Lessons in Heartbreak

Somehow, Anneliese got up and went into the living room, where she broke with the habit of a lifetime and poured herself a strong brandy from the stupid globe drinks trolley that Edward loved and she’d always hated. He could have that, for a start.

She heard muffled talking from the kitchen, then the sound of the kitchen door closing and the revving of Nell’s car. That was some relief.

She couldn’t bear Nell being in the cottage now. Her very presence was poisonous: the worst sort of poison, the sort you hadn’t known was dangerous.

After the first drink, Anneliese had a second. Ludicrous to be drinking now, but she needed something to numb her. She sat on the window ledge looking out at the bay and tried not to listen to the sounds of Edward’s packing.

When Beth had been a teenager, Anneliese became very good at listening. It was different from listening to a small child messing round in the kitchen: hearing the fridge opening, the milk bottle top being laboriously pulled off, the glug of milk and the intake of breath when some spilled. That was a sort of innocuous listening.

But mothers of teenagers had to listen in a different way; what CD was being played was an excellent gauge.

Oasis and Counting Crows were good signs. Anything slow and dreamy might mean Beth was in a relaxed mood. But Suzanne Vega was fatal. A signal that Beth was in turmoil.

She’d have to tell Beth about this, of course. Anneliese closed her eyes at the thought of that conversation.

The back door banged and she jumped at the noise. Edward had gone. She rushed to the side window to see him put one suitcase and a gym bag into his car. He could have taken very little, just his clothes, she decided. Did that mean he wanted to stay after all, or was he so desperate to be with Nell that he didn’t care about his belongings? Who knew?

Evening was casting its greying spell over the beach and despite the old padded jacket, Anneliese shivered. The beach was bleak when the promise of sun had gone: like a wild kingdom that showed a softer side during the day but, when evening arrived, it was time for humans to clear off so the place could revert to its feral, untamed state.

The tide was coming in, slowly, inexorably. Anneliese stood at the edge of the water and watched as the waves lapped in and swept out, surging further and further up the darkening sand every time. It was relentless. In and out, on and on. Like life, coming at her endlessly, when she wished it would stop.

She watched as if hypnotised, until the water seeped into her shoes and then she moved back, startled.

If anyone could see her now, they’d think she was crazy, and perhaps she was: a lonely woman standing half-crazed at the shoreline, stuck in every sense of the word. Then she turned and walked home, leaving the dark of evening behind her.

The cottage was scarily silent and she went around turning on all the lights, anything to create a sense of warmth. In the sitting room, she picked up her knitting bag and looked forlornly at the tumbled skeins of coloured wools that perched on top.

She couldn’t bear the thought of the television or even the radio. But she might knit. Knitting somehow soothed her mind. It was a newish hobby. Newish in that she’d knitted things years ago: slippers, baby clothes, blankets for Beth’s dolls. But she’d never been much of an expert. She’d come back to it a year ago, after she stopped working in the garden centre and knew she needed something to occupy herself.

She’d toyed with the idea of learning another language or learning the computer, and then Marcus, her son-in-law, had helped by giving her an old laptop. Even though he apologised endlessly for its age and decrepitude, it still worked and Anneliese was thrilled with it.

‘It’s obsolete,’ he’d said apologetically.

‘It’s wonderful,’ Anneliese smiled.

‘It’s ten years old. That’s practically a dinosaur in computer terms,’ he’d gone on.

‘Like myself,’ Anneliese added, patting him on the arm.

She loved it, and surfing the Net – how she loved to say those words! – had taken her down a strange path one day to a craft site where she found all types of knitting that had nothing in common with the lumpen slippers and baby cardigans she used to make.

This knitting involved making felted handbags, crafting lace-like shawls, making wall hangings.

She loved it and instantly ordered a handbag kit. Then, in a might-as-well-be-hung-for-a-sheep-as-for-a-lamb moment, she’d also gone to the Crazee Knitters forum and signed herself up as a fledgling knitter. On the site, women from all over the world shared their knitting experiences.

It had taken her ages to write her first message: there was something scarily final about sending your thoughts out there where everyone could read them, but Anneliese felt safe in the anonymity of the internet.

Anneliese from Ireland could be anyone.

In her cottage with every light lit, Anneliese logged on, clicked on to her last message and felt a stab of utter astonishment at what she’d written only a few days before. It was so normal, so ordinary.

I’m halfway through knitting the pink-and-grey bag. It’s so pretty and I can’t wait to actually finish it because I want to see what it looks like when it’s felted. Last night, I sat up until midnight with the TV on and kept knitting. I sort of watched two medical dramas I’ve never seen before at the same time and a programme about a man-made island in Dubai and I kept knitting. I wish I was faster and I’m not sure how to knit the flower – does anyone have hints for it?

Anneliese thought of that night. Edward had laughed at her manic knitting and had gone to bed, leaving her and her circular needle in front of the television. At the time, she’d felt guilty leaving him to go to bed on his own. It was as bad as having separate bedrooms.

Just showed what she knew.

She’d been worried about sending him to bed alone, when he was probably grateful to escape her.

The pain of today was still too fresh to be anything but numb, but for a brief moment, Anneliese felt a sharp stab of agony. Edward was gone and he’d left with Nell. And all along, she hadn’t had a clue what was going on under her nose. She used to feel so intuitive, so connected with the universe. Clearly she wasn’t. That connectedness was another big misconception.

What else had she been wrong about in her life?

Suddenly, Anneliese felt that she couldn’t cope with all this on her own. She needed something to dull it. She found the corkscrew and a bottle of very expensive red wine that Edward had been saving. Blast that for a game of soldiers, she thought, pouring herself a big glass.

Then, glass in hand, she sat down in front of her laptop and felt grateful for the existence of those other people around the world, who might be sitting as she was now, alone.

The wine bit as it went down. It tasted too acidy, but perhaps that was just her. She’d had a strange metallic taste in her mouth all day: was that what grief tasted like? She drank it all the same and wondered did anyone on Crazee Knitters have any hints for what to do when your husband of thirty-seven years left you? In the five months since she’d been posting on the site, she’d only ever talked about her knitting – the pink-and-grey flower bag that had taken her three months because it was very complicated. Other people did talk about their lives, but Anneliese wasn’t the sort of person to open herself up to others. Now, when she had this unexpected longing to share her pain, it was too big to talk about.

She scrolled down through the posts. MariLee had posted a picture of the most amazing lacy shawl with a rainbow motif and Anneliese wondered absently if she’d ever be able to make anything that complicated. The flower bag was only difficult because there were so many bits to it. There were no really hard stitches, just lots of fiddly little bits to knit, felt and sew painstakingly together.

Lily had loved the finished product.

‘Isn’t it a dotey little thing,’ she’d said when Anneliese arrived to show it off in all its glory.

‘I loved knitting when I was younger although I can’t knit any more,’ she’d added ruefully, holding up fingers gnarled with arthritis. ‘It calms the soul.’

‘I can’t knit, really,’ Anneliese replied. ‘I keep toying with the idea of getting a pattern for a sweater or something, but I’m not sure I could do anything so complicated.’

‘Anneliese, you can do anything you set your mind to,’ Lily smiled.

‘Am I too old to learn?’

Lily laughed outright at that. ‘You’re never too old to learn, darling,’ she said. ‘I’m still learning, and look at me – nearly ninety. You’re only a child, Anneliese. What’s it they say nowadays? Izzie said it to me once…’ Lily stopped to think. ‘Yes, I’ve got it: ninety is the new eighty! So fifty-six is like being a teenager, if you make yourself think that way.’

Anneliese sighed. She’d have to tell Lily about Edward too.

Not that Lily would be like poor, dear Beth and need careful handling once she heard the news. Lily was quite unshockable, for all that she looked like a delicate little old lady in the flesh. While Lily had once been tall, age had withered her until she had the look of a bird about her: still with those fiercely intelligent cornflower-blue eyes that missed nothing, but as fragile as a bird nonetheless. Yet there was nothing fragile about her mind or her opinions.

So it wasn’t the thought of shocking Lily that made Anneliese not want to tell her – it was the pity she’d seen on Lily’s face. Anneliese hated being pitied most of all.

She finished her drink and began to write. Perhaps her fellow knitters had the wisdom she needed.

Sorry to bother you all with this but I’ve got no one to talk to and I’ve got to talk. You see, my husband left me today. I won’t bore you with the minute details but basically I came home to find him and my best friend talking and I knew. They were having an affair. He left with her. I don’t know what to do or think. I haven’t told anybody yet – we have a daughter but she’s very emotional. You could say she doesn’t do reality very well.

The hardest thing is the sense that I didn’t know him at all – or her, for that matter. It’s like a death. I think I’m going through grief. I feel like people must feel when they discover someone they loved is secretly a rapist or a murderer. I’m so astonished that I didn’t know and then, I wonder if everything was a lie? It must be. And I never noticed.

How could that be? How many other things did he lie about? Loving me? That I was the only woman he wanted to make love to? Wanting to be with me? Right now, it all could be a lie because he managed to keep one huge lie, so how can I be sure that all the other things aren’t lies too?

I can see a photo of us on the wall from here and I’m looking at it trying to catch a glimpse of this different person who must have been there all along, except that I didn’t notice him. This picture of us – me and him and our daughter, when she was about ten – is a holiday shot when we were on a picnic and it looks different now. We had that old station wagon and that really ugly tartan rug is spread beside it, and I’m smiling and so is he, and Beth’s dancing – she was so into ballet then – once, I’d have sworn tears of blood that I knew what was in his head at that moment: that he was happy with us. And now – well, I don’t know.

So what he’s done now has made me question every single thing in our whole shared lives. My memories are gone because they might be fake and they might not.

It’s like being shown a picture of a vase in silhouette and then someone points out that it could also represent two faces in profile, and once you’ve seen the new picture, it’s impossible to look at it and just see the vase.

And how do I tell my daughter? She’s thirty-six, married – and that sounds like she should be here taking care of me right now, but the thing is, it’s still the other way round. No matter what happened to me, Beth would need to be taken care of. So, does anyone have any advice for me? I’m desperate.

Anneliese was about to click ‘send’ when she changed her mind. With a single keystroke, she erased the whole message.

She could hear her mother’s voice in her head, a voice made angry by Anneliese’s shutting the door of her bedroom and refusing to come out: ‘Anneliese, you can’t solve everything by shutting us all out, you know.’

Shutting the door might not have worked but it made her feel better. Always had. It could again too. Instincts weren’t called instincts for nothing.

She locked the doors and checked the windows were shut. That had always been Edward’s job: the man’s job, organising the house before bed. Anneliese dampened down the hurt and the pain of thinking of him. They were just doors: she could lock them herself.

She went round the cottage methodically, switching off lights, then climbed the stairs to their bedroom. Her bedroom, now.

The beams in the upstairs of the cottage were stripped wood, bleached pale like all the floorboards. Their bedroom was pale blue with white furniture, two demin rag-rugs on the floor and white curtains that were heavily lined to keep the cold out. Anneliese took one look at the big high bedstead with its white quilted coverlet and backed out of the room. She couldn’t sleep there tonight. It would be like lying in a bed of lies.

Beth’s bedroom was still Beth’s, even though she’d left home years before. Beth liked the comfort of her childhood things still being there: her Barbies and their various cars and wardrobes still arranged on the wooden shelves, her Enid Blyton books lined up neatly.

The spare bedroom in the cottage was barely a box room. Painted purest white, there was room only for a bed, a bleached wood chest of drawers with seashells laid on top as decoration, and a tiny one-drawer nightstand with an old brass lamp on it. In the twenty years she’d lived in the cottage, Anneliese had never slept in this room. Which made it perfect.

She unearthed a small container of sleeping tablets from the bathroom cabinet, took one and washed it down with tapwater. In Beth’s room, she found an old nightdress of her daughter’s and pulled it on. She didn’t want anything from her own room to contaminate her. She climbed into the spare-room bed, turned out the light and closed her eyes until the chemically-induced sleep claimed her.

The Lifeboat Shop in Tamarin was very successful. Perhaps it was due to the loud proximity of the sea itself, but everyone – locals and visitors alike – dutifully went in to search for bargains, knowing that for every second-hand blouse they bought, money went to the upkeep of the local lifeboats. Even with the sea in the bay shining serenely up at people on a summer’s day, the power of the water was felt: beautiful, and yet all-powerful.

Monday was one of Anneliese’s days for working in the shop. She worked there Mondays and Wednesdays and had done so ever since she’d given up full-time work in the garden centre. When she woke early the day after Edward left her, she knew she had to go in.

Not turning up would make everyone think she was sick, and then someone might see Edward and ask him how she was, and he might tell the truth and –

Anneliese couldn’t bear that. She didn’t want everyone knowing what had happened, not until she’d dealt with it in her own head. She wasn’t sure when she was going to be able to do that – the sleeping tablet had made all thinking impossible as she’d crashed out twenty minutes after taking it, and to stave off the sense of solitude in the cottage the following morning, she’d turned on the radio loud, preferring plenty of news stories to being alone with her thoughts.

Her thoughts were dangerous, she decided: she didn’t want to be on her own with them.

Anneliese preferred the mornings in the shop.

The churchgoers were sure to arrive after Mass, and the women who’d dropped children at school popped in for a quick rummage. People who took early lunches sometimes crammed their sandwiches into a few minutes so they could rifle through the rails of clothes, or scan the shelves lined with books.

It was a nice, chatty place to work, with no real pressure, except when something of value came in and all the staff panicked slightly about getting the correct price sorted out for it, in case the original owner returned and felt their donation wasn’t being prized enough.

Today, there were five refuse sacks of stuff to be gone through, so Anneliese sat in the back of the shop where the storeroom, kitchenette and toilet were situated, and went through it all carefully. There were piles of clothes, mainly women’s, soft toys still covered with dust, and children’s clothes alongside ornaments, some paperback books, and bits of costume jewellery. About half of the stuff was in good condition and Anneliese began the painstaking job of sorting the wheat from the chaff.

It was incredible what some people thought was acceptable to donate to charity, she thought, holding up a man’s shirt with a threadbare collar, several missing buttons and a suspicious yellow stain on the sleeve. Curry? Flower pollen? She threw it into the ‘dump’ box.

Yvonne, another volunteer, was manning the front counter and kept up a steady stream of chat with the customers. Anneliese liked working with Yvonne because no response was ever required. Yvonne talked and didn’t appear to care if anyone replied or not. This normally suited Anneliese because she liked working in peace with just the faint hum of the radio in the background. Today, it suited her because she wasn’t sure if she’d be able to have a conversation if her life depended on it.

Anneliese knew she looked wretched and said she hadn’t slept to cover up the fact, even though the chemical cosh had knocked her out for eight hours. But she looked much worse than any lack of sleep could account for. She’d been shocked at the sight of herself in the mirror that morning. Grief had aged her overnight and it was as if her very bones had thrown themselves against her skin in protest at all the pain. She felt as if the last, vaguely youthful bloom of her skin had gone, leaving nothing but sharp angles, hollows and the big indigo-blue eyes her daughter, Beth, had inherited, like shining pools in an oval face. The thick white hair – once a stunning white blonde, now just silky white – that she kept neatly tied back no longer looked feminine. Instead, it made her look far older than her years: older and pantomime witchy.

Anneliese could barely recognise the woman who’d been told by an admirer, many years ago, that she looked like a prima ballerina with her long, graceful neck and doe eyes. She’d been one of Tamarin’s beauties about a million years ago, she thought sadly, or so Edward had told her.

Who’d have thought it now?

She should have bothered with make-up, after all, she decided. Some base, a little concealer to hide the dark circles, mascara to lift her eyes and some creamy blush to bring warmth to the apples of her cheeks: Anneliese had always been very proficient with make-up.

It was the one thing she and her mother had agreed on.

If Anneliese was going to throw herself away on a job in gardening, then she should still look after her skin and never go out without lipstick, her mother had said.

Her mother had also always been firm on women not drinking hard spirits. Anneliese had kept to that dictum too and was regretting her brandies and glasses of wine the day before. Her head ached dully from the unaccustomed drinking.

‘Dogs will do their business on the beach, I said,’ Yvonne was saying to a customer. ‘Signs, that’s what we need; signs on the beach about doggy doo.’

Anneliese was one of the people who disagreed with this point of view, preferring the dog-crap option to lots of ugly signs telling people off for not clearing up. Signs would ruin the craggy, bare beauty of the beach.

But she kept quiet and allowed herself to wonder what Yvonne would make of her news.

Edward has left me. He’s living with Nell Mitchell. Yes, that Nell – my best friend. There you go. Shows you don’t really ever know people, do you?

It still sounded wrong.

She tried it again, saying it more slowly in her mind, to see if she could make sense of it.

We’ve been through hard times, Edward and I, and perhaps it was too hard for him and Nell is so easygoing and, after all, they know each other so well –

‘Anneliese, what did you say?’ Yvonne looked at her expectantly from the front of the shop. The customer was gone and it was only the two of them in the shop.

‘Nothing, Yvonne. Just talking to myself.’

‘Oh sure, I do the same myself, Anneliese.’ Yvonne sighed and went back to scanning the local paper. ‘Nobody pays me the slightest heed. Mam, the kids say, you talk nineteen to the dozen and when we try to answer, you keep rattling on, so we let you at it. Kids!’

‘Kids, yeah,’ Anneliese nodded, when what she was really thinking was ‘husbands’ and ‘best friends’.

‘But we love them, don’t we?’ Yvonne went on, still talking about children and not in the least aware that she and Anneliese weren’t on the same wavelength at all.

It struck Anneliese at that moment that it was really quite easy to deceive people once they didn’t expect to be deceived. How easy had she been to deceive? Shamefully easy, probably.

She stopped sorting out clothes to ponder this. What lies had Edward and Nell told her? Had they gone home to the cottage on days when Anneliese was in the shop, and lain on her bed, having sex?

Suddenly, she had to rush into the tiny toilet to throw up. Bile, yesterday’s wine and nothing else came up.

‘Anneliese, you all right?’ said Yvonne.

‘Fine,’ she lied. ‘Heartburn. Smoked fish pie last night.’

Where did that excuse come from, she wondered, unbending and looking at her red-eyed face in the tiny room’s mirror. Was lying just a matter of practice?

The shop was mercifully busy all morning. Yvonne rushed about, chatting and working the till, while Anneliese gave the appearance of industriousness by tidying shelves and rails after the customers.

Her gaze often strayed out on to the streets of Tamarin, searching for the familiar figure of her husband loping along. Edward worked in an engineering company in town and sometimes dropped in on her when she was in the Lifeboat Shop.

But not, she decided, today.

Still, she stared out of the window, wondering if he and Nell would pass by.

The town was designed like half of a many-pointed star, with streets all heading down towards the harbour where they converged on Harbour Square, a wide piazza with squat Mediterranean-style palm trees, an open-air café called Dorota’s, and the horseshoe-shaped harbour beyond, like two arms reaching into the sea – or like the curve of a crab’s front claws, depending on which way you liked to look at it.

The Lifeboat Shop was on Fillibert Street, halfway between Harbour Square below, and the tiny Church Square above, where St Canice’s stood in its mellow-stone glory.

Her shift in the shop ended at two, when Corinne Brady arrived to take over, trailing scarves, dangly bead necklaces and an overpowering scent of a musky oil purchased many moons ago in the town’s health-food shop. Anneliese knew this because Corinne was always telling her that modern perfumes were bad for you and that eau d’elderly musk was where it was at.

‘Natural smells are best, Anneliese,’ Corinne would say gaily, waving a tiny bottle sticky with age. ‘Modern perfumes cause cancer, you know.’

Normally, Anneliese tolerated Corinne’s eccentricities and her bizarre medical theories, but she couldn’t cope today. She was all out of the milk of human kindness and she wasn’t sure if any of the local shops stocked it.

‘Hello, Yvonne, look at this! A new consignment of black cohosh. Now, Yvonne, I know you don’t want to talk about the whole menopause thing…’

In the background, Anneliese winced. Poor Yvonne. There was no chance of a discreet talk about female problems when Corinne was involved. Corinne didn’t do volume control. She roared, even when attempting to whisper.