Emma stood silent on the doorstep. The proper thing to do would be to tell him that she loved him too, but she still wanted to mope a little more. She resolved to sulk until lunch time, then make it up to him tonight. Perhaps if the weather cleared up, they could go and sit on Primrose Hill like they used to.
The important thing is that he will be there and it will be okay
.
‘You should go,’ she mumbled into his shoulder. ‘You’ll be late for
Maddy
.’
‘Don’t start.’
She grinned and looked up at him. ‘I’ll cheer up by tonight.’
‘We’ll do something fun.’
‘Fun.’
‘We still have fun, don’t we?’
‘Of course we do,’ she said, and kissed him goodbye.
And they did have fun, though it was of a different kind now. All that yearning and anguish and passion had been replaced by a steady pulse of pleasure and satisfaction and occasional irritation, and this seemed to be a happy exchange; if there had been moments in her life when she had been more elated, there had never been a time when things had been more constant.
Sometimes, she thought, she missed the intensity, not just of their romance, but of the early days of their friendship. She remembered writing ten-page letters late into the night; insane, passionate things full of dopey sentiment and barely hidden
meanings, exclamation marks and underlining. For a while she had written daily postcards too, on top of the hour-long phone-calls just before bed. That time in the flat in Dalston when they had stayed up talking and listening to records, only stopping when the sun began to rise, or at his parents’ house, swimming in the river on New Year’s Day, or that afternoon drinking absinthe in the secret bar in Chinatown; all of these moments and more were recorded and stored in notebooks and letters and wads of photographs, endless photographs. There was a time, it must have been in the early nineties, when they were barely able to pass a photo-booth without cramming inside it, because they had yet to take each other’s permanent presence for granted.
But to just look at someone, to just sit and look and talk and then realise that it’s morning? Who had the time or inclination or energy these days to stay up talking all night? What would you talk about? Property prices? She used to long for those midnight phone-calls; these days if a phone rang late at night it was because there had been an accident, and did they really need more photographs when they knew each other’s faces so well, when they had shoeboxes full of that stuff, an archive of nearly twenty years? Who writes long letters in this day and age, and what is there to care so much about?
She sometimes wondered what her twenty-two-year-old self would think of today’s Emma Mayhew. Would she consider her self-centred? Compromised? A bourgeois sell-out, with her appetite for home ownership and foreign travel, clothes from Paris and expensive haircuts? Would she find her conventional, with her new surname and hopes for a family life? Maybe, but then the twenty-two-year-old Emma Morley wasn’t such a paragon either: pretentious, petulant, lazy, speechifying, judgemental. Self-pitying, self-righteous, self-important, all the selfs except self-confident, the quality that she had always needed the most.
No, this, she felt, was real life and if she wasn’t as curious
or passionate as she once had been, that was only to be expected. It would be inappropriate, undignified, at thirty-eight, to conduct friendships or love affairs with the ardour and intensity of a twenty-two-year-old. Falling in love like that? Writing poetry, crying at pop songs? Dragging people into photo-booths, taking a whole day to make a compilation tape, asking people if they wanted to share your bed, just for company? If you quoted Bob Dylan or T.S. Eliot or, God forbid, Brecht at someone these days they would smile politely and step quietly backwards, and who would blame them? Ridiculous, at thirty-eight, to expect a song or book or film to change your life. No, everything had evened out and settled down and life was lived against a general background hum of comfort, satisfaction and familiarity. There would be no more of those nerve-jangling highs and lows. The friends they had now would be the friends they had in five, ten, twenty years’ time. They expected to get neither dramatically richer nor poorer; they expected to stay healthy for a little while yet. Caught in the middle; middle class, middle-aged; happy in that they were not over happy.
Finally, she loved someone and felt fairly confident that she was loved in return. If someone asked Emma, as they sometimes did at parties, how she and her husband had met, she told them:
‘We grew up together.’
So they went to work as usual. Emma sat at her computer by the window overlooking the tree-lined street, writing the fifth and final ‘Julie Criscoll’ novel, in which her fictional heroine, ironically enough, became pregnant and had to decide between motherhood and university. It wasn’t going very well; the tone was too sombre and introspective, the jokes wouldn’t flow. She was keen to get it finished, and yet uncertain what to do next, or what she was capable of doing; a book for grown-ups perhaps, something serious and properly researched about the Spanish Civil War, or the near-future, something vaguely Margaret Atwoody, something her younger self might respect and admire.
That was the idea anyway. In the meantime, she tidied the flat, made tea, paid some bills, did a coloured wash, put CDs back in their cases, made more tea then finally turned on her computer and stared it into submission.
At the café, Dexter flirted a little with Maddy, then sat in the tiny stock room that smelt oppressively of cheese and attempted to complete the quarterly VAT return. But the gloom and guilt of this morning’s outburst still clung to him, and when he could no longer concentrate he reached for his phone. It used to be Emma who made the conciliatory calls and smoothed things over, but in the eight months since their marriage they seemed to have changed places, and he now found himself incapable of doing anything while he knew she was unhappy. He dialled, imagining her at her desk, looking at her mobile phone, seeing his name appear and turning it off. He preferred it that way – much easier to be sentimental when no-one was going to answer back.
‘So I’m here, doing my VAT, and I keep thinking about you and I just wanted to say don’t worry. I’ve arranged for us to view this house at five o’clock. I’ll text you the address, so, who knows. We’ll see. Period property, good-sized rooms. It’s got a breakfast bar apparently. I know you’ve always dreamt of one. That’s all. Except to say I love you and don’t worry. Whatever it is you’re worrying about, don’t. That’s everything. See you there at five. Love you. Bye.’
As routine demanded, Emma worked until two, ate lunch, then went swimming. In July she sometimes liked to go to the ladies pool on Hampstead Heath, but the day had become precariously dark and overcast, and instead she braved the teenage kids at the indoor pool. For twenty minutes she weaved unhappily between them as they dive-bombed and ducked and flirted with each other, manic with the freedom of the end of term. Afterwards she sat in the changing rooms, listened to Dexter’s message and smiled. She memorised the address of the property and called back.
‘Hi there. It’s me. Just to say, I’m setting out now and I can’t wait to see the breakfast bar. I might be five minutes late. Also thank you for your message and I wanted to say … I’m sorry for being so snappy today, and for that stupid argument. Nothing to do with you. Just a bit nuts at the moment. The important thing is I love you very much. So. There you go. Lucky you! I think that’s everything. Bye my love. Bye.’
Outside the sports centre the clouds had darkened and finally burst, letting loose fat grey drops of warm rain. She cursed the weather and the wet seat of her bicycle and set off across North London towards Kilburn, improvising a route through a maze of residential streets towards Lexington Road.
The rain became heavier, oily drops of brown city water, and Emma rode standing on the pedals with her head lowered so that she was only vaguely aware of a blur of movement in the side road to her left. The sensation is less of flying through the air, more of being picked up and hurled, and when she comes to rest on the roadside verge with her face against the wet pavement, her first instinct is to look for her bicycle, which has somehow disappeared from beneath her. She tries to move her head, but is unable to do so. She wants to take off her helmet, because people are looking at her now, faces craning over her and she looks ridiculous in a bicycle helmet, but the people crouching over her seem fearful and are asking her over and over again are you alright are you alright. One of them is crying and she realises for the first time that she is not alright. She blinks against the rain falling on her face. She is definitely going to be late now. Dexter will be waiting.
She thinks very distinctly of two things.
The first is a photograph of herself at nine years old in a red swimsuit on a beach, she can’t remember where, Filey or Scarborough perhaps. She is with her mother and father who are swinging her towards the camera, their sunburnt faces buckled with laughter. Then she thinks of Dexter, sheltering from the rain on the steps of the new house, looking at his
watch, impatient; he’ll wonder where I am, she thinks. He’ll worry.
Then Emma Mayhew dies, and everything that she thought or felt vanishes and is gone forever.
‘She philosophically noted dates as they came past in the revolution of the year; … her own birthday; and every other day individualized by incidents in which she had taken some share. She suddenly thought one afternoon, when looking in the glass at her fairness, that there was yet another date, of greater importance to her than those; that of her own death, when all these charms would have disappeared; a day which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely there. When was it?’
Thomas Hardy,
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Rankeillor Street, Edinburgh
When she opened her eyes again, the skinny boy was still there, his back to her now as he sat precariously on the edge of her old wooden chair, pulling on his trousers as quietly as possible. She glanced at her radio alarm clock: nine-twenty. They had slept for maybe three hours, and now he was sneaking off. She watched as he placed his hand in the trouser pocket to still the rattling of his loose change, then stood and started to pull on last night’s white shirt. One last glimpse of his long brown back. Handsome. He really was stupidly handsome. She very much wanted him to stay, almost as much perhaps as he clearly wanted to leave. She decided that she would have to speak.
‘Not going without saying goodbye, are you?’
He turned round, caught in the act. ‘I didn’t want to wake you.’
‘Why not?’
‘Just you looked so nice, sleeping there.’
Both knew this was a poor effort. ‘Right. Right, I see.’ She heard herself, needy and annoyed. Don’t let him think you care, Em. Be cool. Be … blasé.
‘I was going to leave you a note, but …’ He pantomimed looking for a pen, oblivious to the jam jar full of them on the desk.
She lifted her head from the pillow and rested it on one hand. ‘I don’t mind. You can leave if you want to. Ships that pass in the night n’all that. Very, what d’you call it… bittersweet.’
He sat on the chair, and continued to button his shirt. ‘Emma?’
‘Yes, Dexter?’
‘I’ve had a really nice time.’
‘I can tell by the way you’re searching for your shoes.’
‘No, seriously.’ Dexter leant forward on the chair. ‘I’m really glad we finally got to talk. And the other stuff as well. After all this time.’ He scrunched his face, looking for just the right words. ‘You’re really,
really
lovely, Em.’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah—’
‘No, you are.’
‘Well you’re lovely too and now you can go.’ She allowed him a small, tight smile. He responded by suddenly crossing the room, and she turned her face up towards him in anticipation, only to find that he was reaching beneath the bed for a discarded sock. He noticed her raised face.
‘Sock under bed,’ he said.
‘Right.’
He perched uneasily on the bedframe, speaking in a strained, chipper tone as he pulled on his socks. ‘Big day today! Driving back!’
‘Where to, London?’
‘Oxfordshire. That’s where my parents live. Most of the time anyway.’
‘Oxfordshire. Very nice,’ she said, privately mortified at the speed with which intimacy evaporates, to be replaced by small talk. Last night they had said and done all those things, and now they were like strangers in a bus queue. The mistake she had made was to fall asleep and break the spell. If they had stayed awake, they might still have been kissing now, but instead it was all over and she found herself saying; ‘How long will that take then? To Oxfordshire?’
‘’Bout seven, eight hours. My dad’s an excellent driver.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘You’re not going back to…?’
‘Leeds. No I’m staying here for the summer. I told you, remember?’
‘Sorry, I was really pretty drunk last night.’
‘And that, m’lud, is the case for the defence…’
‘It’s not an excuse, it’s …’ He turned to look at her. ‘Are you annoyed with me, Em?’
‘Em? Who’s Em?’
‘Em
ma
, then.’
‘I’m not annoyed, I just … wish you’d woken me up, instead of being all furtive and sneaking off …’
‘I was going to write you a note!’
‘And what was it going to say, this precious note?’
‘It was going to say “I’ve taken your purse”.’
She laughed, a low morning growl that caught the back of her throat, and there was something so gratifying about her smile, the two deep parentheses in the corners of her mouth, the way she kept her lips tightly closed as if holding something back, that he almost regretted telling his lie. He had no intention of leaving at lunch time. His parents were going to stay over and take him out to dinner that night, then leave tomorrow morning. The lie had been instinctive in order to facilitate a quick, clean escape, but now as he leant across to kiss her he wondered if there was a way to withdraw the deceit somehow. Her mouth was soft, and she allowed herself to fall back on the bed, which still smelt of wine, her warm body and fabric conditioner, and he decided that he really must try to be more honest in future.