Separate Lives (30 page)

I read the letter three times before walking downstairs to the kitchen, putting it in the Belfast sink and setting light to it. Ashes to ashes . . . Daunting though it seemed, my future appeared to be starting right here and now, in front of a sink and a small funeral pyre, in somebody else's Dream Home.

Dear Mum,

By the time Alex finally arrived, close to midnight, I had drunk a third of the bottle of Merlot, changed my outfit three times and spent at least twenty minutes distractedly wiping and re-wiping the already-immaculate kitchen work-surfaces. When the bell finally rang I still wasn't ready—mostly because I didn't know what I needed to be ready for.

On the doorstep, Alex looked slightly flushed and beery, a tiny bead of perspiration hovering indecisively between his brows.

“Pippa.”

“Alex.”

To say the atmosphere was awkward was to understate things to a Samuel Beckett-ish degree. It was already all about the pauses but who knew what was happening with the plot? Now he was actually here, I certainly didn't have a script—and nor, apparently, did Alex.

“Come in. Then you can tell me why you're here.”

I opened the door extra-wide. I didn't want to seem furtive or apologetic, or as if I'd changed my mind. Alex crossed the threshold, dropped his bag on the floor and closed the door, with a bang.

“I love you, Pippa.”

I sighed.

“No I don't think you do, Alex. I think you probably love the idea of loving me. But let's talk about that. Glass of wine?”

“Yes, thanks. But please don't go all chilly on me. I know I've been a total dickhead—it's my great skill—but please hear me out.”

“Of course I will. Come downstairs.”

I poured us both a glass of the Merlot. And then I moved to the other side of the island. I needed to put a bit of space between us.

“So, Alex. How's it hanging?”

“Oh for fuck's sake.” Alex took a gulp of the wine, leaned on the island and put his head in his hands. “Look, I've fucked up every single area of my life. I lost my job, I slept with you . . . not that that was a fuck-up . . . and I'm probably losing the mother of my children. Susie will be out of the door any minute because I can't communicate with her. And the irony of that is that I have tried to do the right thing . . . I wanted to be with you—if you would've had me—but I decided that was—” Alex waggled his fingers to make air-quotes—“‘wrong.' Because me and Susie and the kids are—were—a family, and families are meant to stick together.”

“Well that's the general idea, but if you look at the statistics you'll see it doesn't often pan out like that. Look at me. I'm effectively a family of two. And my son is about to go to boarding school . . .”

“Is he?”

“Yes. He hated his new school. He wants . . . a different kind of life.”

I shrugged. Alex peered at me closely.

“Yeah, we all want a different kind of life. Why is that? Why can't we ever be happy with the one we have? Why do we have to keep trying to change it all the time? Why isn't anything ever enough? My parents, for example—they've lived in the same house for nearly fifty years. They're happy with what they've got.”

“OK, you really want an answer? We live in an insanely consumerist, wildly secular culture. We don't believe in anything anymore except ourselves. But because we don't know who we are anymore, we think happiness means unlimited credit and climbing the property ladder to the en-suite bedroom of our dreams. That's what I think, since you asked. But I'm not sure that's the conversation you came here to have.”

“No, you're right, it isn't. But that's pretty smart of you. And I probably agree.”

“And of course it's very easy for me to say, standing here in my fuck-off house with no need to work. So shoot me.”

“I don't want to shoot you, I want to fuck you.”

“Oh Alex. Come on. That's just sex.”

At which point Alex walked round to my side of the island—would that it had been an archipelago—and put his hands gently, very gently, up to my face, and said: “No, it isn't ‘just' sex. It's more than that, Pippa. It's about feeling alive.”

And the thing was—as much as I tried to deny it—Alex made me feel alive, too, so it was inevitable that we would have sex. It had always been inevitable because we seemed to
trigger something that the other needed, even craved. When it came to Alex, my head said one thing, my heart quite another and so the sex was passionate, swift, and almost—but not quite—painful. Not physically painful, but . . . anyway, I knew why this was because, afterward, when we had moved upstairs to my bedroom and lay spooned against each other, with Alex behind me, breathing heavily, I broke the silence:

“That probably had to happen, Alex. And I'm very glad it did. No regrets, but I think we both know we're finished, it's over. That felt to me like some sort of . . . sorry, but I can't think of a better word right now . . . closure?”

Behind me, Alex remained silent but for his breathing, heavy and labored. After the storm came the calm, albeit a kind of dead calm.

“Yeah. I knew I couldn't ever be good enough for you. But I needed to check.”

I rolled over.

“Stop it, Alex.”

“I'm serious. Quite apart from all the obvious things, like being unemployed and cheating on the mother of my children, I just don't have what you need or deserve.”

“That's bollocks for starters. You don't know what I need or deserve. And I don't think I do.”

“So, how is your rugby player?”

I wasn't fazed by this. I knew Guy had told Alex I was seeing somebody.

“He's good. It's very early days. We have a laugh. I have no idea where it's going, if anywhere.”

“Lucky bastard.”

There was no need to reply, not verbally anyway. The second time we had sex, we made love. Tender, slow and
infinitely generous to each other—and that seemed very important. When I came, it was with the kind of orgasm I'd only ever read about . . . exquisite waves rolling, all of that . . . I lost myself in it, became submerged.

Afterward, it was Alex who spoke first.

“You're extraordinary, Pippa. You are an extraordinarily wonderful and beautiful woman. And the fact that I can make you feel the way you clearly just felt . . .” He paused, slightly self-consciously. “Maybe that's enough of a memory to hold on to.” And then he turned away from me, but not before I saw his tears. We fell into a fitful sleep, eventually, and when I woke in the morning (late for me, 8:40 a.m.) Alex had gone. As I knew—had, I suppose, even hoped—that he would've.

I lay in bed until ten. Unheard of for me but necessary. Alex's smell—two parts grape and grain, to one part sex—clung to my pillow and I drank it in, re-ran the night before the morning after in my head. I felt OK.

Downstairs, I made coffee and mopped up a puddle of spilt Merlot—when had that happened?—and then went slowly back upstairs to what I grandly referred to as “the study” (perhaps one I day I'd actually study something in it) and logged on to the computer. Just a handful of emails, most of them spam or from shopping websites, but also one that intrigued me, from Ruth Abbott.

I glanced up at the pin board over my desk where Ruth's business card was tacked next to last year's Mother's Day card from Hal and I picked up the landline and dialed the mobile number. It was answered after three rings.

“Hi, Ruth? It's Pippa. I just got your email . . .”

“Blimey, that's quick! How are you?”

“Very good, thanks, and all the more so after hearing from you. Look, I'll cut to the chase because I'm feeling in that kind of mood, frankly. Why don't you save yourself the agent's fees and let me buy your house, for cash, at the asking price? No chains, no fuss. I'm sort of OK for money. I think agents describe it as being ‘in a strong position.'”

“Are you serious? I don't know what to say. I just sent the email on a whim, really. Because you never know, do you?”

“You never do, no. Look, I promise I won't mess you around. I'm good for the money and I'm not planning on moving to Random. Not yet, anyway. For the moment it's just an investment, but who knows—I may yet end up down your way.”

It's amazing how fast a sale can progress when there's nothing to impede it. After a few more phone chats with Ruth, and Tom, we exchanged and were due to complete in the middle of February, which happily coincided with Hal's half-term.

I was fifteen minutes early to pick Hal up from Paddington Station on Saturday morning, and when he finally emerged—last—from his train, I almost missed him. He seemed to have grown about three inches, his shoulders were broader and his hair had been cut in a kind of diluted schoolboy's version of a Hoxton fin. He looked . . . handsome,
grown up
. It was hard to believe he was still only thirteen.

“Hey,” he said in a flat teenage monotone, guitar case slung over his shoulder. Way too cool for school—but thank God his voice hadn't yet broken.

“Hey yourself,” I said, resisting the urge to smother him in a Mummy-hug—or indeed, to high-five him in an equally tragic act of parental un-coolness. “So what do you fancy doing? I've cleared the decks. I'm all yours.”

A hint of . . . what was that expression? Embarrassment? . . . flitted across his features, which he swiftly rearranged.

“Awesome. But I just got a text from Dom . . .” he tailed off. I hadn't been prepared for this. Six weeks without my son and now that he was here I could tell he was about to vanish. And I only had him until Tuesday evening, when David would get his own parental fix for the next four days.

“OK, whatever, that's fine.” I tried to sound as though it really was. “Let's grab a bit of lunch and you can get me up to speed with stuff and then you can go over to Dom's, or he can come to ours?”

“I think I've gotta go to his . . .” Hal shrugged his guitar-case.

“OK, so the band members have put aside their musical differences?”

“Yeah. Zak got the sack.
Za-ak got the sa-ack
.” Suddenly Hal was very much thirteen.

“So why was that?”

“Zak got the sack cos he's a twat.”

“That's nearly a rhyme. Although ‘twat' is not a good word.”

“Really? It means idiot.”

“It doesn't, actually. It means . . . well, it's just one of those words we should probably avoid.”

“What, like ‘wanker'?”

“Actually, you know what? I think I'd marginally prefer it if you called Zak a wanker instead of a twat.”

“OK, sure, whatever.”

I desperately wanted to kiss him. Instead, later, after the compulsory pizza, Hal disappeared to Dom's, shortly before Richard turned up on my doorstep. This was becoming a part of our pleasantly predictable routine. Unless Richard was doing an after-dinner speaking gig we'd usually
spend Friday evenings together then go our separate ways to attend to our own domestic trivia for most of Saturday, before reconnecting in the early evening and spending the rest of the weekend together, though never Sunday nights. It was all very easy, un-dramatic and in complete contrast to any of my dealings with Alex.

With whom I'd had a couple of brief exchanges since early January. For example, I'd thought it best to flag up the fact that I was buying Nana's house. I hated the idea of being in Random and bumping, randomly, into Alex, or indeed Susie, and having them think—either together or separately—that I was some sort of psycho-stalker. If anything, I had more of a claim on Random-on-Sea than they did, though I could see how it might look. Anyway, I got a pithy one-line response to this news:
Small world—wouldn't want to paint it. Be happy.

Hard to tell if this was as cheery as it appeared—I hoped so—or perhaps it was sardonic, or bitter? However, my days of over-analyzing Alex's texts were behind me. It wasn't as though I didn't care about him anymore—I did, very much; Alex had re-ignited something inside me and helped me reconnect with the kind of emotions from which I'd cut myself off for so long, albeit without ever realizing I was doing it. But, at the same time we were no good for each other. I didn't like the person I became around him—the phone-stealing, trophy-hoarding obsessive, a woman who slept with other people's partners, somebody who seemed to be out of control with her emotions. That stuff was exciting but it wasn't “real.” I really wanted “real”—and as far as I could tell the way to find it and keep it and then actually treasure it was to recognize that while colliding with Alex had opened a gate to a potential “different kind of life” he
was definitely not—and never could be—waiting for me at the end of the path. Now, Richard, on the other hand . . .