Page 30 of The Work Husband

If only you knew, I thought, how much time I’ve been spending recently thinking exactly that. If I was a different kind of daughter, I might have been able to tell her my worries about Ava. If our relationship was different, she’d have opened her arms, and I’d have gone in for a hug and had a cry on her shoulder. If she was a different mother, she’d have given me advice that would have left me feeling a lot better, regardless of whether it was right or not.

But then, if all those things were different, Sam would have been here with us, sprawled comfortably on the sofa, and we wouldn’t have needed to have the conversation in the first place.

As it was, I felt as if Mum’s words had gently slid a sliver of ice into my heart. It didn’t matter that I knew her marriage to my dad had destroyed whatever faith she might have ever had in men. It didn’t matter I knew her own mother hadn’t loved her and that was why she couldn’t love me, even if she’d wanted to.

She still had the power to hurt me, and we both knew it.

‘Maybe we can talk about something else?’ I said. ‘Are you still going to that hot yoga place?’

Smiling obediently, she changed the subject, and a few minutes later we had our lunch. When at last it was time to leave, I kissed her cool chiselled cheek again and told her I loved her, even though it wasn’t true.

And she said, ‘Do have a little think about what I said about Sam, Gigi.’

As if I had any choice.

FIFTEEN

I left Mum’s flat feeling, as I always did, like I’d had a layer of skin removed – the way you do after bad sunburn when you’ve peeled and you get in the shower and for the first couple of seconds you wonder why the hot water is stinging so much, and then you remember.

As it always did after I’d seen her, the world felt slightly different. More threatening. As I walked down the high street towards the station, a random man smiled at me and said, ‘Hello, beautiful,’ and instead of smiling briefly back, feeling mildly annoyed but also a bit sorry for him and sure he didn’t mean anything bad, I found myself giving him a vicious glare. I walked extra carefully down the escalator to the platform, recoiling when the safety brush tickled my bare ankle. I didn’t even try to beat another woman to the last remaining seat in case it made her hate me.

I wanted to get home – home to Sam. I wanted him to give me a hug and ask me how lunch was, listen to me vent about how I wished things were different, hold me if I needed a cry, and then offer to run me a bath or make me a cup of tea.

But also, I didn’t. Thanks to Ava’s return and Mum’s carefully sown seeds of doubt, home didn’t feel like a refuge any more. Sam didn’t feel like a safe person to be around. What if Ava had been to our flat and hung out there with Sam – or worse? What if the future I’d imagined with him wasn’t going to happen after all? What if, as Mum had insinuated, he wasn’t serious about me and never had been, and was just wasting my time, stringing me along until someone better turned up?

Or until Ava returned, like I’d just been keeping him warm for her.

I thought about dropping in to see Molly, who’d understand how I felt (except maybe not about the Sam bit) and let me cuddle Arthur and be reassured by his simple, warm solidity that there were things in the world that were just plain good. But when I flicked open Instagram, I saw that she and Ben were at Ben’s granddad’s eightieth birthday party, Arthur being cooed over by the extended family.

I thought about texting Jamie, but I dismissed that idea immediately – I felt too raw to explain the situation with Mum to someone who didn’t already know about it, even Jamie.

So I did something I hadn’t done for years – not since I was travelling and had quite regularly found myself in a strange city on my own for a day or an evening, with no friends or acquaintances to hang out with. I went to a bar on my own.

It wasn’t anywhere edgy or dangerous. Just a hipster hangout about fifteen minutes’ walk from our flat – basically the first place I saw when I exited the Tube station, the kind of place that does craft beer and artisan pizza and sells vinyl records. I might even have been there with Sam when we first moved to the area.

My post-Mum alertness made me hesitate in the doorway and look carefully around, but I saw nothing that made me uncomfortable – just a group of students sitting at a table playing Scrabble, a couple on a date laughing as they attempted to take a perfect selfie, a group of women vaping and drinking cocktails at an outside table.

I approached the bar and perched on a wooden stool, resting my arms on the cool copper countertop, although I knew it wouldn’t stay cool for long in this heat.

The barman greeted me, poured me a glass of water and slid a menu in front of me, but I only glanced at it briefly before saying, ‘I’d like a spicy mezcal margarita, please.’

‘Spicy mezcal marg coming up.’ He smiled at me.

The drink was cold, salty, sour, smoky and hot all at once. It was almost as good as the ones I made myself, mostly for Sam because they were his favourite. I licked salt off the rim and took another sip, then another.

Gradually, I felt the sadness and edginess Mum’s presence had induced fading – or not fading exactly but being muffled, distanced. I felt my worry about Sam being blocked off, pushed aside into a secure box where I could leave it until I chose to worry about it again. I felt my guilt over what Jamie and I were doing recede so I could view it with detachment, just a silly prank played between friends.

I didn’t feel that the things that had been wrong weren’t wrong any more – I just felt that them being wrong didn’t matter quite so much.

‘Same again?’ the barman asked, and I nodded.

This time he gave me a little bowl of corn chips to go with my drink. I guess he thought that if I was going to sit there all afternoon caning the booze, I’d need something to soak it up.

But I wasn’t caning the booze. I was just sitting here having a cocktail – or two, or maybe three but definitely no more than four – on a Sunday afternoon. So what if I was alone? No one would think twice about it if I was a man – if I was Jamie or Sam and not myself.

While the barman was making my third margarita, I slid off my stool and made my way to the toilet. I was feeling better – great actually, relaxed, poised and confident. I smiled at people as I passed their tables.

I should do this more often, I thought. Maybe if Sam were to dump me for Ava, being single wouldn’t be so bad?