*
The lady behind the counter at the Hospice Shop would not accept my wedding dress. Piece by piece, she was emptying my clothes out of the bin bags I had carried in. I was wearing the only outfit I would own once I left – jeans and a Primark sweatshirt that Ingrid bought two of because they were ￡9 and had the word University printed on the front, which, she said, made it clear to people that we’d been educated at tertiary level but weren’t so desperate for approval we needed them to know where.
My wedding dress was underneath other things and when she tugged it out by its sleeve and I told her what it was, the lady gave a little gasp. Aside from the fact something as lovely as that should be in tissue paper and a proper box, she was sure I would regret parting with it. Her eyes darted to my left hand. I was still wearing my wedding rings and, assured by their presence that she had not said something unfortunate, the lady smiled and said, ‘You might have a daughter to give it to one day.’ She was going to nip out the back and see if she had something better for me to take it home in.
Once she was through the curtain, I left without my dress and started walking home. It had begun to rain and water was sluicing across the pavement and spilling into the gutters. At the first corner, I stopped and twisted off my rings, wondering if it was form for a woman in my circumstances to toss them down the drain then walk on, emancipated. It was the kind of gesture that would have made Jonathan roar with laughter and say, ‘Brilliant.’ I zipped them into the coin bit of my purse and kept going.
Hamish put them on eBay. With the money, I bought my father a computer and gave the rest to a community organisation that opposes the development of apartment buildings like Jonathan’s.
10
THE JOB I never went back to after my honeymoon was my job at World of Interiors. A final letter, readdressed by Jonathan, arrived at Goldhawk Road. Due to my delinquency, I had been formally released from employment.
Sitting on my bed, I wrote to Peregrine. I wanted to apologise for disappearing instead of resigning properly, and not being brave enough to tell him why I couldn’t come back. I tried but could not, after many drafts, make the real reason sound amusing. In the letter I sent in the end, I told him that I had run out of descriptors that could be applied to chairs. I said I had nothing left except ‘nice’ and ‘brown’ and I was so grateful and sorry and I hoped we could stay in touch.
His reply came back on a monogrammed card the same week. It said, ‘Better for a writer to run than give in to the siren call of thesaurus.com. Lunch soon/always.’
*
According to my father I needed to recuperate emotionally before I even thought about trying to find another job. I was in his study looking at a recruitment website and had selected Greater London, then found myself at a loss.
Because recuperating emotionally was impossible in my room, the soundtrack of my mother’s repurposing coming constantly through the window, he invited me to spend time in his study like I was seventeen – he didn’t say that part, but we were both aware of it. For a few days I did, but the work of writing poetry had become visibly less enjoyable since then. Now, it involved more getting up and chair scraping, walking around the room and sighing and reading the poetry of other writers aloud, which he said helped him get in the zone, although obviously not enough.
I moved downstairs to the kitchen and started writing a novel. The sound of his labour was audible from above. I began going to the library. I liked it there but the novel kept steering itself towards autobiography and I couldn’t steer it back. I imagined myself speaking at a writers’ festival and being asked by someone in the audience how much of the book was based on my own life. I would have to say all of it! There’s not a single shred of invention in its four hundred pages! Except the section where the husband – who is blond in real life and unmurdered – decides to relocate his expensive coffee machine to another part of the kitchen and when he picks it up, brown water from the collection tray cascades down the front of his white jeans.
That scene and every other seemed to vibrate with brilliance and humour as I typed them. The next day they read like the work of a fifteen-year-old with encouraging parents. Altogether, I could see how much it lurched in style towards whatever I was reading at the time. A confusing mix of Joan Didion, dystopic fiction and an Independent columnist who was serialising her divorce.
I gave up and started reading large-print romance until I realised I had made friends with the elderly contingent who also spent their days in the silent area because, by the time they invited me to lunch at The Crepe Factory, it did not seem remarkable that I said yes.