What She Left: Enhanced Edition (28 page)

Dear Larry,

For the record, I persevered with Dr Richard Carter.

‘You clearly enjoy the company of women,’ was his opener to one session, ‘but let’s explore how she, Liz, made you feel.’

I’d felt myself crabbing from exclusively blocking and baiting this chap – we were like two out-of-condition short-sighted bantam weights – to a state that might have arguably been described as candour. ‘Alive,’ I said. ‘Transcendent, primal, glorious. Like a bastard. Like a man.’

‘What do
they
feel like, Jeremy?’

In our early exchanges, I might have responded with a snide ‘You’ll never find out’, but I offered up: ‘Like someone else.’

‘Is that good?’

‘Richard, I’m an upper middle class, virtually middle-aged, white, Anglo-Saxon academic. My existence is predicated on convention, my job demands rationality and diligence. “Meticulous” was how masters would describe me at school. The “someone else” didn’t have to abide by normal rules; he got to tear a near stranger’s clothes off.’

I’d lost a stone after Fliss left and I’d never had weight to spare. She’d gone back to her parents in Lincoln. Everyone’s at it now, a practice that took root in the noughties, returning to the nest like thundering cuckoo chicks because their student loans have consumed them or property prices have escalated away from them, but it had the unmistakeable ring of failure then: it was an inversion of the natural order to return to one’s parental home. Inevitably, eyebrows were raised on campus. Not that my wife’s absence topped the gossip list for long: relegated by the altogether more seismic revelation that Elizabeth Mullens had tried to kill herself. I rang the in-laws’ house every day, but they refused to let me converse with my wife. I also contacted Liz’s lodgings in a bid to establish
her
condition, but all I got was an uncooperative landlady who didn’t appreciate calls after 9 p.m. and complained about overdue rent.

‘Are you a fan of The Rolling Stones?’ Richard Carter had asked.

‘I’m familiar with them.’

‘Because Mick Jagger wrote a song called “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”. He might have a point.’

I rebuffed him. ‘Humans aren’t constructed that way.’

‘I disagree. We’re capable of immense displays of selflessness, often at great personal sacrifice.’

‘We’re selective about our altruism. It’s targeted – typically at kin, in a direct bid to ensure reciprocity.’

‘Not so. I have a direct debit to a charity that digs wells in eastern Uganda – how does that benefit me?’

‘It might enable you to sleep at night, or to highlight it to me, in so doing potentially enabling you to execute your job more efficiently.’

‘That’s a phenomenally bleak prognosis,’ he said. ‘Altruism can be pure. There are female spiders that let their offspring eat them to improve their chances of survival. Similarly, male ones that allow the female to eat them after they’ve mated. Fairly one-sided relationships, wouldn’t you concur?’

‘Typical bloody woman.’ I wondered if Liz had heard about the spiders; she’d be fascinated by them.

‘But we’re not talking about animals or evolution,’ he said, ‘we’re talking about you.’

‘So we
are
talking precisely about animals and evolution.’

Can’t recall if I expounded the full saga back then, Larry, but I was summoned in front of an academic ‘panel’; a bloody kangaroo court, where they’d regarded me quizzically – the plaster on my forehead, the rumpled clothes – and graciously informed me that if I cooperated in preventing this ‘debacle’ from reaching the press, they’d regard that
favourably. I still had much to offer. ‘Something’ rather than ‘much’ might have been the actual descriptor they used; it’s hard to tie down specifics.

‘Could the reason you sought out an extra-marital relationship be a response to you not having children?’ Richard had asked.

Fliss and I hadn’t entirely relinquished our parenting ambitions prior to my dalliance with Liz coming to light, but it had become ever-more hypothetical: like the IRA quitting its bombing or me attaining a breakthrough in the work in which I was involved (basically a derivative offshoot of Chomsky). Liz, meanwhile, had been desperate to get married and have a family; it was the Eighties, women still did. She could reel off examples of animals that mated for life – a type of antelope, black vultures, sandhill cranes, a species of fish called the convict cichlid – but she kept making bad choices and, frankly, I was the worst.

‘Do you feel responsible for what Liz did?’ Richard asked.

She’d hung herself from a beam above top table in the refectory. A fascinating room, that. High ceilings, leaded-light windows, rafters from an old Tudor warship. A cleaner popped in to fetch a tub of floor polish and found her dangling, drunk, her beautiful long spider legs stretched out beneath her, the flap expiring from them.

‘I can’t exculpate myself of blame.’ I had a desire to crawl back to my office, where I knew all the rules. Imagined immersing myself in marking, like collapsing on to a soft bed. ‘Have you ever read Tolstoy, Richard? His contention was that happy families are all alike and unhappy ones are unhappy in their own way, but he got that wrong. Unhappiness is crushingly predictable. It’s making sure one’s pockets are empty before putting one’s trousers in the laundry
basket, it’s bathing to rid oneself of an unfamiliar perfume before scuttling into one’s marital bed, it’s familiar faces contorted into unfamiliar shapes by pain and drink. Happiness is what’s unique. The minutiae of two lives spent together: the warm and unshowy mechanics of a monogamous relationship.’

‘But you slept with another woman.’

‘Yes, because lust is a drug; it addles our brains.’

‘Did the pain you’d inevitably inflict not cross your mind?’

‘I could anticipate it, I could rationalize it, I could hazard a guess at the magnitude of it, but I couldn’t
feel
it. Does that make me a psychopath?’

That night she confronted me in the kitchen, Fliss demanded I explain what this Elizabeth
tart
had that she didn’t, and when I stated it wasn’t like that, she said: ‘I feel so let down, so stupid.’

‘What’s your wife’s view, now you’ve both taken stock?’ Richard had asked.

‘She’s in Lincoln.’

‘Ah, still Lincoln. Beautiful cathedral,’ he said. ‘Much underrated.’

I’d come to expect these switches of direction. It was a device my favourite political pundit, Robin Day, was wont to use: a random catechism. ‘She’d probably be pleased I’m sticking with these sessions,’ I said, ‘she’s always had me down as a slogger. Bless her, she means it as a compliment, but the tag rankles. Sloggers dig roads and pack boxes in factories. It’s originality I’ve sought.’

‘Personally I’d take happiness over originality,’ my shrink declared. ‘I’d take an absence of pain.’

‘The absence of pain and happiness aren’t synonymous. The former is merely that – the lower tranches of Maslow’s triangle fulfilled.’

‘Don’t knock it,’ he said, checking his watch, ‘millions of people would kill for that.’

‘We should get a place,’ Luke said.

Going away often prompted conversations to arc off into territory beyond the norm; it was as if under the surface there was a slight rebalancing of our relationship. It wasn’t until Malta – six months in – that he’d revealed how infrequently he saw his parents.

‘What I mean is,’ he added, ‘I’d like to live with you and I hope you do me.’

‘Luke, it’s a great idea. I wasn’t expecting you to ask, that’s all – or not today.’

‘We’d need to save up for a few months, but we could get a half-decent place.’

‘Where?’

He stabbed one of his chips with his fork and tossed it to a gull. ‘If this was a movie, this would be when the schmaltzy music would cut in and I’d say, “I don’t care as long as we’re together”. But I’m not living in Stockwell!’

‘Or New Cross.’

‘Ultimately I’d like to get out of London,’ he said. There was a new urgency about him; it was as if he’d stored this up and now couldn’t contain it. ‘It’s about time you settled down. You are twenty-five, after all!’

‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘Aaaarrrrgghhh!’

The gull had flapped up, wheeled in a circle and landed
on the rusty railings in front of us. Luke went into his pocket and a crazy notion popped into my head that he might be about to propose, but it was his cigarettes he pulled out. He lit up, blew smoke out and it trailed off into the bright, brittle seaside light.

‘We could actually go anywhere,’ he said and he was giddy, boy-like. ‘
Carpe diem
and all that.’

‘Go fishing?
’ I quipped, one of his favourite lines from
The Inbetweeners.
Only last week, he’d joked that one of his prerequisites for choosing a flat was having sufficient space for his DVD collection, so he must have had the moving-in conversation in mind then. When we’d met in Victoria yesterday he would have done, as he would when he’d returned from the buffet car with my skinny frothy latte and his tea, or when he’d said at Faversham, after I’d finally sussed where we were headed, ‘Barbados has got nothing on the white sands of Margate.’

‘It is OK for you here, isn’t it?’ he asked. ‘I almost went for Paris, but this seemed more you.’

‘Luke, it’s perfect.’ It was, too. Its faded glamour, its lack of ostentatiousness, its unpretentious approach to fun; I adored it.

‘Anyway, I couldn’t take you to Paris because you’ve had a dirty weekend there before!’

I remembered the hotel where a doorman – ‘the twat in the hat’, Ben had dubbed him – had referred to me as ‘madame’ and how we’d clinked glasses over a bowl of moules marinière and he’d said, ‘To us, Lissa,’ and I could have cried. So much for the City of Light.

‘We can save Paris,’ Luke said.

It gave me a warm shiver: us saving stuff, having it still to do.

‘Margate used to have a Victorian pier,’ he said. ‘A Eugenius Birch one. Spot the frustrated architect!’

It pained me that he might have regrets, because twenty-seven might be ancient, but it was too early for regrets. I didn’t want this man to ever have regrets.

‘We can do anything,’ he said. ‘If it’s me and you – us against the world – we’ll be unstoppable, Al.’

I leant in and kissed my boyfriend.

‘What was that for?’

‘For bringing me here, for being you.’
Tell him everything about yourself
. The nights you couldn’t sleep, the disastrous deliciousness of that relationship with Ben, how you’d perpetually felt thin (not thin-thin, I wish!) and insignificant, even the day in the bathroom when you let the pain out –
tell him
. Have this gorgeous man hear it from you. The tide was out but when it reaches the top of the beach you could have told him and when it recedes all that crap would have been washed out to sea, and you could move forward together.

‘What’s the one thing you’d most like to change about yourself?’ he asked.

‘Right now, nothing – because if I did we might not be here. Maybe
now’s
when the schmaltzy music should play!’

He bowed his head. He was welling up. Luke was actually crying. ‘I love you, Al Salmon,’ he said.

‘I love you, too,’ I said.

He’d taken a few months to say it, but I’d blurted it out after five weeks, probably way too early.

‘What about you?’ I asked. ‘What would you change if you were the one with the magic wand?’

‘I
have
got one,’ he said, smirking and glancing down at his lap.

Now he’d been serious, he needed to let go – it was
palpable, the tension draining out of him. He was in pub mode. ‘You’re not getting off the hook that easily,’ I said. ‘Come on, what?’

‘I’d have met you when I was younger.’

‘Good answer!’

‘Before we had baggage.’

‘Speak for yourself!’

‘There’s other stuff, too.’

A kid hurtled along the prom on a scooter, flying by, having simply the
best
time and then the conversation was back on ‘the flat’ and the respective merits of Streatham versus Clerkenwell. I’d get to collect the slow cooker and pictures I’d deposited at Mum and Dad’s, unpack the boxes of books in their loft, might even dust down the ‘best newcomer’ trophy I’d won at work and put it on the fireplace – imagine that, a
fireplace
. Friends would pick it up and turn it over when they came for dinner. It would spark conversations: jokes about its weight, how you could do someone some serious damage with it, discussions about crime and politics unfolding over the Greek salad or white chocolate and passionfruit mousse I’d got from Nigella. ‘Do you know what I like about you most?’ I asked.