Daisy Dooley Does Divorce

by Anna Pasternak

  “Jess thinks I’m a fool,” said Lucy miserably.

  “She doesn’t judge you,” I lied. “She just wants you to be happy. We all do.”

  “Are you happy now?” asked Lucy.

  I paused. “I’m more confident, in the sense that I know I can survive on my own. I still have days when the fear creeps in and I think I’ll be alone and childless forever, but I feel safer than I used to because I have a stronger sense of self.”

  “So all that spiritual self-help stuff really works then?”

  I laughed. “It doesn’t numb the pain. If anything, the more aware you are, the more keenly you feel. The Buddhist books say that any spiritual initiation—an exceptionally difficult life passage that shakes your foundation and makes you question your purpose—is opportunity disguised as loss.”

  “How could my situation be an opportunity?” Lucy looked incredulous.

  “You could find the courage to leave Edward for good,” I said gently. “Build a life for yourself and work on fulfilling your dreams.”

  “I’m not strong like you,” said Lucy. “And I’ve got my girls. They need a father.”

  “Absolutely. But they also need a happy mother brave enough to fight for herself. In the end, if you stay, you build up a powder keg of resentment and regret.”

  Lucy let her head drop into her hands. “Shouldn’t I stay here and honor my commitments as a mother and wife?”

  “At what cost?” I said. She started weeping. I put my arms around her.

  “Lucy, you’ve just turned forty. It isn’t the end but it could be the beginning.”

  8

  Premature

  We-jaculation

  I was in the bookshop writing the meaningful missive of the day in bright cherry chalk: “Happiness comes through doors you didn’t even know you left open.”

  Miles pretended to gag. “Urgh, pass me the saccharine sentiment sick bag, please.”

  “Miles, you emotional gibbon,” I said playfully, “allow me to translate. All this is saying is that in order to be happy, we just have to be willing.”

  “I’m always willing,” he said. “Have you ever known me to turn down the opportunity to get plastered or get laid?”

  “Willing to be open to something greater than yourself,” I said. “It’s like it never works if you look for love, you have to trust that love will find you.”

  Miles stood back and surveyed me. “You really believe in this, don’t you?”

  “Some of it,” I said.

  “And where has it gotten you?” he said, a tad caustically.

  “Out of a lame marriage.”

  “But into it in the first place?”

  Ouch. I couldn’t help laughing. “Oh, wait,” I said. “On a happier note, it’s got me another date with dishy younger man Max Knightly. He’s invited me to Sunday lunch at his flat.”

  Although my date with Max hadn’t left me swooning, it had left me feeling something. Mostly that here was a man keen to pursue me, and on reflection, the age difference was flattering. When my male friends in their forties, like Miles, craved nothing but twenty-something prenatal bullet-bodied babes—he was always harping on about “young flesh”—the fact that a late twenty-something guy was interested in the nearly forty me with my saggy boobs and squishy tops of thighs was quite an ego boost. Also, the worst thing about having no one in your life—as the previous months had highlighted—is that you never get that bubble of excitement every time the phone rings or a text pops up. Being alone means that on an hour-to-hour basis there is nothing to look forward to—apart from lunch with the girls, that is.

  Lucy had asked Jess and me to meet her in a pub near the bookshop. It was a warm early autumn day, so we sat outside at a table on the pavement drinking Diet Coke and eating crisps. Lucy looked unusually plain for her—sure, her jeans were expensive and her T-shirt perfectly ironed and immaculately white, yet I noticed that she wore no jewelry. Even though she had a wan, tired look, she looked less adult than usual. Somehow girlie and afraid. “What’s up?” I asked.

  “I finally plucked up the courage to leave Edward last week,” she said. “Well, it’s more of a separation really.”

  “Thank fuck,” said Jess, raising her glass as a toast.

  I shot her a look. “What happened?”

  “Edward didn’t come home one night and something inside me just broke. I thought, ‘I can’t go on like this anymore, always wondering where he is, doing what to whom.’ So the following morning, after I had dropped the girls at school, I went and rented a serviced flat in Chelsea. I spent all day there, getting it ready for the girls. Making up the beds with their favorite castles and fairy bed linen and putting their toys around, so it felt like home. When Edward got home and found out I’d gone, he called me on my mobile and asked, ‘Where are my golf clubs?’ Can you imagine? He didn’t ask to speak to the girls or if we were all okay. He simply saw our leaving as an excuse for him to take a long golfing weekend.”

  “Enough said,” said Jess smugly.

  “At first I was in shock,” Lucy continued, ignoring her. “I was on automatic pilot, worrying about the children and keeping their routine the same. After I put them to bed, the anger would kick in. I felt consumed with rage; temper thudding through my body like a fever. Now all I feel is grief. I want to lie around and cry all day.”

  “Do you want to go back?” I asked.

  “I don’t want to go back but I don’t want to go through this.”

  “I know.” I nodded. “When I left Jamie and the lawyer’s letters started coming, I lost my nerve. But I promise, you’ll get through this. I’m not saying it isn’t hard but it does get better.”

  “It’s complete hell being a forty-something mother on your own,” said Lucy bitterly. “You have no idea what it’s like. On Saturday morning I took the girls to Kew Gardens. I’ve never seen so many eager fathers with wedding rings playing with their kids, no doubt giving their wives a lie-in or the morning off to go for a Brazilian or get their highlights done ready for some romantic Saturday night.”

  “Oh, don’t buy into it, Luce,” said Jess. “Watch them close enough and you’ll see that while their children play and they drink coffee, they’re all madly texting. You can bet it isn’t the wife at home they’re getting textual with but the mistress they can’t see until midweek.”

  “For God’s sake, Jess,” erupted Lucy, “do you ever see any scenario in life that doesn’t involve infidelity and a bit on the side? Just because you’re the consummate mistress doesn’t mean that there aren’t women out there—wives and mothers—trying to live decent lives. Not every man is being unfaithful, you know.”

  “Wake up, Lucy!” Jess snapped her fingers in Lucy’s face. “Your husband has cheated on you. He’s done it before and he’ll do it again. And he’s not alone. I just want you to find your self-respect and stop laying yourself open to further humiliation.”

  “At least I’ve tried,” screamed Lucy, as a man passing on a bike swiveled his head to stare, making him swerve across the road, “unlike you, who’s scared to ever risk any real feeling. I may be humiliated but I had the courage to put my heart on the line.”

  Jess grabbed her handbag and stood up. “And the dream is over, Lucy. It’s all turned to dust. So who’s better off between the two of us now?”

  Lucy stared at her while Jess glanced at her watch, chucked the rest of her Diet Coke into the gutter, and stormed off. Before I could say anything Lucy turned to me searchingly.

  “Don’t ask me,” I said. We sat in shocked silence.

  After a while Lucy said, “The worst thing is that when Edward had his affair, I really tried to make the relationship work. Not in forgiving him but in keeping our domestic ship steady. I’d return from the school run and if the sun was shining, I’d think, I love my girls, I love my friends, I love my house and garden, and I love my life. So what if I don’t love my husband and he doesn’t love me? We don’t make love but we don’t fight either
. I’m happy enough.”

  “Oh Luce,” I said forlornly, “happy enough is not enough.”

  “Isn’t it?” She shook her head. “I’m not so sure. Whatever Jess says, there’s something to be said for marital stability.”

  “Marital stagnation, more like it.”

  Lucy looked at her hands. “It’s true, but I’m so lonely.”

  “Loneliness, like fear, is a threshold emotion,” I said. “You have to pass through it to conquer it.”

  “I don’t think I can,” she said.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Go back to Edward soon, probably.” She sighed. “Hopefully this will have given him enough of a scare. Daisy, please don’t look at me like that. I’m not like you. You know that.”

  All the way to Bath I kept reciting, “You have to give the water a chance to boil if you want to make a decent cup of tea.” Jess had sent me off to my Sunday lunch date with Max, this ringing endorsement in my ears, after my crisis of confidence the night before. We were tucking into pizza and pinot noir when I began to wonder if there was any point in schlepping off to see Max after all.

  “If you’ve met someone intriguing but you don’t feel an immediate ‘click,’ should you get romantically involved anyway?” I asked.

  “But you won’t know if you click until you’ve kissed him,” said Jess.

  “That’s a chemical click,” I said. “I’m not talking about that. I mean the ‘click’ that involves a lightning-strike sense of familiarity and an uncanny feeling of being understood.”

  “Get real, Daisy, and just go on the date,” huffed Jess. “Your expectations are so high that you constantly set yourself up for a fall. Just give the poor guy a chance.”

  The thing about visiting a potential partner’s pad is that you can’t help doing a mental inventory to see if he could be the winning ticket to something better. It’s not that I expected a man to support me financially, more that I wanted him to shoulder the emotional responsibility of me being me. As high as I could get on self-help, there were bleak moments when I felt I couldn’t actually help myself and the weight of lugging all my anxieties around wore me out. The minute I walked into Max Knightly’s pied-à-terre, I fancied him not because the pheromones were flowing but because it felt calm and safe.

  Although I knew that Max was an architect, I hadn’t stopped long enough to consider that he would have a zingingly metrosexual pulling pad. It was a modern, light, high-ceilinged apartment with thoughtful details that made hope soar. The bathroom—with glass partitions, a thundering power shower, and stacks of thick oatmeal colored towels—was pure sex. Even better, when I went to the loo (not to pee but to check that my hair hadn’t gone flat and fallen into an unflattering middle part), I noticed that Max used Space NK products and even had a Dyptique candle burning. When I took a peek into his bedroom, I did a double take.

  I would never, ever forget the first time I saw Jamie’s bedroom, so peering into Max’s room was like being given another chance. When Jamie had taken me to his childhood room in his parents’ house, that’s when I saw it all. The blueprint of our marriage, of our complete incompatibility, was laid out before my eyes. This was every public school boy’s messy room and then some. The floor was overflowing with old school clothes, the bedside drawer had his Common Entrance papers stuffed in. The bed boasted a psychedelic, frantic-patterned duvet cover and nightmarish bottle-blue pillowcases. On the mantel-piece was every Valentine’s card he had ever received and three Rubik’s Cubes. I remember trying to work out if the pièce de résistance was the teddy bear lampshade or the ceiling covered with glow-in-the-dark stickers that read: JIM JAM LIVES HERE. I was so appalled that Jim Jam might as well have sprayed the walls with blood. Like a fool, my reaction was an urge to help him. I thought that I could force Jamie to grow up and into the man I had convinced myself I wanted to marry if I clutter-cleared his adolescent muckfest of a bedroom.

  I instantly set about cleaning that room. I drove into the local town and bought scented lining paper for his drawers and rubber gloves. For the next eight hours he sat next to me as I tried to redesign his history. When I caught Jamie trying to stuff a glittery cummerbund back into his drawers or hide a red holey jumper that sagged to his knees, I’d hold out the offending item and say, “It’s your choice: this or me.” Invariably I won but what sort of victory was that?

  What I hadn’t bargained for in my control-addled mind was that, far from presenting me with a rosette of honor for hard labor, his mother would resent me. When she returned, Lavinia Prattlock was so insulted you would have thought that I’d trashed the place.

  Poor Lavinia. I wasn’t what she’d envisaged as a daughter-in-law at all. She wanted some nice, uncomplicated, unemotional girl for Jamie, someone who had a little job, as opposed to a career, doing something creative like stenciling frollicking rabbits around friends’ playrooms or seashells on their bathroom ceilings. So the poor lamb was unable to hide her devastation when Jamie proposed to a neurotic, outspoken, bolshy career girl like me. The night we rang his parents to tell them that we had got engaged, they didn’t even bother to ask to speak to me. A week later we met for “drinkie poos” at their home, Manor Farm.

  I often wonder about the exact moment I knew I shouldn’t have married Jamie, but the faster the warning bells pealed, the more determined I was not to heed them. There was the language barrier that I dismissed because at the time, I found it strangely endearing and was quick to adopt it myself. The Prattlocks were fluent in jaunty Enid Blyton speech. An egg was a “peggy weggy,” a sock an “ocky wocky,” breakfast was “brekkie-tuftal” and most hilarious—to me—a willy was a “wonkle.” Their large red brick house, like so many country abodes of their set, was filthy. The dishwasher door always hung open, allowing their bloated Labrador to lick the plates as he waddled past. The kitchen table was awash with debris: old newspapers, sticky jam pots, tins of shoe polish, some rotting fruit in a bowl, half-empty bottles of red wine, and some dying roses in slime-laden water that stank. Yes, that was the point about the place. It was half-dead. Hardly breathing. Everywhere was stuffed with generations’ worth of dust-filled clutter but none of it amounted to anything. It was as if they considered anything beautiful, like a wonderful piece of sculpture, or anything luxurious, like a comfy chair with a cashmere throw, a weakness. Opulence was an irrelevance; a sign that you were stepping out of your circle.

  We toasted our future happiness (or commiserated such an unholy alliance) around the kitchen table, with lukewarm “cham-poo” and Pringles from the can. I sat facing the larder fixated on the overcrowded shelves. When we went to the local pub for supper, Lavinia took charge of the seating plan. Jamie sat next to her and I was placed across the table, next to Jamie’s father,Gordon. It’s one of the biggest regrets of my life, apart from accepting the blind date with Jamie in the first place, that I did not speak up then. I did not expect at my engagement dinner, which I had planned in my head since primary school, to be talking to Gordon about his golf handicap as I ate fatty duck through gritted teeth. Wasn’t this the one occasion when I should have been able to sit next to Jamie and talk about me? Well, Jamie and me? About us?

  I should have said, “Oh don’t be daft, Lavinia. Of course Jamie should sit next to me! This is our engagement dinner after all,” but I stayed quiet and hated myself for my compliance all evening.

  Staring at Max’s Zen room, with its futon, white bed linens, vast window, and window box filled with purple heather, felt like coming home. The contrast with Jamie was staggering. Here, clearly, was a sensitive neat freak like me. The only picture, a large, hauntingly beautiful oil painting of Battersea Power Station, made me fancy him more. Good taste, like the perfect dive into the sea, or an insider’s knowledge of anything from vintage wine to obscure European authors, is an instant aphrodisiac. I quickly licked the back of my hand and sniffed it to see if my breath still smelled of garlicky pizza from the night before—phew, it didn’t—and retur
ned to the kitchen where Max was carving roast lamb. Again, the delight lay in the details: the homemade red wine gravy, the toasty golden roast potatoes, al dente broccoli, Claret breathing, a Kaiser Chiefs CD. Suddenly I felt as if I was in this young, funky yet satisfyingly stylish world.

  When Max poured me a glass of wine in a heavy goblet and gave me a sideways smile as he handed it to me, the chemical click clicked. I couldn’t wait for him to kiss me.

  All through lunch I could hardly taste the food as I was so excited by the promise of what lay beyond. While he was talking—telling me about a block of flats he was pitching for the commission to design on a promontory in Malta—I was only half listening, busy anticipating the moment when our lips would touch. Would he simply lean over and cup my face in his hands, or would he get up, take me by the hand, and lead me silently to the bedroom? Not that I would have slept with him then, of course, because I had to get back to London that night for work on Monday and I wasn’t about to break my steadfast rule that breakfast together is de rigueur following sex for the first time.

  We had coffee on the sofa, sitting tantalizingly close. Suddenly jumpy and nervous, I starting talking too much, telling a deeply unflattering anecdote. I was explaining about a dating Web site that Lucy and I had logged on to for a laugh. We decided to answer the questionnaire to amuse each other and when the question was, “Where are you happiest?” I suppose most people would, like Lucy, say, “With my children” or “with loved ones” or “by the sea,” but I said, “In a five-star hotel when I’m not paying.”

  As I was repeating this, I thought, Why am I telling something so deeply unattractive about myself? It was a ghastly echo of my first post-divorce date with Troy; I simply couldn’t stop sending myself up in the most unbecoming way.

  I thought that Max was looking at me the way Troy had—either eyeing me with benevolent amusement or trying to fathom if I really was that shallow. Either way, it gave me the jitters, so I leaped up and grabbed my bag and coat. “Hey, Daisy, this place may not be a five-star,” he said, “but I’ve got some freebies in the bathroom. I’d love you to stay.”