As another chill spread through her bones Rachel snuggled down in her now sweaty, fever-ridden T-shirt. Sport seemed to be dominating the television, and she turned it off assertively. Somehow her head couldn’t cope with the combined noise and bright light from the screen any more. Even on the lowest volume setting it felt as if everyone was shouting. Rachel realised that this could be turning into a whole weekend in bed. If anything she was feeling worse, not better. Just as long as she was back in the office on Monday morning… She might even manage a couple of hours tomorrow if she was feeling a little less wobbly…
Rachel flicked through the selection of magazines. This was a rare treat. She never actually had time to read the ones lying around the office, and they were only really there to monitor rival campaigns. She was impressed with his choice. Some of her favourite titles plus a selection of the newer British shelf-fillers. The fashion pages had always been one of Rachel’s must-read sections of a magazine, but as she leafed through next season’s essentials she observed that the models seemed to have got younger and thinner since she’d last looked… Thirty-six next birthday, yet it only seemed like yesterday that she had been celebrating her twenty-fifth. Now she was sounding old. She was starting to think things that she had heard her mother say years ago.
Rachel read the copy printed alongside the pictures. It would be far more useful for the reader if they could be just a fraction more honest: Cristalle—it was all about the name; you just didn’t get catwalk models called Joanna or Jane—wears a trench coat that you will never be able to afford and that will never look this good on you, probably because you won’t wear it over your best underwear to nip to the supermarket. Gypselle has been airbrushed to look good in that bikini. Petra pouts for Peckham in an outfit worth the GNP of a small developing country…
Half an hour of ludicrous fashion suggestions, a few potential new looks, an innovative way to apply eyeshadow and several irrelevant horoscopes later, Rachel found herself reading a problem page. They’d always been the most interesting part of a magazine when she’d been at school. Educational, voyeuristic and at times aspirational. All the girls had pored over the pages and learnt a great deal about G-spots, blow jobs and old wives’ tales—all stuff they’d claimed to have known about years before as they’d committed the information to memory before hurriedly stuffing the magazines into their desks at the first glimpse of a member of staff on the horizon.
Over twenty years later Rachel was still gripped. It appeared that agony aunts had come on leaps and bounds. Normal, humorous, down-to-earth and practical advice. Not evangelical or hypothetical. She squinted at the photo. This one wasn’t unattractive either, and, at a guess, was about her age. Rachel digested the page and accompanying column in minutes, before sitting back on the pillows. She didn’t need to pay a shrink to tell her that the reason she was so interested in other people’s problems was because she had several of her own.
For all her denial and self-justification, Rachel knew that every way you looked at it she was taking him for granted. But she simply didn’t have the energy to spoil him at the moment. She’d read the marriage repair articles, she knew it wasn’t about grand gestures but just about doing things together, but time was the one commodity that she couldn’t spare and it was impossible to fit a weekend away into a Sunday afternoon.
She was sure that in a few weeks things would calm down at work—but wasn’t that what she’d said in July? And now it was December. And if she was doing a bit more taking than giving at the moment surely she could make it up to him in the long term…wasn’t that what this lifelong partnership deal was all about? He’d tried to get them to ‘talk’. He’d said she didn’t listen. That everything was always on her terms. They’d laughed about that. But what if he’d given up?
Rachel shook her head. He adored her. Everyone said so. He’d always run to his work when things weren’t going well. She’d taught him to. Besides, if it kept him occupied what was the harm? At least if he was busy she didn’t feel quite as guilty.
Part of the problem was her lack of an available sounding board. Her mother would tell her to reassess her priorities, but then her mum could single-handedly set women’s emancipation back one hundred years in one afternoon with her traditional take on married life. Rachel knew she didn’t approve of her daughter’s lifestyle. And she adored her son-in-law. Their friends all saw them as some sort of golden couple and outsiders saw a good-looking, high-earning, well-dressed couple—people will excuse almost anything if you are aesthetically pleasing—out there getting what they wanted from life. It was a masterful deception. Rachel knew that she should swallow her pride and well-disguised insecurity streak and just call one of her older mates, but she couldn’t help but see it as a weakness that she couldn’t cope.
It must have been a combination of these reasons, coupled with her abnormally high temperature and a strange heaven-sent force, that drove Rachel to do something that she had never thought she would ever do. Taking the ‘Ask Lizzie’ column to her study, she wrapped herself in a blanket and flicked on her computer. It was as if an alien force had entered her body. She half expected Mulder and Scully to appear shouting in the doorway, just as it was too late to save her, but something compelled her to sit down at her computer and type out a letter.
It flooded onto the page. Rachel couldn’t get the sentences out fast enough. Seeing the words on the screen was cathartic, and much less expensive than hiring a therapist, and somehow it was a relief not to have to say any of it out loud. She could admit to herself that she was a bit of a selfish, self-centred control freak with workaholic tendencies who had taken her husband for granted via a keyboard, but actually vocalising it would be a whole different ballgame.
One long, convoluted paragraph later, Rachel looked up. There it was—her life in black and white. She added a few commas and full stops before signing it without thinking, then deleted her name and, remembering the problem page etiquette of her youth, typed ‘Desperate Matt Dillon fan, London’. Smiling, Rachel replaced the pseudonym with the more credible ‘Name and Address Withheld’ and pressed print quickly, before she lost her nerve.
Deleting the document from her hard drive, she held the only hard copy above the wastepaper basket for a few moments, resisting the urge to scrunch it into a ball, instead folding it and putting it in a self-seal envelope. She hadn’t enclosed her address. She didn’t really want or need an answer. But by sharing everything with a total stranger at least now she felt she’d been proactive. She addressed the envelope and slipped it into her briefcase. Maybe she’d post it. Then again she could always shred it tomorrow at the office if she changed her mind.
As she clambered back into bed Rachel closed her eyes and promised herself that she would make more of an effort. Five years of marriage were worth fighting for. She was far too young to be a divorcee. These agony aunts are fantastic, she mused. She felt tons better already.
chapter 5
Sunday morning dawned a little earlier than usual at 56 Oxford Road. Lizzie had been wide awake for a good half-hour, pinching and tensing various body parts and wondering whether it was physiologically possible that she had put on a visible amount of muffin-related weight since Friday night. If she concentrated hard she was sure she could feel a spot on her nose. Perfect timing. A first-date outbreak. She resisted the overwhelming urge to wipe her t-zone on the duvet cover and finally conceded that more sleep was out of the question. Time wasn’t going to tick by any slower if she got up.
Soon Lizzie was languishing in her second bath in twelve hours. Last night’s had promised to detoxify her and this morning’s foaming oil was supposed to be sensual, although it smelt more like a melted down throat lozenge than an aphrodisiac to Lizzie. Maybe that was where she’d been going wrong all these years.
A strange transformation was taking place. Over the last couple of years, via a gradual process of attrition, Clare had introduced a new dimension to Lizzie’s cleansing ritual. A quick splash with