‘Paul has the pub and the house. You know how his life works. Adam’s this freelancer with no secure income, and an ability to piss people off.’
‘Oh, he’s completely set financially,’ Delia said, biting her lip, ‘He has savings.’
It meant an awful lot to keep Adam’s secret, so she said no more. Delia now knew for sure it had been a major thing to tell her. It gave her another hard pang. That whole conversation had been a way of hinting to her that she was important to him in a way no one else had been. He’d nearly said so in so many words, and she’d blithely missed the significance.
‘Falling in love is one thing. Staying together is arguing over whose turn it was to get dishwasher tablets. Ask yourself if you want the upheaval of having those arguments with a different man.’
Emma had a lot of right on her side. Emma was judging the situation without heart, head and loins consumed with adolescent-level Adam longing. Delia was old enough to know tempestuous infatuation was a drug that wore off, and it was what was left when it cleared that counted.
‘Also, I want to be your bridesmaid. Don’t steal it away from me a second time.’
Delia smiled: ‘I promise you, you’ll always be my bridesmaid.’
After she rung off, Delia noticed Emma hadn’t asked the key question.
Maybe because she knew the answer. Maybe because – and Delia thought this was more likely – she’d say the answer wasn’t helpful in making a wise decision anyway.
The thing was, right now, working out the answer to that question felt like the only thing that mattered.
Delia couldn’t respond to Adam. She didn’t know what she’d say. She picked up her pencil again.
Life moved on and there was going to be new life in their Newcastle circle. Delia had been nervous about meeting Aled and Gina for the first time since her and Paul’s break, and she guessed they’d feel apprehensive too.
As it turned out, Paul and Delia’s reunion wasn’t the top item of news. They would be bringing an extra mystery guest.
It meant their usual boozy, rowdy dinner was moved to a lunch, making it easier on a morning-sick Gina. Delia went through the pre-Aled-and-Gina-visit rituals: putting flowers in tank vases, getting the better glasses out, refilling the candle holders. Cleaning up covert Parsnip pee was no longer on the agenda, and Delia felt a little bereft there were no puddles of urine hidden in corners of their house. The things you missed.
Delia was trying a Turkish recipe with a spicy tomato sauce and baked eggs, putting a heavy skillet under the grill until it bubbled.
As she stared out of the window, she thought about the things she’d never cook for Adam. There was an untrodden path back in London, one she’d started down and abandoned.
Lost experiences and unknown things that had previously merited pained curiosity had, since his card, flared into outright yearning.
There was a date they never went on, to Clos Maggiore in Covent Garden. She’d looked it up. The dining room had an open fire and a roof made from white blossom, exactly Delia’s type of kitsch. She stared at the round tables with the linen cloths and imagined the evening that had never happened, the conversation they never had. Their not being able to stop thinking about how they were going home together and seeing that thought in each other’s eyes all evening. The walk home through the streets holding hands, testing how it felt to belong to each other for the first time.
‘Weird not having Snippy the Piss Kangaroo here, isn’t it,’ Paul walked in behind her. ‘Aled always used to bring him those buttons.’
‘You alright?’ he said, seeing Delia’s face as she turned, pausing.
‘Yes, why?’
‘You look a million miles away.’
No, only about three hundred.
‘Oh. It’s … Aled and Gina. They were a bit crap to me when it all happened. Aled called me and wound me up about Paris, and Gina only bothered with a text.’
Paul looked uncomfortable.
‘They would’ve been trying to be considerate, Dee, it was awkward. It was my fault. Really. Don’t think the worse of them.’
He squeezed her shoulder and Delia feigned a smile.
‘Five minutes inside the door, and you’ll forget all about it and so will they.’
As it turned out, Delia hadn’t forgotten it after five minutes, or fifteen, or fifty.
They looked like the same Aled and Gina – exact physical opposites with his black hair and heft, her wiry frame and peroxide pixie cut – but everything else was different.
They avoided her eyes and asked nothing about her London sojourn, keeping up a constant burble of shop talk with Paul.
Delia had been a welcome addition to the gang as Paul’s fun, easygoing girlfriend who made the great food. As a person in her own right, someone who they were unsure around after her mistreatment, who made them feel guilty: that Delia had to be subtly ignored until normal service was restored. Delia had discovered that some friendships got longer without getting deeper.
She retreated into her own thoughts, filling glasses and offering plates round to give the illusion of participation.
Gina showed them the sonogram picture and Delia thought about how Adam had said he wanted kids with her. Ikea arguments. Christmas lunch in paper hats. To get to know Ralph. To be a couple. The idea gave her shivers, the nice sort.
Aled joked about how many times they’d had to do it in a month to conceive. Delia thought about how it felt to do it that many times with Adam in a night, bodies entwined and him whispering heated things in her ear. She thought those things he said on the night about what she did for him might be part of his standard patter, but he must’ve truly meant them …
‘What the fuck is a budget babymoon?’ Paul was saying. ‘We’ve got a honeymoon to afford, don’t tell me there’s more expense round the corner.’
He looked to Delia for her smile at the reference to family plans.
Delia’s imagination went to Paris; a trip on the Eurostar, a walk along the Seine at night, red wine at a café with those wicker chairs …
‘Delia? Delia?’ Paul’s voice cut through. ‘Earth to Delia?’
‘Yes?’
‘I was saying, that place we went in Yorkshire that time. Where was it?’
‘Oh! Swaledale?’
‘Swaledale, that’s it. Beautiful. Al was saying they’re going Ponce Camping.’
‘Glamping,’ Gina corrected him.
‘If you don’t suffer, it isn’t camping,’ Paul said. ‘Dee doesn’t camp. She’s a home comforts girl. Don’t get me started on the time she tried to pack a hairdryer for Glastonbury.’
He nudged her and she smiled obligingly. Aled and Gina pretended to smile the way they would’ve once smiled. Delia thought how the old double act with Paul as the irreverent-yet-devoted antagonist to her sweet long-suffering stoic didn’t work any more. She’d wanted to believe it had been here to return to, like walking back into a room full of your possessions, left untouched.
Aled and Gina left in a shower of positive sentiments and promises to have Paul and Delia round and Delia knew they were dying to get to the car and dissect whether she’d seemed herself, if it was doomed, whether either of them had put a foot in it and mentioned France or infidelity or Celine Dion. Then they’d sigh and say magnanimously Oh well, hope it works out for them and feel glad it wasn’t them.
Delia busied herself with the washing up. She’d noticed when she did housework, the activity made the sensations inside ease. It was as if she had a bag of knives inside, and sometimes their sharpness poked her.
‘Great to see them, wasn’t it? Like old times,’ Paul said, saying exactly what she wasn’t thinking. He slid his arms around her, from behind.
‘Kind of makes you envious, the baby fever. They’re going to have a six-month-old at our wedding,’ he continued. They’d set a date, though they’d yet to decide on a venue.
‘Oh yeah. Hadn’t worked it out.’
‘Unless you want a no-b
abies rule? We always said we’d do it proper old-school relaxed, a total free for all. Kids racing round with cake all over their face.’
‘Definitely. I mean, if they scream the place down during the ceremony, that’s not ideal,’ Delia said, absently.
‘We need a registrar with a voice like Brian Blessed, who can start competing with them.’
Delia concentrated on a tough spot on the pan, then put the wire wool pad down and turned to him.
‘Paul,’ she said, peeling the pink Marigolds off. ‘You know when you came to see me at Emma’s? You asked if I wanted to stay in London? What would you have done if I’d said yes?’
‘Uh.’ Paul stroked his upper lip as if smoothing a moustache. ‘Try to persuade you out of it, I guess. Do you know how much it costs to live there? You need to be an oligarch to have a garden.’
‘But what if I’d said I was staying?’ Delia persisted.
‘I don’t know. I can’t dig the pub up and take it, can I?’
Delia noticed the order of priority, her wishes versus the pub’s needs. Paul possibly regretted what he’d said.
‘We’d have worked something out. If that had been your heart’s desire,’ he said, not completely convincing.
‘Mmm.’
‘Why, do you want to be in London?’ Paul said, again reviewing the meaning of what they were saying, at a slight delay.
‘No,’ Delia said, honestly. ‘But I need to talk to you.’
It was Delia’s turn to answer an avalanche of questions, and accept the hurt her answers would cause. It wasn’t that she didn’t love him. It wasn’t that she’d got cold feet about a wedding. It wasn’t, in the end, because he’d slept with another woman. It was because she’d changed, in the time they were apart, and she’d discovered it was irrevocable.
She was no longer that person on the bridge who proposed to Paul, who’d have done anything to make their life together work, even when she’d sensed him drifting away. Feeling the way you were supposed to couldn’t be accomplished through sheer force of will, Delia knew that now. She wanted love which was mutual, and equal. Even if Paul could finally give that to her, she discovered, she could no longer reciprocate.
Did she have that, with this Adam?
Delia replied truthfully: she hoped so. But while Adam had helped her to wake up to her reality, he didn’t create it. What she and Paul had was past, whether she and Adam worked or not.
She held Paul while he cried and let him say it wasn’t over, he wasn’t giving up. Above all, even more than his sadness, she could tell Paul was astonished. He found it hard to accept the powerlessness of the situation. There was nothing he could offer, nothing he could say or do. He couldn’t be impotent – it didn’t work this way. In his worldview, he would always be leading man and she was his love interest.
What happens next? She could provide the answer.
Now, at last, Delia thought of herself as the hero of her own life. A hero on the train from Newcastle to King’s Cross, armed with the knowledge that risk, when it meant fear, wasn’t a reason for not doing something. She hadn’t followed her artistic dreams because of risk of failure, when the consequences of not trying were far worse than any rejection.
The question of whether Paul would hurt her by cheating again was the wrong question, as was whether Adam was too great a gamble. Nothing worthwhile was without risk. You had to decide whether your feelings were strong enough to make it a risk worth taking.
Delia got to the house in Clapham late. It was a balmy night, and she felt a contained hysteria surge inside her as she knocked the door.
How did you say to someone, as greeting: I’ve pushed all the chips on red. Here I am, I am yours, I hope you meant it. I hope you didn’t write to me in a fit of alcohol-soaked emotion and then wake up in the morning and think: thank goodness I won’t be running into her on the Piccadilly Line.
Dougie answered, understandably looking taken aback.
‘Is Adam in?’ Delia said, sweetly, as if it was normal to be standing on someone’s doorstep at nearly ten at night with a trolley case and no appointment.
‘He’s out,’ Dougie said.
‘Can I wait for him?’
‘Sure,’ Dougie said, shuffling aside to let her in. ‘He’ll be on his mobile, too?’
It was hardly a conversation for the phone.
‘I want to surprise him.’
They sat and had a beer together on the saggy sofas and chatted, Delia feeling guilty that pleasant, earnest Dougie had to make conversation with this twitchy woman, her eyes constantly darting to the clock on the wall.
As the minutes ticked into an hour, Delia couldn’t fail to notice neither of them were mentioning where Adam might be, at nearing midnight on a Saturday.
‘I’ll let you turn in,’ Delia said, after Dougie’s second stifled yawn. ‘I’ll wait in Adam’s room, if that’s alright?’
Dougie made politely neutral noises and she didn’t blame him for being thoroughly clueless by now about what Delia’s trespassing rights were.
It felt oddly intrusive to be in Adam’s bedroom without an invitation. She tried not to touch anything or do anything that could be remotely construed as prying. She rolled her trolley case out of sight of the door, thinking it could look presumptuous.
More oppressive, now she was alone, was the thought circling round her head that got louder and louder: where is he? Where is he? Delia was getting images in her head she didn’t want there. Even worse, her imagination kept defaulting to Freya.
She laid down on the bed and closed her eyes. It made her brain’s sex tape of Adam and Freya having hair-tossing, back-clawing softcore intercourse even clearer, so she opened them again. What if he was doing that? If he’d reverted back to type? They weren’t together, she had no claim over him that made it unfaithful. If he was mowing through women like a tractor to endure heartbreak, however, it wasn’t a great indicator of how he’d deal with any relationship problems.
Also, there was nothing in that card to her to say she was welcome back into his life. It had very much spoken of what could be, which was inevitable when she’d announced her intention of marriage and moved hundreds of miles away.
A few short hours ago she’d have said that that card didn’t strike a single false note. In the solitude of a deserted bedroom that Adam apparently had no need of tonight, she fretted that Emma had read between the lines much more efficiently, unlike a dumbfounded Delia. Perhaps it was full of lavish things you could declare to someone you were confident you’d never see again. A cheque you’d never have to cash.
There was no guarantee he’d come back this weekend. Maybe he’d gone away! His dad in France? No. Dougie would know if he had.
Delia wasn’t going to fall asleep. She’d just put her legs on the bed and her head on a pillow that smelled faintly yet wonderfully of Adam aftershave and … oh. Fall asleep.
Delia woke with a start to the sound of the front door slamming and thought fffffuuuccccck. She scrabbled out of the bed. The LED display on the alarm clock said 7.41 a.m. Adam had stayed over somewhere. The thought hurt like hell.
Oh no. What if he was with the woman, what if he’d brought her back? She hadn’t considered that grotesque possibility. She couldn’t hear any voices though. Her pounding heart slowed slightly.
Mercifully, Adam must have been checking his mail or putting the kettle on or something because Delia had a few minutes’ grace to brush her teeth and get her hair more in order. She looked warily at her tired reflection and heard him bounding up the stairs, two at a time, then he barged into the room.
He made a stifled yelp of surprise at the sight of Delia and stepped back.
‘Hello,’ Delia said, doing a quick raise of one palm.
Adam stood motionless, still staring.
‘Dougie let me in, last night,’ she went on. ‘I ended up sleeping here while I was waiting. I hope that’s alright.’
Adam still said nothing. He was wearing a black coat she�
��d not seen before. His life moving on, even in as much as selecting new outerwear, jolted her. He’d lost weight, which did even greater things for his cheekbones and made his eyes tired.
Adam didn’t look the way he had in her head. What else might be different?
Why wasn’t he saying anything? Where had he been?
Delia had a demented moment of irrational fear that the card to her had been an elegant forgery.
‘Why are you here?’ Adam said. He didn’t sound welcoming. He’d definitely been with another woman.
‘I wanted to talk to you.’
‘Delia,’ Adam said, and he rubbed his hair, his lovely dirty-blond hair. ‘That’s nice, but. If you’re here to check I’m OK, I’m not that OK. Not to sound like a bitter bastard: you can’t help me with this, at all. Please don’t twist the knife by checking in on me as a friend, and then leaving again. You leaving is something I only want to experience once.’
‘Does spending nights out at other people’s places help?’ Delia said, carefully.
Adam frowned. ‘What?’
‘I’m thinking … given the hour …?’ There was a loaded pause.
Adam said: ‘Hang on. You move to the other end of the country to marry someone and I’m not allowed to spend a night out?’
‘You are allowed,’ Delia said, voice thick, eyes glassy. ‘Also, I’ve left Paul.’
Adam stared at her, taking this in.
‘Well, allowed or not, I can’t think of anything I’d less like to do than sleep with someone who isn’t you. I’ve been at my sister’s in Leytonstone. Drinking red wine until a stupid hour, being maudlin and self-pitying.’
‘Really?’ Delia said. She felt a hot tear of exultant relief slide down her face, which wasn’t the way she’d planned on doing this.
It's Not Me, It's You Page 36
