Page 12 of Mad About You

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.’

7

You get what you pay for, and at the hotel Jonathan had paid for, they got discreet, supposedly incurious serenity at the sight of the newly (un)engaged couple doing a flit – Harriet didn’t doubt the staff recognised them, given Jonathan’s extensive arrangements.

They might’ve imagined it was some sort of amorous impulsiveness, like they were about to floor it to Gretna Green, except for the fact Jon and Harriet were both as edgy during the checkout as a pair of bank robbers waiting for the cashier to empty the till.

What on earth is going on there?the staff would say, as soon as Jon’s Merc scrunched away with a spray of gravel.

As they dragged their trolley cases past the dining room, Jon said: ‘Right, it’s inclusive, so if we move like lightning …’

‘You’re not seriously suggesting we have breakfast?’ Harriet hissed. ‘It’s already seven a.m.!’

Every minute he’d spent in the shower this morning had felt like he was trolling her. Jon’s promise of a ‘very early’ departure was now, timewise, well into overlapping on the Venndiagram with ‘the kind of hour that sixty-somethings get up and potter around with theTelegraphover a decaf coffee’.

The thought of Jacqueline appearing round a corner, wreathed in Jo Malone Pear & Freesia and schadenfreude, was making Harriet ill.

‘I’ve got to grabsomethingor else it could provoke a migraine,’ Jonathan hissed. ‘I’ll wrap a croissant in a napkin.’

Harriet suppressed fury. ‘If you must.’

For ‘migraine’ he meant a ‘bit of a headache’ – headaches always conveniently and passively aggressively brought on by anything in his environment not entirely to his liking. The way he finicked over his own health needs had always given Harriet a slight shudder. She once saw him tell a waiter in The Wolseley: ‘No fresh orange juice for me thanks, it’s gastric carnage an hour later. Like a Roman candle. Something to do with the acidity.’

Harriet didn’t want to accompany Jon to the buffet but she sure as hell didn’t want to risk an encounter with anyone they knew while standing on her own, so she followed him through.

They both stopped dead in the doorway at the sight of Barty, alone, calmly picking his way through an absolutely gigantic full English, with three fat sausages, extra granary toast and a fruit salad on the side.

‘Why are you here?!’ Jon blurted, and for once, Harriet had to allow that the insolent Barty comeback of ‘Why areyouhere?’ was justified.

Even in the nasty shock of discovery, Harriet spent a split second admiring Barty’s audacity. He was surely going downfor three counts of ‘Conspiracy to Defraud’ and one of ‘Impersonating a Sheikh’ at the Old Bailey in the future.

In the turmoil of the previous evening and the agony of this morning, neither Jon nor Harriet had strategised for running into his family, and their asking where and why they were going.

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