Love Me Or Leave Me (20 page)

‘At first, I was worried sick,’ was what she actually answered though. ‘So then – well, I started to dig a little deeper. Because all the signs were there, I’d just chosen to ignore them. And when I finally discovered what was going on behind my back … under my own roof, a lot of the time … I mean, can you just imagine?’

Kirk, she noticed out of the corner of her eye, had finally started to focus on her now, calm and serene and cross-legged on the floor. Making absolutely no attempt to defend himself, just letting her have her say.

So on Dawn went, growing bolder by the second, it felt.

‘You ask me how I felt,’ she went on, ‘and the answer is … just so worthless. Valueless. Like the past three years of my life counted for absolutely nothing. Like I’d been a complete eejit for not guessing sooner. Because when it came down to it, the blindingly obvious had been staring me in the face for so long.’

Only the truth. Flashing back, Dawn rewound back to just a few short months ago, when she’d first gone to Kirk’s computer to check something. (In actual fact, her bank balance and what a lampshade she’d put on eBay was now bidding for.)

And there it fecking well was. Her first tiny clue. A whole series of emails in glorious Technicolor, right on his computer screen. Gobshite hadn’t even the sense or the good taste to delete them, just in case she chanced on it. Almost, she clearly remembered thinking at the time, as though he actually wanted her to see. Worse, as though he felt he had absolutely nothing to hide.

And now she saw that Kirk was still calmly listening, making absolutely no attempt to contradict her or to jump in till she’d had her say.

They hadn’t been living together for so long now that Dawn had almost forgotten he was like that. A listener. Even if someone was calling him a lying, cheating bastard of a husband, he’d just sit there and take it and continue to take it till they eventually ran out of expletives and were left with steam coming out their ears. And that was usually when he’d launch into one of his ‘love and peace’ speeches. Or else the one Dawn had nicknamed the John Lennon memorial speech because it went something along the lines of, sorry for making you bawl crying.

‘Hmm, I see,’ Kate nodded sagely. ‘And again Kirk, can I ask if you’ve got anything you’d like to say at this point?’

But Kirk was now single-mindedly concentrating on Dawn and Dawn only, worry and sadness etched all over his beautiful, tanned face.

‘We don’t have to do this,’ he said softly, just to her, acting like Kate wasn’t even in the room. ‘You and I are bigger than this, don’t you see? This negativity, all these accusations, you and I don’t need it. We can rise above this. This isn’t who we are.’

And next thing, in one of his fluent yoga moves that Dawn could never master on account of the way her knees cracked, Kirk was up off the floor and right over beside her, gently cupping his hand over hers.

‘Don’t touch me,’ she said stiffly, instinctively sliding up the sofa from him. ‘Don’t you ever touch me.’

He looked hurt, she noticed. Bloody good enough for him.

‘You must know how sorry I am. I never meant for any of this to –’

‘Leave it, Kirk. I’m sick of it. I’m tired of your excuses and all your ridiculous speeches about how you’ve so much love to give and how you don’t want to lose me. Because you know what it amounts to? A big pile of shite-ology! Just like reiki healing, Kirk, which by the way, I also happen to think is a load of dog poo. And while we’re on the subject, the astro-chart reading you gave me for my birthday? Eva and I laughed ourselves silly over it and she even suggested we use it as loo roll.’

‘But I thought –’

‘I thought we were husband and wife and that meant something to me! I’d have said anything! I’d have said mass if I thought it would make me fit into your world that bit better. But then, you’d know all about lying, wouldn’t you? You and your double life!’

‘It’s okay,’ he said, putting his hand in the small of her back and immediately going to massage it. She baulked though, and he instantly stopped. ‘Just let it out, Dawn. All the anger, the harshness and acrimony. Let it all go. Verbalize it, then visually imagine it all inside a pink balloon, that’s just floating away from you …’

‘Oh, will you shut up about bloody pink balloons! Because you want to know something? Getting married to you was a horrible, awful mistake and everyone is right, my mother and Eva and everyone. All I can do now is try to extricate myself from it as quickly as I can!’

And having held it together for so long, the tears were finally threatening.

‘We don’t have to do this,’ Kirk said, looking like a hurt little boy. ‘Not here, not like this, not now. You know I never stopped loving you … not once … and I never will either. Nothing has changed between us, not a thing. I still love you as much as I did the day I first committed to you. Loving someone else doesn’t mean I love you any less. I love all women, you know that. And there’s no reason why you and I can’t continue on, just as we were …’

‘How could you, Kirk!’ Dawn yelled at him for all she was worth. ‘In our flat, in our bed! How could you have done that to me? You lied to me, you deliberately misled me and all I can do is sit here and hope to God you suffer for it. You’re the one who’s always banging on about karma, aren’t you? So why don’t you try shoving that in one of your pink balloons?’

‘Please, both of you!’ Kate tried her best to interrupt the pair of them. ‘Let’s just try to stay cool and detached. Remember, there’s never any need for raised voices!’

Too late though. Now that the two of them were physically locked in a room together and had actually started to communicate, after months of enforced silence, there was suddenly no shutting them up.

‘I never lied to you,’ Kirk said, still so annoyingly serene that Dawn wanted to screech and fling a vase at him. ‘I never led you on … it was never my intention to …’

‘To what? To do what exactly, Kirk? To have an affair right under my nose? Why can’t you for once in your life, accept that you can’t just do whatever you want, whenever you feel like it? Your actions have consequences for other people around you … in this case, me!’

‘You have to understand that …’

‘That what? That you and your lover just accidentally fell into bed together and things went from there? Is that what you want me to believe? Just how stupid do you think I am! What kind of an eejit do you take me for anyway?’

‘You know that isn’t what I think at all –’

‘Oldest cliché in the book, isn’t it? The wife is the last to know! So just how long had things been going on between the pair of you before I walked in on you? Care to tell Kate all about that?’

Kate, meanwhile, was up on her feet now, like a schoolteacher in a classroom she could no longer control.

‘Please, I really must ask you both to lower your voices and to stay nice and calm for me. All of this is getting us absolutely nowhere!’

Dawn completely ignored her though.

‘So will you tell her or will I, Kirk?’

‘You’re not even attempting to listen to me –’

‘I asked you a question!’

‘And I need to talk to you. But not here and not like this!’

‘Fine, if you won’t, then I will.’

A pause while Kirk just looked at her. And suddenly, feeling scarily in control of the whole situation, Dawn turned back to where Kate looked like she was practically about to call security.

‘You’ll notice Kirk won’t fill you in on my replacement,’ she said quietly. ‘Someone he’s seeing still, as it happens. So it’s up to me. But you’d better prepare yourself for this though. It’s quite a shocker.’

‘Then let’s all discuss that, but nice and sensibly,’ Kate said, sounding relieved that at least things seemed to be cooling down between them a little.

‘Fine by me. But I think you may want to sit back down for what’s coming next. I certainly know I had to.’

Chapter Fifteen

Chloe.

So I’m barely out of one meeting when I’m striding through Reception heading straight into another (banqueting manager, tomorrow night’s scheduled shindig, don’t ask) just as our guests are drifting into dinner.

And so far so good, I’m thinking. All our guests seem to have settled in well and are busy with initial meetings, just before the showstopper of a dinner our head chef’s laid on for later this evening. I allow myself a tiny sigh of relief and am just touching wood that everything continues to run this smoothly, when suddenly my mobile rings.

One quick glance down at the screen is all it takes and my heart rate has instantly shot up into the high nineties. Him. Rob. One of his ‘hi, just checking in with you!’ phone calls which as he and I both know by now, are actually anything but. They’re spot checks, just under a slightly friendlier name, that’s all.

Which is fine and which I completely understand; after all, it’s his money at stake here, isn’t it? It’s just that all this constant micromanaging is making me feel like the guy still doesn’t quite trust me to do the gig and do it right. What in God’s name, I wonder, will it take for him to see that I’ve got everything under control?

I slip into the entrance hallway, where it’s that bit more private, so I can really hear him properly.

‘Chloe, talk to me, how’s it all shaping up?’ is his cut-straight-to-the-chase opener.

‘Rob, hi!’ As always, I somehow manage to over-compensate for how nervy these calls never fail to make me with slightly OTT cheeriness. ‘How’s everything?’

‘More to the point,’ he says, ‘how is your first evening going so far?’

Sounds incredibly busy, whatever corner of the globe he’s calling me from this time. And trust me, with this guy he could literally be anywhere. Zimbabwe, the top of Mount Olympus, you name it. There’s roaring in the background, like engine noise. Way too noisy for a regular car, barring it was a Ferrari Formula One model. We both have to shout to even hear each other.

‘Everything is absolutely perfect!’ I yell over the noise. ‘All of our guests have checked in and everyone seems to be absolutely delighted with their room arrangements. Oh and by the way, the mini flat screen TV’s in the bathrooms went down a bomb too, let me tell you.’

‘They always do in my experience. So no complaints so far?’

‘Are you joking? Absolutely not!’

Only a tiny little white lie, as there was that Jo Hargreaves. But then from the first time I laid eyes on the woman, I just had her down as the kind of guest who absolutely nothing is right for, no matter how well you looked after them. There’s always one, isn’t there? In any hotel I’ve ever worked in, you can take it as read that there’ll be a guest that needs to be handled, and the big challenge for me as GM is to turn their whole experience completely around and send them home a happy camper.

Besides, I remind myself. Jo Hargreaves is here to get divorced. Hardly surprising if she’s not exactly dancing on the ceilings, now is it?

‘Everyone about to have dinner round now, I’m guessing?’ Rob asks, again almost having to shout over the noise around him to be heard.

‘Eh … yeah, yeah, that’s right!’ I tell him. ‘We’ll be serving dinner shortly and then first thing tomorrow morning …’

‘Speak up a bit, will you? The racket going on in the background here is something else.’

Too right, it’s almost deafening me.

‘Rob? Whereabouts are you?’ I have to really shout this time, just so he can hear me.

‘Long, long story. Tell you when I see you. So everything’s okay and our first evening went well? You’re happy with the progress?’

‘Absolutely,’ I tell him confidently. ‘I think I can safely say we’re off to a great start. All of our guests have settled in well, they seem relaxed, comfortable and happy to take the first steps towards getting divorced now. So do you plan on coming over to see how things are running here for yourself?’

No offence, but please say no. We’re all under quite enough pressure here without Rob McFayden breathing down everyone’s back.

‘You know neither the day nor the hour,’ is all he gives me to go on, though. Which let’s face it, could fecking well mean anything.

‘Anyway Chloe, I really have to go. Just checking that no soon-to-be-exes were overturning tables and stabbing each other in the eyeballs. At least, not to date.’

‘Don’t you worry a bit,’ I laugh a bit pitchily. ‘Things couldn’t be running more smoothly really! Each one of our couples was carefully screened before they got here and it goes without saying, they’re all on the absolute best of terms with each other …’

Suddenly, I’m interrupted by the sound of screeching, coming from right behind the closed Lavender Room door.

‘YOU COMPLETE AND UTTER
BASTARD!!!
YOU LIED TO ME JUST LIKE YOU LIED TO EVERYONE ELSE, PRACTICALLY FROM DAY ONE!’

‘Dawn, please, I really need you to calm down and listen to me …’

‘NO I BLOODY WELL WILL NOT CALM DOWN! I’M FED UP WITH EVERYONE TELLING ME WHAT I SHOULD AND SHOULDN’T DO! WHY DID YOU DO IT, KIRK? YOU WERE THE ONE WHO INSISTED THAT WE GET MARRIED IN THE FIRST PLACE! WHY PUT ME THROUGH ALL THAT WHEN YOU KNEW ALL ALONG IT WAS NEVER GOING TO MEAN ANYTHING AT ALL TO YOU?’

Oh, holy shit. I recognize both voices instantly. Dawn and Kirk. Missing dinner, still in their mediation session and by the sounds of it, only a heartbeat away from properly gouging each other’s eyes out.

‘Chloe? You still there?’ Rob asks worriedly, dragging me back to the call.

‘Emm … yes …’

‘Marrying you wasn’t just what I wanted then,’ Kirk’s insisting, and not in his usual deep, sonorous, calm voice at all. Right now he sounds heated and intense, which catches me off guard, bearing in mind, this is probably the last man on earth you could ever imagine losing his cool. ‘It’s
still
what I want, Dawn. The last thing on my mind is to just cut you out of my life. Do you think for one second that I could ever contemplate that?’

‘NO! YOU CAN’T SAY THINGS LIKE THAT TO ME KIRK! YOU DON’T GET TO HAVE THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS!’

Sweet Jesus. They’re actually killing each other. And right now, from the sounds of it, poor Dawn is only a degree away from setting fire to Kirk’s long, swishy ponytail and flinging all his white, flowing
Jesus Christ Superstar
gear onto a bonfire.