Twenty Tones of Red (20 page)

She immediately felt better and organised a mini girls
’ conference in the kitchen to tell her friends about the latest communication. They fully supported her stalling tactic and she managed to calm down a little. She felt a bit more in control and even managed to do some useful work before setting off to catch the train to her brother’s house.

That evening was much more comfortable. She got home early and helped Cathy cook dinner then updated her hosts on the latest in her relationship problems. They approved of her plan and she started to relax even more. She actually enjoyed sitting watching television with them and felt much happier when she went to bed. She slept more deeply with much less tossing and turning and woke up to a beautiful bright summer’s morning with a strange optimism in her heart. She was going to take control of her relationship and if David couldn’t convince her of his love then she knew deep down she was prepared to move on; recognising her strength and determination made everything feel much more manageable.

Her morning at work past uneventfully but after lunch she started to feel an anxious tightening in her stomach. She was slightly nervous about her dinner with David and had to continually remind herself that nothing bad was going to happen. She was right. When she did get home David wasn’t even there. She had expected to find him cooking, having bought some flowers and made an extra effort to tidy their little flat, but he came in twenty minutes after her with a takeaway in a white plastic bag. She couldn’t blame him for not making dinner, he was never much of a chef, but the effort would have been appreciated.

They ate and made small talk for a
while and then after a few glasses of wine she asked him why he hadn’t taken the photos of her down. He told that he’d tried and explained that whilst he could post things he had no editing access. He reassured her that he’d emailed the Webmaster and asked for the galleries to be removed. She felt strangely distant while she listened to his excuses. It all seemed a bit lame and she wasn’t convinced that he’d even made much of an effort at all. He didn’t seem to understand why she was so upset, and even worse, he didn’t seem to be making much of an effort to make her feel better.

After dinner h
e asked if she’d stay but she told him that she had made other arrangements and left as quickly as she could. She cried as she walked to the underground station. It took her a little while to work out the cause of her sadness but in the end she had to admit that she was becoming more and more uncertain about her relationship and increasingly accepting that it might have to end. There was no hurry. She would stay as long as she could with her brother and use the time as a cooling off period. She needed to create some distance from her past life to see if she really loved David or not.

Over the next few weeks she returned frequently to their flat and removed more and more of her possessions. By the fourth trip there was nothing left that she wasn’t prepared to walk away from and she suddenly felt much happier. She gave herself lots of excuses why she was removing so many of her things but what she needed to accept was that she was preparing for the worst. David did nothing dramatic to try and win her back. They had several more dinners together but he never once did or said anything romantic or made any real effort. When they’d finished eating he always asked if she would stay and she found increasing pleasure in telling him that she had somewhere else to go. He knew she was staying with Sean and Cathy but she avoided giving too much detail. It wouldn’t harm him to think that she might be going somewhere else or seeing somebody else occasionally. Maybe it would snap him into action.

W
hen she finally came to face facts it was more than a month after she had stormed out. She admitted to herself that she had given up on David and had extracted all her possessions so that she didn’t have to create a dramatic ending. All she had to do now was keep herself busy and find somewhere new to live and he would eventually just fade into the background. As her anger subsided she was surprised at how little she felt for him. The worst stage was when she started to feel pity. He did genuinely seem to be confused about why she was leaving him but at the same time he seemed completely unable to see her view of the world or express his own emotions. He remained incredibly calm and self-contained and that was one of the things that infuriated her.

The real ending came the following month when she cancelled her direct debit on their flat rental. She wasn’t living there and she couldn’t really afford to keep paying for it. Yes, this was going to put David under a lot of fi
nancial strain but that was his problem. He responded in a flurry of angry texts and emails telling her that he would change the locks if she didn’t pay her share. Fine, she told him. She wasn’t really that bothered and she was disappointed to see that the only time she’d managed to provoke an emotional reaction from him was on the topic of money. It was over. What she needed to do now was to analyse what had gone wrong and what she could learnt from the situation.

She had plenty of time to reflect on her relationship because her life had become dull and remarkably uneventful.
Her brother was something of a cliché. She loved him but she wasn’t sure that she understood why he seemed to delight in plain grey suits, accountancy exams and nothing more exciting than a few pints while watching sport in the pub. He was a nice man and calm and pleasant but he lacked spark or any kind of spirit of adventure she liked to think that all the family’s fire and passion and being poured into her.

When she’d been little the whole family had watched a sitcom called
The Good Life
; a delightful tale of a couple who chose to experiment with a life of self-sufficiency. Their neighbours were the model of tradition and conservatism, Margo and Jerry. Seemingly without any hint of irony or self awareness her own brother had moved to the place where the TV series had been set and established himself as a corporate accountant in exactly the same vein.

Sean
and Cathy were kind and consistent but she couldn’t share the details of her relationship with them. She was fairly sure they’d be deeply shocked if they knew some of the things that she got up to but perhaps she was underestimating them. She sometimes wondered if behind the dull and fairly timid-looking facade they were secretly enjoying a wild hedonistic lifestyle. But it seemed unlikely. She was fairly sure that they’d never taken any kind of drugs or experimented sexually in any way. The two of them were well-suited to being middle-aged in suburbia and seemed to have spent their early years waiting to age into their natural personalities.

D
espite their suburban dullness she had to admit that her brother’s house made an excellent refuge. She never felt any pressure to explain herself or to leave and every day Cathy told her that she could stay as long as she liked. They were good people but she didn’t want to overstay her welcome and so forced herself to begin the long arduous business of flat hunting. She had offers from various friends at work but there was no point moving from one small room to another. If she was going to rent then it had to be her own place. She was too old for student accommodation or its equivalent.

Summer quickly faded and she spent her autumn evenings trailing around the cheaper parts of London looking at tiny drab studio flats. It
was a dull lonely time and felt as if someone switched all the colour off. Had all the melody vanished from the songs that she loved? Had the taste and seasoning drained from her food? It certainly seemed so because on her own and coming to terms with the loss of her lover the days felt grey and cold and empty. The weather didn’t help. The sun seemed to have gone away for good discretely and a cold dark blustery autumn arrived in its place. The first month that she was officially single it always seemed to be dull and grey.

             
It wasn’t just heartbreak there was more to it than that. There was loneliness and sadness and a sense of failure. She was a positive optimistic person but the mornings that she woke early in her brother’s spare room and lay awake listening to the sounds of his house she struggled to find any hope or cheer.

She was good eno
ugh at her job to go through the motions and get things done but her mind wasn’t really in it. Her mind wasn’t really anywhere though. It would be wrong to say that she was thinking about David or their relationship because actually her thoughts kept drifting to her fears about the future. It took a lot of effort to convince herself that she hadn’t done anything wrong that she hadn’t betrayed him or abandoned him in fact what she needed to do was to reassure herself that she had been betrayed and abandoned. He had taken their submission and dominance games into a very selfish place and in the end he’d spent all of his time and energy thinking about himself and she’d become lost in the relationship. She needed to convince herself on an hour by hour basis that she was right to leave. She was better than that. She deserved somebody’s love and attention.

Jen and
Jackie were a great support. At the end of each day her best friend at work would come to her desk ask how she was and offer to take her for a drink and a chat. Jackie texted her every few days and every couple of weeks would organise a mini-reunion of old uni friends.

When she wasn’t being cheered by friends
she would go to the gym then make her way to Waterloo and take the lonely train to her brother’s.  Back in the small but comfortable house in Surbiton she would help Cathy cook and sometimes she would bump into Sean on the train. The two of them would stop for a drink in the local and sip a contemplative glass of wine before they went home. Sean was always calm and understanding and for every hour he sat patiently asking her how she was and making kind and considerate conversation she made a mental note that should one day thank him and reward him.

Life in the small detached house in Surbiton had developed a routine.
After dinner she would stay and help Cathy clear up but her brother always went to the living room to read the newspaper or watch TV. It was the traditional division of labour and because he was the only breadwinner he didn’t feel obliged to do any household chores. She wasn’t certain how she felt about the situation except that she was glad that she’d always worked. Working gave one an equal part in any argument or discussion and she was amazed how meek and submissive Cathy was. The irony that always made her smile was that by watching their domestic life she could see more and more clearly how being sexually submissive was nothing like being submissive in real life.

When she’
d done as much as she could in the kitchen she would go and join her brother and watch TV for a few hours. It was relaxing but usually mind-numbingly boring. She missed having a joint and talking about kinky scenarios with David. Eventually she would choose to go to bed early; hurrying to wash and brush her teeth in case one of her hosts wanted to use the house’s only bathroom. The worst time of the day came when she slipped into the small bed in the tiny guestroom and lay trying not to allow her mind to drift to the failure of her relationship or what David might be doing. Any options she could think of distressed her; if he was alone and feeling as sad as empty as her then she felt sorry for him. If he was out enjoying himself then she was annoyed that he was not missing her more. Worst of all was the thought that he might be with another woman. She tried as much as possible to find other things to think about but night after night she would lie awake listening to her brother and his wife moving around in the room next store and desperately hoping for a peaceful sleep.

The music of the time didn’t help. As she walked a
round the streets near her office in nearly every coffee shop, pub and boutique in Camden they were playing either one or other of the year’s two sad songs. The worst was Morrissey singing
You Have Killed Me
. She’d always been a Smiths fan and she’d always found his lyrics and tone of voice haunting and moving. This tune was a real heartbreaker. It had the quality of all great emotional songs in that when she heard it she was convinced that it had been written for her and her alone. The words, the mood and the references seemed just too precise and fitting not to be about her and David. The other real heart breaker was Snow Patrol’s
Chasing Cars
; a slow epic of a song that seemed to tear her apart whenever she heard it.
If I lay here, if I just lay here. Would you lie with me and just forget the world?
Several times she had to flee from a table or a queue in a shop so that she could march around the back streets near Mornington Crescent dabbing her eyes and breathing away the sudden sadness that had possessed her.

Although she’
d been trying not to since she’d left David part of her mind was compulsively analysing their mistakes. Sometimes she thought about what had
gone
wrong and sometimes she thought about what
he
had done wrong and often she thought about what
she
had done wrong. Each brought a different range of feelings. Looking neutrally at what had gone wrong was the most objective. This was the analytical part of her mind examining the relationship like some kind of scientific experiment or computer program. This place yielded the best results and was the calmest and easiest to deal with.

Sometimes she needed
a kind of emotional hit though. Sometimes she needed to blame him and when that happened she found it difficult not to start listing all the mistakes he’d made and all the ways that he’d failed her. Finally there was the question of what she’d done wrong. This was the place of self-pity. This was where she went at her lowest moments and thought about her own failings and considered what she could have done to have kept the relationship working.