Years After You

by Woolf, Emma

  Back in his hotel room Harry was like a maniac, pulling shirts out of his bag in an attempt to find his razor, brushing his teeth while he checked his phone. Dammit, there were three missed calls from Pippa.

  Lying in a bath as hot as he could bear it, willing the muscles in his back to relax, Harry called home. Daniel answered, and then Joe came on, and they chatted to their dad for a while, Dan telling him about rugby training, Joe interrupting to tell him about his Pokémon progress. Then he spoke to his wife briefly, explaining that he’d been in meetings all day. She asked about his plans for the evening and Harry said he was going out for a meal with his old friend Will, a botanist at the university.

  That was the first lie. Changing into a fresh shirt and jeans, Harry asked himself why he’d said that. Pippa knew they were here on business, but since she’d found out that Lily was coming with him she’d kept asking questions. She even demanded to know which hotel he was staying in, something she’d never done before. Thus far, he had tried not to hide his friendship with Lily; Pippa knew they got on well and worked closely together. When they went for drinks after work, he mentioned it, usually. Did Pippa suspect something? Waiting for the lift, Harry wondered whether or not he cared.

  Striding through the lobby at a quarter to eight, he realised that the pain had disappeared. The hot water seemed to have done the trick, or maybe it was the double dose of painkillers with vodka from the minibar. Either way, he was a new man. Dinner with Lily. It felt like a date. He asked the concierge to call a taxi, then waited in the lobby. At five to eight, the lift doors opened and there she was.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting.” Lily had changed into a simple black dress which skimmed her body, the thin straps leaving her shoulders and collarbone bare. Her hair was loose now, and her eyes were touched with just a hint of dark kohl eyeliner and mascara. “Had a quick shower, I feel much better now. And rang my mum too.” She chattered away lightly. “How’s your room? More importantly, how’s your back?”

  “Thanks, my back’s good—room’s good too.” Harry was still taking her in. “Are you going to be OK like that? We’ve got a cab waiting, but I don’t want you getting cold.” He gestured at her bare shoulders, and in reply, Lily waved her cardigan at him.

  They walked through the hotel lobby. Opening the door of the taxi, Harry said, quietly: “By the way, you look beautiful in that dress.”

  Years later, Lily would wonder if it was inevitable, their meeting, the connection, and everything which followed. In another world, perhaps they might have continued like that, flirtatious colleagues who never crossed that boundary. But all evening, in that restaurant, they were teetering on the edge. The dynamic had shifted. Harry was no longer just her eccentric boss, who liked to drink and smoke and talk too much. But what, really, could their relationship ever be?

  As for Harry, he was sunk. Whatever they were talking about he couldn’t be sure, but he couldn’t take his eyes from her shoulders, the curve of her collarbone, her clavicle. Through his mind there floated half-remembered lines from Balzac, something about a woman with a complexion as fine as porcelain, a mouth like a half-burst pomegranate . . . In the taxi, he breathed in the scent of her hair. When she crossed the restaurant in that black dress, coming back from the bathroom, weaving through a crowd of men at the bar, walking towards him, Harry felt his heart banging in his chest.

  Their first kiss was deadly serious. It was nearly midnight and freezing cold. They were crossing the deserted square in front of the town hall when Lily stopped. She looked at him and smiled, and time seemed to stop. Slowly, Harry took her hand and kissed it, just barely touching her knuckles with his lips, drawing her closer to him. They stood there, silent, their faces inches apart. Her brown eyes flashed green in the streetlight as she lifted her mouth to his.

  Without words, it was clear that the line had been crossed. Everything up to this point was before, and now everything else would be after. They walked slowly back to the hotel, not feeling the cold, and sat in the bar, drinking hot, strong espressos, fingers linked, talking. Around two a.m. the bar closed and they wandered across the empty lobby.

  “It’s late,” Lily said as they waited for the lift. “And we have so many meetings tomorrow . . . Whose bright idea was it to drink coffee?”

  “Actually it was your bright idea,” Harry said. “To sober us up.”

  “You’re right.” She smiled. “Dammit. Now I’m going to be awake for hours.”

  They didn’t make love that night. In Harry’s room, they drank a nightcap, showered together, lay on the bed, and found Lost in Translation on Netflix. Halfway through the movie, Harry realised that Lily had fallen asleep. She was curled up under the sheet, her head against a pillow, one arm across his chest. Gently, so as not to wake her, he reached for the remote and clicked off the TV.

  For the first time since leaving London, Harry was properly alone with his thoughts. Here she was, naked, beside him. But he didn’t feel guilty. Instead, he felt an uncontainable joy. He gazed and gazed at Lily, young and defenceless in sleep. At one corner of her mouth, the pillow was slightly damp. Harry had watched his boys sleeping this way too, open-mouthed, leaving a tiny patch of dribble on the pillow. Had Lily’s father watched over her like this as a child?

  Outside, the wind was picking up. It lifted one corner of the curtain where they had opened a window, and showed a grey day dawning. Harry felt the familiar heaviness descending as he considered the future. Everything would change; everything would end. He wanted this moment to last. He put his arm over Lily’s arm, encircling her, and lay awake listening to the gentle rain.

  Lily rarely spoke about her father, and she tried not to think about him either. But they had all been thinking about him on the day of Cassie’s wedding.

  The preparations had been complicated, even by Cassie’s perfectionist standards. “If I was Cass, I’d be too exhausted to enjoy the wedding after all this,” Lily said to her younger sister, Olivia, at the final church rehearsal in Covent Garden. The vicar led them through each stage, walking up the aisle behind their big sister, dealing with the veil and flowers, the wedding poems and signing the registry. All dressed in blue jeans, Cassie; her future husband, Charlie; Lily; and Olivia practised their stately procession to the strains of Pachelbel’s Canon, imagining the pews filled with hundreds of guests in a few days’ time.

  On the morning itself, Cassie, Lily, Olivia, and their brother James gathered at the de Jongh family home in Hampstead. This was where the four of them had grown up; their parents had bought it decades earlier when spacious, rundown houses in North London were still affordable for young couples just starting out.

  De Jongh was their father’s name. His ancestors had come over from Holland in the early twentieth century, Amsterdam Jews who made their money in the diamond trade. Celia de Jongh (she had kept her husband’s surname) wasn’t rich, but after a lifetime working as a dress designer and museum curator, she had saved enough to get by. Despite the exotic heritage on their father’s side of the family, none of the children spoke Dutch, nor had they been to Holland. All they had was his unusual surname.

  The family joke was “de-Jongh-where-does-that-come-from?” because they could never tell anyone their surname without the question being asked. Although that wouldn’t be a problem for Cassie once she was married—Charlie’s surname was a good English one: Taylor.

  Celia had called a final family gathering before her eldest daughter’s wedding. So, before the hairdressing and make-up and pinning of silk dresses began, the five of them sat down to brunch in the garden. It was unexpectedly warm for late spring, a brilliant May morning.

  The doorbell rang. “Wedding!” Celia interrupted her oldest and youngest daughters, who even at the ages of thirty-one and twenty-five were squabbling over the last piece of toast. “Are you still planning to get married, Cass, because I think that’s the hairdresser at the door.” Cassie ran towards the house, closely followed by Olivia, who was
muttering something about her dress not fitting.

  James leaned back in his chair and stretched, as if he didn’t have a care in the world, let alone a sister to walk up the aisle in less than three hours. He rolled himself a neat joint and wandered over to the garden shed. Lily helped Celia carry the breakfast plates and mugs into the kitchen, then joined James for a smoke. The last few months had been a blur, not only of wedding mania, but also Harry. Lily felt emotionally exhausted, raw with love and passion, and uncharacteristically on edge. Before she turned into chief bridesmaid, she needed something to relax her.

  Finding the bridesmaids outfits had been a challenge—or as Cassie had said when they returned home that day, “a complete bloody nightmare.” Olivia had wanted something dramatic and busty, possibly in fuchsia or scarlet. Lily wanted something classy and understated, preferably in ivory or cream.

  The problem was finding something which suited them both. Although they were close as sisters, physically they were completely different. In fact, the only similarities between them were their height—both girls were five feet seven—and their identical voices.

  Olivia was currently a brunette (she changed the colour quite often): a glossy, raven shade from a bottle. She had a heart-shaped face, pale skin, and light blue eyes. She didn’t know it, but she resembled her father Claude in both temperament and appearance. She was strong and stubborn, a true Taurean, and she had curves; in previous centuries, she would have been called Rubenesque. Dressed up or dressed down, Olivia had that knack of looking striking: hair piled haphazardly on top of her head or shoved into a beanie hat, last night’s make-up still smudged sexily around her eyes. Winter or summer, she wore layered, strappy tops which showed her cleavage, strong legs encased in jeans or a short skirt, her outfits a casual, eye-popping ensemble of clashing colours. Olivia smiled a lot, and she was naturally sunny and sociable. Celia always said that her third daughter would one day slay a man with those dimples.

  Lily had no dimples: instead she had cheekbones. Where Olivia resembled their father, Lily took after their mother. She had Celia’s slender frame and olive complexion; they both tanned easily and kept the colour most of the year. She had her mother’s large brownoval-shaped eyes which flickered from green to hazel depending on the light. As a teenager, her hair had been peroxide blonde—even magenta once—but these days it was natural mid-brown with a few blonde highlights. She wore it long and straight with a centre parting, nothing too high maintenance. Her expression was serious; if you caught her deep in thought, she could look stern. But then she smiled, and those cheekbones changed her expression completely.

  Like her hairstyle, Lily’s clothes were unfussy: skinny blue jeans, white T-shirts, navy cashmere jumpers, tops in pale blue or oatmeal, smarter trousers in grey. She didn’t wear much black—she had lived in black clothes as a teenager and got sick of it.

  When it came to the bridesmaids’ dresses, it was clear that Lily and Olivia were looking for very different things. Poor Cassie, who was actually getting married, was caught in the middle with just her credit card, trying to mediate between them. Lily wanted classic, Olivia wanted dramatic.

  Finally, against the odds, they found a style which suited them both. It had taken hours of searching, first in specialist bridal boutiques, then designer stores, then finally in an upmarket vintage shop in Marylebone High Street. The perfect dresses: pale pink silk, full-length with delicate ribbon straps, elegant but not Barbie doll.

  The next miracle was that the dresses could be altered by the first of May. The final stroke of luck was finding two pairs of shoes, in pale pink and white silk. They both struggled to walk in the shoes, but as Olivia said: “Who cares? We just have to get up the aisle behind Cass without falling over. And later at the reception, everyone will be falling over, so that’s fine.” Hearing this, Cassie wasn’t sure that her youngest sister was particularly going to raise the tone of her chic London wedding—but one needed two bridesmaids really, for balance.

  “The first time we had sex? It was in Frankfurt, not that night—she fell asleep, I watched her sleeping for hours—but in the morning. We woke early, and it was . . . I can’t describe it, like waking up and discovering the whole world had changed.” Harry looked at Dr. Christos sadly.

  “Until the day I die, I’ll never forget that morning with Lily. The sex was great, of course, but I mean everything else too, taking a bath together afterwards, watching her wrapped in the hotel bathrobe, laughing, running down the corridor back to her room to get clothes, then meeting in the restaurant for breakfast. All day, being beside her, having this amazing secret between us. Our relationship had gone from a warm glow to a fiery explosion. In the weeks which followed, I swear I’d never been so alive, never experienced life so intensely.”

  “It’s fine—we’ll keep things under control,” Lily told Cassie on her return from Frankfurt. “The important thing is that we can still work together, that we like and respect each other.”

  “And what about his wife?” Cassie asked. “Is she going to be fine with it? What happens when she finds out—is he leaving her?”

  Lily shook her head vehemently. “No, things are never going to get that far. No one’s leaving anyone. I don’t want him to leave his wife, and there’s no need.”

  The Harry situation was worrying Lily more than she would admit to herself. What she had thought in winter might be a brief affair was still going strong in spring. She was more in love with Harry now than at the start. And yet she knew it was wrong, and she was trying to keep things under control. His wife wouldn’t find out. Everything was fine. Here she was, with Cassie and Olivia, getting ready for the wedding in her mother’s guest bedroom. Lily began to feel jittery and excited on her big sister’s behalf about the upcoming ceremony.

  An old school friend of Cassie’s had offered her professional hair and make-up services as a wedding present. Lily’s hair was blow-dried straight and glossy, with a tiny plait of pink roses around the crown, and Olivia’s hair was piled into an elegant up-do, with red roses scattered across the chignon. While Cassie’s hair was being done, Lily and Olivia walked up and down the hallway, practising the walk in their vertiginous shoes.

  When all three girls were ready, Celia had a quick go in the make-up chair. She’d already “put her face on,” she protested (they smiled at the 1960s terminology, and their mum’s unique ability to smudge her eyeliner), so the beautician tactfully tidied it up, added a dash of base colour, and neatened up her bohemian bird’s nest hairdo. Celia had never exactly been soignée, but her cheekbones and large hazel eyes made up for the haphazard hair and wonky lipstick.

  By this time, Clive the photographer had arrived. He appeared completely at ease in the bridal mayhem: a tangle of silk stockings and women’s underwear, discarded coffee cups and cosmetics. They were slightly self-conscious at first, but Clive was so laid-back that they soon forgot he was there; Cassie later found his series of getting ready photographs with her sisters and mother among the most natural and captivating of all the wedding day images.

  The taxi which was to take them to Covent Garden arrived at two thirty p.m. Their hair and make-up were done, their dresses and bouquets were in place. But where was their brother?

  When James appeared in the kitchen, they all fell silent. The transformation was remarkable. In between reading the newspaper, rolling cigarettes, and enjoying the sunshine in the garden, he’d taken it upon himself to shower, shave, and change out of his T-shirt and boxer shorts. He was wearing the morning suit Celia had hired for him: black cutaway jacket, pinstriped trousers, dove-grey waistcoat, black jacket, and white shirt. He looked older than twenty-three all of a sudden, and very handsome. He gave Cassie a quick hug, and they practised a stately march across the terrace.

  It wasn’t just Celia who thought about what James was doing that day, giving Cassie away in place of the man who should have been there. Even James, who’d never met his father, was thinking of him on Cassie’s
wedding day.

  * * *

  If he has nothing to hide, why would he lie? Does honesty even mean anything to him any more? I am so confused. I can’t work out what’s true and what’s not, why he never seems to want to be here, whether I’m being paranoid, suspicious, or a total fool. I’ve just opened a second bottle of red—Harry’s “working late” again—and I intend to drink every last drop.

  Remember that Frankfurt trip he went on back in the autumn? It’s their annual publishing get-together, he’s been going for years. Once I went with him, before Dan was born. Actually it was the most boring four days of my life and I flew home early.

  Anyway, I know the hotel he stays in, so I ended up ringing them to check up on him—not proud of this but there you go—I asked the receptionist how many rooms were booked for their firm, because of that Lily woman he works with and seems so close to . . . The hotel had one room booked in Harry’s name, one in her name, and for a couple of their sales people, so I assumed it was all kosher and there was nothing going on between them.

  Then today, I was leaving Waitrose and I bumped into Fiona Parr, literally haven’t seen her for years. She’s the sister of an old friend of Harry’s, a guy named Will who is a professor of botany or something in Frankfurt. Well, I thought he was, but it turns out he moved to Japan quite a while back.

  What the f??? I know it’s six months ago now—but I specifically remember speaking to Harry in Frankfurt and him telling me he was going out for dinner with Will. It was evening and I’d been trying to get hold of him all day, I wanted to discuss Dan’s winter rugby schedule. So there I am, this afternoon, telling Fiona that Harry and Will met up in Frankfurt last October, and Fiona gives me an odd look and says that he’s been in Japan for the past three years, that he hasn’t been back to Europe since his wife had twins last summer, but they’re hoping to see him soon. I actually felt sick when she said that—I garbled something about it being another friend called Will, but I could see she was curious.