by Nicky Wells
Of course there were plenty of messages from Tim. Some pleading, some angry, some hurt—all of them impatiently asking where I was and when I was coming back. I gave a big sigh. This was going to be hard. Still, the only way out was through. I ordered a cab, having got way too used to being chauffeured around to face the Tube, and made my way to Tim’s house.
I arrived in Garden Mews just after five p.m., and I knew that I would probably have an hour or so to myself before Tim arrived home from work—if he left on time for once, that was. I deposited the cardboard boxes that I had brought along in the hallway and took a first tour of the house, taking a mental inventory of all the things I needed to gather together and silently saying goodbye to the place. I grabbed the first box and got going, starting with my toiletries in the bathroom.
After half an hour, I was shocked to find how little time it had taken for me to assemble my belongings in Tim’s flat. The bathroom had been super quick because I had always had a separate cupboard all to myself, so I just swept the whole lot into a box. In the bedroom, there were only a few remaining items of clothing—a couple of jumpers, a few pairs of trousers, a pair of shoes, a few undies, and a stuffed teddy bear. There were a few CDs and books in the lounge. After more than two years together, it was a sad surprise just how few of my things had made their way into Tim’s house. And none of his had ever made it to mine. It had only been on my way here that I had realized that Tim had always turned up with a little overnight case on the rare occasions that he had stayed over. There quite literally was nothing of his at my place.
At a loss as to what to do next, I flicked on the stereo to get a few moments of thinking time. Dan’s voice shot from the speakers and I jumped, switching the stereo off again instantly as though I had been scolded. I couldn’t believe it. What had Tim been up to in my absence? Was this some belated attempt to get used to my kind of music? Or was it some kind of accident that a Tuscq record inhabited the CD player? I pressed the eject button and examined the CD. No, it couldn’t be an accident; this wasn’t even one of mine. Tim had to have bought it. I was spooked. And then I was overcome by remorse, and guilt. Why was I being so horrible to this man who, it appeared, tried hard to make allowances for me? Better late than never, right? But I hadn’t given him the chance.
Well, arguably, I had given him lots of chances; two years’ worth of chances, in fact, but he hadn’t taken them because…well, he was simply not the right man for me. Or more likely I wasn’t the right woman for him.
Nonetheless, this wasn’t an excuse for what I had done. The enormity of my betrayal suddenly settled on my heart like an iron clamp and I found it hard to breathe. He would be so hurt. He didn’t deserve to be hurt.
I sighed deeply. What a mess. And all my fault. Now I had to figure out how to tidy up in the least possible painful way. And what exactly did that involve? I challenged myself. To tell all, or not to tell all? Honesty, or kind oblivion? Did I owe him the truth, and nothing but the truth, or would that be yet more selfish?
I was pondering these weighty matters without much luck but with an ever growing sense of shame when I heard a key in the lock. I squared my shoulders and sat up straight on the sofa. Okay then, so be it. I steeled myself for the conversation that was about to take place. I would follow my heart and play it by ear, but whatever happened, I would give Tim the truth, if he asked for it.
However, no Tim emerged in the lounge, and all I could hear were hesitant footsteps around the place. Suddenly I was scared. What if it wasn’t but some kind of burglar? The snap lock was easy enough to break without the deadbolt engaged, and I hadn’t bothered to lock the door from the inside.
“Tim?” I called out tentatively, deciding that it might be worthwhile to alert a speculative burglar to my presence, just in case he might decide to bolt rather than confront an owner. To my greatest surprise, I heard another female voice shout “Tim” just at the same time.
“What the heck?” I muttered and rose from the sofa, almost bumping into Dina sailing into the lounge in search of Tim.
We stared at each other in mutual surprise for a few minutes.
“Hey, look,” Dina started first, “This isn’t what it looks like…I split up with my fiancé, and Tim offered that I could stay…I just came by to…bring a few things.” She paused. “Gosh, this is really awkward,” she blundered eventually. “Honestly, please, you must believe me, this is totally innocent.”
I exhaled sharply, trying to calm my still-racing heart by adjusting to the fact that the would-be burglar had turned out to be Tim’s ex. Then I laughed and raised my hand before Dina could dig herself in any deeper.
“Dina, hey. Good to see you,” I started by way of introduction, trying to inject as much warmth into my voice as possible to put her at ease. “Look, it’s not a big deal, honestly. You’re so welcome here.” I laughed again when I caught the bewildered look on her face.
“I am?” she repeated. “But I thought you were moving in…I saw the boxes in the hall.”
Ah, the telltale boxes.
“As it happens,” I announced only slightly shakily, “I am actually moving out. Tim and I are breaking up. Amicably I hope, but…well. Anyway, I’m just clearing out.”
Dina was flabbergasted. “He never said a thing,” she spurted out. “In fact, he was forever telling me how much he missed you.”
Oh dear. “Ah,” I stalled. “Well, you see…the thing is…he doesn’t know yet. I’m here to tell him.”
Dina’s face was a question mark. Before I could elaborate, the phone rang and clicked straight into answer mode. Tim liked to set it up that way so that it sounded as though he was on the phone rather than not at home.
Dina, hi. It’s Tim. I guess you made it to the house by now. Please feel free to take over the guest room. There is a lot of Sophie’s stuff in the bathroom. Please don’t disturb it. I’ll make some space for you as soon as I get home. Sophie should be back sometime today as well. Hope you’re feeling better.
A small pause and a rustle as he consulted his diary. Listen, I’ll have to work a little longer yet. There are takeaway menus in the kitchen drawer. Hang in there. See you later, chick!
Listening to Tim’s message, Dina and I had both sunk to sit on the sofa, she on one end and I on the other. When the message was finished, we looked at each other in silence. Once more, Dina was the first to talk after we had gathered our thoughts.
“He used to call me ‘chick’ when we went out,” she offered, “but really it doesn’t mean anything.”
“Dina, it doesn’t matter to me one way or another. I made a huge, huge mistake. I am about to hurt this good, kind man in the most awful of ways. I feel terrible about it, but I have to do it. You’re not intruding. I’m not worried if there might be something between the two of you. In fact, I’m glad you’re here,” I paused, trying to gauge her reaction. “I could do with a friendly face and two sympathetic ears…if you’re willing?”
Dina’s eyes assumed the proportion of saucers, and then lit up at the prospect of the inside scoop. Although we had only met each other once, there was a connection between us, and I could tell she was keen to listen.
“Oh,” she gushed, “why don’t you tell me over one of those takeaways that Tim mentioned? I’m starving.”
“So am I,” I discovered to my surprise. “That sounds great…if you’re sure?”
Dina laughed. “Can’t wait to get the dirties…oops, sorry if that was a poor choice of words. I know we hardly know each other.”
I grinned. “Dirties is a thoroughly appropriate choice of words. And it’s strange…I know we hardly know each other, but somehow I figure you might understand. And if you don’t understand, well…” I reflected for a minute. “We never have to see each other ever again so nobody’s lost anything. How’s that for a deal?”
“You got yourself a deal there,” Dina declared jovially, and I was warming to her more every second. “Somehow I think I’ll understand. I doubt I’ll want t
o go round the houses gossiping with your story.” We regarded each other solemnly.
“What do you fancy?” I asked to get us going. “Chinese, Indian, Italian, Korean, Thai, French? ”
We settled on Chinese, and I started talking while we waited for our sweet and sour chicken and king prawn noodles. I started at the beginning. Well, I started at a beginning, which I placed at Tim and my somewhat dramatic second anniversary dinner. I held very little back, although I held back on the intimate details—she was a stranger after all. But then again, this stranger had one advantage over other listeners; she knew Tim and she could relate—or maybe not—to some of the quirks and odd traits I described. The food arrived and was worked seamlessly into my narrative as we dished up and tucked in. Dina found a bottle of white wine in Tim’s fridge. She poured us a glass each with the proprietary ease that comes from having been someone’s girlfriend a long time ago. It was a rather expensive one too, I noted, and wondered whether Tim would be upset…but then, that wasn’t really of concern to me anymore.
Dina was a great listener. She laughed with me, she cried with me, and she didn’t interrupt except where I paused and invited interruption. She was a woman after my own heart, gasping in horror at Tim’s botched engagement proposal on the train and squealing in delight when he finally did get round to doing it properly, sort of. Her eyes widened with shared intrigue when Dan first turned up, then when we had the first not-date, and even more when he whisked me off to the Royal. Here, she sighed enviously.
“How romantic,” she breathed. “How extraordinary.” She couldn’t get over the events at the engagement party and was choked with tears when I confessed that Dan had been wearing the pearl necklace. She shared my outrage at being coerced into covering the tour, and she understood my self-abandonment, when it finally came. Had the circumstances not been so weird, I would have suspected the makings of a great friendship here.
“And so now I’ve come to the conclusion that neither Dan nor Tim is the one.” I was close to finishing my tale, catching up with today’s events. “Dan took it well, I think, but I feel much worse about telling Tim. He is a good man and a darling but…it just wouldn’t be right to go ahead.”
Dina nodded thoughtfully. “I think I know what you mean. And I think you’re very brave.” We contemplated everything for a moment.
“Gosh, I’m awfully rude,” I finally warbled. “Here I am sitting and pouring my heart out to you and you’ve just had…well, a break-up yourself. I am such an idiot. I hope I haven’t upset you too much.”
Dina only smiled, if a bit shakily. “Actually, it’s a great distraction to be caught up in someone else’s trauma. From my end, there isn’t much to tell. The lovely Robert finally told me last week that he would love me even more if I was a Dino rather than a Dina.” She swallowed. I must have looked at her blankly because she elaborated. “He prefers men, on the whole.”
“No,” I gasped. “Never. He was so…charming.”
“Exactly,” Dina agreed. “But sometimes too charming. I can’t say I suspected anything, but it all makes sense now that he’s told me. I don’t know why he even came clean. I’m sure he could have got away with it. I mean, even the sex was”—she hesitated—“okay. Not great, I guess, but nothing wrong with it. Anyway, look, I really don’t mind if we don’t talk about it. I haven’t told anyone yet why we broke up—not my parents, not my friends, and certainly not Tim. I just don’t know how to put it, and so…I need some more time to deal with it. But don’t feel guilty about sharing your troubles with me, I feel very honored. I’m just not quite ready to verbalize mine in the way that you have verbalized yours. If that makes any sense.”
“It does,” I assured her and gave her a spontaneous hug.
That was how Tim found us when he finally got home. Neither of us had heard the key in the lock, and the first thing that announced his arrival was a rather embarrassed cough. Tim surveyed the room, taking in the empty plates, the takeaway wrappers, and the bottle of wine making a nice little stain on his mahogany side table.
“What’s going on?” he asked in a thin, brittle voice.
“Um,” Dina started.
“Well,” I uttered at the same time. We looked at each other, neither of us sure how to proceed.
“I think…I forgot something at my place. I’d better pop back to get it before Robert…I’ll be back later…” Dina managed at length, beating a diplomatic retreat. She gave me a quick, encouraging wink and departed hastily.
“But hey, what about all the stuff you brought already?” Tim shouted after her. “Won’t that do you for tonight? I feel awful about letting you go back on your own when…” But Dina didn’t hear him, and the only response he got was the slamming of the front door.
I cleared my throat. “Actually, that stuff in the boxes…that’s my stuff.”
“Your stuff?”
“Uh-huh. I thought I’d better…clear out.”
“A clear-out?” Tim asked, uncomprehending. Then, “A clear-out? You’re taking your things? But why?”
I cleared my throat again. A frog seemed to have taken up residence all of a sudden and prevented me from speaking. “Look, Tim. I’ve done a lot of thinking. Can we talk?”
Chapter Forty-Five
There, I had said them. The three words that will make anyone who thinks he or she is in a happy relationship blanch with horror as realization strikes that not all is well. Tim obligingly paled, then sat down heavily on the sofa next to me.
“This is about Dan, isn’t it?” he stated flatly.
“Actually, it isn’t,” I corrected immediately. “But it’s a long story.”
“You’d better start at the beginning, then,” he demanded. “Because I sure as hell have no idea what’s going on.”
So once more I launched into my tale, initially editing out the delicate content as I saw appropriate. I didn’t want to hurt Tim more than was necessary and the gory details of what had happened to me recently wouldn’t be helpful. But my strategy did, perhaps unsurprisingly, not work. When I got to the bit about having seen Dan on the odd occasion or two, he completely flew off the handle. In fact, I had never seen him in such a rage before, and I was half-fascinated and half-terrified as he ranted out of control.
“I knew it,” he began, almost innocuously, his voice barely rising then. “I knew it.” he repeated with more force. “It is about that turd, Dan. That asshole. That ageing, drug-abusing, beer-swilling, mother-fucker rock star. Cradle-snatching, too,” he added as an afterthought, not making much sense. Mother-fucking and cradle-snatching seemed like an oxymoron to me, but now was not the time to argue finer points of semantics and collocation. “And Rachel,” he pounced, “Rachel didn’t make it all up. You were shagging the guy, even at our engagement party.” He turned on me with fury and venom. “You slut! You cheap, dirty…evil…slapper,” he ended a little lamely. I had braced myself for something more vicious.
I hadn’t really had a chance to explain myself fully yet, foolishly having started with the facts rather than the end-results, but I decided to let this storm blow itself out. He was angry and hurt, and I was near-paralyzed with shame and guilt. The cussing and stomping of feet continued for a few more minutes, and then abruptly Tim sat down on the sofa—pale, trembling, fragile.
“Actually,” I resumed, “this really isn’t about Dan. Yesterday, or a week ago, I might have thought it would be. But I realized last night that it isn’t. It’s not about him. It’s not about you. It’s about me.” I rubbed my eyes. All of a sudden, I felt the fatigue and tiredness of the day, and I remembered that I was tackling all of this confrontation on only four hours of sleep. In my increasingly tired state, I had inadvertently hit upon another cringeworthy cliché—it’s not you, it’s me—and I sighed. There was no good way of doing these things, really.
“Look, I’ve done a lot of thinking. We need to break up. I’m breaking up with you, and I am walking out of this house single. Very scared, and lonely, and ve
ry much single. It’s all my fault. I take the blame. I don’t know what is going to happen from here, but you and me, we aren’t right for each other. You deserve better than me.”
I stopped, uncertain how far to go. I had already said more harsh things than I had ever intended to, but I was not convinced that I had got through to him.
“What you have to understand is that I am not leaving you for Dan.” Pause for effect.
I. Am. Not. Leaving. You. For. Dan. It was imperative that he should understand this fact. I hadn’t told him about Dan’s proposal, and wondered for a second whether disclosing this little detail would help me ram home that I was leaving Dan as well as Tim, but I had a suspicion that that might complicate things beyond repair.
“I am breaking up with you because we are not right for each other. We were good together for a while, we were great friends, but…come on…you must know that something wasn’t right. You can’t stand me going off doing crazy things, and you were forever trying to change me into something I am not. I am not what you need. We are simply not right for each other.”
Switching from rage to hurt, Tim had now begun to cry—gentle, little sobs at first that crescendoed to a full-blown, weepy howl. I squirmed, unable to soothe or provide comfort. It was weird seeing a guy cry. I said nothing and let the tears flow. His tears only, because for once I had none.
“But what about the wedding?” Tim finally managed to splutter between sobs. “Our little, semi-detached house in the ‘burbs? The kids? All the things we had planned? All the things we wanted together?”
“All the things you wanted,” I corrected. “That’s where we went wrong. I don’t want the same things as you. I don’t want them in the same shape and packaging as you do.”
He still didn’t get it.
“Okay,” I tried to explain after all. “Consider the wedding. My dream wedding takes place at home, in Cornwall. In…”
