‘I’ll try to get hold of a copy,’ I said. ‘What about you?’
‘What about me?’ He was half smiling at me, teasing.
‘Are you here on business?’
‘Yes.’ He gave a warm, open, engaging smile. ‘I am.’
‘Any clues?’
‘To what exactly?’
‘What it is you do!’
‘I design fountains.’
‘Really? Is that a job?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘It is. At least, it’s what I do for a living.’
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound rude.’
‘You didn’t.’
‘I don’t think I’ve ever met a fountain designer before.’
‘There are only a couple of companies in the UK and they employ just a handful of people so not many people have met one.’
‘I have now.’
‘Not properly.’ He leaned forward and stretched his hand across the table. ‘Abe,’ he said, taking mine and shaking it long enough for me to note the smoothness of his touch and the clack of his wedding ring. Long enough for me to note that I was noting all of those things.
‘Ivy.’
An awkward pause.
‘So, I guess you’ve seen the Tivoli fountain?’
‘It’s kind of compulsory, isn’t it?’
‘And the bubble fountain?’
‘I liked that. It’s mesmerizing.’ I’d sat and watched the water-filled tubes dotted around a circular pond, bubbling away on a previous trip. ‘It’s not one of yours, is it?’ The Tivoli fountain clearly predated him but the bubble fountain looked contemporary.
‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘It was designed by Niels Bohr in the sixties. I’m not that old!’
‘I wasn’t suggesting you were. I’m not very good at dating fountains.’
‘Early sixties, and although I was born in 1955, I didn’t work as a child.’
‘Me too!’
‘You weren’t a child labourer?’
‘No, but I meant I was born in 1955.’
‘You look younger.’
‘Only because you’ve taken your glasses off.’
He put them on again. ‘No. You definitely look younger than forty-five.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, embarrassed now. ‘The bubble fountain. Who did you say designed it?’
‘Niels Bohr, a quantum physicist who worked at the university here. You’ve probably heard of him.’
‘I saw a play about him a while ago.’
‘Copenhagen?’
‘Yes. Have you seen it?’
‘No. But I’ve heard it’s good.’
‘I can’t remember much about it, except that I met my husband that night.’
‘Ah. So it made an impression.’ A slight pause. ‘You’ve been married long?’
‘Ten years,’ I say.
‘Children?’
‘Two, a girl and a boy, eight and six. You?’
‘Just the one.’
He looked down at the table, not to be drawn, so I switched the subject back. ‘I caught half a documentary about Bohr recently. Something to do with a row he had with Einstein?’
‘They famously differed over the nature of reality.’
‘In what way?’
‘I don’t fully understand it myself but Bohr claimed that what cannot be observed does not exist.’
‘That doesn’t seem likely.’
‘That’s what Einstein thought. He cited the moon as existing even when you can’t see it. But Bohr believed that for very small particles it was true. They only came into being when you measured them. He challenged the nature of reality.’
I didn’t fully understand so I asked him more about his work. ‘What’s the design you’re working on now? Does it exist?’
‘Not yet.’ He laughed. ‘But I’ve been measuring the dimensions, at least on paper.’
‘Something to rival the Tivoli?’
‘Nothing quite so grand. It’s basically a clock.’ He pushed his drawings in my direction. ‘The middle ring represents the hours,’ he indicated a circle of jets, ‘and the outer ring the minutes. It will only tell the time every five minutes. Otherwise the jets will be random displays of water.’
‘And what do they represent?’
‘I’m trying to convey something of the randomness of life between the precise measurements of time.’
‘That’s interesting. I’ll look out for it.’
‘It’s not even commissioned yet. But there’s a new urban park being built on the outskirts of the city. They want to include a fountain. My company is pitching for it.’
‘I hope you get it.’
‘Thank you.’ He pulled the papers back towards him. ‘It’s been lovely talking to you …’ He looked at his watch, for a precise measurement of time.
‘You too.’ I smiled.
‘I wondered …’
‘Yes?’
‘I mean, you probably have plans and you don’t know me and, well, I don’t want to make you feel uncomfortable, so I won’t be offended if you say no.’ He stopped.
‘Say no to what?’
‘I just wondered if you might want to join me for dinner, either here or maybe somewhere in town.’
‘Um …’ I hesitated. I wanted to but wasn’t sure that I should.
‘Unless you already have other plans or would rather not?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I was just going to get something to eat here.’ I’ve never liked dining on my own, although it’s a necessary part of the job, but I wasn’t sure if it was wise to take up Abe’s offer, although I was tempted.
‘There’s a place just around the corner,’ he said. ‘Less than a five-minute walk. They do great fish and you can always make your excuses if I bore you!’
‘I’m sure you won’t,’ I replied.
‘But I’ll understand if you’d rather just stay here. You’ve probably got a busy day tomorrow.’
‘I’d love to go to the place round the corner,’ I said, reassured by the effort he was making to give me a get-out.
‘I don’t,’ he said, as we got up to go, ‘make a habit of asking strange women out for dinner every time I’m away for work.’
‘Am I strange?’
‘No.’ He laughed again. ‘The opposite, really.’
‘Normal?’ I was teasing him now.
‘Strangely familiar. Does that sound odd?’
‘No.’ I’d never met him before, our paths had never crossed, yet he did seem familiar, so familiar that accepting his invitation to join him for dinner did not even begin to unnerve me. I shook my head, the way Mum used to when she experienced déjà vu.
‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ I say, scanning the restaurant for anyone I know before I allow myself to kiss Abe.
‘It’s so good to see you,’ he says, as I take off my coat and hang it on the back of my chair, still anxious that perhaps this restaurant is a little too close to home, a little too likely to be somewhere a friend may come or someone I know from the children’s school.
‘Are you okay?’
‘Yes. It’s just been a difficult day. I had some work to finish for a client but I had to pick Max up from school early and then Richard was a little late home from work and it all felt a bit …’
‘What?’
‘You know.’
Stressful, deceitful, wrong, unnecessary were all words I could have used to describe how I’d felt when Richard came home, fed up after a day at work and having forgotten that I needed him to look after the children.
‘Where are you going again?’ he’d asked.
‘A client meeting,’ I’d lied. ‘Dinner with the manager of that chain of restaurants.’
I was banking on him not being interested enough to ask too many questions.
‘Oh. Okay.’
He clearly wasn’t. If he had been, I might have felt worse. ‘There’s a bit of chicken and bacon pie in the oven for you and some potatoes. The children ate earlier
and they’re both ready for bed.’ I couldn’t be accused of neglecting anyone. ‘I had to pick Max up from school early today because he said he felt sick but he seems to be fine.’
‘You’re too soft on that boy,’ Richard said.
‘What else could I do? The school called and said he was unwell. I had to stop working on the report I was writing so I’ll have to finish it tomorrow now. And I may have more work for this client if the meeting goes well.’
‘Okay. Enjoy your dinner.’
‘I’m sorry, Ivy,’ Abe says now.
‘What for?’
‘For making things difficult,’ he says, as the waiter approaches our table and asks what we’d like to drink.
‘A bottle of the Merlot.’ We’ve already agreed on that. ‘And some sparkling mineral water.’
He has the same wine preference as my husband and took a similar route into his job. Abe worked as an architectural model-maker before he moved into fountain design. Richard is an architect although these days he describes his job as ‘endless office refits’.
He’s bored, and am I simply bored with him? Am I a total cliché? A middle-aged woman having a mid-life crisis involving a man who is really just another version of what she already has?
‘You didn’t,’ I say, when the waiter has gone. ‘Make things difficult. It’s just Richard’s not exactly stressed with work but by the boredom of it. It doesn’t excite him any more and he can’t seem to see a way out of the rut he’s in.’
‘And that affects you?’
‘I suppose. Kind of. I feel disloyal for saying so.’
‘It’s not disloyal to talk to someone,’ he says, as the waiter returns and pours a little of the wine into his glass. ‘That’s fine.’ He’s quiet as our glasses are filled. ‘I’d like to feel you can talk to me about anything, Ivy,’ he says. ‘It won’t go any further. My wife always says it helps her to moan. It gets things off her chest and stops her feeling resentful.’
There was something about the way he spoke of his wife, with an easy affection but with the hint of a suggestion that they had their ups and downs.
‘Sometimes I feel as if I’ve trapped Richard, by being married to him and having the kids, in a job that he doesn’t really enjoy any more.’
‘What do you think he’d rather be doing?’ Abe asks.
‘I don’t know. When he started out he had big plans. He wanted to be the next Richard Rogers. He wanted to design ground-breaking buildings, but most of the work he does is remodelling or extending existing ones.’
‘And how did meeting you lead him on to that path?’
‘It didn’t, really,’ I say. ‘I suppose the pressure of having a mortgage to pay and mouths to feed pushed him towards a steady job.’
‘He wouldn’t have wanted that anyway?’
‘Well, yes.’
‘It doesn’t sound as if you need to beat yourself up over his frustrations. Everyone gets bored with their jobs now and then.’
‘Do you?’
‘Occasionally.’
‘And do you moan about it?’
‘Yes, but I’m not going to now. I’ve been very lucky. I landed a job I love pretty much by accident.’
He’s told me this before. How he went to art school, wasn’t sure what to do when he left, got the job as an architectural model-maker with a firm of architects and was thinking about training to be one himself. Then one of the partners left to set up a fountain-design business and asked Abe to go with him.
‘Sometimes that’s the way things happen,’ I say, thinking that our meeting had been entirely serendipitous and all the more wonderful for it. ‘But if I’m going to unburden myself about things at home, you’re allowed to moan about your job, or whatever, too.’
My comment was intended to be light-hearted, and maybe I was trying to define parameters too. This is what it is, I was telling myself. We are two people who met by chance and got on well, and because our worlds are separate, we can talk about them more openly than we otherwise might. And in some ways this much is true but I know something else is driving our desire to meet, something far more dangerous.
‘But I don’t want to, Ivy,’ Abe says, looking directly at me. ‘I don’t want to dump any of my frustrations on you. I want my company to be a source of pleasure to you.’
There is no physical exchange, only words and a look, but my body reacts as if he had leaned across the table and kissed me. My face is hot and I try to quell the restlessness I feel by reaching for my wine glass and sipping too quickly, then mumbling a heartfelt but slightly awkward ‘That’s nice.’
‘Oh, and before I forget,’ Abe is reaching for his jacket, which is hanging over the back of his chair, ‘I’ve got something for you.’ He takes out a paper bag, the kind that could double as wrapping paper if necessary, yellow with a scattering of white stars. He passes it across the table to me.
‘Thank you,’ I say.
It feels like a book. I open the bag and take out the slim volume inside. ‘Babette’s Feast!’
‘You haven’t already bought a copy?’
‘No. But I did mean to. This is lovely.’ I look at the blurb on the back, then at Abe. ‘Thank you.’
Our eyes meet and linger for a moment too long before I look away.
‘So, is your son okay?’ Abe asks, topping up my wine glass and letting his hand settle briefly on mine as he puts it down.
It was a deliberate gesture and from then on our conversation is accompanied by moments of physical contact.
‘Yes. He seemed fine as soon as I got him home. He sometimes gets a bit panicky and I think he genuinely felt sick but it seemed to pass,’ I say, letting my hand lie on the table where it had been when he touched it.
‘That’s good.’ Abe covers it with his own for longer this time.
‘I hope so. I’ve got a lot on at the moment and if he gets sick he’d inevitably pass it on to Lottie and I’d have one or other of them off school for weeks.’
‘That’s an advantage of having just one,’ Abe says. ‘A natural isolation unit.’ He shifts in his seat so that his knee rests against mine.
We are having one conversation with words and another with our bodies.
‘Did you never want to have another?’ It was something I’d wanted to ask since meeting him, but the moment never seemed to arise naturally.
‘To be honest, Ivy, I never really wanted children in the first place.’ He removes his hand from mine and picks up his glass.
‘Oh?’ I’m surprised and a little disappointed.
He is so gently charming, so interesting and easy to talk to, and I find him so physically attractive that I’m already wondering what might have happened if I’d met him at another time. I’d always wanted children despite all the risks that entailed.
I move back in my chair, away from him.
‘Don’t get me wrong. Ruby’s the best thing that ever happened and I wouldn’t be without her for anything, but Lynn’s pregnancy wasn’t planned.’
‘Ah,’ I say, not wanting to overstep some boundary or pry too much into his home life.
‘We hadn’t been together very long and when she got pregnant I wasn’t really prepared.’
I take a sip of my wine.
‘But Lynn wanted to keep the baby and I was beginning to think, well, it was time for me settle down. Plenty of my friends had children. It was something I always seemed to shy away from. There was another woman I’d been seeing before I met Lynn. She wanted to settle down and have a family but it ended because I didn’t feel ready to commit to that.’
‘I think a lot of people feel the same. A lot of men. Women too.’ Although in my experience women are often ready to think about children at an earlier age than men, I’m not ready to tell him that, for me, the decision whether or not to have children was more loaded than it is for others.
‘I did love that other woman but it all seemed to move too fast for me. I seemed to be heading towards marriage and children, I got scare
d.’
‘What happened?’
‘I blew it. I told her I didn’t feel ready and that effectively ended the relationship.’
‘Do you still see her?’
‘No.’ He shakes his head. ‘I’d have liked to stay friends with her. I just didn’t feel ready to get married. I know I really hurt her. So I had to let her go.’
‘The one who got away?’
‘I suppose so. When I met Lynn and she got pregnant, I felt maybe it was what I needed. The baby, although I was terrified at the prospect, felt like something concrete, something that would stop me running away.’
Not for the first time, I feel grateful for Richard’s lack of hesitancy about having kids, for the way he never let what might have been an issue become one, for giving me two wonderful children and a wonderful life, for allowing me to turn into the person I have turned into, the person sitting here in a restaurant now, the person who is attracting the man I’m sitting opposite.
I would not be that person without Richard. I’d be a shyer, less confident version of myself.
I shouldn’t be here now with Abe, I think. It’s not fair on Richard. But at the same time I can’t help myself. I want more, even if that means hurting the people I love most in the world.
‘And the other woman. The one you ran away from. Do you know what happened to her?’
‘She married someone else. I hope she’s happy. She’s lovely. She deserves to be. You remind me a little of her.’
‘Really?’ I say, flattered.
‘More than a little, in fact,’ he says, stretching his hand across the table and putting it over mine again.
‘But it all worked out in the end,’ I say, turning mine so that I’m holding his hand.
‘There’s no point in thinking about what might have happened if she hadn’t got pregnant and we hadn’t stayed together,’ he replies. ‘Because she did and we did.’ He removed his hand when the waiter returned with the starters.
‘That’s my philosophy for life,’ I say.
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s probably going to sound a bit heavy but it’s kind of important.’ I say.
‘Go on. I’m listening.’
Ivy and Abe Page 13
