‘Phil never liked birds.’ Dad was chuckling too, and, mercifully, allowed the subject to turn to the dinner he’d just half eaten, the flavours of yoghurt drink he most liked and disliked. ‘I’m glad you’re here as well,’ he said. ‘I don’t like visiting on my own.’
‘I know what you mean,’ I agreed, and I held his hands in mine to reassure him that we were both visitors, that the visit was finished and we were just taking a little break before going home. I did this every time now, even though I was not supposed to tell him outright lies; I had done it ever since the time I’d insisted he understand that he was the patient and I the visitor and he had become very distressed.
Occasionally I added little false details to cheer him up, such as that I would drive him home in my new top-of-the-range convertible and show him my house, a beautiful old place on the famous Walnut Grove. Perhaps the embellishments were as much for myself as for him.
Sometimes he demanded to know who it was we’d been visiting and I would make up a name on the spot, but today he did not.
No, I was not thinking of Arthur when I came home. I was thinking, in fact, of Matt; I was thinking that I would phone him and find out which drinking hole he and his friends had climbed into, join them in it. Somewhere along the line I’d stopped thinking of them as ‘our’ friends and recognised them as his, recognised too their common aim: to prolong their twenties into their thirties and devote themselves to the dance of dodging next steps (while denying that such a dance existed). Those who succumbed to marriage or parenthood were either mocked or marginalised by the group, while those who remained knew to keep any nobler ambitions to themselves. It was absurd.
But tonight I didn’t care about any of that. Tonight I needed to be among the old crowd, to sit in a group of consciously self-centred adults and be absorbed into the Saturday-night smoulder of the living world, to remind myself that the hospital unit was a capsule I could enter and leave at will. If I could have, I would have bent time back to the start of Matt and me, to when the wandering hands on my body were his and not those of a dementia sufferer.
As I’d expected, the flat was empty and had been left by him in the usual disarray. Less explicable were the signs in the bedroom of hasty packing; on closer inspection I found that his backpack was gone. There was nothing sinister about this, for we had long since reached the point where we no longer included each other in weekend plans – I worked every Saturday and went to the hospital either the same evening or the following afternoon, while Matt had every weekend free – but it was a first to find him gone and to have no idea where.
I dialled his mobile. ‘Are you away for the night or something?’
‘I’m in Scotland.’ Raucous sound effects placed him in the very bar of my dreams.
‘Scotland? What for?’
‘Biking with the sales team. I told you the other day, Em.’
I vaguely recalled talk of mountain bikes and trail grades, but I was fairly sure I hadn’t been apprised of any forthcoming dates. ‘Oh, OK. I must have forgotten. When are you back? Tomorrow?’
‘Not till Monday.’
Something – a thwarting of that need for physical contact, a final acknowledgement that the clock could not be turned back and this man would always be in a different country from me, even when in the next room – made me say what I should have said months ago. ‘Can we talk when you get home? About us.’
‘What about us?’ His tone became slippery, that of a man being unjustly hounded by an ex-girlfriend. Which I was, I understood; ex in all but name.
‘Everything.’ But I spoke gently. I did not want to insult him. ‘I don’t want to go on like this and I don’t think you do, either.’
I heard him sigh. There would be no struggle, no wires crossed or cut. ‘Fine. Monday night. But I’ve got to go now.’
The conversation did nothing to quell my urgent need for a drink. There was no alcohol in the flat and so I left at once for the off-licence on the high street, already rehearsing in my head the conversation Matt and I would have on Monday evening: candid and personal or cautious and indirect? In their own ways, each would bring sorrow, if only for old times’ sake.
Walking past the pub on the corner of the Grove and the high street, I saw Arthur Woodhall sitting with two or three others at a table in the window, his face square to the glass, and I waved to him, slackening my pace a little in the expectation of a return gesture. When it didn’t come, I hurried on, telling myself that the glare on his side of the window meant he’d not caught my face, only general movement.
But in the wine shop I became aware of someone arriving in the doorway soon after me and I knew before looking that it was him: he had seen me, followed me.
‘Oh,’ I said. I felt an immediate orchestra of effects inside my body and knew I had no hope of silencing them. ‘Didn’t I just see you in the pub?’
He looked briefly about him in mild surprise, as if not quite clear where it was he had found himself. ‘I told them I left my wallet at home.’
This was not an answer to the question I’d actually asked, but since I was peering at him as if at an apparition, I thought it possible he was doing something similar aurally. ‘But you didn’t,’ I said, simply.
He scratched at the centre of his forehead and left a pink mark. Our eyes locked, bringing a stutter to my pulse at the sight of his expression: fascination, vague fear, as if I were an exotic creature he’d accidentally cornered. ‘I’m with some neighbours,’ he said. ‘I wondered, would you like to join us?’
I hesitated. ‘That’s very kind of you, but wouldn’t they find it odd if you came back with me instead of your wallet?’ I’d noted his use of the singular – ‘
I’m
with some neighbours’ – and needed to hear the crucial clarification. ‘Anyway, what would your wife say if you suddenly reappeared with another woman? She might not like it.’
‘Sylvie’s in Sussex this weekend with the boys.’
‘Sussex?’
‘We’ve got a place there.’
Of course they did. The Woodhalls’ life would be one of second homes and pieds-à-terre, Michelin-starred suppers and weekends in deluxe hotels. And yet here he was in a grungy off-licence, apparently transfixed by… me.
‘I’m on my own as well. Matt’s gone on a biking trip to Scotland.’
‘Right.’
As he stepped aside to let a chain of new customers enter, my mind turned over a dozen possible outcomes to the question I burned to ask. The worst of these was that I’d be rejected outright and later be confronted by Sylvie or one of her friends (I refused to allow the face of Nina Meeks to come into focus), laughed at or snubbed in the street, whispered about. But this was London, even streets with residents’ associations like the Grove afforded a certain measure of anonymity to those who stepped out of line. People were too busy with their families and careers to conduct witch-hunts. No, the worst that could happen was still worlds away from what I’d seen earlier in the evening.
Goodness knew how long it took me to think all of this but Arthur just waited in silence while I did, an actor whose colleague is having difficulty with her lines but who has no helpful improvisation of his own to hand.
‘After the pub, come and have a drink at my place if you like,’ I said at last, and in not making a question of it, it seemed to have less criminal intent.
He did not speak. Nothing of him moved, not even his eyes, but I knew the answer was yes.
‘Do you remember where I live?’
‘One-nine-nine, Flat B.’
‘That’s right.’
It was a tense, skeletal exchange of desires. When he turned and left it seemed to me that the meeting might not in fact have taken place, but was a desperate fantasy brought on by the events of the day, the hospital visit and the flight of Matt; the fiction of a woman too tired to conjure dialogue any sharper. I half expected the man behind the till to ask me what I thought I was doing talking to myself.
Nonetheless I chose a much nicer wine than I normally would, bought two bottles instead of one, and hurried back to the flat, my earlier exhaustion evaporated. Tidying up would have to wait while I addressed my personal hygiene. I showered and scrubbed off the smells of hospital and tube and rubbed rose oil into my skin, dressed in jeans and a silk blouse, heels in place of the trainers I’d been wearing. I dried my damp hair and twisted it from my face, put on lipstick and eyeliner. I was neither the exaggerated confection I’d been at the Laings’ party nor the colourless drone I must have appeared just now in the off-licence. Then I cleared up the one decent space in the flat, the living room with the tall Georgian window, and lit orange-blossom candles to sweeten the air.
It was ten o’clock by then. I didn’t know what time the pub closed or how much longer he’d want to spend there. As I waited, the suspicion returned that I’d misconstrued our encounter, suspending me breathlessly between fear and hunger. Half of me prayed it
was
a delusion, that I
had
invented it; the other half wanted to commit suicide if it did not turn out to be true, if he did not come. My head swam with the recognition that somehow, with neither warning nor logical justification, Arthur Woodhall had become the person I most needed to see in the world. No one else would do.
He arrived at close to eleven. As he came through the door he exhibited none of the commotion I was experiencing; only when I caught sight of myself in the mirror by the door did I realise mine was not outwardly evident either. I
looked
utterly composed. I was clean and shiny-eyed and wholesome, like someone who’d just showered after a run. I didn’t look anything like an adulterer beautified for seduction.
‘Hello again.’ I stepped aside to let him in, not sure how to proceed. I’d imagined him kissing me at once, a bold, greedy kiss in place of spoken greeting, but that now seemed both an absurd assumption and an adolescent cliché. In the living room I gestured to the sofa – our only seating – and went to the kitchen to fetch the wine. Returning, I sat next to him, turning primly inwards as if I were the guest and he – easy and expectant, left arm hugging the back of the sofa, right foot resting against the coffee table – the host.
‘Sorry about the flat,’ I said. ‘It must be the only dive left on the whole street.’
‘I like it. It reminds me of one of the places I lived years ago when I was training.’ Hearing himself, Arthur apologised. ‘Maybe I should rephrase that.’
‘Oh, don’t worry, I completely agree. It
is
like student digs. Not that I ever went to university, but even if I had it would be long enough ago by now that I should have worked my way up to something more salubrious.’
‘“By now”? How old are you, Emily?’
‘Thirty. How old are you?’
‘Forty-eight.’
Eighteen years. It was about what I had guessed.
‘An old man to you, huh?’ Arthur smiled.
‘No.’ I thought briefly of Ronnie in the unit, of the heedless infant his condition had made of him; I thought of my father, shrunken and ancient.
‘Have you had a rough day?’ he said, narrowing those flecked eyes a fraction, and I thought he must be some sort of mind reader. But then I realised he was commenting on the speed with which I was draining my wine.
‘Yes, as it happens. Terrible. But I feel much better now.’ Now you’re here. I put down my glass and turned to face him properly, waiting, hoping. All at once I was terrified. The prospect of rejection was a thousand times more powerful here than it had been in the wine shop. Now it felt as if it would be the end of my world if this went wrong, that I’d have to leave the area, and in a hurry, overnight. Matt would have to report me as a missing person. So stricken was I by this thought that when Arthur began to move towards me I remained perfectly motionless, which caused him to hesitate, and we hovered uncertainly in the space in front of one another.
‘Have I misunderstood this?’ he asked, anxious not to offend me but evidently not at all self-conscious.
‘No, no, you haven’t. Of course you haven’t.’ But still I couldn’t move, mesmerised by the closeness of him, this man who was both a stranger and someone I seemed already to know as well as I did myself.
‘Good. I didn’t think so.’ His face came closer and warm skin touched mine, mouth first, hands soon after. His kisses were hard and precise, almost formal, his fingers gentle and vague, entirely
in
formal, and the two in conjunction sent me leaping over any last barrier of inhibition. Soon we were having sex on the sofa, clutching and straining and groaning, and it was the most alive I had ever been, my responses outside the limits of normal sensations; as I said, it was like being activated, set in motion for the first time. Afterwards, I was almost limp-limbed with the new knowledge of it, the giddying sense that everything had been made better, all the faults of my life corrected, the future blessed.
Which I
know
sounds ridiculous, an overreaction by anyone’s standards.
‘I feel like I’m under the influence of some mind-bending drug,’ I told him as we lay flattened against one another. I adored the stinging heat of his skin, the sharpness of his collarbone against my cheek, the beat of his pulse. ‘Did you spike my wine with something from the hospital pharmacy?’
‘I’m not sure I needed to,’ he said. ‘And endorphins
are
very similar to opiates.’ He stroked my damp hair for a time, growing more serious. ‘Just for the record, I don’t want you to feel bad about this:
I
pursued
you
.’
‘You did follow me down the street and into an off-licence,’ I agreed.
‘And I came to your work.’
‘For the plate? I thought your wife sent you?’
‘I offered to go. I came another time as well, after the plate business, but you were on your lunch break.’
‘Oh? I didn’t get any message.’ I thought of Charlotte – or perhaps it had been Aislene – with rose-tinted fondness, knowing she couldn’t have been aware of the magnitude of her oversight.
‘I didn’t leave one,’ Arthur said. ‘I hoped I might see you in the street some time – which I did.’