:

  Good mixer? (Probably)

  Good cook? (Can learn…)

  Con:

  Dreadful parents

  Suburban background

  State school

  A little immature

  Unsophisticated

  Sexually inexperienced

  No family money

  Dervla not keen

  I sank down on to the floor, feeling like I had been punched in the face. He’d really weighed up marrying me like it was some kind of business decision? I thought we’d been in love!

  My shock very quickly turned to rage. How dare he say my parents were ‘dreadful’ – especially considering what his mother was like. OK, so my father was not exactly ideal, but I reckoned Dervla came in at about the same level of nightmare, in her own way, and at least my dad didn’t sponge off us. And Ed was always saying how much he loved my mother – was that all lies?

  Feeling a bit sick, I read it again. Dervla being ‘not keen’ had been an issue for him? She hadn’t even met me when Ed proposed. Clearly he’d discussed me on the phone with her and she hadn’t liked the sound of the package. Obviously, I wasn’t rich or grand enough for Dervla. Not enough in it for her.