11
When Harriet got back to Jon’s, she was exhausted. She picked up the mood of weddings by osmosis, so, even sober, she felt as if she’d been through the emotional wringer.
Jon wandered out of the front room, holding a large glass of red wine, Sting playing in the background. He was in a striped shirt – one Harriet had once said she liked – with two buttons undone, and she got a disconcerting feeling he was trying to look enticing.
‘Join me?’ he said, raising his glass.
‘Oh, thanks, but no. I want a shower and my bed. It’s been a day.’
‘Ah well. If you change your mind, I made lamb shanks with mash. There’s plenty left in the slow cooker.’
He was definitely trying to contrive a date-night ambiance.
‘Thank you,’ Harriet said.
As she turned the corner, she said: ‘Oh, Jon. I’ve found a place to rent in Meanwood, I move in next Saturday.’
She expected this to be taken with minor dismay, but Jon’s jaw dropped.
‘What?! It’ll have been two weeks?’
‘Roxy was helpful,’ Harriet said.
‘Amazing. Some indecent haste. You really can’t bear to be around me, can you?’ Jon said, the jazzy atmosphere disappearing in a puff of smoke.
Harriet was too tired to be diplomatic.
‘What do you think separating means?’
‘I didn’t think it meant you rushing out so fast there were tyre marks on my driveway.’
‘Was I supposed to stay in your spare room for months?’
‘… Are you on dating sites yet?’ Jon said, hesitantly.
‘What? Are you serious?’
‘Yes.’
Harriet did a double take. ‘Yes, Jon, I’m already on five of them and telling the dates I’m not having to not come back to my place, which is your place.’
He sniffed. ‘Just checking.’
‘What the hell? Why would I be dating days after we ended?’
‘How am I meant to understand any of this, Harriet? You seem to think there’s a rulebook. I’d love to see it if so, because I’m at a loss.’
She frowned.
Earlier in the week, Jon had gone out for a game of squash and obviously a heart-to-heart with his friend Gavin. Gav was someone she’d always kept at arm’s length, finding him friendly enough, but perfumed with heady base notes of chauvinism and snobbery. She knew Gavin thought she was a scrubber of undistinguished origins who had lucked out in snaring Jon. He’d have gloried in all this, and likely pumped Jon full of there will definitely be Someone Else, my friend, sorry to break the news, that’s women for you.
‘I told you there wasn’t anyone else.’
‘What a learning curve this is proving to be,’ Jon said, gnomically, after a pause, and stalked back to the front room, which seemed a twattish statement, given he’d learned nothing.
It was ironic that in tearing into Harriet for going, Jon had only confirmed to Harriet that it was the right decision.
Dating sites? You don’t really land a blow by accusing someone of something ridiculous, she thought, you only make yourself look ridiculous. Jon was drifting into paranoia.
Harriet knew why he wanted her to stay longer: he thought he was vividly demonstrating how wrong she’d been. For her to come home to the domestic idyll of lamb shanks and expensive Bordeaux and Fields Of Gold and start to wonder if she’d been gripped by some skittish madness at the hotel in the Dales. Did he have a fundamental inability to take her seriously? Harriet pulled her shoes off and lay down on the bed.
As she stared at the ceiling, the strangest of messages arrived on her phone.
Jacqueline Barraclough
Now I know Jon said you were having a long engagement but no harm in being prepared. This boutique is absolutely delicious and she has appointments free the week after next …
Harriet sat bolt upright and reread the words three times, then a fourth, while she tried in vain to invent a context that made sense of it. What the …? She checked the time and date, in case it had been logjammed in the system for ages. It hadn’t, and the long engagement detail was distinctly bizarre. That was what Jon offered her during their break-up?
She sprang from the bed and ran into the sitting room, where Jon was on the sofa, staring morosely into the middle distance rather than at the television, wine glass topped to the brim. Many tea lights flickered in his decorative tea light tower.
‘Jon,’ Harriet said, quivering with the adrenaline of the incipient clash, ‘Why have I had a text from your mum suggesting we go bridal dress shopping?’
She held the iPhone up, as if he needed to be reminded what a mobile was.
‘Oh. I haven’t told them yet.’ That Jon didn’t react with the slightest embarrassment told Harriet that he was in a major strop.
‘Uhm, why?’
‘I decided to put them off until I felt ready to discuss it. That’s my right with my family, isn’t it? Or did I lose all rights here?’
Harriet stiffened at the evident nastiness in his tone, felt an old familiar fear. She forced herself to mimic confidence.
‘It’s not your right to lie about me, no, nor not to warn me. I’m fielding messages about a wedding that isn’t happening from your mum? What the hell am I supposed to say?’
‘Ignore her. Fob her off. You’ve managed it well enough when it suited you.’
Jon took a large swig of wine.
‘What the fuck is that meant to mean?!’
Jon ignored her.
‘You’re acting as if I wasn’t allowed to make a choice here?’ Harriet continued. She was taken aback at how unreasonable he was being. Reason was one of the keynote Jon qualities.
‘Oh, you had one. You made it. The bad news is that I get choices, too.’
Harriet put a palm to her forehead in frustration. ‘Can you stop enigmatically pronouncing like some sort of Obi-Wan of scorned men and actually discuss this like a human being? It’s not OK to put me in a position where I have to lie, is it? I presume you don’t want me to reply: “Sorry Jackie, has he not said we’ve split up”?’ Harriet waved her phone by way of illustration, but also as a threat.
‘I’m seeing them next week at their barbecue, I’ll tell them then,’ Jon said sullenly, and Harriet sensed her implied threat had done the job. ‘Just ignore it.’
Urgh. The Barracloughs’ annual barbecue at their sprawling manor in Ilkley, she’d forgotten about that calendar fixture. Jackie made jugs of Pimm’s and Martin Senior manned a top-of-the-range outdoor oven called Broil King. One time Harriet had timidly asked for a semi-raw sausage to get another few minutes’ cooking, and Martin Senior acted as if she’d ridiculed his exposed manhood. ‘Nonsense, that’s the correct texture!’ he said, inspecting its Barbie-pink innards. ‘They’re not fairground-quality bangers, you know,’ he added, to make it clear Harriet was too common to understand an artisanal meat product.
Never having to suffer his parents again was a joyous bonus of leaving Jon, no doubt about it.
Yet Harriet was blindsided by the oddness of Jon’s reluctance to tell them. What on earth was he doing?
‘What did you tell them to explain why we’d left so early? I thought Barty knew anyway?’
‘I told them you had a stomach flu and we were only joshing with Barty. Felt good to undermine the little turd, to be honest. I’m damned if he’s going to be town crier of my private business.’
So much for Barty being entitled to a grotty phase.
Jon must’ve gone really all out with the ingratiating bluster to allay their suspicions, after Barty dropped his exclusive bombshell and the happily engaged couple were nowhere to be seen.
“’Stomach flu” the morning after a boozy night is only going to be interpreted as “hanging out of her arse”, isn’t it?’ Harriet said, frowning.
‘No, I don’t think they thought that …’ Jon said vaguely, which meant: I didn’t think about whether they thought that.
‘This is crazy. When you tell them the truth, they’re going to realise you made my illness up?’
‘For me to worry about, isn’t it?’
It wasn’t. As Harriet climbed the stairs, having concluded she’d get no sense out of Jon, she felt the mediocre disgrace of it smeared all over her. It was bad enough she’d ditched the beloved younger son of the Barraclough family, but when it was revealed they’d been bullshitted – and Barty had been right, the poor lamb! – the whole thing would be a scandal.
No doubt they’d take it as proof of how deeply distraught Jon was that he’d do such an out-of-character, desperate thing, and it would intensify their disgust at her.
Oh, well. Aside from receiving death stares in chance meetings in department stores, she’d never have to face any of them again.
If there was one thing she was sure of, the Barracloughs weren’t the types to offer any bon voyage! fond farewells. By leaving Jonathan, she’d made herself a Bad Person. They were one of those families who were hard enough to marry into but would be even worse to divorce out of.
Back in the spare room, Harriet marvelled at the stupidity of Jon telling such short-termist, pointless, self-defeating lies. He’d now have the mortification of copping to them over a corn on the cob from the Broil King, probably in earshot of Ilkley’s braying high society.
When the answer dawned on her, it was as though she actually had the phantom stomach flu.
Her departure had screwed up a secret timetable.
Jon had gambled he’d have persuaded Harriet to stay by then.