Starting Over by Sue Moorcroft Page A

sharp, wine-relaxed. Wonderful. Then suddenly, from nowhere, she heard herself volunteering, ‘Olly hated the card work, he said it was naff.’
    And she was sober.
    Just like that, invoking Olly’s name was an ice bath and Alka Seltzer. Her words dried.
    As if such an abrupt silence was unremarkable, Ratty picked up the conversational ball, telling a story she needn’t listen to. She let the swell of bad feeling wash over her, recede.
    Jos wandered in, dreamy eyes the colour of newly popped horse chestnuts, contributed his own view to Ratty’s story, drank barley wine, smiled and drifted off to some other conversation. Ratty talked on, about his abbreviated accountancy training and his garage. She recovered enough to smile about the customer who’d whizzed along one day in early autumn and crashed into the back of his breakdown truck.
    Her blood gradually stopped thumping in her ears and her fists unclenched.
    Then, armed with fresh drinks, apparently privy to the scant information Tess had given Angel, he prompted, ‘So. Olly was the guy you didn’t marry?’
    The guy she didn’t marry. Tall, greyhound Olly, athletic from squash and tennis, still so vivid in her mind. Was it just the wine or did he still stir her?
    ‘What happened to him?’
    She sipped. Cold, delicious white wine, so dry it made her ears hurt; her favourite. She licked the flat-tasting condensation from the outside of the glass. ‘He dumped me.’
    ‘Ah. At least it was before the wedding.’
    ‘Just.’ She focused on the corded forearm closest to her, just above a TAG Heuer watch, where a tattoo, blue-grey, flexed as he moved. An old-fashioned milestone inscribed with the words, One Miles . ‘That’s good !’ She laughed too hard, poking the tattoo, his flesh warm and only slightly yielding under her fingertip, letting herself slide away from the subject of Olly. ‘One Miles! Miles A. Rattenbury. Miles Alan Rattenbury? Miles Andrew Rattenbury?’
    ‘Miles Arnott-Rattenbury.’
    She laughed again. ‘You’re not hyphenated?’
    ‘’Fraid so.’
    ‘God,’ she said again. ‘Hyphenated. Shall we have coffee? I’m half cut. Is that hyphenated, too?’
    Coffee was good, they had a second. Ratty backtracked. ‘And so Olly told you marriage wasn’t for him? And you wanted to leave ... London ?’
    ‘ Brentwood .’ She nodded, considered. ‘That’s a version.’ The coffee wasn’t working too well in the sobering-up stakes. ‘I wouldn’t say he told me,’ she adjusted. ‘Olly e-mailed me. He complained that I wanted a commitment he didn’t – news to me. I was messy – I hadn’t realised, but I suppose next to his computer-brain compulsive orderliness, I might be. All stuff and excuses. Like men do. By e-mail.’
    That squashed feeling which went with thoughts of Olly, settled her. She gazed into her coffee. Would it ever stop hollowing her out?
    ‘You – must – be – joking .’ His entranced distaste recaptured her attention. ‘He jilted you by e-mail !’ If he was registering the whiff of distress, it didn’t stop the dancing of his eyes.
    She glared. He was trying not to laugh!
    In fact, he was choking and giving in to it. ‘Christ, I’m sorry! But I’ve never heard anything so ludicrous, so ridiculous , so preposterously brutal ! It’s outrageous! Didn’t you send your brothers round to give him a hiding?’
    ‘It wasn’t funny .’ She tried not to let her disobedient smile evolve into a laugh. ‘And I haven’t got any brothers. Just my cousin Guy, who you met when you pulled his car out of the muddy field ... Could you imagine Guy meting out a hiding? And, anyway, he likes Olly.’
    Ratty laughed himself sensible again. ‘Pity,’ he remarked. ‘E-mail. What a shit. E-mail.’
    Perhaps it was the wine, the relief at functioning normally in a normal situation, or just the sympathy – of a kind – from such an unexpected source. At any rate, she found herself telling him. Telling him what she