Second Chance - Jane Green [99]
She checks her watch. There isn’t that much time. She goes from room to room, picking up the things she really wants, the things she will miss if Marcus does indeed act as disgustingly as some of his clients.
The smaller paintings she takes, stacking them in the car, and her collection of antique porcelain pill boxes. The books she leaves, aside from a few she has had since she was a little girl, a few she was hoping to pass on to Daisy.
Her mother’s pearls, her grandmother’s ring. Some favourite bags and scarves. It doesn’t look as if she has moved out, and she’s hoping she hasn’t, hoping too that few judges would look well on a man shutting the door on his wife and children, but preparing herself for the worst-case scenario.
The children’s rooms are harder. How is she going to explain this to them? How will they take it? Particularly Oliver, Oliver who adores his father even though he hardly ever sees him.
Holly sinks down on Oliver’s bed clutching his old blanket, and shivers. She can’t cry. She doesn’t feel the slightest hint of sadness about Marcus, but what about her children? Her beloved children. How can she do this to them?
But how can she do it to herself? All these years, unhappy. All these years knowing she had made a mistake and waiting for it to get better, thinking that perhaps she could make it work until the children go off to university, when she could leave to rediscover herself.
She never expected this to happen. Not so quickly nor so simply. One minute she was married, and the next, it feels, not. She shakes her head and gets on with the business of picking the important things for the children.
A necklace Daisy has been given by her great-grandmother. Her teddies and favourite dresses. Her colouring pads and crayons. Oliver’s Star Wars transformers collection. His Darth Vader speaking mask that long ago stopped speaking but is still one of his prized possessions. Uppy, the threadbare stuffed dog, once brown and white, now mostly grey with his fur loved off, that Oliver sleeps with every night.
Holly gathers them up and crams them into the boot of the car. She is hoping she will be able to get the rest of her stuff when she gets back, but there are no guarantees and, at the end of the day, it’s just stuff. She has her children with her, and she has the things that are important to her.
The rest is just furniture.
‘But where are we going, Mummy?’ Oliver asks again as Holly hauls their suitcases downstairs and squeezes them in the back of the car. ‘Whose house is it?’
‘My friends Paul and Anna, darling. Our friend Saffron is here and she hasn’t been very well, so she needs all of us to go and look after her.’
‘What’s the matter with her?’ Daisy asks, sitting on the front step cuddling lambie. ‘Does she have flu?’
‘Sort of.’ Holly smiles, crossing her fingers that they won’t arrive to find Saffron drunk.
They say there are seven stages of divorce: breakdown, shock, anger, pain, hatred, grief and acceptance.
What they don’t tell you is that in cases like this, cases like Holly’s, there are actually eight. They don’t tell you of the very first stage, the stage that comes before breakdown. The stage that is enabling Holly to drive over to Olivia’s house with High School Musical blaring out of the radio as she and the kids sing along at the tops of their voices, a huge grin on her face.
The first stage?
Exhilaration.
*
‘You look good!’ Olivia climbs in the car and wedges her rucksack under Daisy’s feet on the floor of the back seat.
‘Thanks!’ Holly smiles. ‘I think my marriage is over.’ She keeps her voice low so the kids don’t hear, and she turns around to check, but because she cleverly brought her computer and armfuls of DVDs, they’re currently engrossed in The Ant Bully.
‘What?’ Olivia’s mouth drops open. ‘What do you mean? I thought you weren’t going to do anything.’
‘I mean I just had the mother of all arguments with Marcus, and he told me that if I went to Gloucestershire, my marriage would be over.’ Holly feels completely stupid because