Collecting Thoughts

  Chapter two

  Darcy felt like she had been planning this trip forever instead of the three frantically busy weeks it had really taken. Working every moment of the days and a hefty portion of several nights she had packed up the children’s and her London lives to move them lock, stock and smoking-barrel across the English Channel to Normandy.

  The thought sourly crossed her mind; if she’d had the aforementioned smoking-barrel, she’d have probably used it on her stinky rat of an ex-husband, Patrick, when he’d unexpectedly announced that he was moving out of their marital home to go and live in sunny Rio with his newly pregnant Brazilian girlfriend.

  The same girlfriend that he’d apparently first met at an international engineering conference two years previously, been seeing on the sly every time he’d crossed the Atlantic to attend yet another terribly important meeting and not bothered to mention until he’d invited her and her equally in-the-dark husband to stay at Darcy and Patricks’ Islington home a scant eight weeks ago.

  Patrick had swaggeringly made the dual announcement of his falling out of love with Darcy and his impending departure with his new beloved for the South American continent while the four adults were sitting chatting about this and that around the family dinner table the night after their guests had arrived. That dinner menu was now indelibly etched in Darcy’s mind.

  Patrick’s news had been delivered with a abruptness akin to the dropping of the Hiroshima bomb, right there in the gap between a main course of succulent roast pork with apple sauce and dessert, which was to have been a wickedly-rich chocolate mousse, accompanied by an appallingly expensive sweet wine that Darcy had gone out and bought specially, knowing how much Patrick liked it.

  Not, thought Darcy afterwards, quite the pleasant dinner-table conversation she’d imagined having with their guests.

  Shocked, not so much by the news as the manner it had been delivered, she had sat for some seconds, dithering between several options: ...door number one, she could continue playing the polite hostess and offer dessert and wine to her stunned (him –poor thing) and smirking (her, the Brazilian bombshell –Darcy realised later that she must have been forewarned by Patrick as to what was coming) dinner guests; door number two, indulge in an absolutely justifiable hissy fit and upend the mousse she’d placed just moments before in the middle of the table over Patrick’s balding, half-drunk, Irish-trash cheating head; or alternatively, door number three, flee the room in utter embarrassment.

  Years of her own mother’s drill-sergeant schooling at not making scenes meant she’d opted for the latter, not so much fleeing as demurely pushing back her chair and quietly walking out of the room, to climb the steep stairs to her and Patrick’s suite and sit on the side their bed staring out at the darkened street until she’d heard the front door close behind what she assumed were their now-departed guests. On her return downstairs Darcy found Patrick gone as well, having taken a full set of luggage that he must have had pre-packed in readiness. Still reeling at what had just transpired, she had opened their front door to the sight of a black London cab pulling away from the kerb in front of their house with Patrick and his baby-mama on board.

  Still, she had one thing to be thankful for, she had thought, while she had sat there in the gloom of their master-suite listening to raised male voices drifting up from downstairs. At least he had waited until after the children had left the table. Darcy had served their dessert early and they had both taken their pudding plates with them into the TV room to watch re-runs of Sponge Bob Square Pants so had not witnessed the sordid scene.

  Cold, calculating snake that he was, she’d realised later, he’d timed it near-perfectly to do maximum damage to Darcy’s feelings.

  “Drama Prince!” Halley had pronounced, when she had come over the next morning, adding that, knowing Patrick it was a wonder that he hadn’t invited a few more of their friends to witness the spectacle.

  Still, as embarrassing as it had all been, it possibly didn’t rate as the worst he’d done to her in their years together, Darcy thought, looking back over her troubled marriage as she mused bitterly in the weeks afterwards.

  As a consequence, since that night, despite kindly meant offers from her friends, she had refused all invitations involving meals or food-consumption of any kind, on the grounds that you never quite knew what was going to happen around a dinner table.