Next we take a long bath together – as we used to do but this is a far superior bath tub than any our skint youth ever brought us – and we plan to leave and start over. We’re glad we’ve lost those years because of our children and we’re relieved that we have that caveat because otherwise the pain of that loss and that waste would be too much to deal with.
I picture it over and over, this scene.
But it’s not real.
It does not happen because my answer to Ollie is no. It has to be a no, doesn’t it, if I am giving my marriage even a fighting chance. Currently it clings to the rafters, bloody of lip with a clump of hair yanked out of its skull. It needs all the help it can get. But I am doing it for past me, who used to stare at Ed in bed and think I’d never seen a man so beautiful. Who used to look at our life and our family and our home that looked like a Pinterest board and think this, this is the stuff of fantasy. I wasn’t the only one who thought that either; why d’you think Cheshire Mama is so successful?
We made small talk at first, Ed and I, when we met at the agency and then one day he asked me for a drink. We had this physical chemistry that meant I slept with him after two dates, and that felt like I had waited a year. Something about us clicked into place and I was excited too, about being part of his close family and its big, fancy gated mansion in the country and their annual Salloway Sports Day and their four-course meals and their poshness. I made him laugh until he roared, I knew, and he used to stare at me regularly. ‘I’ve never seen a face I like so much,’ he said, a month or two in. ‘Never take this face away.’
So I tell Ollie no, for that Ed and that me, and then I lie there and carry on imagining that other world, where I had said yes and Ollie and I picked up where we left off, the new us, and found out exactly how that worked.
I dip back down under water.
You wanted respectable, Scarlett, then this is the sort of sacrifice respectable people make. You think respectable people aren’t tempted? Hardly. They just learn to say no, over and over, to the late night and the single-use plastic and the chips for dinner and the fourth gin and the affair. Definitely to the affair.
But Ollie.
My phone beeps and it’s one word in response to my negative. Shame.
I tilt my head back against the tub and groan.
My phone beeps again.
Any luck with Mitch?
It’s no harm to tell him about that, surely, to keep the line of communication open to pass on this information. It concerns him too, after all.
He says he didn’t do it, I say. I met him for a drink.
I should have messaged and told him that, I realise. It impacts him as well.
Sorry I didn’t tell you, my brain is all over the place, I write.
And what do you think?
My gut instinct was that he was telling the truth.
Ollie is typing. Like we’re friends now and I don’t know why but I’m glad. But if not him, who? Who would have had access to his phone?
I sit back. Don’t reply as I don’t know, and I feel stupid for not knowing. I should be able to solve this; it should be intuitive.
Website operator says the video was posted in Cheshire, I tell him. He’s in my team now; there’s going to have to be some trust.
I have no idea how they would have got hold of the video, but any exes bitter when you left them and based there? he says. I know how much being dumped by Scarlett can hurt.
A few months after we had the night with Mitch, things had completely unravelled in my brain. I was struggling, and booze and nights out were making it worse.
When a friend told me she wanted to get off the party circuit and was looking for a buddy to go travelling with, I took out a credit card and said yes because I had been waiting for something like this to break the cycle and I ended it with Ollie abruptly, like a coward. A phone call, the night before I got on a plane, after all that we had been through.
‘Is this because of what happened with Mitch?’ he asked me that night, speaking into the last days of the landline.
I was silent. In a way, I thought. Kind of.
‘I regret it,’ he carried on, crying. ‘It’s taken something away from us, I know, an intimacy, but we can get it back, Scarlett. We have a lifetime to get it back. We can have another baby. A family. Don’t end this.’
I sounded cold in my effort not to cry but I promised to call him when I got back from my trip. I went away for three months. We never spoke again, until this.
I am an in or out person, always have been. I got rid of my phone and picked up a pay-as-you-go for the trip, and it was easy to disappear when you left the country back then. You didn’t update social media, you only paid the obscene prices to message if it were an emergency.
When I got home, I moved in to my dad’s house and saved up some money.
I had started to get into the advent of social media and I got work experience at a digital marketing agency and I applied myself to it with as much dedication as I used
