by Carol Mason
‘I don’t know if asking her out again tonight is too much,’ he says. ‘I’d like to, but I don’t want to come on too strong. I’m not sure what the etiquette for these things is.’
‘Oh,’ I say, looking anywhere but into his eyes.
‘What do you think I should do?’
He seems to have lost the little paunch he developed in his late thirties and is wire thin now, almost like Mick Jagger.
‘When is keen too keen?’ he presses.
I am inexplicably exasperated. ‘Well, I… perhaps you should wait a few days. It seems a bit… fast.’
He glances over my denim dress that I’m wearing again. ‘Thanks,’ he says. Then he nods his head to the door. ‘Come on, I’ll show you the rest of the place. It’s not Buckingham Palace but you can have a look.’
In the hall he gestures for me to walk ahead of him up the stairs. I really don’t want a guided tour, but now have no choice. As I mount the stairs, I’m aware of his eyes on my bare legs.
‘This is my room,’ he says, squeezing past me on the small high-ceilinged landing, and pushing open a door. I take one step toward the room and then he edges around me again, so that I am almost in the bedroom, and he’s got me hemmed in there. I take a peek. It’s just a room with a chest of drawers and a bed in it. Only the bed is unmade. On both sides. Mike always sleeps on the left. And Mike has never been known, in all the years I have been with him, to make a bed. Did Jennifer stay here Friday night? Have they slept together already? Surely not.
‘Sorry it’s a mess,’ he says. I am aware of how close he is behind me.
‘Very nice,’ I tell him, feeling my face burn up. I turn around, hoping he’ll move, but he continues to stand there, blocking me, our faces now only inches apart. A complex energy passes between us. ‘Please,’ I say, wanting to shut down my mind and the picture I now have of Mike immersing himself happily between Jennifer’s legs and, at the same time, wondering why this picture is bothering me. ‘Can I get past?’
His gaze is level with my throat. He moves barely half a foot, enough for me to brush past him, out of the suffocating confines of his bedroom and onto the small landing again. My heart is racing.
‘The bathroom,’ he says, pushing open another door. Then, ‘this is Aimee’s room.’
It’s clear he’s given Aimee the best room. It has a beige-painted drop ceiling on both sides, making a V shape above her bed, a small window, and a double bed, with a dark green eiderdown on it and a collection of fetching patchwork pillows. Aimee sits parked in the middle of the bed, legs crossed, with her back to us.
‘What’s the matter?’ Mike and I both say together when we realise that Aimee is actually in tears.
‘I don’t want to go home. I don’t want to stay here. I want us to be a family! I don’t want two homes, I want one home with all of us in it.’
I sit on the carpet by her legs, letting my head rest beside her knee, in its holey pink leggings, with the denim shorts on top. Mike stands there, watching us, like a man who is first on the scene of an accident and he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do. I know in years to come that Aimee will remember today, and this feeling of being split between two people. Like I remember. The anger I harboured for years at my parents—toward my dad for having to have other women, and toward my mum not forgiving him, and just getting him to come back. My wishes were borne of a simple, naïve heart. I just wanted them back together again. I didn’t care how.
Seeing her like this, I suddenly ache for our old life back. Haven’t I done to my daughter the one thing I promised myself I never would: failed her as a parent, as I always felt I had been failed, as a child?
‘How about if she stays tonight?’ Mike says.
‘No! I want us all to stay!’ Aimee says.
‘Aimee, we can’t all stay!’ I want to hug her but can tell she’s angry with me. ‘What about Molly, darling?’ I get up off the floor. ‘We can’t leave Molly.’
‘I forgot about Molly,’ she says, softer now.
I reach and stroke the top of her warm little head. ‘Look, I’m happy to go home and see to Molly, if you want to stay here with your dad. Just for tonight.’
Aimee nods, calming right down, then she says, ‘It’s okay. I want to come home with you.’
In the car she says nothing. But I am aware of her every breath, her every tiny sniffle. Her hands are lock together in her lap. She sits barely moving a muscle. At a traffic light I look at my own eyes in the rear view and just see oceans of confusion.
Twenty-Nine
‘His name is James,’ I phone Trish at work. ‘I’m not going to tell you any more, except that you’re never going to meet anyone else who is as right for you.’
‘Seriously?’ she sounds excited. ‘Is he going to be able to afford a parking meter?’
‘Several parking meters.’
She laughs. ‘Speaking of James, have you been in touch with James? As in my James? Do you have a match for him yet?’
‘I have, yes. I think he’s going to really like her but I don’t want to say any more. Client confidentiality.’
‘Good then.’ She sounds a bit deflated. ‘Now back to this other James…’
Thirty
‘To love and other mistakes,’ I raise a glass of wine to Jacqui, across the pub table. We’ve not been out for a drink in months.
‘Don’t keep looking at your phone,’ she tells me as I look, almost obsessively, at my phone.
‘He hasn’t rang me in nearly a week.’
‘Look at me,’ she instructs me, when she sees my sad face. ‘You know he had to go.’
‘I know. I just didn’t think it would feel so much like… like he’s gone.’
‘But you know he’ll be coming back.’
‘Well, that’s easy to say. What’s to come back for? More walking around London? More endless fantastic sex? More strange encounters with my peculiar family members?’
‘I’d take more sex, and less of the peculiar family members!’
‘No you wouldn’t. You said he was middle-aged and ordinary with an unsociable job.’
‘I never said he was ordinary.’ She beams at me. ‘He’s attractive, in a very takes-life-quite-seriously way. And from my brief meeting with him, I think he’s nice too. Exceptionally nice.’
‘He has a lot to sort out, Jacq. His entire career is hanging in the balance. He says he’s done with working abroad, but I’m not so sure it’s done with him.’
‘But one thing’s for sure, he’s definitely not done with you.’ She beams, as though all her fairytales have suddenly come true. ‘He’s in love with you.’
I wag my wine glass at her before drinking, bummed that he hasn’t called. ‘Ah but he’s never actually said it.’
‘Some things don’t have to be said.’
‘Not all the time. But they should be, once.’
She can’t contradict me. ‘So what does he really think of us lot, then?’ she changes the subject. ‘I mean, there’s your old man who molests models, then there’s me who is about to get engaged, who attempts but fails to molest a co-worker. And we both seem to gravitate to your house to tell you what disasters we are, any time of the day or night, not really caring whether we’ve been invited. Actually preferring that we haven’t because it somehow adds to our drama.’
I beam. ‘At least he knows who we really are. What he’d be taking on. Not that he is going to take us on.’
Duffy is singing Mercy and I have to shout over the music. ‘Too much stacked against us. We don’t even live in the same country. He’s got a great career over there, which he wouldn’t have over here. Aimee is still in school, so I couldn’t uproot her even if I wanted to. And besides, there’s no way I could move her thousands of miles away from her father. That would be so unfair to Mike, and to her. She’d hate me for the rest of my life.’ I throw up my hands. ‘Plus I have my job here. What would I do over there? I couldn’t even legally work in Canada!’
�
��Those are, admittedly, obstacles.’
‘Obstacles are his parents don’t like me. His dog likes to sleep between us on the bed.’
‘Are you sure you’re over Mike?’
The question stops me cold. I’m about to say of course! But what comes out is, ‘Can anyone ever be over the person they were married to? Unless that person really hurt them? Mike never hurt me, and I know him more than I know any other human being. Even more than I know my own daughter, I sometimes think.’
She stares at me with so much sympathy that I have to change the subject because I don’t know why I gave the answer I just did. ‘Have you seen him yet? Mr. Somebody’s Strange Idea of an Office Heartthrob?’
She looks sadly across the room. ‘I saw him this afternoon, by the coffee machine. He did that thing of following me with his eyes—a little bit flirty again, and a little bit smug.’ She shudders. ‘Ergh, it was horrible. Like a time warp. Like I was Doris Day and he was Cary Grant. Liz said something about him saying the other day that he likes very ladylike girls.’
‘Oh please! He’s worried that word has got out. He thinks you’ve told people, and now everybody’s laughing at him.’
‘I told you, he thinks he’s Cary Grant.’
I have a laugh. ‘Cary Grant was bisexual.’
She beams. ‘ God, I love you. You always make me feel better.’ She raises her glass to mine. ‘To love and other disasters.’
‘Mistakes,’ I correct her.
~ * * * ~
I’m just pulling up in front of the house when my phone rings.
‘Hi!’ he says, sounding happy.
‘Where are you?’ I ask him, thinking Thank God he rang!
‘At my desk, in my apartment, staring out of the window, waiting for a phone call.’
He’s back in Canada. And life moves on. And everything feels more impossible again, than possible.
‘I can’t stop thinking about you,’ he says. ‘In fact, I don’t know what I thought about until my mind started going automatically to you.’
‘That’s nice,’ I tell him. ‘You’ve just created the perfect fifteen second sound bite. You should be proud.’
He laughs. ‘Look,’ he says. ‘The reason I called, Celine, I wanted to tell you something I should have said a very long time ago. I wanted to tell you that I love you.’
Could he have heard me just talking about him? I laugh a little. ‘You love me?’
‘I love you,’ he says. ‘But I have to go now. My other call’s coming through. We’ll talk more later.’
And then, in typical Patrick fashion, he goes again.
But he’s not gone, is he? Not when he leaves me with those words.
Thirty-One
I meet Mike’s Jennifer Platt in Costa’s coffee shop opposite the Theatre Royal. She has just been to a meeting with National Express East Coast, and excitedly tells me that the head of catering for the train company has agreed to hear out her proposal. She drinks off one latte looking like she hasn’t even tasted it, then asks me if I fancy another. I tell her I’ll buy.
‘I really, really, really like him!’ she says, before my bottom reaches the seat, when I return with two more coffees. ‘I never thought I would, you know, meet someone this fast.’
I dive into my coffee cup while I remind myself not to show the uber-curiosity about whether or not they’ve had sex. ‘Actually, the most successful matches were lukewarm about each other the first time they met. Generally the average person goes on dates with three different candidates before she meets the one who seems like he might be right. And by that I mean, one she actually ends up having a few dates with and going to bed with.’
Her gaze slides from me, out of the window, and back. She’s glowing like a hundred-watt light bulb. ‘Mike’s interesting, he’s mature and sensible, he’s very down to earth. He’s not crude, like some who make you feel more like a buddy than a lady. He’s actually funny too! Just little things he comes out with. And he listens to you. He seemed fascinated with my business idea, although I might have talked his ears off about it,’ she tinkles a laugh. ‘We really hit it off.’ Her eyes are iridescent with new love.
‘After that first date, I barely got home and he rang me, and we talked for another two hours!’
Now feels as good a time as any to tell her. ‘Did Mike mention how I know him?’
She nods. ‘I know that you were married. And in a way, this is why I feel I can say so much about him to you, because, well, you know all this about him, don’t you? You’ll understand.’
‘You’re probably wondering why, if he’s so fantastic, we’re divorced,’ I try a laugh.
She tries the same. ‘No! I don’t believe in judging people. I mean, the only two people who really know what their marriage is like are the two that are in it, aren’t they? Sometimes you can think you’re marriage is all right, and be kidding yourself.’
Why is she so fabulous? And how did she manage to get such massive natural breasts on such a petite frame?
‘Is that what he told you?’ That last comment sounds like just what he’d say.
‘No. Honestly he never got into any specific details about his marriage. When you meet someone, you don’t want to bring out all your old baggage, do you? Not right away.’
I nod, trying to swallow the idea of my being old baggage.
‘Same as me, I rarely talk about my divorce. Because while I think I’m doing fine now and I’m all right, I don’t want someone to sit there looking for chinks in my armour, or then I’ll probably start acting like I’m not all right, if you know what I mean.’
‘I never asked you why it didn’t work.’ Because something about her just made me take her at face value. But now I am brimming with curiosity about her.
‘It’s all right. I don’t mind saying.’ She looks at me with a certain reconciled expression. ‘It was an affair. Not especially original. I remember thinking that there was so much I should be feeling—anger, jealousy, sadness—yet all I felt was an overwhelming disgust. Disgust at myself for not suspecting, and disgust that he could be with her and then come home and be with me, sometimes in the same night, as I’m pretty sure happened. It seemed monstrous.’ She wrinkles up her nose, and I notice she’s got a rather big freckle on the edge of her top lip, that looks like a crumb she needs to dust off. I can see Mike becoming enamoured with that freckle the way he used to fixate on the small mole on the inside of my elbow. ‘But once I made him leave I was determined not to let his actions ruin my own self-image. His decision to screw around was a reflection on him, not on me. I had to keep reminding myself of that. So that’s one of the reasons I don’t want to talk about it with Mike before we really know each other that well. I don’t want anybody thinking I’ve been shaped at all by what he did.’
I drink some of my now unwanted coffee and stare out at the dashing, neo-classical façade of the Theatre Royal opposite, one of Jacqui’s favourite buildings in the city, thinking she’s a bit goody-goody, isn’t she? Just a weeny bit. Then I think, God that was a catty thought, Celine! She’s lovely. She’s better for him than I ever was.
Suddenly she reaches a hand and briefly lays it on the back of mine. ‘You’re obviously a very good person wanting to set him up with someone else and see him happy.’
Tears inexplicably burn in the back of my eyes. I look across the road, turning my head slightly so she won’t see. When I can speak, I say, ‘It was his idea I take him on as a client, not mine. I didn’t want to tell you I was married to him when I set you up because I thought you might think I was weird or something. You know, as though I had no one else to offer so I touted my ex around.’
She laughs. ‘Touted your ex around! That’s a funny picture!’ She cuts her half of the muffin down the middle. ‘I’d have thought nothing of the sort. I hope, Celine, I hope that it’s not awkward in any way for you, you know, if Mike and I…’ She pushes the muffin around the plate, while I hang in anticipation. ‘I can certainly promise you that i
f Mike and I do work out in the long run, I will never try to be any sort of mother to Aimee. Only, I hope, a friend.’
I swallow hard, shake my head a little too enthusiastically. I wonder if Mike knows she’s already seeing herself as Aimee’s second mum.
‘It’s not awkward for me in the slightest. You’re a client and I took you on to help you find someone. And you were quite right, I want nothing more than for Mike to be happy because he deserves to have everything he should have got from me.’
We smile together, holding eyes, and in one synchronized move our hands go out for our respective coffee cups, and they touch. It’s almost as though we are shaking hands.
It’s only when we have parted ways at Grey’s Monument, she about to go into Waterstone’s, and I about to trot down the steps of the Metro to go home, that I remember something. I hesitate there one foot poised to keep on going, but then I shout her back.
For a second I think she hasn’t heard me and I’m prepared to let it go, but then she turns. ‘Did you call me?’
I am already walking over digging in my handbag. ‘I forgot, I brought this with me…’ I hold out a folded up piece of foolscap paper. ‘I intended to give it to you, but, well, anyway…. It’s yours.’ She takes it, looking curious. ‘It’s just some questions and answers I put down when I was considering taking Mike on as a client. A little exercise I put myself through to somehow reposition him in my mind—you know, as Mike the client not Mike the ex-husband.’ I give her a smile. ‘I thought that perhaps you might like to have it.’
As it exchanges hands, a shift seems to occur in me. It’s too late to take it back. It’s gone now. Like Mike, or so it seems, it’s hers now not mine.
Thirty-Two
