‘Because I can’t, Rose. My team has been putting pressure on me to end it the minute I told them Mark wouldn’t let me post about him. And my friends are just so bored with it all, obviously. But none of them know the extent of what’s been happening. They think the fact that I keep going back to him means I’m choosing this. Like I have a victim complex that means I want to stay miserable. But it’s just not that simple. I honestly sometimes wish it was. Mark can be kind, generous and really thoughtful. It would be so much easier if he was a monster the entire time. This is going to sound like a ridiculous example but a few months ago I came home after a long shoot and he’d made me a full roast dinner with a vegetarian wellington and everything.’
‘That’s nice of him.’
‘It was. But then we sat down to watch a film later and this actor I used to hook up with appeared on screen. Mark lost it and started accusing me of choosing that film because this guy was in it. I swear I didn’t even know he was in it. But Mark didn’t believe me. And then …’ Her eyes started to water again.
‘Fuck’s sake, I’m sorry, Rose.’
Rose put her hand on Clara’s arm. ‘It’s okay, Clara. You can tell me.’
Clara sighed through pursed lips.
‘I am fine, I promise. And he didn’t hit me or anything,’ she said, looking down at her feet.
‘Right.’
‘But he went into a kind of wild rage. He does this quite a lot when he gets upset – and more so when he’s drunk, which he was. I later found out he’d spent the day at the pub and had then come home and drunk a bottle of red wine while he was cooking. He has never hit me. I promise he has never hit me.’
She was speaking faster now, vomiting every sentence.
‘Anyway, then he accused me of cheating on him,’ she continued. ‘He was shouting a lot, pacing around the living room, screaming at me, “You fucked him. I know you fucked him.” Then he asked me about the size of this actor’s penis, asking me how it tasted in my mouth. God, it all sounds so childish when you say it out loud.’
‘No, it doesn’t,’ said Rose.
‘Things went on like this for a while and then he eventually picked up one of the wine glasses on the table and threw it across the room. The shards went everywhere. So did the wine, leaving these enormous blotches all over the floor. The stains are still there, hiding underneath a rug he bought me the following week.’
Clara had lost the ability to hold back her tears. She was panting now, her hand clutching her chest. ‘I know it sounds ridiculous because it’s just a wine glass and it didn’t even touch me. I don’t even think he threw it directly at me. But it was still so … violent. The act of it. The look in his eyes when he threw that glass, it was just …’ She trailed off, trying to calm herself down. ‘I couldn’t see him, Rose. That person was a stranger. And I felt scared for the first time. I felt that this man, this person I love … That he had vanished. And this new person who was here, in my home, could really hurt me.’
Rose nodded as one of the waiters approached their table and, on seeing Clara sobbing, swiftly turned around. She was a different person to him now too: a glossy veneer splintering right in front of him, losing its shine.
Clara took a large gulp of water and continued. ‘Afterwards, he rushed over to check I was okay and apologised. He was practically on his knees, begging I forgive him.’ She put her head in her hands and took a few deep breaths. ‘I told him I wanted to stay somewhere else that night, so he booked me into a suite at the Dorchester for two days. Listen to me, some sob story, right?’ she said, laughing.
‘Shall we go somewhere else?’ Rose asked, nodding at the waiter for the bill.
‘Yeah, okay,’ Clara nodded, rubbing her eyes before putting her sunglasses back on.
They left the restaurant and walked towards Hyde Park, which was mostly empty aside from a few young mothers pushing prams in matching athleisure sets. Clara was telling Rose about more arguments she’d had with Mark. There was one occasion when she had surprised him with a trip to the Lake District for his birthday. But when he discovered that the trip had been gifted to her by the hotel PR, meaning she had to post about it on Instagram, he lost it. By the time they’d arrived at the hotel, Mark had already booked another hotel room nearby and insisted he would get the train home the following morning. Clara had managed to assuage his anger over dinner and they’d had sex all night. They wound up extending the trip by another week.
‘It is the best sex I’ve ever had,’ Clara said, adding how, before meeting Mark, she’d never really enjoyed sex at all. ‘It always felt like something I was performing,’ she said. ‘Sort of like my social media. Maybe that’s why I’m so good at it,’ she laughed.
Rose nodded, hoping not to be asked about her own sex life.
‘Don’t your followers ask you about your love life?’ she asked.
‘Oh, all the time,’ Clara replied. ‘I get hundreds of DMs a day, and so many of them are from women asking if I have a boyfriend. Of course, they all assume I’m straight, which I am. But still. That bothers me.’
‘Do you ever reply to any of them?’
‘Never. I used to when I started out. The whole thing was so novel; I couldn’t believe anyone wanted to speak to me about my life. So I’d have all of these conversations with them as if we were friends. Then it started to get a bit weird.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, one guy worked out where I lived and started delivering flowers to my door each week. It was harmless at first but then he started leaving notes too … I ended up reporting it to the police but they said they couldn’t do anything unless he actually broke into the house or physically attacked me.’
‘I see. And now?’
Clara stopped and turned to face her. ‘Now, they’re all just looking for a reason to hate me.’
She told Rose about the online hate forums that post about her. There were thousands. Not just on Reddit but on dedicated blogs and websites where people would go to dissect and dismantle her every online and offline move. There were certain threads she could quote word for word, entire paragraphs people had written tearing her apart. Some were by total strangers. Others were by followers she’d briefly met or spoken to. And some were just people who’d worked in restaurants and hotels she’d been to, accusing her of being rude.
‘There is an entire thread dedicated to a dinner I hosted on behalf of a skincare brand where they were serving beef burgers. One half of the group called me a cheapskate and the other accused me of being a liar. I didn’t even eat them!’
‘Why would that matter?’
‘Because I post so much about vegetarianism and yada yada yada. So the second I’m associated with anything animal-based I’m labelled a hypocrite for going against my values. My team is constantly telling me not to get sucked in to the negativity but it’s impossible not to. I don’t know who has that kind of strength.’
This, Clara explained, was another reason why she had never posted about Mark.
‘Imagine having your relationship subjected to that kind of scrutiny,’ she said.
After a pause Clara went on: ‘It’s just exhausting.’
‘What is?’
‘Pretending I wanted this. Pretending I enjoy it. All the lies we tell ourselves.’
They continued walking around the park until, eventually, Rose asked if they could sit somewhere because her back was starting to hurt. They rested on a park bench overlooking the Serpentine, sitting silently for several minutes.
‘See that couple?’ asked Clara, pointing towards an elderly couple walking past them. She was using a walking frame, he had his hand on her upper back. They must have been in their eighties.
