What Might Have Been

by Holly Miller

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, we go for brunch in a café close to Max’s flat. He tells me he stops there most days for espresso on his way to work, and sure enough, they greet him by his first name when we walk in. I wonder, fleetingly, how many women he’s come here with, the morning after the night before. I’m paranoid the waitress’s smile is partly code for Your secret’s safe with me.

  The café’s nearly full, but we get the last table for two by the window, overlooking the road. The space is sunny and high-ceilinged, its chalkboard scrawled full of brunch offerings, the scent of coffee beans spiking the air.

  It’s a warm day, and Max is weekend-casual in shorts and a T-shirt, sunglasses propped on top of his head. I keep catching sight of him and thinking, We’re really together. This is finally happening. We actually were meant to be, after all.

  His skin is gleaming, his eyes bright. He snuck out for a run first thing this morning, even after all those cocktails last night and barely a couple of hours’ sleep when we got back to the flat.

  “I feel guilty, Luce,” he says out of nowhere, as I’m dipping a sourdough shard into the molten middle of my poached egg.

  “Guilty about what?”

  “That you never got your degree. It was my fault you left uni, wasn’t it?”

  I pause, leaving the toast speared into the egg like it’s been slayed. “I guess if we hadn’t broken up, I wouldn’t have quit. But it was my choice. Nobody forced me. I made that decision.”

  “Have you ever thought about going back?”

  “A degree’s just a piece of paper,” I say, though I’m not sure that’s true. Being a dropout affects everything—your CV, your self-confidence, your prospects—if you let it, which for a long time I did.

  “What did your parents think?” he asks, raising his voice slightly above the pneumatic pulse of a coffee grinder.

  “They were sad for us.”

  “I meant about you dropping out.”

  “Actually . . . they weren’t really thinking about that. And neither was I, at the time.” I stop short of saying it was my broken heart that everyone was worried about, to retain some level of dignity if nothing else.

  “How are they, your mum and dad?”

  Max met them a few times—those occasions when he came to Shoreley, and twice in Norwich, when they visited me at uni. Each time, he was the perfect boyfriend—attentive and polite, but not overly smooth, never trying too hard. I thought back then that maybe Max’s particular gift in life was making people fall in love with him.

  “They’re good. Still working.” Mum’s a primary school teacher, and Dad’s in middle management at an insurance company—though there’s been talk of redundancies lately, which is never great news for someone in their fifties. But I’m not going to bore Max with all that now.

  “Still head over heels in love?”

  “Ah, sickeningly so.” I smile, set down my fork, pick up my coffee. “And do you remember my sister, Tash?”

  He hesitates, probably reluctant to admit he doesn’t, not properly.

  “I think you only met her a couple of times. But she’s doing really well. She works in marketing now. Married, with a son.”

  “Crazy,” Max says, like he’s struggling—as I have been, over the past few weeks—to get his head around the passage of time, to become reacquainted with everything he’d thought was firmly in the past.

  “Tell me about your last girlfriend,” I say, sipping my coffee.

  His expression remains open, unfazed. “All right. What do you want to know?”

  “Why did you break up?”

  “Our lives were going in opposite directions. I like it in London, but she wanted to give it all up to start a yoga retreat abroad somewhere.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah. We were polar opposites, really, personality-wise.”

  “Do you ever think about what might have happened if you’d gone with her?”

  Max finishes his espresso and laughs. “Yeah, I’d have caught the next flight back to Heathrow.”

  I smile.

  “And you? Why did you and your ex split up?”

  “Lack of fire in the belly,” I say, which is a generous way of saying a bit lazy and that amount of online gaming’s not healthy for anyone.

  I don’t mention, of course, that I thought of Max often while I was with my ex. Sometimes late at night, while he snored beside me. Occasionally out at dinner, as he was asking for a knife and fork to replace his chopsticks. And once—I was ashamed of this—while we were having sex. It was all I could do to stop from calling out Max’s name.

  Eight

  Stay

  “I think it’s good,” the man with the tomato-colored face says, doubtfully. “It’s just not to my taste, I suppose.”

  He shrugs and looks at me apologetically. As my heart thunders away in my chest, I am about to tell him it’s fine, that I completely understand, when Emma—the girl with long blond hair sitting opposite me—says, “Sorry—good writing’s not to your taste?”

  “I meant,” says Tomato Face, “I don’t really read romance.”

  “But this is a writing group,” Emma counters. “You can’t only be prepared to critique dystopian thrillers.”

  I’m sensing there might be history between these two.

  “I don’t only like dystopian thrillers,” Tomato Face snaps. “I like crime, and fantasy.”

  His evident irritation rings around the room where we’re sitting, which abuts the vestry of a church in Shoreley town center. It’s far too big for the six of us, really, with its high ceilings, enormous stained-glass windows, and unnecessary levels of reverb. Though the weather outside is warm, the air in here is cool in the way that churches are, rich with the limey, mineral scent of centuries-old stone. There’s a long fabric hanging on the wall opposite where I’m sitting, which reads TRUST IN THE LORD’S PLAN FOR YOUR LIFE. It reminds me of a particular religious studies lesson I had at school, when our teacher had just said something similar, and someone put up their hand and asked why we should try hard at anything, if God already had a plan for us. Our teacher’s response was that God knows where you are going, but how you get there is up to you.

  For so many years, even after we’d broken up, that was how I felt about me and Max—that we were destined to be together, no matter how circuitous the route we’d take to get there. I’m surprised to realize I don’t feel that way anymore.

  Around the table, a tense silence is simmering. Reluctant to look up and take sides in the standoff, I stare down hard at my phone, the screen I’ve been reading from now idle.

  “Okay, then,” says Ryan brightly, like a playgroup leader trying to calm down warring toddlers. He glances up at the clock. “Reckon we’ve got time for one more exercise before we finish.”

  * * *

  —

  Ryan catches me afterward as I’m packing up to leave. Dark-haired and sunken-cheeked, he’s wearing mostly black, a handful of chains around his neck, like he’s off to play guitar in a battle of the bands.

  Ryan has had two books published, both dark comedies set in corporate London. Earlier this week I read his first, which was a best seller on publication nine years ago. It reminded me loosely of Joseph Heller, and I wondered if it was partly autobiographical (except for all the firearms, obviously).

  Ryan’s enthusiasm for his craft seems at times to border on eccentricity—intermittently throughout our session, he’d plant his hands on the table, leaning his whole body in to make his point, before leaping to his feet and striding the length of the room. I was braced for him to jump up onto the furniture at any moment.

  He’s calmer now. All that adrenaline came from sharing his passion, I realize, which is very inspiring, in a Dead Poets Society kind of way.

  “Will you be back next tim
e?” he asks me. “Hope we haven’t scared you off.”

  I smile. “Not at all. I really enjoyed it.”

  “Out of interest . . . how long have you been writing?”

  “Just a few weeks, really,” I say, shyly.

  He seems surprised. “Seriously? Never before now?”

  “Well, I started sketching out the idea years ago, but . . . never went anywhere with it.”

  He nods, slowly. “Life got in the way?”

  “Kind of. I feel a bit stupid it’s taken me so long to get round to it.”

  “Took Margaret Mitchell ten years to write Gone with the Wind.”

  I smile. “Ha. There’s hope yet, then.”

  “Absolutely. You should keep going. Really. You’ve got talent.”

  I almost gave up and went home before the session had even started—I was late, having only just clocked off from a full day at Pebbles & Paper after Ivan’s daughter was struck in the neck by a lacrosse ball at school (luckily, she’s fine). But when I did finally arrive, I struggled to find a way to the room that didn’t involve clattering down the church nave during evening choir practice. Anyway, apart from Ryan and me, four others are regulars: Debs, a grandmother of four in her sixties who’s writing a heavily religious novel set in a hospital; Aidan, a computer engineer and dad of two whose writing reminds me a bit of Jay McInerney; Paul, my tomato-faced challenger from earlier, who’s all about the dystopian thriller; and Paul’s adversary, Emma. Roughly my age, maybe younger, she’s writing a novel about a woman who walks out on her own life in order to find herself.

  I like Emma: I’ve only known her for two hours, but she seemed to enjoy my writing, and I appreciated her fierce defense of it against Paul. I met her eye over the table once they’d stopped arguing, and she shot me a little You’re welcome wink.

  I like the idea we might become friends. I’ve met up with a couple of ex-colleagues from Figaro since I left, but seeing them feels awkward now. The topic of Georgia seems to be off-limits, and we don’t really discuss the office, and without that common conversational ground—colleagues, clients, who stole whose biscuits, the slightly scary sandwich man—our chatter quickly ran dry, and so our meetups have become more sporadic. I still have old school friends in Shoreley, but those were never intimate friendships—just surface-level, gossip-based. Good for quick drinks and nattering over coffee, but little more than that. My true friends dispersed across the country after we left school—for university, jobs, relationships—and it soon became clear that Shoreley was fast becoming a place to be returned to only at Christmas, or for funerals, weddings, or holidays.

  Caleb’s much the same. His friends from school have largely moved away now, and the ones he’s made since are mostly London-based. Like me, he has casual acquaintances here, ones he can meet for a pint or game of pool. But his two closest mates are still in North London, and they also happen to be mutual friends of Helen’s.

  Right at the start of the session tonight, Ryan asked if I’d be comfortable sharing an excerpt from my novel, to give everyone a flavor of my writing style. So, with my pulse buzzing and my cheeks tingling, I read out the first chapter.

  I’d been expecting to wilt with regret as soon as I finished—despite Caleb’s words of encouragement at the weekend. But then something strange happened. As the group began discussing the work I’d written—suggesting improvements, dissecting my characters, debating certain turns of phrase—I could feel my mind start to sing with something resembling pride. The same feeling Caleb was able to stir up in me the other night, for the first time in almost a decade.

  * * *

  —

  He’s probably got unresolved emotional issues,” Caleb says later, when I describe the altercation between Paul and Emma. “Don’t take it personally.”

  “No, I mean, the feedback in general was positive. And Ryan was super-encouraging.”

  He squeezes my hand happily.

  I squeeze him back. “So, where are we going, again?”

  It’s late, long after dark. I called Caleb after the session to see if he’d mind me dropping in. He didn’t, so I did, but we got pretty distracted as soon as he opened the front door, so it was getting on for ten o’clock by the time he said, “Fancy doing something a bit crazy?”

  “That depends. How crazy is crazy?”

  “Well, that also depends,” he said, lifting an eyebrow. “On your appetite for adventure.”

  Of course, I want Caleb to think I’m at the greedy end of the adventure scale, so together we left the cottage and walked hand in hand down to the beach. Now, we’re making our way toward the end of the shingle, the section that faces dunes rather than houses.

  In front of a row of classic candyfloss-colored beach huts, Caleb pauses. They’ve been here as long as I can remember, these sought-after wooden cabins offering high-tide refuge to Shoreley’s beachgoers. They’re nestled back from the shingle, deep in the dunes as if they’ve sprung up quite naturally through the marram grass.

  “Fancy a swim?”

  I let out a sound that’s somewhere between a laugh and a shudder. “What?”

  “Come swimming with me.”

  “I . . . I mean . . .” No. No. Not in a million years. If I don’t drown, I’ll freeze to death, probably, or get arrested for indecent exposure.

  “Sorry, forgot to check—you can swim, can’t you?”

  “I mean . . . I can, but . . .”

  “You’ll love it, I promise. There’s no feeling like it.”

  “I don’t . . . have a bikini with me.” Even the word is enough to make me shiver.

  “Kind of the point,” he whispers, devilishly.

  “I think there are laws against that.”

  He looks as though he’s trying to suppress a smile. “Well, then, we’ll just have to make sure we don’t get caught.”

  “Also, I don’t want to sound like a wimp, but . . . it’s freezing.”

  He rests a palm flat against the beach hut we’re standing next to. It’s smart and stout, painted in a glossy flamingo pink. “Don’t worry. We have a good place to warm up afterward.”

  “This is yours?” I say, surprised and impressed. “These things are like gold dust.”

  “Actually, no,” he confesses. “It belongs to a mate of mine from school. But he moved away years ago and hardly uses it now. So he gave me a key.”

  He moves to the front of the hut to unlock it and I follow him inside. Tash had a school friend whose parents owned a beach hut on this row, but it was nowhere near as nice as this one. It’s very neat, and smart: all the wood inside is painted cream, there are two banquette benches upholstered in deckchair-striped fabric, and a line of brightly colored bunting is strung across the back wall. It reminds me of a rather grandiose playhouse in a catalog I once got fixated on as a child. Somewhere magical to escape to, its own little world.

  Caleb flicks on a garland of fairy lights looping from a shelf before showing me round—as much as you can conduct a tour of a space not much bigger than your average garden shed. “Okay, so we have towels and blankets, and crucially—a stove, heater, and hot chocolate. Shall we go?”

  Letting slip a laugh, I realize I’m starting to feel nervous. “So what—we’re just going to go skinny-dipping? Just like that?”

  “I’m up for it if you are.”

  I release a breath like I’ve eaten something hot, then laugh again. “Okay. Okay. All right. Let’s do it. Why not? Yes.”

  “Ah, you’ve convinced me,” he jokes.

  So we ditch our shoes and outer layers in the beach hut, and then Caleb locks up, hiding the key beneath a piece of driftwood before we walk down to the shoreline. The shingle is cold and sharp, biting into my bare feet. I decide as I follow him that Caleb is the only person on earth who could have possibly persuaded me to do this.

  We come to a pau
se at the water’s edge. I glance left and right. The only other people I can see are a pair of night fishermen, their little tents glowing like igloos, a quarter of a mile or so along the beach. The air is cool and calm, sublimely still.

  “So,” Caleb says.

  “So,” I reply.

  The only time I’ve been naked with Caleb before now has been close up, well within touching distance, in the heat of a moment. It’s vastly different to the idea of standing still and unclothed in front of him, which I’m worried will feel a bit too much like I’m auditioning for something.

  “I’ll go first,” he says, gallantly, then starts stripping off.

  I sneak a look at him once he’s lost the clothes. Tall, toned, and lean, with an irresistible, incorrigible smile.

  “Your turn.”

  So I peel off my dress, then lose my underwear, realizing as I’m doing so that I don’t feel as self-conscious as I thought I might. In fact, standing here like this with him feels like the most natural thing in the world.

  Stars spill like glitter across the velvet folds of cloud and sky above our heads. On the surface of the water, the moon has splintered into a million shivering shards.

  Caleb passes me a woolen hat. “Here. It’ll help keep the heat in.”

  I pull it on, then grin. “How do I look?”

  He keeps his eyes on the horizon, shakes his head. “I’m actually trying very hard not to look at you right now.”

  I laugh. “Oh, sorry.”

  He takes a step closer, grabs my hand. “Ready?”

  “As I’ll ever be, I guess.”

  Together we step into the sea. It’s cryogenically cold, like wading unclothed into snow. As we go deeper, the water reaching first my knees and then my ribs, my chest contracts and I gasp with the shock of it, growing more hesitant with every step.

  To my left, Caleb is swiftly becoming submerged. Eventually, his hand slips free from mine. “Just go for it,” he says, his voice slightly stiff from the shock of immersion. “It’s just like . . . ripping off a plaster.”