Every Woman For Herself. Trisha Ashley

      Flossie was not big on brains, but she had grasped that Matt hated her, and it was safest to keep out of his way. Of course she forgot sometimes, especially when overcome by greed, like the previous morning, when she was drooling over his feet at breakfast, and he kicked her when he thought I wasn’t looking.

      Afterwards I went up to the bathroom and gave all my big silver rings a vigorous cleaning with his toothbrush and a bit of powdered floor cleaner. The rings came up a treat and I expected his teeth would, too.

      Flossie now sat in the dining room outside the conservatory door, looking dazed, though this is not unusual. She wagged her tail happily when she saw me coming.

      The breakfast debris still littered the table, and Alien Nation had left a note pinned down by the teapot that said he’d had to call a taxi, and if he missed the connection it was my fault.

      There was also the name and address of the solicitor who would explain everything to me.

      I wished someone would.

      Why did I never seem to grasp anything until a couple of years after it had happened? I never knew where I was going, only where I’d been.

      As Joni Mitchell says, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. I only knew what I had to start with.

      Or did I only know what I thought I had to start with? Or did I have what I thought I had, but had somehow swapped it for an alien? Could living with me for so long have turned him into an alien?

      He was right about one thing – he’d changed, but I didn’t think I had very much.

      Clearly, that was my mistake.

      I took stock of my innermost feelings and discovered there weren’t any: I was a blown egg, all shell and void.

      You might have heard the sea if you’d put your ear to me, but that was about it.

       Chapter 2: Wrong in the Attic

      Lay awake all night with my mind doing hamster-in-wheel impersonations, then came groggily down the following morning to find a letter from Matt’s solicitor.

      Wasn’t this indecently fast? The letter said that since Matt and I were in agreement (were we?) and there were no children of the marriage, I didn’t need to have my own solicitor: just sign on the dotted line when asked to, and don’t make a fuss.

      The only good thing Matt’s sudden bombshell did was to make me realise that he had turned into an alien, and an elderly one at that. Otherwise, who knew how long it would have taken for me to realise that I was beginning the slow trek through that long, rocky hinterland before fifty, hand in hand with a grumpy old man? (And as Sherpas go, he’d have been no Tensing.)

      A day or two later Matt phoned, his usual bossy self, and basically instructed me just to do as I was told, and he would see me right financially.

      That would be a novelty.

      And there was definitely an underlying threat there …

      I’d finished the painting: miniatures of looming menace, my speciality.

      When I lived on the moors among all those vast spaces I painted long, narrow landscapes where tiny figures were set like random jewels. But once transposed to the claustrophobia of a city (even one as beautiful as York), I began painting ever-smaller canvases in which the minute figures cowered under threatening jungle foliage.

      They sold quite well through Waugh-Paint, a local gallery. Vaddie Waugh, the owner, said it was because they were so small that they were easily portable. Or maybe people just liked having something small, dark and threatening hanging on their walls?

      I hadn’t told anyone about the divorce yet because it didn’t seem real. And anyway, there was only really the family to tell, and frankly I didn’t want to phone home and confess that not only had I failed in the motherhood stakes, I’d also failed as a wife.

      The solicitor had explained everything to me, but it all slid away from my grasp immediately. All I understood was that financially we are up Shit Creek without a paddle, so there was no point in my fighting for half the house or a huge chunk of maintenance. The maintenance Matt did propose giving me was a pittance, though combined with my painting earnings I thought I would survive: Remittance Woman.

      I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep the house, but the only thing I’d regret leaving was my conservatory. I’d have to return home to the Parsonage at Upvale – but where could I put my jungle? I couldn’t paint without it any more.

      I’d have to find some kind of job, and a house of my own if I could afford it, because much though I loved going home, it would be difficult to do it permanently after having my own place for so many years. I could live on my painting, but it would not pay a mortgage.

      Having looked around the house, I found it totally amazing what Matt had removed without my noticing before! Still, I didn’t wish to keep ninety-nine per cent of the household contents anyway, since they were never my choice, and in fact were as alien to me as Matt now was.

      Perhaps it could all go to one of those auction houses that take anything, though I supposed I’d better ask Alien Nation if he wanted to keep any of it first – that is, if he ever phoned again. He’d gone from checking up on me every other night (although after all these years he must have known I was either here or in Upvale), to one solitary, admonitory phone call.

      A couple of weeks after the discovery that Matt was an alien, I opened the door to a most unwelcome visitor: Angie, raddled bride of Matt’s best friend and colleague, the revolting Groping Greg.

      ‘Angie! What are you doing here? I thought Greg’s contract didn’t end for another three weeks?’

      Of course, had I known she was home, I wouldn’t have opened the door without checking who it was first, from the upstairs window.

      She pushed a bundle of magazines and a box of chocolates into my arms. ‘These are for you,’ she said in the hushed tones of one visiting the sick. Then she trailed past me into the house, exuding a toxic effluvium of sultry perfume and nicotine.

      If you dipped Angie into a reservoir it would turn yellow and poison many cities.

      I followed her into the living room, where she draped herself into one of Matt’s minimalist white leather and birch chairs. She looked surprisingly comfortable, but then, she’s all sinew and leather herself.

      ‘I had to leave Greg out there and come home early, because the cleaning service said we had weird noises in the attic. But anyway, after Matt told us about the divorce, I just knew you’d fall apart! And since you’ve got no friends except us, I said to Greg, “I’d better get back and help poor Charlie.”’

      Angie was not, and never had been, my friend. Her presence was about as welcome to me as a tooth abscess.

      ‘I’m not falling apart,’ I assured her, which I wasn’t, because nothing lately had seemed at all real. I wasn’t sure if I’d been living in a dream world for years and just woken to reality, or vice versa. Sleeping Beauty in her jungle. ‘Actually, I feel more as if I’m imploding – hurtling inwards on myself. There’ll be a popping noise one day, and I’ll have vanished, like a bubble.’

      ‘You poor thing! There, I knew I was right to come back. But look on the bright side, darling – you and Matt are having a friendly divorce, so it will go through really fast. Then he’s going to pay you maintenance, although I don’t suppose you’ll need much because you’ll just go back to that insane-sounding family of yours. Did you see your sister Anne on the news last night? There were bullets flying around her head, and she just kept on talking.’

      ‘Emily – my older sister – has second sight, so she knows Anne’s invincible to bullets. And I don’t know why