Page 9 of The Monday Night Heartbreak Club

To my surprise, Margot arrived with Fraze-the-Haze.

‘He asked if he could have a lift,’ she said to my raised eyebrows while Fraser was at the bar.

‘And it turns out that he doesn’t live that far from me, and I know his mother slightly.

’ She watched Fraser, who was trying to initiate banter with Flynn, a man so far removed from banter that he was practically Trappist. ‘We met through work,’ Margot went on, slightly dreamily.

‘Oh? What is it that you do?’ I asked politely. I had Margot down as a woman who lunches and attends every work function of her husband’s looking groomed and together.

‘I’m a barrister,’ she said, still vague, and I nearly swallowed my tongue. ‘Wren should be here in a… ah. There she is.’

Wren pushed at the door, reversing in with a large cardboard box in her arms which she set down on the table with the air of one expecting a fanfare.

‘What the fuck’s that?’ Fraser came over carrying a long glass of something for himself and a wine for Margot, which he handed over with ceremony.

‘Everything I could get from Annie without being obvious.’ Wren lifted the lid.

‘I popped over this morning, after Margot rang. It’s all right,’ she said to our intakes of breath, ‘I was subtle. I didn’t tell her what I wanted it for.

In fact, some of it I stole off her shelf.

Oh, it’s all right, I’ll take it back, I’ll tell her I picked it up by accident. ’

Wren took out a framed photograph of a man, some other loose photographs and one of the notepads that Margot had given us. ‘I managed to get some details of his timetable too, so I wrote them down here.’

Margot bestowed a smile. She was the kind of woman who ‘bestowed’ most of her expressions, wearing them as though the front of her face was an advertising hoarding. ‘Well done!’

Wren’s cheeks glowed. ‘Thank you. It wasn’t too hard to get Annie to talk to me – she’s got all those groups and clubs but she says that nobody there knows anything about her circumstances, so she can’t really talk to them the way she can to us.

’ She glanced around at Fraser and me. ‘It’s really sad,’ she said.

‘For the whole forty years that they’ve been together, Eddie has always bought her flowers and a card for Valentine’s Day.

And this year he forgot. She said that he bought her some the next day, but it’s not the same, is it? ’

I thought of Dexter, who had never bought me anything for Valentine’s Day. Or birthdays, Christmas or even just because. He’d always been too busy trying to break out as a TikTok-sensation MMA fighter, while making what money he did from stealing cars and drug dealing.

‘She’s trying to be all stiff-upper-lip about it, but she was crying when she was showing me the pictures.

’ Wren laid out the photographs on the table.

There, all in white, was a very young Annie with a tall, handsome man on her arm, in an immaculate suit and buttonhole.

She looked radiant and I had another belt of that vicious envy.

Then more photos of an increasingly ageing Eddie – doing DIY, on holiday in Paris, mowing the lawn.

‘How did you get these? I mean, what did you say? You can hardly wander into someone’s house and empty their albums without a good excuse.’ I flipped among the pictures trying to find one that didn’t look like contented domestic bliss to make me feel better.

‘I told her I was writing an article about marriage through the ages.’ Wren put her notepad down. ‘I’m a journalist. I write articles for the weekly magazine in the local paper, so I think she believed me.’

At this rate, Fraser was going to turn out to be an astronaut who did brain surgery in his spare time. I felt like such a loser suddenly, with my call-centre job and my pathetic three rooms across the road.

‘And, of course, it meant I could make notes. Only they weren’t really notes on what it was like to get married in 1985; I was writing down what she told me about Eddie.

It’s amazing how much people say without realising.

’ Wren pulled out the photograph in the frame.

‘This was Eddie last month, the most up-to-date picture Annie had. He works at Drayton’s out on the York road, eight thirty to five, four days a week, finishing early on Fridays.

’ She consulted her notepad. ‘He goes to the gym every morning at seven for an hour, then straight to work.’ Wren looked up at us.

‘And if you believe that, you’ll believe anything. ’

‘So he’s got a bit on the side, yeah?’ Fraser moved his chair over and when I looked across, I saw Flynn had come alongside him and was wiping the table in a desultory way, clearly listening in for all he was worth.

‘Maybe… maybe he’s not happy, yeah? Maybe she’s not giving him everything he wants, if you know what I mean.

’ Fraser stared around at our blank faces.

‘Not enough sex,’ he muttered into his glass now.

‘Yes, we fully comprehend your meaning, Fraser,’ Margot snapped, and Fraser’s ears got a bit red. ‘But don’t you think that a man who’s been married to his wife for forty years has a duty to raise an issue if he’s unhappy? To talk about it to his wife, rather than go off and find another woman?’

All of Fraser’s visible skin had now gone so red that I was surprised the drink in his glass wasn’t bubbling. ‘Dunno,’ he muttered, as though a favourite teacher had suddenly started to pick on him in class. ‘S’pose so.’

‘And if a satisfactory conclusion for both parties couldn’t be reached, then he should end the marriage first, decently and cleanly, before taking up with another partner?’

Wren and I looked at one another and pulled similar ‘blimey, she’s fierce’ faces.

I wondered whether Bruce had perhaps not always been faithful to Margot, and sympathy tugged at me along with that memory of Flynn telling me about Dexter and his ‘visiting women’.

While I’d not really kidded myself that he’d stay faithful, bringing them to my flat to cheat was disgusting behaviour.

And it wouldn’t have occurred to him to change the bedding either.

Meanwhile, Flynn had practically cleaned the varnish off the table. ‘Why don’t you just sit down?’ I suggested to him. ‘If you’re going to eavesdrop, you might as well do it comfortably.’

‘He’s not a Disappointed Valentine!’ Margot pulled herself back from her haranguing of Fraser, who had practically crawled inside his glass by now, and stared at Flynn, who’d fetched another chair from the next table and was squeezing it in between Fraser and me with a shocking amount of eagerness.

‘I am really,’ Flynn said, leaning forward with his black-clad elbows on the table.

‘I didn’t get any kind of valentine, disappointing or otherwise.

I was working in here all day and we stayed open late.

Not so much as a sniff of romance, unless you count the quite frankly massively over-the-top amounts of body spray I had to put up with.

It smelled like the cheap aftershave section of Boots the Chemist in here all night. ’

‘And we’re not Disappointed Valentines any more,’ Wren pointed out. ‘We agreed. We’re the Monday Night Heartbreak Club now.’

Fraser looked disgruntled. ‘Why can’t we be the Vengeance Squad?’ he asked. ‘That’s got a ring to it, that has. Vengeance Squad. Like a film.’

‘Because that sounds like it should be on an arrest warrant.’ Margot gave Fraser a stern look and he reddened around the ears again.

‘Or a T-shirt,’ Flynn said and grinned. ‘Maybe we could have club T-shirts?’

‘You can’t have The Monday Night Heartbreak Club on a T-shirt!’ Fraser’s disgruntlement had almost ignited his hair now. ‘People will think I does line dancing and stuff like that and bang goes my credibility in me online forums if anyone sees me.’

We all jointly lapsed into a momentary silence, clearly wondering about Fraser’s current credibility status in any given forum.

Flynn coughed. ‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘Can I join?’

‘But you didn’t come to the meetings!’ Margot almost wailed.

‘I couldn’t. I was working.’

‘And he sort of did,’ I added, not quite sure why I was so keen to support Flynn joining the group, other than I was tired of him making judgey remarks to me whenever he saw me.

If he was going to be supercilious, he could be it to the whole group and stop singling me out.

‘He was hanging over us like a cheap Christmas decoration the whole time.’

‘Oy. I’m a lot of things but I’m not cheap,’ Flynn said, and winked at me, which made me narrow my eyes in his direction.

‘Plus, and this might be the biggie, I have a lot of free time during the day. The wine bar only opens at six, except on special occasions. Like Valentine’s Day,’ he added with a hint of resentment.

‘All right, all right. I suppose one more member won’t hurt.’ Margot sounded begrudging now, but Flynn gave me a beaming smile as though she’d welcomed him in with tea and cake.

‘Plus we needs another bloke,’ Fraser muttered. ‘I don’t want to be a sex symbol.’

‘Token representative member of your sex, is what you mean, Fraser,’ Margot said, but not in an unfriendly way, then turned to me. ‘So, as this is your idea, Fee, do you have a plan?’

I hadn’t, but the way everyone crouched low over the table as though we were MI5 made me come up with one really fast. ‘Wren says that Eddie goes to the gym every morning, yes? And it’s early?’

‘Seven o’clock,’ Wren said and shuddered. ‘Awful. Nobody should be that enthusiastic for exercise at that time in the morning. It isn’t even daylight!’

‘Do we know which gym?’

‘The new one, on the outskirts of Malton, Annie said. She’s always asleep when he leaves.’

‘Then one of us should join the gym and be there at the same time. We can find out if he actually does go and, if he does, what he gets up to while he’s there,’ I said triumphantly.