by Nick Hornby
He didn’t know why he was getting so agitated about it, but he had turned up the volume, and he could feel his cheeks flushing.
“Did you want more than that?”
“Did you?”
“I asked you first,” said Lucy.
“I didn’t even think about it. I knew it couldn’t be done. I’ve thought about it more since than I did at the time.”
“Why is that, do you think?”
Why? Because he’d just spent the last few months drifting backward in his mind, unable to love the one he was with, and maybe not even the one before her, although they were two different kinds of disability. Lucy was older and had two kids, so there was all that; Hanna was at college, pushing forward into someplace he guessed he wouldn’t be able to get to, so that was something else. Was it just that he hadn’t been to uni? That wasn’t quite true, because he had, but only for a few weeks. He was supposed to be studying Sports Science, but the size of the loan he was going to need for a three-year course seemed ludicrous when he didn’t even know what he was going to do with the qualification. And even though his mum had encouraged him, she’d been relieved when he quit. Anyway, now he was worried that he’d only ever be attracted to women who were being, or had already been, educated out of his league.
There was something else, though, and it was serious, in all senses. He had never told any woman he was seeing that he loved her. It just wasn’t done. If you told someone you loved her, she might get the wrong idea, whatever that might be—even if it was clear that there was love going on, in some form or another. They had no legal force, these words, as far as he knew, but there still seemed to be some kind of commitment that hung off them, weighing them down to the point where they seemed unusable. He knew now that he loved Lucy, and could see that he’d loved her even when he’d started seeing Hanna; he’d just presumed that he’d have to love her in a way that didn’t involve monogamy, or sex, or anything very much. Anyway. That was the real answer to Lucy’s question.
“Dunno, really.”
That was the best answer, however.
“Oh,” said Lucy. “That doesn’t really encourage me to talk about why I’ve been thinking about it.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I know.”
“Have you ever been skinny-dipping here?” said Joseph.
“I’m not sure that’s the complete change of subject you think it is.”
“Ah. I see what you mean. All right. Is there a backgammon set here?”
She laughed.
“I’m not playing backgammon. I’m either talking to you or going to bed. We don’t need to fill time.”
“Right.”
There was a long silence. Joseph stood up and hooked the football that was stuck in the corner of the pool out with his foot. He juggled it a couple of times and then side-footed it gently onto the grass.
“I’m going to tell you what I’ve been thinking about,” said Lucy. “And if you want to get the first train back tomorrow, you can.”
“Yeah, I’m not gonna do that,” said Joseph.
“Thank you.”
“I just meant, there’s nothing you can say that will make me leave here early. If I don’t like it, I’ll just move my chair up the other end of the pool and sit there tomorrow. It’s too nice here.”
“OK. Well, that’s still reassuring, in a strange way.”
He was nervous. He had the feeling that whatever she was about to say couldn’t be unsaid, like most of the crap that passed for the conversations he got into.
“I can’t imagine myself with Michael.”
“Oh.”
“All the surface things are good. Nice. I can happily go out in the world with him. Nice restaurants. Cinema. All that.”
“Conversations about books.”
“I suppose. He tells me about novels in translation that he thinks I’d enjoy. I’m sure he’s right. But I can’t see myself reading them. One of them is French and doesn’t contain the letter ‘e.’”
“Really?”
“Apparently.”
“Like, deliberately?”
“I don’t think it was an accident. He didn’t forget to use the words ‘he’ and ‘she’ for a few hundred pages.”
“French, though. ‘He’ is ‘il,’ isn’t it?”
“Yeah, but ‘elle.’”
“Oh, yeah.”
“And ‘the’ is ‘le.’ Anyway, I’d be reading it in English.”
“Does the English one leave ‘e’ out as well?”
“I think so.”
Joseph got his phone out of his pocket.
“What’s the name of this fool? I want to look him up.”
“Can we, you know, put a pin in that?”
“Oh. Yeah. Sorry.”
He knew that the conversation they were about to have would be difficult, or dangerous, or something. But he didn’t often talk to Lucy about books, especially French books. He was thinking maybe he could show her he was capable of a conversation, at least, even if he had no intention of reading the bastard book.
“You can’t imagine yourself with Michael.”
Lucy looked at him, surprised.
“Exactly,” she said.
“I’m not saying that,” said Joseph.
“What are you saying, then?”
“No . . . You said it. Before we started talking about the French book.”
“Oh. Right. Yes.”
She seemed disappointed. Maybe she’d thought he was about to seize the moment, tell her that Michael was all wrong for her.
“So there’s this, I don’t know what you’d call it,” she said. “This vibe. I feel I’d be on my best behavior all the time. It’s all too grown-up for me.”
“You’re a grown-up.”
“I’m not that sort of grown-up, am I? I don’t see how you can be when you’ve got kids. They drag you down into the world of stupid jokes and farts and fights. Life is hard enough without reading books with no ‘e’s in them.”
Now he didn’t know whether to go back to the French writer or not. He decided not.
“Anyway, there’s not much you can do about the inside world, I don’t think. That’s the important part too,” she said.
“It’s very small, though. There’s a lot of outside world.”
“I think maybe I’m not expressing myself very well.”
“No, no, I get what you’re saying.”
“Right. Do you really?”
“Yeah. You need someone a bit more fun than Michael.”
“Yes.” And then, “It’s you.”
“Me?”
“I thought you got what I was saying.”
“I got the Michael part. I didn’t get the me part. Or maybe I did, but then I thought, she can’t mean that.”
“Well. There you are. I did.”
“It’s not a choice between me and him. It’s a choice between me, him, and every other single man in Britain. Or Europe, really. If you factor in like Skype and cheap flights.”
“I don’t like any other single man in Europe.”
“How can you say that? You haven’t met . . .”
“Oh, don’t even go there. That’s the whole basis of everything.”
“What?”
“You meet someone, you fall in love, you don’t even want to know anyone else. You don’t need to meet every single man in Europe to compare. Nobody would ever have sex again.”
Joseph got the impression that the love part had just slipped out at the wrong point in the conversation, and that, he felt, put him in an awkward position. He decided to ignore it for the time being. There was still a possibility they were talking theoretically.
“Unless you have sex with every man in Europe just to help clear your head.”
&nbs
p; “Bloody hell, Joseph.”
He was probably wrong to ignore it. She was frustrated and a bit annoyed with him.
“Why do you keep telling me to be with everyone else except you?”
“I keep not being sure of what you’re saying.”
“I want to be with you. Inside and outside.”
“Oh.”
She gave him a few seconds, and then she stood up.
“Right. I’ve said it. I’m going to bed.”
“Hold on, hold on.”
She sat back down again.
“Have you thought this through?”
“Can we first establish whether this is something you’re remotely interested in?”
He couldn’t just say yes, he was guessing. The situation required some kind of speech, or at least a sincere expression of feeling. The inside/outside relationship felt much more achievable than the words he needed to find, but his failure to find them was causing her alarm and embarrassment.
“First of all and very quickly—yes.”
“OK. Really? OK.”
“And . . . Well, there are other things about it, apart from yes. Things that don’t stop the answer from being yes. They sort of add to it. But it’s, you know. Not easy. Unless we’re somewhere else. Will you stand up and say what you said before?”
She looked blank for a moment.
“Oh.”
She stood up. “I’m going to bed.”
“Will you come to bed in the barn for a bit?”
“No!”
“What?”
“You were sleeping in there with your girlfriend until this morning.”
“Great.”
“Isn’t that true?”
“Yes. But she didn’t want to have sex with me because of you. And you don’t want to have sex with me because of her.”
“You didn’t have sex?”
“No. I told you.”
“You said she didn’t feel comfortable. I didn’t know whether that was before, during, or after.”
“Before.”
“Right. But you’d have been fine.”
“Men are built all wrong.”
“I’m going to bed.”
“Goodnight.”
She didn’t say “goodnight” back. She just went. After a little while, he followed her into the cottage, just in case that was what she was expecting. It was. And afterward he found it was easy to talk.
Autumn 2016
12
There was more inside than outside, for the first couple of weeks. They didn’t make any kind of announcement to the boys, although Joseph started staying the night and eating breakfast the next morning, and they didn’t seem to require any clarification or explanation. He was a part of the family—why wouldn’t he eat breakfast with them? Lucy and Joseph watched a lot of episodes of The Sopranos (neither of them had had the heart to continue with the series during the hiatus), and had a lot of sex. They would have gone out for a meal, but Lucy was still looking for a reliable babysitter.
When a neighbor volunteered her daughter, a seventeen-year-old who the boys knew and liked, she took Joseph to the fund-raising quiz at the boys’ school. They didn’t arrive hand in hand, nor did they touch during the evening; in other words, they did nothing to differentiate themselves from any of the other couples there. And many of the parents knew Joseph from the butcher’s shop anyway, so they presumed that Lucy had asked him to come along because he was good at quizzes.
There were ten tables, with eight people on each. There was an Indian couple on the other side of the room, and a Korean woman on the next table, but otherwise all the contestants were white.
“Do you have a specialist subject?” said the woman who was sitting to his right. She seemed nice. Blonde, smiley, very podgy. “I’m Ellen, by the way.”
“Joseph. Sport, I suppose.”
“Ah,” said Ellen. “Sport. Of course. So there’s method in Lucy’s madness.”
The woman seemed to watch the words as they came out of her mouth, and they alarmed her.
“There’s no madness, by the way,” she said. “I don’t know why I put it that way. Why would it be mad?”
Joseph smiled.
“But usually when someone brings someone along, it’s because they have a specialist subject.”
“Well. Let’s say it’s sport.”
“OK. We will listen to you on all sports-related questions. Everyone, Joseph knows all the sports answers.”
“There’s a whole sports round,” said Ellen’s husband, who was also large. “Round five.”
Joseph winced. There would be less pressure on him during round five if he simply announced at the end of round four that he and Lucy were having sex.
They elected a team captain (Lucy), and drank wine out of paper cups, and pored over the picture round. By the time the sheet made its way to Joseph, eight of the ten pictures of famous people had names beside them.
“We’re just missing two,” said Karen, the woman sitting on the other side of Lucy.
“We think the one with the hair might be Beyoncé’s sister, but we can’t remember her name.”
Joseph looked at the pictures and recognized both of them.
“That’s Solange Knowles.”
“Solange! Yes!”
“And the other one is Alex Iwobi of Arsenal.”
There was a momentary silence. Everyone around the table, it seemed to Joseph, was trying to find an explanation for why the only black person in the team had recognized the only black people in the picture round.
“Two things I know nothing about,” said Karen. “Football and modern pop music. Is she pop? I don’t even know that.”
These twin admissions of ignorance were seized upon gratefully.
“Me neither.”
“I know David Beckham and that’s about it.”
“And Adele.”
“Is Dido still going?”
“Dido! That’s going back a bit.”
“And Drake,” said Karen’s husband, Nick, quickly, conscious that they were digging themselves into yet another hole.
“I wouldn’t know what Drake looked like,” said Ellen, who, it seemed, loved digging, would dig to Australia if she weren’t stopped.
As Joseph was handing the paper on to Lucy, he noticed that someone had written ?? Ryan Gosling alongside a picture of the YouTuber Roman Atwood.
“That one’s Roman Atwood,” he said.
“Who’s Roman Atwood?”
“He’s a YouTuber. He does pranks.”
“Oh, well,” said Nick. “That’s another thing. YouTubers.”
“Exactly,” said Ellen. Everyone laughed, a laugh crackled through with relief. Roman Atwood was white! Hurrah! They were equal-opportunities dunces!
“These aren’t my friends,” said Lucy quietly while they were queuing for the Mexican buffet.
“I know.”
“So you mustn’t think this is what every evening would be like.”
“I don’t.”
“What do you think every evening would be like?”
He laughed.
“I’m serious.”
“How many of these evenings are there? I’ll tell you one thing—I haven’t got rich off babysitting for you.”
“I stopped going out when we started whatever you’d call it.”
“Staying in.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t have come here.”
“Why not?”
“They’re so nervous. It’s like you’re an unexploded bomb. Guacamole, no salsa, please.”
“White people are weird. It’s like it’s all they ever think about.”
“That’s because they never think about it.”
“Everything for me, please,” said Joseph.
He got nine out of ten on the sports round, and anyway, horse-racing wasn’t a sport. They were all pleased with him. But at the end of the evening, he lost his nerve: he said good-bye to them all, thanked them for the evening, and left without Lucy. He sat in McDonald’s with a vanilla milkshake until she texted him to ask where he was.
* * *
—
They had conversations in bed that rarely went anywhere. The circularity and pointlessness made Joseph laugh, at first, but Lucy was serious about them: she wanted him to admit that everything was pointless and doomed.
“You’ll want kids.”
“Maybe.”
“You can’t have them with me.”
“Why not? How old are you really?”
“Shut up. You know what I mean. You won’t want kids for five or ten years.”
“No.”
“So that won’t be me.”
“No.”
“So . . .”
“You’re right. We should pack this in.”
“That’s what I think, though,” she said.
“Yes. I know. That’s why we should pack this in.”
“I’m being serious.”
“So am I.”
“Will you stop this and talk properly?”
“You think we should pack this in.”
“Yes.”
“I’m agreeing with you,” he said.
“No, you’re not. Not really.”
“So what do you want?”
“I want you to disagree.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to know I’m not ruining your life.”
“Do I look like someone whose life is being ruined?”
She looked up at him. Her head was on his chest, and he was peering down at her, pleased with himself and pleased with the world.
“Not yet. But you wait.”
“You said the same thing about Brexit and nothing’s happened.”
“Brexit hasn’t happened, that’s why. It won’t happen for a couple of years.”
“Exactly.”
“What?”
“Same thing. I’m not going to stop doing anything because of the terrible future. When we’re all unemployed and I’m itching to have children with a younger woman. What am I supposed to do between now and then?”
