by Julie Cohen
EVENTUALLY, BACK AT Lauren’s, I go straight to bed, my limbs still tingling, and sleep until the intercom to the entrance door rings. Ewan, I think, and then I remember that Ewan doesn’t know where I’m staying. Quinn?
I pull on Lauren’s dressing gown and stumble to the door to pick up the phone. My head feels clearer for a bit of sleep, though I’m still tired. If it’s someone selling something, I’m going to be cross.
‘It’s Suz,’ she says over the phone. ‘I tried to ring, but no luck, so I thought I’d come by on the off-chance.’
I buzz her into the building and have a moment of panic whilst waiting for her to take the lift to this floor. Will she be able to tell what I’ve been doing all day? Who I’ve been with? I dash to the bathroom and splash water on my face, try to finger-comb my hair into something respectable. I’m scrubbing traces of mascara from underneath my eyes with the corner of a towel when she knocks on the door to the flat.
Suz looks good. Not having seen her in nearly three weeks, I can see her for what she is, rather than just another piece of the Wickham family: a tall, attractive, professional woman. She’s wearing smart, tight jeans, high-heeled sandals and a summery top. Her hair’s been blow-dried into a pretty, tousled style and she’s wearing a bit more make-up than she does around Tillingford. It emphasizes her grey eyes, which are the same shade as Quinn’s.
She kisses me in a businesslike fashion on the cheek. ‘It’s lovely and cool in here. Did I wake you?’
‘Just from a nap. Come through to the kitchen, I’ll make tea.’
‘Quinn said you’d had a late one last night.’ She follows me, looking appreciatively at the modern, airy flat. ‘Out with friends?’
‘Yes, old friends. This is a nice surprise. What brings you to London?’
‘Seeing a friend, too. I thought I’d pop in, see how you were getting on before I caught the train back.’
I fill the kettle, and then hesitate. ‘Would you prefer something cold?’
‘A glass of wine, if you’ve got it. I think the sun’s past the yardarm.’ Some loose papers are scattered on the table. She picks one of them up. ‘I see you’ve been able to get some work done. That’s great.’
‘Oh, that’s just … it’s only some sketches I’ve been doing. I don’t think they’ll go into the book.’ On the way to the fridge I see which sketch she’s picked up. It’s a robin, his head cocked with curiosity at the viewer.
‘I love it,’ she says. ‘That’s Quinn, isn’t it? Quinn as a robin.’
I pause, my hand reaching for the bottle of white wine that Lauren keeps in here. ‘How can you tell?’
‘That’s exactly the expression he gets when he’s interested in something. The eyes, the mouth – the beak, I mean. It’s marvellous. Do you have any more?’
I do. ‘Er … not really.’
‘Any of me? What about Mum? She’d be a magpie, don’t you think?’
‘Chattering.’
‘And collecting shiny objects.’ She sorts through the drawings, which are mostly half-finished, scrawls of lines, or studies of wings. ‘Is Igor supposed to be you, then?’
‘I don’t know. Not really. Maybe. I suppose I liked drawing him as part of a big owl family. Because I never had a big family. Not before marrying Quinn, I mean.’ I uncork the bottle and find two of Lauren’s roomy, elegant glasses. ‘And he’s an oddball, so he’s like me that way.’
‘You’re not that odd, Felicity. Oh, I love this sketch. What a handsome crow.’
The crow is Ewan. Swaggering, once glossy, now leggy and a bit rough around the edges. Because the drawing’s in pencil, you can’t tell that he has blue eyes.
‘Here you are,’ I say quickly, handing Suz her wine. ‘It’s probably nice. My friend Lauren’s got expensive tastes.’
‘Chin-chin.’ Suz chimes her glass with mine and raises her eyebrows when she takes a sip. ‘Very nice. How long do you think you’ll be staying here in Town, Felicity?’
Here we are: the point of her visit. Suz is a solicitor, after all. Like Quinn, she likes facts. I take a slightly longer sip of wine than I would usually do, trying to decide which tone to take.
‘I don’t know,’ I say finally. ‘As you can see, I haven’t really got much useful work done. It’s all in the sketch stage. I haven’t even really come up with a good book idea yet.’
‘Because you probably can’t tell it from his phone conversations, but Quinn is miserable.’
I put my wine down on the granite worktop. ‘I know he is.’
‘And unlike Mum, I’m not interested in interfering with your relationship. I don’t need to know the ins and outs. I just want to know, as Quinn’s sister, what we should be prepared for. If this is really a work retreat for you.’
She doesn’t look angry, or accusing. She looks concerned, and like the robin in my drawing, she looks curious. Not because she wants shiny gossip, but because she wants the truth.
Suz picks up the wine bottle from where I’ve put it beside the sink. She fills my glass, right up to the rim. Then she fills up her own. The glasses are so big that now the bottle is pretty much empty.
‘Get that down you,’ she says. ‘Then tell me.’
Because I trust Suz, I do what she says. I drink the wine straight down as if it were water. It probably has a wonderful bouquet and subtle hues of elderflower and lime, but I don’t taste them. Suz also drinks hers, but more slowly. She watches me with her calm, grey eyes.
I gasp when I’ve finished half the glass. I can already feel the alcohol seeping through my system, causing a weakness in my legs that isn’t unpleasant at all. It reminds me of how I felt this afternoon in the park with Ewan.
‘My friend Lauren who owns this apartment,’ I say. ‘Do you remember her? She was at our wedding.’
‘I remember her.’
‘She’s always had this theory that she could never go out with a man who wasn’t her equal. She wants someone equally career-focused, with more or less the same salary as her. Equally intelligent, equally attractive, equally sociable. She thinks that it’s the inequalities in a relationship that make it go sour. Fortunately it’s one of her talents to be able to estimate the probable wealth of a person just by looking at them. From then on she says it’s a simple process of discovery and elimination.’
‘You don’t feel that Quinn is your equal?’
‘No, no, I do – if anything, it’s that I’m not his equal.’ The wine is sort of helping. I take another sip to fortify myself. ‘In our case it’s emotional. He – I’m sure you know he fell in love with me right away when we met. He was the one who wanted to get married. He’s the one who wants to have a baby.’
‘I thought you were in love with him too.’ Suz is neutral, non-judgemental.
‘I am! But I never … I mean, I love him. There’s no way anyone could not love Quinn. He’s wonderful. And he loves me so much that it would be wrong if I didn’t return it. He deserves for me to love him back.’
‘But you don’t feel that you do. Not at the moment.’
‘When I met him, my mother had just died. I mean, she’d died a few months before that, but it felt as if it had just happened. And he … he made me laugh. He made me feel alive again. He helped me.’
‘That isn’t love?’
‘It’s … I don’t know.’ I sit in one of Lauren’s kitchen chairs, miserable. ‘I wish it were simple. I really, really do.’
‘I don’t think anything’s ever simple when it comes to love.’
Suz joins me at the table. She takes the last little bit of wine from the bottle and pours it into my glass and we sit there together, drinking, for a while.
I like my sister-in-law; I’ve liked her from the moment Quinn introduced us. She’s sensible, warm, reliable, good-humoured. She doesn’t waste words. There’s never been an inequality in our relationship that we had to hide. Even if I’d never met Quinn, I’d have liked to have Suz for a friend.
But if I lose Quinn, I’ll also los
e his sister.
I look at her hand on her glass. She’s got clear varnish on her nails, which is unusual. As is this level of make-up, and this pretty new blouse. I remember what she said when she came in, about being in London to see a friend.
‘If I were you, I’d meet up with my dates in London too,’ I say. ‘Tillingford’s too small by half to have any romantic relationship without everyone gossiping.’
‘And Mum’s one of the worst for gossip.’ There’s something about the way she glances at me sideways as she says it, that makes me sit up suddenly.
‘It’s not a man you’re seeing, is it? It’s a woman.’
Suz nods.
‘I just thought you weren’t keen on any of Molly’s blind dates,’ I say, but then I realize that’s not true. I’m not really surprised that Suz would date a woman. ‘Does Quinn know?’
‘I’ve always presumed he does.’
‘He’s never said anything.’
‘There are a lot of things that our family know, but don’t say.’ She drinks her wine, quite unruffled. ‘For example, I’ve known you weren’t certain about your life in Tillingford for a while. It’s only recently I’ve suspected it might be because you’re not certain about my brother.’
‘Are you – are you in love with your girlfriend?’
‘Time will tell. What are you going to do about Quinn?’
‘I don’t know.’ Suz’s quasi-revelation has distracted me from my misery for a few minutes, but now it’s back. ‘It’s a tangle.’
‘You can’t just stay here and hope that he forgets you. He’s not going to do that.’
For the first time, I detect an edge of anger in her voice. I’ve never seen Suz get angry. I have a feeling that it would be quite formidable.
‘I know he won’t forget me.’ Especially not while he’s living in that cottage, which we chose together, decorated together, full of the things we found together.
An emptiness sears through me. I miss our cottage. I miss living in it, sharing it, Quinn’s washed-up mug on the draining board, his notes left by the phone, the wild garden, the uneven floors, us cuddling together on the sofa, all the warmth and comfort that isn’t here in this flat.
‘Maybe I shouldn’t have married him,’ I say. ‘But I wanted to, Suz. I really wanted to.’
Suz gives me an odd look. Then she glances at her watch and stands. ‘I’m going to catch my train. For what it’s worth, I don’t want you to leave Quinn. I want him to be happy, and I think you could make him happy, if you tried. I think you could both be happy. If you decided to be.’
‘I have been trying. I did try. I don’t know if you can decide things like that.’
‘I suspect that it’s possible. I suspect that a lot of people do. But while you’re deciding, Felicity, please consider: if you’re going to hurt him more than you already have, it would be better to hurt him quickly.’
Ewan
EWAN HAD BEEN in love dozens of times, and never. From the age of thirteen, there had been a new girlfriend every few months. He was known for it at school: Romeo, they called him. And later, there was never any shortage of girls. Women liked men in bands, though he tried to steer clear of overt groupies. He had no desire to sleep with someone just because they were available. He liked the first meeting, the chase, the game of does-she/doesn’t-she. He liked talking with women. He liked the exchange of glances, the flare of attraction. He liked learning about them, getting to know how they ticked.
His mates had always taken the piss. They called him a charmer. They said he traded on his looks. ‘Oh, another notch on the bedpost.’ But it wasn’t like that. He didn’t keep score; when he thought of how many relationships he’d had, it was more depressing than boastful. He didn’t start a relationship with a woman, all the time having an end-by date in mind. He started a relationship because he had started to fall in love. Because he was enchanted with someone.
‘I’m a romantic, actually,’ he told his friends, and when they laughed, he would explain: ‘I love to fall in love. It’s the best feeling in the world. The problem is, it doesn’t last.’
Most of the time, it ended in an amicable way. But there were casualties, people he’d misjudged, angry break-ups, women whose feelings he had hurt. Because Ewan usually ended it himself. His job was quite convenient in that way. Other friends, the more perceptive ones, pointed out that Ewan never chose to fall in love with women who had children, or anyone who was in the music business. His romantic urges were purely directed at single, uncomplicated women from whom he could escape as soon as the tour started.
After years of travelling with one band or another, years of transient relationships, he had come to suspect, when he allowed himself to think about it, that falling in love so many times was very similar to never having your heart touched at all.
Or maybe it was the opposite, because every time, with every relationship, he started out so happy, so excited, so certain that this one was the one. And with every relationship he became disillusioned. It was heartbreak, of a sort.
Felicity Bloom was different, if only because she broke up with him before he was ready for it to be over. Even more, she broke up with him in order to send him back to another woman. He’d left her, angry and resentful and still in love with her, still touched by her inner happiness, the brush of her hand on the nape of his neck, the way she wrinkled her nose and how she whistled when she thought no one was listening. He’d gone back to Alana with Felicity still imprinted on his body and heart. It was no surprise that his marriage was doomed.
Maybe if it had run its full course with Felicity, he wouldn’t remember her so well now. He would have fallen out of love with her as naturally as he fell out of love with everyone else he had ever met: he would have noticed a previously unsuspected neediness, or an annoying habit of kicking at night, or abhorrent political opinions, or a tendency to nag or bully, or a complete ignorance of The Smiths. He would have started the slow or rapid process of disenchantment and disappointment.
Or maybe she would have been different. Maybe with Felicity, he would have stayed in love. Ewan wasn’t such a fool that he didn’t know that you had to work at love: you had to ignore the annoying habits, learn to shut your ears when it came to discussing politics. You had to descend from the rarefied heights of poetry and sex to deal with who was going to empty the bins and trying to remember to put the toilet seat down. He knew married couples who negotiated these hazards and still managed to love each other. Lee and Petra, for example.
Lee had never called Ewan a Romeo or talked about bedposts, though he was one of the people who pointed out Ewan’s almost uncanny ability to choose the correct women to fall in love with, ones who were strong enough not to require too much of him, who wouldn’t haunt him when he inevitably ended it. ‘Maybe it’s because you choose women who you know are smart enough to see through you eventually,’ Lee said. ‘So when you break up with them, it’s not really a surprise.’
‘And can’t Petra see through you?’ Ewan had asked.
‘She can see straight through and out the other side,’ Lee said. ‘Where I’m lucky is, she likes most of what she sees.’
Ewan had tried to make it work with Alana. He’d been in love with her once, after all, and she was carrying his baby. He did the right thing, the thing that he’d got so angry with Felicity for telling him to do. He went back to Alana and he married her in front of her parents and her friends. He got a job in a second-hand record shop and used every penny to pay the rent on the house they moved into together, a terrace with a second bedroom for the nursery. He emptied the bins and he tried to remember to put the toilet seat down. He played his guitar at night and on the weekends, in the pubs and clubs he used to play in before he’d left for London, and tried to channel his thoughts away from what Dougie and Gavin and Brian were doing, away from Felicity Bloom, and back to all the things he had once found to love in Alana.
Pregnancy made her softer, made her almost glow. It was easie
r to try to be in love with her when she was expecting his baby. And then afterwards, there was Rebecca to keep him there. Alana was, he had to admit, a good mother. She was practical and sensible, tender and solicitous. She was everything Ewan’s own mother had never had the time to be, working two jobs to keep them both housed and fed without a husband in the picture, and this should have made Ewan love Alana more. Except that from the moment Rebecca was born, Alana’s focus was purely on her. Mother and baby made an inviolable unit, whole and perfect in themselves. They sat on the sofa, Alana feeding their daughter with her body, the two of them gazing at each other with the purest love Ewan had ever seen. And he would watch them from the doorway.
They needed more money and Ewan’s mate Joel knew a band who were seeking a session guitarist at the last minute for a tour. The money was good. Rebecca was two months old, and Alana was so competent, so confident as a parent. There seemed little reason not to go.
And go again, when he was asked. And go on the next tour, too. He sent the money home and Alana saved for a deposit, applied for a mortgage and got him to sign the forms when he was between work. Every time he came back Rebecca was bigger, could do more things that he had missed her doing for the first time. Being absent was what his own mother had done, what she’d had to do, except that Rebecca was with her mother who loved her instead of with childminders as Ewan had been. What other choice did he have, but to keep taking work?
This was what love was, love in the real world: responsibility and obligation, the money sent home, phone calls when the time zones matched, milestones missed, and the real life lived out on the road.
When Rebecca was four he came home for her birthday. He brought a giant cuddly kangaroo he’d purchased for her in a toy shop in Sydney. It had been the biggest toy in the shop, designed to be bought by fathers who needed something impressive to make up for their inadequacy. The house was full of children he’d never met, running around and screaming in their party dresses. Alana had had her hair cut; for a moment, when she’d opened the door to him, he’d not recognized his wife. He could pick out Rebecca right away in the sea of children, by her mass of red curls, the way she skipped across the room. When he handed over the kangaroo, Rebecca gave him a swift hug and was gone before he had time to register the feeling of her little arms around him.
