Chapter 33

CHAPTER 33

The date, in a bar near St.Pancras so bland that she repeatedly forgets its name even while inside it, is not at all interesting and she's glad they met for a drink, not dinner. In the toilet she swipes a few more men.

The next date is boring too, but on the third—with the bookbinder, who got back to her after all—she feels the thing, the spark . The husband—no, she thinks, not the husband, the date— the date is slender and mysterious and flirty and when he puts his hand on her upper arm while they're saying goodbye, she's into it. The spark! There it is! She is disgruntled when he doesn't message her again, or respond to her own eventual message.

"Next," Taj tells her.

She goes on quite a lot of dates. The husbands have taught her, she thinks, not to judge. Perhaps with her expansive view of the possibilities of life, she will make all sorts of discoveries about men, and herself, and the world?

In fact the husbands have, she soon discovers, taught her to judge extremely quickly, which she has to unlearn a little. There is a thin man with a moustache who is keen to demonstrate how feminist he is, and when she arrives a couple of minutes early he is already sitting in the cafe reading Simone de Beauvoir. And sure, fine, she guesses men should read Simone de Beauvoir (she's not a hundred per cent sure, she hasn't read any herself), but not in hardback in a cafe while they're waiting for someone to flirt with, holding it up so everyone can see the cover.

Best book to be caught reading when you're early for a date? she messages Bohai when she gets home.

Uggghg books, he sends back. Walk straight out. No readers. Gameboy advance or gtfo

The night after, she has dinner with Maryam and Toby. "I always thought," Maryam says, "I'd be great at the apps."

"Sorry," Toby says.

"I prefer this, obviously. I just think if it had come up, I'd have been good. Can I have a go?" she adds, and takes Lauren's phone. This is something that her friends in relationships love to do, she's discovering; they want to play the game, spin through faces, imagine.

This is why Taj is better to talk to: with Taj, she doesn't feel like she's a vicarious little adventure, five minutes of make-believe.

The two of them go to a speed-dating night at an art gallery, but the speed-date activities are very intense. At one point Lauren has to spend six minutes finger-painting silently with a guy she's pretty sure she was once married to, and then for the next "date" they are instructed to sit still while their allocated men draw them. Lauren's portrait is only extremely unflattering but Taj declares hers kinda racist, and not even for the right race , and they slip off to the bar around the corner before they have to make plasticine models of the men in the next round.

She goes back home. She sets up another date. The process is not, she admits, as straightforward as she thought it might be. She messages a complaint to Bohai, who like her is still temporarily single, and looks up Felix, who maybe is too, and even Carter, who also, for once, seems to be between girlfriends, or at least who doesn't appear in a hundred photos with a wholesome and charming American woman living a visibly perfect life. Jason is back in London and has twin toddlers. Michael comes up on the app, once, and she approves him—maybe this time it really is a sign—but they don't match. Fuck you, she thinks, squinting at her photos, wondering what's wrong with them; you married me twice, you don't know what you want.

"Yeah," Taj says when she complains, "it's hell, I uninstalled all the apps yesterday. I'm going to meet someone in real life. Or I'm not going to meet someone at all. Get a bunch of pets. Like the volume of a man, but in rabbits."

"No," Lauren says, "come on, dating time, a guy came up on mine who's a professor with a beard, you love professors with beards."

"I love rabbits. Let me know if you want to give it a break too," Taj says. "We can go do spinster things. Hang out and complain about the young people and get stuff done."

"What stuff? I don't have any stuff."

Taj tilts her head from side to side. "We could finish painting your living room? Put the furniture back?"

It has been, it's true, some weeks. But Lauren likes the room as it is, her friendly plant in the middle, growing new leaves, occasionally dropping an old one, the coffee table jammed up next to the sofa so that it's a fun little challenge to get into and out of. And most of all, she likes that she has no responsibility to make it normal and liveable and shareable. It's one of the things that makes her feel good about the dates not working out.

She can see how that might look bad from the outside. But it's honestly fine.

She climbs on to the honestly fine sofa and googles her exes again. After so many husbands, could Carter really have been better than the others? Or is it just that he's the only one she didn't choose to send away, and that's what makes her miss him even now? She searches the others, to see if she feels any regrets. Jason, Rohan, Amos: no. Michael, Bohai: not really. Felix: no. Felix's mansion, which is blurred out on Google Maps but she finds an estate agent's listing from a few years back, with more normal decor: well, maybe a little bit.

○○

She's due a holiday, she thinks. Going to work every day, instead of mostly calling in sick and skipping out: exhausting, it turns out! Starting conversations with strange men on three different apps, and going on two bad first dates a week: time-consuming and upsetting! Taj wants her to come on a trip to Norway, which yeah, sure, sounds good, but first: what about a nice weekend in the country?

She books a cottage near Felix's house, and tells herself that it's because she knows it's a nice part of the country, definitely not because dating is terrible and she is feeling friendlier than she used to about her maybe-evil one-time husband and his millions. Three days in the country. It'll be great.

The cottage is smaller than it looks in the pictures. She unlocks the door, finds a welcome note and a bottle of indifferent prosecco.

There's nothing purposeful or special about being here, she reminds herself. But she goes for a long country walk—a good walk, a walk recommended in the local walks pamphlet that she found on the coffee table, and if it also takes her past Felix's house then that's hardly her fault—and again without thinking about it too much, she goes in the back gate. She just wants to have a look at the garden, which is different (worse). She avoids the CCTV cameras, and walks round to the courtyard outside the conservatory. Yes, Felix was a little bit evil; but only a little bit, right? And he was in prison that one time, but only once, and not for anything real where normal people suffered; just for a little light business crime.

She is exhausted and she knows that back home in her flat her furniture is still piled up in the middle of her living room. And work keeps happening every day, which of course is normal, but she's got out of the habit of it. And she has to pay for everything herself and take the rubbish out herself and cook for herself and shop for herself all the time and clean up after herself and pick up every single thing that she drops, file every bit of paper, never a single day when someone has done it for her. And her big plant buddy has dropped five leaves in a week and grown no new ones, and Bohai hasn't visited for ages, and Elena keeps asking how're the dates going in a way that isn't meant to be patronising but somehow is, and even Toby's got a big work project on and doesn't have any spare time, and maybe she really would have been better off in this mansion, rich and relaxed, learning to play the fluorescent-yellow piano, away from all of it.

She pulls out a weed again, like the first time she was here; then another, two more, three, keeps them in her hand. If anyone asks she can say she's a gardener. They prickle against her fingers as she moves closer to the conservatory and looks through the glass door.

It is shockingly, horribly the same.

She'd imagined that the house's decor was at least partly her work, that gifted with an immeasurable budget she'd had terrible ideas and put them into ill-advised practice. Or at the very least that the conservatory, her refuge, was born of her own decisions.

But even the brass plant mister is there; even that wasn't hers.

There's no point in trying the door code, she thinks; it won't work, and it'll alert Felix that there's been an incorrect attempt, and she'll have to leave right away. But maybe that would be for the best, there's no reason to loiter here, so why not give it a go— regard the dozen men in your upstairs room, octopus— and instead of buzzing with an incorrect guess, the lock clicks open.

Her impact on the house was so slight that even the entrance code is the same without her. It's horrible to think about.

But she opens the door.

She tries to remember where the cameras point. There's definitely one in the conservatory. But she takes two steps in and picks up the plant mister and then, again without letting the thoughts form so she doesn't have to acknowledge them, she slips it into her bag and steps back out and closes the door. The whole house was hers, once; she deserves this one thing.

Out in the garden, she walks through the orchard and past the swimming pool (she knows the code for that one too, but no, she should get out while the going's good), and heads towards the back gate.

She is almost there when she hears voices. She ducks behind a wall, beneath a lilac in early bloom. The voices are getting closer. Not Felix—light, high-pitched.

She inches up and peers over the wall. It's the stepson, Mikey, or maybe Vardon again, and another kid. The stepson is carrying his air rifle.

"I can't believe your dad lets you shoot squirrels," the other kid is saying. "If I tell my mum she'll never let me come back."

"Don't tell her, then," the stepson says. "My dad says squirrels are invasive and pestilential. He gives me a thousand pounds for each one I kill."

That's definitely a lie, but it's nice to see that the kid has a friend.

○○

She waits till they're gone, then pulls herself up from the wet grass. The walk back is almost an hour, but the sun comes in and out every few minutes, and the wind gusts, and she dries off faster than she'd expected. Back in the village she spends the rest of the day wandering and drinking coffees and eventually, bored, opening the apps to see if there are any locals to match with (Felix doesn't appear).

○○

At home a few days later, she sprays Buddy with the ￡80 plant mister. "Come on," she says. "This is expensive. Thrive."

She looks up Carter again, and as far as she can tell he's still single, which if she was superstitious would seem like a sign. He's never single; he sees the best in people, and there's the situation with his face, so he's always visibly, deeply in love with someone . And yet here, in this world where she's alone, he is too.

She swipes on the apps again, and is affronted again by non-matches, and by people who match but don't message, and by people who don't respond to her messages.

"Come on. Let's go somewhere," Taj says again, visiting after work one Tuesday. "It doesn't have to be Norway. We could go anywhere."

Anywhere. What if Carter really was the one? What if they were meant to be together?

She can't afford to go to America but she'll be resetting the world soon so maybe she should just…go anyway? And then she'll see him, and if they're meant to be together, which they probably aren't but isn't it better to be sure, then at least she'll know.

So she schedules some last-minute holiday, which her boss doesn't like but she can worry about that later, and applies for an ill-advised credit card. And she books a flight to, god, Denver , she knows nothing about Denver but apparently it's in Colorado, which she initially thinks is one of the little states over towards the east, but it turns out she was thinking of Connecticut (she googles, and confusingly the singer John Denver did live in Colorado, despite singing about West Virginia—but somehow not in Denver itself).

Anyway, Colorado is one of the big square ones in the middle.

"God, really? Denver?" Nat says. "For fun?"

"There was a sale, it was so cheap," she says, rehearsed, "and there's an exhibition at the art museum that sounds good."

"I think it's a great idea," Adele says.

"I'm going to send you a video about what to do if you get attacked by a moose," Nat says.

If it had been New York, or Chicago, or Los Angeles, or even somewhere with lakes and those big American trees, she might have been able to fool herself that she was going for fun, and that Carter's presence was a happy coincidence , isn't that nice, great to check in on her ex-husband while she's in town but there's so much to do, she's here for the art/restaurants/buildings/nature/calm and tranquillity/spa treatments/just a reset.

But instead, Denver.

She researches potential non-husband-related reasons for visiting. There are mountains! It's sunny three hundred days a year! It does have a lake after all! There's an incredibly tedious craft beer culture as a break from London's incredibly tedious craft beer culture! "I don't know, I always wanted to see the Rockies," she tries, aloud. It sounds like something someone might say.

And nobody calls her out on it, though Taj seems hurt that she keeps putting off the discussion about Norway and is instead visiting some different, substantially more distant and expensive mountains on her own. Admittedly, she doesn't mention the trip to Bohai, who's in Australia with difficult sleeping hours anyway.

Are you still with affair wife, she sends him.

Yeah she's with affair guy for good so we're gonna have to sell the flat but there's an amazing taco place that just opened, sticking with it a bit longer

And one week later Lauren emails Carter, who is an estate agent now, or realtor as the Americans say.

She redrafts the email eight times, ten, fifteen, feels sick as she presses send, going to be in Denver for a week to plan a possible move later in the year , I'd love to see a few properties while I'm around. She keeps feeling sick for the six hours that it takes him to get back to her, of course, let me know what you're looking for. And then she feels sick on and off for another week, and then she's on a plane, and then in an airport, and then on another plane, and then she's in Denver.