Claudia Carroll - Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

AVON

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2011

Copyright © Claudia Carroll 2011

Claudia Carroll asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9781847562104

Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2011 ISBN: 9780007338566

Version: 2016-09-19

For Frank Mackey, with love. This is your year Frankie and don’t forget it!

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,

A medley of extemporanea;

And love is a thing that can never go wrong;

And I am Marie of Romania.

Dorothy Parker,

Not So Deep as a Well (1937)

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

Winter

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Spring

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Summer

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Autumn

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Winter

Epilogue

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

Thoreau said that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. Course he wasn’t to know it, but he was actually talking about me.

Falling in love is easy, you see; any idiot can do it. It’s falling out of love that’s hard.

It takes courage, brinkmanship and a certain degree of recklessness, not just with your own heart, but with someone else’s too. Someone else whose whole existence once meant more to you than your own ever did.

And if you’ve ever sat across the kitchen table from the person you’re supposed to be living happily ever after with and wondered where in hell the spark went…well, then you’ll know exactly what I’m going through right now.

I’m looking silently across the breakfast table at Dan and trying to pinpoint when exactly we first became such a disconnected couple. And I just don’t get it. When did we first start swapping ‘I’ for ‘we’? Dan and I used to be able to have unspoken conversations together. We used to finish each other’s sentences. We used to finish each other’s food. For God’s sake, there was a time when we’d even skip breakfast altogether in favour of an extra hour, tangled up together in bed, making love in a daze of exhausted pleasure.

Now I’m wondering if I sat here dressed like Lady Gaga, singing all the words and doing all the moves from the ‘Telephone’ video, might he even look up from his Times’ Sudoku puzzle? Because the sad truth is this: like wearing nappies as a baby, or the lost City of Atlantis…any love life we once shared is little more than a hazy memory now, as we sleep side by side, like stone figures on a tomb.

The thing about this house though, is that avoidance is generally considered to be a good thing. A sign of deep maturity and awareness. We both know that we’re in a minefield and have been for the longest time; so on the very rare occasions when we find ourselves alone together, we sidestep any embarrassment by just tiptoeing carefully around each other. On the principle that if you don’t acknowledge or talk about a thing then it’ll just quietly go away all by itself.

Trouble is that all this living in denial is physically starting to give me heartburn and I honestly think I’ll scream if I don’t get to articulate what’s going on inside my head. Which is that the current state of our marriage is a steady beep emerging from a heart monitor showing a clear, straight line.

We have officially flatlined.

I take a sip of tea and unconsciously stare over at Dan, my mind in whirling, agonising turmoil but he’s too engrossed in the paper to even notice.

Honest to God, if you were to look at us from the outside, having a civilised breakfast, utterly comfortable in silence, you’d swear our lives were perfect. Dan and Annie, Annie and Dan. Even our names go together. We’ve been together for almost half of our lives, which I know makes us sound like one of those silver-haired, middle-aged couples with porcelain veneers that you’d see in an ad for stair lifts, and yet we’re not. Both of us are only twenty eight. But I can barely remember back to a time when we weren’t a couple.

At fifteen, he was my first boyfriend, I was his first girlfriend, and now, at an age when most of our old pals from our old life in the city are just beginning to think of settling down and getting married, here’s me and Dan like the Mount Rushmore of couples; utterly unchanged from the outside, even after all these years.

Dan reaches out for another slice of toast, but then his tanned, handsome face crinkles with worry as he catches my eye.

‘All right, love?’

I nod back, but stay firmly focused on the Pop-Tart in front of me.

There’s so much that I need to say to him and I haven’t the first clue where to start.

I want to tell him that even though the day has barely started, I already know exactly how it’ll pan out. It’ll be virtually identical to yesterday and the day before and the day before that. I’ll spend the morning working at a job that I don’t particularly like for next to no money, just to get me out of this house but most importantly of all, to keep myself busy. Because busy is always good. Busy means less time to think.

And on the way there, I’ll probably meet one of our neighbours, Bridie McCoy, who’ll chat to me in minute detail about that most gripping and urgent of subjects – her bunions. Like she always does. Then, when I get to the local book shop where I’ve got a part-time job, my boss will joshingly ask me the same question that she always does, day in, day out. Now that I’m pushing thirty, and now that Dan and I have moved from the city into his family’s big country house, when exactly are we planning to start a family? And I will do what I always do: an adroit subject change by asking her whether she fancies Jaffa Cakes or HobNobs with her mug of tea this morning. Never fails me.

Then by the time I get back home, Dan’s mother will have dropped in, letting herself in with her own door key like she always does. She’ll comb through room after room, lecturing me on how the good table in the dining room needs to be polished daily, or else, my particular favourite, the correct way to clean out the Aga in the kitchen. And I will smile through gritted teeth and remind myself that The Moorings is really her house, not mine, so, in fairness to her, she’s entitled.