How to Kill Your Husband (and other handy household hints) by Kathy Lette (top 10 novels to read TXT) 📗

‘You should answer my calls now and then, sweetie. Look on it as a useful distraction from daytime television,’ Jazz lectured me. ‘You look awful,’ she added tactfully. ‘Where the hell have you been?’

‘Oh, obviously at my Joy and Euphoria Seminar,’ I replied sourly.

‘Oh, haven’t we all.’ Jazz gave a dispirited sigh. ‘That flat. Ugh. Thank God Studz is rarely there. I can hear entire neighbourhoods through my walls. Someone flushes the toilet two houses down and I reach for the loo roll. I’m finishing my neighbour’s sentences, crossword queries, arguments. Yesterday I said yes to someone else’s marriage proposal.’

‘Lucky girl,’ I moped, snivelling.

‘You are joking?’

I shrugged dismally. ‘I was born married, Jazz. I don’t know how to act any different. I like obsessing about single fitted bunk-bed sheets, I do. I’m so heartsick and petulant and furious at myself for driving Rory away. I should never have dragged him to therapy.’

‘Ain’t that the truth. Bloody Hannah! She’s the one who sabotaged your marriage. You only acted out of love,’ Jazz said. And then she consoled the way she knows best. She cooked. Lasagnes, curries, beef bourguignon, all individually frozen in Tupperware containers for the kids’ dinners. She also spoon-fed me chicken soup made to Hannah’s recipe until I thought I’d grow feathers.

When Jazz wasn’t cooking, Hannah was cleaning.

Hannah, usually so well-groomed, was now sporting hair which stood in a frizzy corona around her head and there were food stains on her Juicy Couture.

‘Pascal says that living with a woman who is more successful drains you,’ she reported, working her way through the Mount Everest of ironing in my laundry basket. ‘He says it made him clinically depressed. Having a baby with Shona cured his depression immediately. Which, he says, proves beyond a doubt that I was the cause of it.’ The iron hissed angrily. ‘Here.’ She handed me a load of washing to sort into piles of whites and colours.

I had intended staying welded to the sofa for the rest of my natural life, but Hannah had threatened to use an oxyacetylene torch to prise my body from its permanently prone position.

‘He says that being a kept man is hard work. It saps a chap’s confidence and destroys his self-respect. In short, it turns him into a woman. He says that he had to schtup Shona, to make himself feel like a man again.’

‘Pascal has enough chips on his shoulder to open a casino,’ I said moodily. Then: ‘But what about the baby?’ I demanded, fossicking for tissues in Jamie’s jeans pockets before they went into the wash. ‘I thought he said that his sperms were blunt-nosed couch potatoes which couldn’t travel?’

‘There’s worse.’ Hannah now began ironing manically, the iron spitting. ‘They’re having another baby.’

It took a moment for the enormity of this to sink in. ‘What?’

‘And I’m forty-four. My eggs are fried. Stale. Scrambled.’

‘But . . . but I thought you didn’t want babies?’

‘Only because he didn’t. I child-proofed my life, but somehow they’d still get in. I feel judged every day, Cassie.’ Hannah was ironing even more furiously, her anger-gorged face sweating. ‘I don’t know what’s worse. To be judged heartless and unfeeling for not wanting children, or the unbearable waves of pity when people hear how I pretended I didn’t want babies to keep my husband happy, only for him to then run off and have babies with a younger woman. Pascal is also citing “fiscal neutering”, which means he plans on inflicting terminal palimony.’

‘So, he wants custody of the cash? Oh, it makes my blood boil. When wives divorce, they’ve raised the children and run the home. They deserve recognition,’ I said defensively. ‘But Pascal has done fuck all! Forget the thirty-five-hour week. He’s been on a thirty-five hour year!’

‘He maintains that he helped support me emotionally, which enabled me to have such a successful career. And that it’s only fair that I make up for ruining his life by giving him half of everything. He’s insisting I sell my favourite paintings.’

‘He’s worse than a cockroach, Hannah. I mean, Pascal doesn’t scuttle under the fridge. He picks the fridge up and carts it out of the kitchen on his back.’

‘And you’ll soon be in the same financial boat, otherwise known as the Titanic. Your ship will come in all right – your hardship. Thanks to Jasmine Jardine.’

Hannah was adamant that it was Jazz who had whisked up my emotions, like some deranged chef stirring up chaos to make everybody as wretched as herself. ‘She put this big hole in your life, Cassie. That gash is not self-inflicted. No, there was someone holding the knife: Jasmine Jardine, marital assassin.’

All I knew was that I’d lost my husband, my orgasm, my mind and quite soon perhaps, my job. I wanted to make my mark in the world, but all I seemed to have was an eraser.

All through October and November, it was as though a time bomb was ticking on beneath our lives. What happened next, the whole drama of it, was an accident that wasn’t so much waiting as begging to happen.

Jazz and Hannah, with their duelling broken hearts, had been avoiding each other since the showdown. We were all entwined in a slow motion game of Emotional Twister.

It was a sunny, crisp-as-a-Granny-Smith autumn morning when we three women met accidentally. The kids had gone gokarting with Rory and I was panting my way through a morning walk on Hampstead Heath before starting my Sunday ritual of housework and homework marking. The earth steamed and sunlight glinted on the rust-coloured leaves. As they fell around me in the dappled woods, I felt my spirits lift a little. It was such a glorious day, I was not the only one who’d been lured out of her pyjamas. In our favourite coffee shop on Hampstead High Street, I bumped into Hannah. The next voice I heard belonged to Jazz.

‘Look at us!’ Jazz exclaimed, peeling off her gloves and hat. ‘All on the dating-market again. Just like when we met