Free A Winter's Wedding by Sharon Owens Page B

letting a relatively normal man into her not-quite-normal existence.

6. Arabella’s Husband
    It was February now and Arabella felt heartbroken every time she saw a display of Valentine cards in a gift store window, or red roses in a florist’s window, or one of those ribbon-and-cellophane affairs with a cuddly rabbit inside on the petrol station counter. She’d tried chatting to the handsome hunk in the red T-shirt, but he’d looked right through her, as if she were invisible. So presumably there wasn’t much hope of the two of them conceiving a baby in the flower bed out the front any time soon. Arabella felt her age more than ever when she was sitting in the queue for unleaded petrol one day, and she saw the hunk of her dreams kissing his teenage girlfriend on the station forecourt. The girlfriend was wearing low-slung jeans revealing a tattoo of a rose on her lower back. She also had a diamond stud in her nose and super-long acrylic fingernails. Arabella’s mating-in-the-marigolds fantasy keeled over and died instantly, for how could she compete with a rose tattoo and a nose-stud? She turned to look out of the passenger window and then switched on the radio for company. There was a play on BBC Radio 4. It was something to do with a tea plantation in India in Victorian times.
    ‘ I am leaving for England tomorrow ,’ a man said, ‘ but I will never forget you .’
    ‘For pity’s sake,’ Arabella said sadly. ‘This is getting ridiculous.’ She felt loneliness trying to pull her down into its murky depths, like an octopus with super-sticky tentacles. Some days she was so tense and scared she could barely concentrate on her work. David had still not moved back in, and he was also refusing to answer his mobile phone. She’d been emailing and texting him obsessively for weeks, but she’d not received a single reply. Her letters to his office went unanswered, and she’d even been stopped at reception in the steel-and-glass building where David worked and been asked to leave by the security guard. That had been a bit embarrassing, actually, as the guard had told her to stop being so silly and hysterical and just leave quietly. Or he would have to call the police. He’d put one hand on her back, as if she were a psychiatric patient, and steered her out of the door and right down the mobility ramp on to the footpath. Talk about disgraceful. Was that any way to treat the good lady wife of one of their key workers?
    ‘I’m telling you, Emily,’ Arabella said now, lighting another cigarette on the fire escape at the magazine’s offices. ‘There’s something crazy going on with David.’
    There was a rare spell of sunshine that day, so they were having lunch outdoors on two fold-down chairs. Emily had a plain cheese sandwich from home while Arabella was picking half-heartedly over an M&S salad.
    ‘Do you know, there’s something about chilled orange segments that makes me feel quite melancholy,’ she said.
    ‘Stop buying that particular dish, then,’ Emily suggested. ‘Get a nice bagel instead.’
    ‘Yes, I suppose I should, but a salad always looks so healthy, doesn’t it?’ Arabella said, pushing the remains of her lunch to one side and lighting a cigarette.
    ‘Listen, I don’t mean to sound completely heartless, but I know there’s something going on with David, Arabella. I’m so sorry, and I know it must hurt dreadfully, but it would seem that he’s left you.’
    ‘Well, yes, I am painfully aware that my husband no longer appears to be living in the marital home with me. But there’s something else going on – he wouldn’t just walk out on me like this unless he had somewhere else to go, unless he had a Plan B. He doesn’t like staying in hotels no matter how swanky they are. And he’s got a slight germ phobia about using hotel showers.’
    Arabella’s ashtray on the fire escape was overflowing. She was now throwing her lipstick-covered butts into Emily’s empty shortbread tin.
    ‘What