The Art of Not Falling Apart

by Christina Patterson

  She got married in a white hat, white suit and pink high heels. ‘On the way to the registry office, we met a friend of Daniel’s and he said, “Are you coming for a drink, guys?” We thought we looked really amazing, but he thought we were just walking down the road! We said no, we’re going to get married round the corner. I started crying when I said the words. It was all very emotional.’

  Things were good, she told me, for a while, and then she walked into a room at a party and found Daniel kissing a neighbour. ‘I just went home and didn’t say anything,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t do anything about it, but you can’t deny things that happen in the heart. There’s just this little closing thing that you don’t even realize.’

  Patsy is generous, sometimes to a fault. So I wasn’t surprised when she told me that she just tried to put it out of her mind. ‘We had a lovely few years,’ she said, ‘and then I think what happened was the drink.’ Daniel would just disappear. Sometimes, he was with other women, sometimes just drinking with ‘the boys’. By this time, she had her daughter, Jane. ‘I thought about escaping, but I’ve got two cats, I’ve got a baby, you can’t just go anywhere. Sometimes when he didn’t come home from a Sunday morning at the pub I would end up putting his lunch in the bin. I remember once throwing the pushchair out of the front door and then seeing these lovely people who lived in the lodge opposite. “Oh hello!”’ Across the table from me, Patsy did a genteel wave. ‘“Hello, Margery!”’ We both laughed. ‘“And”,’ she continued in the tone she clearly sometimes used with Daniel, ‘“take that fucking pram with you!”’

  She lost a baby. I never knew this. She gave birth to a baby at seven months, but it was, she was told, ‘not survivable’. After that, she had an early miscarriage. Daniel had a skiing holiday booked and went without her. When he came back, he asked Patsy to pick him up. ‘He got in the car and leant over to kiss me,’ she said, ‘and he was like a complete stranger. He’d broken something really serious. So I suppose it went down and down from there. It wasn’t really till he got in the car and I thought: who is this person? He isn’t wicked,’ she sighed, ‘just silly.’

  Melanie is not as generous about her husband’s infidelity. She is forty-eight. She had been with him half her life. I met her at a friend’s hen party, and then again at that friend’s fiftieth birthday. She told me that her marriage had ended and we arranged to go for a drink.

  ‘I found out on iPad,’ she said, ‘iMessages. It’s the most common way. What a dick. It was a work-based affair, as it always is. It was a colleague he was working with very, very intensely. She’s ten years younger than him. A minute before, I’d have said he wasn’t the sort of person to do that. That’s how clever he was. In that moment,’ she said, and she tried to keep her voice even, ‘my whole world came collapsing down.’

  As any sane woman would, she scrolled back through the messages and felt sick. They were already in couples therapy, but not, she realized, the kind of therapy where you talk about what’s really going on. Melanie decided to wait till the next session to tell her husband what she knew. ‘He came straight from one of these team meetings with this woman,’ she said. ‘He was tripping down the road in his smart clothes, all these younger-men clothes that I’d helped him buy. Looking back, it was laughable. I said, “You’re having an affair.” He said, “No, I’m not.” I saw him look me in the eye as if he was just saying he’d had a cheese sandwich for lunch. Of course, I didn’t say, “Well, I’ve been watching what’s happening on iMessage,” but I saw just how good he was.’

  Two weeks later, he told her that he’d had three previous affairs. ‘I felt I was just stumbling from one parallel universe to another,’ she said. She took another gulp of her wine and her face went red. ‘Just when I was getting used to events, I was bumped into a universe where everything was completely different.’

  It was eighteen months since all this happened, but the pain, it was clear, was still raw. ‘It was,’ said Melanie, ‘just the most horrendous time. I’m starting to shake a bit when I think about it. Out of the blue, I lost three quarters of a stone. I felt sick the whole time. I don’t have much weight to lose. I oscillated between days when I was consumed with anger and days when I was consumed with sadness. I would either be in bed sobbing, or I’d be stomping around, the angriest person in the world.’

  I know that feeling. I certainly know that feeling, though not from the same cause. ‘Even today,’ she said, ‘I’ve thought about him being with other women probably four or five times. When I talk about it now, I feel sick.’ And were they still having sex, I asked in as delicate a tone as I could muster, while he was having these affairs? Melanie made a noise that sounded like a snort. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘In fact, he was even more turned on than he normally was. Sometimes I was thinking: oh, what’s going on here? I was a bit surprised.’

  Melanie, like many women, was the one who had taken on most of the domestic burden. She was the one who sacrificed her career. ‘I went,’ she said, ‘from living my life as a single person in London to a married mother in a little village in Oxfordshire. It was like going back to the 1950s. You wouldn’t believe how difficult it can be to look after babies and small children. There is nobody validating you. Your child does not say thanks, Mum, for changing my nappy. When we started out, our careers were about here.’ She raised her hands and put them roughly level. ‘Within two or three years of producing children,’ she said, and her left hand swooped up in a steep curve, while the other one stayed where it was, ‘you’re here.’

  ‘I changed my passwords to “brutal” because it felt like my life was brutal.’ Now she was crying. Her whole body was shaking with her sobs. ‘When people have affairs, they do go bonkers. To have an affair and leave your husband or wife, you have to have an absolute obsession to drive you through that. That,’ she said, wiping away tears, ‘is what I saw in him.’

  I don’t know how many of my friends have had affairs. People tend not to talk about these things, even with their closest friends. I have friends of both sexes who have been rocked by the discovery that their partner has strayed. It isn’t always the sex that hurts most. It’s the lying. No one wants to think that they have been curled up with someone who has been sneaking off to curl up with someone else.

  The research about affairs isn’t clear, because – well, because people lie. But some studies seem to show that about half of married men and women will have at least one affair. Figures among co-habiting unmarried couples appear to be even higher. Among my friends, there’s probably only a handful I know have had affairs. I have quite a few friends. Either they’re unusually faithful or some of them are keeping things very quiet.

  Some of my friends have had emotionally charged friendships with people they have met, which have probably stopped short of sex. I have had them too, and they are sweet. There have been times in my life when I’ve been invited out for lunches, drinks and dinners by quite a few married men. I don’t think many of them expected an affair. If they did, they didn’t get it. I have never wanted to be squeezed into the gaps of someone else’s life. But I did feel that they were playing with a possibility, one that gave them, and perhaps their marriage, an extra edge. Sometimes I resented it. When you’re single and the other person isn’t, this feels unequal. I don’t want to be the chilli in any couple’s carne.

  I have watched a few friends’ relationships break down and it can be like watching a war. Most of my women friends have ended up with the children most of the time. One male friend fought like a tiger to get half and half. I wrote him a character reference, to be read out in court. He has done his children proud.

  But until I met Laura, at that business where I messed up the workshop, I had never heard of a custody battle like this.

  ‘When we met,’ she told me, ‘we agreed we wouldn’t have children, but that changed for me. I had the biological clock ticking, and I wanted a child. He agreed reluctantly, because I think he realized he’d probably lose me. So we had our bab
y. I remember praying that it was going to be a boy because there would be more chance of him bonding.’ The baby was a boy. I’ll call him Aidan. ‘I actually chose not to breastfeed,’ she said, ‘so Jon could take part in the nightly routine. He didn’t, actually. He put earplugs in. I thought having a baby might bring us closer together, but it didn’t.’

  Since she was the breadwinner, and was being treated by her husband as a cash cow, Laura took the minimum maternity leave of four months. ‘I wanted to go part-time,’ she said, ‘but my ex was pointing out all the outgoings, and it wasn’t possible. So I’d be getting up at five, spending breakfast time with Aidan. I found a really good nanny round the corner. I did all the picking up and everything. I was still the primary carer, really. But my company was being restructured again and I was getting pushed by my husband into taking the transfer. I’m basically,’ she said with a weary smile, ‘getting told what to do.’

  Under pressure from her husband, she took the transfer, and then another one. She was working nearly all the time and he wasn’t working at all. ‘He was,’ she explained, ‘living the expatriate lifestyle. Aidan was school age. Jon was just swanning about. Even though I was earning this big money, there was no money left over at the end of the month.’

  One Christmas, when her mother and his parents were staying over, it all blew up. ‘Jon had already bought himself a watch and booked himself a skiing holiday,’ Laura told me. ‘I was beginning to worry about money and I said, well, you’re not getting any Christmas presents from me. On Christmas morning, we were all up, Aidan was opening his presents, and his father was in bed. He couldn’t,’ she said, and now her voice was flat, ‘be bothered to get up.’

  On New Year’s Eve, they were all watching a film on TV and Jon strode in and changed the channel. ‘I said something like, “Don’t be an idiot, what are you doing?”, thinking of our guests. He just completely lost it,’ she said, ‘completely. I thought: right, OK. I have tried so hard. I’ve put myself into jobs and locations that I wouldn’t have chosen. We have a beautiful home, a beautiful son. If we can’t be happy now, when will we be?’

  For several weeks, they talked about whether it was possible to make it work. When Laura came back from a weekend in London, Jon handed her an envelope with a date for an interim court hearing. ‘He was on legal aid,’ she said, ‘but he’d found a really good lawyer. In my panic, I found a shitty one. It was, basically, a war on when each paper could be stamped and dated. Luckily for me, my lawyers were just around the corner from the court and were able to get their divorce papers stamped before Jon could get his. That meant the divorce and financial hearing would be in the UK. But the child custody paper was a separate document. The family law side closed early that day, so we missed it by a matter of nanoseconds. That meant that his papers, the child stuff, were dated earlier than mine. So,’ she said, in a tone of such resignation that it almost made my heart stop, ‘it was a car crash.’

  Jon wouldn’t let her access her own papers, to prepare for the hearing. ‘He locked the office in our house,’ she said, ‘and I actually had to call the police, because I felt quite threatened. So we turned up at the court. My lawyer turned up late. She was ill-prepared. My ex came across as the caring primary carer. They put me down as some frazzled career woman who kept changing jobs and expecting her family to follow her, but actually it was the other way round.’

  When she left the court room, she phoned her mother. ‘It was at that point,’ she said, ‘that I realized what was happening to me, and I collapsed. Some lovely people took me to the local doctors.’ She broke off. Laura has such an air of calm that I almost panicked when she broke off. ‘Sorry,’ she said, trying to blink away her tears, ‘it’s quite emotional now. I was so keen to keep up my strength for my son, because I had to go back to him, have dinner with him, read him a story. I spent all afternoon in this room, just bawling my eyes out. There were some animal screams. I was actually having a breakdown. This lovely woman kept stroking my head and letting me get it out of my system, so when I went back home I was able to show up well to my son. But from there on, the nervous energy was all-consuming. I was losing weight. By June, I must have lost a couple of stone. People,’ she said, and the tears were still rolling down her face, ‘didn’t recognize me any more.’

  Laura lost custody of her son. Jon’s parents coached him on how to be a ‘fun dad’ and it seemed to do the trick, at least in court. She has been through seven court hearings. She pays whacking fees in spousal maintenance as well as maintenance for her son. ‘At one point,’ she said, ‘I had sixty thousand pounds of debt. I was earning this big salary, with nothing to show for it. I couldn’t afford to get on the train to work. I was eating cereal for tea.’

  And does she, I asked, feel any stigma for being the woman who lost her son? Laura put her hand to her forehead. ‘Oh my God. The initial reaction of people going “there must be something wrong with you, why didn’t you fight for him, why didn’t you camp out on the lawn?”’ She shrugged. ‘They just come out with it.’

  For a while, I didn’t know what to say. Did she, I said in the end, feel her heart was broken by this? Laura looked down and then back at me. ‘Yeah. I would go over and have these fun weekends with Aidan, and I’d say goodbye and just felt like I’d lost a limb. It was,’ she said, ‘like he’d died.’

  There are so many ways to break a heart. There are too many ways to break a heart. I have made those animal noises, when I was lying on a hospital couch and had just been told that the kind of cancer I had was the type that meant I was more likely to die. I had lost my breast. I had lost a chunk of my stomach, to replace the gap where there had been a breast. I couldn’t stand upright and at night I felt as if I was being stretched on a rack. And now the doctor was telling me, in effect, that it might all be in vain because the cells that were trying to kill me might well win.

  I waited for the doctor to leave the room and then the animal noises came out. I thought they were terrible noises, but I couldn’t stop them coming out. One nurse removed the stitches and another nurse stroked my hair. I will never, ever forget that nurse who stroked my hair.

  Six weeks before, I had been dumped by the man I saw at that private view. I thought at the time that my heart was breaking, but I didn’t know then that a broken heart can keep on breaking and keep on beating, too.

  There’s a medical condition called ‘broken heart syndrome’, where the heart muscle becomes suddenly weakened or stunned. The left ventricle or chamber changes shape and makes the heart beat at an irregular pace. The syndrome was discovered by Japanese doctors in 1991. It’s also found in antelopes, Arabian oryx and pronghorn sheep. The medical name for it is Takotsubo cardiomyopathy because the shape of the ventricle reminded the doctors of a special Japanese pot used to catch octopuses.

  There are two main things to learn from this research:

  1) You can die of a broken heart, but you probably won’t.

  2) Your broken heart might well turn out to be useful for something else.

  Part II

  Gathering

  ‘I love those who can smile in trouble, who can gather strength from distress’

  Leonardo da Vinci

  A sentimental journey

  I believe in parties. If you have parties to mark the fact that people have died, I think you should certainly make an effort to mark the fact that you were born and are still alive.

  I didn’t think I would face my fiftieth birthday without a partner, a family, a regular income or a job. But there you are. It’s no reason not to have a party.

  I have a party in December almost every year. I usually give the impression it’s an early Christmas party, but most of my friends know it’s my birthday on 8 December. If they turn up with cards and presents – well, I’m not going to turn them away. I like parties because I like chatting, and laughing, and eating, and drinking. I like introducing people I like to each other. It’s a good way of doing several of my favourite things at onc
e.

  I am, as you know, not keen on cooking. That’s why most of the cookery books on that shelf in my study still look brand new. I did once go on a cookery course in Ireland for a piece I was writing for the Independent magazine. When I got back, I spent the whole of a Saturday afternoon sweating over a fish stew. I invited my friend Winston, who’s a trained chef, to try it. He took a mouthful and frowned. Most of the white fish had fallen apart, but the octopus was still springy and raw. ‘It’s not a total disaster,’ he said, but I just wanted to pour the whole pot over his head. Life, as Shirley Conran once said, is too short to stuff a mushroom and it’s certainly too short to spend your precious Saturday afternoons producing something that will make your home stink for weeks of boiled fish.

  I met Winston sixteen years ago at a rice and peas stall at the Elephant and Castle. We went out for a while and have been friends ever since. Winston’s a brilliant cook. Stick him in a kitchen with a near-empty fridge and a couple of tins and he will still somehow create a feast. Winston has done the food for almost every party I’ve had since we met. He did the food for my fortieth birthday party, which was the year I first had cancer. He also paid for me to have a DJ. At one point, he got the DJ to drop a mic from the mezzanine and sang a song he had written for me, before presenting me with a giant cake slathered with cream.

  Winston now lives in Yorkshire, but he still sometimes helps me with my parties. He got the Megabus down the night before this party, seared some beef and set the smoke alarm off at 1 a.m. My friend Lorna planned the rest of the menu and emailed through scans of Ottolenghi recipes. I hadn’t heard of half the ingredients, but then I have (honestly) googled how to boil an egg.

  Lorna turned up at lunchtime, with home-made sloe gin. All afternoon, we toiled away, bruising aubergine, blanching pine nuts and taking nips of bright pink gin. She didn’t just command my tiny kitchen. She also, later, lent me her boyfriend, to let people in, take their coats and offer them drinks.