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Six

‘Read it,’ Delia said, and Paul shook his head.

Delia felt a determined venom pulse through her veins. ‘Read it out,’ she said, steadily.

Paul pulled the phone from his coat pocket. She waited in case a look crossed his face that told her it wasn’t Celine, but she could see from his unchanging scowl of dread that it was.

‘I’m not reading this.’

‘If you ever want any trust between us again, read that text aloud.’

Paul grimly swiped the text open, jaw clenched. When he spoke, he sounded strangled. Delia knew she’d never forget the strangeness of hearing her fiancé’s lover’s voice coming through his. She could see him desperately trying to edit it and not quite having the time to do it and still make it sound natural.

‘If I think you’re leaving bits out, I’ll ask to see it,’ she said, hearing herself as if she was a stranger. The woman scorned wasn’t a role she ever thought she’d have to play.

‘Oh my God, you’re getting married to her? What does this mean for us? Can you …’ Paul looked over, beseeching in his shame, obviously hoping against hope that Delia would burst into tears and let him off the rest of it. She shook her head and willed herself to wait. He continued in a funereal whisper: ‘Can you get away tonight at all to call me? Speak tomorrow. Love you. C.’

Love.

‘How many kisses?’

‘Three.’

With a gasp, Delia felt the tears start, warm water that gushed down her cheeks and partially blurred Paul from view. Her nose started running too; it was a full face explosion of liquid. Paul made to get up and comfort her and she shouted at him to get away from her. Delia wouldn’t allow him to hug her, to make himself feel better. As if right now, he was the person who could make her feel better.

Delia rubbed at her eyes and when she could focus, she saw Paul was crying too, albeit in less of a fountain-like way. He wiped at his face.

‘I’ll end it. It’s over. It was the most massive, insane mistake …’

‘What were you going to say to her tomorrow?’ Delia said, in a half-sob.

Paul shook his head, looking sorrowful that he kept being asked all these tricky questions.

‘Tell me the truth, or there’s no point. If you keep lying, there really is no point any more.’

‘I was going to say we were getting married and it was time to finish.’

‘No you weren’t. You said you didn’t know what to do.’

‘I didn’t want to break it off in a text. I was building up to it.’

Delia cleared her throat several times, and mopped herself up as best she could with her bare hands.

‘I don’t believe you. I think you hadn’t decided what you were going to say to her. You don’t want to get married.’

Paul muttered, ‘It was a surprise, I admit.’

‘I can imagine you weren’t in the mindset when you were busy throwing your nob up someone else.’

Paul looked at Delia with bloodshot eyes.

‘How would you feel if I’d done this?’

‘Devastated,’ Paul said, without hesitation. ‘Gutted beyond belief. I can’t tell you this isn’t shockingly unfair and awful shitty behaviour, because it is. I hate myself for it.’

Yet – was Delia imagining that he sounded as if he was recovering, ever so slightly? Some of the Paul self-assurance had already crept back in. The worst had happened for Paul – Delia had found out. So now he was already repairing, while Delia was still scattered in a hundred pieces.

Parsnip waddled into the room. For the first time since they’d brought him home, Delia resented their dog; she’d cleaned up a lot of piss. Petting him was a way of easing Paul’s discomfort, breaking the tension.

‘I know it’s going to take a huge effort to get past this, but please tell me we can,’ Paul said.

Paul wasn’t leaving her for Celine? She hadn’t framed the question quite so bluntly until now, but it was the big question, she supposed. However, it dawned on her what he was actually asking. If I end it with Celine, promise me you’ll still be here? He didn’t want to be left with neither of them.

She wasn’t ready, not by miles, to decide how she felt. Especially as she didn’t believe that he’d planned to end it with Celine. That text spoke of uncertainty, tell me what to do, the same way he was asking her now.

Delia saw the light glinting on the unused flute glasses in her open bag. They’d never even used them.

Ten years together, laden with guilt, and he hadn’t indulged her enough to drink the champagne. I mean, maybe the guilt was why he hadn’t wanted a spotlight on the whole engagement thing, but that hardly made matters better.

‘I don’t know if we can,’ Delia said, standing up, stiff underskirt rustling. She felt like a painted panto dame. ‘I’m going to stay in the spare room tonight.’

‘You don’t have to, I’ll stay in it.’

‘I don’t want to be in our bed. Tomorrow I’m going home to my parents. You can meet Celine and tell her whatever you like.’

‘We can’t leave it like this,’ Paul said.

Paul honestly expected some sort of pledge from her? Delia feared this said something about Paul, and something about her too.

‘I don’t know who I’m with any more, so how can I know if I want to be with him?’

‘I’m still the same, I’ve just done something that makes me a huge arsehole.’

‘No, you’re not the same. You’re a traitor, who I don’t trust.’

Delia left Paul with Parsnip, thundered up the stairs, pulled her dress off and went to bed in full make-up and her new underwear. She didn’t cry again. She was numb, only partly functioning: as if a chamber of her heart was no longer pumping blood round her body. Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ looped in her head.

She realised perhaps that failing to set a date wasn’t about what Paul was waiting for. It was who.

Seven

Ralph answered the door to Delia in a t-shirt saying Colorado Surf Club ’83, eating a floppy buttered triangle of Mighty White toast.

‘S’up,’ he said, grinning, and then remembered why his older sister was on the doorstep with a trolley case and puffy eyes. ‘Ehm. Are you … well?’

Delia smiled, despite herself. Ralph didn’t quite comprehend the subtleties of conventional interaction. Liberal, well-meaning teachers at their comprehensive had tried to get him diagnosed with this and that, so everyone could label it and feel better, but never succeeded. Ralph suffered from chronic Ralphness. It was a benign condition, in Delia’s view.

‘I’ve been better,’ she said, smiling, stepping inside and stretching up to make him hug her. Ralph bent his head in an awkward, touching way and circled her with his arms, looking like someone doing an impression of a hug they’d seen once in a Human Beings instruction manual.

Ralph was a mountain of a man, with Delia’s carrot-coloured tresses, worn haphazardly tufty.

A cruel onlooker might note that it wasn’t only the fact of Colorado being landlocked that’d prevent him being in Colorado’s Surf Club. Delia worried about his weight, but he worked in a chip shop and had never met a junk food he didn’t like, so it was a futile battle.

‘Mum’s at the allotment and Dad’s out back. Want some toast?’

Delia shook her head. She’d not eaten a meal since last night’s curry, so it was just as well that had been huge. Her stomach was now a balloon knot that tightened every time she spent more than a minute in contemplation.

‘I’ll put my stuff in my room,’ Delia said, fake-brightly, bumping her trolley case up the stairs, grateful her parents weren’t witnessing this sorry sight. The thirty-three-year-old wanderer returns.

She was supposed to be showing them an engagement ring.

‘How’s Parsnip?’ Ralph asked, to her back. Delia was glad she didn’t have to meet his eyes. Leaving wobbly Parsnip was a wrench. He’d been abandoned once and she’d promised him it’d never happen again.

‘Good!’

‘You could bring him, you know. He can sleep in my room.’

‘Thanks.’

Delia’s family lived in a semi in Hexham, a market town about twenty miles up the Tyne from Newcastle. Ever since she could remember, the house had looked like this; full of solid wooden furniture, patchwork and crocheted old throws, and rows of herbs in tubs that leaked earth along the windowsills. It was resolutely about function, not form, which was perhaps where Delia’s urge to prettify and home-make had come from.

It was welcoming and constant though. On the bricked mantelpiece, there was a framed photo of her parents’ wedding in 1971: her dad in giant chocolate-brown bell-bottomed suit, big ginger Open University beard. Her grey-blonde mum in that bowl cut that gripped the circumference of your head, and a post-hippy-era trailing veil with daisies.

Her family were … eccentric was the gentlest word, though Delia felt disloyal even using that. Paul used to sing the theme tune to Button Moon as they drove to visit, in affectionate reference to the fact her family home was its own planet, with its own customs.

Paul. Their team of two, that no longer existed. The stomach knot tightened.

Everyone in Delia’s family related best to something other than people: her mum to her allotment and garden, her dad to the timber, saws and planer in the shed, her brother Ralph to computer games and the television in his stuffy bedroom.

Delia was loved, but she was – she didn’t like to admit this, as she pushed open the door to her old bedroom – a little lonely in their midst. She was the only one with common sense, and a sense of the outside world.

She heaved her case onto the pine single bed and unzipped it, flipping the lid. Looking at the possessions she’d brought, she felt the tears swell in her chest. Oh God … this was even harder than she’d thought. Delia wanted to go home to Heaton. But she couldn’t. Her feelings completely forbade it. For all she knew, Paul was with Celine right this second, telling her he’d marry her instead. She didn’t know where she stood or what he wanted any more.

She’d got up very early, after a sleepless night, thankful that she kept lots of her clothes in the spare room and could pack and leave without seeing Paul. He’d obviously woken with the closing of the front door and the disturbance of Parsnip though because she’d had a missed call and a text offering her a lift shortly after, which she’d ignored.

Again, Delia wished she had someone to tell her what to do. Was leaving the right thing?

Her mum had made sympathetic noises when she’d called that morning to say they were having problems and that she was going to come home for a while, but Delia wasn’t surprised that she was out when she arrived. Her mum found emotions, especially raw ones, disconcerting. She would make her a cup of tea and rub her back, but Delia would know she’d be dying to get out to her cukes and radishes and not discuss the whole messy personal business. Ralph and her father were even less use.

No, there was only one person who’d have insight and sympathy about this, though she dreaded telling her.

Delia’s eyes moved to a familiar photo blu-tacked to the mirror. It was possibly her favourite picture in the world. It could stay here as she’d had copies made, framing them and sending one to Emma.

It had been taken in their second year at university, by some long-forgotten amorous boy. Delia and Emma wrapped around each other in a cheek-to-cheek embrace, huge Rimmel-lipsticked smiles, plastic pint pots of Newcastle Brown Ale in hands, toasting the camera-holder.

It wasn’t that they both had the moonshine complexion of the twenty-year-old, or that they were so happy. It’s that they both looked so confident. It brimmed with the ‘Look out, I’m coming to get you’ insouciance she used to have.

Delia wasn’t vain, but she thought she looked pretty in it. She had such heavy liquid eyeliner, she was practically in a bandit mask. She’d believed life was going to be full of adventures. Then she met Paul three years later, and was happy to give them up. All that she had, was suddenly his.

‘Hello, knock knock,’ said Ralph, his unkempt head, with its specs and watery blue eyes, appearing round the door. ‘Ehm. Would you like to play Grand Theft Auto?’

Delia smiled. Actually, that was exactly the sort of thing she wanted to do. Even though she didn’t know what it involved.

She followed Ralph to his bedroom. Ralph’s cluttered, natural-light-free, Star Wars memorabilia-strewn lair might conceivably be the HQ of some young pop culture website punk, or Pentagon hacker genius. Instead it was exactly what it looked like: the dream timewasting crib for a twenty-eight-year-old man who still lived at home.

He handed Delia a confusingly complicated control panel and motioned for her to take a place on one of the beanbags. She loved the way the video games reversed the roles between them: Delia asking stupid questions, Ralph gently chiding her for not grasping it fast enough.

It was strangely reassuring, concentrating on clumps of pixels instead of real things, in the bluish haze of Ralph’s eternal twilight mole hole.

‘Is Paul not coming here again, then?’ Ralph said, eyes fixed on the screen, as Delia’s avatar crouched behind a car in the middle of a firefight with some Mexican drug lord’s gang. Her parents had been licensed to pass this news on.

‘I’m not sure,’ Delia said. She had a sudden desire to share. ‘He’s been seeing someone else.’

‘Why?’ asked Ralph. ‘They’re dead now, you can move. Fast.’

‘I don’t know,’ Delia pushed a button and head-butted a wall.

‘Does he like her more than you?’ Ralph said. From anyone else, this would have been wounding. From Ralph, it was artless, childlike curiosity.

‘I don’t know that either. She’s younger than me. She might be cleverer and better and funnier and more attractive and … fresher.’

‘She’s still not The Fox, though,’ Ralph said, as he took the controls from Delia and expertly navigated her out of a dead end.

‘What?’ Delia had not heard that name in so long, it took her a moment to absorb its meaning.

‘The Fox. Like, Super Delia.’

‘You remember her?’ Delia said, taken aback and very touched.

‘Course,’ Ralph said.

‘She was retired a long time ago,’ Delia said, sighing and resting her head on Ralph’s arm, then realising it inhibited his gaming, and awkwardly moved it.

‘It was you who put her into retirement, so you can get her out of retirement. You’re in charge, like, here,’ Ralph said. ‘Oh YES! Let’s go rob a plane.’

Ralph had a high-pitched, cawing bird-like laugh that ripped from his larynx with no warning rumble and took people unawares.

Delia smiled. She could enjoy Ralph’s games for a bit, then she’d get bored. Ralph’s ability to have a complete immersion wallow for days at a time struck her as a male brain thing. Or maybe a Ralph brain thing.

‘Do you want a Swiss roll?’ Ralph said, and for a second, Delia thought this was gamer talk, but he reached over and picked up a cake box.

‘I’m alright, thanks,’ said Delia, frowning a little as Ralph unwrapped the cellophane and started eating a whole cylinder of buttercream-filled sponge like a baguette.

Her mum put her head round the door. Her upper half was clad in her grass-cuttings-flecked gardening gilet. ‘Oh you’re here, love.’

‘Yes,’ Delia smiled.

‘Macaroni cheese for tea?’

‘Sounds good.’

Her mum hesitated. ‘Are you alright?’

‘I will be.’

‘Cup of tea?’

‘Yes please.’

In terms of maternal advice, that – bar the odd stiff word as Delia helped clear up from the evening meal – would be that. The door closed and Delia turned back to the screen, where Ralph was racing across the fictional city of Los Santos to Aphex Twin’s ‘Windowlicker’, the wind in his virtual hair.

‘You really liked The Fox?’ Delia said to Ralph. ‘I worried it was silly.’

‘No way. Best thing you ever did,’ Ralph said, wiping some jam from his chin.

There was something to be said for having someone who would, with no spite whatsoever, give you the unvarnished truth.

Eight

‘I see you’ve got something less smelly,’ Ann said, by way of Monday-morning greeting.

A wan Delia was unpacking her lunch on to her desk: cling-filmed ham and gherkin sandwich squares, salt and vinegar Hula Hoops, waxy Granny Smith.

‘Oh. Yeah,’ Delia said absently, registering Ann’s triumphant smile and belatedly remembering the spicy prawn bollocking.

Delia wouldn’t be explaining that all her pots and pans and exotic odorous ingredients were back at her house in Heaton which she’d fled on Saturday morning. This was a Hexham cupboards’ effort.

She still couldn’t eat but she didn’t want to worry her mum. She felt her concern when Delia’s gluey bowl of macaroni cheese was returned having been vaguely tampered with, as opposed to eaten.

Delia usually turned up with a Ziploc bag of spices to customise her parents’ cuisine to her tastes. Her parents obviously wondered who this floppy, quiet, appetite-less imposter was.

She placed her phone on her desk and saw she had a text: the umpteenth from Paul.

Please answer my calls. We need to talk. Px

The standard issue one small kiss, Delia thought, remembering how Celine merited the frankly promiscuous hand-in-the-bra quantity of one big, one small. She felt revolted.

Would it always be like this? Could she ever see their relationship free of this stain? She only knew there was a huge hole in her middle that you could see the sky through, like a surrealist painting.

Delia gave thanks that she was nowhere near close enough to anyone in her office to have confided Friday’s plan.

No one was asking to see the Art Deco square emerald and diamond cluster she wasn’t wearing, no one was demanding to hear how she had worded her proposal, or Paul’s reaction, or the hoped-for date of the wedding that wasn’t happening.

There was only one person who knew about Delia’s plans last Friday, and the inevitable email arrived within an hour. They’d have talked during the weekend, but Emma was in Copenhagen for a whistle-stop three day holiday. She did that a lot. They mostly conducted their friendship via email nowadays.

From: Emma Berry

Subject: Well …?!

How did it go, future Mrs Rafferty? (I’d like to think you’d keep Moss but I bet you won’t, you surrendered, cupcake apologist Stepford.) Can I see my bridesmaid dress yet? (No bias satin with spaghetti straps that’s designed for fatless flamingos, I look like Alfred Hitchcock at the moment.) X

In another universe, one where Paul had concentrated harder on who he was sending his texts to, or better still, was turning round to twenty-four-year-olds and saying ‘Woah, I’m taken,’ Delia was giggling in purest delight at these words, rather than wincing.

Delia didn’t want to tell Emma. Emma adored Paul, Paul adored Emma. ‘Can’t you clone him, or do some lifelike android thing,’ was Emma’s refrain.

He’d sweep her into a bear hug when she visited and make her his special recipe scrambled eggs, always keeping her glass topped up. Delia would spend the whole time refereeing good-natured debate between two highly opinionated people, enjoying every second. There was nothing as satisfying as two people you loved independently, loving each other.

Pulling Paul’s statue down was no pleasure at all, although it seemed like the kind of savage cold comfort she should be entitled to.

With heavy heart and hands, Delia opened a reply she could scarcely believe she was typing.

Hi E. It went like this: I proposed. Paul said yes, not particularly enthusiastically. Then we went for drinks, and he sent a text to his mistress saying ‘oh fuck, Delia wants to marry me’ to me by mistake. Turns out he’s been shagging a student for the last three months. So I’ve moved out to my parents and he’s asking for me to stay, but I’m not really sure what’s going on. Hard to tell what Paul wants. Or what I want, now. How was your weekend? (BTW, just to be clear – the wedding is off.) (But for the record, I’d never dress you badly, what are we: amateurs?) Xx

The reply was sent from BlackBerry, within three minutes.

Delia, what? Seriously? What?! Can I call you? Ex

Thanks but maybe not right now. Sour tits Ann would die of schadenfreude earwig joy. Maybe at lunch? 1.30? X

Yes. FUCK. E X

Delia wasn’t sure she should be spending her lunch hour sobbing on the phone, but Emma wouldn’t be put off for long. Emma was a corporate lawyer for a big firm in London and pursued an agenda with a dedication Delia reserved for pursuing Crème Eggs when in season.

Their lives had taken very different directions since university and Delia was so grateful they’d met in that little window of egalitarian opportunity. That brief space between adolescence and adulthood when it didn’t matter that Emma was high-powered alpha and Delia was domesticated beta, only that they’d been put in rooms next door to each other in halls of residence. Delia would be completely terrified meeting Emma, as they were now. As it was, she remembered younger Emma trying to bleach her cut-off denim mini by pouring lemon Domestos over it, or getting off with a gentleman at the Student Union known as Captain Tongue, three Fridays in a row.

Delia stared unseeing at words on a screen about the council’s new tree-planting drive until noon approached, and the chance to stalk Peshwari Naan. She’d forgotten about him in all the turmoil, and was hugely glad of the excuse to escape the office and breathe fresh air. It’d be an opportunity to call Emma. Although as soon as she was on her way to the café, she felt the risk of thinking, and weeping. Oh no – and she was passing the university, and its students.

Every single girl who entered her line of sight was a possible Celine. Delia’s eyes darted left and right as her nerves snapped. Did Celine know who she was? Oh my God, you’re getting married to her? What does this mean for us?

Her. Us.

Delia nearly broke into a run to reach the coffee shop, wrenching open the door as if pursued by wolves.

She got herself a flat white and took a seat in the window with a good view of the room. There was a trustafarian-looking girl with dreads, typing on a MacBook Air, and three Japanese students huddled round an iPhone – no one with plausible Naan potential. Before, she thought she’d love a stake-out; today, she was listless. It was a countdown to speaking to Emma.

Delia’s mind drifted, as she toyed with her sugar wrapper.

Clichés about the aftermath of being cheated on were coming true, she noticed.

For example, she used to think the ‘it’s the lying that hurts’ line about affairs was slightly wishful. Really? Pretty sure it’d be the tongues and the hands and the frantic pulling at clothes and the groping and licking and gasping and grasping and sharing a shuddering climax that’d most bother me.

And while the thought of Paul having illicit intercourse with Celine was so horrific as to make her nauseous, unexpectedly, it wasn’t the worst pain. He’d had plenty of girlfriends before Delia – the thought of him having sex with another woman could be assimilated, however agonising it was. What Delia couldn’t begin to reconcile was the eerie, disorientating sense that she hadn’t known Paul the way she thought she had.

Take the conversation on their anniversary meal in Rasa, for example. He’d blithely mocked the younger generation’s dating habits and implied he’d be at sea if he was back on that scene. Meanwhile, he was confidently knocking off a twenty-four-year-old. Oh my God: and the remarks about intimate waxing. He knew this from a firsthand encounter with a lady’s bald part? Delia couldn’t bear to contemplate it.

That discussion had been gratuitous. Paul had voluntarily done an impersonation of a person he wasn’t, for her benefit. She tried to tell herself he’d been so scared of her finding out, that he’d overdone it. But it was more than that. It was treating Delia as a dupe.

She now recalled a few times recently that he’d grumped about being left to do all the bottling up at the end of a shift. I’m too nice a boss. These were times the too-nice boss had been in bed across town with another woman.

It was accomplished, bravura bullshittery. His deceit had been conducted so artlessly, all as part of Paul’s charming patter. Who exactly was she in love with?

Did any of his staff know? They might’ve had some idea, at these lock-ins. Did Aled and Gina know? Aled and Gina. She couldn’t believe it had taken this long to wonder. They’d declined the last dinner party, she remembered.

Had they cancelled out of awkwardness? Had Paul told Aled, in a drunken ‘Mate, I’ve messed up’ confidential?

She couldn’t pretend she was on her A-game, as time alone meant time thinking about her broken engagement, yet she saw precisely no one who could conceivably be Naan for the hour that she staked out Brewz and Beanz.

The only gang on a laptop now was a shoal of squawky teenage girls in private school uniforms, and whenever she passed them, ostensibly to get a stirrer or a sugar, she saw Facebook on their screen.

The Naan could be a member of staff, she supposed, tapping away out of sight in a backroom office. But his or her activity was unlikely to be confined to between 12 p.m. and 1 p.m., if so. She checked his timeline her phone: no Naan tweets.

The search for answers would continue, in more than one area of her life. How ironic: Delia the ‘resident sleuth’, who hadn’t noticed her other half had another life.