I drank some wine, and we were quiet. I was dwelling on the email from Alex, not quite ready to offer it up. Fitz asked if I’d had a good weekend. I said it was routine, that I’d washed and ironed, visited my mother, done some work. I missed out seeing Phil for just one hour in the park because that would surely involve some sort of explanation, but he noticed the absence.
‘What about your bloke? Is he planning to take the job in Ireland?’
‘I think so.’
‘Can’t make up his mind?’
I shook my head. ‘No.’ I realised the futility of pretence. ‘He’s married.’
Fitz did a double take, sucked in his breath. ‘So the shit is about to hit the fan?’
‘Yes. Maybe. Although it’s not as bad as it sounds.’
I explained Phil’s arrangement with Sue, and that probably the worst thing for her would be his going so far away rather than going at all.
‘Don’t bank on it,’ Fitz said. ‘Agreeing to do something and having it done to you are very different things.’ I raised my eyebrows but he didn’t bite, just asked me more questions. However, I didn’t want to think about Phil right then, or to discuss it, to lay it neatly at Fitz’s feet: this is how it is. Sensing my reluctance, he left it alone. Outside a few spatters of rain hit the window.
‘You wanted to talk about something?’ he reminded me.
I pulled my gaze back from the stove’s glow. ‘About Alex.’
‘I guessed that.’
We exchanged looks, each of us with our own idea of Alex. I was trying to recall the things Fitz had said that at the time had seemed odd, but now that I was here, face to face, it was hard to remember what they were. What did he know that I didn’t?
‘Alex Day replied to my email,’ I said. Fitz sat up. ‘Not to the first one, but I sent another and this time I mentioned you.’ Now he looked at me warily. ‘That’s when she replied.’
‘What did she say?’
‘
Sorry. I don’t know a Beth Steele
.’
He frowned. ‘So what makes you think it is her?’
‘I don’t know exactly.’ This was true. It was just a notion that had fluttered up inside me the instant I’d read it. ‘But if it isn’t, and she’s bothered enough to reply, wouldn’t she be curious? At least ask something, find out who I am? And if she’s not curious because she knows precisely who I am, then—’
‘And if you’re right,’ he interrupted, ‘and it’s her? It looks like she doesn’t want you to know that.’
‘No.’ I watched him twizzling his glass by its stem, his eyes narrowed. ‘You saw her, didn’t you, Fitz? After I left London. You know something about her that I don’t.’
He looked up at me and I could see in his face, in the slight hesitation before he answered, in the way his hand reached for the back of his neck, that I was right.
‘It wasn’t like you mean.’
I stared at him. ‘But, I don’t know how I mean.’
Fitz shifted in his seat, wriggling like a fish on a hook. ‘It wasn’t straight away. This was years after… I bumped into her on the tube.’ A piece of wood settled in the stove and as I watched the shower of sparks fly up it dawned on me exactly what Fitz was about to tell me. The shock of it thudded into my stomach. I sat very still, looking at him in disbelief. He was staring into the flames but then gave a huge, deep sigh, as if it was time now to get this thing out of the way. ‘We did sort of…get together.’
Something crucial seemed to get rubbed out, cancelled, by that one simple statement, by the idea that I shared Fitz with Alex. In one moment everything changed.
‘Jesus, Fitz, you…’
‘I know, I know.’
‘How long for?’
‘A few weeks, no more. It was just… I suppose we were both lonely. But it didn’t work. It would never have worked.’
I pushed some hair back off my face, then folded my hands in my lap, staring down at them. I noticed a jagged nail that needed filing.
‘So you bumped into her on the tube and you got together.’ My voice sounded flat, unreal. ‘Which, apart from anything else, means you do know where she went that night, and lots of things about her that I don’t. And you weren’t going to tell me?’
‘Beth, this has been on my mind since last week. I couldn’t decide… I didn’t know whether to say anything. I was thinking that you’d get the wrong idea, start imagining it was some big thing, which it wasn’t. But then I kept telling myself that it’s all such a long time ago anyway, so…’
‘So what difference does it make now?’
He swallowed hard. ‘Something like that. But this evening, when you said you wanted to talk things through, I knew you’d sussed something out.’
But not this much.
‘And then,’ I said coldly, ‘you thought if Beth does track Alex down she’ll find out anyway and that would look bad on you?’
He looked away. ‘Maybe. Yes.’ He was frowning into his glass and I started to fiddle with a ring that Phil bought me, an engraved silver band. ‘I was going through this whole scenario in my head — you and Alex having some sort of reunion, catching up, talking about the past, and then Alex says, by the way, me and Fitz, we had a little fling…you know? And how bad you’d feel that I hadn’t told you myself, that you’d be hurt, or angry. But then I wasn’t sure how serious you are about trying to find her, and maybe you didn’t need to know about something that was nothing, and then maybe it wouldn’t mean anything to you anyway… I dunno.’ He looked up at me. ‘So, are you?’
‘What, hurt, angry or serious?’
He spread his hands. ‘Any, or all three.’
‘I don’t know, not yet.’ At several years’ distance the acute envy burning into me seemed undignified. I thought, what’s the grown-up thing to say? ‘I suppose what happened in your life after me is none of my business, is it?’ He threw me a look that was somewhere between relief and surprise. I’m playing this wrong, I thought. He’ll assume it means nothing. But there was nothing I could do differently, not without exposing the stupid, jealous teenage me inside, kicking and spitting. ‘It’s kind of unexpected.’
‘It was a mistake. One of those mistakes you want to go back and undo.’
‘And Alex?’ I asked. ‘Would she say that?’
He winced. ‘She said it at the time.’
Some consolation, then. Fitz stood up and fetched the bottle of wine.
‘At Dan’s,’ I said slowly, watching him pour some more, ‘didn’t you wonder if I already knew about this? You seemed to think she would have got in touch with me.’
‘Of course. Did you not see how nervous I was?’
I shook my head. ‘A little, no more than me. What did you think I’d do, slap you?’
‘No, but I thought you might politely freeze me out and I’d be left looking like a fool in front of Dan.’
Suddenly my neck was aching; I pulled my shoulders back, massaged them a little. ‘Well, are you going to put me out of my misery and tell me all the things I don’t know? Like where she went that night?’
‘Okay.’ But he paused, ran one finger round the rim of his glass. ‘Beth, it was nothing, you know? Just a little bit of desperation on both sides.’ I nodded, still massaging my neck, and waited for him to go on, although a tiny part of my mind was focused now on why Fitz had felt desperate. ‘All right. She and Pete crashed on the floor of some dope-head friend of his. It was meant to be for a couple of nights but they ended up living there for months. Then Pete started getting more and more stoned, him and this guy smoking heavily every night. Alex said he was scoring for himself as much as to sell. She got a job in a café, to keep some money coming in. The next thing she knew, she came home and found him shooting up. She packed her bags and left.’
I pictured Alex’s one bag, her backpack, with Anarchy in the UK painted on in Tippex, and I heard her voice:
I’m not madly in love with Pete and I don’t suppose he is with me.
‘Where did she go?’
He spread his hands wide, pulling a face. ‘All over the place, metaphorically speaking, but she never actually left London. I was living in a tiny flat in Battersea when we met, she was dossing with friends, wherever. She had to leave one place and she asked if she could move in for a while. It was the same with jobs — she went through them like a dose of salts, from one to the next, whatever she could get.’
I sat quiet for a minute, and still, while these new pieces of information wormed their way slowly, painfully into my brain. ‘What did she say about me?’
‘Huh?’
‘You said she was going to contact me. The other day, you said that. Why would she?’
He shrugged. ‘I was trying to persuade her that you hadn’t talked, that you hadn’t betrayed her, but she insisted it was obvious you had, from something her mother said. And then suddenly she decided she wanted to hear your side of the story, wanted to contact you. I asked how she’d do that when she also wanted to stay hidden. She thought she could write to your home address and ask you to meet her somewhere.’
‘But that would have meant putting her trust in me again, when trust was the issue.’
‘Exactly.’
‘So she never did.’ I picked up my glass and drank. The wine is rich, heavy, and it’s loosening my tongue. ‘I tried to find her, you know.’ He looked gratifyingly surprised. ‘I went to…’ I stopped. It would sound crazy.
‘Went to…?’
‘I went all the way to Madrid, looking for Alex.’
‘Madrid?’ His eyes widened. ‘Why?’
‘Because a friend told me she’d seen Alex there, working as a nanny. I thought if I did the same I’d be bound to bump into her and I was in this dead-end job, so…’ I smiled, at Fitz’s incredulous face. ‘I hated it. Not Madrid, but the family, they treated me like a slave, the children were brats, and I was still—’
I stopped abruptly.
‘Still…?’
‘I suppose I was homesick.’
Fitz studied my face. ‘No. You were about to say something else.’
I shrugged. ‘I was lonely. I mean, I made a few friends, but basically I was still missing you.’
His eyes changed; he leaned forward.
‘Why do you think I got into this thing with Alex?’ I shook my head, surprised by the intensity of his question. He started talking fast, the words tumbling out. ‘Because it was a connection with you. When Alex said she was going to try to contact you I thought I might even get to see you again. But then, we started arguing, bickering a lot, and she moved out.’ He drained his glass and set it down in the hearth. ‘The night she left she said she knew I still thought about you. She was going to give me your address so I could write, but then I said something to upset her and she got into a foul mood and just went, slamming the door and screaming abuse.’ He was watching me carefully. ‘She did that a lot.’
For a moment I couldn’t speak as I took this all in: Alex, so angry; Fitz, and me; that opportunity snatched away from us.
‘And you never knew if she’d talked to me or not.’
‘No,’ Fitz said. ‘I never knew.’ He turned his head towards the window, where the sky had gone very dark, a bruised purple. He got up to switch on a couple of lamps. ‘Bit of a mess, wasn’t it?’
‘Would you have written?’ I asked.
‘Yes. I think so. Why not?’
His phone rang, from the kitchen. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, and then I heard him talking to Kirsty. She’d phoned to say she got home safely. Fitz talked quietly, and I heard him laugh once or twice but not much of what he was saying.
It’s all too fucking late, I thought savagely.
When the phone call was finished he stayed hesitantly in the doorway, hands shoved in pockets, staring down at the floor. I thought I should go, and stood up, put on my jacket.
‘Beth…’ He stopped, and I waited. ‘Do you really want to open this all up again?’
When I didn’t answer he said, ‘Look, it meant nothing to me. I don’t care what she might say about me. It’s you I’m thinking of. She could be so…vicious.’
‘Let me worry about that,’ I said. ‘I’ll keep in touch, Fitz.’
*
6
th
August, 1977
At the end of my allotted two weeks, with my parents’ holiday over, I board the bus back to Sheffield, with eighty-three pence and an aching heart. Fitz comes to see me off; we cling onto each other like a proper Romeo and Juliet and all my doubts about his feelings are swept away — some consolation for being separated. Only when the driver starts up the engine do I get on the bus, with the promise that somehow I’ll come back down.
Earlier, when I said goodbye to Alex, and that I’d be back, she half-jokingly said why didn’t I just stay, join her there, stay with Fitz and bugger A-levels, bugger everything? We played around with the idea for a while but we both knew I wouldn’t. But now, as the coach swings out of the station and Fitz becomes a black dot in the distance, I promise myself I will somehow snatch a few more days at Empire Road before the end of the summer. Anything else is unthinkable.
We keep in touch, but it isn’t easy. I write to Fitz every day but tell him not to write back — scared that my mother will think they’re letters from Alex and start snooping — and we manage a couple of phone-calls, not from home, but from one phone-box to another. None of it seems enough.
I try to keep busy, going to work at Woolworths each day and sometimes out with friends. Not that I want to see friends; I feel so removed from them, and whenever Alex’s name comes up I get anxious, and have to bite my lip or say I don’t want to talk about it. But then sitting in my bedroom missing Fitz isn’t much fun either. Besides, I have this gut instinct that a point may come when I need my friends’ help, one way or another.
Towards the end of this time I send Fitz a parcel of books, some that I’ve read and think he’ll like, because he said that he was bored without me. In my last letter I tell him I’m coming back and to meet me off the bus in two days’ time.
*
Fitz looks small in the crowds, almost insignificant, and I have a moment’s panic that after two weeks it will all be different, that the magic will have gone. Then he comes over and gives me such a fierce hug I feel my ribs protest. Instantly the excitement is back, a kick in my belly. His hair is newly cut, short, so that the springy curls are tamed. Alex did it, he tells me. The milky skin of his arms shows up freckles, from time spent in the garden. These are the new things I notice. The rest is the same: black jeans and black shirt, with rolled-up sleeves and shades dangling from his back pocket; the tilt of his head, the sharp little nose and the skewed smile as he looks me up and down; the scent of sandalwood from soap I brought with me last time. That smell, together with a trace of the earthy must from the walls in Fitz’s room, brings my spirits right up after a coach journey full of bad thoughts. The bus was delayed in holiday traffic and I’d sat there stewing in sun and guilt.