Page 22 of Mad About You

‘What?! It’ll have been two weeks?’

‘Roxy was helpful,’ Harriet said.

‘Amazing. Some indecent haste. You really can’t bear to be around me, can you?’ Jon said, the jazzy atmosphere disappearing in a puff of smoke.

Harriet was too tired to be diplomatic.

‘What do you think separating means?’

‘I didn’t think it meant you rushing out so fast there were tyre marks on my driveway.’

‘Was I supposed to stay in your spare room for months?’

‘… Are you on dating sites yet?’ Jon said, hesitantly.

‘What? Are you serious?’

‘Yes.’

Harriet did a double take. ‘Yes, Jon, I’m already on five of them and telling the dates I’m not having to not come back to my place, which is your place.’

He sniffed. ‘Just checking.’

‘What the hell? Why would I be dating days after we ended?’

‘How am I meant to understand any of this, Harriet? You seem to think there’s a rulebook. I’d love to see it if so, because I’m at a loss.’

She frowned.

Earlier in the week, Jon had gone out for a game of squash and obviously a heart-to-heart with his friend Gavin. Gav was someone she’d always kept at arm’s length, finding him friendly enough, but perfumed with heady base notes of chauvinism and snobbery. She knew Gavin thought she was a scrubber of undistinguished origins who had lucked out in snaring Jon. He’d have gloried in all this, and likely pumpedJon full ofthere will definitely be Someone Else, my friend, sorry to break the news, that’s women for you.

‘I told you there wasn’t anyone else.’

‘What a learning curve this is proving to be,’ Jon said, gnomically, after a pause, and stalked back to the front room, which seemed a twattish statement, given he’d learned nothing.

It was ironic that in tearing into Harriet for going, Jon had only confirmed to Harriet that it was the right decision.

Dating sites? You don’t really land a blow by accusing someone of something ridiculous, she thought, you only make yourself look ridiculous. Jon was drifting into paranoia.

Harriet knew why he wanted her to stay longer: he thought he was vividly demonstrating how wrong she’d been. For her to come home to the domestic idyll of lamb shanks and expensive Bordeaux andFields Of Goldand start to wonder if she’d been gripped by some skittish madness at the hotel in the Dales. Did he have a fundamental inability to take her seriously? Harriet pulled her shoes off and lay down on the bed.

As she stared at the ceiling, the strangest of messages arrived on her phone.

Jacqueline Barraclough

Now I know Jon said you were having a long engagement but no harm in being prepared. This boutique is absolutely delicious and she has appointments free the week after next …

Harriet sat bolt upright and reread the words three times, then a fourth, while she tried in vain to invent a context that made sense of it. What the …? She checked the time anddate, in case it had been logjammed in the system for ages. It hadn’t, and thelong engagementdetail was distinctly bizarre. That was what Jon offered her during their break-up?

She sprang from the bed and ran into the sitting room, where Jon was on the sofa, staring morosely into the middle distance rather than at the television, wine glass topped to the brim. Many tea lights flickered in his decorative tea light tower.

‘Jon,’ Harriet said, quivering with the adrenaline of the incipient clash, ‘Why have I had a text from your mum suggesting we go bridal dress shopping?’

She held the iPhone up, as if he needed to be reminded what a mobile was.

‘Oh. I haven’t told them yet.’ That Jon didn’t react with the slightest embarrassment told Harriet that he was in a major strop.

‘Uhm,why?’

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