Nine Uses For An Ex-Boyfriend (16 page)

‘Oh God, do we have to?’ Jack groaned, like having coffee, cake and a chat was some kind of ordeal that Hope was forcing on him. ‘I’ve just had lunch, actually, and I’ve got some freelance work to do so I’m going to hole up in the lounge.’

Jack had holed up in the lounge for the rest of the day and rejected home-made posh fish and chips in favour of a cheese sandwich, which he made himself.

Every time Hope tried to go into the lounge, he sighed and made a big show of rustling his layouts so Hope had no choice but to skulk in the kitchen and the bedroom. Even when Jack finally came to bed at nearly two in the morning and she’d stayed awake so they could have make-up sex, he’d turned out the light before she could snuggle up and rolled on to his side with his back to her. There was something to be said for being a shouter, rather than a sulker. Hope shouted and then, usually, she felt better and could get on with the rest of her life, but when Jack was having a fit of the sullens, it could last weeks.

Still, Hope was sure that Jack’s bad mood would melt away when she woke him up on Sunday morning with eggy bread and bacon and another heartfelt apology, but though he ate the eggy bread and the bacon, he cut short her apology with a terse, ‘All right, all right. I get it. You’re sorry. You don’t have to keep saying it.’

‘But you don’t seem very pleased that I’m sorry,’ Hope said.

‘Look, Hope, we’ve been through this before,’ Jack said wearily like he hadn’t slept for weeks. ‘You can’t just yell and scream and have temper tantrums and then think that saying sorry cancels it out. You know I don’t like confrontations. They make me tense and keyed up and that doesn’t go away just because you’re done with your snit and you want to be friends again.’

‘But it’s only ’cause I love you so much, that I get so mad at the thought of you with …’

‘Oh God! I can’t have this conversation with you again,’ Jack snapped, scrambling out of bed so he could rifle through the piles of clothes that Hope hadn’t got round to putting away. ‘Anyway, I’m meeting Marvin in Shoreditch in an hour to have a look round the galleries.’

‘I’m going to really, really try to let this whole business die a natural death.’ Hope’s best, brightest and most beguiling smile was beginning to wane. ‘You’re right, we should get
some
fresh air and going to Shoreditch sounds like fun. If you give me five minutes to have another cup of tea, I’ll come with you.’

‘Look, Hope, we don’t have to be joined at the hip.’

‘I know,’ she said and the effort not to snarl the words almost sapped her of all her strength. As it was, she could actually feel her blood pressure rise as the prickly heat of a stress rash travelled along her chest and down her arms. She was definitely going to hunt for an elastic band in the kitchen junk drawer. ‘It’s just I’ve hardly seen you all weekend.’

‘And you think that the minute I’m out of your sight, I’m getting up to no good,’ Jack added bitterly.

‘I don’t think that!’ Hope insisted, and she stood her ground until Jack raised his eyebrows at her. ‘Well, I’m trying really hard not to think that.’

‘Well, you have to try harder,’ Jack advised, and then he went out and she was alone in the flat and she couldn’t help it, she was torturing herself with elaborate, pornographic scenarios of Jack and Susie together and trying to think of a really good reason why she could call Marvin and subtly discover if Jack really was with him, so it was actually a relief when her mother made her weekly Sunday-afternoon call.

Mrs Delafield would have been quite happy to talk to Hope every evening and maybe even for five minutes every morning, but Hope had whittled her down to one Sunday-afternoon call. Yes, she felt guilty for keeping her mother at telephonic arm’s length, but as it was, that Sunday call usually lasted up to three hours and always featured a lengthy critique of Hope’s lesson and menu plans for the coming week.

That Sunday afternoon, Hope wasn’t in the mood to listen to a lecture on how modern primary-school education would benefit greatly from a return to the three Rs, or why soup wasn’t a main meal in itself but only a starter, or an
hors d’oeuvre
, as her mother insisted on calling it because she
watched
too many cookery programmes on the Food Network.

‘Soup, salad and maybe a couple of slices of toast is a perfectly decent evening meal,’ Hope insisted while they were clocking up their second hour on the phone. ‘The world won’t end if I forgo having meat, two veg and a starch at every meal.’

‘There’s absolutely no need to take that tone of voice with me,’ her mother said evenly. ‘No wonder you’re so snippy if you haven’t been eating properly. Skipping meals always makes you peevish.’

‘I haven’t been skipping meals,’ Hope said sulkily, except she had, because for the last two nights she hadn’t been able to face cooking and then choking down even a bowl of soup when her stomach was tied up in knots. That said, she could always manage a packet of chocolate fingers. ‘And that’s not why I’m peevish.’

‘Oh, is Auntie Flo about to visit?’ her mother asked delicately. ‘I thought she wasn’t due for at least another week.’

There was something very squicky about her mother having such an in-depth knowledge of her menstrual cycle, but Hope knew that she probably marked it out on the calendar in preparation for that happy day when Hope forgot to take her pill and found herself in the family way. She was so desperate for her first Hope-produced grandchild that she wasn’t likely to even kick up a fuss if the baby was conceived out of wedlock, though she and Jack’s mum, Marge, would march them down the aisle so fast that there’d be no conspicuous baby bump to ruin the wedding photos. During happier times, Jack and Hope had laughed themselves stupid at the very real possibility that their respective mothers had already planned their wedding and had their first-choice caterers, photographers and florists on speed dial, when they’d much prefer to go to Vegas and be married by an Elvis impersonator.

If that was the case, then they were both going to be sorely disappointed. ‘No, it’s not my special lady-time,’ Hope gritted, then she couldn’t help sighing, though the sigh was less to do with her mother being annoying and more to do with life in general.

‘Well, what’s the matter then? You know you can tell me anything. We’re more like best friends than mother and daughter, aren’t we?’

‘Yes, of course we are,’ she replied dutifully but with barely any sincerity, and her mother made a little hurt noise, which was usually a precursor to a diatribe about how desperately she’d wanted a daughter and had determinedly set about having a child every eighteen months until she had her longed-for baby girl, and now that baby girl was all grown up and wanted nothing to do with her.

‘I always thought that when I had a daughter, we’d be so close. Girls together, confiding in each other, that sort of thing,’ her mother predictably began, and as always Hope felt guilty because she wasn’t the girly, confiding daughter cum best friend that her mother wanted her to be. And she also felt guilty about taking her bad mood out on her mother, because she wasn’t allowed to take it out on Jack any more.

‘I’m sorry, I’m being a bitch …’

‘Language,’ her mother chided.

‘OK, I’m being a cow,’ said Hope, her good intentions to be more confiding and daughterly already under strain. ‘It’s not PMS and it’s not you, it’s Jack. We had a row.’

‘Oh, Hope,’ her mother sighed. ‘What have you done now?’

Obviously it would be something that
Hope
had done to cause the row. However much her mother had wanted a daughter, she wanted Jack as a son-in-law even more. Unlike her three older sons, who had spent most of their formative years belching and farting in each other’s faces and indulging in ferocious displays of sibling rivalry, Jack
had
always been smiley and charming and never broke wind in her hearing. That pretty much made him a god in her mother’s eyes, and while it would be so satisfying to tell her mother exactly why they’d had a row and pierce her Jack-worshipping bubble a little, Hope’s promise to Jack still stood and with good reason. As soon as she let slip that Jack had kissed a girl who wasn’t Hope, her mother would race next door, there’d be tears and recriminations, and then both Mrs Delafield and Mrs Benson would break the speed limit to leadfoot it down the motorway and be on Hope’s doorstep for a rousing chorus of: ‘The shock will kill your grandmothers.’ And somehow Hope would get the blame for Jack straying because she didn’t iron his shirts, even though generally Jack didn’t wear shirts, or because she thought soup constituted an adequate evening meal, or because she wasn’t making the best of herself and never blow-dried her hair straight even though it looked much better that way – so who could blame Jack for seeking comfort with another woman?

‘I didn’t do anything,’ Hope said indignantly. ‘He did something completely heinous and we’ve been kind of fighting about it, and then we made up but I was still secretly mad at him, and we had another really big fight and he walked out on Friday evening and stayed out all night and now he’s not really speaking to me.’

‘What do you mean by heinous?’ Caroline Delafield wanted to know.

‘You don’t need to know that, but he knows, and he has to understand that it’s not the kind of thing that I can simply get over in five minutes.’

‘Have you been shouting at him?’

‘Well, maybe a little bit, but I just get so angry and hurt when I think about the heinous thing, and I do say I’m sorry and I try to make up for the shouting by being really nice,’ Hope explained.

Her mother clicked her teeth reprovingly. ‘Look, dear,
men
have a tendency to be a bit thoughtless and selfish and there’s no point in fretting about it. It’s just the way they are.’

‘Yes, but …’

‘Even if Jack did do something to tick you off, we both know that when you get riled, your mouth runs away with you. It’s the red hair.’ She paused to let that revelation sink in, although Hope had sent her many links to articles that stated categorically that there was no correlation between having red hair and a bit of a temper. ‘And Lord knows you’re stubborn. You never let anything go. You’re like a dog with a bone.’

‘Wow, that’s a really attractive picture you’re painting, Mum.’ Hope had been sprawled disconsolately on the bed but she managed to rouse herself so she could look at her hair in the mirror on the inner door of her wardrobe. ‘Look, Jack did a bad, bad thing and I know he’s sorry but I can’t seem to move past it.’

‘Well, you do need to move past it, and Jack’s probably just giving you a wide berth because everyone knows you need a cooling-off period of at least two days when you’re angry,’ said her mother as if she hadn’t heard a single word Hope had said. Or she had, but had chosen to ignore them. ‘This will all blow over when you’ve properly apologised for being such a crosspatch. Why don’t you make him something nice for his tea?’

Hope wished that she’d never gone down this well-trodden path with her mother. If she hadn’t been a crosspatch before, now she was the crossest patch in Christendom. ‘I’ve said I’m sorry about a hundred times. Quite frankly,
he
should be making
me
something nice for my tea, but he’s been so …’

‘Yes, he’s been what?’ her mother prompted eagerly and with an icy-cold shudder, Hope realised how close she’d come to blurting out the terrible truth.

‘Oh, it doesn’t matter …’

‘Well, if it doesn’t matter, then there’s no harm in saying you’re sorry again, like you really mean it this time. You should never let the sun set on a quarrel and you can’t let this silly situation drag on any longer just because you’re being obstinate.’

It was like trying to have a conversation with a breeze-block, and Hope made the mistake of telling her mother just that. Which led to another argument and conclusive proof that Hope’s red hair was responsible for her sharp tongue and uncontrollable temper. The only way to appease Mrs Delafield and get her off the phone before they ran into a third hour was for Hope to agree that her baby brother, fifteen-year-old Jeremy, could come to stay for half-term. The Delafields and the Bensons wanted to squeeze in a week at the timeshare they co-owned in Corfu but didn’t want to drag Jeremy along ‘because honestly, we need a week away from him. He’s going through that difficult phase that you went through too.’ Of course, there was no question of leaving Jeremy home alone to burn the house down or have a party that would be posted on Facebook, with his parents returning home to find the house razed to the ground by marauding teenagers high on Meow-Meow.

By the time Hope rang off, she was emotionally exhausted and hopping mad again. So mad that she had to go for a brisk walk to work off some of the aggression, which took her as far as the Holloway Road to buy a family-sized bag of salt and vinegar crisps and a huge bar of chocolate, and when Jack finally deigned to come home with a Chinese takeaway as a pitifully inadequate peace offering, Hope felt too bilious to eat it.

Jack took Hope’s refusal to partake of sweet and sour chicken very badly and they segued seamlessly into the next part of their never-ending row, or maybe it was a new row – Hope couldn’t tell any more.

All Hope knew nearly two weeks later was that they still seemed to be locked into a cycle of endless bickering, even
though
she was trying to be on her very best, most non-confrontational behaviour, which was draining,
and
she had a ring of bruises around her wrist from repeated elastic band-pinging. Jack didn’t even appreciate the effort she was making. Not that he was around much to witness her restraint – he’d been working late every night.