A son? Of course she’s spoken for. Just because she doesn’t wear a bloody ring, Max, doesn’t mean that…
‘Though – the sandwich was a nice offer. Thank you.’
‘No problem. We’ll finish up here then.’
‘Right.’
‘Good. Excellent.’
* * *
That evening Max put in an extra run of three kilometres before supper. He pushed himself really hard, bending down for rather longer than usual to catch his breath before facing the steps up to his front door.
And then, as soon as he was inside, he couldn’t help himself – standing sweaty and still out of breath as he dialled.
‘Hi. It’s me.’
‘As in Max me?’
‘Yes. As in Max me. You OK?’
‘Yes. I’m fine. Just finishing a new watercolour for the gallery. I’ve been a bit lazy lately and they’ve been nagging. Anyway. It’s come out rather well so I’m rewarding myself with a second glass of extremely good Sancerre.’
Max glanced at the sofa, then down at his sweaty shorts and walked over to the window. The light was just fading and across the park he could see the first warm glimmers of a sunset over the grouping of three oaks. He suddenly felt very hot, wishing that he was back out there. In the breeze. Beneath the oaks.
‘The sky’s good here. How about you?’
‘Not so special. Cloud cover.’
‘Shame.’
‘So you were right about Greece. More trouble, I mean.’
‘Yes. Absolute shambles. But someone will blink soon.’
She paused for a time.
‘OK. So are you going to tell me what’s the matter, Max, or am I going to have to guess?’
‘I was thinking – wondering actually if I could come and see you tomorrow.’
‘Oh right. I see,’ there was a distinct change now in Sophie’s tone. In Max’s head one voice wanted to suck the words back in. Another wishing he had faced up to this long ago.
This was breaking the rules.
Max and Sophie saw each other on the first weekend of every month. Her suggestion. Her rules. They had dinner, they went to the theatre and sometimes to an art exhibition and afterwards they had extremely enjoyable sex. But they did not ring each other in between these encounters and Max no longer asked questions about the rhythm of the rest of her life.
Sophie was intelligent, beautiful and like no other woman he had ever met. She did not do commitment or conventional relationships, eschewing all the usual conventions over how liaisons might normally progress.
Max had broken off their ‘connection’ as she called it once before when he had experienced the disaster of dating Deborah at the university. Melissa had met Deborah. Quite liked her. But Max did not discuss Sophie with anyone…
‘Is this what I’m thinking, Max?’
‘I don’t know’
‘You don’t know?’
‘To be honest – I don’t know what I know any more. That’s why I need to see you.’
‘I thought we had talked this through, Max. The last time. I thought we were both OK?’
‘Yes, I know. And so did I. But I’m not sure if I really am OK.’
‘I see.’ There was a pause. ‘OK, Max. If talking is what you need to do then talking is what we will do. Tomorrow at 7 p.m.? I’ll cook us something nice.’
‘Oh don’t cook. Please don’t go to any trouble. I’ll book somewhere. Hartleys?’
‘And now I am really worried.’
‘I’ll text you. Pick you up around 7 p.m.’
Max put the phone down and stared at it.
He had no idea if he was doing the right thing but the truth was Sophie had become a paradox in his life, making him both very happy and terribly sad. The very reason he had not told Melissa about her.
They had met at the Tate of St Ives gallery in Cornwall – admiring an exhibition to champion local artists’ residencies. It was years after he lost Eleanor - in the phase when friends felt Max should be ‘moving on’. But he did not. Later that same day Max and Sophie bumped into each other again at the nearby Barbara Hepworth museum. They talked very easily and so walked on the beach and shared coffee which turned into lunch. It was not until they were parting reluctantly and several hours of excellent conversation later that Sophie shared that she was an artist herself.
A very good one as it turned out. Her paintings – mostly watercolours and charcoal sketches – sold well, especially, she confided, since she had hit upon a darker streak. Sophie began to weave shadows into the water and skies of otherwise bold and bright colour ways – an effect which always seemed, to Max at least, to be terribly sad and also rather brilliant.
For the most part, Sophie reflected the vibrant shades of her work – a torch beam in the room. The kind of person who always had some fascinating titbit from Radio Four and the Sunday papers, which she seemed to find the time to read from cover to cover every single week.
Max had for a short time imagined that this might be the relationship which could surprise him. But – no. It was not many weeks before he realised that the very thing that had drawn him to Sophie – her enigma – was the key. She had a switch. On. Off. And while she was very happy to ‘connect’ for their dinners and the occasional weekend, she did not want a conventional relationship.
Those dark shadows through her paintings.
Max had wondered if he might help her with this. If they might help each other? But Sophie did not see her situation as anything that needed solving. And so Max simply went along with her rules. They enjoyed each other’s company. They enjoyed each other in bed. She was kind and funny and made the best fish soup he had tasted outside of France. But – sorry; she did not ring and she did not need to talk in between their monthly dates and very soon Max realised it was precisely why he was both drawn to her and had stayed with her.
With Sophie he had found a place where he did not need to ‘move on’ from Eleanor.
Which was – yes; perfect and completely disastrous all at once.
12
MELISSA - 2011
Melissa woke with a start – at first disorientated and then, slowly registering the new anchors. The hum of the air conditioning. The shutters instead of curtains at the window. The large and ridiculous case casting a shadow in the corner of the apartment.
And then her mind was moving somewhere else – slipping back for just a second into the dream so that she had to close her eyes tight to it. Turn her head away towards the wall. She felt her right hand flinching. Imagined the wet sand between her toes. The sound of the ocean.
Melissa opened her eyes and sat up quickly to shake herself fully awake. To try to compute what was happening.
Jesus. She hadn’t had that dream in years. Relieved now, heart pounding, that she had moved during the night onto the sofa bed. Sam had felt guilty – tossing and turning and keeping them both awake.
I’ll go on the sofa bed, Mel.
No, Sam. We’ll both sleep better if you stay in the bedroom. You need the space for your leg. Just for a night.
Melissa kept very still and listened. No sound from the room next door. He must finally have dozed off.
Melissa picked up her phone from the floor alongside the sofa bed to check the time – three a.m. She tightened her lips at the message tag reminding her of two unanswered texts from her father – her eyes slowly adjusting to the half-light as she leant back now against the wall to slow her breathing. To wait for her heartbeat to settle.
She didn’t want to wake Sam but badly needed a drink and so, after a few minutes, swung her legs ever so carefully from the bed. She tiptoed then to the kitchen area and poured water from one of the large bottles on the surface. It was unpleasantly warm but she daren’t risk the fridge door – couldn’t remember how noisy it was.
Sam, if he woke, would want to sit with her. And talk. And because he knew her face better perhaps than anyone, he would very soon work out from that same face – her hands an
d her demeanour also – that it wasn’t just the accident that was disturbing her.
Melissa glanced over to her bag, zipped tight in the corner, now containing her mother’s book which she had retrieved from the wardrobe.
Just four days since she had first set eyes on it in James Halls’ office. How could it possibly be just four days?
She had so far read very little but now that Sam was safe, she couldn’t quite understand her reluctance to read on. Felt guilty about it.
Shouldn’t she want to devour it? Page after page? To finish the book.
How could it be normal that she didn’t want to do that? Read on. Somehow couldn’t.
Melissa closed her eyes again to the familiar prickle behind each one. She remembered how in school she would do arithmetic to control this.
Eight eights are sixty four. Nine nines are eighty one.
She had the dream a lot back then. Once she had asked a friend if she ever had the same dream over and over and her friend – Laura – had said – absolutely. She had this dream about sitting a test and not being able to do it because it was all in a foreign language. Seriously. Like Russian or something. Other friends much later at university said they had recurring dreams about being naked in public. Or having to re-sit their A levels without having done any revision.
Melissa never told anyone about hers. Most especially not the woman back in school with whom she met once a week and then once a month for ‘special chats’.
She wouldn’t understand. No one would understand. They would all think, you see, that it was quite a nice thing. Comforting. They wouldn’t understand the confusion. That Melissa did not actually want the dream. No.
For in this dream, Melissa was walking on the beach with her mother. She was holding her hand and Melissa knew for certain that it was her mother – not only because she could feel the wedding ring on her finger as she gripped her hand, but because she knew deep inside from how completely happy and how utterly loved and safe she felt.
They were at first walking along the beach and then running and laughing and Melissa could feel the wind in her hair and she could hear the roar of the waves and taste the salt on her lips.
She was so happy. And that was actually the problem that no one would understand. They would think it odd – that she was some kind of freak – that she did not want to feel that.
But here was the truth: Melissa did not want to remember just how good all that felt. And the more often she had that dream the harder she had to work not to look up into her mother’s face. Because Melissa knew that if she let herself do that in the night – to look up at her mother’s beautiful face, smiling right at her – she would not be able to cope with the next morning. Or the next day. Or the next week.
And so she ran along the beach in the dream over and over and over. Do not look into her face, Melissa. Look at the sand.
Eight eights are sixty four. Nine nines are eighty one….Eleven times twelve …
Melisa wiped her cheeks. She looked again at the bag containing the book.
How was it she could have something so very precious and be so terribly afraid to read it?
13
MAX – 2011
Max settled into the driver’s seat and reached into his jacket pocket for his glasses. He then completed the ritual of checking the car as thoroughly as possible for anything with wings.
The truth was there was very rarely anything to find – just occasionally in the summer when a tiny fly might need squatting against the inside of the windscreen – but Max was not for taking any chances. He sighed, remembering the time when it was just a joke. When it did not trigger this flicker of dread.
All their marriage Eleanor had ribbed him about it. ‘Oh for goodness’ sake, Max. It’s only a fly. It can’t hurt you.’ Melissa had learnt to join in too, laughing as Daddy once waved an ice cream so frantically at a fly while on holiday in Cornwall that the sphere of raisin and rum had plopped straight onto the floor. Before he had enjoyed even one lick.
And then came the day – eight weeks into the numbness of his new life post-Eleanor – and it was a fly which brought it all to a head. A single, sodding fly pointing up just how thinly the thread now stretched for Melissa.
It was June – loads of flies about – and he was fed up to the back teeth of them; waving them away from his food out of doors and from the surfaces in the kitchen. Max just couldn’t help himself, unable to relax and ignore them as other people, including his young daughter, seemed to do. He couldn’t bear the thought of them landing on his skin. His face. His arms. Anywhere.
It went back to childhood when Max had watched a programme examining whether it was true that flies puked and pooed on you when they landed. Turned out they did. Flies, Max learned, had no mechanism to chew solid food and so their strategy was to vomit enzymes onto anything they fancied to break down the solids before slurp, slurping it up. They also drank big time compared to other species which was why so much came out the other end.
Thus began Max’s hatred of flies and on that fateful morning, some two months after Eleanor’s funeral, he was in a rush – late for the university, having dropped Melissa at school en route. Max had arranged flexible working but was still struggling to adjust to his new circumstance. He needed to get in earlier than usual to sort a presentation for later in the day and was stressed. Not coping well enough. For his daughter and for his job.
The motorway was completely clear and so he had his foot down. First mistake. And he was going over the plans for the presentation in his head. Second mistake. And then suddenly there was this tiny fly flitting to and fro right by his face. Max couldn’t help it. He took his hands right off the steering wheel to bat it away and in that split second the car veered completely out of control. Unbelievable, when he looked back on it, that from cruising straight, albeit very fast, in the inside lane one second, he could be veering across towards the central barrier the next.
He very nearly clipped the barrier, swerving alarmingly as he struggled to regain control, still terrified of where the bloody fly was. By the time he had things back under control the car had swung through 360 degrees and he pulled up, horrified and disorientated to discover he was facing the wrong way.
Still – thank Christ – nothing coming.
Max, his heart pounding almost out of his chest, executed the fastest three-point turn of his life and pulled up into the hard shoulder. He had read somewhere that you shouldn’t get out of your car on the hard shoulder unless in an absolute emergency but Max had no choice. He got out, walking around the front of the car, stepped over the low barrier and sat on the grass on the other side. And then, to his horror, it came.
The one thing he tried so hard, for Melissa’s sake, not to do.
Max completely lost it.
He lost it for Eleanor’s last breath and his last words to her in the hospital. ‘Please don’t go… I’m not ready.’
He lost it for Melissa who now followed him around at home like a frightened puppy.
He lost it for the vanilla-scented soap he would not throw out at home because it was the last soap Eleanor had used.
He lost it for all the baking tins and recipe books that he had packed into a big box because he could not bear to bloody… look… at… them.
Roaring his fury. Kicking then at the bracken and the twigs and the metal barrier. Picking up rocks and a discarded Coke can to hurl them, still roaring, into the undergrowth.
All over a frigging fly. A stupid, puking, poxy insect which could have left his daughter to face all of this shit all alone.
And so – yes; Max now went over the top every single time he got in the car. He checked for flies and he would not pull away until he was absolutely sure there were no sodding, stinking distractions; at least none that were in his gift to control.
The journey to Sophie’s took just under an hour and a half. He had allowed 15 minutes for traffic and so was under no pressure.
Hartleys was her favourite r
estaurant – a tiny place with a huge fireplace and sloping floor of original flagstones. Just half a dozen small tables, which created exactly the relaxed and intimate environment they both so loved. Sophie was an excellent cook herself and hence quite a difficult customer to please, but Hartleys had never failed them and Max needed the meal, at least, tonight to be good.
They had not spoken since the phone call to arrange this and Max guessed exactly how this would go. They would both be sad. On edge. And he would add guilt and nerves into the mix, hoping that she would not try so hard this time to make him change his mind.
Max had broken things off with Sophie once before. Over Deborah. They had not seen each other for the eighteen months of that relationship, for Max, try as he might, could not be like Sophie.
When everything had imploded with Deborah – he winced at the thought, clutching the steering wheel very tightly – it had not occurred to him to get back in touch with Sophie again. What kind of person would that make him, for Christ’s sake?
No. It was Sophie who found out. Sophie who called. Sophie who soothed and supported and coaxed him back. And yes – it was weak of him to rewind. No strings. No stress. No future.
Tonight she looked wonderful – a turquoise Chinese-style dress, sporting deep blue dragon motifs with tiny pearl buttons down the front and a deep blue shawl. But she was unusually quiet as he drove them the twenty minutes from her place to the restaurant. And then as they sat at the table and he ordered only sparkling water for himself, she tilted her head. ‘So – you really aren’t staying tonight, Max? This is really it?’
He wanted to take her hand and was trying to remember the script he had rehearsed on the way but it was gone now.
‘You know your problem – Maximillian Dance?’
‘No.’
‘You are way too nice.’
‘Don’t, Sophie’
‘No. It’s true. Someone less nice would keep their options open.’
‘I hope that’s not how you think I see you. An option? I really never meant—’
Recipes for Melissa Page 7
