Page 25 of Mad About You

In the year she’d lived at Jon’s, in their two-year span together, Harriet occasionally felt somewhat Surrendered Wife about the fact that there’d been no way to stamp her personality on it. Everything was so top-of-the-range and European-brand lustrous in his detached residence that there was no reason or space to buy a stick of furniture, or a white good. (Or, to fit with the look: a brushed-steel good.) Their taste didn’t overlap: Harriet tried putting up some blue fairy lights and Jon had said it looked like ‘luminol for blood spray’ and taken them down. They had also given himone of his headaches, natch.

As she stuffed her car with another black sack of her clothes on the day she left, Harriet was finally grateful for the fitted kitchen, fitted wardrobes, everything-from-Heals bachelor-pad sterility.

Much better not to be working out how to put a sofa or a bed into storage, to not be cramming a five-foot-tall fern into her Golf. It was pathetic really, but the fact virtually nothing here was hers felt like vindication that she was right to go. Or perhaps it was an indictment of her failure to try.

Harriet wondered if her subconscious was way ahead of her – it knew, long before she’d accept it, she’d never really be long-term mistress of Roundhay.Hold off on buying the Etsy knick-knacks,it must have whispered.

She could’ve done with Jon making himself scarce today but of course he didn’t, he hung around twitchily, waiting to make their final goodbye. He was the man who endlessly asked what she wanted yet somehow never thought about what she wanted.

As Harriet slammed the boot on her junk, he strode out onto the tarmac in his Penn State University sweatshirt and moccasin slippers, hands jammed in pockets. It wasn’t Jon’s fault that he was fast becoming an entirely alien creature to her, it was hers for messing with a boy from the right side of the tracks. Preposterous idea.

‘This is it, then?’

‘Think so,’ Harriet said, casting a look at her car, feigning to think he meant packing. It had been an effort, with her camera kit, but putting the seats down she had got everything in. She brushed her hair away from her face and tucked it behind her ears, tightened the band on her plait.

‘Will you give me a forwarding address for your mail?’

‘Sure. Easiest for me to message you with it,’ Harriet said.

Jon shielded his eyes against the intense June sun.

‘Feels like we should have some words befitting the occasion, doesn’t it. Not “see ya”.’

Harriet’s chest felt as if it had a concrete block resting on it. She’d not considered, until this second, what she should say in parting. Being a grown-up was so strange. In someone’s life and their bed constantly for two years, and then suddenly unable to offer them so much intimacy as a coffee.

‘We’ll see each other again,’ Harriet said.

‘When?’

‘Barty’s trial,’ she said, and this only raised a weak smile.

‘Should we shake hands?’ Jon looked like he was going to cry; Harriet prayed that he wouldn’t.

She stepped forward and put her arms around him, mumbling: ‘Take care, Jon.’

He gripped her tightly and clung on, pushing his face hotly into her shoulder. As they parted, Harriet was careful not to meet his eyes. She knew it was cowardly, but she rationalised that making this more excruciating helped no one, least of all Jon.

‘Goodbye Harriet.’

‘Bye.’

Her heart was blocking her throat as she pulled out of his drive and studiously avoided looking at the immobile figure in the rear-view mirror.Goodbye, Jon. Sorry I hurt you. Sorry our two years ended up only setting you back two years on the wife and mother-of-your-kids hunt.She didn’t mean that unkindly: he wanted that, and she wanted it for him.

As she drove to Meanwood, postcode punched into the satnav, Harriet remembered telling Jon she didn’t feel alone on that first date at Alfred.

Was it true now? Had it been true at the time? Her answers were: no, and probably not. Harriet had confused her refusal to admit to loneliness for not being lonely.

Who was she kidding? She was on her way to a house she’d never set foot inside before, at the wheel of a hatchback full of her worldly possessions, soul in transit. She gripped the wheel tightly, letting her nails dig into the plastic as she blinked back tears.

Maybe she was cursed to never belong anywhere. Orphan: a strange word wreathed in tragedy that belonged in old novels, a descriptor that Harriet steadfastly refused to apply to herself. Yet leaving one man’s house and moving into a stranger’s, she felt it. She let herself say it in her head: Mum and Dad’s. Imagine having amum and dadto flee to. She genuinely couldn’t. The sentence sounded peculiarly foreign to her; it was a phrase she’d rarely had cause to speak aloud. She remembered finding court letters pronouncing hera minor bereft of the usual legal guardians.

Harriet shook herself out of the unhelpful wallowing. This was what was called a hard reset, that was all, and hard resets were hard. She had to shed her existential Freshers’ Week flu. Toughen up.

Perhaps her spell in Cal Clarke’s party-ready house, in which he never held parties, was going to be transformative. Perhaps the very meaning of her life was contained behind that tangerine door in Meanwood. She’d accept a working washing machine and a separate bin for recycling.

13

There was space on the house’s drive for Harriet to park, but she didn’t want to seem presumptuous and pulled up on the kerb instead. She made a note to self to negotiate terms of access with Cal. She was belatedly remembering how when you moved in with someone, you took on their oddities and peculiarities. She’d not done a flatshare since her early twenties, when the other girl got blazing mad if the cereal boxes were turned ‘the wrong way’ in the cupboard, and kept an empty pet carrier in her bedroom with teddy bears in it.

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