Marriage and Other Games Read Free

It provided no comfort whatsoever. Because it didn’t actually give you a cut-off point, a reason to give up. It didn’t let you draw a line, so it was entirely up to you to take a deep breath and say ‘enough’ when you couldn’t take it any more: the relentless cycle of hope, expectation and disappointment.
     
    No wonder that among it all, Charlotte Briggs had got lost. The sweet-faced sparkly eyed girl who found it easy to make friends, and keep them, had slipped away quietly somewhere. Oh, she’d been able to pretend. Charlotte could chat incessantly when called upon, she could get any party started, she made strangers feel at ease, but her heart wasn’t in it. It was a carefully calculated cover-up designed to deflect suspicion. She didn’t want questions or pity, so she’d kept the mask in place. Underneath, she’d been desperate and distraught, engulfed by a terrible sense of claustrophobia as each month slipped by and she realised that her dream was never going to come true.
     
    She had thrown herself into her work, to give her life momentum and meaning. The consultant had told her to ease up, even take some time off, but the prospect of doing nothing had appalled her. How was sitting staring at the walls supposed to help? Instead, she had doubled her workload, thereby minimising the amount of time free to spend bemoaning her lot. She fell into bed each night exhausted, and slept too deeply to dream of tiny fingers and the sweet, shallow breath of the infant she was yet to conceive. Weekends were spent socialising, preparing for and recovering from cocktail parties, brunches, nights at the opera, days at the races. Corporate freebies, which both she and Ed enjoyed as part of their work, he as a consultant in the incomprehensible but profitable world of spread-betting, she as an interior designer to the filthy rich. Not the merely wealthy footballers and pop-stars and supermodels who peppered the pages of the tabloids, but the silently, stealthily super-rich who had been quietly invading London courtesy of the tax breaks and wanted no publicity, just total discretion.
     
    Now it was June, six months after they’d decided to stop the IVF, and it must have taken all that time for the hormones and drugs finally to leave her body, for tonight, as she stood in front of the mirror, she caught a glimpse of her true self again. There was a gleam in her eye and a radiance to her skin. Her hair was glossy. She felt . . .
     
    Happy?
     
    Perhaps that was too strong a description. But somehow, in the past few weeks, she had moved on. She had come to terms with the fact that she and Ed would probably be childless. She wasn’t ready to consider other options yet. The prospect of adoption brought with it a whole new set of dilemmas and ordeals. If she needed anything it was a break, a chance to enjoy herself again. And that’s what she was going to do. She was tired of putting everything on hold, tired of her mood being dictated by circumstances beyond her control. She was going to grab her life back with both hands.
     
    In that one moment, she felt as if she could cope again.
     
     
    She and Ed met six years previously. One of the senior partners in the firm he worked for was moving his wife and family from New York to London, and wanted the Chelsea town-house they had bought decorated from top to bottom. Ed had been charged with overseeing the project, rather inexplicably as he was the first to admit he didn’t have a clue about ‘housey stuff’ - as long as he had a comfy sofa to stretch out on and a big telly to watch the rugby and reruns of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, he was happy. But for some reason the partner seemed to trust his judgement, and so Ed had dutifully gone to Breathtaking Designs, the company Charlotte worked for, to see if they could help. Charlotte’s boss, a garrulous Dubliner called Connor, had assigned the project to her.
     
    She went to Ed’s office in the City to give him their pitch.