Miss You (24 page)

‘How about the Eye?’ I suggested, knowing it was one of the things he wanted to do.

‘Shame to waste the afternoon queuing . . .’ he said, insisting he’d be more than happy to wander round places like Doll and I used to. But as we passed a pub on the way to the
Tube station, I could see him craning his neck to catch a glimpse of the match on Sky Sports.

‘Why don’t we meet back at the hotel after?’ I said.

‘Are you sure?’

I walked straight down to Waterloo Bridge and along the riverbank to the Tate Modern.

A huge, blood-red sculpture by Anish Kapoor filled the vast space of the Turbine Hall like a jumbo jet in an aircraft hangar. To me, it looked like a giant human organ, which kind of made sense
when I read that the title was
Marsyas
, a mythological figure who was flayed.

In the galleries, I spent a long time looking at a cut-out picture by Matisse called
The Snail
. The spiral of bright colours gave me such a feeling of joy I was glad Dave wasn’t
there making comments about painting like that when he was four which was what he always said when there was something about modern art on the news, like the record price a Picasso had fetched at
auction, although I’d read that Picasso himself said he’d spent his whole life learning to paint like a child.

In the lobby outside the gallery, there was a little exhibition of a primary-school class’s attempts to reproduce Matisse’s
Snail
with torn coloured paper on a sheet of white
A4. It was amazing how different all the pictures were. A couple of them were really good; others, even though they contained exactly the same elements, just weren’t, somehow. I wondered what
Picasso would make of that. I bought a postcard of the work in the gift shop, thinking Hope’s class might try a similar thing in Art.

There were posters advertising free lectures in the gallery on weekday evenings. If I lived in London, I thought, I would go along and learn about art, and in summer I would queue for the Proms
and learn about classical music. There was so much stuff available, even if you weren’t a student.

Standing on the wobbly bridge I could see Shakespeare’s Globe and the house Sir Christopher Wren lived in when he was building St Paul’s and all the way down to Tower Bridge. I
walked across to the north side of the river and caught a bus along Fleet Street to the Aldwych. Wending my way through Covent Garden, I paused outside the regal frontage of the Royal Opera House,
its cream stucco columns flooded with golden light. Along the outside walls, there were framed advertisements for the new ballet season.

A few weeks back, Kev had sent us the programme of a triple bill. I hadn’t been able to work out why – he’d been in lots of productions and never sent a programme before
– until I spotted his name on the cast list. His first-ever solo role. Along with it he’d enclosed a postcard of the Empire State Building, with
When are you coming to see us?
scribbled on the back. I’d promised Hope long ago that we’d go to New York and I’d almost saved enough money when 9/11 happened, which put everyone off flying. It would be so
amazing to see him performing on stage, I knew I should get up the courage while Hope was still young enough for a child’s fare.

The crowd going into the Opera House matched the opulence of the foyer. Whoever it was who said that women can never be too rich or too thin was probably an opera goer. Some of the men were
wearing bow ties and the women had those little bejewelled clutch bags you see in magazines and tottered on high-heeled shoes you’d never find in Clarks. I swept inside with them and up the
red-carpeted staircase.

On my right was the Crush Room, where people were eating their pre-show suppers beneath sparkling crystal chandeliers that were reflected in the enormous mirror at the end of the room, making it
look like an endless glittery hall; on my left, a huge conservatory-like room echoed with the hubbub of rich people drinking champagne.

I slipped through a door which took me up a red flight of stairs into a curving corridor lined with wooden doors and, daring to open one, found myself in the dark antechamber of a box, where
there were hooks to hang your coats. Stepping down into the seating area, I sat and gazed up into the vast, empty auditorium, its tiers decorated with pretty little lamps and gilt curlicues, then
down at the heavy crimson velvet curtains edged with gold rope and embroidered with the initials of the Queen. It must take some nerve to step out onto the stage with thousands of expectant faces
watching you. No wonder Kev was highly strung.

I jumped up as the door to the box opened.

‘Oh, excuse me!’ said a tall man, backing out again.

‘No, I’m just looking,’ I mumbled, sliding past him and his female companion, my eyes lowered, as if I’d ventured into a posh shop where I couldn’t afford to buy
anything.

Dave wasn’t keen on trying any of the Chinatown restaurants with roasted ducks and strange-looking sausages hanging in the window, so we got a window table in the
Aberdeen Steak House where you know what you’re eating, and there’s an awful lot of it, including a big flat mushroom, onion rings, the lot.

I loved watching the different types of people hurrying past: groups of foreign teenagers carrying matching backpacks; families with whining children who’d been on their feet all day;
chefs who’d stepped out of the kitchen for a quick smoke; young couples on their first date, and elderly ones who’d grown tetchy with one another.

‘They’ve obviously missed the start of the show and she’s livid because she booked the tickets months ago,’ I said about a couple who were arguing just on the other side
of the glass.

‘Do you know them?’ Dave asked.

‘Course not!’

‘You’re weird, sometimes, you know that?’ he said.

The waiter took our order and brought glasses of house white to go with the prawn cocktail.

‘This is the life!’ said Dave. ‘Cheers!’

We clinked.

He leaned across the table. ‘Can you believe it’s been three years?’

People always say that women are the ones who push for commitment, but in our relationship, it was more Dave. I was always a bit flustered when he started talking about ‘us’ because
he was my first proper boyfriend, the only man I’d had sex with, but I wasn’t quite convinced that he was the soulmate I’d envisaged sharing my life with. My romantic education
had come from novels and all my favourite heroines had to suffer misunderstanding and despair in their pursuit of true love: Bathsheba Everdene and Gabriel Oak, Dorothea Brooke and Will Ladislaw,
Meggie and Ralph de Bricassart – none of them were easy-going relationships like mine with Dave. Don’t get me wrong – I really liked him and we had a good time together. He was
attractive and generous and occasionally, like this weekend, surprised me with unexpected thoughtfulness, but I just wasn’t sure I was ready for the next step and I sometimes suspected
that’s what he was leading up to.

It’s difficult to keep veering off the subject when you’re sitting face to face in a booth, and he’s intent on three courses. I babbled on about the passers-by and the steak
– was it the quality of the meat, or the sharpness of the knife that made it so easy to cut? – and I ordered a glass of red to go with it and encouraged Dave to do the same. Since
he’d been drinking lager all afternoon, he went fairly rapidly from mistily sentimental to recounting, step by step, the injustice of the penalty kick that had been awarded to his
team’s rivals.

When we left the restaurant, the audience was coming out of the theatre where
Mamma Mia!
was showing, laughing and singing snatches of the title song. An air of celebration mingled with
the delicious sweet smell you get from those vendors cooking nuts in caramel, which I’ve never tried because I always think the taste’s bound to be a disappointment, like proper
coffee.

‘Wouldn’t Hope love this?’

Hope was somehow always with us, even when she wasn’t.

‘We could bring her up to see a musical at Christmas, if you like,’ said Dave.

I wasn’t sure it would be worth the money. When we’d taken her to the pantomime at the Winter Gardens, she’d sung along so loudly that the pantomime dame – a comedian
famous for his ad-libbing – had invited her up on stage to sing with him. Hope was wearing a yellow summer dress with thick purple tights because she chose her own outfits in the holidays,
and had a Santa hat with lights in the white trim perched on her head. The dame just about managed to tread the line between having and making fun, but it had been a struggle to get Hope to leave
the stage, and had probably set a dangerous precedent. Nobody would tolerate that kind of behaviour in London.

Back in our hotel room, Dave switched on
Match of the Day
while I went into the bathroom to have a shower. We only had a bath at home, so a shower was a bit of a treat. Standing under the
powerful jet with the water streaming down my back, and the wine still blurring my brain, I jumped when Dave slid open the perspex door and stepped in with me.

Even now I was still slightly shy about being naked with the lights on. Dave’s body was sturdy and strong. He claimed he was five foot ten and a half which was technically taller than me,
but I always felt kind of exposed standing beside him with no clothes on, as if my arms and legs were a bit too long somehow. I was never sure whether to look him appreciatively up and down like he
did me. There’s nothing hidden with a man, is there, and it feels so personal, somehow. Dave kissed me, first a peck. Then, with the mmms becoming longer and more intense, he pressed against
me in the shower cubicle, his stiffening erection jabbing into my tummy button. There was a gleam in his eyes, a subtle change from affection to urgency. He wanted to do it, right there with the
water streaming over us. Trying to get some purchase on the tiles with my back as he hoisted me up, I inadvertently knocked the temperature dial from warm to scalding.

‘Bloody hell!’ Dave slammed the dial the other way to freezing.

So we had to turn the water off, which killed the moment.

‘It’s not like it is in the movies, is it?’ Dave laughed.

It was one of his phrases, and I knew it was meant to be funny and forgiving, so I laughed too, but it always made me slightly feel as if I wasn’t very good at sex.

Dave wrapped me in a big white towel, and then picked me up, carried me back into the bedroom and lay down beside me. I dried myself as best I could, making a turban of the towel for my head, so
my wet hair wouldn’t soak the pillow.

Dave climbed on top of me, giving me another long kiss.

He was very gentle, but I was still always a bit tense as he caressed my breasts, half-expecting him to find something that I’d missed. I lay there, holding my breath, as if he was a
bomb-disposal expert checking the ground for unexploded ordnance.

Dave was always keen for me to have a good time, but sometimes I wanted to say to him, ‘Just get on with it, I don’t mind.’ Instead I’d pant and moan into his ear, like
they actually did in the movies.

The bit I enjoyed most was lying in his arms afterwards, all warm and contented, knowing that I’d satisfied him.

‘You know when we first met,’ Dave said, propping himself up on one elbow. ‘When I came back to your school on the last day of term?’

‘Yup . . .’

‘I told you I’d left something in the hall . . .’

I did remember, but thought it was funny to mention it now, three years later, because if it had gone into lost property, it would probably have been thrown away by now.

‘It was my heart,’ Dave said. ‘I left my heart in that hall, Tess. I’ve loved you from the moment I set eyes on you.’

I couldn’t think of an adequate response – I was meant to be the one who was good with words – and the silence began to feel too long, so I said, ‘I love you
too.’

The following afternoon, Dave’s reluctance to queue for the London Eye was explained. He’d booked us tickets that fast-tracked us to the front.

We were almost at the top, and I was pointing landmarks out to him – ‘Look, there’s Nelson’s Column, there’s the Telecom Tower’ – when I became aware
that the whole pod full of tourists had gone quiet. I turned round to find Dave on one knee, offering me a ring in a little blue velvet box.

‘We’ve been together three years now, Tess . . .’ He started into a speech he’d clearly rehearsed. ‘It’s been the best three years of my life, because
you’re the nicest, funniest person I’ve ever met.’

There was a wobble in his voice. Please God, I prayed, don’t let him cry!

‘I know you don’t think you’re beautiful . . .’

Why are you even telling everyone that?

‘. . . but you are to me. I want to make a happy life for you, so, I’m sure you know what’s coming next. Will you marry me?’

The crowd sighed, as if they’d collectively been holding their breath. Even if you didn’t understand a word of English, it was pretty clear what had just happened. Camera lenses,
which had been pointing out of the windows, were now trained on me.

‘Look at the view!’ I wanted to shout at them. ‘We’ll be down in a minute and they don’t let you go round again!’

‘It’s been such a lovely weekend—’

Realizing it wasn’t going to be a straightforward ‘Yes!’, Dave interrupted before I had a chance to get to ‘but . . .’

‘You need to think about it,’ he said, adding for the benefit of any English speakers, ‘She thinks a lot!’

No one responded. They were mostly Chinese, I noticed, much shorter than me, and looking up at me the way children might gaze at a dinosaur skeleton in a museum.

‘Take the ring anyway,’ Dave urged.

So I did, because it gave him the chance to get back up to his feet without losing face. Then we kissed quickly, and received a little round of applause.

‘Dave didn’t tell you he was going to propose, did he?’ I asked Doll when she popped by on Monday evening to hear how the weekend had gone.

‘No, but I guessed. He was so keen to get everything just right, bless! Let’s see the ring, then,’ she said.

I went upstairs and got the blue velvet box. It was a pearl, surrounded by tiny diamonds. It looked so modest compared to the bracelet of diamonds dangling from Doll’s arm, I felt almost
fonder of it.