Page 80 of Mad About You

None of this needed to happen. Harriet felt like the contestant on the game show who isn’t content with their modest gains and gambles it all, only to walk away with nothing. She itched to throw things and smash furniture and pummel something into submission. Instead, she lay motionless on the bed, limp and defeated.

She’d wanted to demonstrate Scott Dyer no longer had any power over her. She’d ended up proving the exact opposite.

36

An hour or so later, there was a cautious knock.

‘Harriet,’ Cal called. ‘Are you OK?’ A long pause. ‘Please know I’m so, so sorry. That was a stupid way to broach something you must be in bits about. I’m totally and completely on your side and I should’ve been upfront.’

Even in the teeth of her anguish, she had to concede he was charming. Perhaps it was even … emotional intelligence?

‘Go away,’ she said, half-serious, like a sullen teen. She was lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling, eyes swollen but dry now, all cried out again. She knew her behaviour was unbecoming, but somehow she had to go through it to get to the other side. If Cal was truly sorry, if he really liked her, he’d withstand it.

‘Please can I grovel my explanation and apologies face to face?’ Cal said.

‘No. Grovel them through the door.’

‘OK, I will. Hang on, I’ll sit down first.’

She heard the sound Cal’s t-shirt brushing against the wall.

‘There’s a German word,zugzwang, to describe a situation where any move a chess player makes, makes things worsefor them. I feel that way right now, because my reasons for saying what I said aren’t what you think; I wasn’t doubting you. But they’re still quite shit.’

Harriet said nothing. She throbbed with the indignity of what he knew. Cal Clarke – irrepressible, haloed, priority boarding pass for life, Cal – had read about her begging for sex. She wanted to die. She rolled onto her side and blinked at the light coming under the door, then closed her eyes against her humiliation. She felt as if she’d been stripped in the town square, and Cal had turned out to see the Walk of Shame. It wasn’t possible to be calm and gracious when she was naked and he was not – even if it wasn’t his fault.

‘A colleague showed me the Facebook thing.’

‘How did she know you knew me?’

‘I’ve talked about you. Some of them met you at my birthday. She didn’t know your last name, but enough to make the connection.’

‘Whyhaveyou talked about me?’

Harriet knew she sounded peevish to the point of silly, but then again, what exactly was there to preserve, of anything, at this juncture.

‘As my friend. I think you initially came up as a wedding recommend.’

‘Hmmm.’

‘She was winding me up, saying perhaps I didn’t know the nature of the person renting a room in my house. I said of course I did. She said:Don’t you think it’s unlikely, how she turned up by coincidence when she’d photographed your wedding,and …’

She heard Cal hesitate.

‘… That you knew I must be single, and targeted me.’

Harriet flinched. She thought about Cal pondering this, scrolling back through memories of their interactions for clues of a seduction.

‘I said, don’t be daft. She’d remembered what I’d said about how you and I agreed this arrangement, sight-unseen. She said:Wasn’t she the first call you got – you said the room wasn’t even online? How did she know to call you before the room was online, if she didn’t know you?I didn’t have an answer for that. Obviously, I knew it wasn’t because you’d plotted anything. I wanted to have the answer ready for next time if she raised it, that was all. I should’ve told you why I was asking and not fished like a clumsy wanker. I didn’t want to mention Facebook before you did. Obviously, because you’re not an idiot and hadn’t drunk as much six per cent IPA, you made the connection immediately. And here we are.’

‘You weren’t gossiping: “Oh God yes, what IF my lodger’s unhinged?”’

‘No, of course I wasn’t!’ Cal said, with what sounded like real indignance. ‘For what it’s worth, even if I hadn’t known you, I’d have thought it read like absolute horseshit. There were about a dozen weird leaps of logic. Like, why was he snooping at your phone?’

Harriet twinged again at this outsider’s perspective that she had been traduced: she was simultaneously grateful, and freshly humiliated at his being informed.

‘Not that it would’ve mattered if it had been revealing,’ she forced herself to say, unable to let him think less of her inany way, ‘but Scott lost it at a photo of an ordinary dress in a Topshop changing room. It was only “provocative” to an Edwardian grandfather.’

‘I don’t doubt you. He’s one of those blokes who doesn’t even know when his entitlement’s showing. He kept giving himself away.’

---