by Woolf, Emma
Dr. Christos raised an eyebrow. “Go on.”
“Just that I don’t think Lily wants me to get a divorce. In fact, I know she doesn’t. The cliché is that the married man will never leave his wife for his mistress, right? But this is the other way around. If Lily gave me an ounce of encouragement, I’d up sticks and leave . . . I’d move in with her tomorrow. I’d buy us a house in London.” He shook his head and muttered under his breath, “I’ve even offered to help her buy her own place, for God’s sake.”
“In your mind, the two are very much connected?” said Dr. Christos. “Or let me put that another way: you trace your altered feelings towards Pippa to meeting Lily?”
Harry let out a sigh. “I honestly don’t know. I’d probably been out of love with Pippa for a while but I hadn’t really noticed. There wasn’t anyone else, if that’s what you’re asking—I’d never been unfaithful. The one thing, maybe the only thing, I was proud of and cared about was being a good father. You know, a decent husband and provider. But this thing with Lily. I’m just all over the place . . .”
“In what way all over the place?”
“I mean, my head, my priorities, my behaviour. What I told you about a few weeks ago, when Pippa came home and Lily was there—you’re right, it was risky and reckless. But I almost didn’t care. Within minutes of Lily leaving, even while I was trying to hide the signs of her being there—I found her bra behind my study door, for God’s sake—even then, with Pippa in the house, I just wanted Lily back. But sometimes—I don’t know.” Harry shook his head.
“Go on.”
“Sometimes I get this moment of clarity and see things from the outside: when she turns thirty next year and I’ll be turning fifty—what do I really expect is going to happen? She has male friends her own age, I know she does, plenty of ex-boyfriends sniffing around, and lovers, I assume. I’m just this old guy she works with. It sort of tears me in two. Maybe I’m a father figure to her.”
“A father figure?” Dr. Christos looked up. “That’s interesting. Can you elaborate?”
“Not really,” Harry said. “I don’t even know if that’s right; she never talks much about her father. As far as I know he died when she was a baby, or walked out, or something . . .” He fell silent.
“I don’t want to be her bloody father figure. I don’t want any of that shit—I want her to love me back, properly, like a man, not put up with me or pity me or use me. To be honest, the whole thing is making me desperately unhappy.” He shot a look at Dr. Christos. “There. You wanted to know how I’m feeling? I feel desperate. When she’s with me, I’m so high I don’t care about anything, and when she’s not, I do dangerous things: I take risks, I drive too fast, I get off my face on drink and drugs. I’m constantly thinking about who she’s with and what she’s doing. And if she doesn’t answer the phone or can’t see me, I get angry, really angry. I just need to know what’s going through her mind, whether she actually gives a shit about me. Because if she doesn’t, I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do.”
After several minutes of silence, Dr. Christos cleared his throat. “Obviously I’m not privy to Lily’s feelings, but we’re here to talk about you. You say you’re feeling desperate, and I can see that. But you’re not powerless—”
“But that’s exactly it,” Harry interrupted. “I feel powerless. In the rest of my life, I’m in control—or at least, I can make decisions, sort out problems. I’ve always been on top of things, at work, at home, I don’t just wait for things to happen to me and sit around moaning. If something’s wrong, I fix it—if the boys are in trouble or colleagues aren’t delivering, or whatever. With Lily, it’s completely different; I can’t do anything to make her want me more, I can’t change the way I feel about her. I’m completely fucking obsessed.” He shook his head. “And I don’t know what I’ll do next.”
“Harry, we’re coming to the end of our session for today, but I’d like to suggest an extra session quite urgently this week. I’m concerned about where this is heading and I’d like us to look seriously at alternatives. I mean, giving you back some sense of agency, getting you back in control. In any situation, it’s important to remember that you always have a choice.”
“Lily, you make it sound like I decided to fall in love with you. But I never intended any of this to happen. It wasn’t a choice.” That was how Harry remembered it. He and Lily were having dinner in a small French restaurant in Frankfurt, after a long day at the annual Book Fair.
He was talking about her job interview, the day they first met. Harry recalled her walking into his office, and what she had been wearing: “White shirt, navy trousers, bare ankles . . . your hair twisted up in that thing you do” (he meant a chignon). Lily was twenty-seven and it had been her “professional” outfit at the time: slim, dark blue cigarette pants from The Kooples, a crisp white shirt, navy ballet pumps. Smart but not too formal.
The waiter intervened, pouring more wine from the bottle on the table, adjusting their cutlery, fussing with the bread basket. They sat in silence, looking at each other, the air between them crackling. Lily felt as though she were watching this scene from above: both intensely present and very far away. She knew they were getting in way too deep. She needed to change this conversation somehow, to stop it from going any further. The problem was, she believed Harry. When he talked about his marriage, about realising you didn’t love someone any more, about making the wrong choices for the right reasons, Lily knew he was telling the truth.
But then there were his children. Although Harry wanted to leave his wife—they had been growing apart for years, he said—he couldn’t imagine leaving his sons. Lily remembered how his face lit up when he talked about them.
“You know the cliché about having children, that it changes everything?” he said. “It’s true. If it weren’t for the boys I’d have left years ago. Dan and Joe are the only reason I’m still there, they’re everything to me.” He took Lily’s hand. “Before you, I mean.”
“Harry, I’m not sure we should be talking like this . . .”
But he continued, lost in his own head, seemingly oblivious to Lily. “I never realised how hard it would be—whatever I do affects the boys. There’s such a difference between leaving a relationship and leaving a family. Although divorce is the obvious solution, and of course I’d still get to see the boys, how can I put them through all that pain and confusion? Seeing them at weekends, or a few days on and off, having them come to visit me as some kind of divorced dad set-up, their toothbrushes and pyjamas in their bags, you know it just feels so wrong. I can’t imagine not seeing them every morning and night. I live with them. I’d die for them.”
“I don’t . . . look, Harry, whatever’s going on in your marriage, I don’t want to break up a family.” She took her hand away. “I can’t promise you anything. I can’t be the reason you leave.”
“I know that,” Harry said. “I don’t want to put you in this position; I know I’m a mess. Just that . . .” He took a gulp of wine, and fumbled for his cigarettes. “Just that I love you.”
Just that I love you. Lily always remembered Harry’s words. As if love was just anything.
It wasn’t an “affair,” not at the start. In fact, nothing physical happened for nearly six months. They talked and talked, closer than colleagues, more flirtatious than friends, the chemistry between them like a live wire. But for all the rumours and suspicion swirling around them at the office, until that evening in Frankfurt they had not crossed the line.
Harry may have fallen for Lily at first sight, but her feelings for him crept up on her. She could see he was handsome, she loved his confidence, his presence, even his smell, but it went deeper than sexual attraction. Whenever she was around him, her body relaxed. If love was an instinct, there was something instinctive between them. When she was in Harry’s company, she felt herself resolved, complete. Being close to him reassured her, and their conversations were like thinking out loud.
> How could something which felt so right be so clearly wrong? Lily had to remind herself: he was twenty years older, he was married with children. She struggled with this for months—not jealousy of his wife, but an awareness of the fragile situation. Harry was physically strong but vulnerable. He put up a good front in the office, but there were evenings when she saw him close to despair. Everything about this situation said danger, stay away, leave the building, in flashing neon lights. Anyway, she was twenty-seven, he was forty-seven. What possible future could there be?
Looking back, that sense of danger had always been there: danger, desire, and a sort of hopelessness. Had she ever really thought it could work out between them? Did relationships founded on deceit ever end happily? And would she have allowed Harry to come to her, fresh from walking out on his family, to live with her, both of them feeling responsible for that fractured family he’d left behind? The guilt was inseparable from the love. Perhaps she should have stopped to question herself, but it was always up and down, heady and hopeless, with Harry. The problem was that her feelings changed constantly: At times she was jealous of his wife and wanted him all to herself. Other times she felt claustrophobic and trapped by the situation. Still other times she felt an immense tenderness for Harry, and overwhelming love.
When it was all over, when the mistakes had been made and the catastrophe complete, Lily spent a lot of time thinking about that beginning. It was always there with Harry, she thought to herself, this sensation of being on the edge. It was there long before the first kiss. In all, they had barely two years together, but she felt much, much older than the young woman who had walked into the interview on that day in April.
“As for the job—I decided instantly,” Harry said, twisting linguine around his fork. “The moment I laid eyes on you, it was yours. I don’t think I heard a word you said, I just kept thinking how lovely you were, how your brown eyes sparkled and the way you smiled. Even while I was going through the interview questions on the sheet in front of me, all I could think was: I can’t let this woman walk out and never come back.”
“Harry . . .” Lily shook her head, smiling. “You can’t just give someone a job because you find them attractive!”
“Attractive? I didn’t just find you attractive, Lil, I was consumed. You walked in and I wanted every single inch of your body and your mind. I wanted to talk to you forever, I wanted you never to leave the room. It wasn’t a question of attraction.”
Lily looked uncertain. It was nice to be appreciated, but she wasn’t entirely comfortable with the implications of Harry’s words. “And there I was, thinking it was my publishing experience which got me the job.”
“Of course you got the job on your merits—your CV and experience were great.” Harry took her hand across the dinner table. “I saw five other candidates and you were already at the top of the pile. Plus, if you remember, at the second interview there were two other directors and they asked all the questions. We made the decision unanimously to offer you the job. So there.”
Frankfurt was their first business trip away together. It was October, a bitterly cold evening. London was having a mild autumn, so they had been unprepared for the raw German wind. They had lingered in the restaurant long after they finished dinner, partly because of the cold walk back to the hotel, and partly because they had a candlelit corner table and it was too cosy to move.
Lily hadn’t been to Frankfurt before; she hadn’t expected it to be so elegant. Avoiding the usual publisher hangouts, receptions, and parties, they had found a restaurant in part of the old town.
After dinner, Harry ordered coffee and Baileys. There was an undercurrent of tension this evening; they were wary, savouring and dreading the next steps. They had been leading up to this for six months, and they both knew exactly what might happen next. It was precious and painful, this moment before a love affair was launched. It was the calm before the storm.
Packing for the three-day trip while Cassie was round at her flat, Lily tried again to convince her sister that there was nothing going on. “I mean, obviously we’re close, but just as friends.” She held up a handful of lace and silk from her underwear drawer: “What do you think? The Elle Macpherson matching set, the new pale pink silk, or the black lace?” They burst out laughing.
“Right, of course,” Cassie said, “because when I go on work trips, my underwear is the most important thing!”
“Seriously, nothing physical has happened. It won’t and it can’t.” Lily threw a handful of the underwear into her suitcase and began to pull dresses from the wardrobe. “It just can’t.” According to their colleagues, they were already in the throes of an adulterous liaison. Eventually, Lily had given up trying to convince anyone otherwise; let them think what they wanted. The problem was, being unfaithful wasn’t just about sex. She knew that Harry’s emotional infidelity was far more damaging.
She tried constantly to talk herself out of it. His wife wasn’t her responsibility, as such, but she mattered. Anyway, if she and Harry began an actual affair, what could it lead to? On the other hand, how could she stop it? Harry was so wholehearted and committed to Lily, she sometimes forgot he was formally committed to someone else. For all her sensible resolutions when they were apart, being in his presence was another matter entirely. These three days in Frankfurt marked a watershed: Lily knew that if anything was going to happen, it would happen there.
She had talked to her big sister about Harry a lot. Cassie had met him and liked him, but she warned her not to get involved. “I know he cares about you, Lil—I’ve seen the way he looks at you—but honestly? It’s just going to end with everyone getting hurt.” The night before she left London, Lily kept thinking about what Cassie had said. How was it possible now to go back, to undo the bond between them? They were like magnets in each other’s presence.
The company secretary had booked them on an early flight, so they met at City Airport at six a.m. It felt somehow clandestine: meeting at dawn, having coffee in the airport lounge, reading each other their horoscopes from the newspaper. Harry was wearing jeans; Lily’s hair was still damp from her shower; everything felt different from the office. There was an intimacy to the travel routines, taking off their belts and shoes at the security gate, alone together at the back of the half-empty plane. On the short flight across Europe, their conversation was punctuated by moments of shyness; Harry would break off, lost in the middle of a sentence, just looking at Lily, and she’d smile back, questioningly.
The Frankfurt schedule was packed. After checking in at their hotel, they had various meetings with agents about potential rights deals before lunch with authors. Then it was straight into meetings with a group of French and German academics about writing a European-style International Baccalaureate course in psychology. It was an area which Harry was keen to develop, a potentially lucrative market, and Lily had been working on the proposal since she had joined Higher Education Press six months earlier. The International Bac was very different from the UK curriculum, and it took hours of discussion to agree on a framework which everyone was happy with. After that, they took a taxi to a drinks reception for the international sales reps, where Harry gave a short presentation on the latest company news.
Working like this, rushing around Frankfurt, grabbing food in between meetings, out of the familiar office environment, Lily felt even closer to Harry. She was seeing a new side to him, the capable, sociable—and yes, powerful—strategic director. She noticed the respect he drew from others. And yet he wore his power lightly. He wasn’t pompous or self-important: he listened to others, discussed their ideas, and then made firm, clear decisions. He was sharp, and Lily admired sharp people (Cassie had described her as a “sapiophile”). Until Frankfurt Lily had thought she was in control of the Harry situation, or at least in control of her own actions. Now she wasn’t so sure.
By the time they escaped the drinks reception, it was after seven p.m. In the taxi back to the hotel, Harry stretched and rubb
ed his back, trying not to let Lily see. He was in agony from the flight, then hours of sitting on too-soft chairs, and he didn’t have his TENS machine with him.
Lily nudged his knee with hers. “Your back’s killing you, isn’t it?”
Harry smiled and said: “Oh, it’s not too bad. Well, a bit . . .” He’d suffered appalling back pain since his twenties. Nothing cured it, not the two operations he’d had, nor his weekly hydrotherapy sessions. Regular massages helped, and the painkillers of course. At the office the staff were used to Harry’s unorthodox habits; even in board meetings he’d walk up and down the room, rubbing his back, unable to sit in the same position for long. Over the years, Harry had also battled major depression, which coincided with the most acute episodes of back pain, the one exacerbating the other.
Lily wished she could help. Although he put a brave face on it, she knew that he was in pain much of the time. Often, it brought him very low. “Harry, you look really tired,” she said. “Don’t worry about dinner, you need an early night. We’ve got more meetings tomorrow, and you should rest your back.”
“Don’t be silly, we don’t need to cancel tonight,” Harry said. “I’ve been looking forward to it all day. I’ll be fine after a hot bath and some pills. How about we move the reservation to eight o’clock, would you mind? That would give me time for a soak, then I’ll be right as rain.”
“Are you sure?” Lily said as Harry limped beside her, out of the taxi and into the hotel lobby. “It looks really bad.”
“Seriously, Lil, we’re not cancelling anything. I’ll be better once I’ve had a drink.” Harry smiled and tried to walk normally. He felt like an old man, hobbling along beside her clutching his bloody back. Was this what love did, he wondered, make you feel ancient? “I’ll change the reservation, and see you down here at, say, ten to eight?”
