He didn’t know what to do with this self-loathing, and he couldn’t imagine an end to it. How he would ever be okay with it all – how he would get through the exams, and even if he did, there were A levels, then UCAS, then uni, then a job hunt. Life lay ahead like a series of opportunities to fuck up. How Mum would ever stop being so destroyed by Dad going. How he would ever stop getting an erection when Genevieve bent over to put something on the lower shelf of Dad’s fridge.
And then, when he thought he was just about as low as he could go, as irredeemably, miserably, unreachably a mess, she’d just happened. That was precisely, almost to the day, when Saskia had slid into the seat next to him on the coach to the last geography field trip, a day visit to windswept and freezing Chesil Beach.
She’d moved to his school at the start of year ten, and they’d never really spoken. She was in a few of his classes, but the cliques were formed, and the battle lines between the sexes pretty well drawn by then, so there’d been no real chance. She was dark blonde, and pretty, but in a very quiet way – not the orange-tinted, eyeliner flicking, go-on-I-dare-you way the really popular girls were. He wasn’t sure she wore makeup at all. She had a nose stud, a tiny sparkly one, and he’d always thought it seemed intriguingly out of character, speaking of a wild streak that had, outwardly, no other signs.
She’d smiled at him, and for some reason – vestiges of politeness, maybe – he’d felt obliged to push off his headphones. She’d asked him what he was listening to, and he’d said Oasis, and instead of scoffing at his old-school tastes, she’d turned out to know all the words to ‘Wonderwall’, although she preferred Pulp and Blur, she’d said. And just like that, maybe, she was going to be the one to save him, he thought.
15
Yoga helped. It actually did. Who could have predicted that? Laura had spent a lifetime avoiding strenuous exercise, believing herself to have been born without the endorphins other people always talked about. There’d been netball at school, and hideous hockey, of course, and she’d briefly flirted with university rowing, mainly because of the social life to which it offered access. But for its own sake, for its positive benefit on one’s body, let alone on one’s mind, she’d had a lifelong cynicism about exercise. She’d even been a bit judgemental – shock, horror – about other people’s devotion to it. Her brother Scott’s daily gym visit, his new wife Heather’s insistence that reformer Pilates had completely changed her life. Even Nick, jogging in ancient, holey shorts and a T-shirt. They all seemed to her, well, just a bit self-absorbed. Naturally and effortlessly slim, she’d never seen a reason or felt an urge to start. Sometime around their collective mid-thirties, mothers at the school gates had gone from wanting to meet for coffee and cake to charging off to boot camp on the common, beginning their King Canute attempt to hold back time, and she’d felt bewildered by it, when coffee and cake was so much nicer, and time’s winged chariot was unstoppable anyway. Then even Mel had betrayed her, insisting she try yoga, with her typically blunt brand of advice: ‘It’ll help suppress your inner bitch, Laur.’
So she’d gone, because her inner bitch was far more worrying to her than any spare tyre or aching hip flexors could ever have been. And it had been hard and hateful to start with. She didn’t have the right gear, and her T-shirt kept riding up and exposing her bra, and her neglected feet looked awful even to her on the mat when she’d discovered you had to take your socks off to do even the simplest manoeuvre, which had seemed difficult at the beginning. Downward dog made her head feel congested and achy, child’s pose was vulnerable, and full-sun salutation required more arm strength than she possessed. Plus you had to breathe in and out on the motions in the right way, and that felt very much like rubbing your belly and patting your head in synchronicity – impossible to maintain.
But the teacher had been beautifully patient and kind, as well as firm and insistent, which turned out to be a potent combination. She would stand behind Laura and coax her limbs into places her mind really thought they couldn’t go, and her soft voice and example made the correct breathing come naturally in time.
And the very best part was the shavasana at the end, when you lay perfectly still for a few minutes, covered with a soft blanket, and a bean bag infused with geranium across your eyes. ‘When thoughts come, do not engage with them,’ the teacher said, and while Laura might have scoffed in weeks one and two, by week three, she was getting better at pushing them away. Now, those few minutes, two or three times a week, suffused her with the most welcome sense of calm and tranquillity, like a natural high. She might even describe herself as evangelical about her yoga.
She tackled paperwork on yoga days, banking the peacefulness and eking it out on dealing with the crap her divorce generated. For years, she hadn’t done administrative stuff. She’d stopped work when Ethan was born. She might not have done, if she’d loved what she was doing, but she remembered feeling uninspired, stagnant even. In truth, pregnancy and early motherhood offered a way out. Not very PR or girl power, but there you go. Alex had wanted her to, and she’d been happy to comply, besotted with her baby, and feeling lucky that they didn’t require her salary to survive. He’d dealt with the household bills, financial advisers, pensions and savings. She’d handled all things Ethan – school paperwork, holiday bookings, that sort of thing – and all the domestic stuff. Alex had changed precious few nappies, and cooked dinner once in a blue moon. Only when she was ill, come to think of it. He couldn’t have named more than a couple of Ethan’s teachers, or his little friends, and wouldn’t have had a clue whether Ethan had been given the MMR as a combined vaccination or as three separate shots, or if he’d had chickenpox.
How had that happened? How had she let that happen to herself? To each other. When had they stopped being an equal partnership? When they’d met, she’d been competent, capable and confident. She’d been bloody good at what she did – practice manager at a firm of architects in the city. He’d fallen in love with someone and gradually, knowingly, turned her into someone else, then been surprised when he suddenly didn’t love her any more. Wasn’t that the stupidest thing you’d ever heard? And she’d let him. Which was even stupider. What had she been thinking? Had she been thinking at all? Had she taken the easiest, laziest route through life and did that make it her fault? Why hadn’t she gone back to work, even part-time – had something for herself? Her own money, clothes in the wardrobe that didn’t go in the washing-machine, something to talk about at dinner besides their child.
He’d been a good cook when they’d met. He’d done a course at Leith’s. And a season at a chalet in Méribel, cooking three courses plus hors d’oeuvres for posh skiers. He’d seduced her with food in his flat near Balham tube – prawns in garlic butter, a perfectly cooked steak, a chocolate fondant – and she’d thanked her lucky stars she’d found him. Now he barely knew how to switch on the oven.
She had to find a way out of the hole she was in. She didn’t want him back, even if she sometimes fantasized about him begging her forgiveness. She didn’t wish him well – she wanted to see him fall on his face with Genevieve, wanted the silly girl to wake up to the fact that the man she’d fallen in love with had walked away from eighteen years of marriage and a child to be with her. Or just to realize that he would be old too soon. She wanted Ethan not to forgive him, even if she felt slightly ashamed at the selfishness of that. And, yes, she wanted him to pay. So Mel was right: she needed to buck her ideas up, reawaken the part of her brain that understood numbers and legal speak, and not let him screw her over. Know her rights. Be more angry than sad. More aggressor than victim. Not keep making the same mistake she’d made for too long.