Cover Story - 12

Later, Bel lay awake and processed Tim and Rhiannon.

It was taking some getting used to.

It was ridiculous to feel this upset really; Bel and Tim would be no more or less finished than they were already if he attended masked ball orgies, or lit church candles under an Isabel shrine and pledged a decade’s celibacy.

What made Bel’s stomach churn was that he must’ve known she’d find out this way, and knew it’d hurt all the more. It was a message, posted second class: you don’t deserve to hear it from me. Does it sting? It should . Knowing that he was still sad and angry enough to do something spitefully out of character, it was painful. Someone was alive in the world and hating you, and someone who used to bring you your morning coffee and call you ‘Mac the Wife’. It really hurt. She’d made a good man bad.

Tim was the son of her mum’s best friend, they’d grown up knowing of one another’s existence. She, her brother Miles, Tim’s sister Verity and Tim always called themselves ‘honorary cousins’. It had burst into unexpected attraction one drunken family barbecue in their late twenties, when the security of falling for the nice guy who’d been there all along made perfect sense. But some part of Bel had always suspected she’d outgrow the size of what they had, and that gnawed at her. She’d let him play co-pilot, crashed the plane and run from the wreckage. If what she’d done wasn’t cruel, why did it feel so cruel?

Not only that, there was collateral. It had been a fairytale when it united the two families and a political nightmare when Bel ended it. Tim’s parents saw their son was in bits over it and responded emotionally, Bel’s mother laboured to support her daughter and absorb the fallout with stoic neutrality. Tim’s parents had been exceptionally kind to them all during Bel’s father’s illness and death – they’d spent several Christmas Days at the Hornbys when they were all too devastated to face their former, four-person rituals – and she desperately wanted to keep the peace. Tim was so burned by the loss of Bel that he vaguely resented her mum and brother Miles for still having her, too.

They’d finished last autumn and got through their first Christmas with the Boxing Day get-together, stuck to opposite walls, both too stubborn – slash – principled to cry off. Bel had moved to Manchester at the start of the year.

They couldn’t avoid each other forever, though – Tim’s sister Verity was getting married at the end of the summer and they’d have to see each other then. It was non-negotiable: her mother had secured a promise from Bel: ‘no Cold War, you must both still be involved in family celebrations, set the precedent now.’

It turned out Bel would likely be tackling Tim and Rhiannon’s big coupledom debut, and she was surprised by how daunting that felt. The Hornbys would form a tight and defiant mob, Bel would be imagined to be getting her just desserts as they fussed over Rhiannon. There would be a schadenfreude of : well, she broke his heart, but looks like karma did its job.

Tim had completely and totally adored Bel, cherished the very bones of her, and she’d ruined it and devastated him by stopping adoring him in return. She knew no one would ever feel for her as he had, you couldn’t recapture the innocent intensity of your first serious relationship. She didn’t want him back, but she did still love him, and therein lay the paradox that left her crying in the dark.

Alcohol always gave Connor insomnia, which was why he’d knocked it on the head towards the end of the last career horrors, when he needed all the energy he could get.

He sat up, propped on pillows in the dark, illuminated only by his phone, and typed Shilpa’s name into the Instagram search bar. He’d seen her surname Gupta when she’d shown him profiles on her phone.

Tonight had been grimly hilarious: Bel’s accomplice had been a lovely girl, really easy to talk to, open and witty. However, unfortunately Bel clearly had not had time to deliver the Don’t Bother With The Arsehole Intern, He’s Trash memo, so she had sat rigid, awkward and lightly fuming throughout, until booze took over.

Why did she and Parry think the minor rank they pulled in that hole of an office was so important? Though Connor didn’t doubt Bel would dislike him for all kinds of other reasons outside it, too. He could sense who she thought he was, some stuck-up Rah, and that everything he said and did was interpreted as confirmation.

Ugh, speaking of Parry, he didn’t know if Bel genuinely didn’t notice or chose not to notice his drooling. Bel, periodically turning on her stool to speak to Shilpa, pulled the fabric of her dress taut against her chest, and Connor saw Aaron’s eyes drift downwards so many times he’d wanted to slap him himself.

Shilpa’s online presence was predictably exuberant, though as she’d alluded, he could see no sign of her best friend in her available photographs.

It wasn’t Shilpa he was interested in, it was this ‘Tim’, mention of whom had clearly blindsided Bel Macauley. He couldn’t picture a Macauley boyfriend pick whatsoever, and 1.38 a.m. had a low bar for time-wasting curiosity. There was a reason he suited reporting, and Bel wasn’t the only one who could conduct investigations.

Although Shilpa was the one who was supposed to be upset by their exes being coupled up, and Bel indifferent, Connor had a strong intuition the exact opposite was true.

Bel had changed colour and Connor could see her frowning on it later in the evening, when she thought no one was looking.

He found a ‘Tim Hornby’ in Shilpa’s follow list and hoped, if he was the right perp, that he had a similarly loose approach to privacy. Sure enough, Tim’s account was public, the most recent picture of a mid-thirties man in a khaki anorak, copy-posing the stance of an Anthony Gormley statue. He got a firm sense of Bel’s former significant other. He was good-looking in a lopsided grin, good teeth, friendly kind of way: the obligatory Neck Oil drinking, Arcade Fire listening, beard-haver sort of dude. Solid dad material, worked in the public sector and rode a Lime bike home from a lads’ night out.

He was not quite who Connor expected, somehow, though he wasn’t sure exactly why: too goofily unassuming, maybe? Bel, by contrast, was all about assumptions.

Deep in the archives, Connor was startled to trip over evidence of Bel, dated four years ago. He got the feeling an embittered Tim Hornby on a deleting rampage had accidentally failed to expunge it from the record. It was a Christmas dinner party, paper crown hats, Bel’s chin propped on her hand, eyes rolled upwards: angelic. Tim gazing sidelong at her, the poor sod looking smitten.

@belmac was a defunct link. Wait, who was the fresh-faced farm girl next to her, name in the list of tags? Rhiannon? Wasn’t she the interloper? Shilpa wasn’t mates rates wrong. Your eyes went straight to Bel in the tableau, she was strikingly attractive: skin glowing like alabaster. Her combination of scoop-necked top and balcony bra a little distracting, even to a man of Connor’s taste and maturity. Lovely cleavage, shame about the personality.

Connor left the page and idly clicked on his rarely used Facebook. He had been recently tagged with Jen, which led him to her profile. He paused: her green ‘online’ dot was lit up – active? Jen went to bed very early and was an ‘out as soon as her head hits the pillow’ person who liked to go for runs at dawn. Connor stared at it. It was the tiniest of clues and yet because he knew her so well, and the context so intimately, it felt quite a hefty one. Jennifer was awake late-messaging with someone, or doing research, like him.

He quickly shut the screen down and was left staring contemplatively at the shadows in a large portrait of a morose John Lennon in his rented bedroom. He was more curious about who Jen might be interacting with, than anything. There it was, the hammer blow: if he could feel nothing about this, they were flatlining. He theoretically tried out various options of single men in their orbit, to see if, as per Shilpa and Bel, knowing the guy could stir anything up. Nope.

Would it actually make sense to finish things while he was up here and Jen was down there? Was it fair or desirable to let her travel for an ordeal of a conversation they could have on the phone? Would she make a thing of his having ended it by phone?

Could Connor face handling their finale while in this place of miserable, lardy-pastry perdition?

No, he was chickening out. Better to let Jen admit she’d met someone else which would take the bitter recriminations out of it – then Connor got to be magnanimous – or wait until he was back in London to deal with it.

He startled at an eerie, monkey-like whooping out in the dark, very near his flat and thought, with teenage petulance: I hate it here. He ignored the voice in his head that replied: you hate it there, too.