I wanted to be alone but it seemed impossible. Lucy always hovered around somewhere. My muscles cramped, my nerves twitched and my skin felt raw and powerless, exposing my veins as if my blood was there for the taking. Of course, Lucy tricked her mind into thinking I had broken up with Claire for her, but Lucy Rowe was the last person I wanted to be with. I admired her spirit, the zeal with which she kept coming at me. I didn’t understand it, I didn’t even try to, but her determination, in a way, did flatter me.

And then there was the ghost of Vivian Carsey, which haunted me. What had she done to me? How had she taken four years of my life, four years of desperate longing and failed romance, and transformed them into this short anti-climactic break-up? From the second Claire had turned on her heels and had started walking away from me, I had craved her presence more than ever. I knew something had to change. I needed to find some sort of control over myself and our relationship − I wasn’t foolish enough to think I could ever hold any control over Claire − but did it have to be so drastic, so radically transforming as a break-up?

All week I tried to keep to myself. I avoided Alex and Liz − they were never Claire Burns’s biggest fans, and I wasn’t in the mood for their anti-Claire pep-talk. At work, I pretended not to hear Lucy’s innuendo and to my relief I had an Eleanor and Lucy-free weekend to look forward to. Lucy’s parents, whom she hardly ever spoke of, had invited the entire family to a country estate to celebrate their thirtieth wedding anniversary. Except for Jane’s phantom-like presence, I would have the house to myself for forty-eight hours. The prospect of those two days and the simple pleasure of just being by myself was the only thing that could force a smile out of my stubborn lips. From Monday to Friday, on automatic pilot on the tube, at work and in life in general, I anticipated the thud of the front door as Eleanor locked it behind her. The emptiness hadn’t frightened me. I would welcome it, absorb it. I had high expectations of it. The silence of the house would show me where I had gone wrong. But then, as Friday came and Eleanor stuffed a small suitcase in the trunk of Lucy’s car before they both drove off, I suddenly feared the emptiness would swallow me. Claire hadn’t been to the house many times but I saw her everywhere. In the kitchen where we had broken up, in the hallway where she had suddenly appeared one night, in my bedroom where she had seduced me into going to Paris with her. It wasn’t so much the fear that she may have forgotten me − not even Claire would be that heartless − but of what she might do to try to forget me. Was she out and about somewhere, scouting the London night for a one-night-stand? And what if she was? What was it to me?

I knew my refusal to talk to anyone − even my best friends − about the break-up was a form of denial. I had left the door ajar. It wouldn’t take much to let Claire back in. I sat in my favourite arm chair in the living room, a bottle of brandy on the side table next to me, a glass in one hand, my phone in the other. Outside the day was giving in to the night, the grey clouds turning dark-blue, then pitch-black. This was no way to spend a Friday evening. What would I do? And more importantly, who would I call?

To be continued…