It Had to Be You (19 page)

When he felt that he couldn’t quite see himself and Helen performing their little charade with their separate cabins on one of these ships, he began to be worried. He realised that the charade was never going to happen, wouldn’t work. He took the brochures back to the shelves. He was shaking.

When he said, ‘Thank you very much,’ he could hear a tremor in his voice.

He knew then that it wasn’t just the cruise that wasn’t going to take place. It was his life with Helen that wasn’t going to take place. Perhaps, he thought, he had never truly wanted her, he had only wanted to want her.

He knew now why he had been dreading this evening so much.

When he went outside he walked into a wall of heat; the heat was already bouncing off the pavement, and it was still early morning.

He felt faint. He had to clutch at the traffic lights at the pedestrian crossing, and when the lights turned green he was afraid to cross. He felt in that moment that the lights would never be green for him again. He thought of Helen and he felt sad, scared and ashamed. He thought of the rest of his life and he felt bewildered.

He had only spoken two sentences, nobody had spoken to him at all, but he would never forget his visit to the travel agent’s.

By the time he got home it was thirteen minutes past eleven. He didn’t see how it could be. It didn’t make sense. It hadn’t been long past eight when he’d transferred his money. All he’d done was walk to the travel agent’s – ten minutes? Fifteen top whack? – and back again. Well, he’d had to wait quite a while for the travel agent’s to open. And he
had
looked through quite a few brochures. Oh, and then, because he’d felt so weak, he’d gone to a greasy spoon, had a cup of tea and a bacon sarnie. He must have sat there for longer than he’d thought, enjoying the banality, hiding in the crowd, wondering how to handle his meeting with Helen tonight.

What had he been thinking of, having a bacon sarnie when he was going out to lunch? Oh, of course. He had decided to cancel the lunch.

He wondered if it was too late to phone Jane and cancel lunch. He decided that it was.

Quarter past eleven. Jane had suggested an Italian restaurant that was ‘a bit above the average. And Nino will look after us.’ She was the sort of person who would have lots of Ninos around. She was the sort of person who made sure she was looked after. God, he hated her.

No, he didn’t. That was unfair. What he hated was the fact that the first woman he had made love to was a woman like that.

Sixteen minutes past eleven. He only needed to allow forty minutes to get to the restaurant. That left sixty-four minutes unaccounted for. And they would go slowly, the bastards, you could count on that. James hated to be late, hated to be rushed, but he wasn’t obsessed with time. Until today. He had never known a day when he had been so conscious of the passage of time, or one when time had behaved so capriciously, so cruelly, so teasingly.

How would he fill the next sixty-three minutes? Yes, another minute had passed with all the pace of a snail on its day off.

Calmness, James. That’s the key. This is the only moment in this day when there is any real prospect of calm. Relax. Let your mind go blank.

His mind would not go blank for sixty-two minutes without help. Where would he find help?

He switched the television on.

At first he watched calmly. At first he found the tedium exquisite. He was in a time capsule. Time passed very very slowly, but it did pass, and it passed without incident. But then he felt the first stirrings of distant anger. He began to feel trapped in his capsule. The anger built. It struck him that he had rants the way other people had fits. He needed to break out of the capsule. He needed to release his anger.

He stood up.

‘Who in their right mind,’ he shouted, ‘would want to watch a programme about a tedious badly dressed young couple with moderate IQs and charisma bypasses being shown by a smarmy young estate agent with two O levels round three very ordinary houses with cramped kitchens and brown window frames in dreary countryside on the outskirts of ugly towns and enthusing about all three and buying none of them?’

He felt better after his rant.

‘Oh, well,’ he said, much more quietly but still out loud, as he switched the television off, ‘at least there wasn’t any blood, and there wasn’t a pathologist in sight.’

More than once he was tempted to ask the taxi driver to turn round. There wasn’t any point in seeing Jane. It was her just as much as Ed that he had deliberately cut out of his social life. She had to have been a willing accomplice in Ed’s ruthless bankruptcies.

But then, each time he was tempted, he realised that there was something inescapably intriguing in meeting again, after many years, one’s first love.

Once he’d realised that he
was
going to meet her, he’d felt a growing excitement.

Could it be that he thought that he might be able to have an affair with her? Surely not? With Deborah not yet cremated. With Helen not yet dispatched. Unthinkable.

But they were both widowed and perhaps in time they would rekindle that old flame.

Then he realised why he really wanted to see her. He wanted to confess. He ached to tell her all about his affair with Helen. Pour out the guilt that sat on his stomach like a surfeit of cheese. Tell her what he had told nobody else and what he could tell nobody else. He realised, as they turned a corner by a Wren church, how powerful was the seductiveness of confession. Perhaps that was why Tony Blair had become a Catholic. He had so much to confess.

He would tell Jane of their first meeting, the first time they made love, the snatched moments in foreign cities, her lonely hotel dinners while he talked styrofoam and sex with men, how their love flourished not in Venice and Paris but mainly in Bridgend and Kilmarnock, in hotels that were not called Majestic or Splendide but Premier and Comfort Inn. He would tell her of the secrecy, the lies, the narrow escapes. He would tell her how essential those things had become to him. He would tell her how, last Sunday, he had failed for the first time in bed. Well, possibly by that time he would have told her too much.

He was going to be early. He asked the driver to pull up round the corner.

As he approached the restaurant on foot, James saw Jane striding along the pavement towards him from the opposite direction. They met just by the door. It was like a scene in a film, and he wondered if she ever imagined that she was a star in a film, and decided immediately that she didn’t, that she was extremely intelligent but had no imagination at all.

In her high-heeled shoes her long legs looked slim and elegant. In her high-heeled shoes she was exactly the same height as him. He felt that this had been calculated.

She kissed him on each cheek and then on the lips. Then each stepped back to examine the other.

‘You look great,’ he said.

‘You look tired but interesting,’ she said.

They wafted into the restaurant on a tide of expensive perfume and to a chorus of dramatic and meaningless exclamations of delight. Jane was kissed on both cheeks by three handsome Italians. There were cries of, ‘Ah, Mrs Winterburn,’ and, ‘Oh, Mrs Winterburn,’ and, ‘So good to have you back, Mrs Winterburn.’ Men who were big in plastics sighed enviously into their pasta. James’s hand was vigorously congratulated on the good fortune and good sense of being in Mrs Winterburn’s company. Their chairs were pulled back, and then softly moved forward once they had sat, and their shining white napkins were opened with a flourish that might in a different environment have brought several bulls to heel.

James could sense Jane’s endless firm thighs under the table. To think that he hadn’t known whether he would still fancy her or not.

‘So,’ he smiled, ‘not just Nino to look after us, but Franco and Mario and Marco and Polo. God, you look good.’

He wished that he hadn’t said this, it was too much, and much too soon.

There followed a curious silence, a silence born not out of the difficulty of finding something to say, but out of the fact that there was so much to say that it was impossible to know where to begin. With their being companions in widow-hood? With Ed’s murder? With the question, concerning Ed’s murder, that he had to ask, and to which he dreaded the answer? With memories of their brief affair in Cambridge? With the challenge to her business ethics that he would have to make?

Easier to start on menu chat.

‘It’s a good menu.’

‘Oh, yes.’ In her voice was a tone which stated, Would I be here if it wasn’t?

He had forgotten just how supremely confident she always was. He was amazed, now, to think that he had ever possessed the courage to ask her out, to take her to bed, to unroll her tights, to … please her.

But had he pleased her? Perhaps he hadn’t. Perhaps that was why she left him, so soon, all those years ago.

‘Everything’s good, but it’s always as well to go with Nino’s recommendations.’

She spoke as if she was sitting in a sedan chair being carried by two lesser mortals. You don’t have to like somebody, James thought, to be seriously attracted to them.

‘Now. Wine,’ she said. She was taking control. He had forgotten how she took control.

When she turned to summon the wine waiter unostentatiously but in a manner that was impossible to refuse, he noticed that perhaps she didn’t look quite as good as he had thought in the theatricality of their arrival. There was just the faintest beginning of a second chin, above a slight, barely detectable scrawniness to the skin of that swan-like neck. Soon it would be more turkey than swan.

That’s the danger of compliments. You can never take them back. You can’t ever say, You know how good I said you looked. Like to qualify it a bit, on reflection. You
are
beginning to go off just a little.

She asked the wine waiter for his recommendation. ‘All the wine’s good, but it’s always as well to go with Paolo’s recommendation.’

‘The Barolo’s drinking well at the moment,’ said Paolo.

‘So am I, to be honest,’ said James.

He wished that he could take this remark back, God, how he wished that he could take it back, but Paolo laughed as if he had never heard it before and said, ‘Sir is a wag.’

James met Jane’s eyes, and he wanted to laugh. But he seemed to remember that she didn’t do laughter, and his amusement died.

‘But perhaps that is too heavy for luncheon,’ said the Italian sommelier. ‘I have a Valpolicella that will dispel any prejudices you may have against that wine.’

‘Thank you,’ said Jane. ‘All right with you, James?’

‘Perfect. I’m more than happy to dispel a prejudice.’ Oh, how he wished she would smile.

They ordered dry Martinis.

‘Carlo makes the best dry Martinis in London.’

‘Of course he does,’ he said, dry as the Martini.

She didn’t recognise the mockery.

Nino recommended the vitello tonnato and the wild sea bass. After careful consideration they both chose the vitello tonnato and the wild sea bass.

‘Well, well, poor you,’ she said, clasping his hand but without warmth. ‘You must be devastated.’

A sliver of sorrow flitted through James like a sparrow through a greenhouse. Yes, he missed Deborah, but this wasn’t devastation. He wanted to say more, but it was still too early to confess. You confessed over brandy, not in dry Martini time.

‘My feelings are very different. Ed and I had no sort of …’

Even in this immaculate restaurant the waiters brought the drinks in the middle of important sentences. James longed to take the first exquisite, bracing sip, but was too polite to do it till she’d finished her remark.

‘… no sort of marriage in the last years. He went to bed with anything that moved. I lost all interest in that kind of thing. Anyway, cheers.’

He tried not to look too eager to take that first sip, but the sigh of pleasure that he gave as he rolled it round his mouth gave it all away, and he felt obliged to make some comment.

‘A little voice inside me cries out for cool, clear, mountain spring water,’ he said. ‘It praises it as the finest, most healthy, tastiest drink on earth. But it speaks too quietly, and I hardly hear.’

They talked about Ed’s death. James didn’t mention his suspicions over Mike. Nor did he ask his question. It was too soon for that too. It was strange, but it was too soon for everything.

Jane said that it was only natural that Ed should have made enemies, and James could tell that, although she no longer loved him, she couldn’t quite conceal her pride.

He seized on the moment.

‘After going bankrupt he opened up again once in your name, didn’t he?’ he asked. ‘So you knew all about it?’

Her eyes challenged him.

‘We did nothing illegal.’

You didn’t have to admire a woman to want to go to bed with her.

‘I don’t think that’s the point. The point is moral, not legal.’

James found himself – he could hardly believe it – talking about responsibility, talking about how he felt about his workers, about the ethics of business and indeed of all human life. Why? Did he have the faintest chance of cracking this hard nut?

‘You always were naive,’ said Jane. ‘I remember that being what attracted me to you.’

‘Oh. Terrific. What every man wants to hear. “What first attracted you to me? Was it my charm, my sense of humour, my good looks or my big prick?”. “No, it was your naivety.”’

‘Not just your naivety.’

‘Ah. There’s hope. What else?’

‘Your shyness.’

‘Fantastic.’

The wine, though not ideal with the sea bass – black mark, Paolo – was very pleasant. The sea bass – black mark, Nino – was no more than adequate. James felt that the restaurant – black mark, Jane – was no more than average in quality. It was only outstanding in charm. Jane had fallen for the charm, perhaps because she had so little herself.

He realised now why he had gone onto his high horse about the ethics of business. He’d been trying, with words, to do what memory and appearance and the passage of time had failed to do. He’d been trying to quell the excitement in his genitals.