Lessons in Heartbreak (40 page)

‘I’m sorry,’ she said abruptly. ‘You did pull me out, thank you. It’s just that I don’t have much social grace in me at the moment,’ she added. ‘This isn’t the sort of place for pretending and smiling politely. I seem to have lost the ability to hide the truth.’

Also not entirely true. She’d pretended everything was fine for Beth. But she wasn’t going to do it for anyone else. No more pretending she didn’t mind that Edward had left her. No more pretending politeness and happiness. How liberating.

‘You want to go and get a coffee?’ he asked.

Anneliese looked at him in surprise. ‘It’s a locked ward,’ she said.

‘Time off for good behaviour,’ he said. ‘I’ve been here before and I know the rules. I can bring you out, if you’d like to go and have a coffee with me? Of course, if I don’t bring you back at the prescribed time, they’ll set the dogs on me. But we’ll get a head start on them.’

Anneliese laughed. It felt great to really laugh again.

They sat at a table and drank coffee. It felt good to be out of the ward where she’d spent the last five days and Anneliese enjoyed watching the world move around them.

‘Thanks for the coffee,’ she said, ‘although I should be buying. I owe you, after all.’

‘You don’t owe me anything,’ he said. ‘I just happened to be there at the right time.’

‘You’re very laid back about this whole saving-woman-from-killing-herself thing,’ she said curiously. She couldn’t
imagine many other people sitting there so calmly with someone they’d pulled from the sea, yet Mac wasn’t watching her warily, as if expecting her to wail and throw herself on to the table with grief.

‘I’ve been on the edge myself a few times, I sort of understand it,’ he said. ‘That’s what life is about: teetering on the edge.’

‘How do you know all this?’

‘Just do,’ he said.

‘Been there, done that, got the T-shirt, huh?’

He smiled slowly. ‘I bought the factory that makes the T-shirts.’

‘Tell me about it,’ she said.

‘You don’t want my life story.’

She grinned. ‘Actually, I do. Before the Sea – should I have a word for it, BS (Before Sea)?–I’d never have been so blunt, but now, After Sea, I am. The new and improved Anneliese tells it like it is. Confess all.’

It took another coffee to tell his story of alcoholism, a failed marriage and two little girls whom he hoped more or less forgave him for it all after ten years of recovery. He couldn’t give them back their childhood, though, any more than his alcoholic parents could give him back his.

‘Do you ever wonder why it happened to you?’ Anneliese asked. It was the one thing she had trouble sorting out in her head: why had it all gone wrong? A man who’d been born into addiction must surely understand that?

‘This wise guy once told me that when someone falls in a hole, they think “How do I get out of the hole?” But when an alcoholic falls in a hole, they think “Why did I fall in the hole.’”

Anneliese laughed.

‘Makes sense, doesn’t it?’ Mac said.

She nodded. ‘Works for me. Actually, it
does
work for me. Every time I fell in a hole my entire life, I wondered why instead of just getting out of it.’

‘The
why
is the killer for some people,’ he shrugged. ‘How about you just accept it? Stop asking why, move on and try to find peace.’

‘I have peace,’ she said, with a certain pride. ‘Before, I tried everything for a sign that it would all work out. I read books, tried to meditate, listened to CDs, and finally I sat in St Canice’s and prayed for a sign, and there was none. But I was looking in the wrong place. The sign is me. I’m still here, so I guess I must be meant to be here. That’s my sign.

‘Mind you, this feeling-at-peace thing is very strange,’ she added now to Mac. ‘I dare say it’s a gift. I asked for help and it came. Sort of last minute,’ she added wryly. ‘You can’t get more last minute than that, but the help came. You came. Angels, God, I don’t know who did it. But whoever it was, I’m grateful’.

‘Glad I was there.’

A woman Anneliese knew saw her and waved, then stopped still and her hand dropped and her face fell.

Anneliese kept smiling and waved back.

‘Poor old thing,’ she said kindly, ‘probably forgot for a millisecond that I’m here for trying to kill myself, and now doesn’t know what to do. I might not have managed to kill myself, but I’ve probably committed social suicide.’ Then she laughed. ‘We should go out together, Mac. Wouldn’t that be apt – you’re an alcoholic and I’m a failed suicide.’ She beamed at him. ‘We’d make a lovely couple. People would be terrified to invite us to their houses: they’d be worried in case you saw a bottle of wine and freaked out, and they’d be worried in case I tried to impale myself on the kitchen knives.’

‘And every time they’d mention the beach or the sea, they’d all go silent and gasp in case you started to cry.’

It was so ridiculous, they both started to laugh. Anneliese knew people were probably looking at them but she didn’t care. She’d come out the other side of the abyss. Wasn’t that something?

‘How did you get involved with marine rescue?’ she asked.

‘It was the only liquid I hadn’t tried to drink,’ he deadpanned.

Anneliese shrieked with laughter.

‘OK, why didn’t you consider stand-up comedy?’

‘I’m not depressed enough.’

‘Have you ever been depressed?’ she enquired slowly.

‘No. I was never anything. Whatever I felt, I flattened with alcohol. I didn’t have any feelings left to be depressed about. You?’

‘Yeah, for most of my life. It’s not quite the mountain on top of you that some people talk of. For me, depression is so subtle, it creeps up like a colony of termites eating away at your house, nibbling through all the – what are those important bits called?’

‘Joists?’

‘That’s it. Joists. The termites ate away at the joists. They messed me up, turned me into a bit of a control freak – or at least that’s what my daughter says.’ She winced, remembering Beth accusing her of trying to control everything. ‘And…’ She stopped.

‘And?’

Anneliese sighed. ‘Can I say anything to you? I feel as if I can, but can I?’

‘Say anything,’ he replied. ‘I’m unshockable.’

‘I think I probably ruined my marriage.’ There, she’d said it out loud, the horrible thought that had been haunting her for the past few days. That she was more responsible for making Edward leave than silly Nell had been. That her retreat into her sadness had pushed him away.

‘I don’t know if you know, but my husband left me earlier this year for my best friend. That’s partly what pushed me over the edge. But I’m realising that I wasn’t easy to live with. Not in the slamming-doors and dropping-crockery sort of way, but in my own quiet way. I wanted to cope with it all on my own,
so I shut Edward out and didn’t talk to him about how I felt. In the last five days I’ve told the doctors here more about what’s been going on in my head than I’ve told Edward in our whole marriage.’

Mac said nothing. He just listened. He was a good listener, she decided: he didn’t let his attention flicker even for a second.

‘I hate admitting that it was my fault. It’s like I’ve failed and I can’t bear failure, but I have to take the blame, or most of it, anyway. I shut him out and if it was the other way round – if I was married to someone who shut me out of that part of their life – I’d want to leave too. When our daughter was grown up, I shut down even more.’

Anneliese felt her throat tighten thinking about Beth. It wasn’t her darling daughter’s fault, but when Beth had been young there was someone there for her to fight for. Beth needed protecting and Anneliese would do that; if it meant laughing, smiling and singing at the top of her voice in the morning, she would do whatever it took to make their world happy and normal.

With Beth gone, there was nobody left to protect. The fire in the husband-love corner had long since gone out while Anneliese had tended the daughter-love one.

‘Nell said I wasn’t interested in him any more,’ she said slowly, ‘and she was right. I loved him, cared about him, yes. But not in the way I used to.’

There was something immensely freeing in saying what she’d thought out loud. In her head, the words had such dark power, but when she spoke them to another human being, and he didn’t cringe away in horror, she felt enormous relief.

Anneliese wasn’t sure that talking about problems endlessly helped – it had never helped her. But speaking the absolute, unabashed truth and not flinching,
that
helped.

‘Would you have him back?’

Anneliese didn’t know why, but the question lacked the breezy informality of all the others.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I doubt if either of us could go back. I’ve changed. It’s different now. I don’t want to be the old Anneliese again. I can’t go back. When he left me, I wanted it all the same as before, I longed for that, actually. What was hard to grasp was that I’d believed in one reality all along and I was wrong. Edward was deceiving me and so was Nell. I’d thought the world was flat and it was round.’

‘And now?’ he prompted.

‘Now I know
I
was deceiving me too because I was living as if we had a wonderful marriage, and we didn’t. In the end, neither of us was sharing our innermost thoughts with the other. I kept mine to myself and he shared his with Nell. Not a textbook happy marriage, I think.’

‘My wife and I split up in my second year of recovery,’ volunteered Mac. ‘She’d lived with me through the drinking, through the nightmare of the first year of recovery, and then, I left. She’ll never forgive me for that, but I’d changed too much. It was time to let go of the old stuff and move on.’

Anneliese understood. Going back would be lovely, but it wasn’t an option.

‘Not that Edward is asking me to have him back, but even if he did, I wouldn’t be able to. I like the freedom of now.’

Mac grinned at her.

‘Freedom to be me,’ she went on. ‘It’s so liberating. I can say what I like.’

‘Such as?’

‘I want to tell dear Corinne who works in the Lifeboat Shop with me that if she waves another smelly little potion under my nose and tells me it will change my life, that I will strangle her with her moonstone necklace.’

‘Moonstone?’

‘Good for life energy.’

‘Is she energetic?’

‘No, poor dear, she’s the least energetic person I know,’ laughed Anneliese. ‘Her idea of exercise is sitting back in her chair and telling the rest of the world where they’re going wrong.’

‘So the moonstone’s not working, is it?’

‘No, but I couldn’t tell her that,’ Anneliese groaned. ‘Don’t want to hurt her.’

‘I thought you were saying what you wanted to? You are nice, after all.’

‘Yes,’ she sighed, ‘I am nice. I don’t want to hurt people.’

‘Who else, then?’ he asked. ‘Who else can you tell what you think without hurting?’

‘I’d quite like to tell Nell that fixing her hair, wearing lipstick and moving in on your supposed best friend’s husband isn’t the recipe for long life and happiness. She’s not right for Edward, actually.’

‘Is this advice coming from your intellect or your heart?’ he asked. ‘Bitter part of you speaking or rational part?’

‘What I like about you is that you don’t sugar-coat it,’ she said.

‘Sugar-coating is for wimps. You don’t get in the door of AA if you sugar-coat.’

‘Not even saccharine-coating?’

‘Especially not. In fact, coats are out, full stop. We meet in the nude. It’s hard to hide things when you’re naked.’

‘What a horrible picture that conjures up,’ she laughed. ‘The advice is from the head and not from the heart,’ she added after a few moments’ consideration. ‘Edward is complex, for all that he appears like a straightforward individual, and he needs someone who understands that. Nell is pretty straight down the middle: what you see is what you get. Apart from the
running off with my husband bit,’ she amended. ‘But generally, Nell is Nell. No sidebars, no hidden extras. Edward likes the hidden extras, although I think he got fed up with mine.’

‘You don’t have hidden extras so much as hidden labyrinths,’ Mac said.

‘That’s very forward, coming from someone who’s only just met me,’ she said lightly. But she wasn’t offended: far from it.

‘When are you getting out of here?’ he asked as they walked back upstairs to her ward. ‘Or are you planning to stage a hospital break-out?’

‘Tomorrow, as long as I don’t lose the run of myself tonight and go mad.’

‘Tomorrow then,’ he said. ‘Do you have someone to collect you?’

She was touched. It was clear he was offering himself for the duty.

‘I’m going to ask my friend, Yvonne. We’ve known each other for a million years and she’s one of the few people who probably won’t be fazed by coming here.’

‘See you around,’ he said, and touched her hand briefly in goodbye.

Back in her bed, Anneliese lay on her pillows and closed her eyes.

Letting go. Mac had talked about letting go of the past. It was a nice idea: like cutting all the old bonds and letting them trail away, leaving her free to start again. Letting go: yes, she liked that idea, she liked it a lot.

Izzie had always adored New York Fashion Week. Twice a year, beautiful Bryant Park on 6th Avenue was transformed into fashion central, and the world’s top designers, models, fashionistas and celebrity dogs – plus owners – descended upon it to watch. By Friday morning, after an enormous amount of work, several huge white tents sat in the middle of the pretty little square, with all the iron tables and chairs having been moved out of the way under the trees.

It was lunchtime on a sweltering September day and people were taking advantage of the square’s khaki table umbrellas, shading themselves from the sun and sipping coffees and diet sodas as they waited for the next show to begin. After getting out of her taxi in a traffic jam on 42nd Street to walk the final few hundred yards, Izzie felt that Bryant Park was like an oasis of calm snoozing under the watchful eye of the surrounding tall buildings.

The calm was strictly surface, though. Izzie had the spring/ summer schedule in her hand and there were shows running from ten in the morning right through until five in the evening, every hour, on the hour. Not all the designers used the tent, either – some showed in hotels and restaurants nearby and for people working in the modelling industry there was a lot of
rushing around from venue to venue, hoping everyone had turned up, frantically phoning for replacements if they hadn’t, and generally trying not to panic.

Bookers only got to go if they were lucky enough to get precious tickets from the designers and when she’d worked with Perfect-NY, Izzie had managed to see quite a few shows every year.

This was her first time at Fashion Week as boss of her own company and though there really wasn’t any absolute need for her to be there, SilverWebb had models in one of the shows, so Izzie had made sure she’d got her hands on tickets and backstage accreditation for today. High fashion designers almost never used plus-sized models but Seldi Drew, a vibrant new design company run by a couple from Florida, based their whole range on ordinary women. They were showing in the main tent at two, but there was another show ahead of them, which meant that backstage, the make-up, hairstylists, dressers and production people for that show would be taking up all the space.

Izzie had eight girls in the show and they’d already had a run-through with the Seldi Drew producer, making sure they moved at the right pace to throbbing, rhythmic beat. Sometimes after shows she’d watched in the past, Izzie found she had a headache from the music, but models always said that walking down the runway was easier with a heavy beat, so they loved the bass thump of runway music.

By half one, all the SilverWebb girls were in make-up and hair, all the models for the show had turned up, and there had only been one minor catastrophe when Feliz Guadaluppe, one of the Seldi Drew stylists, had discovered a model wearing a black thong instead of a nude one.

‘Why would you do that?’ he shrieked to the startled girl. ‘It might be seen through the clothes!’

Izzie felt a moment’s relief that the guilty party wasn’t a SilverWebb girl.

‘Feliz, settle!’ she commanded. ‘It’s not the end of the world. Here you are,’ she said to the girl, pulling a new three-pack of Gap G-strings out of her bag. She mightn’t have spent much time backstage at shows, but she knew enough to be prepared.

‘You’re a regular girl scout,’ laughed the model.

‘That’s me,’ agreed Izzie, and hugged Feliz briskly to break the cycle of horror. He leaned against her, a quivering mass of gym-toned, Hedi Slimane-clad fashionista.

‘I’m fine, I’m fine,’ he said, fanning his face with his hand. ‘The shock, you know?’

‘I know,’ Izzie said.

Crisis over, Feliz whipped round to continue styling the models. Izzie’s cell phone, which she had stuck into her trouser pocket so she’d feel it, began to ring.

‘Hey, you, how’s it going?’ said Carla.

‘Great,’ said Izzie.

‘Someone phoned looking for you,’ Carla went on, ‘a Caroline Montgomery-Knight.’

‘Doesn’t ring any bells with me,’ Izzie shrugged. ‘She leave a number?’

‘Yeah.’ Carla read out the number and Izzie jotted it down. She really had to clean out her handbag, she thought, it was full of bits of papers and numbers, and with the agency’s model cards tucked carefully into a hard folder in the outside pocket, not to mention necessities like G-strings, it was like hauling around a sack of potatoes.

She dialled the number, got a WASPy-sounding woman’s voicemail with no clues as to whether it was a private or a business line, and left her name and cell number. If this Caroline wanted to talk to her, she’d ring.

Izzie didn’t care much either way. It was hard to get worked up over anything these last few days. She was still reeling from her lunch with Joe. He hadn’t phoned her since and she was glad. Glad because she still didn’t know what she was going to do.

She and Carla had talked it over endlessly.

‘How badly do you want your own kids?’ Carla would ask, devil’s advocate style. ‘Could you settle for not having them?’

Each time, Izzie came back to the same answer: she didn’t know. She loved Joe, but she had a vision of them in the future, with this question coming back to haunt them. Would she wake up some day when she was too old for children and resent the hell out of Joe for stopping her conceiving? If she pushed him into having a baby, would he resent the hell out of her for affecting his relationship with his older children?

And could they ever accept her? Could Josh, Matt and Tom ever learn to love her, either way?

There were no answers to these questions, and therefore, no peace for Izzie.

When her cell phone rang again, the situation backstage in the big tent was at fever pitch. Someone was screaming in one corner of the tent, a model was yelling that she didn’t see why she shouldn’t smoke just because there were bloody signs up everywhere saying she shouldn’t, and the buzz of hairdryers and loud conversation made hearing what the caller was saying near impossible.

‘Izzie Silver?’

‘Yes?’ roared Izzie.

‘Caroline Montgomery-Knight,’ said the woman. It still didn’t mean anything to Izzie.

The woman said something else but the screaming had reached a crescendo and she couldn’t hear.

‘Sorry, I didn’t catch that. It’s a bit noisy here,’ Izzie yelled. ‘I’m at Fashion Week, down at Bryant Park.’

There was silence and Izzie thought the connection must have been broken, but then the woman spoke again.

‘If I come down, can I meet you there?’

‘Izzie! My hair, look!’ Belinda, a tall girl from Idaho, stood in front of her, on the verge of tears. ‘Look!’ shrieked Belinda
again. She held up a blonde ringlet that seemed perfectly all right to Izzie but which bore the faint smell of singed hair.

‘The show’s just starting and it should be over by two-twenty. I could see you at three-thirty?’ That would give them twenty minutes for the show, and over an hour for the post mortem. ‘I’ll meet you at the Bryant Park Grill, you know it? The restaurant with the green awning and the trailing plants hanging down from upstairs.’

‘At four then.’

Izzie scribbled a note on a corner of her notebook. Caroline Montgomery-Knight. The name was vaguely familiar, that was all. Still, it would be appalling to lose business just because she’d had a momentary blip and couldn’t remember who the woman was. She’d know her when she saw her, presumably – otherwise, Caroline would have asked what Izzie looked like.

The show was a fabulous success: the clothes looked wonderful, so did the models, and there was an admiring buzz from the fashion press that said, louder than any front page headline could, that Seldi Drew had produced a break-out collection.

There was prestige in being associated with such success and Izzie was glowing with contentment when she made it to the restaurant at half three and ordered a bottle of icy Pellegrino. Her water had just been delivered and she was about to take a sip when someone addressed her.

‘Izzie Silver?’

She looked up to see a tall blonde woman staring coldly down at her. Caroline Montgomery, she surmised.

Izzie didn’t know why, but there was something about the way the woman was looking at her that sent chills down her spine.

‘Yes,’ she said with a confidence she didn’t feel. She didn’t know this woman, that was for sure. Ms Montgomery was tall, Park-Avenue slim and had a Nordic blonde bob. In
the midst of the fashion crowd, she stood out like a very elegant sore thumb in a mocha-coloured twin set, real – and not ironic – pearls, and Capri pants finished off with soft ballet flats. Izzie had never seen her before but…wait, she looked a little like –

‘You’re the bitch sleeping with my brother-in-law,’ the woman said flatly.

Too late, Izzie realised the woman looked
exactly
like Joe’s wife, Elizabeth Hansen.

For what felt like the first time ever, she was utterly lost for words.

‘You want to do this here?’ Caroline Montgomery gestured around the room. ‘Or outside?’

‘Outside,’ gulped Izzie.

Izzie followed Caroline out of the restaurant, clutching her big handbag with one hand and trying to feel her way through the crowds, as if she was blind, with the other. She might as well be blind, she thought: blind-drunk, blind-stupid, blind-something. This was an absolute nightmare, coming face-to-face with her lover’s sister-in-law. How had it all come to this? She knew she could always run away, but that wasn’t Izzie’s style. There was no running away from this, she had to face the music. A few yards from the restaurant, Caroline whirled around and stopped, folded her arms, and faced Izzie, her expression diamond hard.

‘I suppose this isn’t the first time you’ve done this,’ Caroline said harshly. ‘It must be tough, finding the right rich guy. Though perhaps finding them isn’t the hard part, I guess. Getting them to leave their wives,
that
must be harder. I guess because you’re still working for your little agency –’ She spoke as if Izzie’s job was a mere step up from street-walking ‘– you mustn’t have got the right guy yet. And Joe’s not your guy.’

Izzie stared at her and felt sick at being the focus of such hatred.

‘My sister wouldn’t lower herself to come here to meet you. She doesn’t know I’m doing it. Let me tell you, she’s worth ten of you.’

Still, Izzie said nothing.

‘Joe’s not a bad person,’ Caroline went on. ‘Dumb, though. Dumb enough to think he can have it all if he leaves Elizabeth. They can’t, you know: the fathers can’t have it if they leave. They might think the money will fix it, but you can’t fix Daddy not being home every night. Money doesn’t make that work. Elizabeth and I grew up with that. Our parents divorced and, let me tell you, she won’t let it destroy her boys. They have a good marriage and they’ve three great kids, did he mention that to you? Bet he didn’t. Men never do when they want to get you into bed.’

Izzie felt herself recoil at the venom in Caroline’s voice. But painful as it was, she felt that in some way she deserved this venom. She had hurt this woman’s sister, not out of malice or greed for his money, but in the belief that Joe couldn’t be interested in her if he still had a marriage left.

Now, Caroline was saying something different.

‘You know, Elizabeth thinks that, if he wants to go, he should.’ Caroline glared at Izzie. ‘I’m not handing him on a platter to you, no way. You need to hear it all. He’s done it before – screwed around, that is.’

Izzie took the punch and remained standing. But she’d had enough. She hadn’t gone into the Hansens’ marriage with a crowbar – she’d met one half of the marriage who’d wanted out. The damage they’d done themselves to bring Joe to that point was not her fault.

‘I’m going to stop you there,’ Izzie said. ‘Yes, I was seeing Joe for a while,’ she added, knowing she had probably broken the number one rule of difficult discussions by admitting blame in the first five minutes, but she had to, there was nowhere else to go. She had slept with Caroline’s sister’s husband and she
could understand what had driven Caroline to storm down here to confront her.

‘Bragging about it, are you?’ replied Caroline, and for the first time, her carapace cracked. Her eyes looked suspiciously watery.

‘No, that’s not it at all,’ Izzie said. ‘There is no point pretending it didn’t happen. To get the facts straight, Joe told me his marriage was over and I believe him – he wasn’t making that up. Whatever’s gone on between the two of them is their business, but don’t try and blame me for it.’

‘How can you say –?’ began Caroline.

Izzie interrupted her: ‘Your sister’s relationship with her husband is none of my business.’

But Caroline came right back at her: ‘Oh, so that makes it OK to take him away from her, does it? Don’t think about anything else, just take the guy. I hate women like you. You’re after one thing: money. You’ve probably run around with every guy in New York and then, when the botox stops working so well, you decide you’re going to snatch somebody else’s guy. If he wasn’t rich, don’t tell me you’d have looked at him twice.’

As she finished, she began to cry: sad, slow sobs that had been building up.

Izzie reached into her bag and found a tissue. First G-strings, now tissues.

‘Here,’ she said, handing it over.

‘Thanks,’ mumbled Caroline.

‘Do you want to sit down?’ asked Izzie. She must be mad. She should be running away from this woman, not giving her tissues.

They found two seats near the tents and Caroline sank on to hers with the weariness of someone who’d just about fired themselves up with enough energy to complete a horrible task, and then collapsed when the task was over.

She
was the task, Izzie realised grimly. She was the monster Caroline had come to slay. With her anger dissolving in tears, the other woman looked normal, like a slim, tired woman with
lines around her eyes, a woman who’d come to fight for her beloved sister.

‘Sorry if it sounds like cliché central, but Joe is the first man I’ve ever been involved with who wasn’t single or had his divorce papers in a drawer,’ Izzie explained. ‘And what I feel – sorry, felt about Joe has nothing to do with money.’