6
He stared at her, eyes wide, skin turning a terrible lime-white colour, chalky, like the paintwork. It was his spirit dying, in real time.
Eventually he said: ‘You can’t be serious …? You’re breaking up with me?’
‘Yes.’
‘… Because I botched a proposal?! Harriet, this is ridiculous. You’re quite right to be angry but let’s not turn this into a full-tilt drama.’ He paused. ‘I don’t need any more punishment to understand how upset you are.’
She hard-gulped, as the tears surged up. ‘I’d hardly say this and not mean it, to punish you. That would be vile.’
‘Then why say it now?’
Harriet said, thickly: ‘You’ve kind of forced the issue tonight.’
‘So you weren’t happy before I proposed?’
Deep breath. Say it.
‘No.’
Jon said: ‘Really?’ in a broken voice, which was a small stab to her heart.
‘Yes.’
‘You don’t love me?’
Harriet closed her eyes. ‘Not in the way I need to.’
‘What the hell does that mean?’
‘Just … what I said.’ She opened them again. It was as if Jon was shrinking inside his clothes. She hated herself.
‘How do you love me then? Like a hamster?’
‘… I feel this has run its course.’
‘Oh, all the lazy cliches coming out tonight! What’s up next, you love me but you’re not in love with me?’
Harriet said nothing.
She realised she had on some level known that this conversation would be barely any less traumatic for her, which was partly why she’d never looked directly at it. Harriet was not skilled at antagonism.
Yet it was still even worse than she could have imagined. The version in her head didn’t have this ugly, hollow quality to the air around them, as if the oxygen levels had plummeted.
Jon walked across the room and sat on the bed, head in hands. When he looked up again, his eyes were red.
‘A moment ago, I was getting married to the love of my life. This can’t be happening.’
‘You weren’t getting married,’ Harriet said, quietly, rubbing a hand across her eyes. In the face of Jon’s pain, it felt manipulative to cry, so she pushed it down as far as it could go.
‘No. No, seems I wasn’t. Fucking hell.’
He held his hands out, in exasperation.
‘I don’t understand, we were happy. You seemed perfectly happy? What the fuck, Harriet?’
‘I was happy! I was happy loads. I don’t regret our time together.’ That wasn’t entirely true, but compassionate lying had its place. ‘But we’re very different people, Jon. Tonight proved that.’
‘What can I do, what can I say to persuade you not to do this?’
Deep breath: say it.
‘Nothing.’ Harriet tried to say this gently, though obviously it wasn’t gentle. ‘I’m going to pack and get an Uber home, if there’s any near enough.’
Jon’s head snapped up. ‘Oh no, at this hour? Don’t be ridiculous! I can sleep on the floor if you want.’ Harriet couldn’t decide if his insistence on this was gentlemanly or martyrdom – either way, it made her grit her teeth.
‘I very much do not want to see your family tomorrow,’ Harriet said.
Jon paused, clearly realising he was going to have to face them too, and despite their shared misery, Harriet still felt some vindication that he finally comprehended how demented it was to involve them.
‘We could leave very early tomorrow morning,’ Jon said.
Harriet paused. It made more sense than trying to run from the middle of nowhere at midnight. But the trouble with Jon’s plan was that it meant many more hours in his company. He’d use it to press her to change her mind and even if he didn’t, being in a small space with someone you’d broken up with – possibly simply broken – for many hours was a gruelling prospect. However, it’d be worse to find no taxi could get to her, and then, shabbily, take Jon up on his offer. And fleeing the scene of the crime was an illusion – she’d only be going to his house, to sleep in his spare room. Proximity to Jon couldn’t be avoided, for the time being.
‘OK,’ she said at last. ‘But I’ll sleep on the floor.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ Jon said, and she knew his chivalry wouldn’t allow it.
Examination of the bedding revealed there wasn’t any way to disassemble it that made any sense, but the bed itself was vast, so they agreed to share it. It also humiliatingly revealed that Jonathan had apparently tasked someone with scattering rose petals on it. Harriet had to wordlessly brush them away as if it was lint. They took turns changing in the bathroom, then lay stiffly in the dark, bolster pillow between them, trying to breathe silently, the room filled with the cacophony of their thoughts.
Harriet woke to the sound of the toilet flushing at dawn, thin grey sunshine seeping in at the edges of the brocade curtains. The gruesome script of their break-up had kept her awake, replaying its lowlights, and her skin still prickled in the aftermath. She pushed herself up on her elbows as Jon came out of the bathroom. Only now in the gloom, she saw there was a bottle of champagne on a side table that had clearly been delivered while they ate dinner, unopened in its tin bucket of melted ice, two spotless flutes.
‘Harriet. Please don’t leave me.’
She focused on Jon’s face in the half darkness, which was shining wet with tears.
‘Please. I’m begging you. This is breaking my heart. I can’t imagine life without you, Harriet. Please. Stay.’
Harriet said, her voice hoarse: ‘I can’t. I’m sorry.’
‘What if we agreed to some time apart, had a break?’
‘It wouldn’t change anything.’
‘Is there someone else?’
‘One hundred per cent, no.’
Jon gasped back a sob.
‘Do you know, I almost wished there was. Because then there’d be a reason. A person I could compete with …’
‘Jon,’ Harriet said, as softly as she could, a hot tear sliding down her own cheek. ‘You haven’t done anything wrong. Apart from the proposal.’
‘Apart from not being who you want.’
He put a palm over his face and cried, the kind of crying that rattles your ribcage. She couldn’t hold him; the contact would feel wrong. For the first time since the door had closed on them last night, she allowed her own sobbing, drying her face roughly with her pyjama sleeve.
It was completely harrowing to choose to shatter another person like this. It wasn’t a choice, she told herself – except it was, because it was within her gift to not break up. She kept her weeping silent, bit it back, because it felt like giving him false hope that she was going to regret her decision – agreeing that it might be a mistake.
She was scared of her decision – scared at passing up someone who cared for her so much, scared of the loneliness on the other side, of having to go back to dating, of being single at thirty-four and what that might mean. But even in the teeth of that fear, she knew no part of it was second thoughts. The only upside to spending so long in an emotional limbo was the value she could now place on her certainty. As terrible as doing this was, knowing and avoiding that she needed to do it was worse.
‘How long have you been unhappy?’ Jon said, when he could speak again.
Harriet was ashamed of the truth, of the first incontrovertible sign. Coming back from our first holiday together in Barcelona and you made a joke about how we’d return in twenty years and I had to stop myself from physically flinching at the idea. Stop being such a pathetic commitment-phobe, she’d told herself. Happiness wasn’t a constant with anyone, it was an elusive, nebulous, fluctuating thing. She’d told herself she couldn’t accurately gauge it. No one splits up with anyone the second they feel conflicted, or bored. Or maybe they do, but it makes them Warren Beatty in the 1970s.
‘I don’t know. A few months?’
‘Months?! Why not tell me before? Say to me you were having doubts?’
‘I had to know my doubts were real, first.’
‘When would you have said something, if I hadn’t proposed last night?’
She looked away. ‘I don’t know.’
‘You knew you were going to finish this, break my heart, and yet you were coming to weekends like this?’
‘I didn’t know what to say and when to say it. When is the best time to break someone’s heart?’
Jon shook his head in disbelief. He gave an answer that was both quintessentially managerial Jon, and, she feared, infinitely wise.
‘As soon as possible.’