Daisy Dooley Does Divorce

by Anna Pasternak

  An hour later I got his reply. “Off on a business trip tomorrow. Will call you on my return. J. xx.”

  The next week had that taut, cooling-one’s heels quality. It’s almost impossible to live in the present when waiting because everything is angled toward the possible future outcome. Time drags and fantasies take hold. I managed to avoid Andy’s calls as I didn’t want to confuse my head even more. Eventually Julius texted back: “Meet me tomorrow afternoon at my office. Looking forward. J.”

  That night I lay in tumult. Was Miles right? Was I infatuated with Julius because he was emotionally untouchable in the way only the super-rich can be? True, he could buy himself out of most situations, but that wasn’t a ticket to happiness or trust, was it? If anything, that amount of money fosters fear because you’re never sure if people love you or how much you’ve got. I truly loved him and that’s what always frightened him. He once said to me, “You don’t even know how scared you are until you’re not.” Looking at him, I realized that no matter how much a man is worth, he needs to feel important. Women, on the other hand, need to feel important to a man. We can try to kid ourselves otherwise but we will always believe that the catcall of loneliness can only be filled by the callback of a worthy mate.

  As I opened the curtains, I felt the familiar stab of anxiety. Would I ever be able to look back on parts of my life and think: at least I was happy then?

  I read in Chad Peace’s book that the way to connect with your inner wisdom and learn to let it guide you is to write a letter to your younger self, sharing everything you have discovered. I decided to write to my twenty-four-year-old self, to the ditzy girl who fell in love with Julius. I propped myself up against the pillows and began:

  Dear Daisy,

  Don’t believe the negative propaganda that plays in your head night and day. All those niggling voices that try and convince you that you are not good enough and that you won’t get what you want in life. These will destroy the fabric of your dreams if you give them breathing space, and without hope, you have nothing. Hold on to what you believe in, honor your inner voice, and if your gut says no, heed it. The greatest regret comes when you only have yourself to blame.

  So you think that the tops of your thighs are fat? Chances are they won’t change. You’ll add a pound here, lose two pounds there, but you’ll never dramatically remodel who you are. External appearances aren’t going to alter much in the next two decades so don’t fritter away precious time caring. Men don’t notice how thin you look in your jeans; self-acceptance is what turns them on. Sex appeal comes from some bolshy place inside that radiates an unshakable confidence yet, strangely, also hints at vulnerability. Some of the best times will happen when you can’t be bothered to wash your hair. Don’t try to be perfect because nothing and no one ever is.

  Don’t set yourself unrealistic defining deadlines. There’s no rush. You don’t need to be married by thirty, pregnant by thirty-five. If you have the courage to let it, life unfurls at an unpredictable pace. Don’t be so impatient because by forcing things, you’ll make mistakes. Better by far to wait in hope than live with regret. If you have one teensy doubt about a man, however painful, leave him. If you commit, and God forbid, marry him, you’ll feel a fool forever.

  The most important ingredient between a strong woman and any man is that he have a cast-iron sense of self. If you threaten a man, in time he will try to destroy you. Weak men cannot bear a feisty female who outshines them. Beware: they can be more vicious than the most aggressive alpha male. And don’t bother with younger men. They may seem fun and alive and profess to understand you, but in the end their immaturity will cripple the relationship. Passion dies—it always does—and you’ll want a mature friend, a worthy shoulder to lean on, not a spoiled boy dependent on you. Finally, there is only one source of pain that is worth it: laughing until it hurts. The best feeling there is.

  Love, Daisy

  When I finished I felt strangely elated. It was encouraging to discover I had some insight worth offering myself after all. All day long, I obsessively checked my watch. It was finally time to go see Julius. Just as I was leaving the house, my mobile rang. Typical, I thought, he’s ringing to cancel. That’s the thing about an alpha male—you’re always on his schedule. An important meeting, a ball-breaking deal and you are jettisoned to the sideline faster than a rock in free fall. That’s why a true alpha alliance of two strong, successful people is so rare and tricky to negotiate—alphas always expect the upper hand: in business and in the bedroom. When it comes to love, they can only operate efficiently if their partner loves them more because they can’t stand a threat to their emotional equilibrium.

  To my surprise it was not Julius’s number that flashed up. Instead it was Edward Primfold’s, Lucy’s ex-husband. I’d never heard him so agitated. “Where have you been? I’ve been trying to get hold of you.”

  “I took some time out,” I said coolly, thinking, Since when do I have to answer to you, arsehole?

  “Is Lucy with you?”

  “No. I haven’t heard from her in a few days. Is something wrong?”

  “Everything is wrong. She’s disappeared.” There was a tight pause. “Daisy, Lucy has run away.”

  I must have caught Edward’s panic because by the time I put the phone down, my hands were trembling.

  According to Edward, two days earlier he and Lucy had had their first joint access with their children since their divorce. They went to Hyde Park and while Edward pushed the girls on the swings, Lucy sat on a bench nearby. When he turned around, she was gone.

  For Lucy to leave her beloved daughters, I knew that something must be hideously wrong. I was tempted to give Edward a piece of my mind—what man deludes himself that he is a loving father, then ups and leaves two small kids and his wife because he can’t cope with the monotonous pressure of family life? But I held myself in check because he was a waste of space and all that mattered was Lucy. She wasn’t with her parents—Edward had called them immediately and roped them in to do the childcare while he’d rung around her entire address book with still no luck.

  My first thought as I sank into a chair was, Why hadn’t she rung me? It stung that she was clearly in a dreadful state and yet hadn’t contacted me. Had I been so wrapped up in myself that she had presumed I wouldn’t be there for her? I texted Julius: “Sorry, can’t make today. Something serious has come up. Will call you, D. x.” I felt a frisson of alpha female as I pressed send. After all, it would do him no harm to be stood up for a change.

  I called Lucy’s mobile. “Lucy, where are you? What is happening? Please forgive me if I haven’t been around enough lately. I’m so worried about you. Nothing is too awful that we can’t get through it together. I’ll do anything for you. Call me. Love you, Daisy.”

  I was terrified by the time I put the phone down. Distraught for her and disgusted by myself, I could see that Lucy had kept flashing the siren of distress before me but I hadn’t paid attention. Thinking back, she was always mentioning the intolerable loneliness and exhaustion of being a single mother, but because she seemed to perk up after a few coffees or cocktails, I assumed she was just airing surmountable surface stuff.

  I stayed in all day and every time the phone rang, my heart shot sky-high. That evening I received her text: “Am in the Randolph Hotel in Oxford. Please come quickly. Lucy.”

  When Lucy saw me and Jess standing in the doorway of her hotel room, she welled up and flung her arms around Jess. It had been the first time they had seen each other in months. “Thank you for coming . . . I’m sorry . . .” she sobbed.

  “You’ve got nothing to be sorry for. It’s me that needs to apologize,” said Jess, unusually emotional. “I misjudged you and how difficult it’s all been. In many ways you were right. I am a tight-arsed, blocked-off workaholic. Forgive me?”

  Lucy nodded, then fell against me. I could feel the cut of her pain as I managed to guide her back into the room. Clearly she had cried herself to hell and back. Her face was
swollen yet wan; she was utterly depleted. What had happened to Lucy Primfold, the poster girl of our generation who never had a straggly eyebrow out of place?

  “Lucy, what’s happened?” I asked, plonking myself on the bed.

  “Oh Daisy,” she said, “I can’t live like this anymore. I want to die.”

  “You don’t mean that,” I whispered.

  “I do,” she shouted. “The reason I didn’t phone you is because I knew you wouldn’t understand. Unless you’ve been there, you have simply no comprehension how demoralizing it is being a single mother. I’m so tired of the backbreaking effort, of counting the minutes until the kids’ bedtime, and then the gnawing loneliness that takes hold of you afterwards. There’s no one to offer you a glass of wine, give you any praise, or hold you. No one, apart from a clingy child pawing at me, touches me anymore.” She threw herself on the bed and started crying again.

  I moved nearer. “Luce, I know I don’t have a baby so I don’t know what that’s like, but I do know what it is to feel so devastated that your life appears not to hold any meaning anymore. I’ve been where you are in feeling that the grief inside is so deep that you’ll never surmount it.”

  Lucy riffled through a mountain of tissues while Jess said briskly, “Let me order you some room service and run you a hot bath and you can tell us everything.”

  Later, as we all sat on the bed eating club sandwiches and chips, she began.

  “Edward turned up for our first joint access day with the girls, looking all chipper and rested, which I resented because I was so damn tired,” she said. “We went to Hyde Park and all the way there, while the girls slept inches away in the back of the car, he told me that the relationship breakdown was my fault, even though he had had an affair. ‘You pulled the trigger, Edward,’ I said and he looked at me with such spite and said, ‘But you loaded the gun.’ When we got there I sat on a bench by the swings as he pushed the girls and all around me were kind, decent, Knightsbridge fathers, arms around their honed and happy wives, discussing where to go to dinner and what cocktails they would drink. I felt so alone because these were proper families with strong bonds of understanding who seemed to be actively enjoying their lives. I started crying while Edward pretended not to see. It was as if in that moment I realized that our whole marriage was built on a lie because Edward can’t ever have properly loved me or he’d never have done this to me. As I watched him playing daddy for that hour or two, I thought what a total fraud he was. Even as he was pushing the girls on the swing, he kept discreetly eyeing his watch. All I could think was soon he would drive us home and then he’d swan off, no doubt to screw some young tart, and I’d be left with the bed-and-bath routine and two overtired daughters. I kept looking at the buses in Knightsbridge and it was as if unseen hands propelled me forward and I just walked away and got on one. I spent the next three hours walking around crying, then I found my way to the train station and next thing I was here. I knew it was wrong to leave the girls but all I could think about was how much I wanted Edward to feel the complete devastation of being left with two children.”

  “Totally understandable,” Jess said.

  “You don’t think I’m a dreadful mother for leaving my girls?”

  “Lucy, as mothers go, you’re one of the best,” said Jess. “The girls were perfectly safe—they did have their father with them, after all. No my love, you’re just chronically exhausted and you reached crisis point. Everything suddenly hit you. No big deal.”

  “Do you think I’ll ever feel like myself again?” asked Lucy lamely.

  “You’re going to feel better. It’s just when you’re as tired as you are, life is bled of all significance. I’m diagnosing a break with complete and utter spoiling and rest. Just stay here for as long as it takes and hit the spa with a vengeance.”

  “Thanks, Jess. I’ve missed your brusque doctor’s orders.”

  “And I’ve missed you too,” said Jess.

  After Jess and I left—and I had gotten Edward’s credit card number and forced him to pay, telling him it would be cheaper than long-term child care if Lucy ended up in the Priory—I rushed back to work. It wasn’t yet closing time when I arrived but I found the main shop plunged in darkness, while a telltale stain of light was seeping from the stockroom floor. When I opened the door, I found Miles lying on the accounting spreadsheets in a haze of cigarette smoke, a can of beer in his hand.

  “Are you mad?” I shouted, rushing across the room to retrieve a joss stick. “You’re totally polluting the environment with your toxic energy. Last month I smudged the stock to enhance our good fortune and you’re undoing all my hard work.” I lit the joss stick and started waving it around Miles’s head. “Haven’t you noticed that since my abundance ritual and my daily prosperity chanting, the takings are up?”

  Miles batted the sweet-smelling oriental jasmine away, while slowly exhaling a series of nicotine-laden smoke rings. “Nope,” he said casually, “but forgive me if I prefer not to partake in the senseless spiritual smorgasbord that is your life.” He waved the beer in my direction. I was so frustrated, I took a swig. “That’s it, Dooley,” he grinned. “Embrace your inner laddette. God knows, if anyone needs a drunken night out, followed by a curry, an obligatory pavement puke, and a zipless fuck, you do.”

  “What’s gotten into you?” I asked. “Are you having some sort of male identity crisis? Is this a pathetic attempt to beef up your manliness?”

  Miles sat up and cracked open another beer. “Actually I have had a change of direction and I’m celebrating,” he smiled.

  “Tell me,” I said, settling myself beside him in a cross-legged position.

  “I’m done with casual sex,” Miles said. “I’m ready to fall in love.”

  I couldn’t have been more shocked than if he had told me that he got his kicks by squirting whipped cream across choirboys’ cherubic faces.

  “Finally I feel ready for the beating heart, the gooey pillow talk, meeting the parents, and possibly working up to the big day.” Relishing my stunned incomprehension, Miles continued, “You see, Daisy, I don’t know what it’s like to feel crazy about another human being and I want to.”

  “Has your latest trophy shag dumped you?” I asked.

  “Worse,” said Miles. “She stole from me.”

  “Obviously not your heart.” While I wanted to feel pleased for Miles that he was finally ready to be a mature adult rather than an overgrown teenager, I felt unsettled; a niggling inexplicable sense of disquiet. As I helped myself to a beer, I couldn’t help wonder if I was jealous.

  “So,” said Miles, “have you got anyone in mind for me?”

  “Well, I wanted you to take Lucy out, then take her to bed, but I suppose your new puritanical bent might prohibit that. It’s just that if anyone deserves a sexual odyssey and to get that prat Edward out of her system, Lucy does, and you’d be just the guy for the job.”

  Miles let out a contemplative sigh. “Yeah, Lucy’s top totty and I’d love to comfort her but let’s face it, it wouldn’t lead anywhere and remember, I’ve decided to turn my back on meaningless sex.”

  “Why couldn’t it mean something?”

  “Jesus, Daisy, you’re worse than someone taking a bottle of vintage bubbly to an AA meeting. I’m trying to tell you that I’m a recovering sex addict and you’re dangling the prospect of Lucy Primfold before me.”

  “Firstly,” I said defensively, “You’re not a sex addict, you’re a recovering commitment-phobe, and secondly, why couldn’t you fall in love with Lucy?”

  “One word,” said Miles. “Kids.”

  “Kids?”

  “Yeah, I don’t want the hassle of being a father to another man’s sprogs. All that responsibility without any natural authority. No blood ties. I want to start fresh with my own.”

  “I had no idea you were a closet romantic,” I said.

  “I’m not the emotional cripple you think I am. I was just biding my time until I was ready for the real thing.” S
haken by a sudden sense of insecurity that Miles was going to give some lucky girl a life that had eluded me, I decided to play the Julius card.

  “That reminds me, I must text Julius,” I said. “We’re meeting to discuss him fathering my child.”

  Miles looked me squarely in the eye. “Forget him. Why not have a baby with me?”

  When I asked, “Is this for real or are your rampant beer goggles talking?” he gave a lopsided grin, leaned across, and kissed me. After two decades of wondering what it would be like to properly snog Miles, watching the steady stream of sluts and Sloanes come and go, I finally knew.

  As Miles pinned me to the ground, instead of raw urgency and clichéd passion, I was struck by a growing tenderness. The way he looked at me and traced the contours of my face with his fingers completely confused me. I couldn’t help wonder if this was part of his successful seduction routine, and if any woman had the sense to go with it, rather than being as destructively analytical as me, she’d be in nirvana by now. But true to my erratic form, I was plunged into doubt. I kept thinking, “I mustn’t open my mouth too wide or he’ll see my fillings.” Then, while he kissed my neck, I tried to smell my own breath by giving off little putts to ensure it wasn’t foul. The more he wooed me, the more uptight I became. That’s the problem with studs. You know you’re not the first and you doubt you’ll be the last, so how do you know when it’s genuine?

  Miles was gently coaxing the buttons undone on my shirt when I pulled away. I ran my fingers through my hair. “Come on,” I said. “This isn’t what you want.”

  “It bloody well is.”

  “It might be what you want right now but it’s not what you’ll want tomorrow.”

  “You’re the one always saying we must live in the moment,” he said. “Why forsake today because you’re frightened of tomorrow?”

  “Don’t you get it?” I shouted. “If we did it now, it would mean something to me. And I couldn’t stand it that it wouldn’t mean anything to you.”