Love Me Or Leave Me (24 page)

He took a deep, soothing puff on the cigar, just as yet another email pinged into his iPhone, shattering the stillness.

Damn. This late on a Friday evening? Hardly the office he figured, or yet another panicky message from a fellow board member. Not this late at night, surely?

That could only mean family trouble in that case. Josh onto him from Berlin, maybe? Or something up with Alannah, yet again? And yet what could possibly be the problem with either of them? Between them and with particular credit to Alannah, they both had to share equal responsibility for he and Lucy being here in the first place.

His phone beeped again, momentarily distracting him and pulling him back to the unread, urgent email. Ha, he thought ruefully, weren’t they all urgent these days?

And sure enough, when he glanced down and read it, his instincts had been on the money. The very second Andrew read the email, from his Chief Financial Officer at the Board, as it happened, he’d regretted it.

When sorrows come, he thought bitterly, they come not as single spies, but in battalions.

*

The letter had been handwritten and shoved under the bedroom door.

My darling.

Remember the first time we met? Remember the trainee waitress who got our order all wrong and kept texting on her mobile while we were trying to attract her attention? And how you’d probably have dealt with her in lightning quick time if it had been any ordinary day, but so anxious were we to impress each other that we just decided to find the whole thing hilarious?

Well I remember, vividly. In fact, I carry the image with me to this day. Walking into that restaurant you’d chosen, one I was unfamiliar with. Feeling rough after a late night, not being in the mood for a date at all. Silently checking the time on my watch. An hour tops, I’d given myself. So as not to appear rude. Then I’d make some perfectly polite excuse and exit pronto stage left.

And then I saw you. So much better looking in the flesh than in that horrific photo you’d sent. Did you no justice whatsoever. But you seemed to me like this tightly coiled little ball of tension, sitting bolt upright, checking your phone every three minutes, visibly jumping each and every time an email or text pinged through for you.

Well this is never going to work, was my first thought. Sod all chemistry for starters. We were just too different, too unsuited, from different worlds; in a million years, I never thought you and I would have a single thing in common. You seemed far too distracted to even focus; there was an air about you of someone in a mad rush to be somewhere else. Anywhere else.

It was only when I got to know the real you that I really began to understand. It wasn’t general antsiness on your part, just nerves. It became one of the traits I slowly grew to love about you. How you mask insecurity in a social situation with toughness, whereas actually my darling, scratch the surface and underneath it all, you’re just a marshmallow. Same as the rest of us.

Our date got steadily worse. Food arrived and I made the mistake of ordering spaghetti with meatballs, thinking the carb-hit might wake me up a bit. Now I defy anyone alive to try to impress, while trying to suck up spaghetti and with bolognaise sauce dribbling down their chin. But you were polite enough to pretend not to notice and I of course, tried to lighten things up a bit with a few gags.

Remember my asking you about the worst date you’d ever been on? You rolled your eyes and we started swapping tales from the ugly coalface of internet dating. The married men actively trawling websites, making it perfectly plain that they weren’t available evenings or weekends. ‘Daytimes only.’ One eejit had even posted a profile photo clearly taken on his wedding day, with the bride cut out, but her bouquet still visible in her severed right hand.

And so we started to laugh. Do you remember? You finally began to relax and really open up to me. I told you that when someone said in their online profile ‘fond of a drink,’ it could loosely be translated as ‘would basically suck the alcohol out of a deodorant bottle’. You said that ‘chubby’ was a euphemism for ‘overweight’ and that ‘sociable’, meant someone who’d happily spend five nights a week sitting in a bar till 4 a.m., or until the place was raided, whichever came first.

And we both agreed that ‘seeks friendship’ was the saddest of all. That meant someone who lived alone in a bedsit the size of a converted wardrobe, who’d absolutely no friends and only the odd stray cat for company.

Before we knew it, we were both laughing. Genuine laughter too, not just doing it out of politeness. What should have been a lunch that lasted a bare hour suddenly stretched out to past five in the evening.

I think I knew right there and then. Just knew. Just because you and I weren’t a likely match, didn’t mean it couldn’t work.

And now here we are.

My darling, if I could turn back time, believe me I gladly would.

Yours now, yours always.

Whatever the outcome of the next few days.

Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Chapter Nineteen

Lucy.

Thrashing about in her bed, dizzy and nauseous with sleep refusing to come, Lucy found her thoughts wandering. Maybe it was seeing Andrew again after so long, or maybe it was just the lorry-load of drink she’d been laying into, but try as she might, she still couldn’t hold back the memory. Pin-sharp, like it had all only happened yesterday.

*

It had been a baking hot, gloriously sunny day too, not all that long ago really. And awful things like this weren’t supposed to happen while the entire world felt like it had just gone on holiday. She was standing on the front lawn outside their beautiful house in leafy Rathgar. Her home, their family home. Where she and Andrew had lived so happily before they got married, and for the brief tiny interlude of what you might call a normal married life they were allowed immediately afterwards.

Their primary asset, as the banks kept describing their home. That she and Andrew had bought jointly. That she’d scrimped and saved for. That she’d put so much of herself into, that she’d done countless photo shoots for magazines in. She’d worked so bloody hard to maintain it … and now this.

Her white-hot fury directed not only at Andrew, but primarily at Josh and Alannah. How could they have done this? How could they have colluded to bring this about? Leaving aside the fact that they were the single most manipulative siblings on the face of the earth, how in God’s name did they manage to pull this one off? Lucy wasn’t stupid, she knew right well they’d both wanted her out of the picture from day one. But that they’d somehow schemed their way to bringing this about?

Then image after image started to crowd in on top of her. And dream or no dream, it still felt just as raw now as it had done back then. Solicitor’s letters and registered bank letters suddenly turning into final demands. Endless months of gruelling meeting after meeting with their bank manager, their mortgage advisor, their solicitor, everyone. She and Andrew had started out battling them and ultimately ended up pleading with them. If they could just hang on to the family home, they argued. Not possible, they were curtly told. And the only option you have is to go quickly and quietly, so as not to make this any harder on yourselves.

Then finally, the utter humiliation of a removal van pulling up outside their home – her home – and having to load up every single thing she and Andrew had ever owned. In full view of the neighbours, some of whom where kind enough to come over and sympathize, but most of whom just kept a polite distance. Like repossession was something contagious.

But one kind neighbour, an elderly widow who lived alone, came striding up the path to hug her and say goodbye.

‘Never you mind, love,’ she’d told Lucy. ‘You and Andrew still have each other. And that’s what really matters, isn’t it? Sure, this is only bricks and mortar at the end of the day!’

Lucy had smiled and hugged her fondly back. Kind-hearted old Mrs Walsh. Bless her, she only meant well.

Even if she didn’t know the half of it.

*

Still sleep wouldn’t come and then thirst got the better of Lucy. Horrible, rasping thirst, like her mouth was lined with carpet underlay. Suddenly she became aware of a dull throbbing at her temples and realized the hangover to end all hangovers had already set in.

Oh God, she wondered, had the whole evening been just some kind of a rotten hallucination? She hauled herself out of bed and checked the time on the alarm clock beside her bed. Early-ish. Well, for her, anyway. Just coming up to eleven. She padded across to the minibar and helped herself to the largest, coldest bottle of water she could find. Then she rooted out two paracetamol from the bottom of her handbag, gulped them back and lay back down on the bed, while she waited on them to work their magic.

Bits of the evening started to float back to her, in horrible, fragmented shards. She remembered sitting up on a barstool downstairs and hammering loudly – probably that bit too loudly for a posh place like this – for Tommy the barman to keep the champers coming. Fuck it, she figured. If she couldn’t get a few drinks into her at a time like this, then when could she?

Something else came back to her too. There’d been a guy with her, chunky, thick-set, late thirties. Dave something or other. They’d fallen into one of those easy, drunken chats about the misery of their respective love lives and what exactly had brought them both to this pass.

And although Lucy mightn’t have exactly been anyone’s idea of an agony aunt, she thought she’d done a pretty good job of convincing this Dave bloke that his situation wasn’t quite as bleak as hers. He had told her all about his wife and all the problems she’d been having trying to get pregnant. All the expensive fertility clinics they’d been going to, not to mention the countless cocktails of hormones and steroids they’d been pumping through her body. The gruelling rounds of treatment and the horrible effect they’d had on his wife, both emotional as well as physical.

With a jolt, yet another memory shattered through her fuzzy, unfocused mind. His wife striding into the bar and in one single, sharp glance taking in herself and Dave cosily drinking together, as they had been all night. Jo, was that her name? A slim, petite woman in a Reiss suit and neat, dark, bobbed hair that Lucy could tell at first glance was at the winding down stage of a three-week blow dry. Scarily white skin, absolutely no make-up at all, arms folded, coldly furious.

She could remember this Jo hissing at Dave to get out of there, something about a divorce lawyer who was standing waiting on both of them.

Oh Jesus, Lucy thought with a sudden jolt back into reality. Had the next five minutes really happened? Had she really been cheeky and invasive enough to tell Jo all about her sister-in-law who’d been through IVF too?

Lucy was sweating now, palpitating to think back on what else she might have said to that poor woman. She couldn’t remember exactly, but it must have been bad, because no sooner had she opened her big mouth than Dave had rightly abandoned her. And would you blame the guy? She must have made a holy mortifying show of herself! For God’s sake, why did she have to go and interfere in the first place? Even if all she’d been trying to do was cheer Jo up a bit.

Still more memories started to flood back. An American couple, the Fergusons, they might have been called, joining her after Dave disappeared. Sixty-somethings, Jayne and Larry. Great fun, so much so that Lucy remembered thumping the bar and demanding to know why the hell they felt the need to bother getting divorced in the first place. ‘Look at the two of you, you get on like a house on fire!’ she’d drunkenly told them.

Then someone – and she’d a horrible feeling it might have been her – decided it would be a great idea to start a sing-song. ‘Because you both need to start learning a few Irish come-all-yas while you’re here!’ she’d bossily told Jayne and Larry, who seemed all on for it. At least, at first.

There was definitely singing but the evening started to blur a bit from then on in. ‘If you’re Irish, come into the parlour!’ Lucy remembered trying to teach them. And then – oh dear God no – had she really got up in her too-high heels and started trying to teach the pair of them a few steps of
Riverdance
?

She remembered falling. Then laying face down sprawled out on the floor, with a crowd gathered around her. Concerned voices.

‘Who’s she with?’

‘Someone get Chloe.’

‘Someone get the husband, whoever the poor eejit is.’

Then Jayne’s worried voice in her ear.

‘Honey, I think you’ve had enough for one night. Don’t you think you’d feel a whole lot better if you came outside for some nice fresh air?’

Then Tommy, that lovely barman, physically lifting her back onto her feet, half carrying her out to the garden and then a woman’s voice. Hers. Yelling all sorts of unprintable obscenities, just because he wouldn’t go back to get her another drink. Followed by several kindly, well-intentioned voices saying that maybe she’d feel so much better after a little lie down. Tommy trying to steer her back inside and towards the lift.

Then seeing Chloe come over to her and insist on escorting her all the way to her room, ‘just so you can rest up a bit. It’s been a long day for you.’ Tactfully brushing over the fact that Lucy had just made a roaring disgrace of herself.

And then the worst memory of all. The one she’d gladly have herself lobotomized just to suppress, were it only possible.