42
Harriet woke at dawn, and despite a head full of bees, had perfect clarity about what she’d do next.
Harriet knew that Jon a) habitually got up at bastard early o’clock (‘One of the habits of highly effective people, Hatmandu!’) and b) would’ve been warned by Roxy that she knew, and be waiting for her to make contact.
That was the point of what he’d done, after all, she thought, as she scrubbed at her furred tongue with her toothbrush.
How Roxanne could be participant in her exploitation, and not really care, was baffling to Harriet. She’d not want to be used by a man as a weapon. Harriet was confident this wasn’t her ego speaking: she was sure Jon thought Roxy a glittering trophy, most men did. But Jon was distraught about Harriet, only weeks ago. Of course he’d not spontaneously fallen for one of her best mates in the time it takes milk to turn.
As she rinsed and spat, she was reminded of a phrase of Cal’s, to Kit: this isn’t how human beings work.
The one benefit to the agony of being awake at this hour was not having to see Cal before she left the house. The idiocies of her behaviour last night kept revisiting her, in agonising flashbacks. The Deceased Husband montage, aaaaaaargh.
She rationalised – Cal couldn’t not know he was good-looking, and he could’ve reasonably guessed Harriet thought he was good-looking. She hadn’t given that much away, if you were going to be hyper-logical about it. Yet her having told him this, in so many words, was exquisitely embarrassing. You have a lovely face?! God, NO.
Oh God, oh God – wait, did she make a joke about him undressing her?! That was halfway to a real come on? Oh God. BRING ON DEATH. Which, inspecting her reflection, looked as if it was on its way and stuck in traffic. Bloodshot eyes were magnified by glasses.
She didn’t want to risk waking him with a phone ping, so Harriet scrawled Cal a message, which she propped next to the kettle.
SORRY FOR BEING SUCH A PISS ARTIST and thanks for putting me to bed if you fancy an apology takeaway later, it’s on me. H x
Then she sent a WhatsApp:
Hi Jon. I’m coming round to see you in an hour, if you’re in?
Near-instant response, as she anticipated.
To what do I owe the honour, etc etc. Be great to see you.
Harriet didn’t have to ask whether Roxy would be there. She felt sure that as soon as Jon told her that Harriet was steaming over, Roxy would be out of Roundhay Towers as fast as her LK Bennett ruby suede courts with scallop detailing could carry her.
Harriet bought herself a drive-through McDonald’s en route, wolfing down McNuggets and a large fries in goblin fashion, before wiping her hands on paper napkins and checking for stray ketchup in the wing mirror. She noisily gurgle-drained the Coke and threw the bag in the bin with a bullseye shot as she drove past, feeling like a maverick detective in a TV drama who got casework results at the expense of a functional family life.
She parked up on Jon’s drive in her VW Polo with an assertive crank of the handbrake, then marched to the door and rang the bell, which came complete with Ring Video. Harriet always thought that was needlessly showy. As if Jon thought he might have the kind of demise to feature in an award-winning murder podcast, and instead recorded hours of footage of DPD drivers and next door’s cat defecating.
‘Hey, Hats! I wonder what you want to talk about,’ Jon said with faux-jollity, crackling through the intercom. He opened the door, dressed for squash and looking inordinately pleased with himself.
‘That would be you involving yourself with one of my closest friends.’
‘Oh, do you have an opinion about that? That’s a shame for you.’ Jon folded his arms. ‘Do come in.’
Harriet stepped into the hallway.
‘What’s got into you?’ she asked.
‘You. You got into me. Then you left. You made it clear you weren’t coming back. No more Mr Nice Guy, I’m afraid.’
‘You’re admitting this is about interfering in my life?’
‘Your life? I’m an adult. Roxanne is an adult.’
‘I’m not saying I can legally prevent you, Jon. But it’s a horrible way to behave, and you know it.’
Jon leant against the wall and looked her up and down. Harriet had a feeling he’d been scripting this showdown in his mind, for a while. What he’d needed was her attention, and now he had it.
‘Gav made the observation recently, all women on dating sites say they’re looking for the click, the spark, good sense of humour, personality. Yet mysteriously, there’s no dull man on £100k a year who “can’t find love”.’
Harriet frowned: ‘What’s that meant to—’
‘It got me thinking about how everyone else goes after exactly what they want, in this game. They just don’t own it. I’ve always been so low on confidence, held myself to such high standards. Why not have what I want? Your friend flirted with me, and I thought: why not?’
‘Because it’s treacherous, insulting to me, and has blown apart a friendship I’ve had for over fifteen years? Plus you’re cynically using Roxanne to injure me.’
‘Oh and no women have cynically used me, I suppose?’
‘Jesus Christ, Jon, listen to yourself! You’re going to end up on talk radio saying women are the real Taliban. If I’d left you and immediately started sleeping with Gavin, that’s equivalent. That’d give you some idea of how despicable this is.’
‘The man you DID immediately start sleeping with causes me no less anguish.’
‘I’m not sleeping with anyone! I told you, I didn’t know Cal. I’d have thought your girlfriend could confirm that, given she introduced us.’
‘Very much not the impression my mother was given.’
‘Ah yes, your mum. You handed her my address, you didn’t warn me, or ask my permission. You were perfectly happy for her to turn up and verbally lambast me.’
‘From what she said, you gave as good as you got.’
Harriet exhaled sharply at the futility of holding Jon to account. Nothing was ever his fault. If he didn’t want to see something, he simply didn’t. The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Jon.
‘And are you forgetting that your pal stuck his oar in? No euphemism, though maybe it should be,’ Jon said. She could see, under the ‘Patrick Bateman of racquet sports’ routine, how angry he still was.
He was so warped by intervening events, he even looked changed: his eyes and the bones of his face were sharper and harder, the lines deeper. Or then again, perhaps he’d played tons of squash and lost weight.
‘Cal overheard her fulminating about how I’d die a spinster after breaking up with you. He was incensed on my behalf. Given how you’d behaved, you can hardly blame him for not being a fan of the Barraclough dynasty.’
‘Oh, what convoluted crap. He’s only doing that because he’s got what we quaintly call the major hots for you.’
‘You deduced that on a visit where you turned up steaming drunk and smacked him in the face?!’
‘No. I deduced that when I called him at his place of work, to apologise for said incident.’
Jon blinked and looked away and Harriet kept her face straight while thinking: what?
‘You … you called him?’ she asked, trying to remain dispassionate while unsure of her ground.
‘Well. It was only right that I apologised. It was the right thing to do.’ He looked uncomfortable and Harriet sussed that it was a ‘getting out in front of the situation’ in order to protect his employment, and his masculinity couldn’t bear for her to know he’d done some tactical grovelling. He shifted his weight. ‘We both agreed to keep the conversation between us. He said he’d not press charges if I stayed away from you. I hardly think that’s a pact you’d make if you weren’t pretty keen on the lady involved.’
‘I think Cal was trying to keep things calm around his property,’ Harriet said, uncertainly.
‘Hah. The property being a redhead. I know my enemy when I encounter him. I’ll start practising my surprised face for when news of your marriage reaches me. Despite your trenchant objections.’
He rolled his eyes. Harriet didn’t know how to respond to this lunacy.
‘The bottom line here, Hats, is I don’t care if you’ve finally experienced some agonies, or if I’ve stepped over imaginary lines you’ve drawn. If you’ve come here to ask me to feel remorseful for exercising my single-guy freedoms, you’re shit out of luck.’
Harriet’s hangover, the effective loss of a dear friend, the upheavals of Scott Dyer: her response was more of an exhausted outburst.
‘OK then! Congratulations on being a shitty person with some seriously twisted, misogynistic justifications for hate-shagging one of his ex’s best friends, weeks after our break-up. My respect for you is entirely gone,’ Harriet said.
‘It was never there in the first place,’ he shot back.
‘That’s not true. What happened to your goodbyes to me, saying you wanted to stay on good terms, be there for me if I ever wanted to talk?’
Jon looked uneasy. ‘I realised it wasn’t being reciprocated.’
‘Translation: that offer wasn’t without strings, I was supposed to start rewarding it somehow. You think you treat women as equals, but you don’t. You liked and respected me for as long as I was your girlfriend. When I didn’t want a relationship anymore, it was apparently inconceivable to you to both be sad and carry on liking me and respecting me. You using Roxy is part of the same contempt.’
‘Roxanne is a fling. That’s all.’
God, was she supposed to be jealous, to fight to win Jon back?
‘Cool. Whatever. It makes no difference to me, though you should probably tell her.’
Harriet turned to leave, and Jon said: ‘Wait. There’s something I want to say.’
He cleared his throat. When he spoke, he was level, the cocky register had gone.
‘I always knew you weren’t in love with me.’
These words hung in the particularly velvet silence of a cavernous house full of purring appliances.
‘I knew I had you on the rebound – I know now from who – and I decided not to question my luck. Because I knew from our first date that I was an absolute goner. You weren’t anything like the women I’d been out with before, or what I’d have said I was looking for. Then there you were. Everything I didn’t know I wanted, and somehow that is the most addictive thing of all. With your dry humour and your modesty and that face and that laugh. That vulnerability you’re so determined not to display. I decided to be the best partner I could be, to throw my energies into that and hope either that would be enough, or that you’d fall in love along the way. But as you said, you didn’t feel what you needed to feel and I think you knew that very early on. So what I think now is … it wasn’t fair for you to carry on. You’re too emotionally intelligent not to have known how far apart our expectations were. And,’ he paused here, distress crossing his face, ‘I think with that proposal, I was subconsciously trying to trap you. I knew I’d not get a yes, fair and square. Which is an awful culpability to have to admit on my part. But getting to that point? I think you have to admit it’s both our faults.’
Harriet’s stomach clenched. This was deeply uncomfortable to hear, because it was mostly, if not wholly, accurate.
‘I’m told the character, your ex who posted on Facebook, is a truly nasty piece of work. I certainly didn’t recognise the person he described,’ Jon added.
Harriet folded her arms, across the pain behind her ribs.
‘In summary. I’m truly sorry for the ordeal you had before you met me, a lot makes more sense now I know about him. But my God, you made us both pay for it,’ Jon said, his voice raw.
Harriet swallowed and forced herself to meet his eyes, as they welled up. She weighed her words, before she spoke, and willed her voice to stay steady.
‘You’re right. But I didn’t fail to tell you about Scott to purposely shut you out; I shut myself out from it too. I wanted to carry on my life without it being important to me, so I acted like it wasn’t. Maybe it was the same coping mechanism I had with my parents. If you give something bad an importance, then you let it define you. You’ve given it power, that’s what I thought. But in fact, by not facing it, I was giving it power over me.’ She took a deep breath, as the next words weren’t easy to say. ‘I didn’t set out to hurt you, Jon. I felt safe with you, and in the end that wasn’t enough. I’m sorry.’
Harriet’s eyes shimmered and Jon nodded. He waited for her to continue. She sensed in the ensuing pause he wanted more discussion about Scott: no way, not now. Not with Roxy’s caramel-coloured hair in his shower plug hole.
This was the crux of it: Jon had legitimate complaints, but his recent behaviour had blown them out of the water. Expecting her full disclosure now, it was the equivalent of breaking the lock on someone’s diary and then hoping they trust you with their innermost secrets. Some lines crossed can’t be walked back.
She went to let herself out.
‘Harriet?’ he said, as she left.
Jon leaned on the wall and smiled a broken smile.
‘The thing is. I’d still take you back.’
‘Yes,’ Harriet said, ‘I know. Treat Roxanne well, won’t you? She’s not got friends looking out for her anymore.’