Page 12 of The Woman Who Said Yes

While Eva and I rollicked around London, back in my West Yorkshire home town, virtually all of my old friends had settled into serious relationships. Some even had ‘bottom drawers’: depositories for cutlery, tablecloths, napkin rings and other requisites for a future married life. Even Sam and Bibi were shopping for wicker bedroom furniture and had become the proud parents of a Breville sandwich toaster. Although it pains me to admit it, I was jealous: not merely of that nifty appliance that sealed in molten cheese – hot as lava and thrillingly dangerous to the mouth – but of their seemingly sorted, coupled-up life.

How embarrassing is that? At twenty-nine, Marnie cheerfully rides around Deptford on her bicycle and hangs out with her flatmate and many friends from the university where she works as a lab tutor in geoscience. She isn’t bothered about meeting anyone because she is a whole person – no parts missing – all by herself. Yet by the start of the nineties, I’d started to wonder what was wrong with me, that I couldn’t find myself a decent boyfriend in a city of six million people.

It’s bizarre to think that being ‘left on the shelf’ was still a thing. I was twenty-six, for God’s sake. Barely fully formed! However, although dear Mum possessed many wonderful qualities, she’d have had me marrying a sideboard if it had come to that. ‘Aren’t you meeting any nice lads?’ she’d ask, her West Yorkshire accent so broad my flatmates could barely understand her. ‘But you must meet so many, Andrea! Are you being too fussy or summat?’ As an only child I was the subject of her full focus, the recipient of twice-weekly letters updating me on all the news on our estate.

Maybe, subliminally, that had sunk in. That I’d been too picky so far and time was fast running out. And so, as if willed into being by Mum, along came this well-scrubbed, athletic young man from a small town in Hertfordshire, politely handing me a Budweiser at a party.

Phil was training to be a police officer. As we chatted, I pictured Mum swooning at that. She loved a uniform and, short of me marrying one of the Beefeaters at the Tower of London, I knew he’d fit the bill perfectly. ‘He sounds lovely,’ she enthused, with no small note of relief, when I first mentioned him. A year or so in, we moved into a scrappy little flat, then a slightly nicer flat, and we got married.

I’d done it, I thought. Despite my patchy education and not being especially pretty or gifted or anything remarkable at all, I’d ticked all the boxes. Along came our beautiful Marnie, followed by a mortgage on a teeny terraced house in the outer reaches of east London, and then we had Jake. Honestly, I thought we were pretty good together, Phil and me. Even as the kids grew up and left home, I assumed we still loved each other; that we were doing okay, considering how long we’d been together. Wasn’t it normal for the sparkle to fade, just a little? What couple was still snogging in the kitchen after more than two decades together? But perhaps I’d taken my eye off the ball. Maybe I should have really thought about the Superdrug gift card Phil had handed me for my birthday instead of laughing about it with Eva and Sam. ‘That’s husbands for you,’ Eva joked.

‘Sure you don’t want one?’ I asked.

‘What, a Superdrug gift card? No, I’m good⁠—’

‘I mean a husband.’

‘I’m fine, thanks.’ She smirked, and around our favourite table at Niko’s we listed the many treaty items I might buy. Wart ointment, Anusol, incontinence pads! One of those metal rasps to grate the hard skin off my heels! Somehow, it was easier to giggle about it than to try and figure out: what does this actually mean?

‘I thought you’d like to pick your own present,’ was how Phil had framed it.

‘From Superdrug?’

‘Well, yeah. They have a huge range of stuff, don’t they?’ Yes, I was familiar with the store.

My friends at work reassured me that he’d probably just been a bit lax, or in a hurry. However, as time went on, I started to wonder if something was amiss. All that late working, those unexplained absences and the way he’d virtually had a full-on panic attack when I’d picked up his phone instead of mine. ‘My God, Phil,’ I’d said. ‘Calm down. Here you go.’ I held it out and he swiped it from my hand. ‘I’m your wife, remember?’ I added, trying to make light of it. ‘Not a thief. Did you think I was going to cycle off and sell it? Or try and hack into your bank?’ He’d apologised and said he was wound up about something at work.

Then there was the fact that he’d virtually lost all interest in sex. At least, sex with me – even when I’d bought a saucy little slip constructed from black fishnet that made my boobs look like a couple of onions trying to escape their net bag. Whenever we did do it, about as often as the window cleaner came (money was tight and I’d cut him down to once every couple of months), Phil had got into this thing of twiddling my nipples as if they were little pieces of plasticine he was rolling into balls. Then he’d stick it in and do the business, exhibiting all the pleasure of someone trying to dislodge a plug of solidified fat from the kitchen sink drain.

I still couldn’t bring myself to believe that he was having an affair. It was Phil who told me, all in a rush: ‘I’ve met someone, Andie.’ Met? What did he mean, met? As it turned out, he’d met her in the Met. That is, at work: London’s esteemed Metropolitan Police Force, in which Gina was a fellow officer.

Even if I’d wanted to, there was no chance to try and sort things out. Phil announced that he was leaving – just as Bibi had left Sam so suddenly a few years before. Not that Phil ran off to Thailand. Just to Gina’s boxy new-build flat with its communal garden that looked like it had been constructed from Playmobil pieces (I’d forced the address out of him and googled it, mocking the plastic-looking trees).

There was so much to get my ahead around but weirdly, it was the birthday gift card that I fixated upon. I tortured myself by picturing Phil spotting a branch of Superdrug, his eyes lighting up as he thought, Aha! That’ll do. There’s women’s stuff in there. Perfume and bubble bath and all that. At that point, I imagined he’d thought of Gina wallowing in the bath, breasts jutting proudly out of the bubbles (whereas mine flop dolefully to the sides). Like an excitable dachshund, his penis had then sprung up and led him into Superdrug where his gaze had landed upon the gift card display. Crisis averted. Hurrah!

Naturally, Marnie and Jake were appalled at what their father had done. However, as young adults they were also forging their own lives, and over time – having left home already – they came to accept the new situation. Secretly, though, they were always on my side. Like spies, they would pass on classified information about their dad’s life at Gina’s. How the man who treasured his signed copy of Shakin’ Stevens’s ‘This Ole House’ was now a classical music aficionado, prone to wittering on about ‘movements’, and not in a bowel context. So that certainly helped. But really, it was Sam and Eva who had hauled me through it all: the sale of our family home, the divorce and carving up of our lives together, and the buying of my little Hackney flat. I was a mess, sure – but without them I’d have fallen apart.

Now it’s my turn to worry about Eva and the speed at which she’s thrown herself into this thing with Dom. I’m aware of the rule that you can’t say anything bad about the person your friend has fallen in love with. But then, in saying nothing, am I really doing the right thing? As her closest friends, do Sam and I have a responsibility to at least encourage her to stop and think?

I climb off the bus and squint in the bright sunshine. It’s rare for the two of us to have an afternoon like this, hanging out together at her flat. I should be looking forward to it but, as her block comes into view, I’m aware of a growing sense of dread. How can I feign enthusiasm about dresses and venues and caterers? I’m not sure I have the acting skills to carry it off – plus, I hate all this fakery. It feels unfamiliar and very wrong.

I pass through the arched entrance and into the courtyard of Eva’s building. Built around a lovingly tended communal garden, the redbrick block is immaculately kept. I glance up at her second-floor flat, easily spottable by its vintage tangerine curtains. She’ll be waiting for me, anticipating excitable chat – like when we had the good fortune to live close together in our early twenties, and I’d go round to her place before we went out. The getting ready, amidst clouds of Elnett hairspray with a couple of beers on the go; it was the only thing we used to do that didn’t involve Sam.

‘Why don’t you invite me to get ready?’ he joked once, knowing that we needed our girl time too. Now, though, I wish he were right here with me. He’ll be at the shop, and I know that Saturdays are generally his busiest days. But I need his voice in my ear, just to propel me through Wedding Planning Afternoon. So, with one eye on Eva’s window, and willing her not to appear there, I call Sam.

8

SAM

‘What should I do?’ Andie asks. She has just arrived at Eva’s and Sam feels under pressure to come up with some kind of strategy. He glimpses the latest squirrel painting awaiting framing, currently propped up against a wall in his workshop. Finding its beady stare unsettling, he turns away and thanks Farrah as she hands him a mug of tea.

‘Maybe you should say something,’ he offers.

‘I feel like I should,’ Andie agrees. ‘It’s an opportunity, isn’t it? The two of us on our own together. I don’t think I can sit there all afternoon with a big phoney face on, pretending everything’s okay…’ At the ding of the bell on the counter, Farrah heads through to the front shop, leaving Sam alone. ‘Because it’s not okay, is it?’ Andie prompts him.

‘No, it’s not.’ Sam hasn’t told her about his online snoopings, as now they feel ridiculous and certainly pointless as wedding plans are going full steam ahead. But he knows that something doesn’t sit right. ‘If the chance comes up,’ he adds, ‘I think you should say you’re a bit concerned⁠—’

‘—I’m not going to get a chance,’ Andie retorts. ‘She’s not going to say, “So, tell me honestly what you think about me marrying Dom”, is she?’