Katy Regan - The One Before The One

KATY REGAN

The One Before the One

For my parents

Cover

Title Page KATY REGAN The One Before the One

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

By the same author

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

September 2008

I knew this would be the day the minute I opened my eyes that morning, the sun pouring through our slatted blinds throwing stripes onto Martin’s face. I turned over and examined him, his face slack with sleep, head half turned into the pillow, mouth ajar.

That was it, I decided, tears already threatening. I’d come to the end of the road.

I just couldn’t do this any more. It was killing me. Not softly, like the song, but slowly and painfully, sucking the life force out of me like hands around my neck.

I reached over and gently (guilty, probably, at what was about to come) pushed his dark hair, clammy after another Indian summer’s night, from his face so that it stuck up, revealing his widow’s peak. I’d watched that peak develop. That deepening V was like a measure of the fourteen years we’d spent together. Sometimes I felt like my feelings were receding at the same rate as his hair. Fourteen years. More than a third of my life. Did I even know who I was without him? My heart thudded with nerves.

‘Happy Birthday, gorgeous,’ he mumbled, still half-conscious, before flinging a heavy arm across my chest.

I swallowed hard. It felt like trying to swallow a mouthful of dried leaves.

‘Thanks,’ I managed eventually. But it was already anything but happy.

The next time I would be in this bed, I would be here alone. What I hadn’t predicted at that point, however, was that technically I was about to finish with my fiancé, the man I was due to marry in a month’s time, the only man I had ever loved or who had loved me, over a present. A present he’d bought for me.

‘Here we are birthday girl, one blueberry smoothie and Eggs Benedict with – I dare say so myself – a Michelin star standard Hollandaise sauce.’

It’s two hours later (one of those spent perfecting the Hollandaise sauce) so that I’m that unfortunate mix of so ravenous I am annoyed, and guilty that I’m annoyed, Martin places the tray on the duvet in front of me, then sits down on the bed. He tightens the belt of his white ‘waffle’ dressing gown, a free gift from Boots with a Magimix coffee machine last Christmas.

I look at the tall glass with the sprig of mint placed lovingly on top and then at his face – such a pleasant, friendly face that I knew so well: the neat, narrow mouth, pressed deep into a generous chin that told of a man who was full of joie de vivre and liked the good things in life; the slightly upturned nose that he liked to root around constantly when he thought I wasn’t looking; round cheeks that made you want to reach out and squeeze them and those small, yet ever-twinkling dark eyes behind tortoiseshell glasses, slightly too far apart like a sheep, and yet filled with so much unwavering love it made me want to cry.

I forced a smile. ‘Thank you, honey.’

‘My pleasure. Now, does birthday girl want her present now, whilst she’s eating her breakfast, or later?’ Martin liked to refer to me in the third person.

‘Ooh, I think now.’

‘Good choice.’ Martin reached deep into his dressing gown pocket and produced an envelope wrapped up in red ribbon. Martin was always an excellent present-wrapper, unusual for a man I’d always thought. A momentary flurry of hope: tickets to the theatre perhaps? Beauty Salon facials? A voucher for John Lewis? It didn’t really matter since I’d already decided I won’t be able to keep it.

‘Come on then, Caro, the suspense is killing me. Aren’t you going to open it?’ he said, eyes glistening.

I opened the envelope, my hands shaking. A leaflet with a picture of a tree in full autumnal blaze on the front.

‘Your Guide to the National Trust', it read in an uninspiring font.

Membership to the National Trust? I momentarily had to catch my breath. If it was membership of the National Trust at thirty-two, what would it be at forty? His-and-her flasks? The Vicar of Dibley box set? Jesus Christ, I was about to marry my dad. (If my dad were a normal sort of dad, which he isn’t).

‘So do you like it? he said, nudging closer whilst I held the membership card in my shaking hand. ‘I thought after the honeymoon, when weekends are more free, we could start with the Stately—’

‘Course I like it!’ I cut in, and then an awful, awful thing happened. I started to cry. I started to cry and I couldn’t stop.

Martin peered at me, alarmed.

‘Caro, what on earth is the matter?’ The membership leaflet was damp with tears now. ‘Please. Tell me. What on earth is wrong?’

And that’s where it ended, in what should have been our marital bed. Martin, the only man I had ever known, really, the man who had loved me for more than a decade, who had talked about having children with me, who had held me whilst I sobbed through no end of twenty-something self-esteem crises, who had listened to me moan about my parents and my mental family, who knew the best of me, the worst of me, the ugly truth of me and yet accepted me more than anyone else in he world, was lying next to me, shushing me, stroking my hair.

And I was about to break his big heart into a million different pieces.

Early June 2009

I suppose you could say that things had barely moved on in my life, nine months later, when my seventeen-year-old sister turns up on my doorstep and I am drunk, alone, on a Sunday afternoon.

When I say drunk, I don’t mean staggering-all-over-the-place drunk. God no! That would have been humiliating. It was more like two-large-glasses-of-wine drunk. Okay, possibly half a bottle, exacerbated by two fags and the dregs of a bottle of Prosecco. I’d say, on alcohol consumption alone, I would have just about got away with convincing someone I wasn’t drunk. If I hadn’t been crying. Or if I hadn’t answered the door with said bottle of Prosecco. Or if I wasn’t standing barefoot on my doorstep at 4 p.m. on a Sunday wearing a wedding dress and a tiara.

It had been raining, sheeting it down for hours, but was on the verge of brightening up so that the sky glowed, making the row of white terraces behind where Lexi stood and the trees of Battersea Park – full as broccoli florets in the height of summer – look unreal, like a stage set.

She was carrying a trolley case with fuscia-pink lips all over it and was wearing gold leggings, and a silver headband, Grecian-style, around her forehead. In the luminescent light, I thought how lovely she’d become, a modern take on Wonder Woman, with her gamine crop and kittenish eyeliner. I, on the other hand, must have looked like a contestant for Trailer-Trash Bride of the Year.