It was the Commodore who did it.
Tall, dark and as slippery as engine sludge, he ‘lived on his yacht’, walked with out-turned feet, and told me the night we met that he was looking to cheat on his lover, with whom he cheated on his wife.
As encouraging as this sounded, I did dally with him (the wife was separated and the mistress dropped him) as part of the euphoria of Post-Divorce Second Adolescence*, until he introduced me at the Yacht Club as someone else and his (‘separated’?) wife turned up in tears on my doorstep. I asked her in, comforted her and dropped him.
He was a cad too far. There endeth my period of *PDSA.
But before that overdue punctuation - oh, what adventures I had!
It had all started shortly after my marriage ended, with my dear cousin, always in my court and bounding around emanating love and hope.
“Here!”, she cried, whipping out some darkly exotic serviettes. “These can be for your first dinner party as a single woman!”.
I look at her in incomprehension. I would never, ever have another dinner party. I’d been with my husband for over half my life. We had been deeply married, and I was utterly committed to the lives and wellbeing of my children.
Yes, I’d wrangled myself free of the marriage, but now I was lying, panting with exhaustion and confusion on the other side, and how would I ever, ever resume any kind of normal social intercourse, as if nothing had happened?