Page 16 of The Monday Night Heartbreak Club

We all mumbled acceptance. I really didn’t think anyone had enough dirt on anyone else to be a real danger, but I did take her point.

Some of this was personal. It hurt. We were making ourselves vulnerable – I’d already had my turn earlier, spilling my life story to Flynn, and that had been hard enough.

Now we were basically laying our faults and fears bare in front of people we didn’t know that well, and that was scary.

I admired them all for it.

Margot took a deep breath, but then paradoxically whispered, ‘It was sex. It was all about sex.’

I saw Fraser open his mouth, but the under-table kicker must have been at work once more, because he closed it again, went slightly pink and nodded wisely, although what he was wise about I wasn’t entirely sure.

‘It wasn’t so bad when we were younger,’ Margot went on, still in the peculiar whisper as though she were afraid that the glasses racked on the wall behind the bar might be listening in. ‘I could do it then. But as we were together longer and longer, I found I… couldn’t.’

The whole table had gone quiet now. Fraser appeared to be holding his breath. Even the dominoes team were reduced to clacking tiles and clinking glasses.

‘I knew Bruce wanted to… more often, but I had to bring myself to do it, and as we got busier and busier I began to find it – yes, almost repulsive. Oh, not Bruce, no, he’s a very handsome man,’ Margot put in hastily, with evident pride.

‘Very successful. A perfect husband in many ways. But not…’ she lowered her voice still further, ‘…in that way.’

‘Was it kinky sex?’ Annie asked in a more normal tone of voice, and slightly surprisingly. ‘Did he like it all fancy in the bedroom? Stockings and suspenders and fantasies about watching you with other men?’

All the rest of us, who had seen Eddie and knew him to be a slightly overweight, balding and possibly prissily concerned with detail middle manager, busily rewrote our mental images.

‘Oh, not that Eddie ever goes in for that stuff,’ she went on, and we all silently scrubbed our visions of Eddie in suspenders, wielding a whip.

‘But he’s told me about some of his workmates.

Well! You wouldn’t believe what goes on!

My Eddie is strictly twice a week, lights out, thankfully.

’ And then, obviously remembering her fears, ‘At least, that’s what I thought,’ she added sadly. ‘I might be wrong, of course.’

‘Er.’ Margot was off balance. I suspected she had shared our musings over Eddie’s predilections.

‘No, no, nothing like that. Very… straightforward. Bruce is a man of simple tastes.’ Now she looked down at the table.

‘I just couldn’t comply with any of them.

We hadn’t had… intimacy for three years.

I loved him very much, of course, and he was exceptionally talented in…

in the bedroom when we were younger. But I began to feel taken advantage of, a little as though we were going through the motions and I just lost the urge.

It came as a blow to poor Bruce, of course.

He suggested counselling. I refused. That’s when he asked for the divorce. ’

More silence. Beside me, Flynn shifted his chair slightly.

‘Had you seen a doctor?’ Annie again. Her soft Yorkshire burr made the words feel sympathetic, not as accusatory as they might have done. ‘They can do wonders, there are creams and all sorts.’

‘I am not being medicalised into having sex with my husband!’ Margot snapped, more loudly than she obviously intended, because the silence extended across the room and the dominoes fell dormant again.

‘It’s not a medical problem,’ she went on, voice lowered again.

‘I simply don’t want sex. That was the deal-breaker, as far as Bruce was concerned. Sex or divorce. I chose divorce.’

Now Margot’s face crumpled. It seemed as though saying the words had drained her of the unemotional sternness that kept her skin taut.

‘It’s dreadful.’ She fumbled in her handbag and drew out a packet of tissues.

‘Truly dreadful. I love him, of course I do, but I couldn’t love him as he wanted.

I thought we were all right, we were planning for our anniversary, and then…

’ she trailed off, words lost to sniffing.

‘It’s all right.’ Wren slipped a consolatory arm around Margot’s shoulders. ‘We understand.’

I thought of Dex and some of his more extreme sexual requests – the arguments that had resulted when I wouldn’t go along with whatever porn-inspired ideas he’d come up with, the feelings that I was letting him down that he played on.

Then, my assertions that I wasn’t a performing seal or blow-up doll for him to act out his fantasies on. I gave a little shudder.

Beside me, Flynn shifted again. I wondered if he knew what I was thinking. Some of this had come out in my teary collapse, but not all. Not by any means all. Maybe he could imagine the rest.

‘I drink… drank too much,’ I said, feeling I should offer something.

‘I made stupid decisions and Dexter was one of them. There’s a lot of boring backstory, but that is the crux.

Too much wine, trying to make myself feel better and only managing to make myself feel worse.

And I feel a bit of a fraud being part of this club, because the only person who’s broken my heart is me.

I brought it all on myself by getting with a chauvinistic thug like Dexter. ’

All eyes were on me now. Under the table, Flynn’s leg rested against mine for a second.

‘You say you drank? In the past?’ Wren’s frown made her look like the worried little brown bird I’d taken her for when we’d first met. ‘Have you given up?’

I thought of Flynn’s ‘conditions’. Of the headaches, the hangovers, the disturbed sleep and the gaps in memory. The feeling that I needed to drink just to cope with Dexter and his behaviour. Then I remembered last night’s single small bottle. ‘Nearly,’ I said. ‘I’m working on it.’

‘Still reckon Vengeance Squad is a better name,’ Fraser muttered.

‘Eddie’s booked another day off,’ Annie said quickly, as though she worried she wouldn’t get her fears out into the open if she didn’t say it now. ‘He hasn’t mentioned it to me, not a word.’

A look went around the table, all of us trying not to look at one another yet desperate to catch the eye of someone to communicate the internal ah-ha! that we were clearly all thinking.

‘How did you find out?’ Margot asked eventually.

‘Nikki, she’s the person who manages their diaries, she rang me to let me know.

I asked her to, after last time. I said that Eddie was getting a bit forgetful and he’d only tell me last minute when he had a day off.

So I asked her to tell me next time, and she did.

Oh, I pretended I already knew, of course.

’ Annie’s tone was sad. Lying clearly didn’t come easily to her.

‘Will she tell him that she told you?’ Margot asked.

Wren was making notes on her phone, I could see. I hoped Annie wouldn’t guess what she was up to and just assume that Wren was callously using this time to text her friends.

‘I asked her not to. Said he was getting a bit self-conscious about his memory lapses – oh, I made him sound a right nellie! But having nursed Mum with the dementia, I know how it can start, just the odd “forgetting”. Poor Nikki, I think she thinks I’m worrying over nothing!

But she knew Mum, they all knew how it was, so I think they’re putting it down to me being a little bit overcautious. ’

I glanced at Margot, then Flynn. How did I ask the question? I didn’t want to make it sound obvious.

Fraser came to my rescue. ‘He’s probably going to watch the football,’ he said. ‘Is it next Wednesday he’s got off? There’s a big match on, kick-off’s at three.’

I had no idea whether this was true or not, but had to admire Fraser’s quick thinking.

‘No, it’s a week on Thursday,’ Annie said and I watched Wren tap the date into her calendar app.

‘He watches most matches on catch-up when he gets home. Nobody’s allowed to mention the scores at work!

’ She laughed, but there was an undercurrent to her laughter that showed how worried she was about what Eddie was really up to.

‘Ah well,’ Fraser said. But there was a pink glow to the tips of his ears – he knew he’d been clever.

‘What about you?’ Margot suddenly rounded on Flynn, who’d been sitting there eating crisps all this time. ‘You want to be a member of our club, you didn’t have a Valentine’s Day date – why not?’

Flynn withdrew his hand from the crisp bowl, startled. ‘Me? Oh, I dunno. Like I told you, I had to work.’

That ‘headmistressy’ tone was back in Margot’s voice now. Perhaps she wanted us all to forget her moment of weakness. ‘Yes, but as you say, this place doesn’t open until six. You had all day.’

I turned to him now. The light was reflecting off his glasses and his eyes were hidden behind the bobbing white bulbs, but I could feel the stillness that had descended over him.

His hands were balled in his lap and he’d pulled his shoulder away from mine.

‘I wondered about that,’ I said. ‘You could have had a daytime date.’

He shrugged. ‘Nobody I felt like asking.’

Then, to his evident great relief, the dominoes men approached the bar for refills and with some questions about hiring a space for a dominoes tournament, and Flynn had to get up and go across to them.

The Monday Night Heartbreak Club talked about holidays, then, until it was time to go home.

We seemed to feel the need for general chat after the emotionally charged nature of our previous conversations, and hearing Margot casually mentioning Mauritius, while Fraser debated the merits of Pontins with Annie, was the normality we wanted.

I didn’t have much to add to the chat, having not had a holiday since 2014 when my parents took us all to Center Parcs and I was shouted at for not letting my brother beat me down the water slide, so I found myself letting much of the talk flow over me, while I wondered quietly about Flynn.

It felt as though he was hiding something.

He was evasive, not to an offensive degree, but he’d duck and weave away from direct questions as though he didn’t want to give anything away.

Why couldn’t he have found himself a date for Valentine’s Day, if he’d been that keen?

He certainly didn’t seem to be heartbroken either.

I glanced over at the bar, where he was serving red wine to two women.

He wasn’t bad-looking, I supposed, he was socially acceptable and seemed easy enough company.

Flynn looked up suddenly from pouring the wine and caught my eye, which hadn’t been hard because I’d been staring.

One eyebrow raised above his glasses’ frame, giving him that lopsided look again.

What was the deal with him? Then it occurred to me that if he was lying about being the owner of this place, the more people he told the lie to, the more chance there was of the real owner getting to hear it.

Unless it wasn’t a lie and he really did own the place?

But that would mean financial backing, and surely someone with a sound and monied background could find a date?

Women would be scrambling over themselves for a good-looking, solvent man.

But Flynn didn’t have a date. Or, it appeared, anyone else.

I looked again at the dark figure, who’d stopped giving me the sarcastic glances.

There was something rather lonely about him, now I came to think about it.

Maybe he’d attached himself to our club to have people to talk to?

After all, he’d volunteered to sit for hours in my car while we waited for Eddie, and, by extension, Fraser. Perhaps he just wanted company.

The thought that he might quite like me was easily dismissed.

Apart from listening to me trot out the miseries of my life amid much snotty crying, and giving me a job when I was clearly desperate, he’d shown no sign of it.

He hadn’t asked me out and hadn’t demonstrated any signs of attraction – there had been no attempts at groping, no thoughtless patting of my bum when I passed him behind the bar.

And – I faced the idea with a burn of acid up my throat – I would have been the easiest person to get drunk and involved in a casual overnight tumble, wouldn’t I?

Flynn had done none of these things. He had, in short, been a gentleman.

Or, putting it another way, he’d been a man who was kind, listened, talked to me and who had no overt interest in simply trying to get me into bed.

Which was, I thought, in the quietness of my flat as I was tidying up before going to bed late that night, the definition of friend.