Where Love Lies (37 page)

He couldn’t take his eyes off his daughter as she watched the busker. She was skinny, in a raincoat that was too short for her in the arms. Her feet danced in the forming mud.

‘How … how
do you know Felicity?’ he asked.

‘She was the one I spoke to? The one who sent the train tickets and told us what time to meet you? What is she, your girlfriend, or your personal secretary?’

‘Felicity is …’

A life saver. A life changer. The person who was not coming, who was never going to come, but had known how to give him his second chance. The second chance he really needed, who was nodding
her head to the music right now in the rain.

‘Does Rebecca want to see me?’ he asked.

‘I said she did, didn’t I? I’ve left the other two with Mike. It was lucky I could get the time off work at such short notice. But she was excited, and it’s important.’ Alana pointed at Rebecca. ‘She’s the queen of lost causes, that one. She’s got a heart as soft as soft. She begged to watch that man playing
guitar. Because no one else would watch him in the rain, and she felt bad, she said.’ Alana turned and seized his sleeve. ‘Listen, Ewan, I mean it. Only if you’re going to be there for her from now on. She’s growing up quickly, and you can’t break her heart any more. You’re in, or out.’

The song finished, and his daughter clapped, holding her umbrella under her chin. She half-turned then, and
he saw how she was searching the park, looking up the hill.

‘I’m in,’ he said, barely able to hear himself over the drumming of the rain and his own heart. ‘I am in.’

And then she spotted him, his daughter, and he was running down the hill, jacket falling from his head, forgotten, rain in his face and in hers as Rebecca ran up the hill to meet him halfway.

IT’S NOON ON
12 September, and as soon as I reach Hope Cottage I can tell that it’s empty. Someone has tidied the front garden; the grass has been mowed and the hedges have been pruned. I recognize the hand of my mother-in-law, though the weeds are already starting to grow back. Quinn’s car is gone.

I pause at the front gate. I knew he wouldn’t be here; that he’d be at work.
Quinn’s habits are entirely predictable. I’ve told myself this was the reason I didn’t ring first. I was planning to let myself in to wait for him, to be here when he got home. I wanted to be early, for once, and waiting for him. But the cottage looks deserted, as if the soul has gone out of it. Maybe it’s because the garden has been trimmed. Or maybe it’s something more.

The real reason I didn’t
ring first was because I was afraid he wouldn’t answer. Or that he would answer, but he would tell me not to come.

The rain that’s been threatening all morning has started to fall, a few drops at a time. I follow the path round towards the back door, but stop when I reach the side of the cottage. Quinn’s bike is leaning against it. There’s a large, heavy D-lock on its wheel.

I can hardly believe
it until I touch it. It’s new. It looks impenetrable. A raindrop hits it and beads off. Probably in the city, a bike thief could be through it in ten seconds flat but out here, it’s a gleaming black deterrent to a child’s joy-rides.

‘Oh Quinn,’ I whisper. ‘What have I done to you?’

Gravel crunches and I look up to see Quinn’s car pulling into the drive. He’s a shadow behind the windscreen; he
probably can’t see me yet, as the shed obscures half the drive and I’m behind it. The motor shuts off and I hear his door opening, his footsteps on the gravel, the boot open and close. He’ll come round the shed towards the house in a minute. I listen for his footsteps, distinct from the patter of the rain.

He rounds the corner. He’s wearing jeans and a blue jumper. He has a backpack slung over
his shoulder and he carries a suitcase. Sunglasses have been pushed up onto the top of his head. He’s let his beard grow out and he’s tanned, always taller than I remember, with rain in his hair.

This is the feeling. Simple joy. A drink of water after the desert.

‘Hello, love,’ I say.

I know what Quinn meant every time he said it. Every single time. Because I mean it too.

He’s staring at me
as if he can’t believe that I’m here. It’s not joy on his face; it’s surprise, and caution – and I’ve done that to him too.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I tell him.

‘I …’ He shakes his head to clear it and the sunglasses fall off; he catches them in one hand without looking away from me. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘I’m feeling fine. I’m feeling exactly the way I want to feel. A little nervous about seeing you,
though.’ I point to his suitcase. ‘Where have you been?’

‘Oh – Croatia.’

‘Croatia?’

‘I needed to get away. It was the first package deal that came up on the first website I visited. I took two weeks off work and went.’

‘Was it nice?’

‘I don’t know.’ He hangs his sunglasses from his collar, something I’ve never seen him do before, and rubs his face. It’s raining harder now, the drops fatter
and more frequent, but neither one of us is very concerned about getting inside. ‘I thought today was the day you were meant to meet him.’

‘I decided to meet you instead. If that’s all right.’

He hasn’t moved forward since he spotted me, and I haven’t moved either. My hair has flattened to my skull, and it’s beginning to drip down my neck. His eyes are the shade of the cloudy sky, the shade
of the rain.

‘I’ll go if you want me to,’ I say. ‘I know I’ve hurt you. But I miss you so much, Quinn. I love you. I came to see if you can forgive me.’

Quinn drops the backpack, leaves his suitcase on the wet ground, and steps forward at last. He reaches past me and unlocks the D-lock with a single twist of a key. Then he throws it, in two pieces, into the bushes. There’s a clunk as each piece
hits the ground separately.

‘Horrible thing,’ he says, and then he takes half a turn towards me and I’m in his arms. I hold tight to his waist and I press my face hard against his chest where I can hear his heart, his strong, tender heart.

And this is what love is. This is what we’re starting again. All the things we’ve done together and will do, all the extraordinary ordinary things. It’s the
scent of a favourite jumper, wool and cedar. It’s the sound of someone in the kitchen making a cup of tea at the beginning of the day, the squeak of the gate at the end. It’s arguments and partings, misunderstandings on the telephone, washing the laundry wrong so that things shrink. It’s the scrawled double X on the bottom of a shopping list, the moment when you both see the sun rise and your hands
meet and curl around each other, the exchanged glances at Sunday dinner that promise a conversation later in bed. It’s the times his mother drives you crazy and he’s remembered your best friend’s birthday when you’ve forgotten and that’s more annoying than helpful. It’s wet shoes lined up together in front of the fire and a sleepy hand stroking your hair when you wake up sad. It’s the silences,
always broken in the end with the right words or the wrong ones, or the wrong ones that are the right ones really. It’s built from nothing in layers, with sloppily-patched holes, weeds untrimmed, no corner of it perfect, all of it beautiful.

He holds me and whispers into my hair.

‘Hello, love,’ he says.

In 2010, my friend Ken told us that he had to have brain surgery. He’d been having these funny turns, episodes that felt like anxiety attacks, snatches of half-heard music or dialogue from television shows. When he consulted a doctor he discovered that he had a massive cerebral aneurysm, which had been in his brain probably for many years, and which looked unnervingly like a squid.
Although he joked about it, he knew, and everyone who loved him knew, that this odd-looking thing in his brain had the potential to rob him of everything that he was.

I’ve always been fascinated by the power of the human brain. I read Oliver Sacks books like they’re candy, and one day in
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
I came across an account of temporal lobe seizures in an elderly woman,
which manifested as her hearing music – but not just any music. She heard Irish songs from her childhood, which reminded her strongly of her mother, and where she had been, what she had felt, when she had last heard the songs in real life. The songs were distracting, and at times, very loud … but they were comforting too. Such epileptic hallucinations, Sacks explained, were real memories, accompanied
by the same emotions the woman had felt during the original experiences.

Novelists are magpies, and this shiny titbit fascinated me. I immediately copied it out and stuck it on my wall – this idea that your brain can, at any point, reproduce not only the sensations of something that’s happened to you in your past, but all the emotions that were associated with it as well. What if, I thought,
a person were to have a seizure that felt like an emotion? Something that felt real, and more intense than everyday life? What about the feeling of falling in love – celebrated in a million pop songs, poems and love stories – the feeling that we believe is more authentic and precious than anything else?

I was introduced to Dr Dirk Baumer, Research Fellow and Neurology Registrar at the John Radcliffe
Hospital, Oxford, who told me that, although it’s not common, it’s entirely possible to have temporal lobe seizures caused by a cerebral aneurysm. He also told me that yes, those seizures could consist of evocative phantom smells, and emotions associated with a particular moment in the past. He explained the nature and symptoms of seizures to me, and he also passed me a number of case studies.
One was of a man whose cerebral aneurysm was causing him to relive, in his own brain, specific scenes from his past life.

The Dostoevsky quotation that forms the epigraph to
Part Three
of this novel is also in Sacks’s book, and that got me thinking, too. A person sick with love may not want to get better. They may prefer to stay in love, even though their love might kill them. It might work as
an addiction, an artificial euphoria that nevertheless comes from the innermost part of a person’s being.

I was halfway through writing the novel when I came across the quotation at the beginning of
Part One
, from Katherine Mansfield’s short story ‘Bliss’. Her heroine Bertha, a married woman, has an intense attachment to a female friend, something that makes her unbelievably happy, which lends
a glow to everything. And yet the story is highly ironic (and has a masterful, cruel twist), because although we might fall in love with someone, we can never truly know what their innermost emotions are. We can only understand the reality inside our own heads.

I collected all these things together and they made me excited. I wanted to write a story with an unreliable narrator, someone who can’t
quite work out what love is, or what is real, or what she really wants. Someone who wants to be authentic but is at the mercy of structures in her brain. From my own experience I know that scent is incredibly evocative of the past. I’ve had the unsettling experience of catching a whiff of aftershave on a stranger in the street, and believing that I’d just passed the boy I used to date in high
school. Quinn tells Felicity a story of opening a book and being overwhelmed by a memory because of a scent trapped between the pages, and that’s happened to me, too. So many of my friends and family have said the same: that scent can hijack you and transport you.

My friend Ken’s surgery was successful as far as removing the aneurysm went; he no longer has a squid inside his head, and he doesn’t
hear snatches of
Star Trek: The Next Generation
any more. But during surgery he suffered a stroke which caused damage to another part of his brain. He’s spent the last four years learning how to be himself in a new way. Ken was generous enough to talk frankly with me about his symptoms, treatment and rehabilitation, and to give me permission to lend certain parts of his wonky brain to a fictional
woman. You can read his ongoing story at
www.mylifeasasemicolon.com

Thank you to Ken Shapiro, Dr Dirk Baumer, Dr Natasha Onwu, Dr Matthew Cohen, Dr Joanna Cannon, Monika Mann (RN), Jennifer Cohen (RN), and my friend Ben Pearson’s mum.

Thank you to Cat Cobain who teased out the story with tea. Thanks to Gemma Sims and her mother Sue Edwards. Thanks to Lee Weatherly and Ruth Ng, Brigid Coady and Anna Louise Lucia, and all of my Reading mummy chums.
Thanks to Rowan Coleman, Miranda Dickinson, Kate Harrison, Tamsyn Murray and Cally Taylor for a particular weekend near the inception of this book. Thanks to Kathy Lewis, who donated to CLIC Sargent to have her name used for Quinn’s first love. Thanks to my husband, Dave Smith (aka ‘The Rock God’), for information about tour buses and life on the road, and for actually breaking Graceland.

An
enormous grateful slobbery hug type of thank you to my agent Teresa Chris, and to Harriet Bourton, Larry Finlay, Tessa Henderson and every single one of the team at Transworld who have made me so amazingly welcome.

Finally, thank you to my family for showing me what love is.

Julie Cohen
grew up in Maine and studied English at Brown University and Cambridge University. She moved to the UK to research fairies in Victorian children’s literature at the University of Reading and this was followed by a career teaching English at secondary level. She now writes full time and is a popular speaker and teacher of creative writing. She lives with her husband
and their son in Berkshire.

Her novel
Dear Thing
received great acclaim and was a Richard & Judy Book Club selection.

Talk with Julie on Twitter:
@julie_cohen
or visit her website:
www.julie-cohen.com

Spirit Willing, Flesh Weak

One Night Stand

Honey Trap

Girl from Mars

Nina Jones and the Temple of Gloom

Getting Away With It

The Summer of Living Dangerously

Dear Thing

For more information on Julie Cohen and her books, see her website at
www.julie-cohen.com