by Carol Mason
He smiles. But I recognise the slightly vacuous expression of the daunted. He makes no more notes. The interview comes to a close bang on the thirty minutes I had allotted for it.
The second he’s out of the door, I lunge at my phone.
But it’s only my service provider sending me my bill, and telling me I’ve earned one hundred more free texts next month.
Rain lashes the window of Leonardo’s Trattoria. I sit opposite my friend Sally at a small table that overlooks the Theatre Royal. Three or four white-haired Italian waiters efficiently work the room, slapping down giant pizzas or bowls of pasta and full glasses of house wine – the popular lunchtime special. I’ve always wondered why the Italians choose Newcastle to open their restaurants. Surely there are warmer parts of England that might remind them more of home? A young and voluptuous Newcastle girl is waiting on our table, looking frenzied.
Despite being determined to not utter a word of any of this, the minute I see my friend’s face, it is impossible.
I don’t think Sally moves, or breathes, even. Then her lips part. I am aware of astonished green eyes staring back at me among a mass of freckles, and of myself being oddly fascinated by her reaction.
‘You are not being serious,’ she says, when she can speak. ‘My God! The bastard! Alice!’ She covers her nose and mouth with her hands and gasps into them.
I catch the slight tremor of my head, and realise my hand is tightly gripping the end of the flimsy cotton tablecloth by my leg.
Bastard. It’s what my single friends would call the host of dysfunctional boyfriends they’ve all encountered. It seems absurd applying it to Justin – like a case of mistaken identity.
Sally is still looking stunned as the waitress returns, and we order the same thing we always do, without needing to look at the menu. The girl goes away, then returns and sets down some fresh focaccia and oil, her slender arm sneaking in between our faces, as though her female antenna has picked up on the seriousness of our conversation.
‘Why would he do that? Have you any idea?’ Sally asks, once the waitress has left us again.
I can’t believe that I can talk about it, yet feel so removed from it. It’s as though it’s happening to a mutual, absent, third friend, whom I like, but whose happiness and well-being I’m not inextricably invested in. For want of a better reaction, I just shrug.
‘You literally have no idea?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘None.’ I stare at her lovely hair that falls to just above her shoulders – not quite brown and not quite auburn – at the freckles on her chest and the gold locket that sits centrally in the V of her blouse, unable to bring her into proper focus. Then I have to look away to try to right my eyes. I gaze across the room, suddenly aware of things I don’t believe I’ve noticed before: a revolving display cabinet containing slices of tired cheesecake, chocolate cake and a plate of slightly more promising tiramisu; and a pleasingly large and colourful print of the Amalfi Coast, that makes me think distantly of my honeymoon, or perhaps more of a sense of everything being truly idyllic.
‘How are you feeling?’ she asks. Her question pulls me back from wherever the print has transported me. ‘What are you thinking? Have you any idea what you’re going to do?’
‘I don’t know.’ I frown, unsure which question to answer first. ‘I mean, what can I do? I suppose I’m doing all I can. I’m just putting one foot in front of the other, trying to keep my sanity, and get through my day.’
The words everyone’s sake come back, filling my head and my vision.
No. Justin doesn’t have someone else. It was a turn of phrase. How many times have I said it myself? I feel fractionally better now I’ve formed that conclusion.
‘I’ve tried ringing him, texting, emailing. I know he got on his flight because the airline confirmed it.’ The police had checked. ‘His car’s gone, so I know he must have come back to the flat at some point, but he hasn’t picked up any of his clothes – not that I can tell, anyway. I’ve rung every hotel in the area. Even the ones he used to stay in when he travelled for work . . .’ I shrug again.
‘But there must be something else you can do! There has to be! You can’t just . . . just sit and wait and be entirely at his mercy.’ She is shaking her head, mouth gaping in amazement again.
I know she means well, but it puts me on the defensive. In fact, I feel a little breathless with it. Sally is nothing if not direct. I’ve always appreciated that. She’s the one person whose opinion can make me second-guess my own. But I don’t want to be told what to do. ‘Is there? Like what? I can’t exactly put him on the regional news. He’s not missing. He managed to ring his secretary and say he was going to be working from home!’ It sounds ridiculous, but it’s real. ‘Clearly, if he needs to be away from me so badly that he’d abandon me halfway across the world, what’s the point of even trying to find him? He mustn’t want that. Maybe when he wants to talk to me, he’ll talk to me. In his own time.’
I glance out of the window, at the rain coming down; the abject colourlessness of this city on a dark day has never got to me before. The waitress sets down my plate of pasta and makes some excuse to Sally about the wood-burning oven being backed up.
‘You seem so . . . calm or something. So rational,’ Sally says, after a moment or two. ‘I’m surprised you’re not angrier, I must admit.’ Her eyes roam over my face, my hair, my upper body.
Sally is normally the person who tries to understand me even when she doesn’t understand me. That’s all I want – her to feel for me and to constructively commiserate, not to tell me how to feel. I stare at the bread basket and contemplate this assessment she’s just made. ‘I don’t know what to say. I wouldn’t say I’m calm – more numb. I suppose I’m worried more than anything else. We don’t know what’s wrong with him, do we? What his reasons are . . . And it must be something. It’s just too out of character for him.’
She is watching me with an element of incredulity. ‘Admittedly, though,’ I add, ‘I was more worried about his welfare earlier, before I learnt he’d rung his secretary. So we know he isn’t dead. He wasn’t rendered mute. He’s had his act together enough to prioritise his job . . .’
She dips a rectangle of focaccia in a small bowl of rosemary olive oil, and brings it quickly to her mouth before it drips. ‘But why do his reasons matter?’ She frowns. ‘I mean, what could he possibly say that would make what he did okay?’
I suddenly have a profound sense of my own inadequacy. She’s right. Why aren’t I more furious? Why am I being so charitable? ‘I don’t know,’ I tell her. We sit there in silence, just looking at one another, neither of us knowing where to take the topic next.
Sally is my closest friend. I’ve known her since I moved here from Uni in Manchester. We met at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, at a function she’d organised – she’s an event planner. The one downside of moving to a new area was that I was lacking a proper friend, and then there was this woman around my own age who was so straight-up and funny and fresh. We’d both shown up in the same peacock-blue and emerald-green dress – an immediate conversation starter. We’d even joked that she’d bought it for eighty-nine pounds and I had only paid fifty. The rapport was instant. There is nothing I haven’t shared with her over the years. Nothing she hasn’t been able to relate to. No boyfriend horror story that she couldn’t take on board as if it were her own, even though we have led very different lives when it comes to relationships. Sally married John, who was her first boyfriend, and has seventeen-year-old twin girls. I have had one long post-Uni involvement that ended when I was twenty-eight because he suddenly decided he wanted to go and live in Australia – and not with me. Then there was Colin, who didn’t want marriage and children. Between Colin and Justin there were a few ill-advised flings, just to prove to myself that I could do casual without always being on the lookout for The One. Or, perhaps because I was hoping that if I stopped trying too hard, what I wanted would waltz along, loosely affirming the laws of attracti
on. Somehow, they had all just felt like stepping-stones on the path to Justin.
‘It’s just such a monstrous thing to do,’ Sally says now, looking at my food. ‘I just don’t know what kind of person would abandon his wife on their honeymoon, halfway across the world!’ It comes out a little loud. The couple at the next table look across. Suddenly, it’s as though the eyes of a thousand people are on me, instead of just two.
‘I don’t know,’ I say again. I realise I’ve said that too many times already.
The smell of grated cheese hits me. I stare at the sickly-looking, sloppy white pasta. It appears to be wobbling. But then I realise it’s not the food moving, it’s me. I’m trembling with the force of reality rewriting itself. The quiet panic. The distant urge to throw up again.
‘Are you okay?’ she asks. ‘You look awful.’
‘I don’t want to judge him, Sally. Not yet. Not until I know more.’ I can’t look her in the eyes. I can feel her watching me and thinking that I’m either very fair or quite pathetic – neither of which means much to me right at this minute.
‘There was a phone call while we were away,’ I say, after a while. He hadn’t been himself. The delayed responses, the distant stares off to the side of my head when I was talking. He always had multiple things going on in his mind. Sometimes, you had to fight for your spot there, but when you fully got his attention, it was worth it. At the time, I felt like saying, We’re on honeymoon! Can’t you just leave work back in bloody Newcastle? But it’s only now that I’m bringing it up that it blazes with significance.
‘We were sitting on our balcony, drinking wine. When he answered the phone, he quickly left the room – just sort of shot up out of his chair.’
Justin always went somewhere private to take calls. I found it a bit insulting. But he never normally went with this alacrity. ‘When he came back, he seemed in a strange mood. Dark somehow. Very changed.’
I can see him sitting in profile, motionless and unblinking, a moment or two after I’d asked him if he thought I should open another bottle of wine, and he hadn’t seemed to have heard.
‘Who do you think it was?’ Sally appears spellbound. ‘Did he not say? Didn’t you ask?’
‘He said it was something about a file at work. But it would have only been 4 a.m. in the UK. Who would be ringing him from work at that hour?’
The waitress sets Sally’s pizza down and offers another apology, mumbling something about a free dessert. Sally, who normally has the appetite of two construction workers, doesn’t even register the arrival of her food.
‘What if he’s in some sort of trouble?’ I say. ‘You know how stressful his job can be. He once said that if he committed professional negligence, he would move to Buenos Aires and never come back.’ All these conversations that were a bit strange at the time. I’d assumed he was joking, of course. But he certainly appeared to have his plan thought through! ‘Or maybe he’s got money problems. I know he’s highly leveraged. The apartment building he owns, and then his interest in the firm . . . Maybe he’s made some terrible mistake at work.’ It was too exaggerated to be possible – besides, Justin wasn’t that careless. And yet the possibilities were more palatable than the idea that he had someone else.
‘Then why couldn’t he just tell you? Why would money problems mean he has to walk out on you in the middle of your honeymoon?’
I feel the distant rumble of panic. ‘I don’t know. I honestly have no idea . . . Say he was having second thoughts about us, Sal, why wouldn’t he have just told me before he married me?’ I take a steadying sip of my wine. ‘I’ve had a million break-ups. I’d have coped. How could he have married me knowing he was making a mistake?’ It’s a question more to myself than to Sally. ‘He must have known he didn’t want to do it – we’d only walked down the aisle a few days before! It’s not even like him to do something as reckless as this. He doesn’t make stupid decisions. He always thinks of the consequences and contingencies. He’s too aware of the fallout. Too sensible . . .’
‘It’s completely mystifying.’ Sally shakes her head, and finally picks up her cutlery. ‘I wish I could speculate but you can’t, can you? It’s just such an insane thing to have happened.’ She bisects her pizza, as though she’s aggrieved by it.
‘I wonder if he’s ill.’
The fork freezes halfway to her mouth. ‘Ill?’
‘You know his dad died suddenly in his early forties with a heart thing. His twenty-year-old nephew is waiting for some big procedure. There’s a lot of ill health among the men in his family. Remember? I told you. That’s why he was always so paranoid about staying fit. I always sensed he was convinced he was never going to see old age.’
Justin is always jogging, pumping iron, checking his BMI, weighing himself. His fixation with zero trans fats, low salt and omega 3 fatty acids is an ongoing joke between us. But it’s not feeling very funny now.
‘He’s not ill, Alice. His note said he can’t do this any more. Those aren’t the words of a man who’s just heard he’s dying.’
I nab the waitress as she passes. ‘I don’t want this. Sorry.’ Suddenly, I need it all gone. The food. The smell. Sally. Perhaps it’s just me, but I’m finding her disappointingly unsympathetic, which is not like her. I want to run out of that door and keep going, to run until all this falls off me, until I don’t have to carry it any more. Whose husband walks out on them on their honeymoon? Whose?
‘Me neither,’ Sally says to the waitress. ‘Take this away, too. All that bread filled me up.’
As the girl removes the plates, I have to fix on a spot of oil on the tablecloth to try to steady my thoughts and suppress the meltdown that I sense coming. Breathe!
Then Sally says, ‘You know, have you considered that maybe you never knew him? Maybe you just thought you did.’
‘Knew him?’ I’m not sure I’m hearing straight. ‘Of course I knew him.’
‘But you did only meet him a year ago. You have to admit, it was fast. I mean, I could tell he’s a bit like that. When he wants something, he wants something. It’s his personality. But you’ve never been that way. You’re far more level-headed than the person you became after meeting him.’
It’s so odd hearing someone describe you, who knows you so well. Especially when they pinpoint a change in you that you don’t entirely disagree with. It was a little true. I had allowed myself to suspend my cynicism about men when I met Justin. ‘But we didn’t need to wait longer. Look where waiting got me with Colin! Justin and I knew we wanted a life together. And, frankly, I’m a bit sorry you’d think I’m so whimsical or easily influenced.’ My heart is pounding from the effort it takes me to say this to her. I recognise we are on the brink of having words, which feels insane. Not at all what I was expecting from this.
I should have kept quiet.
The restaurant has gone from warm to instantaneously suffocating. The pungent smell of garlic and charred salami makes my stomach lurch, and I burp up the taste of sick. I’m gripping the edge of the leather seat. When I release my hand, it’s dripping with sweat.
‘I didn’t mean it that way, Al. I really didn’t! Sorry!’ Her eyes are full of concern for me. Sally and I never have confrontations – disagreements, yes; but that’s different. ‘I just didn’t know what the rush was, that’s all. Wanting a family is one thing . . .’
‘I didn’t marry Justin just to pop out his baby! I could have had one on my own if that was what I’d wanted. There are ways.’ Ways I would never have taken up, of course. ‘I didn’t wait because there was nothing more I could have learnt about him that was ever going to change my feelings for him, that’s why.’
It’s there in her face. No. Maybe there wasn’t then. But you can bet there is now.
We eat the free tiramisu in silence. The words everyone’s sake are back, but now they’re underlined with doubt in red ink. I feel the profound shift of things. The inescapability. The unlikeliness of us ever going back to the way it was – or to earlier perceptio
ns, even – no matter what happens next.
We pay up and leave. As I’m slipping on my coat and we step outside, I say, ‘He’s gone. And yet I still think he’s going to come back.’
There. The truth. So quiet, I am not even sure I’ve said it. Sally looks terribly moved for a moment, then puts her arms around me and gives me a long, tight hug. I am stiff as a board. It strikes me that I’m unable to cry.
We begin walking, and I slide up my big red umbrella. When we get to the Monument Metro Station, we stop, and she gazes at me with eyes full of sympathy. Then she says, ‘You know, it might not count for much, but John never cared for him.’
I watch her lips with the hint of pinkish neutral gloss, and frown. ‘What do you mean?’ Our umbrellas are touching. My red one is casting a warm glow over us. Yet the dampness suddenly gives me a shiver – the kind that locks your spine, and won’t dissipate.
‘I just think he finds him a little . . . unknowable.’
Unknowable. The word rebounds. I try to think, What does this even mean, and why are you telling me this? ‘And you agree with that?’ I ask.
‘Oh, Alice, my God . . .’ She glances around her, avoiding looking at me. People part around us. They disappear into the subway immediately behind, and an odd, draining sensation comes over me, as though part of me is detaching and disappearing into the ground, too.
‘I don’t know what to think,’ she says. ‘Not at this moment. But he’s a Scorpio, isn’t he? You know what they’re like? They’re driven, successful, have great sway over people, but rarely display their true feelings, and are filled with inherent contradiction.’
