I would like to have lunch with you, yes. I don’t know when you were thinking of but we don’t open the salon on Wednesdays, so that’s always a good day for me.
Anyway, I will wait to hear what you’ve got in mind. Happy New Year to you too,
Michelle
His hand was trembling. His heart was pounding. In a way his feelings were just as ambivalent as his feelings about the text from Letty, but they were far more powerful in both directions. There was dread in there, real dread, a sense that he’d blundered into something he should have left alone, but at the same time there was a dazed, childlike amazement that this woman who had been an idea in his mind for the last two months had suddenly, magically, become a real person again.
‘Enough dithering,’ he told himself. ‘Enough see-sawing. I need to see this through.’ And he replied at once, suggesting that he pick her up from her house at eleven thirty on Wednesday, in three days’ time, and take her to a pub he knew of in the village of Breckham St Mary. He’d once eaten there with some friends from Cambridge after a walk in the nearby forest.
Her reply came back almost at once. A strange feeling, to know that right at this moment she too was focused on this same conversation so that, although she was ninety miles away on the map, in another less literal kind of space she was right there with him.
That sounds lovely, Harry. See you then.
And then, once more, she was simply ninety miles away, invisible to him and moving on to something else.
He sat for a while, trying to make sense of what was happening inside him. Then he sent an awkward email to Letty explaining that, lovely as it had been to see her again, he was ‘in a funny confused place at the moment and I think perhaps we’d better not go ahead with another get-together. I’m so sorry for being in a muddle about this.’
TWENTY
I’ve heard rumours of an insurrection in Greenland: some of the Inuit people there are said to have risen up against the settlers who outnumber them these days ten or even twenty to one. I’ve seen grainy pictures, taken from planes or satellites, of streets in tropical cities strewn with skeletons, killed not by war or famine or disease but by pulses of heat so intense that the human body can’t endure it for more than an hour or two. I’ve heard that the fine grey dust that falls on London from time to time comes from vast forest fires in the tropical zone. Large areas of the Earth these days are barely habitable, and very little news comes out of them. There are whole nations that are completely silent. But then again, news is carefully filtered for us by the Guiding Body in the interests of social cohesion and psychological health, so we can never be sure that we have the whole picture. This may very well be wise. It reduces the risk of widespread panic. But it also means that the present time is rather a mystery. One of the attractions of the past is that it’s easier to see. Cally wanted to know why we should care about the lives of people two and a half centuries ago, and I think that’s one of the reasons. And its remoteness makes it comforting.
*
Harry arrived back in Breckham, that nondescript little town with its Victorian clock tower, its war memorial, its slightly shabby old-fashioned hotel. An app in his phone directed him. ‘At the roundabout, take the third exit onto Thetford Road.’ ‘In one hundred yards, turn left on to Forest Drive.’ He entered the former council estate where Michelle lived.
The drive from North London had taken him about two hours, back up the M11 and then on to the A11 and the A14, switching back and forth between the parallel streams of metal and plastic and rubber. It wasn’t very far at all back in those days, but it struck him that Breckham was more remote from the world he knew than cities on other continents like New York or Sydney or Toronto.
‘Turn right on to Woodland Road . . . You have reached your destination.’
He parked his car and climbed out. He remembered standing here in almost this same spot, before he’d even met Michelle, and for a few seconds he stood there again, under a flat grey sky. He was wearing that smart blue jacket of his, and, after much deliberation, a white and blue striped shirt without a tie. His feelings were extraordinarily intense, but so confused that he couldn’t name them, or even tell whether they were positive or negative overall.
He pressed the bell. A few seconds passed and then there was movement behind the frosted glass. The door opened and there she was.
Just for a moment she was simply a human being standing there, a human being like any other, no more and no less, so that it seemed strange that he had expended so very much time and emotion on thinking about her. But in the space of about a second, all the connotations that she’d acquired in his mind came flooding back, wrapping themselves around her again, clothing her in meaning, turning her into a kind of miracle in human form, an idea that had become flesh.
‘Michelle!’ he croaked, wondering what kind of hug or kiss was appropriate when you greeted someone you’d only met once but had slept with. She solved the problem for him by kissing him lightly on the lips.
‘Hello, Harry. Nice to see you. I’ll just go upstairs and get my bag.’ She was wearing a brown leather skirt and matching boots, and a cream polo-neck top. ‘Come inside for a minute.’
He hadn’t expected it but there was someone else already there in the living room. ‘This is Cheryl, Harry. My best friend. You remember I told you about her?’
Cheryl stood up from the sofa. She was a tall black woman with light brown skin and curly fairish wavy hair that was very meticulously layered and highlighted. She wore a good deal of make-up and bright red lipstick. She had sharp, green, interrogative eyes.
She let him shake her hand, but did not grasp his as he did so. Michelle left the room.
‘It’s good to meet you, Cheryl. Michelle talked about you when I came here before. You’re her business partner, right?’
‘That’s it. We run the salon between us. You’re an architect in London, apparently?’
He wondered whether Michelle had asked her friend to be here to give her a second opinion, or whether Cheryl herself had taken the initiative.
‘I am,’ he told her. ‘I’m afraid it’s not quite as glamorous a job as it sounds. It’s mainly a matter of—’
‘Michelle’s been through a lot of shit, you know. She’s a lovely person. I couldn’t wish for a better friend. But she’s had a tough life. She doesn’t need anyone else to mess her around.’
‘I know she’s been through a lot. She’s lost a child. I don’t know if she told you, but that happened to me as well, so I do know what it does to you.’
Most people received the news of his loss of Danny with at least a nominal expression of sympathy, but Cheryl ignored it completely. ‘I won’t lie to you, Harry, I don’t have a good feeling about this. If you haven’t got anything real to offer her, please, please for her sake, let her be.’
‘I appreciate your concern for your friend, Cheryl, but I can assure you—’
But then Michelle came back in. She’d put on a short white coat and was holding a small cream-coloured bag with a gold chain. All three left the house together, Cheryl to climb into her own immaculate white car, Michelle and Harry to get into his battered red one. As he drove off, he glanced round at the woman beside him. He couldn’t quite believe she was really present.
‘Did Cheryl come over just to check me out?’ he asked, when they were on the road through the forestry plantation that led to Breckham St Mary.
Michelle laughed. ‘Well, we do normally meet up on a Wednesday so we can catch up on paperwork. But yeah, she definitely wanted to have a look at you. She thinks I’m too trusting.’
He glanced across at her again. Those grey, naked eyes. Then she laughed. ‘Hey! Look at the fucking road, Harry!’
‘Sorry. Truth is I can’t quite get my head round the fact that you’re actually here.’
‘Well, I am here and I don’t want to end up wrapped round a tree!’
‘Cheryl seemed very worried that I might let you down in some way, or b
etray your trust.’
‘She’s very protective of me. She knows I’ve made some bad choices before.’
‘I’m not sure what to say. We don’t know each other very well. We can’t know in advance what will happen, can we, or how well we’ll get on? So neither of us can guarantee anything. But I do want to be absolutely straight with you.’
She laughed again, a little uncomfortably. He realized he’d come over as intense. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I believe you.’
‘Cheryl’s your closest friend, yes?’
‘Yeah, we’ve been friends since we were kids. We both started school in Breckham when we were fifteen, so we were like the two outsiders that none of the other girls wanted to be with because we weren’t from round here.’
Harry laughed. ‘No! Really? But you came from Romford. It’s not exactly the other side of the world!’
‘Well, it might not seem far away to you, but believe me that’s a long way in Breckham. Cheryl got teased for coming from Brandon, and that’s only ten miles away.’
‘You’re joking?’
‘I’m not. They gave her just as hard a time as me.’
‘Because she came from Brandon? Not because she’s black?’
‘Well, that too, I suppose, but there were a few coloured kids in our school. We’ve got these big American bases round here, and women get together with black Air Force guys. It was more that no one wanted to hang out with people they hadn’t grown up with. And believe me, it wasn’t just the kids who were like that. It was the grown-ups too.’
‘But you’re not like that. How can you bear to be in a town where people are so – I don’t know – intolerant?’
‘What? You’re saying it’s not like that in London?’
His first impulse was to say that it wasn’t like that at all. Cosmopolitan, dynamic, Remain-voting London was one of the heroes of the story his friends were telling, along with wonderful progressive, Remain-voting Scotland. But he made himself reflect on what London was actually like, and not on the projections that were currently being laid over it. ‘I suppose it’s more like that than we Londoners like to think. We stick with our own kind and keep our distance from the rest. You can get apps these days that tell you what kinds of newspapers people buy in the street you’re thinking of moving to, so Guardian-readers can avoid finding themselves among readers of the Mail or the Telegraph or the Sun. But we don’t really need the apps, if I’m honest. We can tell at a glance whether it’s our kind of street, our kind of people, and if it’s not we avoid it. I guess it’s the same everywhere, one way or another. People feel threatened by folk who are different.’
‘I reckon. So yeah, anyway, me and Cheryl became best friends. We’re good for each other. She’s a bit harder than me. More of a fighter. So she stands up for me sometimes, or helps me stand up for myself.’
‘And what do you do for her?’
‘Hmmm. Good question. I suppose I help her take her armour off a bit, if you know what I mean. Or I like to think so, anyway. We’ve had a few rough patches. It was difficult between us after I lost Caitlin. Lots of the other mums didn’t want to be around me at all, and she found it very hard. But we seem to have got through it.’
‘It was like that with us, too. Our friends didn’t feel comfortable around us. But listen, Michelle. We have that loss in common, and that feels special, but if there was an app that worked on people instead of streets, it would tell us that we weren’t the same kind of people at all, wouldn’t it? We probably don’t read the same papers. We probably don’t have the same ideas.’
‘I’ve never met an architect before, that’s for sure.’
‘I’ve never met a hairdresser. Except when they cut my hair, obviously. I won’t lie, I worry about that difference between us, but at the same time it’s one of the things that fascinate me about you. I don’t know why, but it does. It’s as if I’ve grown bored of my own kind.’
Michelle didn’t answer at first. Harry’s exhaust pipe spewed sulphur dioxide into the wintry forest. ‘I don’t know what you want me to say,’ she finally said. ‘I’m just . . . me, you know?’
He realized he’d said a stupid thing. It was as if he’d told a black woman, ‘You fascinate me because you’re black.’ Who wanted to be an object of fascination because of their demographic category?
‘I put that badly. I’m sorry. You fascinate me full stop, Michelle. I’ve only spent one evening with you, after all, but I couldn’t put it out of my mind. And I don’t want to lie to you or tell you sweet nothings, or . . . ’ He tailed off. ‘I’m sorry. This is what comes of thinking about you for two months without getting in touch. I’ve had so many conversations with you in my mind. So many. I forget that you couldn’t really hear any of them.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said.
They reached the pub. It was called the White Horse and had a thatched roof.
‘Did you really think about me a lot?’ she asked, as they climbed out of the car.
‘Yes. A lot. You could ask my sister. She’d tell you what a state I got myself into.’
‘I thought about you, too. Actually, I know what you mean about being different. I liked it that we were different but we seemed to get along anyway. It was . . . well, okay, I’ll use your word . . . ’ She put on a ridiculous, ultra-posh voice like the Queen’s, ‘It was absolutely fascinating.’
‘Oi!’ Harry exclaimed in mock protest, and then he attempted an imitation of her Essex speech, smudging the Ls in her name into a kind of W: ‘You taking the piss, Michelle?’
‘And that’s supposed to sound like me, is it? Jesus! I’d stick to drawing houses if I were you.’
She took his arm as they entered the pub. A waiter took them to the table that Harry had booked, and helped Michelle out of her coat. The place was panelled in wood, and instead of the ‘edgy’ industrial chic beloved of liberal middle-class Londoners, it evoked, as Harry puts it, ‘the more traditional fantasy, beloved of another section of the English middle class, of a mythical Merrie England of roaring fires, silver tankards and rosy-cheeked landlords’.
‘This is a nice place,’ she said. How precious she seemed to him, sitting just across from him in her silver teardrop earrings. She had a completely different way of being a woman from Letty, or Ellie, or Karina, or almost any woman he could think of, animated by a different kind of spark, and he was terribly drawn to it.
‘Now this was my idea,’ said Harry, ‘so it’s my treat.’
She looked momentarily puzzled – she’d obviously made that assumption already – then smiled, said thank you, and turned to the menu.
‘I was really surprised to get your email,’ she said.
‘You mean after leaving it so long?’
‘I was surprised you got back in touch at all, to be honest. You seemed keen to get away as quickly as possible that morning. I thought we were getting on all right and then suddenly you were desperate to be off. I talked about it with Cheryl and she said she knew exactly what had happened. She said it was the moment you remembered you had a wife.’
‘I do have a wife, Michelle. I told you that when we met before, didn’t I? But we’ve not been together for over a year now and we’re in the process of getting a divorce. She left me, actually. I’m sure she’d feel a bit weird about it if she knew I was here with you, but she wouldn’t see it as something I wasn’t entitled to do.’
She examined his face, those raw grey eyes slightly narrowed. ‘I believe you, Harry. And, for what it’s worth, I told Cheryl I believed you.’
‘I’ve got a lot of faults, Michelle, as I’m afraid you’ll find out. I’m a bit lazy. I’m prone to let other people sort things out for me. I’m a wimp when it comes to arguments. But one thing I don’t do is lie to people. Not on purpose, anyway.’
‘Not on purpose? Can people lie by mistake?’
‘I have to watch out that I don’t get carried away by my own enthusiasm.’
She was still watching his face inte
ntly, her small narrow fingers, with their glossy cream-coloured nails, absently twiddling her glass. ‘So I imagined that, did I?’ she said. ‘That moment when all your warmth turned off like someone had flipped a switch.’
He took a breath. There was no point in any of this unless he was truthful, but he hadn’t anticipated the sharpness of her interrogation. ‘No, you didn’t imagine it. You said something I didn’t like that morning, and it made me feel that you and I were much further apart that I’d thought. And just in that moment the whole thing seemed like a bad mistake. I don’t know if you remember, but some Polish builders drew up outside and you—’
‘And I said I’d be glad when they went back home because they’re taking work from my brother Trevor.’
‘That’s right. And I won’t lie – I didn’t like that at all.’
A stony hardness came into her eyes that he hadn’t seen before. (But of course this was only one of the Michelles he hadn’t seen. There must be so many of them.)
‘Well, it’s true,’ she said with a shrug. ‘It’s just a fact. Trevor’s boss isn’t much of a businessman, but they were doing all right until that lot set up in Breckham and it’s much harder for them now. I don’t see why I should be pleased about that. It’d be the same if someone came in and set up another salon next to Cheryl’s and mine and charged half of what we do.’
‘But those Polish builders are just trying to make their way, the same as your brother, same as anyone. I don’t suppose they’d have come all this way at all if it wasn’t difficult to make a decent living back home.’
‘I’ve no idea what it’s like in Poland, but yeah, maybe if I lived there, I might do the same as them. But . . . ’
‘But that doesn’t mean you have to be glad about them being here?’
‘No. Exactly.’ She frowned. ‘What did you think, Harry? Did you think I was being racist or something? My best friend’s a black woman, as you noticed. My own mum’s half-Italian.’
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