Cathy Hopkins - Dancing Over the Hill - The new feel good comedy from the author of The Kicking the Bucket List

Is this it?

Should I accept that my marriage has gone stale and carry on as we are?

What could change things?

Do I want to change things?

How would I change things?

Should I get some Wonderbrow paste to dye my grey eyebrows?

As I said, all existential stuff.

With those happy thoughts, I made tea and wondered again what Matt had to tell me. I mentally made a list of possibilities.

An affair?

He was ill?

Someone had died?

I liked a list. Some women of my age are ladies who lunch. I am a lady who lists. It’s just the way my brain works, it makes an inventory of everything; lists always make me feel calmer. Debs said that’s because my star sign is Virgo and they like things to be ordered and in the right place. She also said I had Aquarius rising, which was at odds with the Virgo part and accounted for my slightly eccentric and split personality and tendency to surprise people by doing or saying something out of the blue.

When I was younger, my lists looked like this:

Look for God.

Find a way to change the world for the better and bring about world peace.

Find my soul mate.

Live happily ever after.

Now the lists looked like this:

Check blood pressure.

Buy supplement for arthritis.

Google best anti-wrinkle cream.

Buy over-the-counter sleep remedies.

After half an hour, I fetched my laptop from the top floor and went into Facebook for my daily fix of animal rescue clips. There was one of a baby orang-utan playing with a monkey. Cute. Orang-utans are my favourite animal. Now … what else had people posted that was essential viewing and part of life’s rich tapestry? I’d just opened footage of a bunch of Yorkshire men singing ‘Mi chip pan’s on fire’, when I heard a groan from the sitting room. I was about to close the page when I noticed a new friend request from a Tom Lewis.

‘Cait, are you back?’ I heard Matt call.

Tom Lewis. The Tom Lewis? It couldn’t be , I thought, as I abandoned the laptop and went through to the sitting room. I used to know someone of that name, but it couldn’t be him, surely? I hadn’t heard from him in over forty years. He had been the love of my life many, many moons ago. No. Couldn’t be him. Probably some random request. I got a number of those from men, mainly in the military, I didn’t know. Everyone on Facebook did. Spam. Couldn’t be my Tom Lewis. Either way, I’d have a proper look later.

Matt opened his eyes, usually conker brown and focused, now red and blurry. ‘Ah, there you are.’ He smiled at me. On the rare occasions that Matt drank too much, he was a nice drunk – affectionate and sleepy, no trouble.

‘So what’s happened?’ I asked.

He looked over at the dictionary. ‘Was looking up words.’

‘Words?’

He reached over, picked up the book and read from a page. ‘Redundant – no longer needed or useful, superfluous. Retirement – to recede or disappear into seclusion. I am sorry, Caitlin.’

Ah. So that was it. ‘Seriously?’ I asked.

He nodded. ‘Seriously as in not funny.’

With that, he lay back, closed his eyes and nodded off again. I noticed that his left sock had a hole in it and his big toe was poking through. He was usually so perfectly turned out in his spotless shirts and well-cut suits for work, and this vulnerability endeared him to me.

I need a drink too, I thought.

I went back into the kitchen and found a bottle of Pinot Grigio in the fridge as the implications hit me. I opened the French doors and went to sit on the bench in the sunshine on the decking outside. I got out my mobile and called Lorna.

‘Matt’s been made redundant.’

‘Shit.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Will he get a pay-off?’

‘Maybe but it won’t be much. He was there as a freelancer though he’d been with the same company for a long time. He’s still out for the count so I don’t know the details yet.’

‘Is it definite?’

‘Think so. Hell, Lorna, how are we going to get by? We don’t have savings, or any cushion money, in fact.’

‘Don’t panic,’ said Lorna. ‘At least you have your job at the surgery.’

‘Only until Margaret Wilson is back from her maternity leave.’

‘What about your writing?’

I laughed. Despite time spent at my laptop, my ideas were sparse. ‘Nothing happening at the moment.’

‘You need to get an agent.’

‘I need to get a good idea first, and getting an agent is as difficult as getting a publisher.’

‘Something will come.’

‘Maybe. Hope so.’

‘In the meantime, at least you’re earning something.’

‘I guess.’ My job didn’t pay a lot. Matt and I had an agreement. I paid for the fun stuff. I earned enough to keep us in wine, the occasional meal out, and holidays once a year – and those to Devon or Cornwall, nowhere too expensive. Matt paid for the boring stuff – gas, mortgage, electric, phone, car, insurance. In short, he was the breadwinner.

‘He could always look for another job,’ said Lorna.

‘Maybe, but will he be able to get one at his age? It may be time to sell the house.’ It had always been on the cards that we might have to sell up one day, in order to release money for our non-existent pension pot because, like so many of my generation, we didn’t think we’d get old. ‘Matt didn’t just say redundant. He used the word retirement too.’

‘Big change for you both,’ said Lorna.

‘Wasn’t part of the plan just yet.’

‘Never is. Sometimes we chart the course of our lives internally with our choices, decisions and plans for the future, and think we’re in control. Sometimes change comes from unforeseen and unexpected external forces, and we realize that we’re not in control at all. Sounds like today is one of those days and you have no choice but to go with it.’

I got the feeling she was talking about Alistair’s short illness, as much as what had happened to Matt. Her husband had died last year of pancreatic cancer, eight weeks after he got the diagnosis. ‘So what should I do?’

‘Stay calm. Have a glass of wine. See how things unfold. Not all change is bad.’

‘We’ll see.’

‘Call if you need to.’

‘Will do.’

After she’d hung up, I began to think how this change might affect us. Losing his job meant Matt would probably be at home all day. How would that be?

We had our lives worked out perfectly to avoid each other, without actually admitting that was what we were doing. When he got in from work late in the evening, I gave him space and let him retreat into his cave (as advised in the book, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus ). If I wasn’t out at one of my classes, I’d have a brief chat when he got home, and then I usually went up to bed to read. He came up around twelve when I was asleep and, if I wasn’t, I pretended to be. He got up early and was gone by the time I rose in the morning, and so it went on until the weekend. I hardly knew what went on his head any more, nor he in mine, but this never troubled us because we were both so busy living our separate lives that we had never had to confront the fact we’d grown apart.

Will we need to sell the house if he can’t find other work? I asked myself. Probably . I liked our home. It was a five-bedroom semi-detached Edwardian in a quiet tree-lined street in Bath, with a south-facing, level garden at the back – hard to find because so much of the city is built on hills, so most gardens are sloped or terraced. We’d moved here over fifteen years ago after a weekend trip when we’d fallen in love with the area with its Georgian architecture, crescents and houses built with honey-coloured stone. We could walk into town in five minutes and be in the countryside in ten. I looked around at the wooden floors, which were scuffed and in need of sanding, and the magnolia walls, which I noted were overdue a lick of paint. I didn’t mind. It had a cosy, lived-in feel from when the boys were teenagers with a hundred interests and hobbies, hence shelves and cupboards in every room that were full of books, DVDs, games and sports equipment. I’d even found a snorkel and pair of flippers the other day, under the bed in Jed’s old room.