Page 97 of Mad About You

They took the Moët, glasses, and an IKEA candle holder of Harriet’s as an ashtray, and sat at the picnic table with the string light canopy.

As Harriet popped the cork, Marianne pulled Marlboro Lights from her cagoule pocket. She lit up and took a deep drag, leaning her head back as she exhaled the smoke like a train whistle.

She waved a small hand, bearing that engagement ring, to ineffectually clear it, and said: ‘He thinks I’m at my mum’s. I told her I was coming to see you so he can’t catch her out, but he’d not call her anyway. They hate each other.’

Harriet nodded. She had a sense that letting Marianne do the talkingwas the smartest course of action. She didn’t know what she was here to say, and half-suspected Marianne didn’t know what she was here to say, either.

‘First of all,’ Marianne leaned forward, fixing her huge Tweetie Pie eyes on Harriet’s, ‘I feel awful for what Scott put on Facebook. I asked him about your letter and he acted like he’d take it seriously, if he knew what was in it. He was really nice to me until I gave it to him, I should’ve known better. Next thing I know, he’s showing me that post …’ She looked down, frowned. ‘Sorry.’

‘It’s OK, honestly. I know exactly what he’s like.’

‘Everything you said in the letter. Was it true?’ Mariannesaid, flicking her cigarette ash into the candle holder. ‘He says you were crazy, but …’

She glanced up guiltily and Harriet understood what the problem was. Marianne didn’t want to accuse her, yet also needed to hear Harriet outright deny it.

She could empathise so easily – the push-pull of wanting Scott convicted and exculpated, at the same time.

‘In short: yes. Everything was true. But if it helps to put it another way, if you and Scott ended, what do you think he’d say about you? That you were lovely, but wanted different things? He has to trash me, because of the things I know. Because of what I told you. He doesn’t have any other defence than calling me a liar.’

Marianne’s blue eyes widened. ‘Yeah. Like he always runs me down for being a hairdresser, says I don’t have a degree in anything exceptscissors. Tells me I can’t keep up with him.’ She tapped her temple. ‘He said because my dad left when I was small, I didn’t have amale role modeland I take it out on him. When you said that he said your upbringing was … unstable … I was like, oh. Ding. Recognise that.’

Marianne swigged her drink, a tremble in her lip.

‘It’s like we’re the issue and he’s trying to fix us,’ Harriet said. ‘But like I say: in straight answer to your question, I didn’t do any of those things he said. The lying is so strange, because he’s so vehement, and you start to think,do you actually believe this?I think he convinces himself first. He gets so angry and poisonous and he thinks:well it must be true, she must be hurting me, because I feel so strongly?The emotion finds the reason.’

This was as far as Harriet had ever managed to explain Scott to herself, and she offered it to Marianne for what it was worth. If it had any value, then she doubted she’d ever have a better use for it.

Marianne nodded and took a drag on her cig. She knew everything in the letter was true, Harriet realised, she just had to accept it. These were two different things.

‘I can tell you’re not like that, just from this …’ she flapped a small hand at the space between them and smiled.

‘Marianne,’ Harriet said, ‘feeling scared about what he’ll say or do, him checking your phone – it’s not normal. It’s not OK. It’s not that he’s so into you that he gets possessive, or needs more reassuring than other men. It’s abuse. I don’t know how we get ourselves, or rather, howhegetsus, to a place where we tell ourselves it’s our fault all the time. It’s as if he creates this twisted tiny world only we live in, and then it’s like a foreign country with its own language we can’t explain to anyone else. However horrible it is, it’s our home and we fiercely protect it. Our world is just Scott, so if we lose him, we have nothing.’

‘Yes,’ Marianne said, with so much emotion in one syllable. ‘Yes, that’s exactly it!’

Harriet nodded.

‘It’s mad that until recently I thought I still loved him,’ Marianne said, haltingly, rubbing her forehead. ‘When I read your letter, it was like all the things in my head I’d never said out loud. I’d not even said it properly to myself.’

‘I understand,’ Harriet said, quietly, and she did. She could have no better or more thorough preparation for understandingthis, from the other side of the picnic table. She looked at the droplets of rain still clinging to the dangling fairy lights in the indigo of late evening, glanced at the lambent glow from the kitchen. She sipped her drink and let a comfortable silence develop. Marianne shivered.

‘Are you cold? Want to go inside?’

Marianne shook her head.

‘We’d had the worst row before Danny and Ferg’s wedding. Like, I’m surprised the neighbours didn’t call the police. I had to put so much make-up on to cover up my crying, I had eyes like two crows had crashed into a chalk cliff, as my mum says. He never said he knew you. At the wedding, I mean. I didn’t even know he’d lived with someone before me until one of his mates mentioned you.’

‘He wouldn’t tell you about me, not if he had no need to. It took me time to work out that Scott never wants connections, never wants people to share notes. Thanks to his attack on me, I’m in contact with one of his exes. She commented, calling him out on the Facebook post, and I saw it before he deleted it.’

‘Really?’

Marianne’s eyes widened again, and Harriet felt a rush of wanting to use Nina as definitive corroboration, while considering that Marianne might take every last word of this back to Scott.

Harriet said, carefully: ‘Yep. Nina had lived with him before me and had a very similar experience. She said her parents did a “carefrontation” in the end.’

‘So he’s done this loads of times. I’d been telling myselfhe’ll be different when we’re married.’ She dragged on her cigarette again. ‘Maybe Scott’s right, maybe I am stupid! Hahaha. Cos that’s the stupidest idea, isn’t it? I’m twenty-seven going on fifteen.’

‘You’re not stupid,’ Harriet said, reaching over to hold and release Marianne’s hand. ‘I know what you’re feeling. I thought I was a good judge of people before I met Scott. The way he undermines you gradually: it’s so hard to explain until you’ve been through it. He waits until you’re in love and completely vulnerable and then it starts, and you have no defences.’

---