Authors: Catherine Sampson
“I’ll put the twins to bed first,” I volunteered.
“Okay,” Carol agreed, and smiled at Finney, glad to please him. She has her doubts about journalists, but she’s fond of a
little crime and punishment.
We were too hungry to pick our venue well. The Common Touch used to be a real pub with a real name. Now it’s part wine bar,
part aspiring fusion restaurant, part club. Which means you can’t get to the bar, the menu is bad and expensive, and the music’s
too loud. Or perhaps we just weren’t in the mood. We picked at our food, pushed aside plates piled high with leftovers. I
braced myself and launched into it.
“I heard . . . Well, Veronica told me she’d heard . . .”
“That Emma’s back.” He finished my sentence for me and reached across the table to take my hand.
“Back where?”
“On my doorstep.”
“Did she”—I felt ridiculous—“did she step inside?”
“Look . . .” He sighed, leaned back in his chair, away from me. “She turned up out of the blue last week. She’s split up with
Greg. She was upset. We talked. She wanted us to try again.”
“For God’s sake, she walked out on you.”
He gave me a look that told me to butt out of it, and I shut up. I withdrew my hand from his.
“She’s staying in town,” he said. “She’s got some job interviews. She’ll be fine.”
He shook his head and shrugged, as though there were nothing to any of this and the subject should be immediately dismissed.
“I don’t much care whether she’s fine or not. How do you feel?”
Finney looked surprised. “What do you mean, how do I feel?”
“What do you think I mean? I mean your ex-wife suddenly reappears and wants you back. How do you feel about that?”
Finney averted his eyes from mine and found something to look at beyond my left shoulder. “Well . . .” He shrugged again and
screwed his face up. “It feels strange.”
“Strange good or strange bad?”
He sighed. “Strange. I don’t know. Just strange.”
“And if I hadn’t heard it from Veronica?”
“You’d have heard it from me.”
“You’ve never told me what she’s like. I’ve never even seen a photograph.”
He shrugged. “What’s the point?”
“I want to know, that’s the point.”
He shrugged again. “I don’t know.”
“How difficult can it be?” I ran through a few possibilities. “Does she look like Catherine Zeta-Jones?” He shook his head.
“Nicole Kidman?”
He considered for a moment. “More Cameron Diaz.”
I groaned and buried my head in my hands. He reached out and took my hand again.
“Oh, come on, Robin, I’m just kidding around. You started it. What is this about? You don’t want my ex-wife to come after
me, but you’re not sure you want to come after me either. Look—” He broke off. “Recently . . .” He gave up again, then lurched
on. “Maybe you’d prefer it if I just took myself off.”
When I didn’t immediately answer, he gave an exasperated grunt and a little shake of the head. How had this happened? I wondered.
I’d thought Finney was going to break up with me, but here we were, tables turned.
“It’s just that sometimes I don’t know how to do this,” I said eventually.
He sat back. Our hands were still clasped, but Finney’s jaw was tense, as if he were getting ready to receive a blow.
“Because Adam left you,” he said, “and you think I’ll do the same.”
“You might. My father left us all, your wife left you. Everyone leaves.”
“You’re certainly going the right way about it.” He shook his head impatiently. “What else?”
“Come on, Finney, even your mother abandoned you. . . .”
His face froze. We stared at each other, appalled.
“So let’s break the habit,” he said slowly.
I had lost all awareness of anyone else in the restaurant. I was aware only of Finney’s hand still holding mine. And his mouth,
which betrayed his unhappiness. He cleared his throat.
“What else?”
“When I was away. You were so far away. It felt like you didn’t exist. But surely, even so far away, I should have been able
to, you know, to think of you as close to me.”
He sat back, and with the movement his hand slipped away from mine.
“And the twins, did they exist?”
“That’s different.”
“And your family, your mother, Lorna, Tanya. Are you going to cut them off on the basis that they don’t exist either?”
I sat back in my chair, irritated. “It’s not like that. They’re there no matter where I am. If I tried to make them vanish,
they’d still be there. If you’re there, it’s because I choose to be with you . . . or if I choose to be without you, then
you . . . wouldn’t be.”
There was a long pause. His voice was hoarse and so low that I had to strain to hear it.
“Whereas I. By contrast. Do choose to be with you. Entirely.”
I searched his eyes for clues. Was there irony there? Our relationship had been born in a hailstorm of sarcasm, and I saw
no reason why it should not end the same way. He puffed his cheeks out, then raised his eyebrows in rueful inquiry.
“Okay. What else?”
“Nothing else.”
“Thank God for that.”
He sat back and smiled at me, but in a sad, sorry kind of way. I could not help but smile back.
“I thought,” I told him, “that you’d invited me to dinner to break up with me.”
“Ha!” His face twisted in bitter amusement.
“What?”
“What date is it?”
Realization dawned, and I buried my head in my hands.
“Oh shit, I’m so sorry,” I said. “It’s your birthday.”
He shook his head, embarrassed to have made anything of it. “Yeah, well, as you know, it never was much of a birthday.”
Finney doesn’t know exactly what day he was born. He was abandoned as a baby by his mother, and he doesn’t even know her name.
He’s never tried to find her. His birthday is a bureaucratic invention, a formula subtracting his estimated age on arrival
at the orphanage from the date of arrival.
I reached out and took his hand. “I’m really sorry.”
But Finney hates pity.
“Come on,” he said, “let’s get out of here.”
If we’d parted outside the restaurant that night, the things I’d said could have ended it forever. I had revealed my lack
of trust. We might have walked away and never seen each other again. Instead of which we obstinately returned to my house
and went to bed, lying pressed tight together in unhappy silence.
I
N the morning, Finney left for work looking distracted and hurried. Neither of us was in a mood to revisit the conversation
of the night before. I checked my e-mail and found a message from my mother after several days of silence.
The sun is getting to me. It is doing things to me I wouldn’t have thought possible. It’s Peeling something away, and easing
my joints, and Soothing the aches and pains of Old Age, smoothing out the wrinkles like a hot iron. I walk around barefoot,
and the earth burns through the soles of my feet. Apparently they don’t smoke cannabis here as much as they used to, which
is a great Pity. Nevertheless, London is receding to the edges of my consciousness, my Daughters and my darling Grandchildren
are secure in my Heart, of course, but I have to admit that you’re not uppermost in my Mind. I am being challenged—so I am
told—not to Think, but to Feel.
There is a great change in circumstances here. I’ve told you all about my friend Nancy. As you might remember, she is married
to Nate, but I discovered when I got here that, although they have the same address, they are both with new partners. Nancy
has taken a Lesbian lover called DeeDee, and Nate has a Boyfriend—a sixty-year-old boy—called Clark. DeeDee and Clark were
previously living together as man and wife, but they have Swapped Partners!!! The two Men live together in the attic, the
two Women live in a garden house, and they all get Together for dinner. I have been on the lookout for problems—Surely there
must be Problems—but so far I have detected only Peace and Light.
The Subject of your father came up in conversation at lunch the other day. I was asked by Nancy, after I had spoken briefly
on the subject, whether he—your father—had any Redeeming Feature. I said No, and she and DeeDee looked at me with Pity. Does
he love anything or anyone? DeeDee asked. I told them I didn’t know and then I’m afraid I said I didn’t really Care. I am
sure I set back my Personal Transformation by weeks. But I’m right, aren’t I, that he has no Redeeming Feature?
I read and reread, reveling in the vision of my mother in California. But the bit about my father unsettled me. My mother
had never before wavered in her silent contempt for my father. It wasn’t clear that she was wavering now, but I found her
uncertainty disconcerting, and it stayed with me all day long.
I went to the office, where I made arrangements for Majorca. A sixteen-year-old schoolgirl had last been seen there in a nightclub
in the early hours of the morning two months earlier. Her three friends only realized the next day that she was gone, and
when she failed to turn up for their flight home, they became alarmed. Local police had been looking for her ever since, but
her parents seemed to have spent more energy quarreling than looking for their daughter. Then I had a call from reception,
saying that Justin was downstairs, did I have a moment to see him?
I glanced around the room. Sal was out of the country, Penny had gone with him, and our usual bevy of camera operators had
taken up their cameras and walked off. I wanted very much to speak to Justin, and to speak to him in privacy. But to bring
him here, into this office, would only remind him that I was a journalist and that he should watch what he said.
“Okay, I’ll come and get him,” I said.
He was sitting on a sofa in reception, his crutches propped up next to him. He greeted me with an anxious smile, and I thought
how strange it was that he shared his father’s pale beauty but that his facial expressions came from somewhere else. It could
only have been his dead mother, I guessed, who had smiled with that worried, lopsided smile. When Justin greeted me with an
apology, I thought that must have been his mother, too. I couldn’t imagine Kes ever apologizing. I had seen Kes’s defense
of Mike, his refusal to let his friend be harassed by me. Justin, by contrast, seemed to spend his life in a perpetual cower.
“I’m sorry to disturb you,” Justin said, struggling to his feet.
“No problem. Come on,” I told him, “I’ll show you around.”
He shook his head, frustrated. “I don’t want a tour, I just want to talk.”
I signed him in and suggested coffee from the cafeteria, but he didn’t want that, either. So I took him up to the office.
I cleared off Sal’s comfortable leather chair—there was a pair of socks on it that I assumed belonged to Sal—and Justin sat
down awkwardly. I asked about his leg, and he said it was still hurting, but it was clear he didn’t want to talk about that,
either. I shouldn’t have worried about taking him to the office; he seemed to be completely unaware of his surroundings.
“I came to apologize for . . . well, for the way Dad spoke to you. He just wanted to do things right by Mike. And . . . Mike’s
really angry with you. He thinks it’s because of you that the police are questioning him again.”
Justin looked at me questioningly, wanting me to deny it. When I didn’t, he pushed some more.
“When Mike came back from the police station, he slammed the door and went up to Dad’s flat, and I could hear Mike shouting
about you, and how it’s because of you that the police won’t let him alone. He was shouting like he wanted to kill you. Dad
was telling him to shut up and get a grip, but once Mike’s got something in his head, he doesn’t let up. Everything is black
and white to him, there’s wrong and there’s right, and what you did was wrong.”
He paused again, and again I didn’t say anything.
“Is it because of you?” he asked eventually, forced by my silence to state his question bluntly. “I mean, I’d like to defend
you, you’re my friend. So if it’s got nothing to do with you, I should say that to them. But . . .”
He shook his head slowly. I was touched that he wanted to defend me, but I felt guilty, too. If this wounded boy stepped up
against Mike and Kes, they would make mincemeat of him. And how real was this friendship Justin was claiming with me? I had
befriended him largely because I wanted to get closer to Mike. Justin was a source. It was I who was deriving the net gain
from our relationship, in terms of knowledge. Even now, hearing how angry Mike was with me, I was glad to have the information,
grateful for the insight into Mike’s head. To me it indicated a man who was cornered. I deserved nothing from Justin in the
way of loyalty.
“Look, I can’t tell the police what to do,” I told him. “When they realized Mike had met Melanie before, they had to find
out why he hadn’t told them. That’s why they’re questioning him. If he’d been straight with them in the first place, this
wouldn’t have happened. But whatever you do, don’t say that to them. Mike’s just angry with me because he doesn’t want to
be angry with himself. Just stay out of it.”
Justin searched my eyes. “So it was you who told the police?”
I thought I had finessed this point, but I’m a hopeless liar. I nodded.
Justin shook his head, reached for his crutches, and got up. “Well, all I can say is you should be careful,” he said impatiently,
“because Mike is really, really pissed at you. And he was trained to kill people with his bare hands.”
I couldn’t help smiling, it sounded so melodramatic.
“Really”—Justin was hurt—“Dad’s always telling me how Mike was lookout one night, and he killed this man who was creeping
up on their jeep with a grenade in his hand.”
“Okay,” I told him, holding up my hand, “I’ll be careful.”
Justin nodded, satisfied.
“Has Mike talked to you about what happened out there, when he met Melanie?”
“You think he talks to me about things like that?”
“Why don’t you ask your dad?” I suggested. “Mike might have told him.”
“Why should I care what happened?” Justin asked.