Page 14 of Mad About You

In the hallway, Jon checked his phone, scowled, said nothing, and strode off to make calls in the garden.

8

In the atmospheric, dimly lit gloaming of the deserted restaurant dining room in Headingley, Harriet’s friend Lorna leapt from her seat, pushing her chair back with a loud scrape and theatrically clutching her collarbones.

‘Oh FUCK YES! I thought you were going to tell me you were MARRYING THE CLOWN. OH GOD, THE RELIEF. I’m shaking here, I’m shaking, look at me!’

Lorna held out her hands for inspection of the tremors and Harriet blinked in surprise, momentarily speechless.

She’d told Lorna she wanted to tell her something, and Lorna had said guardedlyalright, will our usual Thursday night date at my place do. They pretty much always met for weeknight lock-in drinks at Lorna’s restaurant, Harriet’s job preventing most Friday and Saturday plans.

Lorna had looked wary on Harriet’s arrival and Harriet felt shesawher brace as she made her announcement. However, at the words, ‘I’ve left Jon,’ Lorna exploded like a ticker-tape parade.Clown?

‘You … didn’t like Jon?’ Harriet turned this idea over in her mind while she worked out how she felt about it. Shedidn’t think she’d been rosy spectacled in this matter – she had judged Lorna’s feelings towards Jon as hovering somewhere around ‘good-natured, mild contempt’. Yet this level of jubilation had really startled her.

Harriet decided she was three-quarters intrigued and a quarter defensive of Jon, mostly out of guilt.

Lorna sat down again. ‘I mean also, sorry for your loss or whatever I’m supposed to say’ – Harriet belly-laughed at this – ‘but it was one hundred per cent completely the right decision, you know that?’

Harriet nodded, sadly. ‘I feel awful that I hurt him so much though. I should’ve done it ages ago, not let it drift until he imagined we were going to get married.’

Obviously, having kids stayed as an unformed, hazy expectation too. Unlike marriage, Harriet had no objection, though equally they’d never discussed it. She suspected Jon’s family wouldn’t like pregnancies among unweds, so he thought he’d fix A to move smoothly to B. It was amazing the size of icebergs you could mutually ignore, really.

‘Did IlikeJon …?’ Lorna continued, ‘I didn’t actively loathe him or anything. But … I felt his effect on you was pernicious and he was completely wrong for you. The longer your relationship went on, the less time I had for him. Yes, alright, there’s sufficient material there to say dislike. You could certainly make a miniskirt from the amount of fabric of my dislike.’

‘So if I had been saying I was marrying Jon, I’d have gone the rest of my life not knowing my best friend detested my husband?’

‘Oh no.’ Lorna barked a laugh. ‘I’d have told you. I’d have risked it. I thought I was going to have to tonight, that’s why I was absolutely bricking it.’

Ah. The adrenaline powering Lorna’s rejoicing was principally due to avoiding what she’d anticipated might be a traumatic falling out.

‘This calls for the good wine and the better music,’ Lorna said, jumping up again to first stab at her phone to play George Michael on her duck-egg blue Roberts Beacon Bluetooth (everything in the place was high-end hipster kitsch) then marching over to authoritatively rifle through the illuminated fridges behind the bar.

In a previous lifetime, Lorna had worked for a mobile phone company and hated it. In her late twenties, she got a big compensation payout when she broke her leg falling into an uncovered manhole. (‘They didn’t need to know I’d had a party pack of Desperados and was doing thePulp Fictiondance with Gethin from IT in order to get off with him. Needless to say, I got no fucking action with my leg in traction, he didn’t even call.’)

She used both the recuperation period and the cash to relaunch her life as the owner of Divertimento, a bistro-bar serving Mediterranean dishes. The Dive, as she always called it, was her baby, and: ‘Much like a parent, I spend all my time stressed and knackered by it, yet somehow never loving it any less.’

Lorna plonked a bottle of orange wine between them and as she poured it out, Harriet described the ring-box-on-a-plate farrago.

Lorna’s mouth fell open. ‘You call that misjudgement; know what I call it? Massively selfish. Only someone who didn’t really care about theactual qualities of the person he was proposing towould pull such shit. He treated you like a prize pet pig. Feeding you acorns and taking you to show.’

‘He isn’t that bad! He isn’t callous. He’d not think of it that way.’

‘If he’s only treating you as a vacuous trophy by accident, Hatley, and he’s notintendingto do it … what’s the meaningful difference in outcome anyway? He’s still doing it.’

‘Hmmm.’

She’d never thought of Jon in these philosophical terms before. If you blithely assume everything should go your way, is it that different from fixing it in your favour? If he forgot to consider Harriet’s feelings, was it a world away from not caring what they were?

She had dwelled since on how completely absent her wishes had to have been from his accounting. The mental process must’ve gone: I Love Harriet → I Love My Family → I Love The Idea Of Marrying Her = bingo, it’s all love. Yet without noticing ‘I’ prefixed every aspect.

‘And I had an issue with the money,’ Lorna said, after taking a hearty swig of her wine. ‘I never said anything because I know you’re not materialistic. He bought you, and what’s more, he knew full well he was doing it.’

This was clearly Lorna at last breathing out, getting comfy, after two years in a constrictive corset. (And Lorna might be in a literal corset; tonight she was wearing a banana-yellow chiffon prom dress and hot-pink Birkenstocks. Divertimentowas known for the wild fashion of its bleach-blonde owner-proprietor. Jon once said everything Lorna wore looked like ‘she lost a bet’, which wasn’t said in approval and yet actually described the thrill of her style brilliantly. Except she’d always won the bet, in Harriet’s opinion.)

‘So … that suggests I was for sale, which is my fault?’ Harriet said.

‘No. It was more insidious than that. Whenever you were in danger of coming to your senses in a period of quiet reflection, it was “How about a weekend in Reykjavik!” or “Let’s go to this incredible place in York to try the tasting menu” or “Have your friends round for dinner in my palace and I’ll chuck my wine cellar around”.’

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