Exclusive extract from How To Break Your Own Heart by Maggie Alderson, the Great Read in the November issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
‘Do you always sleep in separate beds?
Kiki’s question took me so much by surprise that I’d answered her truthfully before I had time to think about it. I hadn’t had any coffee yet, my brain wasn’t in gear.
‘Yes,’ I said and turned the tap on to full blast to fill the kettle.
I wanted to drown out any possible further discussion of the subject.
But Kiki hadn’t finished.
‘Do you think that’s normal for a happy couple in their mid to latethirties?’ she asked brightly, leaning round me over the sink, forcing me to look at her.
I switched the kettle on and deliberately moved away to bustle around with mugs and coffee pots. I really wasn’t in the mood for an in-depth discussion of my marital relationship before nine on a Sunday morning. And especially not after the amount of wine we had consumed at dinner the night before. My head was pounding.
I wasn’t used to getting up so early at the weekend, but Kiki had woken me like a puppy, bouncing up and down on the end of my bed, insisting I go for a walk with her. Which was when she’d discovered that Ed and I slept in separate beds. In separate bedrooms.
I glanced out of the window. It was a perfect March morning, as she’d said. The sky was bright blue with little white clouds scurrying across it and the catkins on my neighbour’s tree were dancing in the breeze. A walk through the fields and woods would probably clear my head, I thought, as long as the conversation didn’t continue in the same vein.
But Kiki wasn’t ready to let it go.
‘Amelia,’ she said, walking over to the dresser where I was pouring milk into a Cornishware jug. She put her hand up to my face and gently turned my chin so I had to look at her. ‘Stop running away from me. This is serious. How long have you and Ed been sleeping separately?’
I sighed deeply and pushed her hand firmly away from my face. ‘It’s none of your bloody business where we sleep, Kiki,’ I said, starting to feel really cross. ‘I’ve had enough of this. You’ve woken me up at the crack of dawn on Sunday to go for a walk, and I’m happy to do that, but not if you are going to give me the third degree about my sleeping arrangements.’
‘OK, OK,’ said Kiki, raising her hands in surrender. ‘I’ll shut up now, but I am going to make you talk about it one day.’
‘Sugar, dear?’ I asked in a deliberately over-bright tone and with a fake smile, as I held a mug of coffee up in front of her, my little finger raised genteelly.
‘Two, thank you, sweetie,’ she said, returning my ironic grin and then sticking her tongue out. I stuck mine out back at her.
Kiki kept her promise and our walk passed very pleasantly, with conversation no more intrusive than a post-mortem of the various hilarities of the night before and what we each had coming up socially in the next week – always a rich vein of conversation with her. There were also frequent diversions as Kiki discovered yet another wonder of the English spring to squeal over.
‘I love all the mud here,’ she said, lifting up each of her brightly striped Paul Smith wellies in turn to admire the thick clods sticking to the soles. ‘We don’t get much mud in Australia, because it’s so dry. I love this oozy mud. Listen to that – a proper squelch.’
I laughed. Kiki had lived in London on and off for years, with stints in New York and back in her native Melbourne, but she still took great delight in all the little details peculiar to England. It was just part of the insatiable enthusiasm for living which made her so popular. With her background and money – she was from an Australian brand-name family – and not forgetting her exquisite gamine looks, she would never have been short of friends, but Kiki’s appeal went way beyond the fiscal or the physical.
As my husband Ed said when we first met her at a dinner party a few months earlier, Kiki didn’t just seize the day, she got it in a half nelson and squeezed it into submission. His other pronouncement on Kiki was that she didn’t so much meet people as recruit them. We’d been enlisted immediately.
We had met her that night, she’d decided we were OK, according to some value system entirely of her own, and we’d seen her at least once a week ever since, whether we liked it or not – and I was a bit more enthusiastic than Ed.
But while Kiki’s bossiness could be overwhelming, I was glad she’d forced me to go for a walk that morning. The woods were heavenly in the early spring sunshine, and we got back to the house an hour later with our heads clearer and our arms full of branches of pussy willow and catkins to take back up to London.
My neighbour was in her garden as we walked past, examining the green shoots that were appearing in her flowerbeds, so I stopped by her gate to say good morning.
We’d only had the cottage a few weeks and I hadn’t had a chance to get to her know her properly yet, but I was quite fascinated by Mrs Hart. She was very old – the man in the village shop had told me she was ninety-five – and seemed to live entirely independently.
She spent a lot of time in her garden and it was lovely, even in winter. There always seemed to be something flowering and I was hoping she might be able to give me some tips for my patch. I had big plans for it.
‘Been for a walk, Amelia?’ she said, smiling, when she made it over to the gate, taking her tiny little steps. ‘I bet it was splendid in the woods this morning.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It was glorious down there.’
Kiki joined me by the gate and I introduced them.
‘G’day, Mrs Hart,’ said Kiki, waving cheerfully. Mrs Hart waved back.
‘Hello, Kiki,’ she said. ‘Lovely to meet you. But you must all call me Hermione. Those are splendid catkins you have there, Amelia.’
She put out an ancient hand and gently touched them. ‘Those are female hazel catkins. You can tell by the red flowers at the tips. They are much more spectacular than my birch ones.’
I was impressed by her knowledge, but as she spoke I was distracted by a small thatch of long white hairs on her chin. They were glinting in the sunshine and they really bothered me.
Mrs Hart – Hermione – had such a marvellous face, fine-boned, with very lively blue eyes, and the bristles were a rotten shame. She was always nicely dressed, but her bright coral lipstick was a bit skewiff, so I could only presume that she couldn’t see them. She certainly wasn’t gaga, so it had to be her eyesight. If I ever got to know her better, I thought, I would say something. It was what I would want someone to do for me.
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