Don’t You Forget About Me(14)

The thought is a stab wound, not because Robin was flaunting it, but if they kept this secret from me, this grisly episode has damaged much more than it deserves to.

‘No of course we didn’t know, you moo!’ Clem says. ‘Why would we know and not tell you?’

‘Oh. I don’t know,’ I mumble.

‘Georgina,’ Clem portentously draws breath, ‘We all thought Robin was a massive, tremendous, glaringly obvious arsehole. What on EARTH have you been thinking?’

‘Oh?’ I say, dumbly. ‘You didn’t like him?’

Rav coughs again and Jo stares down into her cider.

‘“Didn’t like” doesn’t quite cover it. Actively abhorred is closer to the mark.’

‘Clem!’ Rav says. ‘Fuck’s sake, she’s just caught him in bed with someone else.’

‘Relevant to the abhorring.’

After a very tense few seconds of silence, I start laughing. They look shocked for a second and then start laughing too.

‘I thought you were going to burst into tears and slap me,’ Clem says, clutching her chest.

‘No, I only want to slap myself,’ I say.

Jo puts a hand on my arm. ‘Not that this isn’t awful for you. I’m so sorry for what’s happened.’

I pat back. ‘I’m well rid.’

‘Did he really claim you were in an open relationship?’ Clem says, her immaculate vermillion MAC lip curling in disgust. Clem dresses like a member of Pulp, only better: dyed red hair in flapper bob, head to toe vintage, pointed retro nails. She’s very pointy, in looks and nature.

‘He said he thought we were free to sleep with other people. Which begs the question why he didn’t mention doing it, ever.’

‘He was sneaking around like your bog-standard shitbag and now he’s gaslighting you.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Making you think you’re going mad, making you think it was your problem.’

‘It’s true we never said “What are the rules on sleeping with other people”. He had said he didn’t believe in monogamy as the only way to live, but you know … I didn’t think it directly applied. He’d met my friends, my family. God’s sake, how are you meant to be totally go with the flow, ultra modern, no pressure and find this basic stuff out at the same time?’

‘This is the gaslighting. You’re questioning yourself. It’s him who’s put the goalposts on wheels.’ Clem sucks on the straw in her gin and tonic, then grimaces. ‘He called you “the Waitress”. He never missed a chance to act like he was better than you.’

‘I thought he was being … I don’t know, light-hearted.’

Clem widens her eyes and Rav and Jo still can’t meet mine and I realise this is Robin’s legacy – me uncomfortably working out how I accommodated and rationalised a lot of crappy behaviour that wasn’t remotely invisible to anyone else. And forever hating Ben & Jerry’s.

‘And you knew the woman?’ Clem says.

‘Lou’s his PA. They’d had a thing before but I thought it was long over by the time I was around.’

Robin said he and Lou had slept together once, ‘in the day’, which I took to mean a long while ago rather than the timing, but who knows.

I was taken aback when he mentioned it, as I’d spent a whole evening in her company thinking theirs was a friendly working relationship and it hadn’t once crossed my mind. Not that I’m saying attraction is an exact science but Lou is my complete physical opposite: long wild brown curly hair, a nose stud, knobbly knees in laddered patterned tights and a pair of silver glitter-crusted clumpy shoes. I’d taken an instant shine to her.

It always causes some mental realignment when you discover someone has been where you have been.

‘She was cool about it, she’s really cool,’ Robin said, which I translated as: there were no consequences when I made it obvious it meant nothing.

Robin had paused.

‘That’s not a thing for you, is it? Who’s been with who?’

Yes it’s a thing for me like it’s a thing for pretty much everyone, that’s why there’s so many pop songs about it.

‘No! Just surprised that’s all. Wouldn’t have put you together.’

‘I dunno if you’d call it together. We ended up having a shower in an Ibis in Luton after a food fight, it seemed the next obvious step. Certainly not much other entertainment in Luton.’

I flinched. In this moment, I definitely wasn’t the cool girl who wanted to hear the details and I didn’t like the way I felt Robin was trying to portray me as uptight and conventional. Even then, I could tell he was getting a kick out of it, congratulating himself as an erotic buccaneer, compared to Georgina the square.

So when he added: ‘Would you rather I didn’t say, in future?’ I instantly replied: ‘No,’ and changed the subject.

I didn’t ask if he’d mind if situations were reversed: when I unpick why, it’s because it’d mean either he was a hypocrite or he was totally without jealousy, which might be great for him but sort of flat for me.

Why didn’t I tell Robin that his free love, free’n’easy approach wasn’t for me? I was scared of seeming like the parochial fiancée in Billy Liar, a woman stuck in the past who represented the opposite of everything exciting.