by Carol Mason
She doesn’t instantly jump to contradict me, but she looks less ready to burst a vessel. I press on. ‘You know, all through my teens I had acne. I bought every kind of cream, always trying to hide it. When it finally cleared up of its own accord, you’d think I’d have been overjoyed. But I actually missed it. I missed not having something to be constantly trying to get rid of.’
She scowls. ‘How has this got anything to do with what we’re talking about?’
‘Well, you’ve got into such a habit of trying to meet someone and it’s not working, that you’d actually be a bit lost if you met someone and it worked. You’ve made unsuccessful dating a habit, and in your own way, you’re happy with it.’
She does a small, shocked laugh. ‘Why would I be paying you then?’
‘To feed the habit.’
I watch her and she won’t meet my eyes.
‘There are such things as the perfect pair of shoes. Or the perfect hair cut. There is no such thing as the perfect human being.’
She picks up her fork. ‘I really do want to meet someone. You’re wrong there.’ She spears a piece of chicken, looking downcast all of a sudden. ‘I just… I suppose I do have some problems, and sometimes I think it’s not worth it—I might as well give up.’ She looks up at me now. ‘But maybe I shouldn’t. Yet. Maybe one or two more tries? Unless of course, you want to give up on me.’
I wag my fork at her. ‘I am not a quitter.’
She puts the piece of chicken in her mouth, smiles a little.
‘Baby steps up the mountain,’ I tell her. ‘Eventually we’ll find you someone. I fully believe it.’
~ * * * ~
Next, in my powerhouse day, I dig deep and I phone Mike to give him the news I know he is wanting to hear. ‘I have someone I think you might like to meet.’
I wonder if my decision to set him up with lovely Jennifer Platt is motivated by my own guilt about my reunion with Patrick.
‘She’s thirty-seven. Divorced. Her name is Jennifer and she’s presently employed in trying to set up her own catering business. She’d like to meet someone but is certainly not desperate. In fact, I actually approached her about joining the Love Market, not the other way round.’
I’m finished my brief intro, but he continues to listen. ‘I think you’re going to like her,’ I add.
‘Right,’ he says, after a second or two of pause. ‘Okay. Well, when am I going to get to meet her?’
‘I’m going to see if she’s free this Friday.’ My usual practice is to give the women the man’s number and let them make the first contact. I used to do it the other way round because even though I’m a modern woman I’ve never been keen on women asking men out. I have noticed that the most successful relationships are the ones that still maintain a degree of respecting traditional roles for the sexes. The most common complaints I have heard married women make are not that the husband has a wandering eye, but that she is expected to wash out the rubbish bin and mow the lawn. But the main reason why I prefer the woman contacting the man to set up a date is because I had one situation where the man wouldn’t accept rejection and became a nuisance. Like most aspects of this business, I’ve learned through trial and error.
‘Mike….’ I try to tactfully broach this. ‘I was hoping that on Saturday you might take Aimee again. I know you just had her at the weekend, but…’
‘You have plans.’
‘I might do, yes.’
‘How was your weekend?’ he asks, even though the question feels oddly placed.
‘Fine,’ I say. ‘So can you take Aimee on Saturday?’
‘Of course,’ he says, quietly. ‘If I go out with this Jennifer on Friday, I can pick Aimee up Saturday morning if you like.’
I ring off and sit there feeling wormy. Then I ring Jennifer.
‘I have a very lovely man for you to meet,’ I tell her.
I neglect to add that he’s my ex-husband.
~ * * * ~
Imagining your ex in bed with someone else is the strangest thing. Which, of course, now that I’ve made those two phone calls, is all I’m imagining. Even though it’s rather hypocritical given that I’ve just spend the weekend in bed with the man who may have helped wreck my marriage without him ever knowing it. Mike and I weren’t great in bed right away. It took time and practice. Mike was too fixated on whether or not he was pleasing me. And I remember thinking that I probably should have taken more time to get over Patrick because I kept comparing. The more we were together, the more we found what worked for us and Mike ended up being an exceedingly good lover. And I realised that loving someone, without necessarily lusting after them, was still love, wasn’t it? I didn’t have to desire Mike in the heart-slamming sense of the word to care about him, to see myself with him, and to feel empty at the thought of him not being in my life. I’d arrived at love through a whole other way; the journey was different but not “less”.
Can I picture Mike with another woman, after so many years of being with me? Jennifer gaining the benefits of Mike’s years of experience, both in and out of bed?
No.
But picturing him without someone hurts more.
Twenty-Four
Then Wednesday is upon us.
I check my email before booting out of the door to meet his train. One from Trish. I read it quickly, excited to hear what she thought of my wounded footballer Liam Docherty.
‘Dear Celine,
Nice-looking bloke. Shy for a footie? Problem though—I was first in line to order, and he told me that he’d buy the coffee because he’d managed to find a parking spot for free!! He’s an ex-footballer!! Why would it even be on his radar that the spot came free???!!!
Of course now I am remembering our fake date, how, when the bill came he scrutinized it then remarked on how he didn’t remember either of us having had an orange juice that cost three quid, even though I had.
I type: Could he have been joking? Can’t see him seriously being afraid of paying two quid to park his car!
She responds by return: He DEF wasn’t joking!! Extremely serious! SO sad! But still don’t think he’s for me. Slightly intellectually challenged?
And I thought he was quite bright. For a footie.
~ * * * ~
Patrick stands there in my oak-beamed little living room absorbing every last crack and crag on the pale lemon walls. His eyes travel over the tall stone fireplace, clutters of magazines on the pine linen chest in front of the window, the pale green velour cushions against the dark brown leather sofa, the lemon and cream drapes, Aimee’s shoes in the middle of the floor, an empty wine glass on an end table what I missed in my tidying up. I had expected we’d go straight to the hotel but he seemed to really want to see my home. ‘Are you thinking of putting in an offer?’ I ask him.
‘It’s beautiful.’
‘It’s old. It needs a lot of work.’ I put the kettle on and he seems to get lost in the view of the giant wilderness of moss green and heather that goes on endlessly beyond our back garden.
‘It’s like Wuthering Heights.’
‘But I don’t want to live in a novel written in the 1800s, Patrick. I like cities, and traffic and noise and life. Sometimes all this is too confining. Everywhere you go you are known. People know everything you do.’
‘But you have a lot, Celine,’ he looks around again. ‘A lot more than most have. More than I’ve ever had, certainly.’
‘You should try being here in the heart of winter. Endless rain and fog and snow.’
‘Do you remember the mist in Vietnam?’
I smile at him. ‘Yes. But that was beautiful.’ Our gazes fuse together. ‘Did you ever go back?’
His eyes comb over my kitchen, somewhere we did renovate when we moved in. Mike bought DIY books and learned how to put down dark honey wood flooring, install white marble countertops, and change the wall and base units to oak. I painted the walls a brighter yellow than the living room, and sewed white roman blinds for the three windows. He shakes his
head. ‘I thought about it. Maybe to make a documentary. But Sa Pa has changed a lot since we were there. The Love Market no longer exists. Or at least not in the way that we saw it.’ He shrugs, sadly, then says. ‘Who’s this?’ as the cat staggers in.
‘Molly. Mike’s cat. She’s really old and Mike didn’t want to upset her world by taking her with him when he moved out.’
He bends to pet her, then looks up, his eyes going straight to the picture of Mike and me that I still haven’t taken down. Instead, beside it, I put one of Aimee.
‘Who does Aimee look like?’ he asks.
‘My mother, actually. I have a portrait that my dad did of her when they first met and were very much in love. Aimee is the image of her.’
He goes on studying the picture, asking some questions about my daughter. But I wonder if it’s really Aimee he’s looking at, or if it’s Mike he’s now studying. ‘Does your mother live nearby?’
‘She died not long before we got divorced. Breast cancer. She was only in her early fifties. It was terribly, terribly sad. When I think of her life I think it was such a waste in many ways. She could never forgive my dad, and yet she still loved him. She let it stop her trying to be happy.’
‘Were you close?’
I shake my head. ‘I used to think she had no time for me. I got in the way of her and my dad. But now I think in her own way she might have been trying to protect me from the harsh realities of what a bad marriage really was, by somehow trying to push me to the sidelines all the time.’ I shrug. ‘All I ever really wanted was for her to open up to me. To let me in a bit.
I held out hope that she might have rallied and been a good grandmother to Aimee. But she was living in York with her third husband when Aimee was little. It’s not far away, but she rarely came to see us. And when we tried to go there, it was always a lukewarm reception. She never seemed genuinely thrilled.’ I don’t tell him that I bumped into my mother and Donald when Aimee was about three. It was in Marks & Spencer’s café in Newcastle. They’d come up for a visit, but had never let us know.
He ponders me. ‘Your dad?’
I smile. ‘Good now. He and Aimee go out painting sometimes, now that the weather is improving. The go to the beach and he shows her how to capture the angle of the waves, and the change in colour and the movement of the sea. She was pleased as punch the other day. He had bought new colours for her. She kept walking around repeating their names: Prussian blue, cerulean blue and titanium white.’ I smile. I pour boiling water on teabags. ‘Didn’t you ever want kids?’
He ponders this, and I wonder if he’s not going to answer. But then he says, ‘It wouldn’t have been fair with my life. But I never especially wanted to have a family, no. But then things happen to you that make you wonder how sure you are about yourself, and about what you do and don’t want…’ He pulls a chair far out from under the kitchen table and sits down, long legs spread. ‘A few years ago we filmed a piece on an orphanage in Sarajevo—what had happened to the so-called rape babies—kids born of women who were sexually assaulted by Serbian soldiers. These kids were largely unacknowledged by the state. We brought them candy and toys so they wouldn’t be too intimidated by a bunch of guys coming in with all this equipment, which they were, at first. But by the time we were ready to go, they were clinging to us and telling us they loved us. They wanted us to take them home. One of them, a little girl of about four, was calling a nine-year-old her mother.’ He shakes his head. ‘And here was I, doing my work and walking away. All I was really doing was broadcasting their story to sell news, to keep the network’s ratings up. I could try convincing myself that awareness is key to change, but it’s not. Actions are key to change. I used to believe in what I did wholeheartedly. I used to believe my news stories could change the world…’ He shakes his head again. ‘But there was no good that I could have possibly done for that child. Even if I’d wanted to, you can’t adopt them. Bosnians have very strong feelings against removing Bosnian children from their homeland.’
‘You were thinking of adopting one of them?’
‘The little one who was calling her sister her mother—and the older child too, of course. The thought did cross my mind, even though I don’t quite know how I’d have made it work. I couldn’t get either of them out of my head for a very long time.’
He looks at me sadly. ‘How’s that tea coming?’
After I pour us our tea, I log onto my laptop on the table, and find the video blog of him in Afghanistan. He is sitting in a white vest and jeans, on his blue sleeping bag, in a tent, drinking from a paper cup, looking extremely gorgeous.
He comes and stands behind me, watches the screen for moments. ‘That was in Helmand Province. It was somebody’s idea of a good segment for the public to see what we look like when the camera isn’t trained on us. People seem to think being a foreign correspondent is glamorous, yet look at us; a bunch of smelly guys shacked up together in a tent in the middle of nowhere. I’d just filed a piece on the Taliban for the ten o’clock news. I’d got a good interview. It was a great day. Brent in the picture there was editing it.’ He points to a big-bellied, hard-lived man in a white vest on the screen. ‘I was drinking cold coffee and I’d been awake all night because these guys snored so damned much...’ He huffs a laugh.
‘So that was a great day?’
‘Yes. Actually it was. When you’re there it all becomes about the story. It’s like being in a room full of heroin addicts. All they can think of is the drug. If they’re not shooting up, they’re stalking around, working on where to get their next fix.’
‘That’s your bed you’re sitting on,’ I say, fascinated. ‘Where you slept.’
‘I told you it’s not luxurious, even in civilized posts. The networks cut back; they don’t have the big budgets any more. So much of the news is reported by stringers who carry their own cameras and do it all themselves. We’re the old brigade. A dying breed.’ He rubs a hand over his mouth, stares at himself on the screen while I look up at him.
‘You really miss it.’ Now his reservations about the news-reading job make sense.
He drags his gaze away from the screen, and looks at me with nostalgia in his eyes. He seems more at home talking about his job than doing anything else. ‘There were good times, for sure. But now so much is at stake reporting a story. As a journalist you’re supposed to be a witness, an impartial observer of the conflict. But in the Middle East you don’t observe it, you become part of it. Sometimes you don’t know what side you’re on.’ His eyes have drifted to a place that only he can see. ‘So what else have you got on me?’ he says.
We look at one another. Then he says, quite out of the blue, ‘I regretted not writing to your mother’s address, at least to tell you I’d got divorced. I regretted not taking that risk.’
I feel tears prick my eyes. ‘It would have been horrible timing. Me getting a letter from you saying you were divorced, and knowing that I had really just got married.’
He puts his hand on the back of my neck. ‘Yes. Our timing has been off all along.’
Hadn’t I recently had the same thought?
His voice from my computer filters into the room, incongruously.
‘Can we get rid of that?’ he asks.
~ * * * ~
In bed—the spare room, not my room, that would be too strange—Patrick makes love to me tenderly. Aimee won’t be home until after six because my dad is picking her up after school, and taking her to the beach to sketch again. She’s building quite a portfolio.
‘Were you ever in love with Anya? You must have been, once.’ I ask him, after, as we lie there.
‘Were you ever in love with Mike?’
I think about this. ‘Not in the way that I suppose we all associate with being in love.’
He strokes my bare arm. ‘I felt I should have been in love with Anya. I think it was my competitive instinct. All my life I’d done well at everything—sport, exams, scholarships. She was just an extension of that for me, I
think. If that makes any sense.’ He kisses the top of my head. ‘Anya was perfect on paper. You’d have matched us, in your line of work. But I just kept feeling I’d got something too easily that I hadn’t wanted badly enough in the first place. That my marriage had been a bit of a pot shot. And that’s kind of how I’d always felt about a lot of things when I was growing up. I got things easily whether or not I wanted them—and usually I didn’t.’ He snorts. ‘It sounds crazy now, saying that about myself. Maybe I just rode life too highly then. Something in me was unstoppable, and yet there were times when, clearly, I should have stopped myself.’ Then he adds, ‘I think when you’re in love with someone, it repositions how you’ve felt about everybody else you’ve met,’ he says.
I lie there blinking, wondering exactly what he means by this comment.
Twenty-Five
On Thursday and Friday I spend virtually the whole day at the hotel in bed with Patrick, between school runs and meal-making for Aimee. On Friday, Patrick and I go out for lunch down at Newcastle’s Quayside. We sit on a patio drinking beer, and dipping foccacia bread into a pool of olives and oil, then sharing smoked salmon and cream of leek pasta and green salad. It’s a warm day. Patrick scrutinizes everything around is, then smiles at me when he sees me watching him.
