Love Life Read online

  Love Life

  Nancy Peach

  One More Chapter

  a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

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  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2021

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  Copyright © Nancy Peach 2021

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  Cover design by Lucy Bennett © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2021

  Cover images: Shutterstock.com

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  Nancy Peach asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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

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  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.

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  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

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  Source ISBN: 9780008496265

  Ebook Edition © September 2021 ISBN: 9780008496272

  Version: 2021-09-06

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you for reading…

  You will also love…

  About the Author

  One More Chapter...

  About the Publisher

  To Mr Peach and the three little Peaches

  Chapter One

  “It is a truth seldom acknowledged but nonetheless unassailable, that there are few moments more pivotal in the life of a young woman than finding her boyfriend in bed with someone else. Particularly when that someone happens to be another man.”

  Occasionally, the voice narrating segments of Tess’s life had a pleasing Regency tone, a genteel feminine inflection evoking Royal Baths, Pump Rooms, and leafy Georgian squares. Having Jane Austen describe her past and plot her future course would have been Tess’s preference, she thought as she wandered the supermarket aisle and chose a large tub of ice cream from the freezer cabinet. It would have been reassuring to know that whatever other calamities may befall her, they would be dealt with in a sturdy, prosaic fashion, perhaps accompanied by an avuncular vicar or an elegant great-aunt swathed in crinoline.

  Unfortunately, her usual commentator was the oily daytime television host, he of the orange tan and the crocodile smile of preposterous whiteness, he of the paternity test results revealed in front of a live studio audience. It was this man whose blokey, jocular, mansplaining voice was most often in her ear. And rightly so, Tess told herself as she pulled a multipack of biscuits and two large slabs of chocolate into her basket and made her way to the checkout; rightly so. Because his was the most appropriate voice to document her coup de grâce. It was after all a storyline worthy of a bad soap opera or a tabloid front page, and he was an experienced commentator in this field, far more so than dear Miss Austen, who might have balked at the finer details.

  Driving home, the bag of food sat like a smug toad on the passenger seat and she thought of the “Day her life was turned upside down” as her television host called it – each word delivered with emphasis and captioned at the bottom of the screen. The host was able to articulate the things she could not – indeed, this was his very reason for being – but recently he seemed to have taken on a life of his own. Constructing an alternative character to channel her positive energy had also proven challenging, but for different reasons. Whereas the television host had outgrown his role, in her ear on an almost daily basis, her Jane Austen creation was struggling to muster even the most basic of witty asides and could certainly not be relied upon to put in an appearance when needed. Frankly it had all been very disappointing.

  As she might have predicted, it was the television host’s voice she heard as she sat in the kitchen with her bag of confectionary goods, and he’d brought his imaginary studio audience with him.

  Looking back, Tess realised she had known as soon as she entered the flat that something was wrong. She had replayed it countless times, dissecting those moments between blissful ignorance and betrayal. It almost always left her with a feeling of utter bewilderment, the type of incredulous reaction she had learnt to quash when hearing about some of her more interesting patients’ outlandish life-stories. She thought it through as she sat at the kitchen table in the semi-darkness, the food assembled in front of her like the Last Supper (just with no disciples or wine – or Jesus, come to that). Had there been clues? The Golden Hind of hindsight had proven to be an elusive beast, galloping off into the sunset without so much as a backward glance, let alone an explanation. And how could she trust her own judgement when it had previously led her so wildly astray?

  She knew the punchline. She felt it with the force of a custard pie to the face – a pie thrown by a particularly resentful clown who had anger management issues. But when had she first realised the joke was on her? The television host led her through the reconstruction like a crime scene as she shovelled in biscuit after sorry biscuit:

  “So, Tess,” he said. “You arrived home at the end of a long shift on the labour ward?”

  She nodded miserably as he addressed the audience.

  “That’s right folks; she’d been up all night, bringing new life into the world. Ahhhh!”

  The audience responded with sympathetic clucks and mutterings of consternation.

  “And it seems you’d been working in obstetrics and gynaecology for a few months, concentrating on women’s problems whilst your boyfriend was concentrating on… Never mind, we’ll get to that.”

  They processed his clue, his little joke. A snigger rippled around the studio.

  “And you didn’t notice the unfamiliar coat on the chair, the additional wallet and keys on the hall table, the two empty wine glasses in the sink? Is that right?”

  She nodded again, keeping her eyes fixed on the food.

  “Of course, that’s understandable. You were tired, weren’t you? Exhausted. And coming home earlier than planned to surprise him? Well, you certainly did that!”

  Another giggle, this time louder, the audience growing in confidence as they neared the main e
vent. He continued:

  “But you did notice a few things in your sleep-deprived state, didn’t you, Tess? The new smell? A different aftershave? The fact that Scott wasn’t up and about, in the shower, getting ready for work as he would usually have been?”

  The host’s attention was diverted by a scuffling noise in the audience. The sound of a tissue being pulled from a handbag and a muffled sob of feminine distress. Some of this was clearly close to home.

  “And so now you’re starting to realise something is not right?”

  Tess unwrapped another bar of chocolate.

  “And you’re making your way down the corridor to your bedroom. The room you share with Scott, yes? And you push the door open… and what do you see?”

  There was a dramatic pause. She wondered if a drum roll would be dubbed over the soundtrack.

  “I see Scott.” Her voice was muffled; she was halfway through a mouthful of chocolate and her tongue stuck to her teeth. “He sees me. He sits up. Puts his hand out to sort of… fend me off. He’s anxious, confused. It’s like there’s guilt radiating off him. I see the other pair of trousers on the floor, the shape in the bed next to him, moving…”

  “And that shape, Tess? What is it? Who is that shape?”

  There was a delay while she up-ended the ice cream tub, letting the molten remains trickle down her throat, and when she spoke her voice was quiet. A tiny mouse of a voice drowning in chocolate. “I see him.”

  She imagined the rows of people, on the edge of their seats, craning forward to hear her.

  “Sorry, Tess? You’ll have to speak up. You see who?”

  “I see a stranger. A man. On my side of the bed.”

  The host gave his usual sharp intake of breath to indicate astonishment, which was followed by the predictable gasp from the audience, the voyeurs expressing their pleasure, imaginary rubberneckers in what felt like Tess’s car-crash of a life. It sounded as though they’d got what they came for.

  Tess started to cry; ragged, untidy sobs, knowing it was better to let it all out in the privacy of her own home. She regretted not having been able to offload her distress at the time of the discovery, but she had been numb, struck dumb by the surreal nature of events. By the time the anger had caught up with her, Scott was long gone, liberated, forging ahead with a new life, a new relationship, an entirely new sexual orientation, and all she was left with was the riddle of how a supposedly intelligent woman could have been duped in such a spectacular fashion.

  In the early months, after they had separated and she was on her own, she had revisited the scenario every night in her dreams, waking anxious and confused, hating herself. She had fought for a return to sleep, hoping her neural pathways would reconfigure and provide her with a different waking image, but usually it was futile and the familiar lurching sadness would stay with her for the remainder of the day, an unwanted companion glued to her side for lack of other friends.

  A year later, the dream was now infrequent, the pain and humiliation less invasive, but the memories could trigger off at any time of day, in any scenario. Tess had given up trying to make sense of it. Instead she managed her self-loathing in the only way she knew how: by stuffing her face. Desperate to fill that aching void with something, anything, she filled it with food.

  Chapter Two

  The following morning Tess woke early, her tomcat Morris kneading the soft crease of her neck with painful enthusiasm and fishy breath. She poked a toe out from under her duvet to confirm that the room was bloody freezing, the type of cold that left a trace of frost inside the window pane where her breath had condensed overnight. Later it would thaw into small pools on the sill as the glass warmed in the weak February sun, and Morris would dab his paws in it as he patrolled the house like an overzealous security guard checking for hazardous substances. She rolled to the edge of the bed and shoved his warm gingery weight onto the floor, swinging her feet down to find her slippers. The clock showed six-thirty and the radio alarm came on, filling her room with the chatter of an aggressively cheerful DJ. The noise was harsh above the peaceful drone of city traffic and the hum of their dodgy extractor fan left on in the mildewed bathroom.

  “Tess?” came a loud stage-whisper as Kath, her housemate, nudged the door open and peered through.

  Tess blinked as her eyes adjusted to focus on Kath’s skinny silhouette in the chink of light. “You all right?”

  “Yeah, fine.” Kath hoisted her bag onto her shoulder. “Just heading off. I wondered if you’d be up for a drink later? A few of us from the department are going…”

  Tess’s heart sank. “Oh, I don’t know. It’ll be busy today. We’ve got a couple of new patients coming in. Thought I might stay late…” She registered the look on her housemate’s face and turned her palms up. “Sorry.”

  “You’re going to stay late again? Is there not somebody covering the evening shift?”

  “Well, yeah but…”

  Kath sighed. “Don’t worry. Give me a shout if you change your mind though?”

  “Thanks, will do.”

  They both knew she wouldn’t.

  She found her dressing gown as she heard the front door slam and made her way downstairs. In the kitchen she saw that Kath had left the usual trail of breakfast devastation in her wake. It appeared Morris had already sampled the milky dregs of the half-empty cereal bowl before heading upstairs to nudge his owner into action.

  The weatherman on the radio confirmed what she had already established from the rain hammering against the window pane. He reported that here in the south it was cold and wet with torrential rain, a deluge expected, and back home in the north where there were blizzards and sleet, driving conditions were described as treacherous, as if roads were something humans could usually put their faith in. Accordingly, she dressed for warmth rather than glamour as she pulled on a fleece-lined cagoule. It looked more like something a sensible middle-aged woman called Barbara would wear for a brisk walk in the Peak District, armed only with a thermos of tea and her friendly Labradors. She briefly envied this imaginary woman striding across the moors and almost checked the cagoule pockets for crumbled remnants of Bonio biscuits before remembering that she didn’t actually own a dog. Morris eyed her sternly from the stairs. Idle thoughts of dog ownership were not to be tolerated in this house, thank you very much.

  Before leaving for work she caught sight of herself in the hall mirror and paused, trying to be objective. She saw dark, wavy hair that many would envy, but to her appeared unkempt and messy – and not in an attractive, recently-shagged way, more as if she’d been recently electrocuted. Deep-brown eyes went with the dark-brown hair, but they were puffy after last night’s tearful overeating, and her brows, despite relentless plucking and shaping, still had the potential to straggle outside their boundaries and pop up where she least expected. She was bound to end up like one of those whiskery, old ladies she sometimes saw on the ward, hair sprouting from their faces with the reckless abandon of weeds in a carpark. The curse of the dark hair, the Latin colouring, was perhaps the only trait inherited from her wayward Italian father; indeed, it was her solitary reminder of him. Her olive skin was clear apart from those tiny pale acne scars at her hairline, marks that told of teenage low self-esteem, feelings she thought she’d outgrown, or at least dealt with, until last year.

  “You can’t run away from it, Tess.” the television host’s voice whispered in her ear. “Although, with a face like that I can see why you’d want to.”

  She sighed once, the exhaled breath fogging up the mirrored image, and drew a smile through the condensation in an attempt to force a reciprocal one onto her actual face, before she headed out of the door into the drizzle, leaving Morris grooming himself enthusiastically in the hall.

  Tess drove with caution along the reportedly treacherous roads, occasionally aquaplaning through a vast expanse of surface water. Her car wasn’t the most robust of vehicles and would likely collapse if she so much as slid into the soft verge, so she clung o
nto the steering wheel like a drowning man as she navigated the city traffic. She had to be at work by eight for the handover from the night staff and was eager to return to a place where she was useful. At least this was something she knew she was good at, and the security of her career had in many ways been her salvation over the past year whilst everything else fell apart. The tranquillity of the hospice provided a respite, not only for patients and their families, but for the staff too, and as she walked into the coffee room the tangled knots of tension in her shoulders began to loosen, and the gentle voice of Miss Jane Austen echoed in her head.

  “What pleasure is there to compare with the companionship of friends, the meeting of like minds and the attainment of gainful employment in a situation worthy of one’s talents?” Jane gave a contented sigh, evidently pleased with her observation.

  Tess’s senior colleague Farida was sitting in one of the tattered armchairs, a mug of tea balanced on the edge of one arm. She waved over at Tess and mouthed, “Good weekend?”