Free Splitting by Fay Weldon

the back of the car. He scavenged amongst what she’d tossed out for anything he really wanted, which he discovered was very little—the old shoes, his address book—and took those, too. The children watched. Daddy was leaving home. They were too stunned to cry, or too riveted by the drama. Then Natalie opened the bonnet of the car and took out spark plugs and threw them into the brook which ran so prettily through the English country garden.
    “I want the car,” she said. “It’s mine by right. I need it to take the children to school.”
    Clive called a taxi, and left home in that: taking nothing further but his wallet and a clean shirt. It had begun to rain. Taxi tires drove the mementoes of a happier past further into mud. Later Natalie went out and retrieved his cufflinks, which were gold, and a present to Clive from his mother. Then she took the car and drove it into the stream so the water played and gurgled through anything material which could remind her of her husband, and destroyed it. Later she told her insurers she’d been stung by a wasp, and claimed for the car.
    Clive went to Susan and said, “I know you don’t love me. But aren’t you lonely in Railway Cottage? You and little Roland need looking after. Let me move in with you. Please?”
    “No,” said Susan.
    “But I love you,” said Clive. “I’ve given everything up for you. Home, wife, family. All for you! I’m losing my clients; my business is failing. When you left me, so did others. You’re all I have!” It was true that Clive was losing the confident, well-fed look a successful lawyer needs to have. His little moustache had turned grey. One architect, one lawyer, one doctor down. Who would be next?
    “Clive,” chided Susan, “don’t be absurd! We did have a certain rapprochement for a time, and some good talks. It was wonderful and I don’t regret it. But it just wasn’t the stuff of which futures-together are made. Can’t you get back together with Natalie? I’m sure she loves you. It’s all such a great fuss about nothing. You really ought to think about your children.” When Clive wouldn’t leave, saying he had nowhere to go, no home any more, she put her case more plainly. “Please don’t pester me like this, Clive. It’s thanks to you and your indiscretions I’ve lost my husband, and Roland now has to make do without his father. I’ve been treated so badly. Please don’t make it worse. You men are unbelievable.”
    Clive took a bed-sitting room in town and hung about in the supermarket, hoping to catch sight of Susan. But Susan changed shops, and blamed Clive for that, too. Now her marketing cost more.
    “It’s really hard to take men with moustaches seriously!” said Susan to Lady Rice, meeting her in the greengrocer’s. “Yet Clive seems bent on serious self-destruct. Natalie is being really horrible to me: she cuts me dead in the street: you’d think she’d at least try to stay out of my way, do her marketing mid-afternoon, not mid-morning. It’s not my fault her husband’s in love with me. She ought to have looked after him better: she’s completely frigid sexually. Rosamund Plaidy was treating her. I thought she was on my side but when it comes to it she’s as cold as you are, Angelica. You’d all rather have a grievance than a friend. Why doesn’t Natalie just ask Clive back and be nice to him? He’d soon get over it. Women make such a fuss about this kind of thing. And so shortsighted of her! If Natalie and I go to the same party and she. sees me, she just walks out. It’s really stupid: people will stop inviting her if she keeps making scenes.”
    And Susan was of course right. Susan always got asked out and Natalie didn’t. The wronged make depressing companions.
    “And Rosamund’s another one,” said Susan. “She acts strangely towards me, too. It’s unprofessional of her.”
    “But you’re no longer her patient, Susan,” said Lady Rice.
    Susan enthused over the quality and