How to Break Your Own Heart Read online

  He grinned at me, winking one of his freshly kohled and mascaraed eyes before jumping on to the train and blowing me another kiss through the window.

  I stood and watched as the train pulled out, pondering what Oliver had said about Ed being grumpy. It was a bit rich coming from him, I thought. He had quite the foulest mouth of anyone I had ever met, and it had taken me a while to get used to him when he and Kiki had arrived at the cottage the day before.

  She’d been telling me ever since I met her how much I was going to love her ‘gay husband’, as she called him, but for the first hour or so, I’d found it hard to see what there was to like. He was so unbelievably rude. But as the day went on, I had gradually fallen under his spell. Oliver was funny, original and always said exactly what he thought. He didn’t play games with you, and it was quite refreshing once you got used to it.

  ‘Are you this frank with everyone?’ I had asked him, when he’d told me that the all-white-and-beige interior I had so carefully chosen for the cottage was ‘tediously fucking obvious Farrow & Boring…’

  ‘No,’ he’d said, his eyes mischievous behind their thick layer of make-up – which I’d also got used to surprisingly quickly. ‘Only people I like.’

  ‘Blimey,’ I said. ‘What do you say to the ones you don’t like?’

  He shrugged. ‘I ignore them. Bunch of fuckers.’

  Remembering that, as I drove back to the cottage from the station, made me reflect how people were sometimes put off by Ed when they first met him. I should have been used to it, after fifteen years, but it still always surprised me.

  I was so accustomed to Ed’s funny little ways and I loved him so much despite them – or even because of them – that I had to remind myself how he might appear to someone who hadn’t met him before: frankly, a little odd. And the same went for certain aspects of our relationship, I supposed. Like what Kiki had said about us sleeping in separate beds.

  I was still quite cross with her about that. It had been such an intrusion on our privacy and it had stuck in my mind ever since she had brought it up, like an annoying little stone in my shoe, because I couldn’t deny it. Ed and I didn’t share a bed – or even a bedroom – any more. Not in the cottage and not in the London flat either. I couldn’t remember when it had become a formal thing, but it had been quite a while.

  It had started because he seemed to work later and later at night in his dark little study and to get up later and later too, whereas I liked to go to bed reasonably early so I could get up and have a run around the park in the morning before work.

  Rather than him disturbing me at three or four in the morning, when he eventually went to bed, and then me waking him when I got up at seven for my run, he’d started sloping off to sleep in the spare room. And over time that became ‘his’ room and our bedroom became ‘my’ room.

  It had all happened so gradually I hadn’t really given it much concentrated thought – although, in my heart, I always knew it wasn’t right for a couple our age. I had tried to talk to Ed about it when he’d climbed into bed with me one Sunday morning, with something other than sleep on his mind, but he had just made light of the whole thing, telling me jokingly it was the time-honoured ‘aristocratic’ way.

  ‘Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had separate bedrooms,’ he’d said. ‘So we’re just living in our own little mini Versailles.’

  ‘They also had about fifty people watching them get dressed each morning,’ I reminded him.

  He’d laughed and pulled me closer, nuzzling into my hair.

  ‘Well, we won’t go that far, but it does make sense for us both to get a proper night’s sleep, doesn’t it, Amelia? And it’s not like we don’t have regular sex, which is a lot more than poor old Louis and Marie Antoinette could say.’

  Regular was the word for it. Ed had very clear ideas about when we should celebrate that part of our marriage, just as he did about everything else in our life together. And that particular conversation had ended right there, because Sunday morning was one of those times.

  He was simply a man of habit, my husband, I told myself, as I carefully backed the Volvo estate into the narrow garage, but not in a boring way; in a quirky way. He was a true eccentric, as the brilliant often are. And with this in mind, I found myself shaking with laughter when I walked into the kitchen.

  Sitting on the table was a rather shabby grey velvet elephant. It was wearing my flowery kimono, and a pair of large dark glasses were balanced on its trunk. The Sunday Times ‘Style’ section was open in front of it, at the fashion pages; on one side was a bottle of brandy, and on the other, my tube of mascara.

  I heard Ed’s feet clattering down the wooden stairs as I leaned against the table laughing.

  ‘Good heavens!’ said Ed, as he appeared, now clearly fully awake. ‘Look at Mr Bun. I think he’s had a bit too much to drink. Whatever is he wearing?’

  ‘Oh, you daft bugger,’ I said, putting my arm around his waist and shaking my head.

  ‘What?’ said Ed, in the tones of offended innocence he always assumed when Mr Bun got up to his tricks. ‘What a very silly elephant he is. I caught him earlier, trying to plug your hairdryer in.’

  ‘What a very silly elephant you are,’ I said, turning to look up at his dear face, my arms still around him.

  He smiled down at me and then, coiling my long ponytail around his hand, he pulled me to him and kissed me tenderly.

  2

  We got back up to London later that afternoon, and I ran straight out to Selfridges food hall to pick up something for dinner. Having that temple of gastronomy just a ten-minute walk from our flat was one of the multifarious joys of living, as we did, on Mount Street, in the heart of Mayfair. About the same walk in the other direction would have taken me to Fortnum’s.

  I knew how lucky I was to live there, and hardly a day went by that I didn’t send up a little prayer of thanks that the man I had fallen madly in love with, at the age of twenty-one, came from a family which owned such a residence. Especially one with four bedrooms.

  As a result of this equivalent of winning the love lottery, W1 had been my postcode for my entire adult life. Had I been reliant on the pathetic salary I got from my job in a nearby art gallery, I would have still been living with my parents in Maidstone. No thanks.

  When I got back with the provisions, Ed was already holed up in his study, as usual, reading proofs for his next client newsletter for Bradlow’s Bottles, his bespoke wine business.

  The ‘journal’, as he called it, was a quarterly account of his travels around France in a classic car, which he changed frequently to keep things interesting, visiting tiny independent vineyards, from where he bought the best vintages and sold them on to his customers over the following years, at a very healthy mark-up.

  You had to be a ‘member’ to receive the journal, which was exquisitely printed on linen paper, and even to buy wine from Bradlow’s Bottles, a detail that made a particular kind of competitive wealthy man desperate to join.

  I never quite understood Ed’s vetting procedure, but not everyone who applied was accepted and, as you couldn’t get those particular vintages from anywhere else, serving wine with Ed’s imprimatur on it – they arrived in lovely wooden crates, with a ‘BB’ sticker on each bottle – was the last word in insider chic among certain elite circles.

  This exclusivity, combined with Ed’s very amusing writing style, the eccentric nature of the people and places he encountered on his travels, the anorak-y details of the wine, the cellars, the food, the hotels and the cars, plus his genuine connoisseurship, had turned the journal into a cult male read.

  He had been approached many times over the years by newspapers wanting him to turn the journal into a column, and by supermarkets wanting him to do upscale wine ranges for them, but he always said no.

  Ed was adamant that the whole set-up should stay as it was – ‘capriciously exclusive’ was his term – and it certainly seemed to work. What had started out as a hobby when he was stil
l a student had grown into a very successful business. Ed was raking it in.

  So, I reminded myself, as I often did, settling down to read on my own, after we’d finished dinner and he had returned to his study, I could hardly resent him spending so much time on the thing which kept me in the manner to which I had become so luxuriously accustomed.

  I’d certainly had plenty of time to get used to it. Bradlow’s Bottles had been at the heart of our relationship since the day we met fifteen years before, in the south of France.

  He’d been down there on one of his early wine-buying forays, when he was still just selling cut-price plonk to university pals as a way of subsidizing his own passion for the seriously good stuff. I was doing a year at the university in Montpellier, as part of my French degree.

  I could still remember so clearly the first time I ever spoke to him. He had rung my lodgings and, by sheer fluke, that morning I was in and my cow of a landlady was out – which was very lucky, because there was no way Madame Marchand would have passed his message on to me. I’d already had several promising flirtations wrecked by her disinclination to tell me when a young man had telephoned, back in those days long before mobiles, texts and emails.

  ‘Is this Amelia Herbert?’ an unfamiliar male voice, with a very English accent, had asked when I answered the phone.

  ‘Oui,’ I said. ‘I mean, yes… who’s calling, please?’

  ‘My name is Ed Bradlow – I’m at Magdalene with your brother, Dick, and he gave me your number when he heard I was coming down to Montpellier. I’m here to look at some wine and I wondered if you’d like to come out with me for a day?’

  I was rather bewildered. What did he mean by ‘look’ at some wine? Go to an off-licence and look at the labels?

  It didn’t appeal to me particularly, but something about Ed’s voice was terribly likeable and made me realize how homesick I was for some British company. It was the first time in my life I hadn’t been at home for Easter.

  ‘What did you have in mind?’ I replied, hoping it was vague enough not to reveal my ignorance.

  ‘Well, today I’m going to see a vineyard about 60 kilometres from here, up in the hills. I think it will be a lovely drive and it would be really nice to have someone to share it with. I’ve been travelling on my own already for a fortnight…’

  ‘I’d love to come,’ I said impulsively, although I had an essay deadline looming. That could wait, I decided.

  Ed appeared less than half an hour later in a red open-top Jaguar. I was deeply impressed – my brother and his other friends drove round in terrible old bangers – and Ed’s broad smile and firm handshake put me immediately at my ease.

  ‘What a beautiful car,’ I said, sinking into the cream leather seat and running my hand over the highly polished walnut dashboard – and then holding tightly on to it as Ed took off at high acceleration. ‘Is it an old one?’

  He turned and smiled at me again. Although he wasn’t film-star hunky handsome – in fact, he looked rather skinny under his striped shirt – there was something about Ed’s face which was as instantly appealing as his voice had been on the telephone.

  ‘1962,’ he said, proudly. ‘I’m glad you like her. I got her last month and thought I’d bring her down to France for a spin on this trip.’

  ‘Do you come to France a lot then?’ I asked.

  ‘A couple of times a year – for the wine.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, suddenly remembering something my brother had mentioned. ‘Are you the one who buys wine direct from the growers and sells it on to them all at great prices? Dick told me about you. He brought some bottles of red home for us at Christmas, actually. It was very nice.’

  I didn’t go on to tell him that my father had liked it so much he’d drunk himself into a foaming rage, which had led to the upending of the Christmas pudding on to the dining-room floor. I pushed that unhappy memory down to fester with all the similar ones and smiled at Ed.

  ‘That’s me,’ said Ed, turning his head to me and smiling back. ‘And I hope we are going to find some rather marvellous wine to buy today. I’ve had a tip-off about this grower from someone whose opinion I seriously respect, and I’m rather excited about the Languedoc in general at the moment. Actually, I need to see exactly where we are going. There’s a red notebook in the case on the back seat – could you get it for me?’

  I turned round to see an old leather suitcase which seemed to be full of maps, folders and notebooks. I did a double take when I noticed there was also a stuffed toy back there, a grey velvet elephant wearing a knitted scarf, propped on the seat next to the case.

  It was, of course, the creature I would later come to know so very well as Mr Bun, Ed’s constant companion since he was sent to boarding school aged six. At first sighting, though, it seemed highly peculiar – or a little pretentious – for a dashing young man like Ed to have a cuddly toy in his car, but I said nothing, just found the red notebook as instructed and pulled it out.

  ‘That’s the one,’ he was saying. ‘Now open it up at the page where the corner is turned down.’

  I did as he asked, and found a page of notes in elegant loopy handwriting – fountain pen – with the name of the vineyard in neat capitals at the top.

  ‘Those numbers and letters at the bottom of the page are the map reference,’ said Ed, passing me a map and a compass from a pocket in his door. ‘How’s your navigation?’

  ‘Well, I was a Girl Guide…’ I said, feeling somewhat nervous, but wanting to please.

  ‘Great stuff,’ said Ed. ‘I know the way as far as there’ – he pointed to a dot on the map with a very long, multiply-hyphenated name – ‘but after that it’s up to you.’

  I did really well getting us up into the hilly country and I loved bowling along with the top down. It was a beautiful April day and the air smelled of wild thyme up there. Everything seemed perfect until I realized we were completely and utterly lost.

  I kept quiet about the first few signposts which meant nothing and a couple of villages which bore no relation to anything I could see on the map, but secretly I was really starting to panic.

  Playing for time, I just carried on randomly saying ‘Left again’ and ‘Right, here’, as though I knew what I was doing, for fear of how Ed might react. I’d had too many experiences of my father going nuts when my mother or brother messed up the map-reading to be casual about it with a total stranger.

  After another couple of signposts that might as well have been in Swahili for all they meant to me, Ed started to laugh. It began as a chuckle and then became such a belly laugh he had to pull the car over. He turned to me, still grinning.

  ‘We’re completely arseholed, aren’t we?’ he said, looking sideways at me, his elbows on the steering wheel.

  I nodded, still slightly terrified that the laughter could turn to shouting at any moment, but he just put his hand on my shoulder, threw his head back and roared. I started to laugh too.

  ‘Oh, that’s so funny,’ he said, getting the words out with difficulty. ‘I started to wonder about thirty minutes ago, but I didn’t like to say anything because it seemed rather rude to question a Girl Guide’s map-reading skills, but when I realized we had gone past the same signpost twice, I really started to wonder…’

  He was now helpless with laughter, spluttering and gesturing at something with his left arm. Whatever he found so funny, he was laughing too hard to get the words out.

  ‘What?’ I asked him, as he carried on flailing his arm around like a madman.

  I turned to look – he seemed to be pointing at a signpost.

  ‘Same… one…’ he got out between gasps. ‘Th— th— third time…’

  Then I lost it too. Partly out of relief at the way he had reacted. He really didn’t mind. He really did think it was funny that I had got us so lost. I was amazed.

  ‘Oh, that’s hilarious,’ said Ed, wiping tears of laughter from his eyes. ‘Your brother is so hearty and I just assumed you’d be similar. Oh, that’s so fu
nny…’

  ‘Ed,’ I said shyly. ‘I’ve got something to tell you.’

  He looked at me with his head on one side and his eyebrows raised expectantly. His grey-green eyes were still bright with amusement. I looked into that fineboned face and felt my stomach do a funny little backflip thing.

  ‘I failed my map-reading badge…’

  For a moment he just looked at me and then he started again – a completely uninhibited, shouting laugh – and so did I.

  After that Ed took over the map-reading and declared that my new job was Music Monitor. I was very happy about that and had great fun going through his box of cassettes and putting on my favourites, with a lot of winding backwards and forwards to find particular tracks, most of which we sang along to together.

  He had all the stuff you would have expected to find in someone’s car in 1992 – Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, the soundtrack from Betty Blue – but also some other things that were less obvious, but which I secretly adored. When I found Shirley Bassey’s Greatest Hits and put on the theme tune from Goldfinger at extra volume, Ed turned to me and beamed.

  My stomach did that thing again.

  Eventually we found the vineyard, and the owner appeared, smiling, in the open doorway of the farmhouse when he heard the car turn into the yard. It was a wonderful old place with the main house on one side, flanked by rambling outbuildings made from the same weathered grey stone.

  Monsieur Fabre didn’t seem at all bothered that we had arrived three hours later than Ed’s appointment and laughed almost as much as we had when we explained how lost we’d been.

  He had greeted us in reasonably good English, but when I described our beleaguered journey in French, the tiniest lift of his bushy white left eyebrow indicated to me that he was suitably impressed with my command of his language, and not another word was exchanged in English. After six months living there I could read such tiny calibrations of the Gallic face.

  Although his accent was terrible, Ed’s French was pretty good – good enough to appreciate quite how fluently I spoke it. I could tell he was impressed and was secretly delighted, but once we got into the tasting, which took place in an old stone barn full of wooden barrels of wine, it was Ed’s turn to shine.